[Mentavious]

I recently found this article on CNN describing how Finland's education system works and some compare/contrast points with the US K-12 system.

Here is the link

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/opinion/sa...?hpt=hp_c2

Quote:

(CNN) -- Millions of American parents spend countless hours trying to figure out how to help their children get better grades, better teachers or better schools.

They may want to take a page from Finland, which is considered to have one of the leading education systems in the world. Finnish students consistently score near the top in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, for reading, mathematics and science. The 2012 PISA results tell us that in these three subjects combined Finland ranks third after Korea and Japan. In comparison, American students' combined performance in reading, mathematics and science places the United States at 21st among 34 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

For some, education in Finland is utopia: a dreamland where teaching is the most desired profession, authorities trust schools and political parties agree on the direction of educational reforms.

For others, they are surprised to hear that in Finland children don't start school until they are 7 years old. They have less homework than their peers in other countries. A child's socioeconomic background is less of an impediment to academic performance. And there is only one standardized test, which is administered in the final year of high school.

What are the main factors that prevent American students from achieving the kind of success that Finnish students attain?

There are three things that have positively affected the quality of Finnish schools that are absent in American schools. First, Finland has built a school system that has over time strengthened educational equity. This means early childhood education for all children, funding all schools so they can better serve those with special educational needs, access to health and well-being services for all children in all schools, and a national curriculum that insists that schools focus on the whole child rather than narrow academic achievement.

Second, teachers in Finland have time to work together with their colleagues during the school day. According to the most recent data provided by the OECD the average teaching load of junior high school teachers in Finland is about half what it is in the United States. That enables teachers to build professional networks, share ideas and best practices. This is an important condition to enhancing teaching quality.

Finally, play constitutes a significant part of individual growth and learning in Finnish schools. Every class must be followed by a 15-minute recess break so children can spend time outside on their own activities. Schooldays are also shorter in Finland than in the United States, and primary schools keep the homework load to a minimum so students have time for their own hobbies and friends when school is over.

The difference is pronounced in America, where a national poll of elementary school principals found that up to 40% of U.S. school districts have reduced or eliminated recess in order to free more time for core academics, and one in four elementary schools no longer provides recess to all grades.

I hear people often arguing that because the United States is much bigger, more diverse, and more unequal, it's harder to reach higher quality education. But even if this were true, it would not explain why in Finland students learn better in their schools than in most other places in the world.

Some aspects of the American school system are not helpful in improving education quality and equity. First, education in the United States is too much defined by testing and data. If getting the data using frequent standardized tests occupies up to one-third of all available time to teach, that will alone prevent students from making the marks they should.

Second, American education places too much faith in marketplace choice, which parents have because of expanded access to charter schools. This weakens the public school structure that is fundamental to many successful education systems elsewhere.

Finally, more students in America have novice or nonprofessional teachers in their classrooms today than ever. Frequent turnover of teachers in thousands of American schools undermines the entire education system.

What would be the way forward then? The United States can't become Finland, but there is a lot it can learn about what works and what doesn't.

One affordable and smart step would be to terminate policies and practices that prevent American teachers from teaching what matters most to their students. Redesigning current punitive accountability for schools and abolishing unnecessary standardized tests would remove a big burden from schools and leave teachers with more time to focus on real learning.

The ultimate test for the American education system will be whether it can bring equity to the forefront of education policies. When poverty explains up to half of student achievement, schools must have measures to better cope with the harmful consequences that disadvantaged family backgrounds have on teaching and learning in many schools. Enhancing equity has been one key to success in Finland.

Is there something else we can do that is not listed above that will help?

[britchard]

The kids are probably more motivated to learn and aren't little brats like most American children.

[heavy]

The problem is "american k-12 education"

You don't take a population spread over 3500 miles consisting of over 300 million various nationalities descended from colonialists, slaves, natives, and an overall large group of immigrants (ie individualist types) and say, "this is how we'll educate them".

That, and 4, 6, 10, and 12 year olds primarily need love, safety, and security from a loving mother and guidance from a father.

[Que enspastic]

I bet Finnish children have parents who love them more within a unified family with extended support networks. They probably have an egalitarian society that puts a strong emphasis on education in the form of critical thinking, reflection and contemplation, and scientific enquiry.

