THE QUALITY MANAGEMENT OF TEACHERS IN THE MISSION OF SUSTAINABLE EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT: ORGANIZATIONAL ASPECT
THE QUALITY MANAGEMENT OF TEACHERS IN THE MISSION OF SUSTAINABLE EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT: ORGANIZATIONAL ASPECT
Ngo Duc Tai
PhD in Education Sciences, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University,
Russia, Kaliningrad
ABSTRACT
It is impossible to argue with the fact that the country's educational system is the cornerstone of state and social development. The prospects for the intellectual and spiritual improvement of the population largely depend on its content, structure and principles. The education system is sensitive to changes in the field of social development, sometimes becoming their root cause. That is why periods of state change have always affected education. The main reforms of education in the state often took place against the backdrop of dramatic changes in the life of society.
Keywords: education, teacher, educational reform, educational system, educational institution, functioning efficiency.
Education reform is one of the main tasks of almost all countries. And yet, despite massive increases in funding and massive reform efforts, the quality of education in many school systems has improved little if any in recent decades. Thus, some school systems perform better and improve faster than others. We have studied some of the school systems in different countries in order to understand the differences in quality and dynamics of development. Of interest was the correlation of the happy functioning of the teacher and the effectiveness of the pedagogical system itself with state support for the educational system.
The experience of the best school systems shows that three factors play a decisive role: 1) it is necessary that the right people become teachers; 2) they should be given training that would improve the effectiveness of teaching; 3) it is necessary to provide conditions under which each student, without exception, would receive a quality education.
Despite significant increases in funding and reform efforts, most school systems have failed to achieve significant improvements in the quality of education over the past decades. However, some school systems performed consistently well, performing more successfully and improving faster than others [2].
Next, consider an example of the impact of educational reform on the effectiveness of the functioning of educational institutions in the United States. Between 1980 and 2005, government spending per student in the United States increased, adjusted for inflation, by 73%. The number of teachers in the United States also increased during this period: students per teacher decreased by 18%. In 2005, the number of students in one class in American public schools was the smallest in the history of their existence. The federal government, state governments, boards of trustees, principals, teachers, education unions, private companies, nonprofits, and other organizations have launched tens of thousands of initiatives to improve the quality of education in American schools. However, the results of the students remained practically at the same level.
The United States has experimented with structural reforms, mainly with decentralized management in school districts, downsizing schools, and charter schools (schools that get more autonomy by taking on more responsibility). However, the results were disappointing. Organizational changes at the system level have often led to the same disappointing results.
Thus, in this case, one can observe how the change in the educational reform did not solve the global problems that arose in schools, and moreover, they are still being solved.
Next, let's consider another example of the impact of educational reform on the efficiency of schools. In New Zealand, the structure of the system has undergone a revision: decentralization of administration has been carried out, during which significant powers have been transferred to the school level, which can be managed by elected councils; two independent regulatory bodies were created, the role of the central government in the school system was significantly reduced. Five years later, almost a third of schools were experiencing difficulties. One reformer explained this phenomenon in the following way: «It was naive to believe that the quality of teaching in the classroom would improve only through structural changes» [4].
The unfortunate truth was that school principals and teachers were unable to change their usual ways of working and improve the situation sufficiently. An undeniable conclusion follows from this: it is impossible to improve the results and happiness of students or of teachers without improving the quality of education.
The one thing that all reforms of the school system have in common is the reduction in the number of pupils in the classroom: «Reducing the number of pupils in the classroom, coupled with an increase in the number of teachers per given student population, was perhaps the most widely practiced and heavily funded strategy for improving school performance». Over the past five years, New Zealand has taken steps to increase the relative number of teachers.
Yet, the available evidence suggests that, if early learning is excluded, class reduction did not have a significant effect on learning outcomes or happiness of students and teachers. No significant relationship was found between the studied parameters, or a significant negative correlation was found. Such results disappointed many – both school directors and teachers. Given the class sizes that exist in New Zealand, "large differences in teaching levels certainly outweigh any effects associated with smaller classes." In addition, reducing the class size is costly; if a school reduces class sizes, it needs more teachers, which in turn means that if the same level of funding is maintained, the teacher's salary will decrease. It also means that as the school system needs more teachers to work in smaller classes, schools may become less selective in hiring teachers. This experience is observed in New Zealand [5].
