ow the world’s most improved school systems keep getting ...

1 Education ow the world s most improved school systems keep getting better AuthorsMona Mourshed Chinezi Chijioke Michael BarberAcknowledgementsThe authors deeply thank the over 200 system leaders, staff, and educators whom we interviewed across the 20 systems during this research. We further acknowledge the following leaders and experts for their counsel and thought partner-ship: KK Chan, John Deasy, Michael Fullan, S. Gopinathan, Peter Hill, Alan Kantrow, Lee Sing Kong, Tom Payzant, Andreas Schleicher, and Tan Ching Yee. The authors are deeply grateful to the substantial and committed contribu-tions of our colleagues Eman Bataineh and Hisham Zarka, and our editor Ivan Hutnik, without which this report would not have been possible.

2 The following colleagues provided valuable input and interview support throughout our work: Akshay Alladi, Byron Auguste, Tara Azimi, Alexander Busarov, Li-Kai Chen, Marcos Cruz, Sidnei Franco, Andrew Moffit, Michael Okrob, and Ramya Venkataraman. Lastly, we thank Nicholas Dehaney for his design the world s most improved school systems keep getting better ContentsForeword 10 Preface 12 Introduction and Overview 14 The approach 17 Lots of energy, little light 20 How to get there from here 241. Intervention 30 Through the looking glass 33 It s a system thing, not a single thing 37 Prescribe adequacy, unleash greatness 52 Common but different 612.

3 Contextualizing 68 Break through, rather than break down 71 The guiding principles in mandating versus persuading 71contentsForewordContents3. Sustaining 80 Collaborative practice: The user interface 84 The mediating layer: The operating program 91 Architecting tomorrow: The CPU 974. Ignition 100 getting going 103 Never waste a good crisis 105 Nowhere to hide 106 Entering stage right 109 The new leader s playbook 110 Staying power 1155. Conclusion 120 Appendix 126 Footnotes 136 ForewordHow the world s most improved school systems keep getting better ForewordThere is a recent and rapidly growing appetite for figuring out and accomplishing what I call whole system reform ---how to improve all schools in a district, a region, a state, province of country.

4 For a long time, there has been the realization that better education is the key to societal and global productivity and personal and social well-being. Only recently are we beginning to see that interest turn into specific questions about how you actually go about whole system reform. What pathways, from what starting points, are going to get results in reasonably short time frames? How do we actually raise the bar and close the gap for all students?How the World s most improved school systems Keep getting Better a report that examines 20 systems in action-- makes a unique contribution to this critical global agenda. Building on their 2007 study but with much more precision, in this remarkable report McKinsey gets inside the pathways.

5 It sorts out systems according to starting points and progression. These performance stage continua from poor to fair, fair to good, good to great, and great to excellence are in turn unraveled according to intervention clusters within given contexts. In each case it is very clear that all improving entities, even if their starting point is dismal, are led by a combinations of leaders who are self-aware that they are engaged in a phenomenon that the report calls it s a system thing a small number of critical factors that go together to create the chemistry of widespread see the clusters of interventions, different for those starting from a weak base than those who have already had significant success.

6 We see the pathways playing themselves out in each type of context. We see what it takes to ignite system change, what specific strategies achieve breakthrough, what interventions build ever -increasing momentum, how systems can sustain improvement, and especially how they can go to the next stage of development. As someone who has worked explicitly on system change in several contexts since 1997, including being directly involved in helping to lead whole system reform in Ontario since 2003, I can say that How the World s most improved school systems Keep getting Better makes a one of a kind seminal contribution to this dynamic and critical field. It couldn t come at a more propitious time.

7 Finally, we are witnessing across the globe a robust anticipatory and proactive interest in OECD s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA). PISA is no longer just a results phenomenon . PISA leaders are increasingly getting at what lies behind the numbers and are thus generating key insights and questions. The How the World s most improved school systems Keep getting Better report goes further, much further, in portraying the inner workings of successful pathways of reform given different beginning points. We don t have a perfect storm yet but there is one brewing. This report is invaluable for policy makers and school system leaders who are or should be crafting a roadmap for improving their specific systems .

8 It furnishes a powerful analytical tool with its intervention data-base to help guide such action. It will stimulate a wave of further whole system reform efforts, and will be accompanied by an associated body of research that will help us assess and learn with very specific lenses provided by this world needs to become much more wise about what lessons to extract for systems at different starting points, both with regards to the what and how of system reform. This is no ordinary report. It has captured action in real time. It will, by its clarity and compelling insights, catapult the field of whole system reform forward in dramatic ways. Michael FullanProfessor Emeritus, University of TorontoSpecial Advisor on Education to the Premier of Ontario7In 2007, McKinsey & Company wrote a report on the common attributes of excellent school systems titled, How the World s Best-Performing school systems Come Out on Top.

9 As we discussed its contents with policymakers and education leaders around the world, one question came up time and again: How does a system with modest performance become great? The leaders we spoke to also wanted to know which aspects of a school system reform journey are universal and which are context-specific. Bearing these questions in mind, we decided to dedicate another major research effort to understanding the transformation of school system performance around the world. This report is the result of that focus here is in analyzing the experiences of 20 school systems from all parts of the globe that have achieved significant, sustained, and widespread gains, as measured by national and international standards of assessment.

10 The Appendix describes our system selection criteria, as well as our database structure for the detailed evidence we gathered to map the experiences of nearly 575 reform interventions made across the school systems in our research sample. Our purpose in this work has been to understand precisely which interventions occurred in each school system and when, and how these interventions interacted with each other and with the system s broader context to deliver better outcomes for our sample we included school systems that have undertaken a journey of improvement along all the different stages of the performance spectrum from poor to fair, from fair to good, from good to great, and from great to excellent1.