International Education News

In a fascinating example of the interconnections among educational improvement efforts around the world, Chris Chapman, Chair of Educational policy and Practice at the University of Glasgow, recently visited New York City to investigate efforts to establish learning partnerships among local public schools. Ironically, New York City’s approach draws on the partnerships established in England as part of the City Challenges that began in London in 2004. Those City Challenges have, in turn, helped to inspire the Scottish Attainment Challenge launched in 2015 to “raise the attainment of children and young people living in deprived areas in order to close the equity gap.”

As Chapman explained, “the Scottish Attainment Challenge focuses on improving outcomes in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing by enhancing the quality of learning and teaching and leadership within the education system and working with families and communities to support the holistic development of children.”

The Attainment Challenge also draws on the lessons from Scotland’s own School Improvement Partnership Programme. The Scottish partnerships seek to create links between government authorities, local schools, and university researchers to develop a shared commitment to improving outcomes for all children and young people. The partnerships are intended to:

• Develop a clearer understanding of their local area, local needs, what is and isn’t working
• Establish mechanisms for utilizing the best evidence to inform planning and service delivery
• Increase capacity to generate, use and interpret evidence
• Foster a better understanding of the barriers and enablers of delivering effective services to meet local needs

The Scottish system is also exploring the potential of creating local, community-based and cross-sector improvement strategies like the Strive Partnership, Harlem Children’s Zone and the Promise Neighborhoods initiative in the US. Along with these approaches to what is often referred as “collective impact”, Scotland is also making a significant investment in supporting the development of evidence-based practices in education as well as in other sectors.

This interest links to the broader public services focused work of WhatWorksScotland, part of a UK network of Government funded What Works Research Centre’s in the UK. Distinguishing the Scottish and UK “What Works” efforts from those of the What Works Clearinghouse in the US.), Chapman explained that WhatWorksScotland is an approach to public service reform that uses collaborative action research to facilitate change in Community Planning Partnerships in four sites:

• Aberdeenshire — with a focus on the development of community planning and health and social care integration
• Fife — where they are exploring a school intervention initiative, the development of a community welfare hub, and collaborative approaches to support families
• Glasgow —with an emphasis on using evidence to inform a ten-year place-based initiative called Thriving Places, and on participatory budgeting
• West Dunbartonshire — where the work centers on public service reform at the neighborhood level and community-led action planning

This “case study” approach is combined with a wider program of research exploring key issues in public service reform: including leadership, governance and partnership “evaluability,” the effective translation of knowledge into action.

As an academic at Nottingham, Warwick, Manchester and now Glasgow, Chapman is intimately familiar with both the City Challenges in England and the most recent developments in Scotland. Currently, he’s involved with a number of aspects of the work both as an advisor to the Scottish government and the Director of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change, which supports and studies the partnerships. Chapman’s previous work includes articles on school networking and scale-up, school effectiveness and improvement, with forthcoming pieces on professional capital and collaborative inquiry to appear in the Journal of Professional Capital and Community. Chapman came to New York to learn more about the evidence base underlying the partnership work in the US as well as to see what it looked like in practice. In New York, Chapman saw “opportunities for teachers to systematically inquire into each other’s practice and develop meaningful professional conversations about how to improve the quality of learning in classrooms” – both of which he considers to be key dimensions of partnerships.

Dr. Santiago Rincón Gallardo

Dr. Santiago Rincón Gallardo is a Banting Postoctoral Fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Chief Research Officer at Michael Fullan’s international education consulting team. His academic work explores how effective pedagogies for deep learning can spread at scale. These ideas have been published in the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, the Journal of Educational Change, the Education Policy Analysis Archives, the Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, and in three books in Spanish. Beyond his academic work, he conducts research and advises leaders and educators interested in advancing whole system reform for instructional improvement in educational systems. As an educator and organizer, Santiago worked for over a decade to promote grassroots educational change initiatives in Mexican Public Schools serving historically marginalized communities. Santiago holds an Ed. M in International Education Policy and Ed.D. on Education Policy, Leadership and Instructional Practice from Harvard University.

