Pasi Sahlberg tries in this article to dispel the myth that Finnish teachers are specifically “the best and brightest.” He notes that misguided education leaders have tried to devise ways to attract the teachers with the highest test scores. But, he says, that is not what Finnish education leaders do.
Finnish teacher educators do not believe that teacher quality correlates directly with academic ability.
“The University of Helsinki could easily pick the best and the brightest of the huge pool of applicants each year, and have all of their new trainee teachers with admirable grades.
“But they don’t do this because they know that teaching potential is hidden more evenly across the range of different people. Young athletes, musicians and youth leaders, for example, often have the emerging characteristics of great teachers without having the best academic record. What Finland shows is that rather than get “best and the brightest” into teaching, it is better to design initial teacher education in a way that will get the best from young people who have natural passion to teach for life.”
Those who become teachers in Finland are carefully chosen, carefully prepared, and are fully committed to a career as teachers.
Note that the term “Best and Brightest” was used ironically by the late author David Halberstam to refer to the “geniuses” from Ivy League universities who got our military mired in a pointless and ultimately failed war in Vietnam. To be the “Best and Brightest” is not a compliment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From what I understand, correct me if I’m wrong, urban residency programs for future teachers in the U.S. are built on a similar foundation to “Those who become teachers in Finland are carefully chosen, carefully prepared, and are fully committed to a career as teachers.”
In “The Teachers Wars”, Dana Goldstein has a chapter that compares teacher training programs, and Teach for America (TFA) was the clear, bottom-feeding loser while urban residences were by far the best teacher training program but they only turn out a few hundred graduates annually. Goldstein based this companion on retention rates and ratings from principals.
While almost half of TFA teacher trained recruits were gone in 2 years, more than 80 percent of teachers that went through year long urban residencies were still teaching 5 years later.
If this is true, then we will have to be careful because the next thing we know the corporate charter school and voucher education CHOICE movement will be calling their army of untrained teachers or short term TFA recruits Urban Residency Warriors or some other misleading label with “urban residency” in it. The far right, and neo-liberal extremist agendas to destroy America’s struggling but successful public schools often use misleading terms, labels, and titles to fool parents and children.
Any agenda built on BS and lies is a failed agenda before it even starts.
“Any agenda built on BS and lies is a failed agenda before it even starts.”
Well, that perfectly describes the standards and testing regime!
AGREE, Duane!
“To be the “Best and Brightest” is not a compliment.
Ahhh, but the edudeformers are looking for the bestest and brightestest to be “leaders” and “teachers” in the private charter sector realm.
That’s right, American technocrats assume based on their own personal upbringings and personalities that highly determined and skilled young people are motivated by a desire to be high paid “leaders” like them, that the “best and brightest” would never have any altruistic motivation to be lifelong public servants in the classroom. They wouldn’t. Hence, merit pay, TFA, and churn ‘n’ burn charters are foisted on us to replace far better, years long teacher preparation programs. They assume everyone is just like them, and by merit of their wealth, technocratic billionaires are able to crush caring, concerned educators and altruism in general. They don’t just believe greed is good; they believe all good has greed.
The trouble with their flawed logic is that there aren’t enough CEO jobs to go around for everyone and since everyone is not a psychopath and being a CEO is important to those psychopaths, the 1-percent among us, most of us would not stand a chance.
Imagine a country the size of the U.S. where everyone earned CEO salaries and had millions or billions invested.
Even in a horse raise, only one horse usually wins. Rarely is there more than one winner. But the psycho oligarchs destroying the U.S. republic are so ignorant, they don’t get it.
Good for Finland!
We have a problem here in the USA. We are stuck into thinking that being #1 really matters. There are differences among humans, thank goodness. We are not made from the same mold and so much cannot be counted and measured.
Depends on how we define #1. And the way this country defines being GREAT leaves a lot to be desired.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-einstein/
In 1914 a precursor of one of the phrases appeared in a religious text. The topic was raising money: 2
Money is not the thing ultimately or even actually aimed at. Money is not what really counts, though it must be counted.
In 1932 another precursor appeared in a Middletown, New York newspaper: 3
The things that count cannot be counted. If price tags were the norm of many of our possessions the full value of them, to us at least, would be immediately determined. But values are not determined by price tags,—not for those who understand and appreciate and can see beneath the surface of things.
The above statement: “The things that count cannot be counted” suggests that it is impossible to measure what is important. This assertion is an extremal version of “not everything that counts can be counted.” The latter phrase states that it is difficult to measure what is important and measurements are likely to be incomplete.
The LIMITS of NUMBERS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVXByZdQbEo
“The above statement: “The things that count cannot be counted” suggests that it is impossible to measure what is important.”
Exactly, Yvonne! Exactly!
I am currently going through the latest “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” put out by the APA, AERA and NCME and highlighting the terms dealing with measure and metric. So far it looks like it’ll probably end up being something like 4-5 times per page a term referring to “measurement” is used. I guess if on repeats falsehoods long enough, they become apparent “truths” (sic)
if one not if on, ay ay ay
Who is going to “measure” how many times I screw up in a post?
This you can also liken to what medical schools learned. Earlier medical schools accepted anyone with a college degree because they would teach them all of the science and medicine they needed. The degree demonstrated the ability to learn at a higher level. If the degree were in History or French, fine. As the medical profession got more technical, they started requiring certain science courses to have been taken already, eliminating their responsibility to teach those basics, but medical school candidates got a slightly different message as started majoring in related science in the droves.
But what the medical schools discovered, when they selected from these sciency students the students with the best grades and test scores is that there was a positive correlation with those student’s performance in the first two years of med school, but a negative correlation with performance in the second two years, the clinical years in which students are put in the position of having to act like doctors.
