An interesting article at open.salon.com speculates about the current drive to privatize American public education.
Inevitably, the author makes the US/Finland comparison. What is missing? He or she never mentions that Finland does not have any standardized testing. Not until students apply to college (which is tuition-free, by the way).
Teachers are respected not only because it is tough to become a teacher–the selection process is rigorous–but because they have wide discretion to exercise their professional judgment once they become a teacher. No one gives them a script. They write their own tests.
There is no value-added assessment, no merit pay, no charters, no vouchers.
And very few children or families are poor.
What can we learn from Finland?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When I was the principal of a struggling Title 1 school I grappled for the reasons behind my children’s difficulties. Others would make suggestions – it’s because their parents don’t care, it’s something about their race, it’s because they have bad role models and so on. It seemed apparent to me that the underlying cause of all this was simple and yet extraordinarily difficult to deal with. It was poverty. Until we deal with the rising tide of poverty in our society too many of our children will continue be swept by this wave into lives that fail to provide them with the means to be effective, enriching members of our society. The soil is poverty and the plant will not grow true and straight in such an environment. Some schools have made great gains in an environment of poverty, but they are too few and we do not seem to have the resources to apply those measures that made them succeed to every school that needs them.
Hi,
I think the results of the Finland Phenomenon are very revealing. However, my real purpose in posting was to bring attention to a very one sided article in the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle. Here is the link:
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/proart/20121007/news01/310070020/rescuing-rochester-s-children-charter-school-30?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7Chome&pagerestricted=1
I would love to hear your response to this propaganda. Thanks for all you do.
I will gather facts and get back to you.
I’m sure Diane will gather more facts, but doing a cursory search on Josh Phillips, currently managing director of Uncommon Schools Rochester, finds he was formerly co-director of Roxbury Prep, Boston. We just learned in an earlier post that Roxbury leads the pack of charter school suspensions in Massachusetts. I would assume maybe the same MO in Rochester?
Wow, that is amazing. Finland really values its teachers and education.
I imagine a day when American public schools and the teachers serving them (and the public) are allowed to put their skills to use. Their knowledge of student development, learning styles, and (esp in small rural schools like mine) their understanding of the individuals and their families-sometimes going back generations. Decades of hoops, bureaucracy, intrusion by publishing/testing industries and regional/state councils of empty suits gifted an appointment and position of influence with little background knowledge in what they controlled…these things have robbed the public of what teachers and schools could do…over and above the amazing things they already do. Why not lift the testing/data/under-funding constraints from public schools and unleash the gifts of those who have proven they possess them, instead of heaping undeserved praise upon charters that often operate outside those constraints?
Private enterprise does not educate.
Private enterprise advertises.
Students in Finland grow up learning a common curriculum. If they elect to become teachers, they learn to teach that same common curriculum. In the classroom, they teach that same curriculum. To say that they write their own tests misses the point. Finland has a stable, standardized educational infrastructure unlike anything in the US. They don’t need a script because they’ve memorized it.
Have you ever been to Finland? What you are describing bears no resemblance to reality. Teachers have enormous freedom to teach. There is no script. There are respected, well-prepared teachers teaching healthy children. The teachers are professionals, not robots. The national curriculum contains NO instructions about how to teach or in what order to teach it.
The enormous freedom to teach is grounded in shared goals and a common curriculum. My understanding–and feel free to correct me–is that Finland’s teacher are prepared (through their professional training) to teach that curriculum. They are given the what as well as the how. Their expertise within a common framework is what licenses their freedom. The choices teachers make are still choices within that common framework. This bears no resemblance to the US system. It doesn’t make sense to advocate for teacher freedom. We already have it. Our problem is that we have it even though we lack consensus about what to teach.
We don’t have anything resembling teacher freedom in the vast majority of our nation’s public schools. Teachers are obligated to use ever-changing curricula marketed by for profit companies with administrators on their payrolls. Teacher freedom, along with equal funding for all schools and a concerted national effort to fight poverty, are as basic as it gets in terms of advocacy here.
The word “privatization” is properly being defined as corporatization or profitization.
“Public/private partnership” has become the euphemism for privatization. Beware. Privatization by any other name is just as damaging. The purpose of public education is public education. The purpose of privatization is financial profit.
Let’s stay focused on that, and all other arguments make more sense as comparisons, statistics, ideologies, etc. are used as masks for personal profit.
Is having a more rigorous selection process for entry into schools of education one thing that we can learn from Finland?
Only if you work to provide for children’s needs (re: Maslow’s hierarchy), and let the professional trained teacher teach. You would also need to have the other professionals such as nurses and counselors provided in the schools. They have a team approach that meets the needs of their children. They do not tolerate or accept poverty. They would never expect their schools to solve social ills. Their goal was equity, their excellence is a product of that, it was not the original goal. As they would tell you, the school reflects the community and society, it can’t repair it.
There is, of course, poverty in Finland as well. The percentage of households living in poverty looks to have about doubled since 1992, rising from a low of around 6% to around 13.3% today. About 12.4% of Finish children live in poor households. Not as bad as in the US, but still significant.
The data can be found here: http://www.stat.fi/til/tjt/2010/02/tjt_2010_02_2012-01-25_tie_001_en.html
According to UNICEF, proportion of Finnish children in poverty is less than 5%.
According to US Census, proportion of black children living in poverty is 38%.
Diane
I am just quoting the Finish data. If you don’t believe it to be accurate, you should take it up with the government of Finland.
I just looked at the admission requirements for the MA in education at my institution. The minimum GPA for admission is 2.5 with a year’s experience, 2.75 without. This is the minimum, so I do not know if this is binding or not.
I also found the upper division GPA of the education school in a dated report. It was 3.5 in 1984 (the liberal arts college was 2.9 at the time) and 3.64 in 2004 (the liberal arts college was 3.03). This is certainly not a rigorous selection process.
Teaching, the article refers to “low income”, not poverty. And while the number of “low income” Finnish has increased, I suspect they still enjoy a safety net far more extensive than ours. In other words, “poverty” or “low income” is far harder in the US than Finland.
Perhaps your right, but the poverty measures in the US do not include the safety net measures, so it is hard to tell.
Diane, I thought the article was quite favorable to the values expressed in your blogs. The Finnish respect their teachers far more, pay them far better, educate them far better, and have less poverty than the US. Also, the article strongly criticizes the idea of privatizing every aspect of life. True, unions aren’t mentioned; but the rest of the article is quite clearly reasonable.
I agree. I did not criticize the article. I just added one missing point: no standardized testing in Finland.
Diane
Thanks, Diane. 🙂
It is difficult to reduce poverty in the US, because our government doesn’t put supports in place the way Finland provides health care for their people. They understand more than we do about child development and how environmental factors affect learning. In addition, our government sabotages the education system by blackmailing states to accept bribe money (RttT) which results in undermining teachers and continually suppresses those in poverty. Our government makes the excuse that Finland’s has low poverty rates which is why their PISA scores are one of the highest. I’m tired of hearing that story. Our politicians needs to do something about it, instead of making excuses.
http://bit.ly/QPQOuu Tennessee has funneled millions into these virtual schools. See this Politifact link.
A total waste Bottom of Tennessee barrel
Diane