Finland
has an education system with its priorities in the right places and the results
to match. It’s time for our leadership to take a look over there and say, “Yes!
I’ll have what they’re having.”

Linda Darling-Hammond’s indispensable new book The
Flat World and Education profiles three
countries-Finland, Korea, and Singapore— that had struggling education systems in the 1970s
but have aggressively revamped them into superior national systems. I plan to blog more on
Darling-Hammond’s opus, but for now, I want to focus on Finland.

Finland has much to teach us, if only we pay
attention. They didn’t arrive at an equitable, world-class system through our
current measures of privatization or accountability via high-stakes testing.
The Education
System of Finland’s website spells out its mission in a way that starkly
differs from ours. (In fact, I couldn’t find any corresponding mission
statement on the U.S. Department of Education site—
only endless links and a blog.)

Here are a few highlights from Finland:

Competent teachers On all school levels, teachers are highly
qualified and committed. Master’s degree is a requirement, and teacher
education includes teaching practice. Teaching profession is very popular in
Finland, and hence universities can select the most motivated and talented
applicants. Teachers work independently and enjoy full autonomy in the
classroom. 

This is the ace. What isn’t even mentioned is that
all teacher training and degrees are fully paid for by the government, making
teaching a competitive and attractive profession. Endless research points to
quality teachers in every classroom as the most crucial helper for students;
Finland actually invests in making that happen. In the U.S.’s fragmented
system, so many teachers enter the classroom with minimal training, heavy
student load debt, and a sink-or-swim attitude from their school leaders.
Naturally, many would-be competent teachers decide not to even bother. Finland
doesn’t have a teacher turnover crisis; quite the contrary, they have a
well-trained, highly talented corps of teachers. This is excellence— although I
can already anticipate loud, insipid criticism from the American right about
government-supported teacher training as a recipe for socialist indoctrination.
We need to get over ourselves and realize that investing in teacher training is
not optional for developing a sustainable, robust school system. We don’t have
that now and it’s killing us.

Encouraging assessment and evaluation The student assessment and evaluation of
education and learning outcomes are encouraging and supportive by nature. The
aim is to produce information that supports both schools and students to
develop. National testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not
exist.

The last line is clearly a knock at the U.S.’s
ideological march toward high-stakes testing as the sole relevant indicator of
student and school achievement. We need to shake off the addiction to
corporate-assembled tests for our students, and pay attention to implementing
rigorous assessments that support, not deaden, kids’ interest in education.

Significance of education in society Finnish society strongly favours education and
the population is highly educated by international standards. Education is
appreciated and there is a broad political consensus on education policy. 

Darling-Hammond mentions an American tradition of
under-investing in preparation. President Obama has committed unprecedented
billions to education in his Race to the Top program, but the money is tied to
the reforms du jour of tying teacher
evaluations to test scores and green-lighting more charter schools. In effect,
we’ll get more testing (and practice testing) and more privatization. So much
high-stakes testing sucks the soul out of education and charter schools are interesting
innovations at the fringes of the system. We cannot privatize our way to a
world-class education system that serves all American students. We need a
dramatic, bipartisan re-commitment to education. Finland did this, and we can
see where it got them— number-one status.

My long-distance love affair with Finland continues: it is
ranked by Forbes as the second-happiest
country in the world. (Side note: it has a single-payer public health care
system and 88% of
its citizens are satisfied with it. The EU national average for health care
satisfaction is 41%.)

Perhaps the U.S./Finland contrast is best elucidated by
Finnish policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg, who is cited in depth by Darling-Hammond:

The [No Child Left Behind] legislation… has led to
fragmentation in instruction, further interventions uncoordinated with the
basic classroom teaching, and more poorly-trained tutors working with students
and teachers. As a consequence, schools have experienced too many instructional
directions for any student, with an increase in unethical behaviors and a loss
of continuity in instruction and systematic school improvement. The difference
between this and the Finnish approach is notable: The Finns have worked
systematically over 35 years to make sure that competent professionals who can
craft the best learning conditions for all students are in all schools, rather
than thinking that standardized instruction and related testing can be brought
in at the last minute to improve student learning and turn around failing
schools.

