These sorts of articles always smack of cargo cultism. First we say "Holy crap, country X is doing better than the US in standardized test Y!". Then we pick out all the ways in which country X is different from the US. Then we throw out the ones which we don't like and assume it must be the other ones which are responsible. Therefore, if we hold childrens' hands more then they'll do better in tests and if build a big flat area in the middle of the jungle and wave sticks in the air then a giant metal bird will land and bring us cargo.
The answer to the question of how to improve US education is obvious to everybody... unfortunately the obvious answer always seems to differ depending on whom you're talking to. Teachers' unions will say that the answer is to pay more money to teachers. Anti-union activists will say that the answer is to get rid of teachers' unions. The left will say that we need more redistributive taxation, while the right will say that we need to implement market-based reforms to force schools to compete with one another. And racists will say that it's unavoidable that the US will do worse than European countries, because the US has so many black people.
Problems are relatively easy to solve when political agendas are involved, but once you get to the stage where everybody is simultaneously shouting "This new piece of evidence clearly shows that my political agenda was right all along" then problems have become completely insoluble.
You are spot on about the cargo cultism. Ever since the first great PISA-scores, we've been getting hoards of visitors from all over the world, trying to understand what makes our system good.
The problem is, even our own politicians aren't really able to comprehend the reasons. Most politicians aren't able to look at the Finnish system in a way that would question their own political views, so all the statements concerning what makes the Finnish system good are just the same old talking points, with cherry picked details from our system to fit them.
There was a big outrage in the press since in my country (Uruguay) we were at the bottom of the pack, after the governing party had made a lot of propaganda about they were doing things right this time around, doubled education spending and all that - they point out that Finland spends 6% of its PBI on education. Uruguay only recently reached that amount.
I expect that my country's politicians were amongst those that visited Finland (which, along with New Zealand, is one of our favourite references as a small and prosperous country), and that your assesment about their being unwilling to question their political views is probably right.
Here's a blog (in Spanish) that writes about what Uruguayans think the Finnish did right:
"One of the highlights is that schools offer more than education. They are centers that provide food, medical and dental care, psychological care, among other services. And last but not least, they are free. "
"Asked the key to success, Tunturi did not hesitate to answer: "The educator is highly appreciated by society. Young people see it as a profession with a future. "Statistics show that 10% of the top high school students choose this route. Grünberg said this is a feature shared by other high quality educational systems, including South Korea, where teaching attracts 5% of the top high school graduates. "In other countries would be brain surgeons or lawyers, but they are teachers or teachers in Finland," said the rector."
These sorts of articles always smack of cargo cultism.
Not this article though. It proposes pretty clear solutions, and no, they don't involve money or anything political you talk about. In fact quite opposite, it talks that both right and left in Finland agree that all kids should get the same quality of education. Did you read it anyway?
It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless.
I don't see how this author can fail to make any mention of the vastly different demographics in Finland as compared to the US. Certainly the US system has problems, but acting like the solutions are so easy doesn't help anyone.
Finland has one of the most even wealth distributions in the world. The education problem in the US, as far as I can tell, is mostly in the lower class. So the larger the middle class, the smaller the problem.
If you happen to have access to an even more comprehensive data set, please share. I'm mainly interest on the Gini coefficient overtime and its relation with GDP or GDP per capita to answer questions like:
Did Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Norway, etc developed maintaining a low income equality?, Which country has significantly lowered its income equality over the last 50 or so years? Are they highly developed now?, Has there been highly unequal countries that were able to successfully reduce and become developed?
I just happen to have watched the documentary mentioned in the article (Waiting For Superman) a couple of nights ago. It found that children from the middle class are just as effected. The issue boils down to the pervasiveness of bad teachers in the system, and an inability to get rid of those teachers and reward/promote good teachers.
I don't want to get into the "right-wing" side of things, as that's overly political. Let's focus on the assertions of the documentary instead.
One of them suggested that tenure is very easy to get. In the article you posted, "tenure" appears exactly twice, neither time doing anything to dispel that notion. Furthermore, the byzantine and kafkaesque "due process" to eliminate bad teachers has been in the news quite a bit the last few years; I had heard of the NYC Rubber Room long before I saw Waiting For Superman.
Perhaps instead of downvoting my comment and appealing to a political agenda -- I have none, and ironically, most of my family are teachers -- it would be more instructive to discuss the actual issues at hand.
W4S is an extremely insidious hitpiece on teachers and unions and was universally criticized by most teachers. Like any documentary with an agenda it extrapolates a few datapoints and says, "look, here is your problem, just get rid of items 1, 2, 3 and everything will work".
