In this post, Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle respond to a recent article that pitted civil rights groups against advocates for the Finnish model of education. They found the dichotomy puzzling. They wrote this article for this blog.
They write:
Two decades ago, Finland made big news in international education circles. Against all odds it became a top-performer in OECD’s first PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) study that compared 15-year-olds’ knowledge and skills in reading, mathematical and scientific literacies. Since about 2010 education experts and pundits in the United States have debated whether there is anything at all that American school systems could learn from that small Nordic nation’s school system. Ten years on and these debates still go on.
In their March 15, 2021 essay “Finland Meets Civil Rights”, Professor Jal Mehta and co-author Krista Galleberg make good points, including “we can draw on Finnish lessons while making them more relevant to our complex, multi-racial, and systemically inequitable context”, and “build shared responsibility instead of finger pointing, policies based in trust instead of distrust, and schools where Black and Brown students thrive instead of merely survive.”
But in framing their argument, Mehta and Gallebergmake the curious claim that “Since the beginning of the No Child Left Behind era, there has been a schism between what you might think of as the ‘Finland folks’ and much of the civil rights community, particularly its policy and legal advocates.”
We are aware of no such schism. We are curious to know which civil rights advocates would oppose the key foundations of the Finnish education system that are adaptable to the American context – such as comprehensive healthservices for every child and mother from birth, teachers trained and respected as professionals, free healthy school lunches for all, regular play and physical activity as part of every schools’ workplan, smaller class sizes, early indidualized special education support throughout schooling, equitable funding of schools, universal early childhood education and care as a basic right of every child, and highly collaborative schools that strive to integrate students of different capabilities and backgrounds.
According to Mehta and Galleberg, “accountability in the U.S. has historically been promoted by civil rights advocates and bemoaned by the Finland folks.” In fact, the opposite is true in Finland, which places the highest national emphasis on accountability– based on trust and constant productive dialogue between highly professional teachers, children, parents and policymakers. Moreover, Mehta and Galleberg also fail to explain to their readers that in Finland all schools and teachers operate under professional responsibility that expands far beyond the typical punitive,vertical accountability mechanisms that are typical in U.S. education administration.
What Finland does not is waste time or money on so-called “test-based accountability,” or basing its school system on the low-quality, expensive and ineffective governing metric of the universal standardized testing of children, as the United States has done under Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump, and seems to be continuing under President Biden, despite his clear campaign promise to stop it. Instead, the performance of Finland’s education system is monitored by multiple measures that include state-led sample-based standardized student assessments and locally managed school self-evaluations and peer reviews.
The verdict is in on test-based accountability – it doesn’t work. Twenty years of it has achieved little to no sustained improvement in reading and math outcomes or in reducing achievement gaps in the United States, which were its main objectives. Today, the main driving forces behind “doubling down” on this failure are not civil rights organizations but under-informed philanthropists, politicians and business leaders.
We also find claims by Mehta and Galleberg that “Even today, educational reforms in Finland are framed as part of the country’s national defense plan” and “Excellent education for all is part of the nation’s response to Russian aggression” strange and without factual basis. It is a mistake to believe that Finland’s education policies are designed primarily to serve economic or national security interests. Furthermore, arguing that “Educational equity is therefore not treated as a national security imperative in the United States as it is in Finland” is simply not true. Promoting equity and social justice through education in all Nordic countries is based on human rights imperatives before anything else, certainly something that any civil rights advocate in the United States would wholeheartedly support.
The main lesson of Finland for any nation is that it is possible – and indeed necessary – to strive for both excellence and equity for all students. According to recent data from the OECD, Finland achieves both the highest efficiency of all the developed world’s education systems as measured by hours of study and learning outcomes, and the least performance variation between schools. “The neighborhood school is the best school” is a mantra often heard in Finland, and it is a reality that is widely achieved.
Finland has deliberately designed its education system, from primary school to higher education, on the values and principles of equal rights to education. Finland upgraded the teaching profession in the 1980s to serve that purpose, so that each and every child would have a great public school in their neighborhood.
In the context of civil rights, Finland is the ultimate American school system.
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case of 1954 declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, but it also stipulated in its order that public education “is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” That simple, beautiful phrase is settled national policy in the United States, but it has never been fully honored.
Those words should be symbolically carved onto the entranceways of every school, legislature and education ministry on Earth.
In Finland, they already are.
Pasi Sahlberg is a Finnish educator who has researched and examined education policies in Finland and the United States. His book “Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from Educational change in Finland”published by Teachers College Press won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award issued by the University of Louisville for an idea that has potential to change the world. He is currently Professor of Education Policy at the UNSWSydney.