Much of Darling-Hammond’s examination of Finland can be found
here
in a 2009 article for Voices in Urban Education, but I recommend getting the book. We’d be fools to ignore what
really works on a national level.

Read on your own,
and you are in a strong position. If you do not do this, you’re in deep
trouble. 

This is my constant
thought about my students. Recent data from my classroom and an eye-opening new
book, African
Americans and Standardized Tests: The Real Reason for Low Test Scores, have borne it out. 

The data from my
classroom has been consistent. At my school, we administer math and English
“interim assessments” three times a year. The teachers create the exams, often
drawing upon practice SAT, AP exam, and state tests. Within 48 hours of the
testing, teachers have run the students’ scores through the in-house Scantron machine
and printed out data reports. Then the Friday of interim assessment week is set
aside as a student-free professional development “data day” in which the entire
cohort of teachers serving a grade-level scours each kid’s test and open-ended
responses. We discuss patterns, draw up action plans, and identify students of
concern. It’s a model of using data to drive instruction.

Every single one of
these data days is an occasion for hand-wringing. The lower-achieving students
rarely display meaningful progress. Their essays are often cringe-worthy. For
some 11th- and 12th-graders on the cusp of heading to college, their lack of
mastery of the English language can be downright scary.

I have a clutch of
students who read for pleasure, yet bizarrely hand in assignments only
sporadically. Let’s call them “Readers.” These are the kids who take home The
Kite Runner and read the
whole thing in two days—then never write any of their journal responses. Their
grades do not reflect their abilities. However, these students always score at
or near the very top of the class on these standardized tests.

I have many more
students who hand in almost all of their assignments, yet they— according to
their own pronouncements— dislike reading and never do it except when forced.
They are the moaners and groaners when new books are distributed in class. They
are always at or near the bottom of the statistical heap. Let’s call them
“Worker Bees.”

The most recent
data day sent me into a tizzy of bafflement about how to boost my Worker Bees.
An hour of Amazon.com book browsing (my new addiction) led me to order Clark
Atlanta University professor Veda Jairrels’s scarily titled African
Americans and Standardized Tests: The Real Reason for Low Test Scores. I devoured the 140 pages in one sitting.

Jairrels, a lawyer
and an education professor, gave me little hope for the upward mobility
(academically and professionally) for most of my non-reading Worker Bees. She
lowers the boom in her introduction:

I believe
African Americans score the lowest… because of a lack of long-term voluntary
reading. Voluntary reading is also referred to as reading for pleasure… This
emphasis on reading should begin at birth (i.e. parents reading to their
infants). The amount of reading that children do in connection with school
assignments is often not enough…

When I tell
African American parents about the importance of taking their children to the
library, they sometimes reply, “My child has plenty of books at home.” My
unspoken response is, “No, you don’t. You just think you do.”

Ugh. She goes on to
lay out extensive, sobering data reflecting African Amercans’ poor performance
relative to other groups on tests. For example, the mean score for African
American college-bound seniors whose parents earn more than $100,000 on the
2007 SAT Writing test was 469; The mean score for white students whose parents
earned less than $10,000 was higher, at 474. At the household income of
$100,000 or higher, the mean score for white students was 540. And so on.

Jairrels claims the
core reason for this disparity is an accumulated deficit of skills and
knowledge from not African American children not reading enough for pleasure.
Reading teaches you words; it shows other places and perspectives. It broadens
one’s world. She wants parents to be getting kids pumped about reading from
birth, and for schools to immerse students in reading opportunities from the
moment they first enroll.

After finishing a
recent unit using the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, James, one of my Worker Bee 11th-graders
told me, with a real sense of accomplishment, “Mr. Brown, this is the first
book that I ever really
read.”

I was proud of him.
James’s effort in class this semester has been strong. He still remains
woefully behind his Reader peers. If he somehow caught up, he’d be a
statistical anomaly.

