Is this School Heaven? No, it’s Finland
Metaphor Alert: I have been to the mountaintop. I have trod sacred ground. I have seen the light. I have been to Finland. It’s the place where teachers go after they die if they’ve been good and taught the Whole Blessed Child; if they’ve rejected the hell of Obsessive Standardized Testing.
It says something about the upside-down world we live in where we are called on to keep believing in the false and failed prophets of absurd school proposals they like to call “reform” – privatize for profit, have children compete with each other for the winner’s crown or the loser label. Here in the United States, we’re told this will hold back the demon – our “Global Competition”.
Well, let’s end the metaphor here or I’ll run out of air-quotes. Let’s talk science. Because our Global Competition is basically every country doing the opposite of what school privateers and test profiteers tell us to have faith in.
Singapore doesn’t use test scores to shame teachers. Canada doesn’t have charter franchises. Korea doesn’t have short-cut preparation for teachers. This is an embarrassment to the Global Education Reform Movement (the GERM) that rolls out economic development plans to entire countries suggesting they will become richer countries if they privatize, standardize and de-professionalize education.
None of the top performing countries got there with this stuff. And these guys have no idea what to do with smart, little Finland.
Finland is no mystery and it is no miracle. They simply have a very good system’s approach to school improvement. They decided 40 years ago that in a country with few natural resources, they would do well to develop the human beings in their society. The believed that healthy, well-educated, compassionate human beings should form the foundation, not only of a good economy, but of good families, neighbors, and even a good democracy.
They did their homework. They saw that private competition in school systems tended to shake out with wealth![FullSizeRender[8]](http://1da9f03rgzm732m9sv35cuvj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/FullSizeRender8-300x225.jpg)
y families getting more for their kids than middle class and poor families. As they had no brains to waste, they decided to invest in one, good public system where all kids would get what they needed whether their parents were rich or not.
y families getting more for their kids than middle class and poor families. As they had no brains to waste, they decided to invest in one, good public system where all kids would get what they needed whether their parents were rich or not.They decided to invest heavily in teacher recruitment and teacher preparation. By design, they made the colleges of education a highly elite program where only the top university students were accepted with all expenses paid.
There is a one-year residency under a top teacher for graduates. All teachers have master’s degrees related to their teaching assignments. They make it impossible to hire a bad teacher.
There are no fast-track, short-cut, temporary teachers. There is no Teach for Finland. Trust is the key word that comes from politicians, parents, academicians, and unions – after a top notch teacher training for top ranked students; trust rules.
And they put in the hands of these skilled, career educators the tools, technology and time to collaborate, design, intervene and assess instruction, teaching and learning on the school building level. (There are no state Is this School Heaven? No, it’s Finland - Lily's Blackboard: