Chapter 4. Powerful, Coherent Instructional Systems—Wrapped in Credentials That Make Sense

Despite the technology revolution, there is almost nothing new about the goals we should set for students. What Harriet Minor saw in the Common Core is what the best teachers have always wanted for their students in the formal curriculum: deep understanding of the subjects they study. The best teachers have tried their best to develop in their students the ability to analyze, synthesize, question, reason, think for themselves, and think outside the box. They've targeted the ability to write about complex matters clearly, concisely and, when required, in a compelling way; the ability to use mathematics fluently for a wide variety of purposes; and the ability to appreciate the power of the scientific method and gain a good grasp of the big ideas in the sciences and technology that have revolutionized the modern world. They have always known that we study history not to accumulate a storage bin of events and dates and battles and changes of government but to understand the forces behind those events and the way humans have reacted to those forces over time, so that students can approach their duties as citizens with an understanding of the importance of the institutions of freedom and democracy.

What we have recently been taught to think of as 21st century skills—things like the ability to solve complex problems creatively and effectively, to lead others but also to contribute effectively as a team member, to work independently but also collaboratively, to plan a complex project and manage it to completion on time, and to use modern information technology effectively—are not 21st century skills at all.

The Duke of Wellington is claimed to have said, nearly two centuries ago, that England's victory against Napoleon at Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The idea that participation in sports prepares students for both teamwork and leadership is hardly new, no more so than the idea that participation in student government prepares students to be good citizens.

The best educators have always cared deeply about more than all that. The best teachers have seen themselves not just teaching subjects in the curriculum or even just helping students to learn what is expected of them as workers. They have always cared very much about the kind of people their charges would grow up to be—not just smart and competent, but also courageous, empathetic, tolerant, caring, compassionate, hard-working, decent, generous, indefatigable, and confident in the pursuit of their aims—good people who would want to do the right thing when no one was looking. They have always hoped to kindle in their students a love of learning that continues through life.

What's Stunningly New

Given what we said in Chapter 3 about the direction being taken by advanced intelligent technologies, you might reasonably ask why we wasted your time with all that only to say that the aims of educators in the future ought to be pretty much what they were in the past. Here is what is radically different about these aims.

Although good teachers in all kinds of American schools have long embraced these aims, the system did not. The mass education system we have now, the outlines of which emerged early in the 20th century, had much more modest aims for students. The goals just described were the goals for only the elite, a tiny fraction of the population. What is revolutionary about the goals we just described is that it is now absolutely necessary for all children to be as well educated as the very privileged children were. Why? Because the jobs for those who up until now needed only modest skills are disappearing quickly. The kinds of jobs that will enable people to earn a decent living will require a much higher level of skills and very different kinds of skills than those that previously sustained most people. This is a huge departure from everything that has gone before, because a large percentage of our children, whose education in the current system does not do enough to help them foster these skills, will be unemployable or working for miserable wages in the economy that appears to lie ahead. It is not possible to educate virtually all students to an elite standard with the system we have, so we need a new instructional system.

Why We Have to Abandon the Sorting System

Why can't we accomplish our new goals by tweaking the system we have? Why can't we just identify the best instructional practices in our current system and apply them everywhere? If they work for some students, why wouldn't they work for all?

They won't work because the American education system operates as a giant sorting system, and a sorting system cannot be used to produce the results the nation now needs. Suppose you are a farmer in the egg business. You get eggs from lots of farms. Some are extra large, some large, some medium, and some small. You go to an agricultural machinery company and purchase an egg-sorting machine. You put all the eggs in one end and out the other come egg cartons, with only one size of eggs in each carton. You would never think your egg-sorting machine would turn out cartons that contained nothing but extra large eggs if you were feeding eggs of many sizes into it.

In the mass-production age, we did not need many professionals and managers. We did not need many craftsmen, either. We had the selective college track for the former and an often selective vocational track for the latter. Everyone else went into the general track. That was at the end, in high school. But the sorting did not begin in high school. It began in 1st grade with the robins and the bluebirds. In overwhelming numbers, the kids from the wrong side of the tracks went in with the other robins and the ones from the right side of the tracks went into the bluebirds. There was nothing mean about this. American teachers were taught by American psychologists that some kids had the genes for academics and others simply did not. Not expecting very much from low-income, minority kids was a matter of not expecting more than they could possibly do.

This sorting within the school was combined with the sorting among school districts. Basing school finance on local property wealth meant that, over time, wealthy students went to school with other wealthy students and poor students went to school with other poor students. The wealthiest students got the best of everything, the poor ones the worst. This proved to be a very efficient system. In this way, the United States concentrated its best resources for education—its best teachers, schools, and everything else—on the students who were easiest to educate to very high levels. If the best teachers, the best physical facilities, and the best of everything else had been distributed more evenly, it would have been much more difficult and expensive to produce the small number of absolutely first-rate scientists, engineers, executives, doctors, attorneys, generals, and political leaders that have made the United States the sole remaining superpower.

This system had consequences. Because students were sorted into ability groups from their first year in school and expectations for each group were different, the students who started out behind got further and further behind. Students who were called gifted and for whom expectations were high were pushed ahead. Students who were sorted into classes and schools where expectations were very low wound up in social groups in which students who performed well were ostracized. Students sorted into classes and schools where expectations were high were ostracized if they performed badly. The most experienced and best teachers wanted to work in districts and schools serving students in the upper tracks, with students who were eager to learn and easy to control, and the most inexperienced and least effective teachers were stuck with those who were the hardest to discipline and the most challenging to get interested in learning something. Along the trajectory of a student's experience in school, as the tracks hardened, the students who started out in the lowest tracks fell further behind until, by the time they got to high school, they were often years behind. Many were desperately faking the ability to read anything at all and, deeply ashamed and angry, they could not wait to drop out of school.