In this interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Santiago shares his thoughts on educational change:

In my view, the challenge of radically transforming the instructional core and creating the systems to do so at scale is one of the most important, exciting, and even daunting issues for educational change today. As they currently exist, schooling and school systems won’t take us much farther in the direction of nurturing deep learning, change agency, and deep democratic values among our younger generations (they have arguably taken us in the opposite direction).

This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.

Samuel Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, is the author of the newly published Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016). In a recent conversation, we spoke with Abrams about the book, particularly his chapters on Finland and Sweden. Abrams also discussed with us a recent controversy in Finland sparked by some of his comments in an interview printed in the Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s major daily. Abrams and colleagues, Jeffrey Henig and Henry Levin among them, will discuss the book at Teachers College on Monday, May 2.

Twenty years ago, Wall Street forecasters in the United States estimated that by 2010 approximately 10,000 to 20,000 of the nation’s 100,000 K-12 public schools would be run by for-profit firms. As Abrams details in his new book, those predictions were wrong. In reality, the tally was about 750. Disappointing academic and financial outcomes had pushed this sector to the margins, Abrams noted.

At the same time, Abrams said, those same analysts were correct that federal policymakers would embrace a bottom-line approach to assessing school effectiveness with a focus on student performance on standardized tests in reading and math. The high-stakes testing prescribed by No Child Left Behind in 2001 and the Race to the Top initiative in 2009, Abrams said, has constricted curricula, crowding out time for history, science, art, music, crafts, physical education, and play. Such testing, he added, has also generated unnecessary stress for students and teachers alike.

To deepen his analysis of the rise of market forces in U.S. education, Abrams analyzes in his book the divergent paths taken by Sweden and Finland. As Abrams puts it, Sweden and Finland provide a study in contrasts. He writes that Finland’s relatively high performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) cannot be dismissed because Finland is small, homogeneous, and egalitarian. Abrams explains that Finland’s Nordic neighbors—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—are also small, homogeneous, and egalitarian; however, these nations have repeatedly posted PISA results indistinguishable from those posted by the United States.

According to Abrams, the difference between Finland and its Nordic neighbors has been deliberate steps taken by Finnish policymakers to improve school curricula as well as the preparation, pay, and treatment of teachers. Abrams writes that Finnish policymakers had concluded in the 1960s that because the nation was young (having only declared independence in 1917) and poor in natural resources (with little more than timber), they had to invest significantly in schooling to develop the nation’s human capital. Economic necessity and national pride together forged education policy, he said. By contrast, Sweden, Abrams writes, was long a regional power, benefitted from its wealth in mineral resources, and prospered from its highly developed industrial and banking sectors; Denmark, too, was long a regional power, with strong agricultural and industrial sectors; and Norway benefitted from not only oil discovered in the North Sea in 1969 but also abundant fisheries and hydroelectric power.

The divergence of Finland and Sweden, in particular, may be seen at two points, Abrams explained. First, in 1962, Swedish authorities introduced a comprehensive school program (grundskola), merging students with different aptitudes in grades one through nine with the plan to reform teacher education so teachers would be better prepared to differentiate instruction. But such reform of teacher education never took place. Finnish authorities introduced their own comprehensive school program (peruskoulu) for students in the same grades in 1972 with a similar plan to reform teacher education. And the Finns followed through, requiring that all teachers from 1979 forward earn a master’s degree in pedagogy. Thirty-seven years later, Finland remains the only Nordic country with this requirement.

Second, Swedish authorities in 1992 embraced privatization while their Finnish counterparts never did so. For the Finns, Abrams said, schooling has been an instrument for nation building. Outsourcing school management to private providers, he said, did not comport with that purpose. For the Swedes, schooling was not about nation building. Outsourcing school management accordingly didn’t pose the same problem.

In addition, Abrams said, the Swedes had been under the Social Democratic Party from 1932 to 1976 and again from 1984 to 1991. He suggests the desire for change and, specifically, school choice was accordingly understandable. In 1991, only 1 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary schools were under private management, Abrams writes in his book. By 2010, the portion of primary and secondary schools in Sweden under private management had grown to 22 percent; and of that portion, 76 percent, or 17 percent of the country’s primary and secondary schools in total, were run by for-profit operators.

