In 2013 vindt de jaarlijkse International Summit on the Teaching
Profession in Amsterdam plaats. Deze top is een gezamenlijke
inspanning van overheid, vakbonden en de OECD. De editie van
volgend jaar wordt gehouden in de Beurs van Berlage en het
Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam.
De top is gericht op een open en vrije discussie over succesvol
beleid, kansen en uitdagingen binnen het onderwijs en de rol van
leraren daarin. Aan de top nemen de twintig in het onderwijs best
presterende landen van de wereld deel.
Over de New Yorkse top meldt het Witte Huis: 'Twenty four
countries and regions will participate: Australia, Belgium, Canada,
Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary,
Iceland, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway,
the People's Republic of China, Poland, the Republic of Korea,
Singapore, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and
the United States.'
"Ik ben er trots op dat we de Teacher Summit in Nederland gaan
houden. Hiermee willen we laten zien dat onze leraren tot de beste
van de wereld horen," vertelt Halbe Zijlstra.
U leest hieronder de openingsrede van minister Arne
Duncan, waarin hij zijn lessen uit de vorige editie schetst en de
visie van president Obama op de rol van onderwijs en leraren in het
Amerika als kennisnatie van de 21e eeuw schetst.
We are thrilled to have such an extraordinary and unprecedented
array of education ministers, union leaders, great teachers, school
leaders, top researchers, and multinational leaders here today. We
are eager to learn from the experiences of high-performing and
rapidly-improving countries and regions about both their successes
and their shared educational challenges.
I want to especially thank the conveners of the summit, which
include OECD and Education International, in addition to our U.S.
Department of Education. Here in the U.S., our sponsoring partners
include our two teachers' union organizations, the NEA and the AFT,
and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Our sponsors also
include the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the
Asia Society, and our local public television station, WNET. Our
sponsors have been great partners in reform.
Before we start, I want to say that our hearts are breaking
today for our Belgium colleagues and friends after last night's
tragic school bus crash in which so many children and teachers lost
their lives and were injured. Know that you are very much in our
thoughts today.
Bescheidenheid en energie
Turning to this year's Summit, I'm pleased to report that last
year's Summit, and the lessons learned from the practices of
high-performing systems, has already had a big impact on our
thinking in the United States. We come to this work with real
humility, coupled with a tremendous sense of urgency. The truth is
that the U.S. has a great deal to learn from countries that are
out-educating us. Today I want to give a brief progress report on
the evolution of U.S. policy since last year's summit.
For U.S. leaders, the message of last year's summit was plain.
High-performing countries provide more professional autonomy and
accountability, more collaboration, and more high-quality
preparation and professional development for teachers than we do in
the U.S.
They do a better job of recruiting talented teachers and school
leaders. And they do a better job of preparing, supporting, and
retaining them in the classroom. As my good friend Randi Weingarten
has said, other nations not only out-educate us, they out-prepare
and out-respect us as well.
Unlike the U.S., high-performing countries typically pay teacher
salaries that are much more competitive with other professions
requiring a college degree and advanced certifications. And unlike
the U.S., high-performing systems offer teachers career ladders and
opportunities for professional growth that do not require them to
leave or abandon the classroom-the work they love most and do best.
Teachers themselves have a real role in informing policy to drive
better student outcomes.
Last, but not least, high-performers pursue all these practices
in a deliberate, systemic way over a period of years-not through
piecemeal policy changes in separate silos.
Boodschap begrepen
We heard that message and understand its significance. And it
has powerfully helped shape a new, five billion dollar program to
strengthen and elevate the teaching profession in America. With
teaching morale low, and with a real need to recruit about one
million more teachers into the profession over the next four to six
years, we must take a challenging situation and use it as an
opportunity to drive transformational change.
Last month, President Obama proposed this new competitive grant
program to empower states and districts that commit to pursuing
bold reforms at every stage of the teaching profession. This is not
tinkering at the margins, or incremental change. The new program is
called RESPECT. That acronym stands for Recognizing Educational
Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching.
Educational Success is all about improving student outcomes.
Professional Excellence means that we will promote continuously
improving practice-and recognize, reward, and, most importantly,
learn from great teachers and school leaders. And Collaborative
Teaching means that we will concentrate on shared responsibility.
Successful collaboration means creating schools where principals
and teachers work and learn together in communities of practice,
hold each other accountable, and lift each other to new levels of
skill and competence.
The RESPECT program has six elements to it. I won't run through
all of them here, but I'll mention a few key elements.
RESPECT will support state and local efforts to attract top-tier
talent into education and prepare them for success.
It will support creating a professional career continuum with
competitive compensation.
It will support evaluating and strengthening the development of
teachers and leaders.
And it will support getting the best educators to the students
and communities who need them the most.