If you gave the Finns the American system and Americans the Finnish system the Finns would still outperform the US

[TigerMandingo]

Every year or so Americans have this futile debate on what to do with the educational system. The result is always the same: nothing gets done, nothing improves, and people forget about the issue and move on to the next hot topic.

This author cracks me up too. He is a fellow at Harvard and is lecturing people on bringing "equity" into education. Dude probably lives in a lilly-white gated community. Fuck off.

[Barron]

Make Latin a part of the common core of education (like in Britain) through 8th grade and then require all high school students to be at the intermediate level of a foreign language in order to graduate (spanish, italian, german, french, even chinese/japanese could be an option but would be held to a different standard than intermediate because they're not Latin based languages).

This would give students more exposure to foreign culture and even grow their interest in traveling and seeing the world beyond themselves and the good'ol homeland of Murica

[ElBorrachoInfamoso]

America does pretty damn well on the PISA if you break down the results by race:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/overa...erica.html

American ethnic groups score at or near the top compared to co-ethnics in other countries. No one in the MSM has any balls to talk about race/ethnicity though.

[Doctor]

"The smartest kids in the world and how they got that way". It's a book on Finland, Poland, and South Korean educational systems.

If I remember correctly, Finland only trains teachers at the elite colleges. It would essentially be, in the US, teachers can only be trained at Ivy League schools. And it is a 6 year program. One of the books main points was that teacher quality, not money spent per student, is hugely important.
At least in the book, Finland doesn't haves tiered schooling. No remedial or no advanced. But more funds and resources are allocated to bringing up those that are struggling. Here in the US we use property taxes to keep schools partially segregated and give more money to schools that already have a lot of money.
It also discussed how Finland has a lot of immigrants coming in that don't speak Finnish. Getting those students language proficiency is a priority.
Also, sports are far less of a priority.

There are other points made in the book. It was definitely a good read.

Won't happen here. Making highly selective teaching colleges would be discrimination. Funding schools more equally (distributing money away from affluent homogenous public schools) would he worse than socialism.

[Que enspastic]

The PISA study results suggest that one way to improve educational results would be to change the country's demographics in favour of white/Chinese/(presumably Jewish too)

[Hedonistic Traveler]

I've worked with some pretty shitty DC schools in the past four years, and it's pretty obvious that the biggest issue is the family. These kids don't really stand a chance, and although some of the teachers are jaded if you were to put them into a nicer school district they would perform well for the most part.

My mom stayed at home when we were growing up and it had a huge impact on how we did in school. She'd make us do flashcards and read during summers off, and as a result we was always above grade level. I was always a pretty distracted kid and I'm sure if she hadn't given me that head start I would have suffered.

Liberals are ready to criticize a lot of things, but they are not comfortable criticizing families yet, especially mothers. That's unfortunate because a five minute conversation with some of these parents(mainly single mothers) would make it pretty clear that they are not capable of raising successful children.

Smaller classes, more one-on-one time, extended summer education, and longer days would all help kids, but a kid from a broken/uneducated home is only going to go so far. Poor communities cannot imitate Finland.

[Native Baltimoron]

In the U.S., traditionally certified teachers are often drawn from people who couldn't hack it in harder majors. Education, as an academic discipline, is a joke here. You could probably get an Ed.D. with a thesis on the migratory patterns of a classroom's desks. On the other hand, non-traditional certification programs, e.g. Teach for America, take idealistic young SWPLs and put them in some of the worst school districts in the country, all while brainwashing their (mostly female) participants that the issue is neither the kids nor their appalling home situations, but rather systemic racism and the education system failing to teach students adequately.

The situation is worsened by the practice of putting students who require individualized (that is, special) education plans in classrooms alongside students without cognitive or behavioral issues. Schools receive federal and state grant funding for every IEP student in a gen ed class, and so they mightily resist cordoning them off from the other students, which hurts everyone's ability to learn. Similarly, the demonstrable reticence in bad school systems, e.g. Baltimore City, to suspend or expel students for violent infractions makes it much harder to remove troublemakers from the classroom.

Middle-class kids are lucky; they can go to schools in neighborhoods that are actually safe, where teachers are not so preoccupied by behavioral problems that they can actually teach. If you're poor, and live in a bad part of your city, you're pretty much screwed as far as the public schools go.

