FEW WOULD DISAGREE THAT, among all the factors that affect how much students learn, the quality of their teachers ranks very high. But what, exactly, do policy makers, universities, and school leaders need to do to make sure that the vast majority of teachers in their jurisdiction are literally world class?

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to look carefully and in great detail at what the countries whose students are performing at the world's top levels are doing to attract the highest quality high school students to teaching careers, prepare them well for that career, organize schools so teachers can do the best work of which they are capable, and provide incentives for them to get better at the work before they finally retire.

It was not hard for us to find the right person to lead a study that would do just that. Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the world's most admired researchers. Teachers and teaching have been lifelong professional preoccupations for her. And, not least, Professor Darling-Hammond is no stranger to international comparative studies. Fortunately for us and for you, she agreed to lead an international comparative study of teacher quality in a selection of top-performing countries. The study, Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around the World, took two years to complete and is unprecedented in scope and scale.

The volume you are reading is one of six books, including case studies conducted in Australia, Canada, China, Finland, and Singapore. In addition to the case studies and the cross-study analysis, the researchers have collected a range of videos and artifacts (http://ncee.org/empowered-educators)—ranging from a detailed look at how the daily schedules of teachers in Singapore ensure ample time for collaboration and planning to a description of the way Shanghai teachers publish their classroom research in refereed journals—that we hope will be of great value to policy makers and educators interested in using and adapting the tools that the top-performing jurisdictions use to get the highest levels of teacher quality in the world.

Studies of this sort are often done by leading scholars who assemble hordes of graduate students to do the actual work, producing reams of reports framed by the research plan, which are then analyzed by the principal investigator. That is not what happened in this case. For this report, Professor Darling-Hammond recruited two lead researcher-writers for each case study, both senior, one from the country being studied and one from another country, including top-level designers and implementers of the systems being studied and leading researchers. This combination of insiders and external observers, scholars and practitioner-policy makers, gives this study a depth, range, and authenticity that is highly unusual.

But this was not just an effort to produce first-class case studies. The aim was to understand what the leaders were doing to restructure the profession of teaching for top performance. The idea was to cast light on that by examining what was the same and what was different from country to country to see if there were common threads that could explain uncommon results. As the data-gathering proceeded, Professor Darling-Hammond brought her team together to exchange data, compare insights, and argue about what the data meant. Those conversations, taking place among a remarkable group of senior policy actors, practitioners, and university-based researchers from all over the world, give this work a richness rarely achieved in this sort of study.

The researchers examined all sorts of existing research literature on the systems they were studying, interviewed dozens of people at every level of the target systems, looked at everything from policy at the national level to practice in individual schools, and investigated not only the specific policies and practices directly related to teacher quality, but the larger economic, political, institutional, and cultural contexts in which policies on teacher quality are shaped.

Through it all, what emerges is a picture of a sea change taking place in the paradigm of mass education in the advanced industrial nations. When university graduates of any kind were scarce and most people had jobs requiring only modest academic skills, countries needed teachers who knew little more than the average high school graduate, perhaps less than that at the primary school level. It was not too hard to find capable people, typically women, to do that work, because the job opportunities for women with that level of education were limited.

But none of that is true anymore. Wage levels in the advanced industrial countries are typically higher than elsewhere in the world. Employers who can locate their manufacturing plants and offices anywhere in the world and who do not need highly skilled labor look for workers who have the basic skills they need in low-wage countries, so the work available to workers with only the basic skills in the high-wage countries is drying up. That process is being greatly accelerated by the rapid advance of automation. The jobs that are left in the high-wage countries mostly demand a higher level of more complex skills.

These developments have put enormous pressure on the governments of high-wage countries to find teachers who have more knowledge and a deeper command of complex skills. These are the people who can get into selective universities and go into occupations that have traditionally had higher status and are better compensated than school teaching. What distinguishes the countries with the best-performing education systems is that: 1) they have figured this out and focused hard on how to respond to these new realities; and 2) they have succeeded not just in coming up with promising designs for the systems they need but in implementing those systems well. The result is not only profound changes in the way they source, educate, train, and support a truly professional teaching force, but schools in which the work of teachers is very differently organized, the demands on school leaders is radically changed, teachers become not the recipient of a new set of instructions from the ”center,“ but the people who are actually responsible for designing and carrying out the reforms that are lifting the performance of their students every day. Not least important, these systems offer real careers in teaching that enable teachers, like professionals in other fields, to gain more authority, responsibility, compensation, and status as they get better and better at the work, without leaving teaching.

This is an exciting story. It is the story that you are holding in your hand. The story is different in every country, province, and state. But the themes behind the stories are stunningly similar. If you find this work only half as compelling as I have, you will be glued to these pages.

MARC TUCKER, PRESIDENT

NATIONAL CENTER ON EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY

WE WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE and thank the many individuals and organizations who contributed to the design, conduct, and reporting of the research presented in this book. In particular, we wish to thank the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) who funded the overall International Teacher Policy Study and the members of their Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB) who reviewed and provided feedback on draft materials. We want to express our deepest thanks to Linda Darling-Hammond who was the overall principal investigator for the International Teacher Policy Study and who provided leadership, direction, and guidance to all case studies. We are indebted also to members of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), who provided advice and assistance throughout this study, particularly: Dion Burns, Maude Engstrom, Sonya Keller, and Jon Snyder.

