Pasi Sahlberg, the eminent Finnish scholar, writes here about why there is no Teach for Finland and why Finland is not a model for Teach for America. In his travels, he has heard people say that TFA is like Finland, because both recruit “the best and the brightest.” Sahlberg explains why this is not the case. While it is true that would-be teachers are carefully selected, those who are selected must meet a number of criteria, including a readiness and intention to make teaching a lifelong career.
Once they are admitted to a teacher education program at the end of their secondary schooling, future teachers must engage in a rigorous program of study:
All teachers in Finland must hold a master’s degree either in education (primary school teachers) or in subjects that they teach (lower- and upper-secondary school teachers). Primary school teachers in Finland go through rigorous academic education that normally lasts five to six years and can only be done in one of the research universities that offer teacher education degrees. This advanced academic program includes modules on pedagogy, psychology, neuroscience, curriculum theories, assessment methods, research methods and clinical practical training in teacher training school attached to the university. Subject teachers complete advanced academic studies in their field and combine that with an additional year of an educational program. This approach differs dramatically from the one employed by TFA, requiring only five or six weeks of summer training for college graduates, with limited clinical training in the practice of teaching.
As Sahlberg explains, teaching in Finland is a profession, and no one would be allowed to teach based solely on having high grades, high test scores, and going to an elite university. There are high standards for entry into the teacher education program and high standards for entry into the classroom as a professional. Consequently, teaching in Finland is a prestigious career. And that is why Finland does not have Teach for Finland.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Why there is no Teach for Barnum and Bailey Circus”
Teach For Barnum and Bailey
Teach for high wire act
New folks needed daily
Cuz gravity is a fact
LikeLike
Thanks SomeDAM Poet.
One of your best to date.
LikeLike
Good one – SomeDAM Poet!!! Love it!!
LikeLike
SomeDAM Poet:
TAGO!
😃
The actual, not rhetorical, practice of the so-called “education reform” movement is one of discarding & shunning & demeaning successful pedagogical and management practices in favor of proven failures. Repeated failure to them just means doubling down on the debacles they cause but for which they blame others. *Think John Deasy and LAUSD and iPads and MISIS.*
They can’t self-correct because—verbal smoke and mirrors and pr slight of hand aside—their goals and the metrics associated with those goals are toxic to sound, successful and sustainable good pedagogical and management practices.
They hold as an inviolable rule what was only meant as a joke by the comedian Henny Youngman:
“If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving.”
It’s just that in their self-serving vanity eduprojects and piratical forays into education, we’re the ones they’re forcing to jump out of airplanes. Without parachutes—because they reserve those for themselves and THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
😱
Time to opt out.
😎
LikeLike
good one, someDAM Poet
LikeLike
The Finnish standards for a professional teacher don’t seem to be any higher than those in New York state where a master’s degree is the minimum requirement. Lots of us have more work beyond this requirement. I hold multiple certifications including(75 credit post master’s): ESL K-12, French 7-12, English 7-12, Reading Teacher K-12, and elementary K-6. Many colleagues have two master degrees, and some hold a PhD. I was an ESL teacher, but I wanted to make sure I was prepared to help my students regardless of what grade level I taught. The difference between Finland and United States is that the Finnish are enlightened enough to know that you don’t monetize public education, while America has put corporations at the top of the food chain so they can dine on the rest of us. In Finland teachers get professional respect; in America we get attacked and abandoned.
LikeLike
retired teacher, you are as well prepared as any Finnish teacher. One big difference between the US and Finland, which Sahlberg was making, is that Finland would never permit an amateur without proper professional preparation, to teach. We have Teach for America–and many other countries are getting their own version of TFA, but there will never be a Teach for Finland. The profession would not tolerate it.
LikeLike
dianeravitch: what you said!
😎
LikeLike
Yes you are correct here in America we tend to put a bandage over gunshot wounds as long as we have a warm body in the classroom regardless of his or her quality it’s good enough for the kids because these so called leaders don’t have their own children enrolled in public schools so why would they even bother to care.
LikeLike
So-called reformers in the United States think education is just a 1950s Drucker style management problem. There is no need for teachers to question anything. Just comply, comply, comply with the Common Core standards and all of the products and “trainings” offered under the banner of professional development, by people who are often clueless about teaching.
Then there are the hawkers of a zillion survellience tools, among these the teacher and principal observation rubrics, one size fits all in the manner of Danielson and Marzano. Add the student surveys designed to reward teachers who comply with the underlying scheme of values and methods required to get a decent score.
And do not forget the junk science marketed under the banner of accountability, specifically the reincarnation of Drucker’s management-by-objectives scheme now known as SLOs, and known-to-be as unreliable as VAM.