[DChambers]

We could stop putting behavior modifiers like fluoride in our food and water.

Getting aside from that though what I think we are seeing is really a decaying of American society in general, which is caused by a myriad of factors. The breakup of the family unit, the decline of morality, the loss of discipline etc...

We also have the Federal Government coming in telling how and what the States to teach their kids.

Put education back on the local level, let schools discipline their students, and I think we would begin o see some major changes in the quality of education in our nation's schools.

[Tytalus]

A big issue in the US and even Canada is the massive GPA inflation of education majors compared to other programs. It is THE cake major from the undergrad to PhD level. Europe as a whole trains and pays it's teachers much better as a whole compared to the US.

[kaotic]

How about starting with family values and parenting first ?

[tomtud]

Schools are basically performing babysitting duties for many parents. Teachers believe it or not are handcuffed with many policies. A parent can berate a teacher, and the teacher has to sit there and take it. Yes you can tell your superiors, but they are handcuffed too. This is why unions are great for teachers. Yes the unions do protect poor teachers, but there aren't many poor teachers IMHO.

Teachers often spend their own money on supplies, work at night, bring their work home. Not many professionals do that.

My suggestions are : suspend students who are disruptive or move them into special classes. Limit class sizes to 20 ish. Etc.
Poor parenting leaves teachers handcuffed as they can do nothing with mischievous children at times. Tiered grades are needed. High, medium, low.

[___]

(10-06-2014 11:29 AM)heavy Wrote:  

The problem is "american k-12 education"

You don't take a population spread over 3500 miles consisting of over 300 million various nationalities descended from colonialists, slaves, natives, and an overall large group of immigrants (ie individualist types) and say, "this is how we'll educate them".

That, and 4, 6, 10, and 12 year olds primarily need love, safety, and security from a loving mother and guidance from a father.

Boom.

You could almost end the thread right there.

The solution entails completely demolishing the current model (specifically federal/state funded public ed), not reforming it.

[Mentavious]

I agree that teachers don't get paid shit so that lowers the standard for highly educated teachers. I know plenty of lawyers and people of other professions who did start of as teachers but decided to go a different route due to money

And yes USA population is much larger than South Korea, Japan, Finland, and some of the other top nations so that obviously has an effect on the numbers.

[kaotic]

(10-06-2014 05:15 PM)Mentavious Wrote:  

I agree that teachers don't get paid shit so that lowers the standard for highly educated teachers. I know plenty of lawyers and people of other professions who did start of as teachers but decided to go a different route due to money

And yes USA population is much larger than South Korea, Japan, Finland, and some of the other top nations so that obviously has an effect on the numbers.

I disagree, here in CA we have some of the highest paid teachers. The Tenure laws here are bullshit because a shitty teacher whose been for a long time will stay while an amazing teacher whose new will get axed FIFO

The teacher organizations and unions will spend money purchasing millions in iPads just so kids could "hack" it and use it on their own free will.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/27/3...ed-to-know

These teacher unions are the WORST here. Sure, they may care more about the kids, but they sure care more about their pay and pensions.

Don't forget the pedos unions defend and shuffle around to other campuses or "teacher jail".

[Mentavious]

You are right. This link here shows the averages

This link here shows the overall state rankings

Some do matchup in terms of more pay=better schools while some do not

[Dantes]

The recruitment and hiring of high quality teachers needs to be implemented and become a priority. The most intelligent and skilled professionals usually go into other professions. In order to attract high quality professionals, you need to pay them better. The opposite is occurring in education with a nationwide reduction on benefits, pension and modest increases in salary if any at all. A financial incentive needs to be created to encourage intelligent people to enter into education.

[MrLemon]

The problem we have (as a parent of 2 kids in the US school system, so I'm right in the middle of it) is that we have massive stupid pressure from the State and Federal level, constantly forcing teachers to ram more and more crap into kid's heads. Kids get burned out in a few months, then they're popping Speed (often with Mommy and Daddy's tacit approval) to "improve their performance".

High pressure school is a completely failed approach. It breaks every rule of excellence. Kids need TIME TO REST and process what they have learned.

