Democratic Underground Latest Greatest Lobby Journals Search Options Help Login
Google

Education in Finland- The opposite of the Bushco/Duncan Corporate model

Printer-friendly format Printer-friendly format
Printer-friendly format Email this thread to a friend
Printer-friendly format Bookmark this thread
This topic is archived.
Home » Discuss » Archives » General Discussion (1/22-2007 thru 12/14/2010) Donate to DU
 
n2doc Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 08:46 PM
Original message
Education in Finland- The opposite of the Bushco/Duncan Corporate model
Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

Finland's schools score consistently at the top of world rankings, yet the pupils have the fewest number of class hours in the developed world.

By Tom Burridge
BBC World News America, Helsinki

a couple of points from the article


A tactic used in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject. But the pupils are all kept in the same classroom, regardless of their ability in that particular subject.

According to the OECD, Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world.

Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition from one school to another.

Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. The idea is that before then they learn best when they're playing and by the time they finally get to school they are keen to start learning.

Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high.


article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
zeemike Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 08:55 PM
Response to Original message
1. I discovered that some time ago.
When the internet was still new I had a pen pall relationship with a Finish girl in school who used it as an opportunity to practice her english....
I was surprised at just how well she knew the english language....come to find out it was one of 3 languages that they were being taught in school.
They place a high value on learning unlike the dip shit political leaders in this country.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DJ13 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 09:21 PM
Response to Original message
2. the pupils are all kept in the same classroom
When I was in the first/second/third grades in an L.A. school district in the mid 60's I was in an experimental classroom where we had rotating teachers for every subject.

Every hour we had a different teacher come into our class and teach their particular subject.

For little kids it was a pretty intense learning experience.

They even had a class in the third grade teaching us Spanish.

Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Brickbat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 09:31 PM
Response to Original message
3. They also have an extremely homogeneous population about the size of Minnesota.
It's an excellent, excellent model. But the country's demographics and history lend itself to a model like that working.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
progressoid Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 09:43 PM
Response to Reply #3
5. What Brickbat said.
+1
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
proteus_lives Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 10:19 PM
Response to Reply #3
8. True of a lot of European programs.
Edited on Sun Apr-11-10 10:20 PM by proteus_lives
A number of European would much more difficult to copy in a huge country with a polyglot population of 300+ million.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
aquart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 10:39 PM
Response to Reply #3
10. I'm sorry. Why wouldn't it work with a mixed population?
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Brickbat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 11:08 PM
Response to Reply #10
12. No need to apologize.
Edited on Sun Apr-11-10 11:09 PM by Brickbat
The U.S. has huge differences in income, culture, language, taxation, and basic view toward public education from state to state and district to district. Per-pupil funding varies widely. At least 8 percent of children nationally are unable to speak English when they start school.

In Finland, per-pupil funding is almost exactly the same throughout the country. The population as a whole has a very good standard of living. While there is plenty of flexibility within it, the curriculum is national. At the end of their school career, the students with the highest grades are siphoned off -- half go to "high school" and the other half to vocational school.

There is much to envy and attempt to emulate in the Finnish system, but the sheer size and variety of our population make it unlikely that such a system could be replicated here. And it would be impossible, in my opinion, to change U.S. culture in such a way that it matches Finland's love of children, learning and reading.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
MadHound Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 10:21 AM
Response to Reply #12
15. You have a point, but that doesn't mean that we can't pick up a few lessons
And apply them to the US. First lesson, stop treating education and teachers like dirt. Though we say grand rhetoric about how education is one of the most important jobs in this country, teachers are grossly underpaid. Rather than paying them like garbage collectors, we need to start paying them like doctors. I've known several people who wanted to go into teaching, who would have made fine teachers, yet with thirty thousand in school debt they simply couldn't afford to go into a profession that has a starting salary of thirty thousand/year.

Furthermore we need to insure that every school is well built, well appointed with modern materials, and big enough to fit all the children under one roof. Trailer classrooms are horrid places to teach, yet they continue to sprout up like mushrooms.

We also need to treat teachers like the professionals they are. Every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks that they can meddle in education, just because they went to school. Thus, they become school board members, or other such administrators, up to and including the Sec. of Ed. Then they decide to meddle in a field they have no clue about, applying business solutions to a field that simply isn't business as usual.