The impulse to standardize all of education ia a clear case of monopolistic thinking that will most clearly be of benefit to profiteers, especially Pearson.
LikeLike
Equating Finland’s teacher prep requirements, their RIGOR, (sorry, just had to use the word correctly for once in the context of education) with TFA’s ersatz teacher prep is truly an act of desperation meant to muddy the waters and buy time. It’s like a kid with a sharp stick claiming he is the same as a Navy Seal or the British SAS and them continuing to insist on that lie when called on it.
LikeLike
There’s a plug for TFA in the Cleveland paper today:
“With 2015 now well on its way, I hope we’ll think boldly and broadly about how to get more of our most dynamic, talented people to commit to our highest-need classrooms.
For some of us, this might mean encouraging a relative, friend or colleague looking for a change to consider a life of impact and inspiration in the classroom. For others, it might mean looking squarely in the mirror. Do I have what it takes? Do I want to be part of building a Cleveland I believe in? Do I believe ZIP code and income bracket have determined educational opportunity in this country for far, far too long?”
It worries me because I don’t think this approach has benefited students at our local community college. The place has changed since I went there. It’s tons of adjuncts who do part time teaching in addition to their private sector job and I think it’s lower quality. I actually know some of the local people they’re plugging in there to teach everything under the sun and I wouldn’t recommend them highly in their own profession let alone branching out to teach others. It’s not true across the board, but I don’t think it’s a net improvement. They’re certainly paid less, but that wasn’t how it was sold.
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/02/a_new_years_resolution_for_pub.html#incart_river
LikeLike
I see the same deterioration of standards here in Florida where the state schools juggle tons of adjuncts rather than opening up any tenure track positions. They are also offering a number of rather drab cyber courses that substitute for live educational engagement so the state can cut costs.
My husband is currently doing taxes. He just did the taxes for a tenured professor with a PhD. She may have to move to another part of the state so she is currently taking a second PhD so she can stand out and hopefully land one of the few treasured tenure track slots. These are pathetic times for academics!
LikeLike
My middle son is taking skilled trades training thru his employer. He was picking his courses and asked me to look at the names-there are only 30,000 people in this county and I’m in business so I know a lot of people.
There were two on there that I was just shocked they’re now “instructors”, quite frankly. It’s really disturbing.
One of the things “credentialing” does is weed people out, so a student isn’t guessing on whether the instructor is even nominally able to teach this course. They’ve made it a complete roll of the dice, and they did it to cut costs.
LikeLike
One of my recent Professors had a PHD and had to work three jobs just to support herself. What a shame! All of this while the costs to attend college continue to rise. So where is the money going? Just like in Public Schools it is being spent on a plethora of high paid paper pushing cronies who can’t even explain their job titles much less their day to day job responsibilities.
LikeLike
If we look at the unfolding of the teaching profession in much of America, we can see why it isn’t regarded as a profession. Many looked at elementary teachers has surrogate mothers during the 1940s and 50s. Pay was considered supplemental to men’s jobs. Women often taught until they got married or had children. Many view teachers as mere public “servants” and not as professionals, like doctors, lawyers, CPAs, etc.
When teachers’ salaries began to rise with union negotiations, both the tax payers’ and the paternalistic views kicked in. With the recession, things became “frozen” and salaries were capped. Women’s professions could not be paid as well as men’s! (Especially with tax dollars).
LikeLike
I think there is an element of sexism in the assault on teaching which is 75% female. You can also see this paternalistic attitude in the attack on women’s reproductive rights. Why aren’t women’s groups supporting teachers?
LikeLike
Ohio is funding a TFA-like program for school principals. They get a free MBA in exchange for a two year commitment to work in a public school:
“BRIGHT leaders will be individually placed in an Ohio public school during the 12-month, full-time Fellowship period, working and learning under the mentorship of an accomplished school principal and an executive-level business leader. During this same year-long Fellowship period, you will earn an MBA – fully paid for by BRIGHT – from the top-ranked Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, through intensive, monthly, three-days-on-campus degree program sessions.”
I think it’s a huge disincentive to commit to this work as a career and work your way up. After one year of training they are running a public school, and not just any public school. The schools that need the most help. Two years after that, they can head down the road with their publicly-funded MBA.
I’d like to ask the private sector leaders if they would allow a person with one year of training and no experience to run their companies. I don’t think so. In fact, they’d all object vigorously to the idea that experience doesn’t matter. For some reason they value their own years of experience highly, but they don’t value that in anyone else.
http://www.brightohio.org/how-it-works
LikeLike
” After one year of training they are running a public school, and not just any public school. The schools that need the most help. ”
Talk about a cry for civil rights. Why would our civil rights leaders allow a thesis project-TFA- to be tested on our students with the most needs. Students that graduate at the top of their class demonstrate that they are good students. It certainly doesn’t mean they are or will be good teachers.
