Dr S Radhakrishnan once said that education, be it in schools or colleges, is only as good as its teachers.
It is a significant coincidence that a high profile organisation in the world should have submitted its education report in September 2007 (the birth month of Dr Radhakrishnan) and given in black and white, just what the great teacher had observed, decades ago!

McKinsey & Co, as many already know, is the world’s most prestigious management consulting firm that helps leading organisations improve their performance. They work with private companies and public sector bodies in a broad range of areas across operations, organisation, technology, and strategy.

Recently the company created the Social Sector Office (SSO) to ensure that the best capabilities of McKinsey are available to help the world’s leading institutions address important societal challenges. One of the projects undertaken by the SSO has been to study the variations in educational standards between countries. The report made public in September 2007 tells “How the world’s best performing schools systems come out on top”.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an international organisation of thirty countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and free market economy. Its  Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has repeatedly established that best performing countries are Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. 

Recommendations

McKinsey based its research on the PISA findings, and came out with certain policy recommendations by which all countries could raise their standard of education. The 56 page report has this simple advise for schools. Get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind.

The suggestions may not seem like anything that people do not know already. Yet the  analysts showed that in countries where the standard of education is unsatisfactory, schools recruit or get to recruit teachers from the bottom third of the college graduates.

The acknowledged explanation for this is that the best of students gravitate toward the more lucrative careers with the result that the teaching profession gets largely the ‘left overs’.
It is here that the McKinsay report provides an interesting insight.     

The report says that the best performing education systems in the world manage to attract the best students. In Finland all new teachers have a master’s degree. South Korea, recruits primary school teachers from the top 5 per cent of the graduates! Singapore and Hong Kong, from the top 30 per cent.

Yet in these places the school teacher’s salary is not the best in the market. McKinsey points out that in contrast Germany, Spain and Switzerland have the highest teacher salaries, yet their schools are nowhere near the top.

What then is the attraction for the brightest in these countries to become teachers? In Singapore and Finland, teaching is a high status profession. This again is because it is not easy to become a teacher here. Admission to teacher training institutes are fiercely competitive.

Singapore screens the candidates to teacher training courses with a fine mesh and Finland limits the supply of teachers to just meet the demand. In South Korea primary school teachers have to pass a four year undergraduate degree from one of a dozen universities. And getting into these universities requires top grades! In contrast, secondary school teachers can get a diploma  from any one of the 350 colleges with easier selection criteria. With the result that the secondary school teaching has a lower status than primary school teaching!

Continued training

It doesn’t end with recruiting the best candidates. The successful countries continue to teach the teachers. Singapore provides with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee development in each school. In Japan and Finland groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland the teachers get an afternoon off a week for this. The big gain in this practice is that the benefits of the innovative techniques thought out by one brilliant teacher reach a wider group of students. 

Lastly, McKinsey says that the most successful countries also do something very significant when things go wrong and when students start to fail. In Finland, one in seven teachers is a special education teacher devoted to pulling up those who lag behind. And on an average, a third of the students get a, one-on-one, remedial lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20 per cent of students and teachers are expected to stay behind a couple of hours after school to help the students.

The Indian reality

Though the study is largely relevant to the developed countries, there is something in the report for our elite schools as well. There are many private schools in our metros and even smaller cities that charge a huge amount as school fees. Yet the quality of teachers here is nowhere near the best. The reality is that even these schools do not get the top college graduates. The worth of a school therefore has come to be judged by the ‘facilities’ it provides. And schools vie with each other in pumping money into infrastructure.

But now that the report has confirmed the old wisdom that nothing is more important to education than teacher quality, schools must do some rethinking and invest the surplus funds in this direction.

The leading schools which have the same culture and syllabus must join hands and establish a teacher training college where only the best graduates get admission. This institution must also serve as a hub where teachers get to meet and share experiences on a regular basis. This would simultaneously lift the status of being a teacher in these schools and also the quality of education imparted here. And in time the changes happening in the top schools will permeate the entire education scene.