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 The Finland PhenomenonPosted on Jul 10, 2011By David Sirota When I heard the news last week that the Department of Education is aiming to subject 4-year-olds to high-stakes testing, all I could do was shake my head in disbelief and despondently mutter a slightly altered riff off “The Big Lebowski’s” Walter Sobchak. Four-year-olds, dude. You don’t have to be as dyspeptic as Walter to know this is madness. According to Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, who headed President Obama’s education transition team, though we already “test students in the United States more than any other nation,” our students “perform well below those of other industrialized countries in math and science.” Yet the Obama administration, backed by corporate foundations, is nonetheless intensifying testing at all levels, as if doing the same thing and expecting different results is innovative “reform” rather than what it’s always been: insanity. In light of this craziness, it’s no wonder we’re being out-educated by countries going in the opposite policy direction. Though bobo evangelists like David Brooks insist—without data, of course—that reduced testing “leads to lethargy and perpetual mediocrity,” Hammond notes that “nations like Finland and Korea—top scorers on the Programme for International Student Assessment” have largely “eliminated the crowded testing schedules used decades ago when these nations were much lower-achieving.” Advertisement “What has happened since is that teaching has become the most highly esteemed profession” in Finland, says Wagner, who narrates the film. “There is no domestic testing ... because they have created such a high level of professionalism, they can trust their teachers.” The inherent parallels between Finland and the United States make the former’s lessons indisputably relevant to us. As Wagner says, Finland is a fellow industrialized country “rated among the highest in the world in innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity.” And though Finland is more racially homogeneous than America, Wagner points out that “15 percent of the population speaks a second language”—meaning the country’s schools face some of the same cross-cultural challenges as our schools. That said, for all the similarities, Finland finds its comparative success in how it chooses to differ from us. Where Finland rejects testing, nurtures teachers, and encourages its best and brightest to become educators, we fetishize testing, portray teachers as evil parasites and financially encourage top students to become Wall Streeters. Just as important, Finland’s tax and social welfare system has made it an economically equal society, and its education quality doesn’t vary across class lines. By contrast, America’s low taxes and meager social safety net have made it the industrialized world’s most stratified nation—and our Separate and Unequal education system is better funded and better performing in rich neighborhoods, and grossly underfunded and therefore underperforming in poor areas. This is the ugly secret that America’s education “reformers” seek to hide. As Joanne Barkan reports in Dissent magazine, data overwhelmingly show that “out-of-school factors” like poverty “count for twice as much as all in-school factors” in student achievement. But because economic inequality enriches wealthy titans like Wal-Mart’s Walton family, and because those same titans fund education policy foundations and buy politicians, the national education debate avoids focusing on economics. Instead, it manufactures a narrative demonizing teachers and promoting testing as a panacea. It’s certainly a compelling fairy tale. Unfortunately for “reformers,” Finland, South Korea and other successes prove the story’s dishonesty—and too bad for America’s kids that those successes are being willfully ignored. David Sirota is the best-selling author of the new book “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. © 2011 Creators.com  Previous item: Making a Progressive Case Next item: Carlos Montes and the Security State: A Cautionary Tale New and Improved CommentsWe are launching a major overhaul of our comments section. In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread. Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts. Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with. Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page. |
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By SarcastiCanuck, July 12, 2011 at 9:44 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Mr/Ms. Lafeyette,your beloved DeGaulle came to Quebec in the 60’s and tried to stir up French nationalistic fervor.We tossed him out on his ass.You can send over la petite presidente and we’ll toss him out on his bony little Napoleonic ass as well.If you don’t mind though wed’d like to keep Carla.Hoowahhh
Report thisBy Egomet Bonmot, July 12, 2011 at 7:54 am Link to this comment
From “Why Schools Don’t Educate” by John Taylor Gatto, available on the web:
“... We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world’s narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn’t buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.
Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the
Report thisstreets…”
By Egomet Bonmot, July 12, 2011 at 7:46 am Link to this comment
“And though Finland is more racially homogeneous than America, Wagner points out that “15 percent of the population speaks a second language”—meaning the country’s schools face some of the same cross-cultural challenges as our schools.”
