A new book has attracted much interest in the Washington DC, especially on Capitol Hill, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?. The book arrives after Finland scored first in science and second in reading and math on the standardized test administered by the Program for International Student Assessment.
Conducted among industrialized nations every three years, American students finished 25th in math, 17th in science and 12th in reading on the latest PISA assessment. Obviously, in our global economy, this nation’s international educational attainment is discouraging for our future prospects.
What stands out to me is that Finnish students take only one mandatory standardized test, at age 16. Finland has the same number of teachers as New York City, but only 600,000 students compared to 1.1m in the Big Apple. Finnish teachers’ starting salaries are lower than in the US, but high-school teachers with 15 years’ experience make 102% of what other college graduates make. In the US, the figure is 62%.
Some of Finland’s students’ outcomes should be especially interesting to US policy makers. Fully 93% of Finns graduate from high school – 17.5 points higher than American students. And 66% of Finns are accepted to college, a higher rate than the US and every European nation. Strikingly, the achievement gap between the weakest and strongest students academically is the smallest in the world.
What might really interest some politicians is that Finland spends about 30% less per student to achieve these far-superior educational outcomes. For those who argue that a much smaller, less diverse country like Finland can’t easily be compared to the US, there is an inconvenient fact: Finland performs much better educationally when compared to similar Scandinavian nations with similar demographics. Plainly, something is right in the «Land of a thousand lakes».
Fortunately, US education policy is evolving in the face of our relative global underperformance. Federal policy continues to move away from the rigid certainties of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind legislation. The NCLB law set a hopelessly unrealistic target for 100% student proficiency in every school by 2014. It’s clear that won’t be achieved.
Currently, 32 states and the District of Columbia have successfully applied for waivers from NCLB. To secure this flexibility, states had to have the US Department of Education approve credible plans to raise standards, strengthen accountability and undertake reforms to improve teacher effectiveness. Localizing education reform in this way should more effectively combine ambition and realism.
Additionally, President Obama’s Race to the Top program provides federal incentives for states to reform their public education offerings. These education reforms include lifting caps on the number of public charter schools, innovative policies to turn around failing schools, and improving teacher and principal effectiveness.
As an educator who opened one of the first public charter schools in Washington DC in 1998, — at the height of the crisis of our unreformed public education system — I’ve always had a different take on reform than the NCLB dogma. I could see that the predominantly disadvantaged students whom the status quo was failing would need more than standardized tests to ensure school success.
We decided to create a school that would help students develop the habits, knowledge and skills that would be required in this new century, rather than limiting our students to learning reading and math, the subjects that students are most often tested on. We require our pre-K through sixth grade students to speak, read, write and think in two languages — either French and English, or Spanish and English.
Our educational program invests in children early, to prepare them for the next step in their academic careers and beyond, into the world of work. We want them to gain the following: an understanding of how to use technology to enhance learning; an appreciation for, and facility in, the arts; scientific curiosity; an appreciation and knowledge of their cultures and those of others; and the capacity to think critically.
We are proud of our alumni, including those who have earned Posse Scholarships (college scholarships for students who exhibit strong leadership and academic potential), those who are enrolled in prestigious colleges; and those who are flourishing at high-performing high schools, such as Capital City and Washington Latin.
Our students — 69% of whom are economically disadvantaged — can perform at the highest-level academically. Traditional standardized tests fail to adequately assess our academically rich program. Yet our scholars outperform their traditional public school peers by 16% points, and charter peers by nine points. We’re not in Finland yet, but we are making progress.
Lea en http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/us-education-reform-lessons-from-finland
Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?
The country’s achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework
Interactive http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html
Are you Smarter Than a 15-Year-Old?
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The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future
by Linda Darling-Hammond
Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2010
Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?
by Pasi Sahlberg
Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2011
A Concise History of Finland
by David Kirby
Cambridge University Press, 2006
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”
In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
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Real lessons from Finland: Hard choices, rigorously implemented
Category: Kathleen Porter-Magee / December 27, 2012
http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/flypaper/2012/real-lessons-from-finland-hard-choices-rigorously-implemented.html
 Finland: Land of reindeer, snow, and a world-class education system. Photo from RukaKuusamo.com via photopincc. |
Finland—the tiny land of reindeer, snow, and more snow—burst onto the scene in the past decade as the unlikely poster child for the anti-reform movement in the United States. Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t implore reformers to learn from Finland—a nation with low poverty, high achievement, and virtually no standardized tests—and abandon our support for standards- and accountability-driven reform. After all, Finland’s education system today is characterized by loose central regulations, broad teacher curricular and instructional autonomy, and virtually no centralized accountability. Given Finland’s success on international assessments, it must follow that American schools would do better if we Xeroxed the Finland model.
Right?
Not exactly.
First, there has been at least some evidence of late suggesting that Finland’s successes may not be asmiraculous as once thought. But more than that, to understand what is going on in Finland, its perhaps important to start not with a snapshot of their test scores and existing education structures but, rather, with a November 2010 McKinsey study entitled, “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better.”