We wish to thank and acknowledge our colleagues and coauthors who provided considerable research expertise and contributions to the conduct, writing, and completion of the Canada, Alberta, and Ontario case studies: Jesslyn Hollar, Ann Lieberman, Pamela Osmond-Johnson, Shane Pisani, and Jacqueline Sohn.

In addition, for the Alberta case study, we offer great thanks to those who provided us with information and materials related to policies and practices in Alberta: Mark Bevan, Paul MacLoud, and Karen Shipka of the Ministry of Education; Diane Wishart of the Ministry of Advanced Education; J. C. Coulture and Mark Yurick of the Alberta Teachers’ Association; Jim Brandon of the University of Calgary; Jean Clandinin, Jim Parsons, and Randy Wimmer of the University of Alberta; Peter Grimmett of the University of British Columbia; Val Olekshy of the Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium; and the following Alberta teachers: Robert Gardner, Marion Brenner, Wayne LaVold, Katherine McReady, Katherine Macmillan, Tammy Thero-Soto, and another teacher who chose to remain anonymous.

For the Ontario case study, our deepest thanks go to the individuals who agreed to provide their expertise and time by being interviewed to inform our case study. Thank you to: Lindy Amato, Rob Andrews, Paul Anthony, Sandra Bickford, Megan Borner, Kathy Broad, Hanca Chang, Paul Charles, Camille Chenier, Suzette Clarke, Peter Edwards, Lori Foote, Richard Franz, Mary Jean Gallagher, Jacqueline Hammond, Rhonda Kimberley-Young, Wahid Khan, Judi Kokis, Ann Lopez, Judith Lyander, Pauline McNaughton, Dawn Merlino, Susan Perry, Demetra Saladaris, Michael Salvatori, Bruce Shaw, Tina Sidhu, Jim Strachan, Christina Terzic, and Sabir Thomas. We are grateful also to several teachers and principals who agreed to be interviewed but asked that we keep their identity confidential. Ontario’s education system and students benefit tremendously from your individual expertise and collective professionalism. Thank you all! In addition, we wish to thank: Taddesse Haile and his team at the Education Statistics and Analysis Branch in the Ontario Ministry of Education and Barbara Gough and colleagues in the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities who provided advice and assistance with provincial data to inform our case study; Simon Young and Bill Powell from the Ontario College of Teachers who assisted with photographs; and Margaret Brennan who provided transcription services for the case study. We are grateful for all of the contributions that have benefited this case study. Any errors or omissions, however, are the responsibility of the authors.

CAROL CAMPBELL AND KEN ZEICHNER

Carol Campbell is associate professor of Leadership and Educational Change and director of the Knowledge Network for Applied Education Research (KNAER) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Carol is also an appointed education advisor to the Premier and the Minister of Education in Ontario, Canada. Her previous roles include: executive director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) at Stanford University, USA; holding progressively senior leadership roles in the Ontario Ministry of Education including becoming the Ministry’s first chief research officer; and academic, education, and policy roles in the UK. Carol is originally from Scotland and earned her PhD at the University of Strathclyde.

Jesslyn Hollar is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington and director of Central Washington University’s alternative route to certification program. Her research interests include teacher education and policy, sociology of education and history of teacher education, teacher learning, and education reform. She is a member of the History of Education Society and the American Educational Research Association and serves on the editorial board for the Northwest Association of Teacher Educators.

Ann Lieberman is currently a senior scholar at Stanford University. She is an emeritus professor from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is affiliated with two Stanford Centers: SCALE and SCOPE. Her major areas of research are: teacher knowledge, learning, and leadership, as well as school/university partnerships. She is internationally known for her work on finding a way to get at teacher knowledge to go with research knowledge. She has written or edited over 18 books, scores of articles and chapters, all focused on the teacher, teacher leadership, and school reform. She has been on the forefront of arguing for policies that enable teacher learning and leadership that recognize the complexities of teaching and the critical importance of supporting teachers.

Pamela Osmond-Johnson is an assistant professor of Educational Administration with the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. Pamela recently completed her doctorate in educational administration from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, with a focus on educational policy. Her research includes work around teacher leadership, teacher professionalism, teacher federations, and the professional growth of teachers. Prior to beginning her doctorate, Pamela was a high school science teacher and vice principal in Newfoundland.

Shane Pisani is a doctoral candidate in the University of Washington’s Curriculum and Instruction Department. He is an instructor with the Seattle Teacher Residency and also teaches a number of courses for both the elementary and secondary teacher education programs at the University of Washington. His research interests include teacher perceptions of global education and the positioning of mentor teachers as teacher educators.

Jacqueline Sohn is a PhD candidate in Educational Policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on the political influencers of evidence use for macro-level policy decisions in the area of child poverty. More broadly, she is interested in the use of interdisciplinary research and cross-sector collaborations for developing effective social policies. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she was employed at the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term care in a provincial project coordination and policy role.

Ken Zeichner is the Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to moving to the University of Washington in 2009, Zeichner was the Hoefs-Bascom Professor of Teacher Education and association dean for Teacher Education and International Education. He was a member of the UW-Madison faculty for 34 years. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, a fellow in the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and a former vice president of AERA. His publications include Teacher Education and the Struggle for Social Justice (Routledge, 2009). His current work focuses on teacher education and professional learning, teacher education policy, and engaging local communities in teacher education.

Access online documents an videos at http://ncee.org/empowered-educators