Which country exerts most efforts in educational reform?

Charter schools in America have shown a lot of promise, but their adoption has been patchy. Parts of Germany have got rid of under-performing schools and reformed technical education. Formerly Soviet Estonia has embraced new technology and data-management with impressive results. But the country that has seen the most radical structural reform is Britain. Michael Gove, education secretary until earlier this year, rapidly expanded the academies programme, to make schools independent of local government bureaucracies. So far, two-thirds of all England’s state-funded, non-selective comprehensive schools have been set free. Some 4,000 secondary schools therefore now control their own staffing, curriculum and budgets. New evidence on the performance of the first pupils to pass through academies suggests that the programme is working. Although the picture is mixed, academy pupils’ results have improved faster than those of pupils in main stream schools; the longer schools have been academies, and the more autonomy they have gained, the better they do. Some of the improvements are startling: the ARK academy chain, for example, has turned around a school in a deprived part of Portsmouth which, in 2006, produced a 3% pass-rate in five key subjects at the national GCSE exams for 16-year-olds. This year the pass-rate was up to 79%. Such performances have inspired interest in the model from a clutch of developing countries, including India and Kenya. Mr. Gove has been shunted aside for fear that his bluntness, and the intense loathing for him that many teachers feel, could be a liability at next May’s general election. There are fears that the academy programme may therefore lose momentum. It would be a great shame if it did, not just because it seems to be improving schools, but also because experience so far suggests how it can be improved further.