Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

opportunities that scientific competencies bring as well as the environment that schools offer for science learning’. Whereas it is the countries of the Far East that do consistently well in the TIMSS tests, it was the Western countries that fared better in the PISA tests. (Finland was top – again – and the UK came ninth, just behind Germany but well above average. Don’t ask about the US … .)
    What the PISA project does, too, is look behind the headlines and seek to assess the background and attitudes of the students involved. For example, they were able to identify that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds were more likely to ‘show a general interest in science’, and this was especially the case if a parent was involved in a ‘science-related career’. What they also found was that ‘streaming’ students amplified the effect that their socio-economic background was having; the earlier the streaming process began, the stronger this impact was. What’s more, ‘Schools that divided students by ability for all subjects tended to have lower student performance on average.’ I always used to half joke when I was teaching languages that we ‘set’ students according to parental income – here is the proof that not only is it so, but also of how debilitating such a vicious cycle is to the young people who need our help most.
    What the PISA report makes very clear, and the McKinsey report picks up on with a vengeance, is that the answer to improving the quality of aneducational system does not lie in throwing money at it. According to the PISA press release:
    across the OECD area as a whole learning outcomes have generally remained flat, while expenditure on education in OECD countries rose by an average of 39% between 1995 and 2004.
    ( www.oecd.org/document/22/0,3343,en_2649_34487_39713238_1_1_1_1,00.html )
    Finland spends a great deal less per head on education than the US and, whereas Finland has come top of the PISA tests three times out of three, the US, well, hasn’t. In the opening few lines of the McKinsey report it is pointed out that, using educationally high-performing Singapore as an ‘average’ (the country that is consistently top of the TIMSS tests), a tiny fraction of children from Africa and the Middle East reach that standard, yet Singapore spends less on educating its primary children than 27 of the 30 countries in the OECD.
    So, when it comes to improving education, money isn’t the answer, nor is the Holy Grail to be found in reducing class sizes. The McKinsey report describes how improving the teacher-to-child ratio in a bid to raise standards has been a strategy employed by 29 of the 30 OECD members. However, apart from with very young children, there is no evidence
whatsoever
that this makes any difference
whatsoever
to the quality of education the children receive. What each and every one of the 112 studies the McKinsey report looked at on the subject showed was that there was one factor that would ‘completely dominate’ any reduction in class size anyway, a factor that their report shows to be
the
critical factor in the quality of education systems anywhere in the world, namely – you.
    According to the report the top two factors that will determine the quality of any country’s educational system are (1) ensuring that country recruits the ‘right people’ to be teachers – after all, according to a Korean participant interviewed for the report and whose words are taken up as a rallying cry by the authors, ‘The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers’; and (2) that these people are then trained to be high quality ‘instructors’.
    With regards to their first point, the authors point out that the top performing countries employ three main strategies to achieve this. They make the profession a ‘highly selective one’, recruiting only from the top percentage of any graduate cohort. In South Korea, this is the top five per cent apparently, something that perhaps calls into question the suggested UK policy of letting failed bankers become teachers within six months. That said, the report does say that teaching is the preferred career optionof graduates and undergraduates in the UK. What the report doesn’t mention is that, of those graduates entering the profession, nearly half drop out before they actually teach a class, with a further 18 per cent dropping out within three years. The report, by the ubiquitous