The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Five Key Trends in Education from Around the World

Fifty-seven million children worldwide are out of school despite the fact that they deserve to be in primary education. While progress is being made toward the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal compulsory primary education, Malala Yousafzai’s call at the UN in July for every child to have “a book, a pen and a teacher” has yet to be answered.

When Alberta looks outward at what is happening in the world and how we can learn from these developments, we should begin with understanding that many Commonwealth countries are seeking to secure basic access to elementary school learning. Meanwhile, we’re seeking to sustain our global leadership in education. It’s critical for the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) to maintain an outside-in focus—understanding how its work connects to global developments—if it is to maintain its role as a leader for the future of education in Alberta.

I see five key trends developing around the world. Here, each is described briefly, with information and data about the development and a look at the implications each development may have for the future of schooling in Alberta.

1. Austerity

In Canada and in the developed world, governments face financial challenges that are leading to significant issues for schools, colleges and universities. Britain, for example, is weighing several decades of austerity, and the situation in most of Europe is serious, especially in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain (the so-called PIGS economies). Only Germany and Austria are posting significant economic growth; all other EU nations are fiscally challenged. Many U.S. states and South American countries (Brazil and Argentina, for example) are scaling back the rate of investment and growth of public education—hence, the attraction of social enterprise and private sector engagement in school systems.

In France, 60,000 secondary school teaching positions were cut during the 2006–12 period, and the French president intends to continue reducing public expenditure in all areas, including education, by C$19 billion (€14 billion).

One consequence of the widespread adoption of austerity is youth unemployment. In France, 1.9 million young people (aged 15–29) are not in school or employed. More than half of those aged 18–25 in Greece and Spain are unemployed, and youth unemployment for the EU has now reached 5.6 million—24 per cent of those aged 15–24. In the U.S., youth unemployment is 17 per cent for this same age group. Alberta, which has compulsory education to age 16 but permits attendance to age 18, has a youth unemployment rate of 8.5 per cent.

As austerity deepens in many countries, youth become disillusioned with schooling and the link between their education and the ability to obtain work. Governments are addressing these challenges through training and work-placement schemes, but the underlying challenge is the strength of economic activity in a jurisdiction. Alberta doesn’t have this challenge, at least for now.

2. Privatization, Social Enterprise and the Public Good

England is rapidly moving to a social enterprise model for the delivery of learning at all levels of its education system. By January 2013, about 2,600 English schools (12 per cent of all schools and over 50 per cent of high schools) had opted out of the control of Local Education Authorities (equivalent to an Alberta school board) and are now free to set their own admission standards, recruit teachers to teach (including teachers without a teaching qualification), set teacher pay levels and receive the same funds as a publicly managed school would receive. There are 28 local authorities where at least one in five schools is now an open academy. In almost all the 129 local authorities, at least one in five secondary schools is an open academy. There are 10 local authorities where at least one in five primary schools is now an open primary academy. Schools are converting all the time—by May 2013, an additional 150 schools had converted since the start of the year.

Presently, academies are not-for-profit organizations. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party has made clear that, should it win an outright majority in the next election, academies can elect to become for-profit organizations.

Similar developments are occurring in Sweden, where “free schools” have been operating since 1992. By 2010, 75 per cent of Swedish students attended a school owned and operated by a for-profit company, subsidized by the state’s grant of per-pupil funding. However, not all is well in Sweden. In 2013, JB Education, which supports the education of more than 10,000 students in free schools in Sweden, indicated that it would close several of its schools since it could no longer fund these “loss-making operations.” Some of Sweden’s private school companies operate schools in the U.K. (Charter schools are similar to academies in England and free schools in Sweden. Alberta has just 13 charter schools, all of which are not-for-profit.)

Private sector investments in K–12 education are rising. Both Pearson and News Corp are investing directly in owning school systems, and other investments are focused on technology “solutions” for K–12. In the U.S. alone in 2012, educational investment topped $1 billion, including investments in postsecondary education systems.

3. The Digital Revolution

The combination of new learning devices (tablet technologies, smartphones and Smart Boards) and the emergence of open education resources (OERs) (free-to-use learning materials, simulations, games, textbooks, worksheets and animations) is making learning with the support of technology commonplace. The Indian government is promoting tablets as an effective medium for learning, with more than 50 models receiving the government’s financial support. By 2014, all textbooks required to complete a K–12 education in the Indian state of Kerala will be available on tablets for free—other Indian states are pursuing similar objectives.

It’s not just textbooks that are going digital: learners can access simulations, educational games and assessment activities online through handheld devices. Students can also engage in video or audio conferences, develop and share presentations, and track and complete projects and assignments.

If learners have access to powerful learning technologies that adapt to their levels of knowledge and understanding, what is it that teachers will do? The answer some give is that teachers will focus on coaching, guiding, mentoring and remediation rather than instruction. Technology provides instruction (knowledge and skill development), and the teacher provides support and creates opportunities for learners to demonstrate their learning in practice. This is the essence of the “flipped classroom”—an outcropping of the digital revolution. The suggestion is that the technology doesn’t replace teaching; it enables teachers to play a different role in their relationship to students and knowledge.