Reading is everything. When kids don’t read at an early age, they fall
behind.  I believe that all
children can learn, but when, for many, valuable years of reading and learning
have been squandered, those students awaken in the upper grades at a tremendous
deficit. Veda Jairrels sees it, and I see it in my classroom every day. 

No meaningful
education reform can ignore this.

Are there any teachers who think state exam scores should be the dominating factor of teacher evaluations? Do they really believe that those high-stakes test provide a genuine reflection of a teacher’s value? Do they agree that teachers who work with students with low test scores should be put on probation and/or fired?

I’m really wondering about this. Teacher evaluation via student high-stakes test scores is on an unstoppable march, and it’s a non-negotiable for states if they want a piece of President Obama and Secretary Duncan’s Race to the Top billions. Last week, NYC Mayor Bloomberg took a big step in this direction, digging in his heels on the test-scores- or-your-job crusade.

I’m distressed. The obsessively stat-driven business model (specifically using state exam stats) doesn’t work in classrooms. Teachers know this. Using data to drive instruction is good, but that’s not the same as basing someone’s competence on students’ scores on one pressure-laden exam. State test scores just don’t give an accurate picture of student achievement, no matter how badly Bloomberg or Duncan want it to.

My students’ SAT scores don’t reflect the learning happening in my 12th grade English class. There the students are leading discussions on The Kite Runner, making connections within and beyond the text. They are speaking publicly and taking ownership over their learning. They’re realizing that the teacher is not the gatekeeper of knowledge and discoveries. They’re doing standards-based creative and expository writing inspired by the text. They are taking responsibility for completing assignments thoroughly and working on self-advocating when they need extra assistance. It’s not perfect, but I know there is forward progress. I can see it in their written work and in their in-class actions.

When I administered a practice SAT test as part of a school-wide “interim assessment” this week, the results were low. The timed testing environment was stressful, and many students worked slightly slower than the pacing clock permitted, leading kids to become frustrated and bomb the test.

I’ll focus with the students on working more quickly through timed tests, but really, I find that skill somewhere toward the bottom of the priority list of what high-needs students have to get out of 12th grade. In addition to the covering the standards, I’m looking to build confidence and responsible risk-taking, networking abilities, technological savvy, awareness of current events, and, most of all, intellectual curiosity. I don’t want to give undue precious time to beating the clock on Scantron tests— a skill that’s not nearly as transferable or important in college or the real world.

I fear that my evaluation under the Duncan-Bloomberg system would declare me an utter failure; I know that I’m not. I fear that I’d be kicked out of the profession I love because I hadn’t prepped my kids enough for a specific kind of timed test. Under evaluation-by-test-score-system, my class would be all test prep, all the time. Otherwise I couldn’t be confident that I could continue to keep my much-needed job.

I
wish I had a dollar for every time a parent told me their fondest wish was that
their child be happy. As in: "I'm not worried about Jason's grades--I just
want him to have friends and be happy." Or: "I'm not going to insist that Mandy practice her flute. If it doesn't
make her happy, she can just quit." 

I sometimes wonder about the pursuit of happiness as iconic American goal.
I'm quite sure that Jefferson had something more noble and laudable in mind
than deciding whether he should jot down a bit of transformative political
philosophy--or perhaps take a nap, whichever seemed more fulfilling at the
moment.

It's
a good week for thinking about what makes us happy--and how we, the village,
can raise our collective children to pursue the kind of happiness that matters,
while simultaneously being aware of and grateful for their many blessings.

In
TIME magazine this week, Nancy Gibbs muses on the confounding information that
Americans scored higher on the ongoing Gallup "well-being index" this
summer than they did last summer. Although happiness plummeted in the months
after the economic meltdown, our national sense of well-being began to increase
in the spring, and has remained relatively high since, even though the news--pretty
much all the news--has been downright awful. 

Gibbs
suggests that Americans have adjusted their expectations, and that's a healthy
thing:

While optimism
is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound
to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the
voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of
relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can
buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with
our causes and connections than with our net worth.

