Questions:
How can a leader best identify an individual school’s position on the poor to excellent performance continuum?
What if a school defines “success” differently from the OECD and the PISA results? Does their context then put them on a continuum that exists entirely separately from other schools?
Mourshed, M., Chijioke, C., & Barber M. (2010, November). Executive Summary: How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keeping Getting Better. McKinsey & Company.
“…all the improving systems we examined within a given journey show little variation in what they do, but a much greater extent of variation in how they do it” (p. 26).
“Collaborative practice is about teachers and school leaders working together to develop effective instructional practices, studying what actually works in classroom, and doing so with rigorous attention to detail and with commitment to not only improving one’s own practice but that of others as well” (p. 75).
I found the notion that all improving schools share similarities in their improvement efforts enlightening, however as I read through the document, I began to question the universality of the author’s assumptions. To begin with, the whole premise of a school’s positioning on the “poor” to “great” scale is determined by a score on a standardized PISA test. It was for this reason that I thought the Sjøberg (2015) article to be enlightening. The OECD, and as a result PISA, can’t help but have political biases. It seems problematic that such high stakes (i.e. the development of educational policies and the well-being of students) hang in the balance of positive or negative standardized test scores. In the same breath, however, I see value in the findings given to particular contexts. For example, identifying an institution’s current standing seems like a reasonable beginning in all contexts. This allows for needs to be identified and context-specific interventions to be developed.
Sjøberg, Svein. (2015). PISA and Global Educational Governance – A Critique of the Project, its Uses and Implications. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education. 11. 111-127. 10.12973/eurasia.2015.1310a.
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