Though the United States has dropped many of the formalisms of tracking, the essence remains alive and well. If the aim is to get everyone to a high standard, then the standard must be high and constant, and the time taken to reach it variable, which is the exact opposite of the system we now have, in which the time is held constant and the standard achieved varies with the student. We cannot sort our way to greatness.

How Would a New System Work?

We can see the outlines of a new system in the countries that have constructed much higher performing systems. One part of the system, the part that we will deal with in this chapter, has to do with the standards for student achievement, and the way those standards are translated into curriculum, course syllabi, instructional materials, teaching methods, and student assessment. No less important is the way students are expected to progress through the curriculum, how many are expected to achieve how much at what rate of progress, the strategies used to keep all students on track, and the way the system provides for student choice and variety while making sure that all students master a Common Core curriculum that will serve as a sturdy foundation of learning for the rest of their lives, no matter what path they take.

To show you how the top performers accomplish these goals, we provide here an overview of the strategies they use. Not all of these countries do all of these things. To show you how these strategies fit together in one seamless system, we will illustrate the overall design with examples, mostly from Singapore.

A System of Pathways and Gateways

The top performers see their education systems as a pattern of pathways and gateways for students. The pathways through the system are clear and populated with challenging curriculum that is fully supported. Some lead to jobs right out of what we think of as high school; all of them lead to further education. The pathways are punctuated by gateways that are set to high standards. At each gateway there are choices to be made. The number of gateways varies from country to country, but the typical pattern is to have a major gateway at the end of what we think of as the 10th grade, or age 16, and another two or three years later, at the end of high school. To get through each gate, a student has to demonstrate a specified level of knowledge and skills, by getting high grades in designated coursework, passing a test, or both. The pathways available on the other side of the gate depend on the courses taken and the grades achieved. For each of the possible pathways, the courses are mostly required and are laid out in a sequence. The exams taken at the gateways are external exams, so that no one can get a better grade by twisting anyone's arm. In most of these countries, the first stretch, from the first day of compulsory school to the end of what we think of as grade 10, is when the students are expected to master the Common Core curriculum. This curriculum is the foundation for everything that comes later. It is set to internationally benchmarked standards and includes the official language of schooling, mathematics, the sciences, and much more.

Though the idea of a demanding Common Core curriculum is important, in practice the curriculum is not necessarily identical for all students. We'll use Singapore to illustrate the point. You can think about their curriculum as including several different tracks. One is what you might think of as the standard academic track. Another is a souped-up version of the standard academic track, with more challenging work for students deemed to be high performing. The bottom track lacks some of the topics in the standard track but would nonetheless be regarded as a tough curriculum in most school districts in the United States. Then there is another track that is also regarded as a standard track, but it is heavily oriented toward applied work. Again, Americans would likely regard the academics quite demanding in this track. Most of the students in this bottom track are headed toward a vocational education program in their last two years of high school.

You will be aghast. Just a moment ago, we were decrying the evils of tracking. Now, here we are, embracing a tracking system. But there is a difference, and the difference is very important. In this case, the whole system is set up so that all but the most severely handicapped students are expected to meet a high, internationally benchmarked standard of academic achievement, including students who choose the vocational path. That means that the least accomplished of them graduate knowing more and being able to do more than the average American high school graduate. The tracking system is set up to make sure that almost all students reach that standard. It is not set up to evade that standard. The whole point of the tracking system is to make sure that the least accomplished students have the time and support they need to reach the standard, no matter what it takes. That is a very different type of tracking system than the kind commonly found in the United States.

When we visit middle and high schools in the top-performing countries, their principals tell us that they do not have to worry about students who enter their schools from their feeder schools being years behind where they should be. The reason that the students in their bottom quartile do so well is that they have not been falling further and further behind their classmates as they have gone through the system.

Again, we will put the spotlight on Singapore to illustrate the point. The curriculum that the lowest quartile of students is taking is demanding but lean. There are no frills. The curriculum that the top quartile of students is taking is the same curriculum but is enriched, with additional topics and deeper work in the core.

For the students at the very bottom of the distribution, the time allotted to the core is extended, all the way to the end of high school, if necessary. "No Child Left Behind" was a slogan in the United States, but it is a reality in Singapore. The whole system is geared toward making sure that almost every student achieves that standard. Not only do students who need more time get it, with more years to reach the standard at the end, but they come in on Saturdays, have extended days, or even work with their teachers into the evening. All through the grades, teachers are expected to closely monitor their students' progress, not just quarter by quarter, but day by day and minute by minute, and to add time and other resources if they start to fall behind. Students are not accumulating credits. Their actual performance is being monitored against a clearly defined common curriculum using the same external measures used throughout the country.

When the students have mastered the common curriculum, usually in 10 years, they go their own way, depending in part on what they want to do and in part on how well they have done up to that point. This sounds like a more rigid system than it actually is. In Singapore, parents can request that their children be assigned to a higher track than their performance to date would entitle them to and that preference is honored. But if the student cannot keep up, then he or she is reassigned to the original placement. At the 10th grade gateway, it is again possible to move across pathways if the student is willing to take additional coursework and makes the required grades. In this way, students can move from vocational education and training pathways to academic ones and vice versa, or students can choose to do both, if they want the career insurance such a choice might provide.

There are no dead ends in this system. Students in Singapore who are in the standard academic program in high school can go on to a polytechnic and, if they want to and take the right courses, can go from there into university and graduate school. Or they can go into a junior college and straight to university. Students who are in the high school-level vocational program can go right into the job market or go on to polytechnic and then university and graduate school if they want to, if they take the right courses and get the right grades. In this system, the bottom quartile performs above the average American student and the top quartile leaves high school two to three years ahead of the average American student.