How
does this square with current education oratory and thinking, wherein "low
expectations" are now equated with soft bigotry? It's clear that our
generational train of progress-through-education--the laborer's son becomes a
merchant, the merchant's son a professional, with each subsequent generation achieving
more--is creaking to an end. We are outstripping our natural resources and have
tilted our economy into crippling debt. The gap between rich and poor is
growing; I'm guessing the people who expressed relief about downshifting were
moving from the top tier into the middle. 

We
can expect all we want, but the reality is that we seem to be heading into a
period where the Real Housewives of Atlanta might become appalling symbols of
tacky excess, rather than an amusing glimpse into the style and habits of
people lucky enough to pursue their personal pleasures. Are we re-defining
happiness as much more than recognition, entertainment and stuff?

Speaking
of expectations, how can we blithely critique teachers for not using "high
expectations" as a handy tool to leverage student learning, when we're
ambivalent about providing those same kids with adequate health care? Don't we
want all children to reach for more than credentials and possessions--should we
expect them to become productive in ways other than generating wealth?

Maybe
we need to re-examine our current goal focus on college degrees, and how many
more dollars they're likely to yield over a  lifetime of work, and start looking at non-material
aspirations and rewards, for our own children and for the nation. Here are the three
core outcomes I want for my own children, as a result of their formal and
informal education:

• Important
  work. Work that leads to making something better, whether it's particularly
  lucrative or not. Work that is variable, challenging and absorbing.

•  Civic
  engagement. Involvement in groups, relationships with people who have similar goals,
  volunteering, participating in relevant ways in the life of their community.

• Intellectual
  curiosity. A life-long interest in a broad range of issues and disciplines, and
  willingness to read, travel, discuss, ponder, and consider alternative points
  of view. 

Of
course, I want my children to be free from hunger and fear (and the fact that I
take such basic needs for granted probably speaks to the privileges I enjoy as
an American citizen). Continuous happiness, however, seems like a pretty
lightweight and empty goal.  Gratitude is
a better place to begin.

Thanks
for reading Teacher in a Strange Land. 
Happy Thanksgiving.

Image: TheABU@ Flicker Creative Commons

Teachers know this, but our knowledge is not reaching the deciders.

Male dropouts are more than three times more likely to get locked up than their counterparts who finish high school. A quarter of all African American males that don’t finish high school will find themselves behind bars. Unemployment rates for young people are over 20 percent higher for dropouts than for high school graduates.

It costs our society a lot— economically and psychologically— more to lock somebody up than to educate him.

This dropout crisis is often mislabeled as a “high school dropout crisis.” Yes, the last years of physically attending school for dropouts happens in ninth- through twelfth-grade. However, the ones who leave are mentally gone long before freshman year.

Sam Dillon’s recent New York Times article presents stark statistics of the extreme consequences that follow not getting a high school degree:

Some juicy tidbits:

The [Northeastern University] report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.

54 percent of dropouts ages 16 to 24 were jobless, compared with 32 percent for high school graduates of the same age, and 13 percent for those with a college degree.

Again, the statistics were worse for young African-American dropouts, whose unemployment rate last year was 69 percent, compared with 54 percent for whites and 47 percent for Hispanics.

Scary stuff. Fortunately, it’s not an impossible mystery to figure out why many students don’t finish school. Kids leave when they don’t have a good reason to stay. Good reasons to stay include:

• Feeling successful in school

(So many students with low skills feel like failures and are perpetually at their frustration level. Sitting through classes where they’re lost is torturous.)

• Connecting with positive role models

(Many adults who work in schools do heroic work here, but I bet every one of them wishes class sizes were smaller so that crucial one-on-one and small-group opportunities will be more available.)

• Understanding where it’s all heading

(Lots of students who drop out see no road map to college or point of reference for how to be happy and successful on that path. Limited exposure to the world beyond their immediate reality is crippling in this regard.)

Stemming the dropout crisis involves investing in all of these areas for preschool and elementary school students. That’s when the race starts, and that’s where the resources are most needed.