Janet Morrison's List: Believography

• Finland's success is especially   intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children   in more creative play.
• there are no private   schools in Finland.
• Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they   are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees.
• There   are no private universities, either. This means that practically every   person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
• Finland has no standardized tests
• The only exception is   what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the   end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of   American high school.
• Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children   in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
• For Sahlberg what   matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given   prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is   required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among   the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad,   it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.
• The main   driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between   schools, but cooperation
• the   goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success   today, was never excellence. It was equity.
• Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the   idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn,   regardless of family background, income, or geographic location.
• Education   has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers,   but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
• Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health   care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
• the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education
• Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.
• Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.
• It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
• More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

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• Under the system, known as Impact Plus, teachers rated “highly effective” earn bonuses ranging from $2,400 to $25,000. Teachers who get that rating two years in a row are eligible for a large permanent pay increase to make their salary equivalent to that of a colleague with five more years of experience and a more advanced degree.
• • What happens to the others who didn't get any kind of raise? Does this eventually make them want to leave the profession? And how do we fill those spots?
• Eighty-four of them received $4,000 each, and 12 got the top payout of $25,000.
• Washington, like several other cities that have rolled out merit pay programs, first promoted the plan mainly by emphasizing the top compensation that someone could earn in a single year: about $130,000 annually in salary and performance bonuses. But earning that much is rare if not impossible — it requires the most experienced teachers, with the most advanced degrees, to have the best possible performance, something yet to be achieved.
• Jimmie Roberts, who is 28 and tutors slow readers, saw his salary increase to about $75,000 in 2011-12, from about $52,000 last year, in addition to receiving $30,000 in bonuses over two years. The money and recognition, he said, helped dispel the discouragement he had felt having to work a second job, as a greeter in a wine bar on nights and weekends, to pay off college loans.

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• Limit the scope of your greatness. It's tempting to develop your new company as the end-all, be-all solution to a whole series of related consumer or enterprise needs, but the most successful companies are laser-focused on being the best at one very particular thing. Think about Walmart being the best at always offering rock-bottom prices or Apple being the go-to company for beautifully designed devices. This singular point of differentiation is the way the most successful companies attain a dominant market position and earn above-market profits. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, Google rose to prominence in its startup days by being the best at search and Facebook achieved dominance by being the best at connecting real-life friends online. These market-leading companies have had the clarity to identify their strengths and then structure their organizations to support that, without compromise or distraction. Small business leaders should be thinking hard about pinpointing exactly where they want to be superior--hardest of all, it also means getting over your fear of missing out and admitting that everything else may not be your strong suit.
• every new business does need a revenue generation strategy upfront, in order to be ready to scale accordingly.
• a cohesive plan for revenue generation must be identified and incorporated into business development early on
• the strongest companies are larger than their people; they are not as fallible as any individual.
• Startups should build a company culture, training programs and processes that instill the best qualities of its leaders into all of its employees.

  • This is what I need to be training teenagers and college students to do...and do well! I want them to understand how to teach kids and adults to explore, experiment, and think creatively.
• Large companies, on the other hand, are very good at focusing on what individual team members should be accomplishing, by setting up clear goals and constructs like separate P&Ls, performance-review programs and well-defined bonus structures. Startup founders would be smart to incorporate this type of thinking into their management ethos, too.
• the essence of what companies do is make people happy by providing solutions to their problems.
• A business is only successful when consumers find its solution worth more than the price tag or the time and effort required to solve it by themselves.

  • So true! My product has got to be worth more than the time it takes individuals to google the lesson plans on their own. I've got to sell the fact that it's more than just recreating the lesson plan. There's strategy to the education process...and I can teach parents that strategy.

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