Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools

The NY Times ^ | Nov. 21, 2005 | Brent Staples

[summer]

The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena...

...Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach.

...Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is "nothing like ours."

...There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control.

The United States, by contrast, has 50 different sets of standards for 50 different states...

...The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach

[summer]

In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight - if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track.

There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region....

I think this guy means well, and I agree with some of his points, like the fact that teachers need to spend more time observing master teachers. And, while I happen to believe some people are gifted as teachers, I do believe all teachers can actually learn to become BETTER teachers. (Although many teachers disagree with me on that, because they do not see themselves as learners. Only as teachers.)

But the kind of changes he is really talking concerns the following: changing the whole way people who employ teachers look at teachers.

For example, in some countries -- high performing countries with high performing students -- teachers have, literally, HOURS to plan ONE lesson. And, truthfully, that is how long it can take to plan a truly great lesson for students. But in this country, most teachers have little time to plan -- maybe a half hour per day for "planning time" for your six hours of teaching. Planning is really important, but teachers are not paid for it when they actually do devote real time to it. So, many teachers don't do it. And, as a result, they are not really "teaching" -- they are assigning students a task (answer questions #1-#10 after you read pages #1-#25) and that's it. That's not teaching, and most students don't learn as well that way.

The other issue the author refuses to acknowledge is that it's true Japan is very different than the US in terms of its population -- Japan has the most homogenous population in the world. They are not dealing with a constant influx of non-native speaking illegal aliens. They won't even let these people into their country. So, teaching a group of Japanese students is very different than teaching in a typical American classroom. Many teachers give up, but keep their jobs anyway. Even though I do believe all studens can learn, it is little wonder there are so many problems in American education.

[summer]

FYI.

[mvpel]

The idea that all we need is more uniformity and more centralized government control over education to solve all the problems in our schools is offensively ridiculous.

Look at our college and university system - it is, by and large, the envy of the civilized world, and students the world over flock to the US to pursue advanced degrees.

Why is this?

Because there is a free market in colleges and universities, with a broad array of choice and price points, from vocational technical colleges and community colleges at a hundred bucks a credit or less, up to rarified Ivy League schools that can set you back hundreds of thousands.

And they're all competing with one another for the best students, and the students are competing with one another for the best schools. It's about as far removed from the one-size-fits-all government-run primary school systems as it can be.

What we need is NOT more government control - that is to say, more and more of what we've had more and more of over the past decades as our performance has slid further and further.

Rather, we need to get government OUT of the business of education, and let the market forces - which have been so ruthlessly stifled in primary education - take hold.

In Soviet Russia, the government was in charge of every aspect of bread production, and you were lucky to get one pound of stale, mealy bread in a week. In the US, where bread is produced in a free market of profit-seeking competition, we have entire aisles in our grocery store selling 50 different kinds of bread from a dozen different bakeries.

The education of our children is too important a task to allow the government to run.

[summer]

I have to say I am always for the free market. I think you make a lot of sense.

[snowsislander]

This is a duplicate of http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1525957/posts, which is already at over 60 posts.

[summer]

To Freepers in ...
  Japan. FYI.

[summer]

Huh. I did a search and nothing came up.

[summer]

Some interesting comments on that thread. Thanks for linking it here.

[Cacique]

btt

[summer]

LOL..nice graphic, Cacique! :)

[GSlob]

"Even though I do believe all students can learn..."
Everyone has one's limits with regard to everything - be it the speed of running, the weight one could lift, acuity of hearing and vision, mental sharpness [IQ] and - necessarily derivative - ability to learn and the limits on one's capacity to do so. Thus everyone could indeed learn, but some will reach their limits at rudimentary reading and multiplication table within 6x6, while others would not reach theirs in MIT postdoctoral programs. And everything in between, of course.
Thus the only reasonable solution would be rigorous streaming by capacity, with different curricula [and different schools] for each stream. Say, one could use the traditional set of 5 streams: retardees[IQ<=70], dullards [71<=IQ<=90], normals [91<=IQ<=110], brights [111<=IQ<=130] and the gifted [131<=IQ]. Transition between adjacent streams ought to be made possible - both ways [one could drop down or - with effort - try to move up].

[Calpernia]

Tell you what JAPAN. You want to be a model for education? Then STOP editing your history books. ADD BACK IN FULL the 'dangerous' contents back INTO the Textbook. STOP revising and down playing the Nanjing Massacre, STOP ignoring your Sex Slaves, STOP depicting Japan as liberating other Asian countries, STOP using wartime propaganda terminology e.g. calling WWII the "Greater East Asian War". TELL THE TRUTH....then talk to the rest of the world about being a leader in education.

[Ninian Dryhope]

Good post and great idea, but we both know that will never happen and why it will never happen.

[GSlob]

It will happen [from the high end], but as private schools - ideally, as endowed schools, tuition free, with competitive admissions. And as and when it blossoms, the public schools would be left with the dullards and retardees.

[LibertarianInExile]

"What we need is NOT more government control - that is to say, more and more of what we've had more and more of over the past decades as our performance has slid further and further. Rather, we need to get government OUT of the business of education, and let the market forces - which have been so ruthlessly stifled in primary education - take hold."

AMEN to that BUMP!

[goodnesswins]

I heard something interesting today....that is....other countries with so called "higher test scores" usually test LESS of their student population....ie. they test the top part of the population. The rest get farmed out to other less challenging curriculum/schools.

WE here in the US test EVERYONE, pretty much.

Anyone here know anything about this?

[The_Reader_David]

Getting the government out of education is not the answer. All of the countries which out-strip us in education have state schools, though in Japan, these are supplemented with lots of private 'cram schools' and educational pre-schools.

The success of American higher-education (despite the best efforts of leftist idiots within) suggests a good model: a mixed system of goverment schools and private schools with direct and indirect government support. (I know Penn gets monies for various purposes from the Pennsylvania legislature, despite being private, and all prestegious universities are supported in part by government research grants and contracts, even as all colleges and universities are indirectly funded through government financial aid to students.)

The thing we need to get government out of is granting a monopoly on teaching to 'ed majors'. When my father was in high school in the 1940's, his teachers all had at least masters degrees in the subjects they taught, with one or two Ph.D.'s among them. Now high schools are taught by people with degrees in secondary education--only elementary education is more of a pud major at most universities. Now, with the exception of a few states in the Northeast where old prestegious private schools would throw fits if they couldn't hire actually qualified teachers with real academic degrees in their subject matter, in almost every state in the union, the legislature has granted a monopoly to the products of 'Colleges of Education' (purportedly to ensure the quality of teachers, though in fact having the opposite effect) not just in state schools but in private schools accredited by the state as well.

[gaijin]

There is extremely thorough achievement tracking and filtering of students in Japan. There is absolutely 100% no way that liberal USA parents would stand for it. There is also very tight discipline --I have personally seen teachers STRIKE students in Japan.

Students all wear conservative uniforms (which are checked for compliance) and they clean the schools --Janitors perform an extremely narrow set of cleaning duties. When students misbehave, they are asked to reflect on their behavior, and to apoligize; they will not merely be asked to stop the bothersome behavior --they must CONFESS.

There would be a TIDAL WAVE of lawsuits if they tried to institute Japanese-style education in the USA.

COMPLETELY UNFEASIBLE.

[samadams2000]

Dont know if Japan has been infiltrated by generations of ineffectual liberal educatots and hordes of illegal aliens.?

[inquest]

How about we look to our own past for better schools? Back when they were locally managed, when discipline actually meant something, when the quality of education wasn't measured by how much money was spent on a school district, just for starters?