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The successes of Finnish schools have become a focus (perhaps more of an obsession) with educational reformers in the United States and elsewhere.
While the BBC video and article, Why do Finnish Schools Get the Best Results? constructs a portrait of public education that few can fail to admire, we cannot uncritically accept the they-are-great-we-stink argument and react inappropriately to the “crisis” in our own system. This film and the current educational reform movement raise a number of interesting and, perhaps, troubling questions that I believe must be addressed as we shape education policy both for the United States and in our local school systems.
- What do we consider success? Is it scores on tests in mathematics, science, and literacy? Is it the development of skills, attitudes, and social abilities that enable learners to lead productive, satisfying lives?
- What about Finnish society makes their schools effective?
- Are Finnish (or Korean, or any other) methods appropriate for American schools?
- What do we in the United States do well? How can we make sure that we don’t lose our strengths in the process of educational reform?
- What are the purposes of schooling? How do we construct learning environments that help all stakeholders achieve their goals?
- What are the purposes of testing? Do the assessments we use address those purposes? Do they support learning and teaching?
Serious, informed, good-faith discussion needs to replace polemics if we are to address the weaknesses, exploit the strengths and improve the state of education in the United States at the federal, state and local levels. An example of why this is necessary and of how it is not what is happening now is this new-found Finno-philia. If Finnish schools are characterized by shorter school hours, supportive administrators, mixed ability grouping, academic freedom, and professionalism, we have to wonder why we ignore these things and focus on high-stakes testing, deprofessionalizing educators, authoritarianism and longer hours as we try to emulate their success.
Click here to read the article and watch the short video. Then, let’s start a productive discussion here that can inform our own work in the classroom and in our discussions with family and friends, the public and the policy-makers.
Thinkfinity.org contains 55,000 standards-based K-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools and reference materials from its eleven consortium partners that are reviewed by the nation’s leading education organizations to ensure that content is accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and appropriate for students.
Thinkfinity’s consortium partners are:
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Council for Economic Education
- International Reading Association
- National Center for Family Literacy
- National Council of Teachers of English
- National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
- National Endowment for the Humanities
- National Geographic Society
- ProLiteracy
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History
- The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
The National Governors’ Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) has release of the first official public draft of the K-12 standards [for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science] as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a process being led by governors and chief state school officers in 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The NGA Center press release asserts that “[t]hese standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs.” The NGA center announcement of the “first public release” of the draft for comment, also states that “[t]he standards are expected to be finalized in early Spring.” So comment quickly!
Any thoughts about standards, the idea of national standards, or these standards in particular? Post them here.
[Note: The links in this post no longer function but the standards can be found on the CCSSI Website.]
References:
Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) Draft K-12 Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science
NGA Center (2010, March 10). Draft K-12 Common Core State Standards available for comment: NGA Center, CCSSO release first official public draft. Retrieved from http://www.nga.org/portal/site/nga/menuitem.6c9a8a9ebc6ae07eee28aca9501010a0/?vgnextoid=e50b863754047210VgnVCM1000005e00100aRCRD&vgnextchannel=759b8f2005361010VgnVCM1000001a01010aRCRD
NGA Center (2009, September 9). Fifty-One States And Territories Join Common Core State Standards Initiative (original news release announcing project)
This is a response to the cover story of the February 14, 2010 New York Times magazine, How Christian Were the Founding Fathers? (reference and link below), which examines the enormous influence of the Texas State Board of Education on the content and language of American textbooks, and the process by which that influence is shaped and wielded.
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We humans project on our gods—both spiritual and temporal—qualities to which we feel we ought to aspire no matter how unlikely it is that we will realize those aspirations. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jefferson Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, David Duke, Ronald Reagan, Tom Metzger all find their way in to someone’s American pantheon. All share admirable, strong, leadership qualities, at least in the eyes of their worshipers.