The Singaporeans are not 10 feet tall, any more than the Japanese engineers who were beating Xerox were 10 feet tall. How do they do it? The first part of the answer is the system of pathways and gateways just described. But that is not all there is to it. There is also the question of what these countries do to ensure that their students can get these qualifications. That requires a carefully designed instructional system consisting of tightly aligned standards, curriculum frameworks, course syllabi, instructional materials, and assessments. We turn now to a description of a typical instructional system in a top-performing country.

Quality Standards, and the Curricula and Syllabi Based on Them

When we say "academic standards" in the United States, what comes to mind are the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics and the Next Generation Science Standards. You will find something very similar in the top-performing countries, but not just for their native language, mathematics, and the sciences. The standards typically cover, in addition, foreign languages, technology, national history, world history, geography, music, and the arts.

In the United States, academic standards are usually thought of as narrative statements about what students should know and be able to do. But in the typical top-performing country, there is more. The standards also include examples of student work that meets the standard (that is, gets a good grade) and a clear, detailed statement identifying the specific features of the student work that justified that grade. The examples of student work are usually drawn from actual student work done in response to the prompts in the national examinations, which typically require long-form essays in response. This is especially important for low-income and minority students, who may have less access to examples of good writing, good mathematical reasoning, or good historical analysis than students from more favored backgrounds.

An example of this type of performance standard comes from New Zealand. That country's national curriculum specifies the achievement levels that indicate a progression of learning from year 1 to year 13, along with samples of student work that exemplify the standards—and annotations to point out the qualities of the work that demonstrate the standards.

Quality standards, and the curricula and syllabi based on them, give students a visceral feel for the kind of work required for success. The top performers typically use the standards to develop curriculum frameworks that spell out in detail the progression of topics to be studied, in sequence in each subject as the student goes through the grades, sometimes by grade, sometimes by grade span. The curriculum frameworks reflect both the logic of the subject and the normal developmental trajectory of students who study those subjects. Development of the curriculum frameworks begins with the specification of what the student is supposed to know and be able to do to get the first qualification, usually at the end of 10th grade, and then backs down to the 1st grade, making sure that, at each grade level or grade span, the student gets what is needed to master the next topic or stage of development in the curriculum. Nothing extraneous is included, and nothing essential is left out. The developers make sure there is enough time for all students to master each topic before moving on, so that no one will be left behind. As we said earlier, some students may need more time and assistance outside the regular classroom hours allotted to the topic, and that extra time and assistance is provided along the way, so that all students can keep up in class.

In many countries, this curriculum framework is then used to create course syllabi for each course in the sequence. The syllabi do what any good syllabus does: describe what is supposed to be learned in the course; the topics to be covered; the books and other materials the student is expected to read; the papers, projects, or other products the student is expected to produce; and the way the student will be assessed. In many cases they also indicate how much each exam, project, or product will count in the final grade (see the example from New South Wales, Australia).

As you can see from this example, the syllabi in top-performing countries do not dictate that every student will be on the same page of the same textbook every day. That stereotype has led many in the United States to fear a "national curriculum." In fact, U.S. states, such as Massachusetts, the nation's top performer, have developed curriculum frameworks that provide important guidance to teachers. The syllabi go a step forward, but they do not constrain teachers.

The syllabi do not include lesson plans. Indeed, teachers have broad latitude, as you will see in Chapter 6, to design lesson plans that fit their students and their personal preferences. The structure provided by the aligned standards, curriculum framework, syllabi, and instructional materials makes it much more likely than in the United States that all students—rich and poor, majority and minority—will get the same rich curriculum, be held to the same high standards, and have access to a strong system of support to enable them to reach the standards.

In many of the top-performing countries, these demanding courses have an enriched version, and teachers are even free to deviate from the course designs if their students are making good progress toward the standards. The supports we have just described are there for everyone who needs them.

Further, because the curriculum framework is the same everywhere, students who move from school to school can pick up where they left off. Teachers in grade 6 can count on students coming in from grade 5 to be ready for the lesson plans they have designed, without missing a beat. Schools of education know what teachers at each grade level and subject have to know and be able to teach. All these parts and pieces work together to provide a strong web of support to all kinds of students as they go through a very demanding program.

Assessment in the Top-Performing Countries

In top-performing countries, the state creates not only the course syllabi but also the examinations, which are based on the course design as captured in the syllabus. They are end-of-course examinations, not tests of the usual American sort that are designed to be curriculum neutral. The big exception in some countries, and a major bone of contention, is the university entrance examinations, which are viewed widely as an impediment to the achievement of national goals in elementary and secondary education.

Though these exams may contain some multiple-choice questions, they typically rely mainly on essay-type questions and responses. It would be much cheaper to use multiple-choice, computer-scored examinations, but these countries have chosen to use mainly essay-based, human-scored examinations because they want to measure a much wider range of complex skills than they think multiple-choice exams can accurately measure. The state is responsible for issuing the exams and scoring them. The scoring is usually done by teachers, under the supervision of a testing authority that sees to it that professional standards of reliability and validity are met in exam construction and scoring. Scoring these exams is usually viewed as part of the teacher's job, and teachers find that the experience is strong professional learning because they develop a better understanding of what kind of work students need to do to succeed.

The results of these exams provide the exemplars of student work we mentioned earlier. They are typically posted on the ministry website after the exams are given, often along with commentary from the examination authority explaining why the responses got good grades.

When American students take a test, their feedback is a score related to the number of test items answered correctly and, sometimes, information about how their score compared to the scores of other students taking the test. That tells the students nothing about what they did well and what they need to work on. It gives no feeling at all about the target they should be aiming for. It is a game of blind man's bluff.