To Abrams, the problem with for-profit operation of schools is not that businessmen are making money off the provision of a public service such as education. Textbook publishers, software developers, and bus operators all make money from schools and should, he said, but they are all providing a discrete good or service that can be easily evaluated. “School management, on the other hand, is a complex service that does not afford the transparency necessary for proper contract enforcement,” he said. “Without such transparency, there’s client distrust: parents, taxpayers, and legislators can never be sure the provider is doing what was promised; and the child as the immediate consumer cannot be in a position to judge the quality of service. Regular testing has been promoted as a check on quality. But teachers can teach to the test. And worse, as we know from cheating scandals in Atlanta and many other cities, teachers can change wrong answers to right answers on bubble sheets once students are done.”

In sum, Abrams said, the idea that schools could and should be run like businesses resulted from “a blinkered laissez-faire triumphalism prevailing in the wake of the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the fall of the Berlin Wall.” According to Abrams, the economist Arthur Okun, whom he quotes in his prologue, got it right: “The market needs a place, and the market needs to be kept in place.”

Ironically, at the same time that Abrams highlights in his book what he sees as numerous strengths of the Finnish approach, he generated controversy in Finland with comments in an interview published by Helsingin Sanomat. Shortly after his book was released, Abrams was asked in the interview about growing concerns over declines in Finland’s most recent scores on the PISA test. Abrams contended that the concerns were groundless, as the decline reflected the improvement of other countries, primarily Asian countries and jurisdictions like Shanghai, that have focused explicitly on improving PISA performance. Under these circumstances, on a normed test like PISA, Finland’s scores would be expected to go down, Abrams said, but would not necessarily suggest any real decline in the quality of education. Finnish scholars nevertheless subsequently argued in one article after another in the same newspaper that the performance of Finnish students had indeed declined, particularly in mathematics. According to Abrams, this decline is a modern problem, echoed in similar nations, not a Finnish problem.

This post was originally posted on The Hechinger Report and was written by Nichole Dobo.

Expect changes at this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual education technology gathering with a reputation as a bustling conference for high-rolling financiers and hoodie-wearing start-up founders.

There were new faces – and perspectives – in the mix at the three-day conference in San Diego this week, and they could break the stranglehold of deal-making that has often been seen as the dominating feature of the event.

An influx of public school educators at this year’s conference could help change the tone. Digital Promise, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that advocates for effective use of education technology, sent 150 educators to the conference, giving members of the organization’s League of Innovative Schools scholarships to attend the (pricey) event. That’s just one example, so the final tally of educators at this year’s conference is likely to be higher – some estimate that at least 1,000 will be there. And for those who could not attend get to San Diego, the conference featured a “conference cam” livestream.

Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state and a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, gave one of the keynote speeches, and used it to challenge the elite attendees to consider immigrants, out-of-work blue collar workers and the poor when it comes to education technology.

“I want to encourage us to think about how innovation in the private sector can help in the most public of goods … education,” Rice said.

So will teachers, superintendents and charter school leaders get any attention from the bankers, techies and so-called thought leaders at this conference?

The “leading educators” sessions at the conference were among the most anticipated, according to an online poll ahead of time. That series included trips away from the conference to visit schools such as High Tech High.

The changes to give educators a more prominent position at this conference weren’t accidental. That reputation as an event only for people interested in making deals?  “I’m not so sure we’re happy about [that label],” Deborah Quazzo, co-host of the conference and a managing partner at GSV Advisors, said recently in an interview with Ed Surge, an online publication that reports on the business side of education technology.

Quazzo said she wanted the conference to include people who wouldn’t normally hang out together in the same room.

Meanwhile, spending on education technology continues to grow. Globally, spending on education hardware increased by an estimated 7 percent in 2015, according to a new report from Future Source Consulting. The report pegs this technology spending at $15 billion, up by $4.5 billion since 2012.

Those new conference attendees may hope that someone will ask teachers, students and parents – the people who have to make use of that stuff – before spending that money.