The founders had ideas—ideals. They didn’t always (or ever) completely live these ideals, but they forged a vision from which Americans have continuously constructed a unique and complex country over the past 240 or so years. That country reflects the founders’ ideals, albeit heavily mediated by who we are at any particular point in history. At times we are and have been slave traders, abolitionists, prairie sod busters, poor Europeans fleeing oppression and extermination, enslaved Africans, entrepreneurs, street vendors, railroad builders, dustbowl refugees, carpetbaggers, hegemonic colonialists, hard-working, God-fearing Christians, equally-hard-working, but not-quite-as-god-fearing atheists, pioneers, invaders and invadees, suffragists, villains, thieves and scoundrels, self-made women and men, tax cheats, philanthropists, saints, pioneers, persecutors and the persecuted.
To be sure, the rich, the powerful and the well-connected make the “important” decisions. But they cannot build a nation that perfectly mirrors their vision. All of the people shape a nation and a national character. America’s founders’ vision, embodied in a surprisingly small number of documents, could not take shape until its ideas played out on the stage of real people in the real world. Foremost among the insightful provisions that they built into the “American experiment” are (a) the ability of later generations to change the plan in light of unanticipated future circumstances, and (b) the construction of internal obstacles (checks and balances) to prevent that change from happening lightly or unilaterally—a dynamic inertia that would preserve the spirit of a new country while allowing it to be forever modern.
So while it may be informative to debate what exactly the framers intended and what they would think about abortion, environmental degradation, science education, or any currently pressing political or social issue, it is more important to emphasize that they sought to give us a living, breathing democracy—“if [we] can keep it.” These people, living in undemocratic times, engaging in undemocratic activities (enslavement, misogyny, genocide), created a scheme by which we could define and re-define democracy, evolving the system to which they gave birth to a point at which many of their own actions would be seen as criminal. They sought to protect us (posterity) both from them and from ourselves. Today, patriotism, dubbed by Samuel Johnson as the last refuge of scoundrels, has become the first refuge of scoundrels—intolerant, cynical, self-righteous zealots who would shape the common home of well over 300,000,000 people to their own purposes—their own authoritarian utopia.
Perhaps the Internet, with its Niagara of information and ideas and its unprecedented demand on scholarship for intellectual tools and habits including skepticism, demand for evidence, debate and analysis, will provide a way for the people to define the real America…for now.
The recent death of Howard Zinn, who long championed the historical perspectives of the oppressed, the poor, and the disenfranchised, shines a glaring light on the Texas State Board of Education’s once again seeking to dictate to a whole country what its children will read, and what it ought to believe.
Re-writing history—revisionism—is not an insidious practice, but is, in fact, the job of historians. But unless we all have access to all voices, and unless our children are equipped with the intellectual tools with which to meet the maelstrom of information and ideas, we will live our lives and make important decisions for ourselves, our families, our communities, our country and the world under a shroud of ignorance.
We require local curriculum development, professional standards for guidance, access to primary documents and artifacts, as well as access to multitudes of resources, and an emphasis by educators on helping learners develop the skills and habits necessary to make sense of the complex world in which they live. This will enable today’s students to affect their own future, to determine what kind of country and what kind of world we will be living in tomorrow, and to demand that their voices will shape that world.
Reference
Shorto, R. (2010, February 14). How Christian were the founders?: History wars: Inside America’s textbook battles. New York Times, pp. 32-47.
In Learning All the Time: How Small Children Learn to Read, Write, Count, and Investigate the World Around Them Without Being Taught, John Holt wrote:
Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. The process by which children turn experience into knowledge is exactly the same, point for point, as the process by which…scientists make scientific knowledge. Children observe, they wonder, they speculate, and they ask themselves questions. They think up possible answers, they make theories, they hypothesize, and then the test theories by asking questions or by further observations or experiments or by reading. Then they modify the theories as needed, or they reject them, and the process continues…
If we attempt to control, manipulate or divert this process, we disturb it. If we continue this long enough, the process stops. The independent scientist in the child disappears. (p. 95)
I’m not sure about “exactly the same, point for point,” but children do meet the world directly, without adult mediation and construct knowledge and understanding for themselves.
