GERM Spreading, New Zealand Infected
MARCH 9, 2014
Pasi Sahlberg at Stanford University, 2012. (photo by the author)
Pasi Sahlberg, the well-known Finnish education expert and author of Finnish Lessons, has described the negative trends in education reform as GERM – the Global Education Reform Movement. You can see his TEDx talk “GERM that kills schools” embedded below.
The basics of GERM are well known to most people by now: one-way accountability, where leaders demand results from practitioners while no one seems to hold leaders accountable for creating the conditions necessary for success; high-stakes testing; misguided focus on rankings, competition, and punishment; a near-obsession with data; deprofessionalizing teaching through reduced autonomy and increased focus on compliance.
And the metaphor of GERM makes sense the way unhealthy ideas about educational systems continue to spread. The latest example comes from New Zealand, where teachers at a school have apparently responded to high-stakes testing and narrowed curriculum by cheating. I’m not excusing cheating, but anyone putting these kinds of systems in place – in Atlanta,