As part of a series of posts on the evolution of schools and organizations working to improve education, we have been exploring the factors and conditions (the “learning ecology” as John Seely Brown put it) that support and limit innovation. Over the next year, we hope to explore the “learning ecology” in a number of cities around the world, beginning with New York City. The New York City “ecology” stands out both as a place that has supported the development of a number of new small schools and a place that has “incubated” the development of a variety of learning models that seek to develop and scale new educational practices. Among those learning models is School of One, an initiative within the New York City Department of Education launched in 2009 focused on personalized learning for middle grade math. Since that time, the creators of School of One launched a national non-profit called New Classrooms Innovation Partners to create new models of learning for schools across the country. Their first model, Teach to One: Math, is currently in operation in 28 schools around the country. New Classrooms also operates School of One on behalf of the NYC Department of Education. The underlying designs of both Teach to One and School of One are the same. To learn more about the evolution of this approach, we talked with Joel Rose, the founder of School of One and currently the co-founder and CEO of New Classrooms.

School of One started with a fairly simple idea: students learn in different ways, so schools should reflect this fact. Of course, the typical structure of school is not designed for individual students but for a number of students grouped together in various ways. School of One aimed to challenge this model. Briefly outlined, then, School of One customized educational content to the strengths and needs of individual students.

Rose started working on School of One when he was a member of the Human Resources department of the New York City Department of Education. At the time, Michael Bloomberg was mayor and Joel Klein was the chancellor of education. Both were champions of providing more autonomy for schools and supporting more entrepreneurship within the public sector. With Klein’s support, School of One launched as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 and served as one of the first initiatives of the iZone.

Operating with a small team, Rose and his colleagues helped restructure a summer school program to create a more customized educational experience for about 80 students. Rose described the day-to-day operations within this pilot project as SneakerNet in that in its infancy the program essentially involved Mr. Rose and his team running around, making decisions on a day-to-day basis, and building the program in the process.

After this initial pilot project, the School of One team undertook a series of R&D and implementation cycles. They took the experiences and data from the first summer pilot and developed a slightly reworked model that they implemented as an afterschool program in three schools in the spring of 2010. Then, in the fall of that year, they embedded the School of One model in one public middle school, I.S. 228. Continuing with the original vision, this iteration of School of One “put multiple learning modalities into the same learning environment in order to personalize instruction around student needs.” More specifically, nearly 100 students worked in a math center with 6 teachers and support staff. The room was divided into sections of independent instruction, small group collaboration, and teacher-delivered instruction. Based on diagnostics that help create individual student profiles, students experienced these different modalities in ways that addressed specific strengths and needs for that student.

Nearly five years later, School of One continues operating in I.S. 228. The approach has also scaled nationally through Teach to One: Math, which is built on the same core tenets. Teach to One: Math is now found in eight states and Washington DC, where it serves around 10,000 students.

Rose explains that both School of One and Teach to One maintain deep investment in the planning and execution of ideas. For instance, in its early stages, the research and development team spent over 500 hours designing homework, just one small component of the overall learning model they’ve designed. This data can help purposefully design the learning model to address each moment of the teacher’s and student’s day. Within this framework, one question they want to address is “can we have an integrated model that enables teachers to deliver on the promise of personalized learning for every student, every day?”

Over the years, New Classrooms has faced a number of challenges. In particular, School of One and Teach to One still must be implemented within the regulations of traditional school, organized by grade levels and driven by state standards based on those grade levels. Given its rapid expansion, however, the learning model continues pushing at the boundaries of traditional school.

Through these changes and developments, Rose explains that New Classrooms maintains a consistent vision. That is, School of One and Teach to One challenge trends of what he sees as a broken system and innovatively provide individualized learning opportunities for all students.

In 1989, New Visions for Public Schools was founded on the belief that public/private partnerships and small school designs could help improve the drop out rate in New York City schools. Since then, the organization has gone through several iterations, expanding from a focus on incubating small schools, supporting a network of small schools, and most recently developing data-based tools that can support the work of educators across and within schools. To better understand this evolution and the issues that New Visions is working on today, we spoke with Mark Dunetz, the Vice President for School Support at New Vision and previously a principal at a New Visions high school.

