What do the best classrooms in the world look like?

This Slate published article makes some interesting observations and connections between student performance (no real data provided) and traditional pedagogy (read, limited technology use).

Classrooms in countries with the highest-performing students contain very little tech wizardry, generally speaking. They look, in fact, a lot like American ones—circa 1989 or 1959. Children sit at rows of desks, staring up at a teacher who stands in front of a well-worn chalkboard.

The measure used to describe 'highest performing students' is not given, but likely PISA as the article goes on to provide comparisons between the US and Finland, South Korea and Singapore.

Shifting the focus from technology (lack of it) to teacher quality, the article supports the call made by others for increasing the academic rigour in university education faculties and lifting entrance requirements for prospective teachers.

More importantly perhaps, school systems in Singapore, Finland, and Korea recruit 100 percent of their teachers from the top one-third of their academic cohort, according to a 2010 McKinsey & Co. report, "Closing the Talent Gap."In the United States, about 23 percent of new teachers—and only 14 percent in high-poverty schools—come from the top one-third. "It is a remarkably large difference in approach, and in results," the report concludes.