That might not have mattered when the aim of schooling was to make sure the student could add a column of figures and get the right answer or to make sure that the student could produce a sentence with subject and object in the right places. But it matters greatly when the student has to figure out how to frame a real-world situation in mathematical terms and then proceed to solve the problem so framed in a series of separate mathematical operations. Or when the student is called on to provide a written analysis of the options facing a policymaker and argue persuasively for one of them.

The big gateway tests we have described are often the only tests required by the state in a student's whole career in school. In Finland, the only exam required for all students is the college entrance examination; Finland tests students on a sample basis in grades 6 and 9. In many countries, the only required test is at the end of the common curriculum, usually the end of 10th grade and at the end of whatever comes next, which is usually a university preparation program culminating in a university qualification or a vocational education and training program culminating in an industry-recognized qualification, a qualification for further education, or both. In some countries, there is an additional state test at the end of middle school, which is used as an entrance examination for selective high schools.

But all along the way, from 1st grade on, teachers are expected to assess their students and report the results to education officials and parents, using a combination of formative evaluation and summative evaluation of the student's progress toward the qualifications.

Building on the State Standards to Create a Top-Performing System

Most states in the United States have adopted the Common Core State Standards or standards very like them. Some have also adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. None that we know of have used these standards to develop the full panoply of curriculum and instructional supports described in this chapter. But there is no reason you cannot do this in your district, alone or in league with other like-minded districts. When you do this, keep in mind the importance of (1) setting a high minimum performance standard for all but the most severely handicapped students and (2) developing the full web of support needed to get all your students there.

Remember, too, that in the top-performing countries, the core curriculum covers not just their native language, mathematics, and science. It also typically includes technology, history, art, and music, at a minimum, and often much more, including, in Finland, philosophy. The whole system of curriculum frameworks, course syllabi, and course-based examinations applies to these subjects as well. You do not have to do this all at once, but the faster you move in this direction, the stronger your student performance will be.

College and Career Readiness Standards

Many states now have what they think of as college-and-career-ready standards or are working toward them. But these standards are often expressed in terms of a maze of scores on the SAT or ACT, accumulated course credits, completion of career and technical education course sequences, attainment of industry-recognized certificates, scores on college placement tests, or some combination of these. A score on the ACT or SAT is just that—a score. It tells neither the student nor the teacher what the student has to do to reach the standard, provides no guidance on what kind of work will meet the standard, and points to no specific curriculum that will help the student meet the standard. Most states count as an approved career and technical education program a sequence of three—sometimes four—career and technical education courses. That is roughly one course a year. No top-performing country would recognize this as serious preparation for a career in any occupation that would support a family. And simply completing such a sequence without specifying a performance test and a passing grade is not a serious standard. College placement tests have largely been discredited as measures of college readiness. Many of those who flunk them do well in college and many who pass do not. There is every reason to believe they are poor measures of what it takes to be successful in the typical college that uses them, and many higher education institutions are abandoning their use. Many states appear to be moving toward the use of occupational credentials as a substitute for academic credentials in determining college and career readiness. But the occupational credentials they are using are often based on industry clusters that are not widely recognized by employers as embodying the knowledge and skill needed to do specific entry-level jobs leading to rewarding careers. More to the point, the substitution of such a credential for a showing that the student is leaving high school ready to succeed in the typical community college is a recipe for graduating a student who will struggle economically his or her entire life. Students who do not have the academic knowledge and skill to succeed in a typical community college are students who cannot read, write, and do mathematics well enough to succeed in the kinds of jobs that will dominate the job market in the near future. To establish school-leaving standards lower than the standards needed to succeed in a typical community college is to cement in place the idea that career and technical education is for students who are no good at academics. That idea is dead and gone in most of the top-performing countries. But we pointed out that the instructional system in the top-performing countries is about much more than their qualification system.

As we said, the United States now has standards for English language arts, mathematics, and the sciences, but lacks such standards for most of the rest of the core curriculum. There are some examples of student work that meets the standards in these areas, but nowhere near the number and variety that exist in the top-performing countries and very little in the way of commentary that explains why they meet the standards. So, overall, we don't have good standards in many subjects, and the ones we have lack the richness that the standards in the top-performing countries usually have, especially the kind of richness that vulnerable students most need. No less important, such standards are almost strictly narrative, lacking in examples of student work that meets the standards and commentary on those pieces of student work that are useful as teachers and students try to understand what the standards really call for.

The United States mostly lacks strong curriculum frameworks matched to the standards. The frameworks we have are not matched to a structure of pathways and gateways, so it is unclear, for example, what part of the Common Core math standards are supposed to be mastered by all students and which should be optional and taught in the upper division of high school. We mostly lack frameworks that are carefully matched to what the research tells us about the way students actually learn the material, nor do they structure the topics to be studied in logical order or eliminate everything that does not contribute to the outcomes that define the standards for student performance at the end of grade 10.

The United States does not have a strong set of course syllabi matched to a strong curriculum framework matched to an explicit structure of pathways and gateways and curriculum frameworks set to a common set of high standards. Some states and some districts have course syllabi, but they are of uneven quality and are rarely aligned with the other elements of high-performance instructional systems. Because the United States does not have a well-developed system of course syllabi matched to the standards, we have not been able to develop a strong system of teacher education and training matched to the courses they are supposed to teach.

In the United States, the tests are usually based on the standards rather than on the courses that students take, which makes it more likely that the student will be tested on a curriculum that was never delivered. Because the two consortia tests—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)—are heavily weighted toward multiple-choice prompts that do not require essay-type responses, neither students nor their teachers have a clear idea about what kind of student work will earn high grades—an especially serious problem for low-income students, minority students, and special education students, because expectations are typically so much lower for those students.

