Many of my friends have school-age kids so I’m often asked for advice on education. Until recently, each time this happened, I lost the better part of a day trying to explain the nuances of testing, standards, charters, and the usual suspects of education reform. But now I have an instantaneous answer: “Move to Finland!”
Moving to Finland is a better deal than paying for private school; financially, it’s a no-brainer. So I tell them, “Dig around on Ancestry.com, find something that says your great-great-grandmother’s third cousin twice-removed was a proud Laplander, and you’re in.” But as soon as I mention that they’ll have to ditch their iPhones for Nokias, the deal is off. Such is the psychic power of the mesmerist Steve Jobs. But then, Finland is has some serious psychic pull, too.
Finland is our current international educrush because of its exceptional student achievement as often noted in their annual scores on the PISA test (only China and South Korea score higher). We heart Finland. We want to play tag with her at recess. We want to pull her pigtails. We get that funny feeling every time she walks by. And as we sit under the Friday night lights in our dorky band uniform, engulfed by an oversized Sousaphone, we dream of swapping places with the starting quarterback on the field who would surely get a “Yes!” when he asked her to the Senior Prom.
Whenever someone wants to create the ultimate argument for why we’re doing everything wrong with ed reform, all they have to do is play the Finland card. But there are three good reasons why education in America will never be like education in Finland: size, structure, and soul.
Turns out, our pretty little miss is indeed rather dainty. We’re about 60 times larger. Finland’s education system doesn’t scale to our size. No wonder she ran screaming down the hall that time we tried to talk to her at the water fountain.
Finland’s system doesn’t scale to our structure either. Education here is a state issue, not a federal one. We’re a republic of 52 (don’t forget D.C. and Puerto Rico) educational entities. State ed departments aren’t strong; most of the power resides with roughly 15,000 semi-autonomous school districts.
Finally, there is the matter of the soul of a nation. We’re all about individualism, capitalism, and local control. They’re more interested in togetherness, a stronger social safety net, and a less stratified socio-economic system — a contrast likely grounded in the homogeneity of their population relative to our own.
But while we can’t be Finland, we can still have Finland here and there—by making little Finlands everywhere.
Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone has been tried, and so far sustained. One would think it could be tried elsewhere. And indeed it has.
Even though funding for President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative remains uncertain, according to this post by guest blogger Christopher Frascella at The Quick and the Ed, another project exists in the U.S. “The Parramore Kidz Zone in Orlando, Fla., is an explicit attempt to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone.”
Yes, this is a piecemeal approach. But it’s a pretty good piece of a pretty good meal, is it not?
If we spent less energy using Finland to beat up on each other about ed reform, and more energy replicating little Finlands in as many places as we could, we might save a few thousand kids from generational poverty and—perhaps most importantly—discover whether or not this comprehensive approach to securing the well-being of children really works for us.
More: Check this space tomorrow for more of our continuing Finapalooza, with guest contributor Neerav Kingsland of New Schools for New Orleans discussing the promise (and peril) of a “Fin-American” school model.
Photo Credit: Eetu Lampsijärv
(Guest contributor Steve Peha is president of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy based in Carrboro, NC.)
5 Comments
“But as soon as I mention that they’ll have to ditch their iPhones for Nokias, the deal is off.”
No. Nokia was cool in the early age of digital cell phones, let’s say in the end of 1990′s. Nowadays, it is a joke even here in Finland. iPhone is very popular here.
“We’re about 60 times larger. Finland’s education system doesn’t scale to our size.”
I’m not disagreeing, but I don’t understand why Finland’s education system doesn’t scale to size of USA? If I am correct, the greatest difference between USA and Finland education system is that:
* In Finland, most of the teachers have master’s degree (if you do not have, you can not get a permanent job, only one year at a time).
* In Finland, there are no standardized tests until at the end of the Senior Secondary School (for 19-year-old students).
* In Finland, the teacher’s have a national curriculum but they can carry it out very freely without someone guarding on them.
I can’t understand how this would not scale to our size.
And USA has better universities. There is only one Finnish university among the best 100 universities, according to the most popular ranking lists.
Thanks for your comments, Vesa. And sorry to hear about the downfall of Nokia.
In answer to your questions about scaling, consider a few ideas:
With an MA rate which is, I believe, below 20% in our country, where would we find 3-4 million people (right out of college) with MAs? The government would have to pay for it (as Finland’s seems to do). How would we tolerate this politically — especially when it has been shown that having higher degrees of education (from ed schools) doesn’t correlate well with teaching ability? Seems like we’d need a complete overhaul of teacher selection, teacher training, and teacher funding — to a scale that we’ll never be comfortable with in the US.
With regard to a lack of standardized testing in Finland compared to the US, think again about the nature of our culture (something that only scales in support of itself). We are test crazy for a very simple reason: AMERICANS LOVE TESTS. Normally, we like them in sports or other more naturally competitive aspects of life. But we are absolutely obsessed as a culture with “quantification”, “comparison”,and “competition”. We also can’t scale a human inspection system to 100,000+ schools to avoid using something other than tests as an “accountability” component — which we also love because our culture is highly enamored of blame and punishment. These aspects of our culture will only scale “up” to greater degrees of testing — as we have seen for almost 100 years now.
Finally, with regard to national curricula, we are a republic and therefore education (and, in particular, curriculum) has always been a state right. It would be very much in contradiction of our nature as a country to adopt a true national curriculum. Again, history and governmental formation don’t scale very easily either. If anything, you can see in the new ESEA reauth that after a relatively brief period of what I might characterize as rather weak (however historic) federalism, we are experiencing a powerful backlash, even from Democrats, toward local control. We’re in the process of setting the clock back 20-30 years on federal influence over schooling. So, obviously, it’s not likely, any time in the next century even, that we would be able to tolerate culturally a national curriculum — and our penchant for control and punishment wouldn’t allow us to tolerate giving teachers the freedom to teach a national curriculum with any meaningful degree of personal freedom.
You point out that America has some of the world’s greatest universities. You might also consider how different is the formation and governance of these institutions from the way we run K-12 public education. Most of the top universities people speak of in the US are private — as are many of our most famed and fabled K-12 schools.
Even though we have a “free and reduced lunch” program at the federal level, there is no “free lunch” when it comes to creating a world class public education system. Your country is either set up for it — or set up to make the choice to have it — or it isn’t. Ours isn’t. At least not right now.
Thanks for your comments.
Steve Peha
Thanks for great reply. There is much to comment but this is the best point:
“How would we tolerate this politically — especially when it has been shown that having higher degrees of education (from ed schools) doesn’t correlate well with teaching ability?”
The required M.Sc/MA degree is the most popular explanation for Finnish PISA success, but I have not found any scientific evidence for “Teacher’s have MA degree” ==> “The schools are great”.
So do you have the opposite evidence? I would be glad to share it with my colleagues.
Another thing: some people say that in USA you can become a teacher “after few weeks of training” but here:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4556272_become-teacher-usa.html
it says that you need at least a B.Sc. Degree.
Another interesting thing is that in US schools, where child poverty is rare, USA does better than Finland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#United_States
Would requiring Master’s degree be a kind of cargo cult?
Here in the US, recent studies have shown that there is little or no correlation between our ed school degrees and student achievement. I would bet that Finland’s ed schools are probably better than ours on average!
As for how fast one can become a teacher, it varies from state to state and program to program. There are many “alternative certfication” programs. Some will let you start teaching while you are earning certification. The “be a teacher in a few weeks” idea may be related to Teach For America’s short training period before their teachers enter the classroom.