New Visions 1.0: An Incubator For The Development Of Small Schools

The early evolution of New Visions for Public Schools reflected the growing interest and commitment to the development of new small schools that swept the United States in the 1990s. In fact, while New Visions began with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to create an after school program to engage students in community service, by 1993 they had received a $25 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation to create 14 new small schools in New York City. In 1996, they officially adopted the name New Visions for Public Schools in order to reflect their focus on supporting the development of wide variety of teacher- and student-centered small secondary schools. With grants from the Gates Foundation and other funders, New Visions has gone on to open 140 schools in New York City. Interestingly, although divisions are often made between those who support opening new public schools and opening new charter schools, New Visions has done both. As the number of charter schools in New York City and elsewhere has grown throughout the 2000’s New Visions has opened up seven charter schools. As one of the few organizations bridging the “charter divide,” several of New Visions’ charter schools have been opened in cooperation with the teachers’ union and Michael Mulgrew, current President of the local union, sits on the New Visions Board. Counting both the public schools and charter schools that New Visions has opened, today, 1 in 5 students in New York City schools attend a school either opened or currently supported by New Visions.

New Visions 2.0: Supporting the Development of a Network of Schools  

New Visions’ expansion from starting new schools to supporting and sustaining a network of schools took advantage of significant changes in local educational policies made after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002. Bloomberg, along with School Chancellor Joel Klein, sought to dismantle what they saw as an inefficient and overly-centralized school bureaucracy, by releasing schools from direct oversight by area superintendents. In contrast, they sought to grant local schools and principals with autonomy while holding them accountable for improvements in student performance. A central element of their approach was the creation of a competitive environment in which School Support Organizations tried to attract schools that would pay for their services. Rather than remaining centered on the creation of new small secondary schools, New Visions embraced this opportunity to become a School Support Organization and began to work with both new and existing schools on day-to-day operations. As a result, New Visions expanded to work with both large and small schools, as well as transfer schools (schools designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or who have fallen behind in credits) and grade 6-12 schools. Dunetz described this as a “laboratory for doing deep work on the day-to-day of everything happening in schools.”

New Visions 3.0: Creating Tools to Innovate Across the System

With another change in school administration in New York City, New Visions has expanded its focus again. In 2015, following the election of Mayor DeBlasio, Carmen Fariña was appointed the new Education Chancellor for New York City schools. She ushered in changes to the organizational structure of the system that included re-establishing the role of local superintendent and eliminating the competitive marketplace for School Support Organizations. However, because New Visions along with a few other organizations was regarded as an effective network-provider, it was allowed to retain its network of schools. As a result, New Visions still works with a select group of schools; however, the support is no longer provided in a marketplace environment. Schools can opt to be members of the New Visions PSO Network for a three-year period. As Dunetz described it, this allows New Visions to play out a set of strategies and focus more on innovation and less on competition. While there was always an explicit expectation that New Visions would work on a set of strategies that would in theory have value for the larger system, in some ways they are also back in a place where they can serve as an innovation lab and incubator for the development of tools and practices that address some of the key problems that their schools and others face.

Today, as Dunetz explained, many schools face challenges implementing their visions. From his perspective, efforts often fail at the point of implementation because people can’t organize quickly and efficiently enough to carry out anything substantially different. As he put it, “I’ve seen that innovations don’t last over time because people can’t keep up with it and can’t work out the details of something non-traditional.” Furthermore, he argues that success may be more likely to happen in places with select or non-representative student populations – where students are screened and the organization and the normal pressures of traditional schooling may be reduced. According to Dunetz, “The places that have tried to implement innovation with a typical non-selective population and with large numbers of students, they tank academically and wind up regressing towards common practice.”