William Doyle has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Finland, as a lecturer at Finland’s largest teacher training university, and as an advisor to the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland. In the last three years he has been a public school father in New York City and Tokyo, and currently in Helsinki, where he lives with his family.
Sahlberg and Doyle are co-authors of “Let the Children Play: For the learning, well-being, and life success of every child” (2019), published by Oxford University Press.
Gotta love how white billionaires call themselves civil rights groups.
Back in 2015, there was a battle over whether to keep the annual testing mandate in the federal law. It started in 2002, with the signing of NCLB. Teachers hated it, parents were opting out. But a coalition of civil rights groups, led by Education Trust and funded by Gates, took a strong stand that annual testing was necessary to secure the rights of children of color. Annual testing became a “civil rights issue.” I wrote critically about the role of Gates’ money, and the reformers came out of the woodwork to attack me for criticizing civil rights groups.
This would NEVER happen in Finland’s schools. Gates, “GO AWAY.”
New York will work with Bill Gates … HORRORS!
https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/496219-new-york-will-work-with-gates-foundation-to
At some point, a confluence of journalists will write about what the world’s least accountable man has cost America.
A total rout of politicians owned by Gates and his brother, Charles Koch, isn’t enough punishment.
I think Senator Whitehouse is working on this. Exposing the corporate influence (dark money) on politics…the players in the big game.
I doubt that Bill Gates could use Civil Rights as an issue in Finland to manipulate that country like he has done to the United States into doing what he wants, even if he tried.
Finland is a relatively ethnically homogeneous country and is nothing like the melting pot of racial, ethnic, and religious groups in the United States.
Everything that Finland is doing in its schools could be done successfully in a multi-ethnic society like ours. For example, a 15-minute recess after every class.
“According to recent data from the OECD, Finland achieves both the highest efficiency of all the developed world’s education systems as measured by hours of study and learning outcomes, and the least performance variation between schools.”
Instead of strengthening public schools, many states in the US have chosen to disinvest and undermine public education with the goal of replacing it with privatized options. Without doubt traditional public schools are the most efficient way to educate young people. Privatization imposes inefficiencies while it weakens the public schools most students attend. This is a recipe for failure as every nation that privatized its schools creates winners and losers and increased segregation. Privatization exacerbates inequity, and so called testing accountability ranks and sorts and has nothing to do with civil rights.
In the US there is a cadre of people of color that support privatization, and many of them are those getting rich by privatization public schools. Some of them like Geoffrey Canada have joined with the billionaires to expand the privatization of public education. Not all charter schools are equal as well. Some charter schools serve elite black and brown students where they cherry pick students and brag about their results. However, most charter schools are not elite schools. When charters take over as in New Orleans, many of the schools get poor results. Privatization is not a placebo that can “solve” systemic poverty and racism.
cx: panacea instead of placebo (in the last line)
I must wonder aloud if there will ever be the political will in this country to make all local schools staffed with great professionals who are paid well and are members of the communities where they exist. This is what a community school looks like, but even if such a thing were achieved, the economic dispair felt in many of our communities would undermine the element of purpose that would render success.
If we do not cure the United States’ habit of economic segregation, I do not see how any community school plan would ever work.
Yes, a recipe which must be followed in the right order: first deal with the economic segregation, then support community
Finland’s Lutherans (the nation’s majority religious group) attend church on average, two times a year. Finland doesn’t have a politically powerful, conservative religious undercutting civil rights.
In the news from Uniondale, New York, a black student was allegedly forced to kneel by the white headmaster of a religious school as a means of apology for disrespect. The boy’s mother claims the male school administrator described the punishment as appropriate based on an anecdote he recited which was related to Nigerian parental discipline. The boy’s mother identifies her son’s ancestry as Haitian.
The mother stated that she carefully selected the school for her son. So….a church that overtly discriminates against a demographic majority who are perceived as 2nd class citizens, women, seemed like a good choice to her.
What could possibly go wrong at a school that has a majority of students of color, run by a religious order when so many religious are GOP and conservative?
Anyone that intends to offer culturally responsive education to young people should try to understand the culture of their students. Haitians are not subsevient. Haiti was the first free black republic, and they were marginalized because of it. They have had one bad dictator after another. They continue to fight today as they are trying to unseat Jovenel Moise, their feckless leader.
cx:subservient
I just don’t know why we can’t try something else.
The United States has been following the Jeb Bush Plan for public education for the last 20 years. Bush, Obama, Trump- thru three Presidents.