The kafkaesque dismissal process you allude to is the same in most union jobs. 1: written warning, 2: written warning with training, 3: teacher review board. That's it. The administrator knows this and the teachers know this so I don't see how it is kafkaesque in the slightest. The only way to shortcut that is if the teacher did something illegal like sleep with the students or possess child porn.
I also read the piece on the Rubber Room and the reason why the teachers were there was because the administrators were too lazy to actually start the dismissal process. From the same NYT article I read that some teachers should have been fired but hadn't and others shouldn't be there at all but butted heads with the administrators. They were put there because there was a procedure in place but no one wanted to follow it.
You work at a large enough company you'll get an employee manual on ways you can be fired and the procedure in place to do so. That is what wasn't happening in the Rubber Room case.
Ravitch is just as radical in her views as Waiting for Superman is on the other side. Both sides vastly oversimplify things and refuse to accept reasonable compromises on ideological grounds.
My personal views are closer to "Waiting for Superman" than Ravitch's, but I (like many ed-reformers) am a lefty. Views on education issues don't split cleanly along party lines.
I'm quite sure that it's not because it's easier to get rid off of bad teachers in Finland. My mother is an elementary school teacher here in Finland, and if I recall correctly, I've never heard that somebody was sacked because of bad teaching. Sometimes teachers take long sick-leaves due to psychological stress, when they have problems with their class, but that's an another topic of it's own.
Maybe it's more controlled in Finland who can end up as a full-time teacher. Teaching is still pretty popular career choice (esp. for women) and not everybody who wants to be a teacher gets into university to study for a degree. What is the situation in US, is it popular choice anymore?
Finland, according to the article, hires the top 10% of graduates, who also require master's degree in education. So they're starting off with a highly skilled base of top candidates. On this side of the pond, there are decades of poor teachers ensconced in the system.
"You can't have good schools without good teachers"
> "The issue boils down to the pervasiveness of bad teachers in the system, and an inability to get rid of those teachers and reward/promote good teachers."
As others have mentioned, that is seen as a solution (and one that the US is acting on), however MANY disagree heavily that that is the core issue, as do I. I hope no one is offended by this comparison, but I believe it can be compared to the issue with the massive amount of people in prison in US problem -- can there really be that many bad people, or is the issue something else? I'm 100% convinced it's something else, specifically that (in a lot of cases) the system itself causes the behaviors by motivating/incentivizing it.
I agree with you that "bad teachers" is not the core or only issue. A more serious issue, as an example, is that good teachers are actively driven away by petty bureaucrats. Those that remain are severely constrained in the good they can do. With the advent of endemic standardized testing tied into bonuses and tenure, classes have devolved into regurgitate the answer mode. That issue, of really excellent teaching being punished or prohibited, is only one of many many problems in the system. Easy fixes don't work because there is not just one thing that is the problem. There are many things and the things vary somewhat state by state and district by district within a state.
A key difference is scale. Finland's population is 5 million people -- right between the cities of New York and Los Angeles.
So you're looking at 200-300 school districts in Finland and 12,000-15,000 in the US. Standards for everything from bussing to curriculum vary dramatically by state or even by district.
I'd attribute the variation in quality to scale, too much money and poor governance in the US.
From the interesting submitted article: "Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7."
The bit about teachers having time to prepare their lessons is one of the key observations of east Asian schools too.
Schools in east Asia have similar staffing ratios (teachers per enrolled pupil) to schools in the United States, but they have MUCH larger class sizes, with teachers having work periods during the day when they review and prepare lessons with colleagues. That makes the teachers more effective, per teacher, and helps the teachers cope with the larger class sizes, because they teach more engaging lessons. When I lived in Taiwan a decade ago, I had a chance to see in a bookstore some Chinese-language books used by teachers to prepare mathematics lessons. They are unlike ANYTHING available in English, much richer in mathematical content and much more filled with sound, practice-based pedagogical tips than comparable books published in the United States.
Because American schools don't try very hard to engage in best practice in teacher coordination for good lesson preparation, and because many United States school textbooks, especially in mathematics, are just plain lousy, I'm able to make a living as a teacher of supplemental mathematics lessons for children who are already attending their free public schools during other days of the week. In this regard, I'd be happy if the system here changed in a way that put me out of my current job.
Another key fact from farther along in the submitted article: "Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive." That explains exactly why I teach in the private sector rather than in the government-operated schools of the United States, which hobble the best teachers and coddle the worst in their employ.
