Physics teacher David Colarusso from Massachusetts is currently on a teacher exchange in Scotland. He discovers that as well as being divided by a common language, the USA and Scotland have developed two quite distinct educational systems. Here he looks at the advantages of each.

My students tease me for pronouncing aluminum phonetically and seem insistent on critiquing my spelling, contending that I’m missing U’s. My head teacher was transfixed by what she described as my funny way of talking, but we share more than we know.

About a month into my stay, I was talking with a non-teacher very intent on hearing my impression of Scottish science instruction. I saw in him a real fear about the state of things, an anxiety over lost advantage, and it surprised me because in America we have the same fear.

How do we get kids interested in maths and science? How do we recruit and keep good teachers? How do we compete in a global economy? For some reason, it never occurred to me that others had this anxiety, like the dejected adolescent convinced no one understands him. In Scotland I found understanding.

After that, I began looking not at what we do differently but at why we do things differently - what hopes and fears shape how we teach? Hopefully, I’ll leave with a better sense of that but one thing does stand out.

Centralization, centralization, centralization. America has no national exams or national curriculum. Teacher pay, course content and school budgets differ from town to town. This is why the occasional story about a school board banning evolution isn’t an indictment against the whole of American education.

It does, however, reveal a weakness and sometimes shameful inequity. My impression is that Scotland’s strong centralized system works well to level the playing field. However, I also suspect that pressure surrounding exams results in a restricted focus. The diversity afforded American schools results both in embarrassing failures and amazing success stories.

Unfortunately, there is no predictive model of human learning, and until we have one, high stakes tests will result in teaching to the test, and true teaching will remain an art. Scotland is trying to address this through the Assessment is for Learning initiative, while in the States legislators are scrambling to address inequities by introducing external exams and ‘accountability.’

Perhaps if we look behind each other we’ll see what the other is running from, stop, and recognize that we need simply to free ourselves from inflexible bureaucracy while committing ourselves to standards. Our shared anxieties are a testament to the fact that neither of us has it right… yet.

When Darwin observed his finches, he didn’t conclude that some were better than others, merely that each was suited to its environment. Evolution is not a planned process aiming to produce the best anything. It’s a reaction, and even with the intervention of government planning, the same can be said for educational systems.

Ultimate ideals of learning might be shared across borders, but proximate goals, such as exams and planned curricula, produce different selective pressures, a good deal of diversity, and ultimately uniquely local systems. Exploring these proximate goals and their often subtle effects just might help us become more proactive.

As we learn how better to align our measurable rubrics with our ultimate ideals, we might just build that better system. That hope is why I came to Scotland, and it’s also the promise of exchange.

David Colarusso is currently teaching Physics at Broughton High School in Edinburgh as part of the Fulbright UK/US teacher exchange programme. Run by the British Council in collaboration with the US Department of State, the programme offers outstanding UK teachers the opportunity to trade places with an American teacher.

For more information on the Fulbright teacher exchange programme e-mail sarah.montgomery@britishcouncil.org or visit the website.