A recent economist article reviews some research McKinsey did on education, where, unsurprisingly, how schools are managed has a great deal to do with how they perform (How to be top, October 20, 2007):
- "the best performing countries do much better than the worst and ... the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea."
- Schools "need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind."
My favorite part of the article was a discussion of being selective when hiring teachers (which matters a lot, as opposed to class size, which doesn't after primary school). Being selective isn't about paying people more. It's about being selective.
This is one of the critical issues in management: blinded by a simplistic view of the efficiency of markets (and so thinking that when it comes to hiring you get what you pay for), organizations fail to devote sufficient attention to being selective, which is crazy stupid. The best people are attentive with regards to money, but compensation is one factor among many. Many, for example, will reject a 50% raise in compensation that would require them to work with ineffective bores.
Singapore and Finland are extremely selective, so that in both countries "teaching is a high-status profession". Effective and high-status does not correlate with highly paid!
Anecdotally, I can confirm this with regards to the team I work on. We can't pay people extravagantly, but we can be very selective, and we are. The results are a team that is effective and has earned the respect of the various teams we collaborate with.
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