Yes, there are differences between Finnish schools and the US school system. But I believe that the biggest difference is one of attitude. The Fins actually follow through on their rhetoric of placing a high value on education, while the US simply pays it lip service and continues to try and do education on the cheap.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
FarCenter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 09:36 PM
Response to Original message
4. A big difference is that they have Finnish kids
A Finnish introvert looks at his own shoes.

A Finnish extrovert looks at the other person's shoes.

wiki has a good description of the schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
old mark Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 10:06 PM
Response to Original message
6. Those who run our educational "system" do NOT value learning or intellectual curiosity,,
only keeping up with the quotas and job prep.
Incurious compliant adults with basic skills who will do as they are told and work shit jobs cheap is the desired end product here.

mark
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
patrice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 10:14 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. Nailed it.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
old mark Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 11:04 PM
Response to Reply #7
11. Have a lot of teachers, professors and educators in general in my family,
and I KNOW how hard they work IN SPITE of the shit piled on them by school boards, administrators and politicians. I STILL have horrible dreams about school, and I'm almost 63...I hated all of it and still do.

mark
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
RadiationTherapy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 10:54 AM
Response to Reply #6
17. Incurious is what I notice the most.
I don't feel like I meet many "dumb" people, but lots and lots of incurious people.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
madrchsod Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-11-10 10:31 PM
Response to Original message
9. that would be obama/duncan corporate model
bush is no longer the president.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
Blue_Tires Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 12:06 AM
Response to Original message
13. k+r
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
eppur_se_muova Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 10:11 AM
Response to Original message
14. other comments can be found in Education forum thread ...
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DevonRex Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 10:29 AM
Response to Original message
16. I talk to Fins regularly online. I'm pretty smart but they all make me feel
feel woefully behind. I took Latin but can't remember most of it. They took it and actually USE it in conversation, decades after leaving school. That's just one example of how far ahead they are of just about everyone else. Simply put, they love to learn. They learn not just to pass tests. And once they learn something they retain it and use it in daily life.

Sometimes I feel like they're studying ME to figure out why Americans are happy with not knowing and remembering things from school. I was told that Latin is something that I should never have let slip away from memory. And you know what? I agree.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
tonysam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 11:04 AM
Response to Original message
18. I don't want to sound rude, but who the eff cares about Finland?
Edited on Mon Apr-12-10 11:12 AM by tonysam
Do you think for ONE minute Finland's "superior" education system isn't going to be privatized, too? I guess I am going to have to copy and paste a post over at the education forum about this very thing. The neoliberals are EVERYWHERE trying to destroy public education.

Lois Weiner has written a book about this worldwide phenomenon. Your beloved European countries and Japan will be going the same way as the United States, and it is a concerted effort which originated back in 2002. Here she responds to Diane Ravitch:


Lois Weiner: No, but listen to what I say, Diane. Where we’re going to disagree – and I want to also state what we agree about – I agree with everything that Diane just said. Every single thing. She laid out in such a way that I don’t have to repeat it, the effects of this disastrous educational policy for the last 10 years. She laid it out. I’m not going to repeat what she said, and I have no criticism with what she said.

And I want to point out that Diane and I, in her recent book, Diane and I agree with the need to defend democratic civic purposes of education, the need for teacher unions, the need for educational equality, and education’s role in promoting social mobility. Those are things that Diane talks about in her book, and I absolutely agree with her 100%, about those aims. What I’m going to suggest, though, is that Diane’s analysis about how we got to this point is flawed. And that if we are going to defend public education, we need to have a very different analysis. And so the analysis that I’m going to offer tonight, I think, takes two sets of blinders off – that we have to take off.

The first set of blinders separates educational reform from what’s going on in the economy. The other set of blinders says that we can look at education in this country separately from what goes on in the rest of the world. Because what I’m going to lay out tonight for you is a perspective that says NCLB, all these policies that Diane just described, are neoliberalism coming home. They are policies that were imposed for the first time under Pinochet – under Pinochet. Next in Argentina. Next in Uruguay. Throughout all of Latin America and Central America. And when I spoke about this at a conference in London about a year and a half ago, I said, “Every country in the world has enacted these policies.”