Nog nooit eerder gedurfd en gedaan
To my knowledge, an ambitious program like this, with the goal
of fundamentally elevating the teaching profession, has never been
tried before in the United States. Let me emphasize that teachers
themselves have had-and will continue to have-a major voice in
shaping RESPECT. Our development of RESPECT has benefitted
enormously from the input of Randi Weingarten, from Dennis Van
Roekel's leadership, and from the groundbreaking, courageous work
of the NEA's Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching.
Our amazing team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows-active classroom
teachers who spend a year at the U.S. Department of Education-have
already held more than 100 roundtable meetings with teachers across
the country. In coming months, the department aims to hold
roundtables and town halls for at least 5,000 teachers. I have
personally met with hundreds and hundreds of teachers across the
nation, and continue to be inspired by their vision and enthusiasm
for what we can accomplish together.
The principal elements of RESPECT are clear-and clearly
consistent with the practices of high-performing systems. We are
very much looking to engage teachers in a national conversation
about how to reshape and revamp America's teaching profession for
the 21st century.
De doelen van het plan
The near-term aim of RESPECT is to elevate teachers' voices in
shaping federal, state, and local policy. Our long-term goal is to
make teaching not just one of America's most important professions
but one of its most respected professions.
Teachers, and the teaching profession, have been beaten down,
and that must stop. I could not be more proud of our teachers' hard
work and commitment, often in very challenging circumstances. I
view our teachers, as so many of you do, as nation-builders-and we
must treat them as such.
With respect to this year's Summit, I am excited to see that we
will be addressing how to improve teacher preparation and better
develop school leaders. To be honest, these are not strengths of
the U.S. educational system. We have a tremendous amount to gain
from studying effective teacher and principal preparation programs
and effective professional development from high-performing
countries and regions.
There are a number of exemplary preparation programs in the
U.S., and the field is showing promising signs of reform and
progress. But we desperately need high-quality preparation programs
to be the norm in the U.S. today, not a hit-and-miss proposition. I
have yet to find a high-performing school that didn't have a strong
principal at its helm and talented teachers in its classrooms.
Talent is cruciaal
We all know that talent matters tremendously in education. There
are no critical classroom reforms that are teacher-proof or
principal-proof. Yet in the U.S. we often act as though talent
doesn't matter. I have spoken out very publicly about the
shortcomings of teacher preparation and principal preparation
programs in the U.S. And I am not alone in offering that
critique.
Virtually every analysis of our preparation programs, including
studies by deans of our education schools, and by AFT and NEA,
concludes that we do at best a mediocre job of preparing teachers
and school leaders. And when we listen, teachers and school leaders
themselves say much the same thing. Sixty-two percent of young
teachers in America report that their training did not prepare them
adequately for working in the classroom. And 70 percent of U.S.
principals report that traditional leadership programs are "out of
touch with the realities of what it takes to run today's schools."
This is the brutal reality we must face.
Unfortunately, our record for delivering high-quality
professional development is equally spotty. At the federal level,
we distribute $3.3 billion to states and districts each year to
spend on professional development. When I talk to teachers, I
always ask them: "How much is that money improving your job or
providing for your development?" They usually either laugh or cry
in response-because they are not feeling that $3.3 billion
investment is helping them hone their skills.
Finnen als voorbeeld
Many high-performing countries do a much better job than the
U.S. of articulating real career ladders, from novice to master
teachers. To cite one example, a number of high-performing systems
refuse to let new teachers sink or swim in the classroom as we
sometimes do in America. In Japan and Finland, novice teachers
spent at least a full year teaching under the supervision of a
master teacher. In Shanghai, new teachers are supervised by master
teachers during their first year in the classroom-and master
teachers often observe every lesson taught by the new instructor
and provide extensive coaching.
In a time of extraordinarily tight state budgets, as all of us
fight for additional resources, we also have to be honest about
investments that are not effective. We have to invest in
professional development that really helps teachers master their
craft. In most places in the U.S., we are not even close to
reaching that goal.
In the 21st century, the role of school leaders has also changed
dramatically. In decades past, principals were thought of as
building managers and supervisors of operations. That is no longer
the case in the U.S. Today, the job of a principal is to be, first
and foremost, an instructional leader, not just a supervisor.
Top-flight school leaders are much more like lead teachers and even
CEOs than building managers.
They are responsible for building a school culture focused on
learning and high expectations. They are responsible for hiring
good instructors, distributing leadership, providing quality
professional development, and evaluating teachers. Great school
leaders nurture, retain, and empower great teachers-bad school
leaders drive them off and are threatened by them.
Leraarstatus is geen vast gegeven
As the OECD background paper prepared for the Summit makes
clear, the status of the teaching profession is not a fixed
attribute of culture. It can be elevated substantially-and not at a
glacial pace-through sustained government policy in countries as
diverse as Finland, China, and Singapore.