In order to combat some of these challenges, New Visions’ current work focuses on finding ways to use technological tools to target areas in need of support in schools—tools developed from his own experiences as a principal. For example, New York City has a complicated set of graduation requirements that makes it very difficult for schools to keep track which students are making progress at an appropriate rate. Traditionally, every principal and school has had to figure out how to solve this problem on their own. However, New Visions worked with their schools to develop a scheduling tool that makes it possible to see whether students are enrolled in the appropriate classes and gaining the credits that they need. As Dunetz described the issues and their current approach:

I experienced, along with my colleagues, that you could do a whole lot with simple technology. Tools have become one really big piece of our strategy. We no longer see it as a necessary evil, where you have to go out and find a vendor that is the least bad. We see the control of the development of those tools as a very powerful mechanism for changing behavior.

 

Where we shifted a year and a half ago was to a much more explicit modeling of what it looks like to use tools at the administrative level. Now we’ve got to go to other levels. We do what we call  “strategic data check ins.” These are scripted, protocol-driven conversations that look at key planning tasks organized around the tool, or multiple tools. We do it largely through Google hangout, so we can do a large number of schools over a period of time. We go through and come up with plans that are recorded alongside the data, and then we pull back and look across so we can be a second set of eyes. That’s become a core part of our strategy and it’s become tremendously successful at shifting practice at scale very quickly around very high stakes things, like what constitutes a meaningful graduation plan and what are the smartest strategies for sitting and preparing students for Regents exams. We can organize systematically. That’s a huge step forward for us.

 

Today, New Visions is focusing on the notion that in order to be effective at regular planning you need a common reference point that is updated and available to everyone involved. The organization is working on designing a framework that takes information out of the heads of the many individuals who work with students, and puts it on paper. Dunetz described this information as more specific than generalized information, but not prescriptive for solving problems. “It’s the guts of the system,” he explained. “It’s what needs to happen in order to be able to sustain innovation, and to be transparent. See all moving pieces and what is and isn’t being implemented with fidelity. It’s different than what people are used to. People are used to a highly prescriptive checklist. Our hope is to get schools to a level of functioning on a whole set of things that can be solved in a short period of time.” With these developments, New Visions now has over twenty staff members working on data analytics and designing systems and structures that can be used by their schools and others.

All in all, New Visions has expanded from starting small schools, to incubating small schools, to leading a network of schools. Now, it serves as one example of a new kind of educational organization that goes beyond school design and school support to develop tools and practices that meet the day-to-day needs of teachers and principals in schools of all kinds.

—Deirdre Faughey

Dr. Karen Seashore Louis

Karen Seashore Louis is a Regents Professor and the Robert H. Beck Chair in the Department of Organizational Policy, Leadership, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She has also served as the Director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota, Department Chair, and Associate Dean of the College of Education and Human Development. Her work focuses on school improvement and reform, school effectiveness, leadership in school settings, and the politics of knowledge use in education. Her most recent books include Building Strong School Cultures: A Guide to Leading Change (with Sharon Kruse, 2009), Linking Leadership to Student Learning (with Kenneth Leithwood, 2011), Educational Policy: Political Culture and Its Effects (2012) and Reach the highest standard in professional learning: Leadership (in press, Corwin Press). A Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, she also served as the Vice President of Division A, and on the Executive Board of the University Council for Educational Administration. She has received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Contributions to Staff Development award from the National Staff Development Association (2007), the Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award from the University Council for Educational Administration (2009), and a Life Member designation from the International Congress for School Effectiveness and School Improvement.

In this interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Louis shares thoughts on the research she would like to see on school improvement:

…we need to turn our research focus and the attention of school leaders not only to their roles and responsibilities for engaging the emotions of those who are part of the school community, but how the greater community can be mobilized to participate in caring relationships as well, particularly for adolescents. The schools I am working with are at the limit of their capacity to change the life trajectory of youth on their own. More money won’t solve the issues that they face – we need broader achievement zones that focus on older children as well as preschool/early elementary years.

This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.

What is it exactly that makes a teacher a teacher? What does a teacher have to know? What do they have to be trained for? And why is it exactly that school, particularly high school, is structured the way it is? These questions travel through many educational contexts. For Professor Felicitas Acosta, a staff researcher at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS), an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), and an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) and San Martín (UNSAM), these questions are particularly relevant for the historical present of Argentina’s education system. In a recent conversation, professor Acosta helped us explore some of these main issues with secondary school teacher education in Argentina.

