Foreign exchange: school leaders find tangible benefits in their overseas educational study missions - Cover Story

School Administrator, Jan, 2004 by Carol Brzozowski

During a visit to China in 2000, Virginia Collier, a clinical associate professor at Texas A&M University, popped in on a primary school music class. She played the "Barney" song on the organ, but the children did not react.

The classroom teacher leaned over and whispered some advice in Collier's ear. The former superintendent responded by performing "Happy Birthday" to a room full of smiling Chinese children.

Collier's lesson in universal educational experiences versus culture-specific ones, such as singing purple dinosaurs, illustrates the eye-opening experience of a few dozen U.S. school leaders who each year travel abroad on organized educational study missions. They are doing so in an effort to build bridges, share the perspective of the United States' educational system, learn about global education and bring back ideas that might benefit their own schools' academic and co-curricular programs.

For the most part, the traveling educational leaders are participants in one of two long-running programs: the Fulbright Teacher and Administrator Exchange managed by the U.S. Department of State and the annual International Seminar for Schooling, co-sponsored by AASA and the University of Texas.

"Unless we understand the people, cultures and histories of the world, we will not understand the students in our own schools. That's one reason why exchange programs are very important," says Gary Marx, president of the Center for Public Outreach in Vienna, Va., and formerly AASA's director of communications.

Because the United States has friendly neighbors bordering it, Marx adds, "some people don't feel a need to get connected with other parts of the world, but the fact is we do. Myopia simply doesn't work anymore."

Sundry Benefits

School administrators who take educational journeys overseas often return inspired to create new programs, spark a re-examination of long-held practices, or share some of the vast resources of the United States with developing nations. Consider the following:

* Joe McGeehan, superintendent of Highline School District 401 in Burien, Wash., studied partnerships between Germany's private sector and schools on a Fulbright trip in 2000. Influenced by those partnerships, McGeehan subsequently acquired funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a four-year aviation and aerospace high school, built on collaboration with Boeing and other private-sector organizations.

* Joseph Cirasuolo, who headed the Wallingford, Conn., school system for 12 years before retiring a year ago, inspired a group of his district's high school students upon returning from a trip to South Africa to collect school supplies for needy children in Kenya, another place he has visited. After one trip, Cirasuolo approached superintendent colleagues nationwide about sending surplus school supplies to developing nations.

* Frank Barham, a former superintendent who now directs the Virginia School Boards Association, has lobbied Virginia's General Assembly to create a "career and technological education" program that could remove for some students the stigma of failing to attend college right away. His actions were influenced by ISS foreign study trips to China, Singapore and Eastern Europe.

* James Egan, superintendent of the Southwestern Wisconsin School District in Hazel Green, Wis., returned from his Fulbright trips to Argentina and Japan with a greater awareness that second-language study must assume a greater role in the curriculum at earlier grades.

"We have to make it more a part of our curriculum," Egan says, adding he'd like to see it begin in 1st or 2nd grade. "About half of our population in larger cities is Latino. We need to have our students be able to communicate. A big initiative for me is to really push the extra time for languages here."

Comparative Thinking

While not every administrator's foreign travels to schools and cultural sites results in policy change or a new initiative back home, the experiences do influence most participants' thinking about their own brand of leadership and the distinguishing qualities of America's public schools.

"I firmly believe we have the most unique education system within the entire world and we should be proud of that," says Miles Turner, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, based on his study missions in France, England and Italy over the past decade. "Too many people want to take the American education system and turn it into some mythical system they believe exists in some foreign country."

Paul Houston traveled widely as a superintendent even before becoming

AASA's executive director in the mid-1990s. He has participated in educational trips to 20 countries on six continents.

"It broadens your world view and opens your eyes to the fact that [foreign education] is much more complex than we seem to view it from our somewhat limited perspective," he says of the benefits.

Houston's travels also provide him with an ongoing supply of colorful metaphors for the educational issues about which he writes for this magazine and others. Watching lions roam the northern end of the Serengeti in Kenya fueled one such point.