Why

1
Why good enough isnt good enough the quest
for excellence in schoolsSSAT Celebratory
DinnerMarch 2009

• Dylan Wiliam
• www.dylanwiliam.net

2
Raising achievement matters

• For individuals
• Increased lifetime salary
• Improved health
• Longer life
• For society
• Lower criminal justice costs
• Lower health-care costs
• Increased economic growth

3
Why are employers unhappy?

• Children are more intelligent than they have ever
  been
• The Flynn effect long-term rises in IQ
• Teaching is better than it has ever been
• Especially in state schools (according to PISA
  data)

4
Its the changing nature of work

• Which of the following categories of skill is
  disappearing from the work-place most rapidly?
• Routine manual
• Non-routine manual
• Routine cognitive
• Complex communication
• Expert thinking/problem-solving

5
The technology bias of change
Autor, Levy Murnane, 2003
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produces greater rewards for skill.
7
Successful education

• The test of successful education is not the
  amount of knowledge that a pupil takes away from
  school, but his appetite to know and his capacity
  to learn. If the school sends out children with
  the desire for knowledge and some idea how to
  acquire it, it will have done its work. Too many
  leave school with the appetite killed and the
  mind loaded with undigested lumps of information.
  The good schoolmaster is known by the number of
  valuable subjects which he declines to teach.
• (Sir Richard Livingstone, 1941)

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The only 21st century skill

• So the model that says learn while youre at
  school, while youre young, the skills that you
  will apply during your lifetime is no longer
  tenable. The skills that you can learn when
  youre at school will not be applicable. They
  will be obsolete by the time you get into the
  workplace and need them, except for one skill.
  The one really competitive skill is the skill of
  being able to learn. It is the skill of being
  able not to give the right answer to questions
  about what you were taught in school, but to make
  the right response to situations that are outside
  the scope of what you were taught in school. We
  need to produce people who know how to act when
  theyre faced with situations for which they were
  not specifically prepared.
• (Papert, 1998)

9
Wheres the solution?

• Structure
• Small secondary schools
• Larger secondary schools
• Alignment
• Curriculum reform
• Textbook replacement
• Governance
• Specialist schools
• Academies
• Technology
• Computers
• Interactive white-boards

10
School effectiveness

• Three generations of school effectiveness
  research
• Raw results approaches
• Different schools get different results
• Conclusion Schools make a difference
• Demographic-based approaches
• Demographic factors account for most of the
  variation
• Conclusion Schools dont make a difference
• Value-added approaches
• School-level differences in value-added are
  relatively small
• Classroom-level differences in value-added are
  large
• Conclusion An effective school is a school full
  of effective classrooms

11
Increasing teacher quality

• A labor force issue with 2 (non-exclusive)
  solutions
• Replace existing teachers with better ones?
• Important, but very slow, and of limited impact
• Teach First
• Gradually raising the bar for entry to teaching
• Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
• The love the one youre with strategy
• It can be done
• Provided we focus rigorously on the things that
  matter
• Even when theyre hard to do

12
Improvements in pediatric cardiac surgery
Senning
Transitional
Switch
Early death rate Senning 12 Transitional 25
Bull, et al (2000). BMJ, 320, 1168-1173.
13
Impact on life expectancy
Life expectancy Senning 46.6
years Switch 62.6 years
14

• Always make new mistakes Esther Dyson

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.
Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett,
Worstward Ho
In a completely rational society, the best of us
would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us
would have to settle for less, because passing
civilization along from one generation to the
next ought to be the highest honor and highest
responsibility anyone could have. Lee Iacocca