Stephen Ball, who wrote a great report on privatization globally for the Education International, corrected me. Very politely in private. And he said, “Lois, it’s not every country in the world – It’s not Finland or North Korea.”

So let us understand that this is a global project that began 40 years ago, was tested, refined – if you want to use that word – imposed on Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the World Bank. Why? Because developing countries wanted aid. If they wanted aid, they had to undergo economic restructuring AND educational reform.

So what were the contours of that – what were the contours – what were the contours of that neoliberal project? And I’m going to talk in a minute about what neoliberalism is. Because I think that in her book, Diane grapples with this concept, but she doesn’t face it head on. And I think that we need to understand what the project is and where it comes from.

What’s the project? Here are the contours: Privatization, fragmentation of oversight and regulation and creation of individual schools, standardized testing, and assault on teachers’ unions. Those are the 4 pillars of this project.

* Privatization: Commodification, marketization of education, Diane describes that.
* Fragmentation: Elimination of the regulatory mechanisms. So that now we have fragmentation, regulation devolves to an individual school; that’s charter schools. In the UK they’re called ‘academies.’ In Sweden they’re called ‘charter schools.’ All over the world, except for Finland and North Korea – China included – China has charter schools. China has charter schools.
* Standardized testing: You eliminate a regulatory framework, how do you gauge “accountability?” Standardized tests. Standardized tests are, for the most part, created by for-profit companies who market the textbooks and who market professional development. Do you see how it’s a web? Everybody see how it’s a web? Standardized tests, well if that’s the only accountability measure, that means teachers are measured by standardized tests. Merit pay. Well, if you have merit pay, you don’t need to have teachers who have a lot of education or a lot of experience because the only thing that you pay them by is the kids’ test scores.
* And finally, what is THE greatest barrier? THE greatest barrier. Most potentially, most powerful, an existing barrier to this program? Teachers’ unions. And now we have to understand that’s the reason, every day in the paper, we read about bad teachers and how the unions defend them. That is the reason. Because teacher unions globally are standing in the way of this project.

And I can only say I have so much to say about this, I edited a book of essays. And I really hope you’ll read it. You will read teachers’ stories from all over the world describing this project, and the resistance to it.

OK. So let me get back to this issue of the neoliberalism, which Diane doesn’t talk about. And I hope that she will. And I hope that she will think about it because in the book, Diane says a couple of really very interesting things. She says she and others were, quote, “…caught up in the wave of enthusiasm for market reforms.” That’s on page 127. And she says that this was a “new thinking” on page 9. But you see, when that occurred it wasn’t new. It had already been implemented for 20 years. Already been implemented globally.

And in fact, the Merrill Lynch report – see this was all in the business pages. If you wanted to know what was going on in education you had to read the business pages and prospectus. Because Merrill Lynch report April 9, 1999 <“The Book of Knowledge: Investing in the Growing Education and Training Industry”> said, “A new mindset is necessary, one that views families as customers, schools as, quote, ‘retail outlets’ where educational services are received, and the school board as a customer service department that hears and addresses parental concerns. As a near monopoly, schools escape the strongest incentives to respond to their customers. And what is the strongest incentive? The discipline of the market.” That’s 1999. And Diane was in the administration that was caught up in a wave of enthusiasm about the market reforms.

So, now I want to unpack – I want to unpack for you this neoliberal ideology. And if you really want to understand it, you can’t listen to what’s being said in this country. You have to go to the way that the World Bank talks about it. Because in the World Bank documents, they present it in it’s unvarnished form. So I’m gonna quote for you from something called – I’m gonna explain what’s in this chilling World Bank document, The World Development Report 2002. And, of course they don’t use this exact language, but this is the analysis.

The analysis is the following: The market is the best regulator of all services, and the state, the welfare state causes problems by intruding on free choice. Next, the global economy requires that workers from every country compete with others for jobs. And since most people will be competing with workers in other countries for jobs requiring little formal education, money spent on a highly educated workforce is wasted. In other words, most jobs are in Walmarts. You know that. You know that; that’s the level of education – seventh or eighth grade. And the plan is – they say this in this document – we’re all going to be competing for these jobs that require a seventh or eighth grade education. Not all of us, of course. Some people are not. Therefore, money spent on education is wasted. It should be spent on other things: on dams, on roads, on health care. Of course they don’t spend it on dams, or roads, or health care. But that’s what they say in this report.