Are we forced to continue to follow it forever? It doesn’t matter who we elect? We always get Jeb Bush’s education plan?
Jeb Bush was rejected by GOP primary voters in 2016. Michael Bloomberg was rejected by Democratic primary voters in 2020. But we still somehow end up with their public education policy?
There’s now an entire generation of education policy people who have never been exposed to anything other than lockstep, market based ed reform. It’s an echo chamber.
Those who aided and abetted the campaign against America’s most important common good-
Faculty at Harvard, Brown, University of Arkansas, Marquette…
Catholic schools like Notre Dame, Georgetown, Catholic University of America, and St. Louis University (Rex Sinquefield)
The Koch network
Linda Now THAT’s a big broom if I ever saw one. CBK
Not only has there been a generation of ed policy people exposed only to reformy policies, now we are beginning to have teachers who know nothing else either. I keep bumping up against them and they don’t know there was a time when teachers wrote their own curriculum and chose their own materials and methods. The rise of alternative training programs like TFA, Relay or one we have here, Boston Teacher Residency, has removed teacher education programs from the purview of the university and turned many practioners into followers of the one true charter way. There’s a significant cultural shift underway.
I just shuddered when I saw Biden’s education secretary was turning to the former Obama Administration for public school policy.
Really? We’re going to do this again? We’re getting testing and charters and vouchers again? More private contractors? Less regulation?
Didn’t we just do this from 2010 to 2020? It wasn’t a success. Public schools were either stagnant and neglected or actively harmed from 2010 to 2021. Why would we stay the course?
And, ed reformers haven’t tempered their zeal for privatization at all- in fact, they’re redoubled their efforts. They’re now pushing vouchers in every state.
They don’t lift a finger for public schools. They offer no benefit to any public school student anywhere, yet they utterly DOMINATE national policy.
Ed reformers have spent the pandemic on two things- mandating tests for public school students and promoting charters and vouchers.
Don’t the 90% of students and families in this country who attend public schools deserve advocates? Why don’t they have any in their own government?
My state, Ohio, a state that is completely captured by the ed reform lobby has gotten NOTHING done for public school students in the pandemic. No work completed of any kind. Each school is completely winging it- our state apparatus is too busy pushing private school vouchers to get anything else done. They can’t even manage to complete a basic funding formula. Our state tax dollars are sent to the black hole of ed reform, never to be seen or heard from again.
Finland doesn’t have the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Council on National Policy
the Federalist Society and a host of religious universities from one sect all located in D.C. influencing public policy toward conservatism instead of progress. They don’t have the Beckett Fund, Napa Institute and other law centers undercutting civil rights. Finland doesn’t have the largest lay organization in the world with a shrine in its capitol, an organization led by a former legislative aide to a politician like Jesse Helms. Finland doesn’t have a conservative religious radio network that has a large audience.
Finland doesn’t contend with the dark money of networks like those associated with Koch (who funded Paul Weyrich’s ALEC, the Heritage Foundation and the religious right).
Any nation that has moneyed, political activists like Gates, Walton family heirs and their subsidiaries like Fordham Institute are fighting barbarians within the gates.
Gates is a sacred cow, the media worship him and treat him as if he were some kind of demigod. The gushing, criticism-free interviews he gets on TV are insufferable. If we had just half of all the benefits and social programs that Finland has, we would be 100% better off.
But Gates wouldn’t be better off! Gates is NO tech genius. He is a marketing guy and nothing more. His philanthropy is a smoke and mirrors act. People think he’s great because of his “schtick” but he’s no better or smarter than anyone else. His Daddy made him by funding him in his early years and by opening the doors to the right people at the right time. Every time he’s on TV, I mute him or change the channel…I can’t stand to listen to him pump himself up with his hot air.
Since Finland is more equitable, it does not have to contend with over 640 plus billionaires sitting on the shoulder of governance. In the US those with outsized wallets have an outsized say in the direction of government. Their fingerprints are all over the policies of the DOE.
So what does education as a civil right look like?
Does it mean neighborhood schools, all equally funded?
Does it mean that populations which have more demanding needs are funded at a higher level?
Does it mean treating teachers with respect and paying all of them salaries commensurate to other professions?
Does it mean providing students who are non-compliant with normal expectations non-punitive alternatives to traditional classrooms?
Education as a civil right should include most of what you stated, and some other things as well. In my opinion it must include democratic governance. Most good public school districts include local governance of the schools serving the community. They offer equitable programs for students, and at their best they are integrated so that students attend school with a variety of the students. Schools that must answer to the local community are an example of democracy in action in my view.