After months of planning, the Graduate School of Education has scheduled the first-ever education roundtable discussion between the United States and France. The talk will be held in cooperation with the French Institut National de Recherche Pedagogique.
The initiative will be a chance to share ideas and innovations among members of the INRP and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, a research center associated with GSE and several other American universities.
Administrators hope that the roundtables, which will be hosted by INRP in 2002 and by GSE in 2003, will grow into a continuing forum for discussion between the two nations. They are also planning a faculty and student exchange program with a French school of education.
"We already have a very large engagement with Asian countries -- we worked with Singapore, Japan, China and Thailand," Executive Director of International Programs Cheng Davis said. "This is our first exchange program with France to our school."
"We're looking at European countries, especially their centralization.... In France, everything comes from the Ministry of Education," Davis added. "And France is interested in what we're doing."
CPRE -- which is also affiliated with Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison -- has already created a model for shared policy research through cooperation with Australian and Thai research centers.
Many of the initiatives, both in the United States and around the world, focus on policy reform, from curricular changes to teacher training and continuing education.
"The National Institute for Research and Pedagogy is an important counterpart to my own research at CPRE," GSE Dean Susan Fuhrman said. "They do very similar studies and we have lots of ideas to share.... I think there's a lot to learn about how very focused teacher education and development leads to better schooling."
Fuhrman and Davis said that the French INRP was mainly interested in learning the secret to American researchers' success with gaining the cooperation of government officials.
"This center wants to learn from the U.S., from CPRE, how CPRE implements policy research in government," Davis said. "Technically and in research method, they can learn from each other. And they can learn from each other in how to implement research."
Davis added that France has had more success with vocational education than the United States -- partly because French vocational high schools have developed close relationships with private corporations. In France, enterprises support the schools and update textbooks, technical equipment and instructor training in return for the highly skilled workforce produced by the public vocational schools.
Additionally, French teachers enter a longer, more centralized training program than those found in America, where teacher certification is based mostly on the completion of a Master of Education program. All prospective French teachers study at the Institut Universitaires de Formation des Maitres.
"We want to study why France has such high quality teachers," Davis said. "They have a very good system for training teachers. [Teachers] come to the IUFM and get three years of training, and then they must pass a national test."
GSE is beginning a limited student exchange program with IUFM within the next year, Davis said. Seventy percent of GSE senior faculty already go abroad at some point in their tenure, and GSE has hosted visiting scholars from Spain, Germany, Russia, Singapore, Japan, Thailand and South Korea.
Davis added that she hopes these initiatives will improve the quality of U.S. education, which has been ranked low in recent studies -- especially in the areas of math and science.