And think about this, because we don’t need a highly educated workforce, we don’t need highly educated teachers. Therefore, we can have a teaching force that’s a revolving door. Teachers will use standardized scripts. Kids will be educated to a seventh or an eighth grade level. And that’s OK! That’s OK! In fact, not only is it OK; that’s what we should be doing. And then in this report, it says, What’s the biggest barrier to carrying out this program? Well, with their political power, teachers and doctors capture governments and protect their incomes when there is pressure for budget cuts.

So understand that the de-professionalization of teaching that Diane talks about is NOT an accident. It is planned. It is planned to replace us. It is planned to limit access to higher education. That’s what this is all about. And you only have to look at the record in the rest of the world, and you see what is planned for us.

You know these firings in Rhode Island? You know these firings in Rhode Island? That Bush and Obama and Duncan have supported? The World Development Report 2002 applauds the firings in Benin and Senegal of the teachers. They applaud it. And they say that’s what’s gonna happen. That’s what we want. So, we all really need to understand that the neoliberal agenda has come home to us. It is a project; some people would say that it’s a conspiracy. I wouldn’t say it’s a conspiracy. You know why? Because conspiracies are secret. This isn’t secret! This isn’t secret.

The final thing I want to talk about is Democrats for Education Reform, and I’m sorry Diane isn’t here to hear me say this. Democrats for Education Reform now hosts, on tour, Rick Hess from the American Enterprise Institute. It’s now on their website. We all need to understand that Obama’s education policy comes from Democrats for Education Reform. There’s no difference. That means that the Obama education policy is lifted, from whole cloth, from what used to be called a far-right think tank. I think Diane flatters them, or fools herself by calling them a conservative think tank. You know. But now, they’re in the Democratic Party! They’re the leadership of the Democratic Party when it comes to education policy. Listen, we are in deep doo doo. We are in real deep doo doo.

And I’m just gonna say that in Diane’s book, and I’m really sorry she’s not here to hear this. In Diane??s book, she has this quote from her book, The Revisionists Revised, and she says she’s still right, she argued that, “The public schools had not been devised by scheming capitalists to impose social control on an unwilling proletariat to reproduce social inequality. The schools were never an instrument of cultural repression, as the radical critics maintain.” That’s what Diane says in The Revisionists Revised.

Well, you know what? Maybe we can argue about 150 years ago when the public schools were created, but there is no argument now; that is the agenda.


link

And here is a 2007 report about the worldwide trend:

Hidden Privatisation in Public Education

There are SO many teachers nowadays, they are regarded as replaceable cogs, to be tossed out and thrown away like garbage. Somewhere I had read some 30,000 people, I believe, applied for a mere 1,000 teaching jobs in Senegal. Lois Weiner mentions this. These neoliberals figure they can pull this crap and get away with it, as long as people go into this field in huge numbers.


Privatization WILL happen in Finland, North Korea, and all of the other holdouts in due time.

Corrected post for duplicate.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
proud2BlibKansan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 11:04 AM
Response to Original message
19. 95% of their teachers are union members
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
tonysam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-12-10 11:22 AM
Response to Reply #19
20. And Finland will go the way of all other countries in the world if the trend toward privatization
isn't stopped.
Printer Friendly | Permalink |  | Top
 
DU AdBot (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view 
this author's profile Click to add 
this author to your buddy list Click to add 
this author to your Ignore list Sun Dec 01st 2024, 11:54 AM
Response to Original message
Advertisements [?]
 Top

Home » Discuss » Archives » General Discussion (1/22-2007 thru 12/14/2010) Donate to DU

Powered by DCForum+ Version 1.1 Copyright 1997-2002 DCScripts.com
Software has been extensively modified by the DU administrators


Important Notices: By participating on this discussion board, visitors agree to abide by the rules outlined on our Rules page. Messages posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums are the opinions of the individuals who post them, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Democratic Underground, LLC.

Home  |  Discussion Forums  |  Journals |  Store  |  Donate

About DU  |  Contact Us  |  Privacy Policy

Got a message for Democratic Underground? Click here to send us a message.

© 2001 - 2011 Democratic Underground, LLC