Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington, DC and the editor of the new book, Surpassing Shanghai, joins us to talk about what the world’s best education systems look like and how they compare with the U.S. The top education systems in the world – Shanghai in China, Singapore, Japan, Finland and Ontario, Canada – don’t use any of the methods that are widespread in the U.S. such as high-stakes testing, charter schools, or evaluating teachers based on test scores, yet they consistently score at the top of the international exams. What can we learn from these countries and can their methods work here? Though few educators or policy makers know it, most of the ideas that define our education system today and made it so successful in the last century, were, in fact, borrowed from European countries. As Marc Tucker explains in this interview, it’s time we returned to what made the U.S. successful – taking what works best elsewhere and incorporating those ideas into our own education system.
Q: So let’s start off by talking about borrowing from the success of other countries’ education models. Now in the 20th century, the U.S. frequently took ideas and models from other countries, both in industry and in education. And not coincidentally, it was the time of the most rapid growth in the American economy. Can you give us a bit of the history?
Marc Tucker: There is a bit of an irony here because there are so many Americans now, educators and others, who offer many reasons why the experience of other countries is irrelevant to the United States, but what I presume most of them don’t know, is that many of the principle features of our education system, were actually borrowed about 100 years ago from other countries. The idea of the research university was borrowed from Germany, as was the earlier Prussian idea of a free education system for all citizens. The idea of both technical and vocational education, in the format which we actually implemented it early in this century, was borrowed from the Scots, as was the idea of the liberal arts college, which was very much a product of the Scottish Enlightenment. And there are many other features of our current system that owe their origins to other countries. But what I think happened was, after the Second World War, when the United States was really the only major industrial power left standing, our education system was producing what was, by consensus, the most highly educated work force in the world, and we became very proud of our accomplishments and really decided, I think, that we didn’t need to pay attention anymore to what other countries were doing. But since then, many other countries have actually overtaken us. I think it’s time once again for us to pay attention to the strategies that they are using so that we can not only catch up to them, but do even better than that.