15% is paltry. And the top-ranking second languages in Finland are English, Swedish and German, in declining order.
It’s absurd to speak of cross-cultural challenges in Finland. There are none. That’s partly why the Finland example has been taken up by libertarians.
Report thisBy Hana, July 12, 2011 at 6:41 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
As a social worker who counsels children and young adults, usually for alcohol and drug abuse, I hear their stories of parental divorce, family alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, and so on. Many of these children are living with grandparents or an alcoholic parent and helping to raise their younger siblings. Being successful in school becomes more and more difficult as these children are just trying to survive a traumatic environment, with few material and emotional resources. And as our tax system crumbles, there are fewer social supports for either families or schools. So it is not a question of the family system vs the educational system in our American society that is failing; it is we as collectve individuals that are failing to see the opportunities to effect change that are all around us. We each have so much to give, so much to teach, so much wisdom we can share. Clearly more testing is not the direction our schools should take, but sometimes we are not in the position to make these policy decisions. However, we can provide parental support and education, volunteer for PTA, be a Girl Scout or Boy Scout leader, be a Big Brother or Sister, or just take the neighbor kids horseback riding; these can all change a child’s quality of life. We can also support teachers by recognizing the importance and difficulty of the work they do. And when each one of us takes on the responsibility to see each child as our own, to nurture those who are hurting and teach them what we believe is important in this changing world, we can each make a difference. We are the problem and the solution, not necessarily the systems we like to criticize.
Report thisBy Lafayette, July 12, 2011 at 4:05 am Link to this comment
OK, but only when Sarkozy also becomes PM of an independent Quebec.
Deal done? ;^)
Report thisBy Lafayette, July 12, 2011 at 4:02 am Link to this comment
THE BOOB TUBE AS EDUCATOR
I could not agree more. I wouldn’t let my cat watch American TV. And I get enough of the violence here in France where the police-series are very popular.
Children today are bombarded daily by Commercial TV with the wrong messages: Eat this, buy that, believe this, drink that. It’s a vast cultural wasteland replete with Pavlovian consumer prompts. And the Internet is employing the same trash advertising. Why?
You guessed it … the Profit-Pot at the end of the rainbow.
I talk to children of a great many varieties (since I am a member of an International Club). It is amazing how 12 year-old French kids employ a vocabulary, in French, that Americans probably will employ, in English, if they get into a postgraduate program at university. Even the non-American children who take classes in British-English at an International School speak a better English than American kids.
And the French kids are every bit as much into “texting” as any American child. Yet, it seems, when tasked to do, they know how to speak proper French. (As adults, however, they will also assimilate the French malady of verbal diarrhea, sad to say.)
Language is the vehicle of thought. American-English is a dune-buggy.
POST SCRIPTUM
I read an article recently in a French weekly about an American professor at the Sorbonne. At present, fourth-year high school students are taking a battery of end-year exams (which are necessary for entry into university). He was amazed that the first in the series was …. philosophy. Yes, French children are taught philosophy in High School.
Report thisPhilosophy = the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
By Fibonnaci65, July 11, 2011 at 3:25 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Sorry, Lafayette, I did not have a stable family life—wait ‘til I write the book. School and the library were my “safe places,” with teachers who cared, and I worked hard to succeed for these teachers and librarians. This was before the days of reporting child abuse, but these teachers knew.
And, of course, an enormous IQ helps—brains will out, I always say. Stable families can produce conformist dolts, stable and uncreative dolts. Good schools and libraries and universities literally save lives.
Report thisBy MeHere, July 11, 2011 at 11:14 am Link to this comment
Lafayette:
Report thisJust to qualify my previous statement, I should add that in addition to poor
parental skills, as you mention, children are the repository of all the other ills in
society. Their environment is made up of advertisements, addictive consuming,
the belief that excessive greed is good, the fact that higher education is
unaffordable, the worship of celebrity personalities, and the many forms of accepted violence. The message is that “bad is cool.”
By SarcastiCanuck, July 11, 2011 at 10:50 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Maybe you could third party your educational system out to the Finns.Come to think of it,you should third party the whole fucken government out to the Finns.