Available data show that the wide variation in student achievement is primarily due to the quality of teachers. A landmark study a decade ago, based on data from the state of Tennessee, showed that if two students of average ability were given very different teachers, one highly qualified and one lowly qualified, their learning outcomes would diverge by more than 50 percent in three years. points. In comparison, reducing the number of students in a class from 23 to 15 improves the performance of the average student at best. Another study in Dallas found that the gap in learning outcomes between students who were lucky three times in a row and students who were unlucky three times in a row was 49 percentage points. A Boston study found that students who had good math teachers improved significantly in math, while students who had less trained math teachers experienced similarly worse performance. Studies that take into account all available data on teacher performance show that students in high-skilled classrooms progressed three times faster than children in low-skilled classrooms. In all the school systems studied in the comparative study, school principals recognized large differences in learning outcomes, and in their opinion, these differences were mainly due to the quality of teachers [1].
A bad teacher has a strong negative impact on learning outcomes, especially in the early school years. Students who end up with bad teachers year after year (which happens quite often, either because they are in schools that fail to attract talented teachers, or because the school system cultivates a policy of «attaching» the class to one teacher, especially in elementary school), causing great and often irreparable educational damage. In some systems, seven-year-olds whose reading and numeracy scores place them in the top 20% are twice as likely to earn a university degree years later as their peers in the bottom 20%. All of this evidence taken together suggests that even if the education system is good, students who do not make rapid progress in their early years of schooling because they do not get qualified teachers have very little chance of catching up.
Yet some school systems boast high quality and the ability to improve rapidly. For example, consider the impact of effective government reform on raising the level of education in Singapore, Finland, and some US states. Singaporean students get high marks in the TIMSS system (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study - International Trends in Teaching Mathematics and Science), despite the fact that Singapore spends less money on primary school education (per capita) than almost all developed countries. In Finland, children do not start school until the age of 7 and spend only 4-5 hours a day during the first two years of schooling. Yet at the age of 15, Finnish schoolchildren rank highest in the world rankings in math, science, reading and problem solving, outperforming their peers in neighboring Norway by as much as 50 points. In Boston (USA), the proportion of students who meet the MCAS standards (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System - Massachusetts General Assessment System) has increased from 25 to 74% in mathematics and from 43 to 77% in English language and literature, and this is in just 6 years [8].
Next, it is necessary to understand why these systems performed better than others and how their experience can contribute to understanding how to improve the quality of schooling everywhere.
There are many differences between the education systems we have examined: reform strategists in Seoul, Helsinki, and Chicago work in very different cultural and political contexts and face different problems and challenges. Some systems appear to be polar opposites: The Netherlands attributes its success to a radically decentralized system of government; Singapore prides itself on centralized control. There are 23,000 schools in England, and only 150 in Boston.
Yet there are not only differences between the systems, but also fundamental similarities. We came to the conclusion that high-performing school systems, while strikingly different from each other in the structure and content of education, focused on improving the quality of the teacher's work, since this factor has a direct impact on the educational level of students. In their quest to improve the quality of teaching, these advanced school systems adhered firmly to three principles [4]:
• attract the right people as teachers (the quality of the education system cannot be higher than the quality of the teachers working in it);
• turn these people into effective educators (the only way to improve student outcomes is to improve the quality of teaching);
• create a system and provide targeted support so that every child can have access to highly qualified teaching (the only way to achieve the highest level of system performance is to raise the level of each student).
The most effective systems are distinguished by the fact that they consistently attract higher quality staff to the teaching profession, which leads to improved learning outcomes. They do this by rigorously selecting applicants for teacher training programs, developing effective teacher evaluation procedures, and charging high (though not too high) starting salaries. This approach raises the status of the teaching profession, resulting in more and better candidates.
The quality of a school system is based on the quality of its teachers. There is ample evidence (both statistical and practical) that it is precisely the ability to attract suitable personnel to the teaching profession that is a decisive condition for improving the quality of education. There have been studies in the United States showing that «a teacher's level of literacy, as measured by his vocabulary and standardized tests, influences the success of his students more than any other measurable teacher's skills and characteristics». Teachers recruited to schools through the Teach for America program, a program aimed at attracting graduates from the best universities to schools, have achieved much greater success in terms of student quality than other teachers, despite having passed only a short, although and effective, teacher training course, worked in the most difficult schools and, as a rule, had no previous experience. One Korean politician very aptly formulated the idea of the importance of attracting suitable personnel to the teaching profession: «The quality of the education system cannot be higher than the quality of the teachers working in it» [7].
The top-performing school systems we studied hire teachers from the top-performing third of school leavers: top 5% in South Korea, 10% in Finland, and 30% in Singapore and Hong Kong [6].