That is an enormously encouraging finding-and, for all our
challenges, one that gives us real hope for what we can accomplish.
Eleven years ago, elementary school students in Hong Kong ranked
17th in the world in reading literacy assessments and primary
school students in Singapore ranked 15th. Just five years later,
they ranked 2nd and 4th, respectively.
Shanghai's students currently have the highest PISA scores in
the world-and I think America has a lot to learn from Shanghai's
educators. But that high performance is not simply due to a
traditional Confucian reverence for education. At one point, China
closed down its universities for more than a quarter century. But
in the years since 1980, when Chinese universities started again
offering degrees, China has successfully rebuilt its education
system. Policy matters.
One final encouraging lesson to emerge from last year's Summit
is that many high-performing countries are evolving in similar
directions-and pursuing similar policies to improve
performance.
A shared theme at last year's Summit was that student outcomes
and data matter. We cannot return to the days when educational
policy was primarily propelled by inputs, instead of by outcomes.
In the knowledge-based, global economy, student learning and
student growth are the ultimate barometers of success. Children are
our first and foremost responsibility.
21e eeuwse vaardigheden
To be on track on track today for college and careers, students
need the 21st century skills that are so vital to success in the
global economy. They need to show that they can analyze and solve
complex problem, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply
knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings.
High-performing nations may differ on how they assess learning and
the acquisition of 21st century skills. Yet virtually every top
performer is intensively using data in one form or another to
enhance instruction at the classroom level, and to monitor and
improve performance.
As the OECD Background report for this Summit states, two out of
three OECD countries give students periodic standardized
assessments to develop information on student performance. Just
under half of OECD countries even give very high-stake exams at
critical educational gateways that can affect students' secondary
and post-secondary educational opportunities, including their
chance to go to college.
Assessment data is used not just at the national level but in
individual schools and classrooms. The survey results of school
leaders in the background report for the Summit show that in three
out of four OECD nations, school leaders report that they often
"use student performance results to develop the school's
educational goals" during the school year.
Echt sturen op echte cijfers
School leaders also use assessment results to shape curriculum.
Principals in three out of five OECD countries say that they often
"take exam results into accounts in decision regarding curriculum
development." In high-performing regions like Hong Kong and
Singapore, nearly 100 percent of principals regularly use exam
results to help inform decisions about curriculum.
Now, while last year's Summit highlighted common cornerstones of
world-class education systems, it also highlighted that there are a
number of different roads and no single path to becoming a
high-performing system. The OECD survey of school leaders suggests,
for example, that school leaders in Finland and South Korea play
different roles in a number of key respects in their schools, even
though both nations are top-performing systems.
I would only add that a number of high-performing systems are on
a much smaller scale than the United States. That doesn't mean that
their successful practices are not relevant to the U.S.
experience-far from it. The implication is rather that these
practices have to be adapted to fit America's unique governance
structure and traditions-just as would be the case in other
nations. In some instances, successful models from Singapore,
Ottawa, Hong Kong, or Finland can be adopted at equivalent scale-in
the U.S., at the state or district level.
Niemand heeft alle antwoorden
So, I am very much looking forward to the discussions here today
and tomorrow. If we are honest with ourselves, I think we can
acknowledge that many high-performing and rapidly-improving
education systems continue to face a number of common challenges to
which solutions have often proved elusive. No one has all the
answers.
Many countries are facing serious challenges of recruiting and
retaining top-notch talent in the teaching profession, particularly
in shortage areas. During the 2009 PISA assessment, nearly 20
percent of 15-year olds were enrolled in schools where school
leaders reported that a lack of qualified mathematics or science
teachers was hindering instruction.
Many countries similarly struggle with how to prepare top-notch
school leaders and top-notch teachers. Throughout the world, most
teachers report that they lack incentives to innovate in the
classroom. And most governments under-invest in educational
research.
I am absolutely convinced that education leaders can best
address these shared challenges, and can better boost student
learning, by working together and sharing best practices, instead
of by working alone, in isolation. And I am convinced that these
stubborn challenges can best be met through tough-minded
collaboration rather than through tough-minded confrontation.
Geen forum voor toespraken
President Obama and I both believe that we must tackle these
challenges with our teacher unions working as strong partners with
us. That is the only way for real change to grow roots and take
hold in our nation's classrooms.
Unlike some international meetings, this Summit is not designed
as a forum for speechmaking. This is not the place to let the
perfect become the enemy of the good. I hope the discussions today
and tomorrow will be thoughtful and thought-provoking. But I also
hope that they will generate frank conversation among counties. I
hope the Summit will provide everyone with some smart takeaway
ideas when you return to your countries and organizations of
origin.
So, welcome back to New York. I look forward to learning and
sharing with all of you during the next two days. You honor us with
your presence. And your gift to us of your time and energy means
more to us than you can know.