Report thisBy Lafayette, July 11, 2011 at 10:39 am Link to this comment
I quite agree—children are having and raising children.
(Having a child should require something like a driver’s license? With accident insurance? ;^)
Report thisBy Lafayette, July 11, 2011 at 8:32 am Link to this comment
But you had the will to learn and succeed in learning. That came from where? You had a sudden epiphany on your way to university?
It came from your parents and a stable family life ...
Report thisBy MeHere, July 11, 2011 at 7:43 am Link to this comment
D. Sirota, thanks for a good article.
The way most children are being raised in this country qualifies as child abuse.
Report thisBless those inspired teachers who try to teach in this atmosphere.
By Lafayette, July 11, 2011 at 7:34 am Link to this comment
IT TAKES A FAMILY
Get it right, DS. The situation is MUCH worse than in just math and sciences. As we transit from the Industrial to the Information Age, there is an onus on brain-work.
That is, we expect workers to be able to “think”. But, what is the thinking process in a typical working environment? It is one of seeking information, assimilating and analyzing it, then deducing consequences and, finally, proposing solutions and implementing them. All of which, is not as easy as one might think.
One needs to know where to seek the right information, how to access it and, once it is obtained, how to analyze it thus arriving at a conclusion towards achieving a specific objective. That is, in total, to perform a service that provides a solution to some issue, matter, problem that has been evoked.
This requires some simple but key faculties: Reasoning abilities, Ability to process, a Sense of logic and Intuition. All are necessary to Problem Solving.
The OECD Program for International Student Assessment has established and conducted a series of test in the capacity to solve problems. The result can be seen here.
The US is 29th out of 40 countries listed. What a sad result. Thankfully, flipping hamburgers requires more dexterity than it does brains ...
Or, is it the reverse? Because I have asked Finnish friends. Their answer is a bit of both. There is high regard for the profession but also there is an inculcated motivation for obtaining an education.
This comes from family values, my friends claim. Children without the right motivation in Finland do not go to school, have an epiphany and start suddenly to study seriously. They are motivated by the family to want to learn. Iow, they hit the road running.
So aside from all the gleaming theories about education, I find that it boils down to what we had expected for a long, long time. It takes a family with parents imbued with the desire to achieve who then inculcate their children in the same beliefs.
What is more, there is another data point that is relevant. A child born in the poor class has five times less the chance of improving his/her lot in life than one born in a middle-class family. Our Economic Escalator in America, once functioning adequately, is now broken.
MY POINT
Yes, we need good teachers. In fact, we have good teachers. That is necessary, obviously. But also obviously and though necessary, it is not sufficient. Because the educational process begins in the home.
Report thisBy Anarcissie, July 11, 2011 at 7:14 am Link to this comment
I think it’s a more general problem—that people, in this case schoolchildren—are considered industrial products.
Report thisBy Fibonnaci65, July 11, 2011 at 6:22 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
And thanks for not bringing in the parents’ faults, another American bit of crap. I have 4 university degrees and a successful career, my siblings are all well educated; however, my parents were grammar school dropouts, never attended a PTA meeting and never spoke to our teachers. They didn’t even speak English until they were teens, and there were no books in my house, none.
Instead, I had excellent schools and great teachers, many after school programs and a public library with many reading programs as well. And affordable state universities—ah, those were the days, gone forever now.
Report thisBy Salome, July 11, 2011 at 5:29 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
To prisnersdilema:
And after the children switch to street drugs, they can be arrested, incarcerated for years. Then, with felony convictions hung around their necks, they will be ineligible for corporate jobs, education grants, public housing, welfare, oh, and to vote. Thereby rendering them invisible and irrelevant. Fate accompli!
Report thisBy prisnersdilema, July 11, 2011 at 5:16 am Link to this comment
The purpose of testing, is to get children on drugs right away. This increases the profits
of drug companies. It has nothing to do with anything that would benefit children, or their
education.
They like to farm children this way. They can have the next 14 or so years on meds,
Report thisbefore those children, now with damaged brains, switch over to street drugs and
prescription meds bought illegally on the street.