As for the worst school systems, they rarely attract the best personnel to the teaching profession.
However, taken together, the experiences we have studied of successful education systems show that focusing on the three principles above is critical to improving the quality of student education; and more importantly, attempts to reform the system without paying due attention to these principles do not appear to be able to achieve the improvement in outcomes sought by education reformers. The following discussion is devoted to a more detailed description of these factors.
In all well-functioning school systems, two almost universal strategies can be traced: the use of effective mechanisms for the selection of candidates for training in the profession and the provision of teachers with a decent basic salary. And it is precisely these features that are most often absent in systems with low quality indicators. Meanwhile, it is they who have the most significant and pronounced impact on the professional qualities of people who become teachers.
Successful school systems consistently employ better mechanisms for selecting people to train in the teaching profession than other, less successful systems. These systems take into account that in order to become a qualified teacher, a person must possess a certain set of characteristics that can be identified even before they are prepared for the teaching profession: a high level of general language and mathematical literacy, well-developed communication and interpersonal skills. interactions, readiness to learn and motivation to teach. The best systems developed procedures for testing the above skills and characteristics to select those applicants who were most likely to become good teachers. The developers of these procedures realized that one wrong personnel decision could lead to forty years of bad teaching.
In general, there are three different mechanisms used in school systems to make access to teacher training more selective and thereby balance supply and demand in the teaching labor market [3].
• Recruitment process at the system level. In Singapore and Finland, the state controls (albeit to varying degrees) the entire process of selecting candidates for teacher training. In Singapore, applicants are selected and hired by the Ministry of Education prior to gaining access to teacher training. Finland has a two-step process. The first round of selection is carried out at the national level, and further selection of candidates is entrusted to individual universities, which have the right to select applicants only from among those who successfully passed the first round. The number of places in teacher training courses is limited so that the number of graduates (supply) matches the needs of the school (demand).
• Controlling the number of places on courses through funding. In Hong Kong, England and South Korea, the government uses funding controls to limit supply (i.e. places in teacher training courses). With a limited supply, universities apply rigorous selection procedures to ensure that the best applicants enter these courses. Apparently, this approach works best in England, where the requirements for new teachers are clearly articulated, where there is a strict system for assessing the quality of teaching, and where any failure entails sanctions, which forces institutions to approach the selection procedure with full responsibility.
• Alternative routes. In systems where governing structures have no influence on university selection procedures and funding, alternative pathways have been created to allow candidates to be selected before they begin training. In the United States, organizations such as The Boston Teacher Residency, Chicago Teaching Fellows, and New York Teaching Fellows screen candidates and guarantee them a teaching position before they enter the teaching profession. These districts have agreements with schools and universities whereby they train candidates selected by these organizations.
Finally, most successful school systems recognize that no selection process can be perfect, so there are procedures in place to rid schools of bad teachers shortly after they are appointed if they do not meet the established requirements. In Boston and Chicago, teachers are not hired until they have served three and four years, respectively, and this allows management to fire them if they are out of place.
Thus, from the above analysis of the educational systems of different countries, one can single out a clear effective correlation between state reforms of an effective educational system. The main aspects that are presented to teachers before hiring were highlighted, and the conditions in educational institutions that are presented by both the teacher and students, where effective work and visible results are noted, were also determined. The results of this work can be applied to any educational systems in various countries around the world.
References:
- Dzhurinsky A. N. (2005) History of Pedagogy : Proc. allowance for students. pedagogical universities. [Рedagogy]. Moscow: (in Russ).
- Dzhurinsky A.N. (2000) Foreign school reforms. Hopes and reality. [Рedagogy]. Moscow: (in Russ).
- Kapranova V. A. (2005) History of Pedagogy: textbook. allowance. [Рedagogy]. Moscow: (in Russ).
- Latvian N. I. (2004) Education at the turn of the century. [Рedagogy]. Minsk: (in Russ).
- Latyshina D. I. (2005) History of Pedagogy (History of Education and Pedagogical Thought). [Рedagogy]. Moscow: (in Russ).
- Orlova A. P. (2019) History of Pedagogy: textbook. allowance for students. higher textbook establishments on ped. specialties. [Рedagogy]. Minsk: (in Russ).
- Rozhdestvensky S. V. (2000) Historical review of the activities of the Ministry of Public Education in 1802-1902. [Рedagogy]. Saint Petersburg: (in Russ).
- Singh R. R. (2003) Education in a changing world. [Рedagogy]. Moscow: (in Russ).