So I'm sitting there with a room full of people who have just won the bronze medal world-wide in the most recent round of 'who's got the best education system'. After years of diligent effort and insightful leadership, Canada is ranked third worldwide in educational performance, and is very close to toppling the two leaders. In every metric you care to apply, we are awesome.
We've applied differentiated instruction, we push technology as far as our budgets will let us, we professionally consider every angle that we can to improve student achievement, from student centred learning to expanding non-academic stream programming in order to meaningfully serve our entire student base.
Are there still problems? Certainly. We still have to work to get every member of our team to produce a peak performance, but this too is happening. Our professionalism, our dedication and our society's values allow us to compete at the highest level.
Into our victory celebration comes a guy from a team that didn't even make the olympics. They've suffered a precipitous drop in performance, dropping from the mid-teens (the highest they've ever been) to thirty-third over all in terms of student performance. Their teaching profession is in shambles, and their society generally views educators as over paid loafers who take summers off. Their public education system (like their prison system or their military) is being taken over by private contractors who are more focused on simplistic metrics, like their own profitability.
He tells us that we have to drastically simplify what we're doing, go back to drilling students on facts, strictly limit teachers to curriculum and install discipline back into education; this is the only way we will get them all back on a college track. He exemplified teachers who drill their students and run their classes with a simple, military efficiency. He floated odd statistics like, students who already know a lesson will learn 400% better if they are made to repeat what they already know over again, rather than differentiating and enriching their specific learning.
He was statistics driven and awash in his country's educational expertise (almost exclusively driven from privatized schools). He suggested that we might be 'a bit ahead'.
The coach in me suggests that if your team is performing well, you keep doing what you're doing. Certainly you tweak it here or there, but when you turn in a world class performance, you don't bring in a coach from a team that didn't even make the show to give suggestions, but we did, because we're Canadian, and the one thing we have even more than an awesome education system is a giant inferiority complex with our big cousins to the south.