The fallacy here is believing we know what learning makes a good teacher or doctor without actually having studied that topic in detail. Then you ad political motives, such as wanting to undermine the power of politically liberal teachers’ unions, and what you get is what we’ve got.
Interesting analysis, Steve! Thanks!
I am not very good with technology. If I ask my husband for help, he does it for me. Then, he is surprised that I am still lost. He should stick to crunching numbers. If I ask my son, who is not a trained teacher, for tech help. He explains the function of what I am about to do. He models slowly, taking me through the process step by step, and guides me through the moves. If I don’t get it, he patiently sticks with me until I do. He has the instincts of a teacher. My “best and brightest” Wharton MBA husband is not teacher material, and he is the first one to admit it. He would be a “fish out of water” in a classroom.
Teachers know how to make material accessible and how to connect with learners. They are patient and encouraging. They guide others until learners gain understandings or skills needed. They know the big picture, even if students are still working on the nuts and bolts of the little picture.
Excellent example RT! Thanks!
Exactly. Scoring 800 on your math SAT gives you no special knowledge about how to help a child struggling to learn a basic math concept that stumps him.
Experience, patience, empathy and understanding do.
That’s why “model” charter school teachers training others are caught revealing privatizers’ wrongheaded beliefs – That you can punish a child into “trying harder” because the inexperienced model teacher was taught that the only reason a supposedly miraculous curriculum isn’t working is that the 6 year old is being “bad”.
And it is the most likely explanation for why charters that use such model teachers are certain all those “bad” children deserve suspensions.
Many years ago, I got a job teaching English lit and writing with my BA in history. There was a short distance between those subjects, but when the math teacher shortage struck in the early eighties, they asked me if I would try to teach math. Somebody had to. I did and liked it. So I devised a plan. Breaking into the teaching field was difficult in those days since everybody just barely older than I am went into teaching. My plan was to,use math to get my foot in the door, then slide into a history position. 29 years after, it worked. I now teach world history.
Along the way I learned that I was an adequate math teacher, despite the lack of formal training which I had deliberately avoided in order to make my MA in History look good. The point is that due to the fact that I am not a natural mathematician, the process the students often have to go through to understand is very familiar to me. I think I did pretty good those 29 years. From a little country school, I was able to help several children toward math careers and the children of others toward a better education as well.
Maybe those guys in Finland have the best idea by not choosing the best looking prospects. We all know that the salutatorian often outperforms the valedictorian.
“We all know that the salutatorian often outperforms the valedictorian.”
The difference in grade point average in the salu vs vale is almost alway statistically insignificant, well within any margin of error, that is never calculated by the schools. Many districts have dropped that bogus “award”.
I now realize that it’s all bullshit anyway but I started high school following my brother who was valedictorian the prior year, and who was always winning scholar bowl awards. I basically didn’t realize most of it until later and by then it didn’t matter. I think it had more of an effect on the teachers that had both of us than on me. I never worried about a grade until I started my masters in Ed Admin where everyone had a 4.0 and if you didn’t, well you probably weren’t getting an adminimal job.
Love that word, adminimal. Your invention?
I believe so. I coined it to show the minimal critical thinking shown by the vast majority of them (I have a very hard time calling them administrators and refuse to call them educators, but I’m a prick like that, eh), and the animal follow the heard instincts so many show. Here is a definition I wrote for the Australian and New Zealand folks who are suffering under the same “testucation” (coined by the Aussie Phil Cullen-boy does he have a way with words) that we here in Gringolandia suffer:
Adminimal: A spineless creature formerly known as an administrator and/or principal. Adminimals are known by/for their brown-nosing behavior in kissing the arses of those above them in the testucation hierarchy. These sycophantic toadies (not to be confused with cane toads, adminimals are far worse to the environment) are infamous for demanding that those below them in the testucation hierarchy kiss the adminimal’s arse on a daily basis, having the teachers simultaneously telling said adminimals that their arse and its byproducts don’t stink. Adminimals are experts at Eichmanizing their staff through using techniques of fear and compliance inducing mind control. Beware, any interaction with an adminimal will sully one’s soul forever unless one has been properly intellectually vaccinated.
For a long time I read admin animal when you would use it.
Not quite the same difference!
Roy,
I, a ‘science guy’ (degrees in Astronomy and Physics’) tend to think that both you and I understand that ‘math’ is pure deduction. As such, I’m sure you understand that the ancient Greeks gave it a subordinate place to induction. The world is not so ‘cut and dried’ as engineers, management majors and math students might think. You see, our vision of the world passes ‘through a glass, darkly’ into our human brain.
I hope that you passed that element of uncertainty to your students. Math is a great game (like chess), and can be fun within those limits. However, the only mathematical games that persist are those that help with the inductive task. And, as it turns out, induction is the language of Nature.
My co-author, Megan Blumenreich, and I quoted Sahlberg’s very point to challenge the prevalent notion of “best and brightest” that has governed TFA since its inception, in our (February, 2016) article, “TFA and the magical thinking of the ‘best and the brightest'” – you can find the open access article here: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1926
At some point, TFA will have to show what value it has added in the past 30 years.
TFA has enabled thousands of young people to use teaching as a stepping stone to a real career.
Abigail, are you saying that teaching isn’t a real career?
Yes, I agree if what you mean is that TFA recruits were promised, after two years as a fake, often incompetent teacher, corporate jobs and/or jobs on the staff of ALEC bought Republicans after the TFA recruits (I see them similar to the Hitler Youth) trained to be minions to further the goals of the oligarchs.