To date, there’s no scientific research base to indicate exactly how well flipped classrooms work. But some preliminary non-scientific data suggest that flipping the classroom may produce benefits. In one survey of 453 teachers who flipped their classrooms, 67 per cent reported increased test scores, with particular benefits for students in advanced placement classes and students with special needs (Flipped Learning Network 2012). Clintondale High School, in Michigan, saw the failure rate of its Grade 9 math students drop from 44 to 13 per cent after adopting flipped classrooms (Finkel 2012). Many students with special needs rely on “smart” technologies to support their learning and development, and teachers are increasingly leveraging communities of practice to develop new learning materials and to find social supports for their teaching.

In many parts of the world, building schools and offering classes with one teacher for each group of 30–40 students simply isn’t possible due to the scale of public investment needed. Open schools, which use open and distance learning, ICT and open education resources, are a fast-growing response to this challenge, with the Commonwealth of Learning (based in Vancouver) leading this work. Using materials developed nationally and adapted locally, radio and ICT access to primary and secondary education is made possible, with considerable success.

4. Learning Analytics, Value Added and Personalization

The use of data to track learning and performance and for the assessment of teachers’ contributions to that learning is big business around the world—a particular branch of the digital revolution. For example, the City of New York released data about 18,000 individual math and English teachers’ performance. The Teacher Data Reports ranked teachers based on their students’ gains on the state’s math and English tests over the course of five years (up until the 2009/10 academic year). Proponents of value-added assessment—including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former NYC school chancellor (and now head of News Corp’s education division) Joel Klein—argue that this model demonstrates teachers’ effectiveness and should be used to determine how to compensate teachers, as well as whom to fire. The U.S. spends $1.7 billion each year testing K–12 students.

Using student assessment data also enables, according to some, the personalization of learning. Analytics are at the heart of the work of the Khan Academy and many of the developments in what is known as adaptive learning, where what students study and what materials they are provided with for this work are shaped by their assessment data. Software programs using machine intelligence, such as Knewton, have been developed to support this work. The vision is simple: within 5–10 years, the paper textbook and the mimeographed worksheet will be dead. Classroom exercises and homework—text, audio, video and games—will have shifted entirely to the iPad or equivalent. Adaptive learning will help each student find the exact right piece of content needed, in the exact right format and at the exact right time, based on previous patterns of use and currently assessed abilities. Students can move at their own speed. They can get hints and instant feedback. Teachers, meanwhile, can spend class time targeting their help to individuals or small groups based on need.

School boards find these developments seductive. They can mine the big data sets concerning performance and look at their return on investment from new curriculum developments, teachers and technology. The fact that there are doubts about the use of these data is secondary to the fact of being able to see the “evidence.”

5. STEM and the Curriculum

The curriculum focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is of growing importance, with many parents demanding that their children take more STEM and less of other subjects. Parents believe that the future of work relies heavily on STEM and that other subjects will distract students from those studies most likely to produce economic returns. On a recent visit to Singapore, it was found that the primary challenge faced by secondary school principals is the demands of parents for STEM to be the only subjects in the curriculum.

One consequence of this is that the creative and fine arts, physical education, music, dance, literature and writing are seen as less important and often disappear from the curriculum as a student moves from elementary school through the high school system. Yet one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global economy involves design and the creative economy (gaming, movie making, television, web design, simulations, architecture and interior design). In the U.K., the creative economy is generating a faster rate of job growth than manufacturing. Across the EU, the creative industries now account for 4 per cent of the EU’s GDP.

Steve Jobs was fond of saying that Apple’s success was due to the fact that rather than employing geeks, Apple hired “poets, musicians and artists who are interested in technology.” The 21st-century curriculum movement is in danger of too strongly focusing on STEM at the expense of other learning and, as a framework for entrepreneurship, missing out on the faster sectors of growth.

Looking Beyond the Alberta Border

Schooling is changing worldwide, in part due to economics and in part due to technology. But at the heart of education the challenge remains the same: How do we build meaningful and mindful relationships between students, teachers and knowledge? The Alberta–Finland partnership, spearheaded by the ATA and its colleagues at the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation in Finland, focuses on engagement, innovation and the need for local solutions to local challenges. Learning from global partners—a significant focus for the work of the ATA over many years—is not an add-on to the core business of the ATA but, rather, is an essential part of making sure that Alberta develops as the place that the world needs it to be, given the opportunities we hold in our hands.

References

Finkel, E. 2012. “Flipping the Script in K–12.” District Administration (November). Also available at www.districtadministration.com/article/flipping-script-k12.

Flipped Learning Network. 2012. Improve Student Learning and Teacher Satisfaction with One Flip of the Classroom. http://flippedlearning1.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/classroomwindowinfographic7-12.pdf.

Stephen Murgatroyd is a journalist, the CEO of Collaborative Media Group and a regular contributor to the ATA Magazine.