jeffery heil's List: Education/Fineland

• Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. 
• wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages.
• You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us
• Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.
• Most start by putting more money behind their hardest-to-educate students than those who are easier to educate.
• In the U.S., we do the opposite.
• The top-performing nations boost the quality of their teaching forces by greatly raising entry standards for teacher education programs.
• Many of our teachers also have a very weak background in the subjects they are assigned to teach, and increasingly, they're allowed to become teachers after only weeks of training.
• The most effective way to greatly improve student performance in the U.S. is to figure out what the top-performing countries are doing and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.
• Playing to our strengths makes sense. Ignoring what works, simply because it was invented elsewhere, does not.

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• Finland is much in the news these days because of its success on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) examinations.
• And just as consistently, the variance in quality among Finnish schools is the least of all nations tested, meaning that Finnish students can get a good education in virtually any school in the nation.
• What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission.
• There is a national curriculum—broad guidelines to assure that all students have a full education—but it is not prescriptive
• They have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals.
• Admission to teacher education programs at the end of high school is highly competitive; only one in 10—or even fewer—qualify for teacher preparation programs
• The schools I visited reminded me of our best private progressive schools. They are rich in the arts, in play, and in activity.
• Teachers and principals repeatedly told me that the secret of Finnish success is trust.
• The child-poverty rate in Finland is under 4 percent. Here it is 22 percent and rising
• hey are paid more if they do more work for the community, but they can't understand why teachers should get a bonus to compete with one another for test scores.
• They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one points out that Finland has the same demographics as Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior results.
• I am troubled by this "lacks diversity" argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities.
• Finland has this singular goal: to develop the humanity of each child.

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• One theme that has already emerged is the prevalence of trust that schools and their faculties will do what is in the best interest of students.
• “We train the people and then leave it to them. The focus is on teacher professionalism. We talk about central steering, not central control.”
• Key decisions, such as class size and textbook selection, are locally controlled.
• a national policy exists that requires schools to avoid ability grouping of students in what was described as preventing a “dead-end education for students.”
• Teachers generally teach approximately 19 hours per week. The balance of their time is focused on working with their colleagues, reaching out to families and other duties
• 96% of teachers are unionized
• High levels of teacher education and preparation allow them to be more independent in the classroom.
• Broad commitment to the vision of a knowledge-based society.
• Education is free of charge to all, including books, meals, transportation and health care
• Educational equality
• “Our secret is investing in early intervention so that students don’t need it later.”
• Sweden and Norway spend less on the front end and more later in remediation.
• The principal works as a pedagogical director.
• A culture of trust in which no school inspectors or national exams exist.

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• 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 is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
• “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
• Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.
• more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations
• “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
• There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.
• Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.
• The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.
• “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,”
• Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”
• Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschoo
• Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.
• The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.
• English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth.
• Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate
• Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,”

• “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

   
• A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks.
• “We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”
• “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”
• Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions.
• The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.
• Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive
• All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind

• The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

   
• A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.

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