Comparing Finnish School Reform To Our Approach

If you keep up with the Education Wars, you know that Diane Ravich is perhaps the most articulate and certainly the most combative critic of corporate reforms to education. She identifies corporate reformers as those who want to reorganize and quantify education, but who come to the task with no expertise in pedagogy. I like her because she makes so much sense and I identify with her because all of her reasonable arguments against the current regime of testing and blaming teachers for everything that ails the country fall inevitably on deaf ears. Corporate reformers, like most conservatives, aren't interested in dissenting opinions, even opinions that are based on fact and logic.

With this in mind, I want to write a quick response to her article in the recent NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS ("Schools We Can Envy," March 8, 2012). She starts by lambasting the, in her opinion, misguided reform movement and then moves on to a discussion of the Finnish school system, a system held up as a shining example of effective innovation by the very reformers she attacks.

The Finnish system consistently scores at the top of all world-wide standardized tests used to measure a school system's effectiveness, but their approach to instruction is the polar opposite of what our current crop of reformers have identified as effective techniques.

There is only one standardized test given to Finnish students, an assessment given upon graduation. Teachers are given almost complete autonomy. There are no national, statewide, or district mandates. Teachers are told what areas kids need to study (Finnish language, math, science, social studies, ART, MUSIC, PHYSICAL ED, the usual), but they are not told how to approach those studies. Teachers make up their own lesson plans, they create their own tests, they allot the time given them as they see fit. There is none of this idea that everyone needs to be working on objective 32A on October 10th, or other ludicrous requirements.

Finnish kids graduate at a 95% rate. After the first nine years of schooling they choose between continuing in an academic or a vocational secondary school. When you walk through the school halls you see happy, engaged kids in small classes with teachers who have the time and the societal support they need to engage students.

Reformers will say that you can't use Finland as an example because the population is so homogenous. True, but those same reformers use Korea and Japan as examples of the successes of reform through testing and Korea and Japan are at least as homogenous as Finland. Critics will say that Finland has too small a population to serve as a valid comparison, but those same critics are crying for the feds to butt out and let states take care of education locally; therefore, since Finland has a larger population that thirty of our states, what's the problem?

Teachers in Finland are among the most respected professional class in the country and for good reason. Only eight universities are certified to offer teacher training. Finnish teachers must have a degree in their discipline rather than in education. They must also go on to earn a masters in education with an emphasis on methods and a preparation to teach all levels and kinds of kids. For every ten applicants to a teacher training program, only one is accepted. The question of finding and dismissing incompetent teachers is not an issue. It is very hard for the incompetent to make it through the program in the first place. Lest you are asking how these prospective teachers can pay for all that extra education, remember that college and graduate level education in Finland is tuition free.

Guess what? Finland also has higher taxes than we do, but they have chosen the wefare of the young over the profits of the old.

Finally, Ravich suggests that educational reformers have somehow conspired to blame education and particularly teachers, for the economic malaise we are currently suffering. If we just get rid of all those bad teachers, they believe, employment will rise, productivity will soar, manufacturing jobs will return, etc., etc., etc.

I love her response to this delusional argument. If it is true that our economic troubles can be blamed on ineffective schools and bad teachers, than isn't it also true that the United States' current position as the biggest economy and the most EXCEPTIONAL country in history is due to an educational system that has served its country remarkably well?