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What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland

100% .. how Trump could have been elected knowing what we knew about him before is almost beyond me, too .. though it was close and even though he lost the popular vote, still my 'faith in the American people', which for so long told me no way he could be, was obviously sadly off the mark .. i say "almost beyond me" now as i understand more now how .. for one as you have said too many don't read .. too many lack the energy, the responsibility, whatever to look at situations from different angles .. too many are stuck into Alex Jones and his fellow dishonest schmucks .. there are so many reasons and education is certainly one of the most important ones .. recently i had one on tab re what America [and Australia, should be] could learn from Finland's approach to education, and tossed in cuz of all of our election spirit .. lol .. this one is better as it sorta covers both sides ..

Pasi Sahlberg Blog
Finnish education reform

What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland

As the United States is looking to reform its public school system, education experts have increasingly looked at other countries for examples on what works and what won’t. The current administration has turned its attention strong performing foreign school systems. As a consequence, recent education summits hosted in the United States have given room to international education showcases. This commitment to think outside of the box was illustrated two years ago, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked for a report titled “Strong Performers and Successful Reforms: Lessons from PISA for the United States .. http://www.oecd.org/document/13/0,3746,en_2649_35845621_46538637_1_1_1_1,00.html ,” prepared by a team of analysts — I was one of them — with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). One of the strong performers that is gaining increasing interest in the United States is my home country, Finland.

During the last decade, Finland has become the go-to place for education reformers all around the world. The main reason is its success in the international survey comparing 15-year-olds in reading, math and science learning called PISA .. http://pisa.oecd.org/ .. (Program for International Student Assessment). Since that OECD report, I have been privileged to meet legislators, administrators, teachers, and parents here in the United States. Anywhere I go, people are eager to hear about Finnish education and its accomplishments. Especially, they want to know what they can learn from it.

What I have to say, however, is not always what they want to hear. While it is true that we can certainly learn from foreign systems and use them as backdrops for better understanding of our own, we cannot simply replicate them. What, then, can’t the United States learn from Finland?

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.

* Funding of schools: Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.

* Well-being of children: All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.

* Education as a human right: All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Second, school autonomy and teacher professionalism are often mentioned as the dominant factors explaining strong educational performance in Finland. The school is the main author of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students.

In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities.

[.. that's a bottom line .. in all my years of teaching in Australian schools i was always impressed at the
dedication, diligence and expertise of some 99% of teachers .. they care about children .. yet Australia has gone
down the test test test, make teachers evermore accountable road as the USA has .. we are better off, but drifting ..

There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students. The United States really cannot leave curriculum design and student assessment in the hands of schools and teachers unless there is similar public confidence in schools and teachers. To get there, a more coherent national system of teacher education is one major step.

Finland is home to such a coherent national system of teacher education. And unlike in the United States, teaching is one of the top career choices among young Finns. Teachers in Finland are highly regarded professionals — akin to medical doctors and lawyers. There are eight universities educating teachers in Finland, and all their programs have the same high academic standards. Furthermore, a research-based master’s degree is the minimum requirement to teach in Finland.

Teaching in Finland is, in fact, such a desired profession that the University of Helsinki, where I teach part-time, received 2,300 applicants this spring for 120 spots in its primary school teacher education program. In this teacher education program and the seven others, teachers are prepared to design their own curricula, assess their own pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching and their school. Until the United States has improved its teacher education, its teachers cannot enjoy similar prestige, public confidence and autonomy.

Third, many education visitors to Finland expect to find schools filled with Finnish pedagogical innovation and state-of-the-art technology. Instead, they see teachers teaching and pupils learning as they would in any typical good school in the United States. Some observers call this “pedagogical conservatism” or “informal and relaxed” because there does not appear to be much going on in classrooms.

The irony of Finnish educational success is that it derives heavily from classroom innovation and school improvement research in the United States. Cooperative learning and portfolio assessment are examples of American classroom-based innovations that have been implemented in large scale in the Finnish school system.

Those who are looking at Finland’s education system as a possible model for reform in the United States point out, quite correctly, that our two countries are very different. In these comparisons, one critical difference is often overlooked that is also essential to understanding what our two countries can or cannot learn from one another.

In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students and teachers are therefore in the center of the ongoing school reform debate. By contrast, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose. As a consequence, education reforms in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners. This helps to explain the difference between the American obsession with standardized testing and the Finnish fixation on each school’s ability to cope with individual differences and social inequality. The former is driven by excellence, the latter by equity.

Quality and equity in education must be conceived as concomitant. Based on its global data, the OECD recently drew precisely this conclusion: “The highest-performing education systems across the OECD countries are those that combine quality with equity.”

What Finland can show to others is how equity and equal opportunity in education look like. However, school reformers in the United States need to be careful when considering equity-based reform ideas to be imported from Finland. Many elements of Finnish successful school system are interwoven in the surrounding welfare state. Simply a transfer of these solutions would add another chapter to already exhausting volume of failed education reforms.

(Published in Washington Post, April 17, 2012) .. http://pasisahlberg.com/text/

AH .. TRUST! .. an American teacher felt the same.

An American Teacher's Thoughts on the Finnish Education System

By Guest Blogger on March 17, 2016 1:37 PM .. bit ..

Trust

As we visited Finnish schools and met with Finnish educators, I saw some stark differences between their system and the American system. It must be noted that Finland is much smaller and more homogenous than the United States, and due to their social safety net, they do not have as much poverty. This, however, does not mean that American teachers should disregard any lessons we can learn from the Finns.

Surprisingly, the word "trust" was something we heard repeated so many times that it became an inside joke among our group. The Finnish education system is founded on the concept of trust, with a national curriculum much broader than Common Core or our state standards. When I first saw the Finnish standard: "Students will develop their reading and writing skills," I thought, 'how can one possibly measure this standard?' Measurement, however, is not the goal of the Finnish educational system according to the Finnish educators we spoke with.
.. more .. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/global_learning/2016/03/an_american_teachers_thoughts_on_the_finnish_education_system.html

So with all of that to see and to learn from what does Trump do but feed his establishment people more bones

Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan's Plan to Defund the Left
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SCHMUCKS