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Last week, the LFA held its annual Leadership Council meeting for our member organizations.  The meeting featured a presentation by Mona Mourshed—a partner and researcher at McKinsey and Company—on a great resource for school improvement. Clearly many people feel they have winning formulas for school success, but this McKinsey research presents a truly compelling set of recommendations based on extensive research.

In the report, "How the world's best performing school systems come out on top,"—a follow-up to the 2007 publication by the same name—researchers examined the common attributes of school systems that exhibited continued performance. To do so, they conducted hundreds of interviews and gathered a large body of statistical data to create a comprehensive analysis of global school system reform. From this, they identified reform elements that they feel are replicable for school systems everywhere.

Diverse Case Studies

The McKinsey researchers chose 20 systems from around the world to analyze based on their improvement as measured by both international (including PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS) and national assessments. The systems studied were Armenia, Aspire (a U.S. charter school system), Boston (Massachusetts), Chile, England, Ghana, Hong Kong, Jordan, Latvia, Lithuania, Long Beach (California), Madhya Pradesh (India), Minas Gerais (Brazil), Ontario (Canada), Poland, Saxony (Germany), Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, and Western Cape (South Africa).

Though all have improved, they represent varied initial starting points and current levels of performance. This makes the report applicable to school systems at varied performance levels. Specifically, the report categorizes systems as going from poor to fair, fair to good, good to great, and great to excellent. Each grouping signifies certain intervention techniques the authors consider to be of universal applicability that can be replicated with due deference to local contexts.

Regarding this latter idea, the report says: “We find that each performance stage is associated with a dominant cluster of interventions, irrespective of geography, culture, or political system. This comprises the set of interventions that systems use to successfully traverse from one stage to the next . . . However, we also find great variation in how a system implemented the same interventions, be it in terms of the sequence, the emphasis, or the rollout approach across schools.” The report goes on to explain that “it is in contextualizing the intervention cluster where we saw the impact of history, culture, structure, and politics come fully into play.” Thus, the recommendations are expected to be integrated in a customizable way, so that local education professionals can guide reform as they see fit.

Targeting Interventions

Each set of interventions correspond to the level of development and funding of a system. So, poor to fair interventions emphasize things like achieving basic literacy and math skills, providing scaffolding for low-skill teachers, and bringing all schools in the system to a minimum quality threshold. Fair to good interventions (where many U.S. schools fall) focus on producing high quality assessments for students, ensuring school and teacher accountability, and creating sound organizational structure and pedagogy models. Going from good to great (where many other U.S. schools are) includes professional development for teachers and school leaders, making sure career paths are in place to fulfill teaching professionals and attract the best candidates.

Finally, movement from great to excellent entails granting greater school autonomy, strengthening peer-based learning through system-wide interaction, and supporting innovation and experimentation in schools. Making this “excellent” category is rare (for a long time it was limited to Finland), but doable.

The general picture of these transitions indicates that at lower starting points, more system control and direction is required, whereas at higher performing starting points, teachers and administrators have the experience and operate in a context that allows for greater creativity and personal autonomy.

Hope for the Future

Mona’s general point was—as the report puts it—“the lack of sustained progress seen in most school systems despite their massive investments should not be seen as the justification for abandoning the desire for educational improvement.” However, the researchers believe “it does demonstrate the need for adopting a different approach – one that will hopefully be guided by the experiences of school systems that have succeeded in improving over the longer term.”  This research provides hope for real improvement in America’s public schools, provided that the system can garner the support it needs. Clearly we want all American schools to be in the great and excellent categories, and allow for true professional development, creativity in reaching students, and general superior performance. This report provides hope that we can get there – and evidence that to do it, we cannot use a one-size-fits-all model.