Because the textbook companies have produced texts they claim are aligned with the standards, though independent researchers say that is not so for most of them, teachers do not have access to commercial materials that will support a curriculum aligned with the standards. States and not-for-profit organizations are attempting to fill the void with teacher-generated curriculum, but few teachers have the time needed to develop the kind of first-class curriculum routinely developed in the top-performing countries and very little of the material and lessons produced by teachers in the United States has been properly vetted. New York made a good start at developing materials aligned with the Common Core, and others have been working to meet that challenge, but we have yet to see anything that can match the well-developed, highly aligned instructional systems in the top-performing countries, either for the subjects covered by the Common Core or for the other subjects in the extended core curriculum for grades 1 through 10.

Most states in the United States have pieces of the structure just described in place, but much—perhaps most—of the instructional system support structure routinely available in the top-performing countries is not available in the United States.

This description of the support provided for teachers and students by a well-developed instructional system sounds a bit mechanical and the mechanics are very important, but the spirit in which the components of the system are developed is as important as the engineering of them. The Next Generation Science Standards nicely capture the spirit driving the top performers when they speak not just of the importance of the big ideas but also of the need to identify the most important ideas that cut across the sciences, and when they call for a curriculum that focuses not just on what you know but on what you can do with what you know, not just on the results science has produced but on the spirit of inquiry and the methods that have produced that knowledge. It is the same spirit that leads in assessment to an effort to capture the quality of the performances that matter most, like writing a long essay in history that captures the key differences and similarities in two eras; creating an oil painting that expresses the essence of the scene; understanding a complex problem in the real world, figuring out how to express that problem in mathematical terms, and then setting up and executing the sequence of mathematical procedures needed to answer the original practical problem; or approaching another practical problem with the toolkit a scientist would use to understand how the world in a particular microcosm actually works by generating a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis with data.

Some of you will wonder why nothing has been said thus far about instructional technology. Surely, we can learn something important from the top performers about how digital technologies can be used to educate students to higher standards and do it in ways that will be more efficient than the 19th century methods we are still using. Well, it turns out that is not the case. The United States spends more on instructional technology per student than any other advanced industrial country. But the OECD-PISA data show no relationship between expenditure on instructional technology and student performance. Even more sobering is the finding from the PIACC data that millennials in the U.S. workforce score lower on technology-enabled problem solving than the millennials in any other country whose workforce has been surveyed by OECD. This is not to say that digital technologies cannot make a difference but only that they have not done so yet. These data would seem to show that, if your aim is to improve student performance, you should be investing your funds in first-rate teachers and high-quality instructional systems, not technology.

What a New Framework Based on Top-Performing Countries Would Look Like

In this section, we describe the system we are recommending to the states we are working with. Think about how you might adapt it to the situation you face in your state.

The Qualification System

The process begins by finding out what your graduates would need to succeed in the community college or colleges nearest you. Don't ask the colleges what that standard is. They will tell you what their aspirations are, not what it actually takes to succeed in their first-year courses. Ask them if you can look at typical first-year textbooks and analyze their reading level. Ask them which is the toughest math course that first-year students will have to take and analyze the content. Ask to see papers that students are asked to write that have been graded by the instructors and use those samples to determine the real writing standard.

Now use what you have learned to set your college-and-career-ready standard. You will be surprised at how low that standard really is, but bear in mind that the majority of high school graduates are now required to take remedial courses and the majority of those who take remedial courses never get a degree. If you can get all of your students to this standard, it will make an enormous difference to your graduates' life prospects.

Establish this new college-and-career-ready standard as the standard you want a steadily rising proportion of your students to reach by the end of 10th grade and all but the students with the most significant delays to reach by the time they leave high school.

This college-and-career-ready standard will be the first big qualification for the students in your system. Once they reach it, students can then choose among the following pathways, all of which they will be ready for: (1) a demanding internationally recognized diploma program designed to get them into the most selective colleges in the world (e.g., AP International Diploma program, the International Baccalaureate program, the Cambridge Diploma program); (2) a demanding career and technical education program leading directly to a well-paying career; or (3) a complete two-year college-level degree program culminating in an associate's degree, awarded to the student along with the high school diploma on graduation.

By using the criteria for succeeding in the first year of community college as the goal for your students to achieve by the end of 10th grade, not the 12th grade, you set up every one of your students for success, whether their aim is Harvard or Stanford, a career in computer systems management, or leaving high school with a two-year college degree at zero cost to their family, ready to go to work in a good job or finish the last two years of college.

A qualifications program structured in this way would greatly improve graduation rates, and it would increase the proportion of high school graduates prepared to succeed in the world's leading selective universities, colleges, and other open-admissions institutions. It would also result in many more high school graduates prepared for entry-level jobs leading to rewarding careers that pay well. Because this structure makes it possible to earn a two-year associate's degree by the end of high school, free of charge, it would result in enormous savings to parents, students, and the state.

Those outcomes will be products not just of the structure of the qualification system just described but also of its systematic implementation in conjunction with all the other policies and practices described in this and the following chapters.

What Happens Outside of Class

The new model learning system is not just about what happens in class. Beyond creating a first-rate qualification system and a world-class system of instruction, two other things are vital. The first is what we think of the extracurricular program. The other we might think of as the heart of the matter.

The extracurricular program. We pointed out in earlier chapters that digital technologies are likely to make what is distinctly human about our students—things that our greatest educators have always prioritized, like our values, moral commitments, social and emotional skills, creative capacity, leadership ability, ability to contribute to a team effort, and the like—more important than ever.

Most of these elements of a good education cannot be taught directly. They are best learned by example or from experience, under the guidance of a skilled and dedicated mentor. These are best learned in the choir, in the school band, on the football field, in the midnight hours putting the school newspaper together, while campaigning for election for the school government, on the stage crew, by helping senior citizens in a nursing home, or while interning in a law office or apprenticing to a master boat builder.

