How to improve education
There
is no substitute to good teacher preparation; unless teachers are well
prepared, their capacity to perform is limited
There
is hardly a country in the world that is not attempting to improve its school
education. Countries like Canada and Finland, which already have excellent
school systems, are still trying to improve. These countries have confidence in
their own approach and remain committed to those fundamentals. Like top-notch
sportspeople, they are only refining nuances, many of which most other
countries have not even begun appreciating.
Then there are countries like Estonia and Korea which
have much improved systems, but they want to improve more, since in their
assessment the situation is not fully satisfactory. These countries are
sweating the details, and are also tweaking some of the fundamentals.
And then there is the large majority of countries which
are dissatisfied with the state of their school systems. They think that they
need fundamental and big changes. This list is large and has a wide range, from
countries as developed as the US, UK and Sweden to developing countries such as
India, China and Malaysia—and also the most disadvantaged countries, for
example, in sub-Saharan Africa.
To be sure, this is a very rough categorization. It also
doesn’t reflect many important dimensions of this issue, like the reasons for
dissatisfaction, including high dropout rates, poor learning levels,
overburdened children, a sense of getting “left behind” in the global school
education “race”, etc.
As can be expected, there is such enormous complexity in
the efforts to improve school education systems that each country and society
must be understood in itself. Any efforts to draw out commonalities is fraught
with risks of oversimplification and over-abstraction.
One of the very few things which are common across these
efforts, and would attract neither of the two charges that I have referred to,
is the importance of the teacher in school education and its improvement. The
teacher is so central to education that this is not surprising. To deal with
this centrality of the teacher, four broad approaches have been adopted.
The central idea of the first approach is that teachers
must be incentivized to do a better job, which will then lead to improvements. This
includes negative and positive incentives: for example, punishment for lack of
improvement in learning levels of children or better pay for clear
improvements. The hardwired “teacher accountability” versions of this approach
(such as “No Child Left Behind” in the US) have only succeeded in causing deep
damage to school education. Other variations, such as the attempt to
incentivize teachers through market-based competition fostered by privatization
have proven ineffective in improving learning levels in school systems, and
have worsened inequity.
The second approach has been to try and attract “better”
people to become teachers. The issues that can be worked on to influence this
matter—for example, reasonable compensation, good recruitment practices, conditions
to support professional satisfaction—are important. However, the relative
attractiveness of any profession is determined by a complex interplay of
economic, sociocultural, geographic and historical factors, in addition to the
characteristics of the profession. And given that the number of teachers is a
significant proportion of the overall population in employment in any country,
this matter is very hard to influence at a systemic level.
The third approach is to carry out better teacher
preparation. Since models of teacher preparation, including the curriculum and
institutional design, are easily comparable, weaknesses (such as with the
Indian Bachelor of Education system) are easily identifiable. Fixing all this,
however, is another matter. It is about investing significantly more in teacher
education and battling vested interests. This calls for political will. But
there is no substitute to good teacher preparation; unless teachers are well
prepared, their capacity to perform their roles is limited.
The fourth approach is about developing the capacity of
teachers currently serving in the system. It’s quite clear that unless this is
done, education systems won’t improve for decades, even if other things are
somehow done perfectly. Professional development of such a large and
distributed workforce, involved in roles that are inherently creative and
requiring human empathy, is very complex. But it can be done if attempted on
the basis of sound principles and with an intent to empower.
The incentives approach fails because, among other
reasons, of the social-human nature of education, which demands the teacher to
be creative, high-expertise, empathetic and ethical. This is almost the
classical prototype of a role which can only be played effectively when someone
has high capacity and is internally driven. While external conditions and
incentives can certainly demotivate and derail, they can’t motivate. Far more
effective than any such crude notion of incentives would be better organization
of schools and the system, including elimination of corruption and political
interference.
On attracting “better” people to teaching, we would do
well to remember John Dewey’s wise and pithy comment: “Education is, and
forever will be, in the hands of ordinary men and women.” To improve education
we have to invest in teacher education and professional development of
teachers. There are no shortcuts for improving education.
Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 18
August 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Events | BOSLA-NIFT ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES-2016 on Saturday,
20th August 2016 at 10.00 hrs in National Institute of Fashion Technology, Kharghar, Navi
Mumbai.
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