Everyone is talking about Finland’s education system (here, here, here – forget it, just google “Finland is awesome” and you’ll see what I mean). Steve Peha jumped into the fray on this space yesterday.
People talk about Finland for good reason: Finland is amongst the highest-performing education systems in the world.
So what can the USA learn from Finland? And just as important, what should we be careful about trying to transplant?
Be Wary of Glib International Comparisons: Confusing the Best Existing System with the Optimal
Imagine if the founding fathers had looked across the globe for best practices in governance when developing our democracy. By measures of economic performance, England looked pretty great – so what if we had just split from them and adopted their governance model. All hail King Washington. The lesson here: the best existing system may not be the optimal system. Of course, plenty of things may be learned from other countries (thank you France), but wholesale adoption of the best existing system may not lead to the optimal solution.
#1 Limitation of Finland’s Model: Government Creates a Performance Ceiling
The United States teacher recruitment and development strategy is this: take the bottom third of college graduates and place them in poorly functioning governmental school systems. The Finnish model is this: take the top third of college graduates and place them in decently functioning governmental school systems. The Finnish model is clearly better. However, here’s a potentially better model: take the top third of graduates and place them in a dynamic and entrepreneurial setting where educators can thrive. The Finnish model is better than ours, but it’s probably not the best.
The Fin-America Solution: Talent + Entrepreneurship
So here’s an idea: What if we can take what Finland does best (recruit and train excellent educators) with what the USA does best (support entrepreneurs to solve tough problems via innovation)?
Well, we have an idea of the results we can get when this strategy is executed: KIPP, which is amongst the nation’s top school operators, has a teaching force that consists of 30 percent Teach For America alumni, an organization that recruits from the top third of graduates. Skeptical? Don’t be. Even Diane Ravitch admires KIPP!
But KIPP will never serve all of our students, and Teach For America will never train all of our nation’s teachers (though their cousin organizations might fifty years from now if regulations allow). So to achieve our Fin-America solution, two near-term things need to happen:
- Reform Education Schools: Ed schools will need to become as rigorous as medical, law, and engineering schools. Remember, medical schools used to be terrible. In 1910, the Flexner Report criticized the fact that there were too many medical schools, many of which were substandard. Sound familiar? Educations schools need to go through the same transformation medical schools went through in the early 1900s (and that business schools went through mid-century). FYI: As much as I love innovation, my instinct is that ed schools that are held accountable to results will cause more standardization, not less. There is generally one best way to perform knee surgery, so to speak.
- Build Charter Districts: I’ve written before about how charter districts can provide the necessary space that educational entrepreneurs need to accomplish great things for students. New Orleans is our nation’s first example of this. The development of more charter districts will bring America’s greatest strengths to the education sector. Unlike others — I actually think charter districts will lead to greater standardization of good practice. As with teacher training, de-regulation and accountability will lead to best-practice recognition and adoption more quickly than government fiat. I do admit charter districts could take up to a decade to build in any given city — all the more reason to get started now.
Taken together, these two strategies – the reformation of education schools and the development of charter districts – hold great promise.
Or to put it another way: All Hail Fin-America!
More: For more of our Finapalooza coverage, check out yesterday’s blog from guest contributor Steve Peha of Teaching That Makes Sense.
Photo Credit: Tommi Berg
(Guest Contributor Neerav Kingsland is Chief Strategy Officer of New Schools for New Orleans.)
5 Comments
Well said.
You mention rigor in Ed Schools. Yes, much needed. But you didn’t mention specialization. That’s needed, too.
Ed Schools combine 2 different aspects of medical training — “med school” (classes and observations) and “residency” (equivalent to student teaching). So analogies are tricky here. However….Taking just the residency aspect for a moment, the residencies to prepare a doctor for internal medicine and surgery are so VASTLY specialized they have little in common.
Mike,
Thanks for the response – and point well taken. Would you imagine specialization to be by subject matter? Age of student? Socioeconomic status of students? Other things?
How specialized is your all’s residency model at MATCH?
Thanks again,
Neerav
Anything Finland can do, we can do better. Or we could do it worse. I doubt that charter organizations (or today’s systems) would even agree on what you mean by “greater standardization of good practice.” Do you mean the greater standardization of one type of practice that some take to be good? Or do you mean that a balance between entrepenuerialism and standardization can create a dynamic playing field where all types of good practice are encouraged? I sure hope you mean the second.
The power of American democracy is our diversity. I’d like to see a NPR/PBS Teach for America where the creators of the world’s best curiculum taught others how to use NPR.org and PBS.org. I’m not interested in a charter system where teachers and students could choose between an endless supply of soap that differs only in packaging.
I think you need a #3, which would be the American equiviliant of the Northern European balance of power between workers and management. Give every worker, I mean teacher, an equal access to a profession where we have a fighting chance to protect our autonomy, and I’m with you. (meaning a lot of unionization of charters) I believe you are on the right track towards combining the best of the American and the Finnish systems, as long as explicit groundrules are laid out in advance. But if we have a bunch of systems, all dictated by aligned and paced curriculum, that would be a nightmare and a repudiation of the individualism that makes America great.
Excellent, but don’t forget Finland’s Arizona-like level of school autonomy/de-regulation: school leaders (with their own school-level governing boards) select their own staff and program and make their own rules, with minimal bureaucracy from above.* Independently-run public schools staffed by hand-picked, brainy educators, getting world-class results. Sounds familiar.
See Robert Kaiser’s 2005 Washington Post “Finland Diary” series:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/finlanddiary/archives.htm
Scarey – Let’s just sacrifice the little bit of humanity that we have left for the sake of “quality” standardization. Let’s keep raising the bar on standardization till they’re all a “standard A.” What if the electricity goes off though, or the batteries run out?
No thanks – don’t need any education factories no matter how much profit they bring to the pea brain sitting at the top. He will reinvest it in himself until the business dries up. As history has borne out – a good idea in the wrong hands. . . This generation of charters will die out when the money and political capital that created them find another investment or another campaign. Not soon enough for me or for all the children who will have lost out on a plain old fashioned good education whose expectations were that some would excel, some would get through in spite of themselves, and some would take an alternative path (let’s see Einstein, Gates. . . . )