American schools not only "don't try very hard to engage in best practice," that sort of thing is often explicitly forbidden. My cousins are teachers in Americorps and preparing their own lesson plans or using outside materials are not allowed under their employment contracts.
How old are your cousins? Americorps seems to recruit (only recruits?) twenty-something, recent college grads. The people I know who've gone to work for them were certainly in that age group. Other teachers I know (15+ years of teaching) seem to have a fair amount of freedom in their lesson plans and materials so I wonder if this is an issue with Americorps, younger teachers, or perhaps I've just known some fortunate teachers.
Confirming this. The experience of a Americorps recruit is barely comparable to the average experience of a professional teacher. Americorps recruits are sent to the worse schools, partly because those schools cannot afford more professional teachers.
The teachers I know (and remain in regular contact with) are mostly high school teachers and a couple of middle school teachers. I believe the Americorps teachers I know are both HS teachers, both are in Mississippi.
As to the other, more experienced teachers, they teach in various parts of Georgia. Rural districts in both north and middle GA, as well as the Atlanta area (in a variety of school types: a few in financially well off districts; others in financially poorer districts).
Subjects taught:
- Math by most of the Atlanta area teachers
- The rural teachers are a combination of foreign languages and english and a couple math/science teachers
I do not know if it was mentioned in the article as I did not read it fully, I'm Finnish and am sort of tired of reading or hearing about this particular subject, but it is worth mentioning that all Finnish teachers are required to have a Master's degree to qualify as teachers (even kindergarten ones). Since higher education is free (there are no private universities in Finland), the threshold to study to become a teacher is very small, and usually there is quite a surplus of teachers in popular fields, in hard sciences as an example.
Those that select a teaching curriculum in the university spend 1-2 years interning in schools during their studies. Most people end up taking up teaching curricula just because it is a sure way of getting employment especially if one is studying a field in which employment is scarce outside of academia, say, philosophy.
I myself am studying computer science and I plan to enroll in a teaching curriculum should life in academia turn out to be boring, mostly because a) teaching is fun b) it pays relatively well c) a three month paid vacation from June to the end of August is a plus and d) it is a respected profession.
> [..] it is a sure way of getting employment especially if one is studying a field in which employment is scarce outside of academia, say, philosophy.
Just a random observation, but having philosophers with an educational background teaching kindergarten is probably not such a bad thing.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem, as if you spend some time on an undergraduate campus in the US, you'll notice that majority of those majoring in Education have deemed other, more profitable, majors as too hard.
Finland has free college education. Mainly for that reason, the future profitability of a specific discipline doesn't appear to be a major factor in how young Finns choose their majors (as evidenced by the enduring huge popularity of objectively unprofitable disciplines such as media and design).
It seems to me that those that become teachers in Finland have chosen the career fairly early on. It's a vocational thing. Money doesn't influence the decision, but of course there is the financial baseline that teaching is a stable job that offers an extraordinarily long summer vacation (something like 11 weeks, fully paid).
Wow -- that alone could cause a number of the effects we're talking about. Anyone who wants to go to college can, versus in the US, there are a number of children who know (or pessimistically assume) that college is just not in the cards for them.
Not saying we should adopt that single tenet. Just that it has surprisingly strong ripples throughout the whole system that should not be underestimated.
That's true but it's not the only problem. Teaching in America is not a high-status profession the way it is in other countries, so people who are capable tend to choose other professions. We need a new cultural value on teaching.
That's partially because many parents see school as free childcare and don't understand the value of education themselves. This in turn is because parents are (in general) spending more time away from their children trying to "make ends meet" which itself has to do with consumer culture and living beyond means. It's a complex problem.
This is the key takeaway for me from the article (and also supports my own beliefs). If teachers in the US started earning like doctors and lawyers ($100K-$200K), then many of our education problems would go away. Why? You'd start retaining good teachers, and attracting new, good teachers. Then these folks would continue to solve education problems. You'd be amazed at what highly paid, motivated professionals can accomplish. But low-paid teachers, no matter how dedicated, get burnt out a few years into a career. Bad teachers would eventually work their way out, due to increased competition. (Read the article about how applications shot up.) Some of the money (thought not all) for higher salaries is in education, but it's just not being spent in the right places.
The 2nd interesting point I took away is the ability grouping. Not grouping by ability works for young children, say K-6. But once older, the gap is too much for a unified curriculum. Taking this concept further out, Americans need more vocational high schools, like Finland. College is overvalued in this country, and a large segment of high school students are being misled by the college myth.
$100k-200k would probably bankrupt just about every US school system.
