McKinsey Report: How School Systems of All Levels Improve

  

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The PISA 2009 results provide a snapshot of the world’s educational rankings, but McKinsey & Co. recently put out a report examining the specific qualities of school systems that produce positive results. The report, titled How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, identifies 20 different educational systems – ranging from city school districts to those of entire countries – that have been seeing strong and sustained improvements in performance.

To understand what brought about these successes, McKinsey studied school systems at all stages of improvement: schools moving from poor to fair quality, as well as those moving from great to excellent quality. The conclusion: rather than follow the examples of the highest-achieving systems (e.g. Finland or Singapore), school systems can learn the most from the successes of systems at similar performance levels.

According to the report, cultivating improvement at any level does share six common interventions:

• Improving the skills of teachers and principals
• Assessing students
• Developing data systems
• Creating supportive educational policy and law
• Revising standards and curriculum
• Establishing a rewards system for teachers and principals.

These six interventions apply to the poor systems as much as the excellent ones. The difference lies in the methods of intervening. A poor or fair system typically focuses on improving data systems and policy coming from a central authority; a good or great system would focus on giving schools and teachers more freedom to craft their curriculums, and on developing teacher-to-teacher accountability.

Read the Executive Summary of the McKinsey Report

Photo credit: www.mckinsey.com