Editor’s Note: Once again, The Selective Echo welcomes our Mexico-based correspondent Mark Alvarez, long familiar in the Salt Lake City community, who weighs in — with perfect timing as usual — on the issue of Utah schools. The commentary should resonate especially loudly in light of today’s report in The Salt Lake Tribune which reveals that the state’s shortage in teachers persists without any relief in sight. The Utah Legislature convenes in January and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has the opportunity to atone for his awkward, unproductive leadership and guidance this past year on the voucher issue. Had the Governor exerted the courage to veto the voucher bill in the first place, money and intellectual energy could have been directed toward crafting a realistic educational blueprint that meets the needs of a rapidly growing state population and economy.

Mark Alvarez:

The debate over vouchers was a distraction from the hard work of improving and funding Utah schools, a critical economic and social challenge for Utah.

Wise advisors say, “to get a good education, choose the best teachers.” The best teachers inspire, challenge and guide their students. Unfortunately, excellent teachers face increasing economic and societal challenges. Utah owes these teachers a better system.

The highly-respected global consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently published a report on the world’s best-performing school systems. Researchers examined 25 school systems throughout the world. Not surprisingly, good teachers are at the core of the best-performing systems:

The experiences of these top school systems suggests that three things matter most:

1) getting the right people to become teachers, 2) developing them into effective instructors and, 3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.

The McKinsey report rewards careful reading. Its lessons can focus the Utah challenge and help all to discard arguments and experiments that have not worked. Some of the conclusions are as follows:

1. “Except at the very early grades, class size reduction does not have much impact on student outcomes (only 9 studies out of 112 found a positive relationship between reduction of class sizes and student outcomes).”

2. “Every one of the 112 studies found that ‘variations in teacher quality completely dominate any effect of reduced class size.’”

3. “The main driver of the variation in student learning at school is the quality of the teachers.”

4. “The negative impact of low-performing teachers is severe, particularly during the earlier years of schooling.” These educational losses may be irreversible, and they place great strain on the student, later teachers and the system.

5. “High performing systems consistently do three things well: (a) They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers). (b) They develop these people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction). (c) They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to reach the highest performance is to raise the standard of every student).”

6. “The top-performing school systems have more effective mechanisms for selecting people for teacher training than do the lower-performing systems.”

7. “The other essential ingredient for getting the right people to become teachers is to provide good starting pay.”

8. “You could define the entire task of (a school) system in this way: its role is to ensure that when a teacher enters the classroom he or she has the materials available, along with the knowledge, the capability and the ambition to take one more child up to the standard today than she did yesterday. And again tomorrow.”

9. “All the evidence from both the high- and low-performing systems shows that the most effective way to deliver sustained and substantial improvements in outcomes is through sustained and substantial improvements in instruction.”

10. “The top performing systems show a low correlation between outcomes and the home background of the individual student. The best systems have produced approaches to ensure that the school can compensate for the disadvantages resulting from the student’s home environment.”

Essentially, “no child gets left behind” is a principle, not a slogan.

Legislators wisely have dropped the voucher issue for the coming session. Improving schools remains as the critical task.