Why do you think bad teachers would work their way out of the system due to competition? Ontario pays teachers generously and as a result has a glut of teachers (widespread unemployment amongst new teachers, people going abroad, certainly many of these people would be good teachers). There's no "competition" because the challenge is to get on the supply list, and then get hired into the unionized workplace. Once you're there, don't worry about getting fired. The main struggle is getting in, not avoiding getting out. High pay does necessarily lead to the sort of competition that I think you have in mind.
Re: competition. When I mean work their way out, I mean retirement. Ineffective teachers will retire, and with higher pay, the increased number of applicants for teaching positions will raise the bar for new teachers. In the article, it said like 6000 applicants applied for 600 spots. That's the kind of ratios we need in the US.
As far as I can tell, teachers don't take up the majority of spending, though. It varies a lot by school district, but typical figures are that ~40-45% of education spending is on classroom teachers' salaries, with a declining trend compared to a few decades ago (when it was more common to have 50-60%).
Facilities and materials aren't cheap. Admin is about 10% of my school system's budget and that counts total admin, not just the principals and the like (there are tons of low paid employees in administration).
Do you have a source for your claim that US teachers make 60% of the national average for someone with a masters in education? (A degree which doesn't qualify one to do anything but teach.)
Wow, if those numbers are true then it sure falls into the "uncomfortable truths" category:
'''
* Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
* White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
* Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
* African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete.
'''
scuze me, I couldn't figure out how to italicise something when it contained asterisky bullet points.
If truth is uncomfortable, it's just grinding against some lies you're more comfortable with.
But there's no "wow" about it. If America has the pedigree amongst whites, asians, africans, and hispanics, it was simply due to the horrible trials associated with distant migration. Simple Darwinian stuff really.
Yes, but there aren't enough of them to affect the statistics. Here's the ethnic breakdown of Finland as of 2006:
Finn 93.4%
Swede 5.6%
Russian 0.5%
Estonian 0.3%
Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%
Sami 0.1% (2006)
Finns and Swedes make up 99% of the population. The first group that historically has trouble in school, the Roma, makes up a whopping 0.1% of the population. If schools can work anywhere, it's Finland.
"All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind."
I imagine this would be very frustrating for a child who is considered "clever". By lumping everyone together in the same classroom, the kids who are ahead of the others could quickly grow bored and lose interest. I live in America, and I know that I was bored as hell until 6th grade, where classes started to be filtered based on abilities. While this article focuses on standardized test scores for all students, I would be interested to see data on "gifted" education in Finland using this one-size fits all approach.
The writing is regular, and vocabulary very simple - think "tear sacs" instead of whatever Latin / Greek / German / French derived term you use in English.
I like their right-wing teaching system, which seems to follow the stuff that's got some empirical backing (DI, mastery learning, no retention, etc), but there are other factors.
I can't wait for Finns to pop in here to tell us about the dark sides of this success. There must be some. For one, there's a tax rate that would make most Americans, and even most Europeans, choke on their latte.
I'm not sure that's bad, but this article seems to neglect to mention that nothing comes for free. This isn't just "doing it smarter", it's also investing a massive chunk of money.
Additionally, I honestly doubt it's sustainable. The example of the Kosovar kid with a language delay is telling: this will only work if there's only a few such kids in the school at once. With immigration to Finland strongly increasing over the past 5 years, the problem may at some point be more difficult to tackle the "traditional way" when, at least in certain cities and suburbs, half the classroom has trouble with the language. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.
I'm not sure that's bad, but this article seems to neglect to mention that nothing comes for free. This isn't just "doing it smarter", it's also investing a massive chunk of money.
Doesn't the article say: "Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States"?
And Finland's per-capita GDP is practically the same as that of the US.
I study at Aalto university, my mom is a teacher and I have thought this stuff a lot.
Dark side of success... What success? Given six million people, who all are smart as hell when 15 year olds, you could assume that there would be at least one university in Finland that would be in the group of 30 best universities in the world. Well, our best is Tampereen teknillinen yliopisto at rank 151.
Switzerland has Universite de geneve at 33 while Sweden has Karolinska Institut at 51
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
I have heard that Finland has quite cheap engineers when compared internationally, but you can hardly speak of very high class upper education.
Teaching in Finland is far from perfect. I think these scores have a lot to do with language. As Finnish is written phonetically, average child knows how to read and write after first grade. It would be more fair to compare Finnish 13 year old with English speaking 15 year old.
They may spend less per child on education, but they probably spend more on social services.
Read the paragraph in the article that starts with "it's almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless."
Many American students face huge barriers to learning that originate outside of school. They are hungry, chronically ill, don't have a home, don't have a quiet space to study, don't have supportive parents, etc. No amount of school reform will fix those problems.