Holt’s provocative statement raises a number of questions for us, among them…
- What is the purpose of learning science (or any other particular subject) in school?
- What is the role of the teacher?
- How does the teachers role change as children move from Pre-K to the upper grades?
- Is science learned differently from the other content areas?
- How can teachers be supported in becoming more effective science educators?
Reference:
Holt, J. (1989). Learning all the time. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Kiran Bir Sethi
In another fabulous TED talk, Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India shares the “I can” initiative through which the school “blur[red] the line between school and life” and empowered children to identify, confront, and ameliorate local problems. She explains how “contagious” making a difference can be and how she and her children “infected” all of India with the power of children to make change.
Click here to watch the video: Kiran Bir Sethi Teaches Kids to Take Charge
Do we truly believe in the capabilities of our students? Do our school systems believe in us and support our work with children? What could saying, “We can!” (and meaning it) look like in our schools?
Links:
My uncle Jerry is a retired HS English teacher and writes for The Press Republican, he likes it when I tell him his writing reminds me of Dave Barry’s, here is a (fairly) recent article of his that I enjoyed.
Published December 12, 2009 12:47 am – Audrey Hepburn reminds Jerry McGovern of the link between expectations and achievement.
Students Mirror Teacher
Expectations
By JERRY McGOVERN, School Ties
Last Saturday afternoon, I was watching the football game between Florida and Alabama. During commercials, I surfed the rest of the channels. But on this afternoon, I never got back to the football game because of Audrey Hepburn. I always put the remote down if I come upon the beautiful Miss Hepburn, and there she was, opposite Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady.”
The musical is based on “Pygmalion,” a play by George Bernard Shaw. Shaw’s play was itself based on a Greek myth, about an artist named Pygmalion who fell in love with a statue he had sculpted.
Shaw rewrote that myth of an artist and his statue into a story about a teacher and his student.
Hepburn plays the role of Eliza Doolittle, an uneducated flower girl. Harrison is Professor Henry Higgins, who teaches “proper English” to Eliza so she can fool the class-conscious snobs at a London ball.
Throughout the play, Higgins is the educated, rational character. In the scene that caught my attention, he and Doolittle are arguing after their success at the party. Higgins is so pompously articulate, so arrogantly logical, that Eliza can’t keep up and sometimes stammers.
But she is the one who says the most memorable words, which especially resonate for teachers, when she tells Higgins, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how’s she’s treated.”
OAK SCHOOL EXPERIMENT
A few months ago, educators shared in this column their suggestions for new teachers. Many of them said, in various Read the rest of this entry »
Learn NC is a rich resource for educators from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education. It contains articles, lesson plans, links and resources, and reference materials in all subject areas as well as materials about education in general. Some resources (notably, Field Trip locations) are specific to North Carolina, but many of these, and the rest of the site should be useful to all.
There also are free online courses for teachers.
Min, Paul and Scott planned a session on the Final Thoughts section of Using Data to Improve Learning for All that shifted the focus from the book to our work at the Bronx New School.
Scott started us off by framing and focusing the session. Paul recounted statements elsewhere in this blog in response to the book. He acknowledged that when you talk about data, it usually sparks a loud and contentious debate, but reminded us that, as professional educators, we work for a system–in fact we work for several systems: local, state and federal–to which we are responsible. Data, whatever the purposes for its collection is simply “another vehicle for knowing children.” He urged us to be accountable without compromising our integrity. Finally Paul observed, that “people who make decisions about children usually are those who are furthest from children,” and asked us to consider why that is and what are its implications.
Min led us thorough a few children’s word games–hangman** and staircase–using data-related terms to help us generate language for our discussion and to help exhausted teachers put the Read the rest of this entry »
Please check out our new Resources for Educators page. It contains useful information on Standards and Curricula, Field Trip Destinations, links to education blogs and websites, and more. Check back often as this resource will be growing and changing…and feel free to add your own material.
BxNS PEN 
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