In America, we hear how great the educational system is in Finland.
The United States and other countries across the globe have studied what has
made Finland educational system one of the best. How they have the best and
brightest in the teaching profession, how they have individualized education
for each student, how they do not have national or state assessments, and how
there society believes in having a great educational system.
In America, we here “they do not have the diversity and
large financial separation in students backgrounds as we do”; “ we do not
receive the same support from the government and parents as they do”. As well
as other statements regarding special need students, English language learners
and so forth. I think you need to look at the beginning of their current system
to find the answers that America is looking for:
"The
Finns had a crisis,” life-long educator, best-selling author, and Harvard
professor Tony Wagner explains, "Their economy was failing. Their
education system was poor. They knew that to grow their economy, they had to
transform their educational system. Starting with the principle that
cooperation is a key pillar of success, the Finns revised their educational
framework.”
We have all heard statements like this about the American
school system, so what is the difference between America and Finland? They
started to ask questions like:
o
What kind of economy will we have for the next
100 years? How will we have a workforce to meet these needs?
o
What skills will our people need to be globally
competitive? How do we make sure everyone is educated at high levels to meet
this demand?
o
What barriers exist that will prevent us from
reaching our goals of having the best workforce in the world?
o
Finland did huge amounts of research, studies and hypotheses
as to what, how, and when could they transform their educational system and
what they needed to do to make it happen. The Finns began with questions like
these and developed an educational system to meet the criteria such as:
o
Equitable for all students regardless of
economic or ethnic background
o
Accessible to all students no matter where they
live
o
Flexible to meet the needs of students on each
individual’s level
o
Create a populace of people who are life long
learners who can meet the needs of an ever-changing global society
And we too have heard that we need to meet these criteria
for our own students. So why are our schools still having difficultly meeting
these requirements? The key is in the last guiding question that the Finns had,
what barriers exist that will prevent us from reaching our goals of having the
best and most prepared workforce in the world?
The issue at hand was teacher quality. The Finns set
out to make the teaching profession one of the most highly regarded professions
in their country.
"I
saw teachers in Finland that were better than 90 percent of the teachers I see
in America," says Wagner. “There were many things that led to Finland
topping the international education league tables (10 years and counting). A
key driver: a tremendous investment in teaching made it the most sought-after
profession in Finland.”
Today in America, the teaching profession is criticized at
every turn from parents, teachers, and most of all politicians. We hear every
politician make states like how tenure is a terrible and how teachers abused
the system. How the health benefits, pensions and pay are exorbitant for what
teachers are doing in the classroom. Taxes are too high for the general public,
which teachers are too, for teachers to have such generous benefits.
If we are going to compete on a global level with countries
like Finland, Singapore, China, and India we need to stop our current political
methodology of criticizing teacher to one that holds teachers in the highest regard.
We need to make the benefits, salaries and pensions that entices our best and
brightest become teachers instead of other professions.
Our obsession with standardized testing has to stop. The
Finn’s realized the main problem with standardized testing was the quality of
tests.
“The
increasing amount of what students learn cognitively today, let alone what they
will learn tomorrow, is due to out-of-school influences, not the teacher or
school. Most standardized tests focus on core subjects and knowledge ands as
soon as you have invested in them, you want to also use them for all sorts of
purposes for which they were not meant to be used, like determining the quality
of schools and comparing them to each other, or measuring the effectiveness
of teachers.”
Here again we have another issue in America, measuring
teacher effectiveness. From a national level educators have heard the call for
new teacher evaluation systems and more standardized tests. If we want a system
as good as Finland, why are we continuing to move towards more standardized
tests and using them to compare teacher effectiveness? We all know that moving
towards standardized testing will undermine achievement and the goal of
delivering life long learners who will be able to meet the demand of a global economy.
America’s global competitiveness will require students to
develop competencies for life and work. Our educational system must be
equitable, accessible, and flexible for all students not just those who can
afford good schools. Cooperation, not competition, as well as a tremendous
investment in teaching quality (and in our teachers) is essential for all
school systems to meet these needs for a new American education system.
