-
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic
-
Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play
-
Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students’ performance if you don’t test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice
-
The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do
-
For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school
-
Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
-
Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.
-
“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.
-
what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility
-
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable
-
“Real winners do not compete.”
-
Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
-
Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
-
this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance
-
Finland’s dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from
-
Finland’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
-