In most high schools, these activities are voluntary and a student need not engage in any of them. Many of them have room for only a few students, and those are the students who seem to be best qualified to succeed in them. Because many schools charge for these activities, many students cannot participate. Similarly, students who have jobs after school frequently cannot participate, nor can students who have no transportation home if they stay to do these sorts of activities.

If it is true that the qualities that are best developed by activities of this sort are at least as important as what is learned in class, if the nation's battles are more likely to be won in the nursing home and in student government than in the classroom, then educators might have to rethink what is core and what is optional. Educators might need to be explicit about the qualities that these activities are intended to develop and work together to make sure that students have sufficient opportunities to develop the qualities, ensure that all students sign up for activities that could help develop them, and then track their progress to make sure no one falls through the cracks.

In this model of education, classwork is not at the center and extracurricular activities on the periphery. Both are joined together in one learning system, the purpose of which is to create a skein of linked learning experiences for students that will enable them to acquire the values, attributes, skills, and knowledge—cognitive and noncognitive—needed to succeed. Teachers organize, develop, and provide some of those experiences directly. In other cases, they just organize, mediate, and track them. Either way, the teacher is making sure that each student gets the learning experiences needed to be successful.

Top-performing countries place a strong emphasis on building such a learning system. They do so in two ways. First, the goals of education, which drive the standards, curriculum frameworks, syllabi, and assessments, are broad and encompass values and attributes as well as cognitive skills and knowledge. For example, the Alberta, Canada, Ministry of Education in 2009 conducted a broad-ranging review of its education system, with the goal of defining what an educated Albertan who graduated in 2030 would look like. The vision that emerged was this: "To inspire and enable students to achieve success and fulfillment as engaged thinkers and ethical citizens with an entrepreneurial spirit within an inclusive education system" (Alberta Education, 2010, p. 7).

Second, top-performing countries give schools and teachers a lot of latitude to provide students with the experiences and supports they need to become good people as well as good learners. This is true even in East Asian countries, belying their (undeserved) reputations as test-taking machines. The examples that follow, from Hong Kong and Singapore, show how schools can take advantage of that flexibility.

"First the heart, then the head." Now we get to what we just called the heart of the matter. A welder can be successful on the strength of her technical skills alone. A teacher cannot. A student who thinks he is destined for failure has no interest in learning. A student whose whole experience says that no adult can be trusted will not trust her teacher. A student who lives in constant fear or constant pain is not a promising candidate for instruction in long division.

Many teachers in the United States know these things and are ready to do whatever it takes to address these issues, sometimes in circumstances that would curl the hair of their most ardent critics. But many of those teachers do what they do, not because their school leaders or districts encourage them or give them incentives to do those things, but in spite of the disincentives they face. What is interesting about many of the top-performing nations, states, and provinces we have seen, especially in Asia, is the degree to which they expect this behavior, incentivize it, and celebrate it.

In Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, we have often heard the phrase "first the heart, then the head." The phrase has particular salience in schools serving children in very poor communities, often communities with many struggling families from ethnic and racial minorities.

The difference between Singapore and Hong Kong, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, is that the former have developed systems that encourage and support what we have just described, so it becomes what is expected and done everywhere, while we don't have such systems and so have come to view their schools as miracles.

In Singapore, as in Hong Kong, the qualification system structured the curriculum and courses that defined the school's program but still gave the faculty the freedom needed to construct the aeronautics program in a way that engaged students' attention and made them dream great dreams. In this case, as in the Hong Kong case, students' predominantly low-income and minority statuses did not translate into low expectations and a watered-down curriculum because the qualification system set high standards and the supportive instructional system provided schools with an ample supply of first-rate teachers. These schools were no accident, and they are not miracles, either. They are the kinds of schools that well-designed and well-managed systems routinely produce.

Summing Up

The driving idea in this chapter can be summed up very easily: The kind of education we have always provided to the elite must now be provided to everyone. That's because much of the unskilled and semi-skilled work that used to be available to people leaving schools with only the basic skills will be done more reliably and cheaply by digital devices of all kinds. Until recently, the United States could run our schools like a large sorting system, sorting kids into bins labelled for their destinations: unskilled jobs, semi-skilled jobs, skilled crafts and trades, and professional and managerial jobs. The sorting began in 1st grade and continued through the senior year in high school. It was widely thought that only a few students were capable of serious academic achievement, so little was expected of the rest. But that was not perceived as a problem because, except for the skilled craftspeople, most work did not require very much in the way of academic skill or knowledge. Now it is very important that we expect high academic achievement of all our students, whether they will end up as boat builders using advanced carbon fiber technology, farmers controlling driverless tractors from their farm office, or medical technicians implanting tiny sensors in the heart or brain that use radio technology to communicate with devices outside the body.

Now all students will need to have skills and qualities that have always been taught in the prep schools that supplied our future leaders: strong ethical judgement, courage, grit, working independently to a goal, figuring out not just what the solution is but also what the problem is, being a great team member one day and a great leader the next, being a self-starter, having great analysis and synthesis skills, empathy and caring, creativity, imagination, and so on. These skills are profoundly human qualities that intelligent devices will come to late—if ever. Some of these qualities are learned in the classroom, but others are learned on the playing field, in the workplace, or while helping others. Teachers will have to see themselves not so much as imparters of knowledge—though that will still be very important—but as managers of experiences.

