Regulation , Trust and Education

1. Regulation and Trust: Complementary or contradictory?Michal BellerDirector-General of RAMATheNational Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education, ISRAEL 23 May, 2012

2. Regulation, Trust and Education Panel Members: • Mr. ShlomoDovrat, Founder and General Partner, Carmel Ventures, Board Member of “HakolHinuch”, Israel • Mr. George Zegarac, Deputy Minister of Education, Ontario, Canada • Mr. Richard Zeiger, Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of California, USA • Dr. SakariKarjalainen, Former Director-General, Ministry of Education, Finland • Ms. Dalit Stauber, Director-General, Ministry of Education, Israel

3. ”Education in one country can be better understood in comparison to education in other countries ” Porter & Gamoran, 2002 Methodological Advances in cross-national surveys of educational achievement. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

4. Questions to the Panel • What steps need to be taken to secure trust at all levels of the education system? • What is the single factor that most hinders trust? • Can accountability and trust “live” together? Are these terms complementary or contradictory? • To what extent (if at all) are the answers to the above questions different for education, compared with other public and business sectors?

5. Trust and Shared Responsibility Wider Community Students Parents Trust and Shared Responsibility Principals Teachers Politicians Active Partners External Stakeholders Administrators Local Education Authorities

6. Quality of Education

7. Complementary or contradictory? Regulation Trust

8. Finding the Right Balance Regulation External/Vertical Accountability Mistrust Trust  Deregulation? Self Regulation? Autonomy? Internal/Lateral Accountability

9. Forms of Accountability Vertical accountability is about systems that provide information on performance to a higher level in the administration Lateral accountability is about systems that provide incentives for teachers and schools to learn from other teachers and schools

10. Governing Complex Education Systems OECD/CERI project launched in 2010 • Despite increasing decentralization, central governments are still held responsible by the general public for ensuring high quality education • School accountability has become a critical topic, often triggered by the results of international benchmarks such as PISA and TIMSS • Attention is increasingly drawn to the outcomes of educational systems on a national level at the same time that much of the decision-making takes place on a local or regional level • New form of accountability that takes account of diverse set of stakeholders – Multiple school accountability

11. Types of Accountability

13. Ministers of education are frequently being judged on the basis of national and international test results … … Often those conducted during the term of their predecessors… …Who in return set short-term achievement goals

14. Campbell's Law "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” "achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” Campbell, D. T., "Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change“. The Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, December, 1976.

15. Unintended Negative Effects of External High Stakes Testing Narrowing the Curriculum Between-Subject Reallocation of time The Impact of Setting a Specific Target Teaching to the Test; Test Inflation Assessment is Only a Sample of the Curriculum “Most Children are Left Behind…”

16. Creating New Assessment Culture Strengthening trust and accountability at the same time Assessment in Service of Learning Mitigating the Negative Impact of High-stake Testing

17. Assessment in Service of Learning of, for and as Learning of Assessment Learning as for Randy Bennett, 2010

18. Accountability and Student Learning • Accountability is not only about measuring student learning but actuallyimproving it • Genuine accountability involves supporting changes in teaching and schooling that can heighten the probability that students meet standards • There are at least three major areas where attention is needed:  • Ensuring that teachers have the knowledge and skillsthey need to teach to the standards • Providing school structures that support high quality teaching and learning  • Creating processes for school assessment that can evaluate students’ opportunities to learn and can leverage continuous change and improvement Darling Hammond, 2004

19. Driving Reform in Education “Wrong” Drivers • External accountability • Individualistic Incentives • Investment in technology • Ad hoc policies “Right” Drivers • Capacity building • Team or collaborative work • Pedagogy • Systemic policies Michael Fullan, 2012

20. Concluding Remarks The challenges are: • Risk-taking supportive environment • Discourse among all stakeholders • Long term processes • Intelligent accountability system • Moving from urgent need for change at any cost toinspiring the necessary level of trust and respect for education

21. Trust is hard to build, easy to destroy Wider Community Students Parents Trust and Shared Responsibility Principals Teachers Politicians Active Partners External Stakeholders Administrators Local Education Authorities

22. Questions to the Panel • What steps need to be taken to secure trust at all levels of the education system? • What is the single factor that most hinders trust? • Can accountability and trust “live” together? Are these terms complementary or contradictory? • To what extent (if at all) the answers to the above questions are different for education, compared with other public and business sectors?

23. Thanks! Q&A?

24. Science and Innovation Profile of Israel (2006) #1 BERD Expenditure on R&D in the Business Enterprise Sector. GERD Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D. #3 #1 #5 Source: OECD Science, Technology and Industry Outlook 2008

25. RAMA National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education Assessment for Learning

26. Assessment for Learning • Formative assessment plays an important role in increasing teacher quality and student learning (when it’s viewed as a process rather than a tool) • Engineer effective learning environments for students by: • Emphasizing the instructional side of formative assessment • Classroom questioning • Learning intentions and success criteria • Feedback • Collaborative and cooperative learning • Self-regulated learning   Wiliam, D. (2012)

27. Updating the Israeli Assessment & Evaluation System The main goals of the recent update: • Implement a culture of “assessment for learning” • Mitigate the threats of external exams (including gaming the system) • Effective integration of internal and external evaluation • Decentralization of the evaluation process along with the use of centrally designed rigorous tools • Empowerment of teachers and principals • Professional design of assessments and scoring (including equating, alignment to curriculum and standards and more)

28. Cycles of Internal & External Meitzav Cluster of Schools

29. Goals of the Internal Meitzav • Reduce the frequency of external assessments (from every 2 years to every 4 years), and introduce internal assessments in between • Provide principals with a way to annually ensure that teaching is aligned with expectations and standards for each subject matter • Annual follow up ofchanges in achievement and school climate relative to national norms • Enable teachers to internally use professional assessment tools to plan and monitor learning • Provide feedback at the student level (hence increase the motivation of students to respond) • Implement a culture of “assessment for learning” and focus attention on aspects not measured by standardized tests

30. Teaching & Learning Content & Performance Standards Curriculum School Climate Achievement Tests Educational Environent