I’m playing catch up with all the programming NBC is producing this week as part of its Education Nation series, but I want to highly recommend one of those videos, an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Finland’s Minister of Education, Pasi Sahlberg.
See for yourself on the video below, but here are a few highlights worth underscoring:
- Finland’s focus has always been on “building a system which is attractive to young people, and morally purposeful.”
- In Finland, teachers “enjoy a certain prestige.”
- In Finland, “poor performance is not punished,” and teachers are entrusted with the authority — and provided with the training and support — to administer all assessments locally.
In short, Finland recognized a generation ago that if it wanted to create a world-class education system, it needed to invest deeply in the long-term creation of a highly competitive and well-trained teaching profession, not the short-term acceptance of a highly-volatile and rapidly-trained teaching force. As Linda Darling-Hammond writes in her newest book, The Flat World & Education, “Finland shifted from a highly centralized system emphasizing external testing to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curriculum around very lean national standards. The logic of the system is that investments in the capacity of local teachers and schools to meet the needs of all students, coupled with thoughtful guidance about goals, can unleash the benefits of local creativity in the cause of common, equitable outcomes.”
Couldn’t have said it any better myself . . .
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J. Chaffee says:
In Finland they looked at their school system, didn’t like it, and purposefully decided to change it. It took many years, but they slowly and patiently built a quality system. In America we live out Einstein’s comment about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. In fact, our “educational leaders” want us to do the same things with more intensity and for longer, as if that will achieve different results. No wonder our kids drop out.