As part of their research, McKinsey studied twenty school systems from around the world that had seen “significant, sustained, and widespread gains in student outcomes as measured by international and national assessments.” Among the most interesting findings of the report was the difference between the reforms needed to move a system from fair to good performance and the policies needed to support good systems working to become great. More specifically, systems moving from poor to fair rely far more heavily on policies that “tightly control teaching and learning processes from the center because minimizing variation across classrooms and schools is the core driver of performance improvement at this level.” Systems working to go from good to great, by contrast, “provide only loose guidelines on teaching and learning processes because peer-led creativity and innovation inside schools becomes the core driver for raising performance at this level.”
What does that have to do with education reform in America? A lot, actually.
As the McKinsey study demonstrated two years ago, school systems that aren’t working don’t magically achieve greatness by merely “trusting teachers” and loosening control and regulations. And Finland is no different. In fact, the autonomy and decentralization we see in Finland today came after more than two decades of tightly controlled, centrally driven education reform that systematically adjusted curriculum, pedagogy, teacher preparation, and accountability. It was only after this top-down systemic reform moved Finland from poor to good that they shifted to a more flexible approach aimed at turning the system from a good one to a great one. And so, as we look to emulate Finland, we should more directly ask ourselves whether our state and district school systems more closely resemble the Finland of yesterday or today.
A brief history of education reform in Finland
In the 1960s, Finland’s education system looked far different than it does today. Achievement was much more uneven and not all students had equal access to quality schooling. In 1968, as part of a nationwide focus on better preparing students to compete in the knowledge economy, the Finnish Parliament enacted legislation to create a new basic education system that was built around the development of a common “comprehensive” school for grades 1–9—a system that spread to every municipality in the nation by 1977. Three things characterized the new Finnish standard:
1. The development and adoption of a mandatory national curriculum that ensured all students were held to the same rigorous standards.
2. Dramatic changes in teacher preparation and certification requirements.
3. A central state inspectorate that evaluated school-level teaching and learning
National Curriculum
In order to ensure that every student in the nation was taught the same rigorous content, the Finnish government (working with teachers) developed a national curriculum that was the cornerstone of the comprehensive school system—and that was for many years mandatory for all schools in that system. Cited in a 2010 OECD report, one high-level education administrator explained how challenging this move from a loosely governed system of independent schools to a system of government-run schools was.
…There were lots of municipalities that were not eager to reform their system, which is why it was important to have a legal mandate. This was a very big reform, very big and complicated for teachers accustomed to the old system. They were accustomed to teaching school with selected children and were simply not ready for a school system in which very clever children and not so clever children were in the same classes. It took several years, in some schools until the older teachers retired, for these reforms to be accepted.
That’s hardly the story of a reform system built on teacher autonomy and professionalism. Instead, it sounds a lot like the debates we are having right now over Common Core and state accountability systems.
Teacher Certification and Preparation
A critical part of the comprehensive school reforms in Finland was a nationwide effort to improve teacher quality. Policymakers understood the importance of teacher quality in driving student achievement, and they invested heavily in it. In the early years, that investment included professional development aimed at existing teachers in the classroom, but Finland wisely took the long view and spent even more time improving its talent pipeline. For starters, they made it far more difficult to get a teaching job—the government now requires all teachers to earn a master’s degree as a condition of employment.
But perhaps even more importantly, teacher education in Finland is highly content driven. Even primary teachers majoring in education need to minor in at least two content areas—and their content-specific education is delivered not by the teacher preparation program, but rather by the content department in the university. (A math minor, for instance, takes her math courses in the math department.)
Second, courses devoted to pedagogy are grounded in content as much as in theory. As the OECD report explains,
Traditional teacher preparation programmes too often treat good pedagogy as generic, assuming that good questioning skills, for example, are equally applicable to all subjects. Because teacher education in Finland is a shared responsibility between the teacher education faculty and the academic subject faculty, there is substantial attention to subject-specific pedagogy for prospective primary as well as upper-grade teachers.
This clear focus on ensuring that teachers are content experts is critical.
Emulating Finland
Of course, a quick look at the existing Finnish education system tells a different story. That is because in the mid-1990s, partially in response to an economic crisis, the government loosened many of its regulations. In particular, the national curriculum was pared down, becoming more of a guide than a script, and the inspectorate was eliminated, thus giving schools far more autonomy. The teacher certification and preparation reforms, however, remain strong as ever.
These changes represent an evolution. Yes, Finnish educators now enjoy broad autonomy over curriculum and instruction, and schools are largely self-governed. But this happened only after decades of reform aimed at raising standards for both students and teachers and ensuring that teachers had the capacity to thrive under a more decentralized system. Finland followed the McKinsey playbook, whether or not by design. When it had a greater number of struggling schools and teachers with weaker training, their reforms were characterized by tighter control with an emphasis on standards and outcomes. Once the teacher workforce—over more than two decades—was better prepared and trained to teach the content articulated by the curriculum, and once student learning had improved, the state loosened its control.
More than that, though, Finnish leaders had the patience to see the reforms through. The national curriculum took five years to develop, and the teacher workforce took even more to prepare. But the state didn’t waver from its resolve to get it right.
Ultimately, Finland’s success is built atop a series of hard choices, rigorously implemented. And these choices were grounded in a unique set of value propositions that favored the overall welfare of the group instead of maximizing the success of the most naturally talented. The closer you look, the more you realize that Finland’s approach works not because it is a universal template of success but, instead, because it was a Finnish solution to which they committed. Americans shouldn’t be looking to slavishly copy these exact hard choices; rather, we should be looking to the spirit with which they made them and their resolve to see these decisions through.
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