LikeLike
This is seriously flawed! My husband, a Wharton MBA, would be the first to admit that he could or should never run a school! His talents are for crunching numbers and doing statistics. In fact, he helped a number of other students get through the statistics courses in grad school, but he knows nothing about teaching and learning other than what I have told him.
LikeLike
Utah is looking at a bill that would remove the requirement that building principals would have to have been teachers. That requirement already has been removed for charter schools. Brad Smith, who is mentioned in the this article, has NOT had ANY experience in education, but managed to convince one of the poorest districts in the state to make him superintendent. About 40% of teachers left the district under his three year “leadership.” NOW, he’s the state superintendent. It’s a punch in the face to the entire state’s teaching corps. http://www.standard.net/Education/2015/02/11/Bill-opens-door-to-non-educator-school-administrators.html
LikeLike
How can they complain about standards when the government is the one destroying them?
LikeLike
I put up the Washington Post piece, with this comment:
BTW, I hold those degrees that Sahlberg describes, and went through an academic program as he described at BROOKLYN COLLEGE IN THE SIXTIES. See my resume at my author’s page.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
BUT, even as I was the NYSEC Educator of Excellence, IN WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICA’S TEACHERS, and a celebrated cohort for the National standards research I was thrown out and charged with bogus documentation; with no help from the union which was complicit, I was harassed into retirement by a process that emptied the NYC schools of its professional staff, so they could be replaced by charters.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
Thus, at the top of a successful career by every standard mentioned above–including the tests of my students, who scored at the top of NYC — I was deprived of my civil rights by administrators who are not sworn under penalty of perjury, and who routinely demolish the rights of citizens who JUST HAPPEN TO BE TEACHERS.
THAT was NY in the nineties, and now, with a critter like Cuomo calling the shots, teachers have no chance of gaining experience.
This is insane!
LikeLike
HUH!—He has heard people say that TFA is like Finland, because both recruit “the best and the brightest.”
Knowing how challenging it is to become a teacher in Finland, it is mind boggling to think that anyone could make this comparison unless they were totally ignorant or didn’t care—or were paid by the Walton or Gates foundation to come up with a PR campaign to fool as many people as possible.
TFA recruits get five weeks of summer training in a seminar setting with little or not follow up support and then two-thirds of these recruits are gone within two years or sooner to be placed in positions of corporate or political power to manipulate education policy that favors TFA and corporate reform..
In Finland teacher training takes several years with internships and then these teachers are in it for a life career without much turn over. 99% of teachers in Finland are also represented by a strong teachers union.
LikeLike
Ironically, many of the educational conservatives I’ve argued with over the last quarter century (mostly engaged in ‘the Math Wars’) would oppose the system Sahlberg describes. They are very hostile to Schools of Education, be they at the best research universities or not. They want math and science teachers to be drawn from people with advanced degrees and/or real-world experience in mathematics and science and would very much prefer to see such people certified to teach with NO training in teaching itself, particularly not from research university schools of education. The opposition comes in no small part from their belief that our universities are filled with left-wing people who seek to indoctrinate would-be educators into a philosophy that is anathema to themselves, the better to weaken America and corrupt its children. I wish I were exaggerating or joking, but I’m not, and can readily cite countless “conversations” and Internet posts where these sorts of sentiments and far worse are expressed.
LikeLike
The worst science teacher I have ever seen was drawn from “real world experience.”
LikeLike
MIchael Paul…your experience is not unique.
Faculty in the colleges/schools of education are often considered no-nothings in subject matter. That judgment comes from faculty, usually in arts and sciences, whose reputations hinge on discipline-based scholarship. I think that the left-wing/right-wing dimension you speak of has always been present too, and perhaps more prominently in the arts and humanities than in science and math.
In my experience, faculty in education bemoan the unwillingness of faculty in the disciplines to become engaged in the “messy” work of making their scholarship intelligible to “beginners.” For the same reason, many try to dodge teaching entry-level college courses in their discipline–math, science, whatever. So the lines are drawn and longstanding, not unrelated to a deeper history of “normal schools” for teacher education–often more pedagogy on the cheap than substance. Most of these were dead or dying when I entered teaching in the late 1950s, but there are some legacies of the problem you mention. Some personal history on the hoof..
Recall Jerome Bruner’s little book the Process of Education, short, simple, and based on the fantasy that scholars could do K-12 curriculum work with only a little help from educators and developmental psychologists, and media technicians. Bruner lead a project based on these ideas. It was called Man: a Course of Study. It was intended to show that any subject can be taught “in an intellectually respectable way” at any level. The project was grounded in sound scholarship from the social sciences, and it proved to be a total embarrassment. Why? The concepts and inquiry methods and exemplars were too raw for the parents and many students. One could say they were developmentally inappropriate and for some (including members of Congress, the content was off the charts of acceptability in schools). You don’t talk about the Inuit practice of dealing with impending death, much less show a film clip, made by an anthropologist depicting of a Inuit elder walking off into a blizzard to die.
