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The Quest for Excellence in Schools: Why 'Good Enough' Isn't Good Enough

This article explores the pursuit of excellence in schools and the need for continuous improvement. It discusses the changing nature of work, the importance of the skill of learning, and different approaches to school effectiveness. It also addresses the issue of teacher quality and the need for improvements in pediatric cardiac surgery.

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The Quest for Excellence in Schools: Why 'Good Enough' Isn't Good Enough

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  1. Why ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough: the quest for excellence in schoolsSSAT Celebratory DinnerMarch 2009 Dylan Wiliam www.dylanwiliam.net

  2. Raising achievement matters • For individuals • Increased lifetime salary • Improved health • Longer life • For society • Lower criminal justice costs • Lower health-care costs • Increased economic growth

  3. Why are employers unhappy? • Children are more intelligent than they have ever been • The ‘Flynn’ effect: long-term rises in IQ • Teaching is better than it has ever been • Especially in state schools (according to PISA data)

  4. It’s the changing nature of work… • Which of the following categories of skill is disappearing from the work-place most rapidly? • Routine manual • Non-routine manual • Routine cognitive • Complex communication • Expert thinking/problem-solving

  5. The ‘technology bias’ of change… Autor, Levy & Murnane, 2003

  6. …produces greater rewards for skill.

  7. Successful education… • The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that a pupil takes away from school, but his appetite to know and his capacity to learn. If the school sends out children with the desire for knowledge and some idea how to acquire it, it will have done its work. Too many leave school with the appetite killed and the mind loaded with undigested lumps of information. The good schoolmaster is known by the number of valuable subjects which he declines to teach. • (Sir Richard Livingstone, 1941)

  8. The only 21st century skill • So the model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared. • (Papert, 1998)

  9. Where’s the solution? • Structure • Small secondary schools • Larger secondary schools • Alignment • Curriculum reform • Textbook replacement • Governance • Specialist schools • Academies • Technology • Computers • Interactive white-boards

  10. School effectiveness • Three generations of school effectiveness research • Raw results approaches • Different schools get different results • Conclusion: Schools make a difference • Demographic-based approaches • Demographic factors account for most of the variation • Conclusion: Schools don’t make a difference • Value-added approaches • School-level differences in value-added are relatively small • Classroom-level differences in value-added are large • Conclusion: An effective school is a school full of effective classrooms

  11. Increasing teacher quality • A labor force issue with 2 (non-exclusive) solutions • Replace existing teachers with better ones? • Important, but very slow, and of limited impact • Teach First • Gradually raising the bar for entry to teaching • Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers • The “love the one you’re with” strategy • It can be done • Provided we focus rigorously on the things that matter • Even when they’re hard to do

  12. Improvements in pediatric cardiac surgery Senning Transitional Switch Early death rate Senning 12% Transitional 25% Bull, et al (2000). BMJ, 320, 1168-1173.

  13. Impact on life expectancy Life expectancy: Senning: 46.6 years Switch: 62.6 years

  14. “Always make new mistakes” Esther Dyson • “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho • “In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and highest responsibility anyone could have.”Lee Iacocca

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