Rather than work within the complexities of teacher identity and teacher training, Professor Acosta argues that the Argentinian education system takes what she calls “a combined approach” to teacher training. That is, as a result of a secondary system where students take 9 to 11 pedagogical subjects, teacher preparation is designed from an amalgamation of other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. In secondary education, training teachers does not rest on education as a specific and independent discipline. Instead, there is a drastic focus on teaching teachers how to teach content (in other words, how to teach their specific subject). As a result, pedagogical training is marginalized as part of learning how to be a teacher. Within this model, teachers are trained for a system where students routinely struggle to finish secondary school. Among other causes, Professor Acosta attributes these struggles to this combined approach. Students who may not already possess the cultural capital to navigate and succeed in areas beyond content will struggle when teachers lack the pedagogical training to engage students in dynamic ways.

For her part, Professor Acosta sees international, structural, and historical roots for this issue. The historical roots extend to the 1930s as Argentina began its mass schooling project. As schooling expanded in Argentina, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, the increase in bodies in school buildings required greater and greater attention to how to organize those bodies. This increase is, at least in part, how Argentinian secondary schools arrived at the 9 to 11 pedagogical subjects in which students enroll. Yet, Dr. Acosta uses this historical lens as an “excavation of the present.” She shows how the current conditions for training teachers emerged from these historical issues. In terms of structural issues, Professor Acosta explains that Argentina’s education system design produces its own defects. The lack of particular pedagogical training and an emphasis on antiquated approaches in general demonstrates how the system produces its own defects. For example, Professor Acosta is forced to follow what she sees as an antiquated model in her own teacher training, simply so that her teachers do not fail in the already-existing system. Finally, Professor Acosta points to international influences that help structure Argentina’s education system the way it is now. She contends that Argentina, as with other countries, is greatly influenced and shaped by other education systems. All of these issues had a direct impact on teacher education.

Argentinian teacher education schools are structured into two categories. The majority of institutions are parts of universities. The universities do face standards and norms for training teachers. At the same time, many of the public universities have legal autonomy from the state. There are also a growing number of teacher training institutes. An original conception of these institutes, as considered by the Argentinian educator Pizzurno, saw institutes training teachers but attached to a lab school. In this vision, school would not be organized by subjects. Teachers in these institutes would be appointed. Teachers would not teach one but rather related subjects. The institutes do not, according to Professor Acosta, reflect Pizzurno’s vision.

As previously mentioned, in both the universities and the teacher training institutes, teachers are trained for content rather than pedagogy. Professor Acosta does not believe that pedagogy should be privileged above content. Rather, she asserts that “the organizational model has led [us] to believe that pedagogical knowledge is unimportant.” Combatting this issue is not as simple as training teachers differently. As previously mentioned, to only train teachers differently without changing anything else would be to train these teachers to fail as secondary teachers. Professor Acosta believes that the very structure of secondary school must be changed in order for teacher training to be changed.

Particularly within her university, Professor Acosta sees these issues as deeply problematic for her student teachers. Her university is fairly new and quite small (particularly in comparison with universities such as the University of Buenos Aires). The university was both created and located to help more students gain access to university. Most of her students are first generation university students, but most of the professors have been trained at places like the University of Buenos Aires. Initially, teachers were trained in a consecutive model, where they learned content and then pedagogy. The school is now moving toward a concurrent model, where both are taught simultaneously. Overall, in its 20 years of existence, the teacher training curriculum has changed 3 times.

All of this information is simply to say that, while the university is trying to make a number of changes they are still greatly restricted in how well they can prepare teachers. They are trying to “get the teachers to consider how the teaching job is built and constructed.” The overall goals are to improve an Argentinian system that is still greatly inequitable at the secondary level. Yet, Professor Acosta argues that her university and the system in general is highly constricted by the system’s design. Her university still bases 75% of its training on content, which immediately pushes pedagogical training to the side. The university, by necessity, still mirrors secondary schools. So, while Professor Acosta believes certain actions may be taken to improve teacher education within her university, they are ultimately bound to present day demands.