This project did not prevent a whole batch of other programs based on the idea that you just needed to be clear about the content and structure and methods of inquiry in any discipline in order to design curricula, K-12, and in the process elevate American education (enough to beat the Russians in the Space Race).
I was directly involved in four projects that attempted to follow Bruner’s “discipline-based” ideas. All ended in bureaucratic quagmires with experienced educators totally underwhelmed with the educational expertise of many scholars whom they otherwise held in high esteem on matters of content and inquiry. And only rarely were these scholars–experts in subject matter– really supportive of public education for all–everyone, irrespective of the students” initial interest, talent, aspirations. So the divide has been there for a long time.
Those longstanding disputes became the focus of the Holmes Report, prepared by scholars at major research universities and intended to squelch any pretensions to superior knowledge about K-12 education from the likes of experienced teachers, and faculty in colleges or schools of education. Their solution to teacher education: Get yourself a four year degree in a subject, and do a one or two year add-on program to acquire some savvy in teaching, get certified, and with clever scheduling you can enter teaching with a master’s degree.
In short order, gone from the educational landscape were many excellent programs that focussed on teacher education over a four-year period, with extended practice in schools integrated into coursework, generous attention to the subject of interest and issues in teaching it, ample time for learning about foundational ideas — thinking about the purposes of education, historical and contemporary research on learning, models of curriculum, assessment and so on.
The demise of teacher education programs with a professional focus and system of induction was also aided by crisis rhetoric–a Nation at Risk–and the idea that standards in subject matter had to be higher, teaching stripped of all purposes that were not strictly academic, rigorous, demanding, etc. etc. –no need for all that pedagogy stuff, just proper management.
The owner of this blog is an expert on that history. Some of us have lived it up close and personal.
LikeLike
To be a superintendent in California one no longer needs a teaching or administrative credential. Respect for degrees and training in the field starts at the top.
LikeLike
“Consequently, teaching in Finland is a prestigious career. And that is why Finland does not have Teach for Finland.”
The process you describe is also why Finland would not hire most teachers who graduate from education schools in the United States.
LikeLike
WT,
Of course, every TFA recruit would be rejected without a doubt. Five weeks of summer seminar training doesn’t even come close to teacher training in Finland.
As for all the rest, well, English isn’t the national language in Finland so you are correct because most U.S. teachers would be disqualified on that fact alone. Because how many U.S. teachers speak the primary language of Finland?
Then, there is the Fulbright teacher swap program where it says: “A teacher, who teaches approximately 25 hours / week (and had all other duties after that), with a contract. Has been teaching ~10 years …”
It’s obvious that Finland isn’t interested in TFA novices. They want veterans with experience for teacher swaps.
“Unfortunately, both countries also share issues that arise from disengaged inactive students, students with behavior problems and students with negative attitudes in their P.E classes. When we face these kinds of challenges we ask questions of ourselves as teachers: How can we engage disengaged, amotivated students in physical education classes? How can we achieve social goals in P.E classes? How can we change students’ attitudes towards physical education and this way encourage them to adopt physically active lifestyle? In my capstone I will introduce the “Sport Education Model” (SE) (Siedentop, 1998), a curriculum model developed to move away from teaching isolated, decontextualized skills in sport that can contribute to disengagement.
https://dfat13fi.wordpress.com/
I also suggest you discover what this teacher from Finland, who spent six months in Maryland as a Fulbright Scholar, had to say about teaching in the U.S.: “Sometimes I feel frustrated with the rules and bureaucracy. I see this so called “over control” in many ways in my daily life and in Finland I’m not used to that.”
http://www.finland.org/Public/default.aspx?contentid=291435&culture=en-US
LikeLike
Does that mean Finnish schools will hire those who have little or no experience beyond TFAers? That’s just ludicrous. Maybe TFAers will be welcome to Japanese schools if they can deal with MEXT’s guest treatment as English Teaching Assistant to local teachers. They are no more worth than a bunch of ALTs recruited through the JET programme.
LikeLike
Oh I forgot to mention. There is also TFJ– Teach For Japan. But they are not equivalent to certified teachers in Japanese public schools. It’s very unlikely that they will kick out many experienced teachers like the US, unless MEXT officials make a horrible decision like Arnestein. They still need a license to teach in classroom like regular teachers. I’m not sure how many of those are willing to work at stressful environment in Japanese school, though.
LikeLike
“Teach For Kopp”
Teach for Kopp
For Wendy’s pay
Yearly crop
Four hundred K
LikeLike