Like those Russian olympics training programs in the 1970s that would routinely break 50% of applicants. It never worked. "Over-training" does not produce good results, as any modern coach knows.

As a society, we made this idiotic decision a few decades ago, to emulate the Chinese and Japanese educational system, which is a hoot because Chinese and Japanese school systems are crappy.

[Paracelsus]

I've learned to become deeply suspicious of people who vault across an ocean for a brief period of time, take a superficial look at an alternative education/medical/financial/you name it system, and then pronounce authoritatively that such systems will work in the author's country of origin. This article, with a murmured concession or two in favour of "Of course Finland is not the US", does precisely that.

How, in particular, does the author come to the view that Finland's students "learn better in their schools"? What data is that assertion based on? Where is the material from past Finnish students to say how they thought the system worked? Where is the data from teachers under the system (actually, scratch that -- the teachers have a vested interest in the system continuing to be dealt with on a Rolls Royce basis).

I think the shortest acid test of the Educational Utopia is this: what's Finland's unemployment rate?

According to this site: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/finland/...yment-rate ... it's 7.4% right now, and earlier this year it was ten percent. Its youth unemployment rate is 19.80%, and its highest was 35%. (By comparison, the US hovers around 12%). Its Labor Force Participation Rate hangs around in the sixties -- on par with the US. You would think a country with a utopian education system would be doing a lot better economically if its system was churning out markedly better students than the US. Wikipedia says 66% of Finland's economy comes from the services industries. So you are looking at some of the world's most sensitively-educated waiters and postmen for the most part.

Having a utopian education system also hasn't made the kids any happier. Finland has the 20th-highest suicide rate in the world. By comparison, the US comes in at number 33 -- for all its massive population and diverse, "poverty-stricken" population. It also has the lowest male life expectancy of all the Nordic countries, so it's a poisonous environment to men. It's such a bad situation that the OECD -- the same organisation that rates its education system so highly -- is "concerned" about its high rates of people killing themselves. Its youth suicide rates in particular have been trending upward: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21294729

Most significantly, Finland has a tiny, homogenous population: 5.5 million people, of which 3.4% are foreign -- among the lowest percentage in the EU, and they're mostly from Russia, Sweden, or Estonia. The author of the article waves this difference away, I think intentionally, but this is a massive difference between the two places.

Let's leave aside the fact it has the world's most extensive social welfare system and only a third of people actually work past the age of 61. This is all well and good when you have one of least densely populated countries on the face of the planet, with decent natural resources, but no significant strategic resources such that you really need to defend yourself from anybody. When there's more money to go around of course you can afford to have a luxury education system. But it horribly skews any rational analysis of how good or bad the education system is: it is as if the author went to a white, gated enclave and concluded that Philmore and Christina Pettigrew III's yearly ski trips, while very nice and doubtless of some benefit to children for the experience, ought be rolled out across the entire education system -- notwithstanding that the said experiences don't seem to be creating a country that's invented anything significant in the past seventy years except Angry Birds, nor a country that's really doing any better than anywhere else in the West economically.

[Emancipator]

Public education is merely just a daycare, watch how parents react whenever your local school district goes on the strike, they aren't worrying about the fact that their kids aren't learning, they mostly worry about the fact that they can't send their kids off to free daycare(school)

The way I see it is that there are numerous issues at play:
1) Parents and weak family structure
2) extreme micromanagement of education (centralization of education with policies like NCLB)

[Switch]

The Usa might not have the best overall k-12 system in the world, but our top students can go head to head with the best students from anywhere in the world. The problem is we have so many very poor school districts because of property tax funding the syytem. There are many other problems too, such as limited english skills, bad parenting, broken homes, etc, but what's important is that we have the smartest people in the world either from being raised here or coming here from other countries. I'd bet though if you take an upper middle class district and compare its scores to the world, we'd match up very well. We need to help our poorest people out, but I'm not sure the education system itself is the problem in that regard.

[Kabal]

Good schools/education systems are more the product of good students than vice versa--despite what the PC blank-slatist crowd would try and have you believe.

Additionally, as we saw with PISA scores, when adjusted for population background, America's students do just fine.

White Americans tend to beat the students of most European countries, East Asian Americans tend to beat the students of most East Asian countries, etc.