Check out season 4 of The Wire for a very grim account of a school in a very poor area.
Some amount of American school spending also goes towards addressing those problems, not really towards education, which can distort what the "education spending" figures mean.
For example, depending on which figures for education spending you use, it might include the free school lunch program, which is really more a kind of anti-poverty program that happens to be distributed via the schools. In addition, beefed up school security, anti-gang programs, and counseling programs are the school acting as policeman and social worker more than as educator. So it could be (but I can't say for sure) that Finland's lower per-student education budget still includes more actual spending on education, if other parts of the government take care of the other issues better.
Finland has free school lunches for everyone, and I guess counseling as well, but the other issues you mention aren't handled by schools as far as I know.
There's some truth to that. However, most of the USA is not like season four of The Wire, and still manages to have public schools that are mediocre at best. If it's valid to use fictional schools from TV shows as examples, my experience is that schools in small to medium sized cities in the USA are shockingly similar to the one on South Park.
The main writer of that series was an ex-inner-city schoolteacher and based those stories on his own experience.
"Burns has said that he stumbled into teaching with little preparation because of the intense demand for teachers in inner-city schools.[2] Burns taught seventh grade. Psychologically, he compared the experience of teaching to the Vietnam War.[2] He found the experience profoundly challenging because of the emotional damage that the vast majority of his students had already experienced before reaching the classroom. He saw his primary role as instilling caring behavior in his pupils.[2] He felt his major impact was in giving the children an example of an "adult who's consistent, who's always there, who always comes through with what he said, then that's a new world for them."[2]"
As a former student in a small town elementary school, I have little doubt Matt Stone and Trey Parker based the South Park school on their own experience growing up in Colorado. Mr. Hand is a bit much - but just a bit. Putting up with bizarre characters, listening to inappropriate personal life details, tolerating dumb lessons and watching videos in class were all standard occurrences.
Top students get diminished returns for their abilities. Everything is based on your age, so students who learn faster just have it easier, but they can't advance any further than the slowest student in the class. As the teacher tells us, a lot of effort goes to helping the kids with more problems learning, keeping the lows as high as possible. Due to the "everyone needs to have equal education" setting, nothing is done to keep the brilliant brilliant.
This isn't a real _problem_ though, just something that could be better and I personally found annoying.
That's true to a significant extent in the U.S. as well, though districts vary on their policies towards "advanced" or "gifted" classes. I think that on average, even with "advanced" courses, the brilliant students progress further mostly through outside-of-school pursuits, whether it's the internet, independent reading, going to museums, an intellectual hobby, or something else along those lines.
When all is said and done, I wonder if Hitler will have done more good than evil? For all the things he did when he was alive, one of his lasting legacies has been, he has made it incredibly shameful to be racist. Most people don't dare to be publicly racist anymore .. they use euphemisms like "immigrant" instead.
Good Lord, just because someone is pointing out that a certain problem might be in a way related to immigration, it doesn't mean that someone is racist. Can you really not see that "more immigrant kids in Finland" might lead to "more kids who have learning problems at school"? Simply because immigrants to Finland typically don't speak Finnish, are poorer than the average Finnish citizen, etc. This is far cry from saying immigrants are inferior.
Suppose that we found out that if immigration in US were heavily curtailed, then some social indicators such as "% of population with low income" or "average grades in standardized tests" would improve and then US would compare more favourably in relation to (say) Finland. That's not to say that immigration is a bad thing! I, for one, think that US is helping more people than Finland, even if reluctantly.
Finland has a policy of providing (wherever possible) early-stage immigrant education in the child's first language. Bilingualism, and an eventual transition to study in Suomi (or Swedish -- which seems to be a level alternative officially) are encouraged, of course, but the object of the game seems to be to get the young minds working as well as possible as early as possible, even if that means teaching reading and math skills in Somali, Vietnamese or Arabic in the interim. It seems to work.
The answer to the question of how to improve US education is obvious to everybody... unfortunately the obvious answer always seems to differ depending on whom you're talking to. Teachers' unions will say that the answer is to pay more money to teachers. Anti-union activists will say that the answer is to get rid of teachers' unions. The left will say that we need more redistributive taxation, while the right will say that we need to implement market-based reforms to force schools to compete with one another. And racists will say that it's unavoidable that the US will do worse than European countries, because the US has so many black people.
Problems are relatively easy to solve when political agendas are involved, but once you get to the stage where everybody is simultaneously shouting "This new piece of evidence clearly shows that my political agenda was right all along" then problems have become completely insoluble.