When we look at how the top-performing countries are doing this, this is what we see:

1. Time and effort put into building a common vision among the professional and in the wider community, so that virtually everyone is committed to the goal of providing to all the kind and quality of education formerly provided only to a select few and is willing to make the changes needed to get there.
2. Creation of a clear idea of what kind of education all students need to have before they go their separate ways and consensus on when most students should complete that common education (typically by the end of grade 10).
3. Development of a clear curriculum framework with grade ranges and milestones that sets out the trajectory of learning for the common curriculum, important aspects of which are the subjects to be taught, the order in which the component topics in those subjects are to be learned, and the standards to be achieved at each stage.
4. Specification of the qualifications that students can earn as they go through school, each qualification representing satisfactory completion of the preceding stage and successful acquisition of the knowledge and skills needed to begin the next stage—as one does not proceed to the next stage, in either career or school, without the necessary qualifications.
5. Development of course syllabi, matched to the curriculum framework, that are used by all teachers of the common curriculum and that specify what is to be learned in the course, key material—including books to be used, projects to be undertaken, papers to be written—and how the student will be graded (though not lesson plans, which are to be developed by the teachers, working in teams, in each school).
6. Development of end-of-course examinations and examinations for the qualifications, matched to the standards, frameworks, and syllabi, and accompanied by examples of student work that meet the standards with good grades.
7. Development of techniques for embedded or formative assessment that teachers can use to determine whether the whole class and individual members of the class are grasping what is taught as it is being taught, enabling them to adjust instruction at it is being provided.

When this system is working well, it is set up so that there is more time and support for students who are struggling to master the Common Core curriculum to a global high standard, while more advantaged students get a more enriched curriculum and can move on to get more advanced qualifications earlier. The standards for the qualifications are immovable; the time and support needed to achieve them may be different for different students. It is the very opposite of the sorting system.

What has just been summarized is the approach to the formal core academic curriculum leading to what could be the first qualification, to be reached by most students by the end of grade 10, after which they can choose from among a variety of high school upper-division programs, ranging from a demanding career and technical education program to what amounts to an Associate's degree program in high school to programs like AP, IB, or the Cambridge diploma program. We point out that the currently popular method of designating as Career and Technical Education students those students who take at least three CTE courses in high school would be regarded as a joke in most of the top-performing countries, where CTE qualifications require years of combined classroom study and on-the-job training set to high standards that can only be met by taking very demanding performance examinations. Career and technical education in those countries is not regarded as a dead-end destination for students who struggle in school, because one can get into CTE programs only after demonstrating high competence in the core curriculum.

The instructional system described in this chapter is not just for students who are college bound. It is for everyone and, though it is set to global academic standards, it is designed not for sorting students into different futures, but for enabling all students to achieve high standards. It encompasses not just the head, but the heart and the hand as well. It is about not just what happens in the classroom, but the experiences that students have on the playing field, in the workplace, on field trips, and in the food pantry.

What Can a School Superintendent Do to Create a Powerful, Coherent Instructional System?

If you are a superintendent of schools, and you believe that what we've described in this chapter makes sense, what should you do?

1. Consider creating a Common Core curriculum for all students that could be completed by the end of grade 10 but might not be completed by some students until the end of high school. Consider building that curriculum as the heart of the college-and-career-ready qualification system described here. Let your faculty know that they will be expected to get all but the most severely handicapped students to the college-and-career-ready standard, with a steadily growing proportion of the students reaching that standard by the end of 10th grade, whatever that takes. Let every student know that is your goal for them and that you will not settle for less.
2. If your state has adopted the Common Core, have your best teachers use it to create a curriculum framework that lays out, grade by grade, or grade span by grade span, the order in which the topics specified in the standards are to be taught, culminating in the exams to be given at the end of 10th grade. Note that the mathematics standards in the Common Core include mandatory topics and, at the end of the sequence, additional standards. These additional standards are the standards the authors thought would be appropriate for the last two years of high school, at least for some students. The mandatory standards are those the authors thought all students should meet by the end of 10th grade. You may well find that the Common Core sets a higher end-of-10th-grade standard than would be required to be successful in the first year of your local two-year and four-year colleges, and you will have to decide where to set the standards between these two poles.
3. Once you have set up the curriculum framework, consider using the framework to create course syllabi for your district, defining an explicit set of course designs that will be used throughout the district to implement the standards. You could make these course designs mandatory or advisory, make them advisory for schools in which all or most students are progressing nicely through the curriculum framework and mandatory for schools where that is not the case, or you could set up a school inspection team to visit schools where students are not on a trajectory to success to decide whether any given school is required to use the standard courses. Once you have course designs to implement the Common Core, you will want to create standards, curriculum frameworks, and course syllabi for the more comprehensive core curriculum for which your state may not have any standards. If your district is large enough, you may have all the specialized talent you need to do this. If not, you may want to partner with other districts in your state to get it all done.
4. If your state is using the Common Core, it may be using one of the state consortium tests (PARCC or SBAC) in the grades in which states are required to test (six grades in elementary and middle school and one grade in high school). Those tests will not be matched to your new course designs, but they will be matched to the standards on which the course designs are based. The providers of these tests may or may not have sample prompts for their constructed-response items and may or may not have annotated examples of student responses that earned high marks. They will not have examples of student work for the multiple-choice items and some other computer-generated items. Where you are not able to get these prompts, you might want to create examples of student work that meets the standards and annotations on the work explaining why it meets the standards, and you might want to assemble teams of your best teachers to start developing a suite of standards and associated materials for every subject in your curriculum, including those subjects for which there are no common standards. Make sure that the examples of student work are authentic, not ginned up for this purpose. Fake work can be identified from a distance, and real student work will earn the support of teachers and students alike.
5. Chapter 6 presents a design for engaging your teachers in a serious effort to develop first-rate lessons and materials to support the instructional system described here. You will need to use the system described in Chapter 6 to curate and populate a growing library of first-rate materials and lessons that your teachers can use to teach the curriculum you are using in your district to get all or almost all your students to your 10th grade standard.
6. The materials your teachers develop should include a wide range of formative evaluation instruments and methods closely keyed to your curriculum. As those resources are being developed, you will want your best teachers to train other teachers on how to use these formative evaluation resources to closely monitor the students for whom they are responsible. The purpose is to catch students who are beginning to fall behind the curve described by the curriculum framework before they have fallen very far at all. The aim is to make sure they never fall far behind. Some testing organizations have developed formative assessment instruments. Some of these instruments are very strong and aligned to the state standards. But others are simply short versions of the end-of-year tests and provide little valuable information for teachers. Look carefully before buying one of these products. Chapter 6 describes a way to organize your schools so that teachers have much more time to work together to design, build, and assess the courses and lessons that will be needed to implement this design. That time will also be available for teachers to work one-on-one and in small groups with students who need extra help to stay on track. You will also need to make time available before school, after school, on Saturdays, and during the summer to help students who would otherwise fall behind the curve established by the curriculum framework. Even if you do all of this, some students will fall behind, and for them, it is hoped, they will still have their junior and senior years, and perhaps even more time, to meet the standards.
7. When this system is up and running, more and more of your students will be ready, by the end of their sophomore year of high school, to succeed in the first year of community college. If you follow the pattern established by the top-performing countries, you will make the end-of-10th-grade standard the point at which students go in very different directions. Some will go into the International Baccalaureate program. Others will take a full load of Advanced Placement courses or do the Cambridge IGCSE program, all of which prepare students for the most demanding, selective colleges in the world. A much larger proportion of your students will be going in that direction than is the case now because students who meet your 10th grade standard will be ready not just for your local community college and four-year state university, but also to succeed in these very demanding upper secondary school programs. However, many of your students will not want to go down that road. They may want to enroll in a nearby vocational program that provides high-level technical training leading directly to good jobs. Or you might have such a program right in your own district. They might want to enroll in a program for their junior and senior high school years that will result in getting a two-year college degree at the end of their senior year, free of charge. That degree might be in an advanced technical area that leads directly to a good job and a great career or it might lead to transfer to a four-year college for the last two years of a bachelor's degree program. In a system like this, all these options become available.
8. What has been described thus far is a system for organizing a student's academic program that is very much like what you would find in one of the top-performing education systems. In most of the top-performing systems, a student's program encompasses much more than academics. It is, as the American phrase has it, about the "whole person." At the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned that Asian education systems put much more emphasis on developing their students' values and character than we do, at least as an explicit goal. Like the Western countries generally, they are also putting more emphasis on the so-called 21st century skills. In addition to the traditional academic goals, they also put more emphasis on physical development of the student—quite apart from sports—than the Western countries. As we said in our analysis of the effects of intelligent machines on the future of work, all these arenas—the ones that go beyond academics, the ones that touch on our humanity and not just our intellect—are likely to be much more important goals for our students in the future than they have been in the past. What we see in the countries that are furthest ahead is a concerted effort to design schools in which all these goals are fused into a unified vision for student development. This is the implication for you and your school system: As you involve your school faculties and your community in long-range planning for your schools, get them to think with you about schools in which the job of the teacher includes instruction in the usual sense of that term, but goes way beyond that. The job of your school faculties gets reframed as the job of people responsible for creating, organizing, and supervising experiences for students in and out of school, all of which contribute to these expanded goals. Some of these goals will be achieved in your sports program, some in school clubs and activities, some on field trips, some in apprenticeships, and some in the opportunities you create for students to lead other students in and out of school. You offer many of these opportunities now, but most people view them as ancillary to the main purpose of schooling, which is academics. The idea here is that the purposes of schooling previously thought to be ancillary—values, character, 21st century skills development—have become central. If that is the case, much more attention needs to be given to making sure those opportunities are available to every student and that each student is participating in a pattern of activities that will enable him or her to emerge from school with all the important qualities, not just the academics.
9. The kind of curriculum that is now needed is not the kind of curriculum in which a student can be successful just by paying attention in class, taking good notes, doing the homework, completing the required assignments, and acing the exams. Just as what we used to call vocational education is going to have to be built in the future on a much stronger academic foundation, academic education will have to be much more applied than it has been. As your teachers create your curriculum frameworks, build the syllabi, and craft their lessons, they will have to be thinking constantly about how they can get their students to apply to real-world problems what they are learning, constantly going back and forth between theory and practice. The aim of the whole curriculum is not to enable your students to get their ticket punched, to pass tests. It is to learn a great deal about the world they live in that will be useful to them in myriad ways. This is not a new idea. Alfred North Whitehead, writing in his classic, The Aims of Education, once called knowledge that is accumulated but not used "inert" knowledge. He did not think much of inert knowledge. The human brain works by forging connections among its neurons. If those connections are not used, they wither. If you understand something but do not know how to use it, you probably do not understand it. If you want to keep it, you must use it. If you want to learn it at a deeper level, you must use it often and in a more complex way. So our last suggestion to you as you think about building your instructional system is to think about how your schools can help students make much better connections between thinking and doing.
10. Just as in the case of Singapore, if you set up a system of very demanding standards and a no-less-demanding curriculum, some students will not be able to get any kind of qualification at various gateways. The easiest way to solve this problem is to let these students drop out as soon as the law allows. The next easiest way to address the problem is to assume that these students cannot meet serious standards and give them something to do while waiting for a credential that has no labor market value at all. The hard thing to do is what an increasing number of top performers are doing: finding a way for these students, the ones at the bottom of the heap, to meet the same high standards the other students do, whatever it takes. There are good models in the United States. Make sure that an effective way to meet this challenge is part of your plan.