finland – Sam Chaltain

“Standardization” is not a dirty word

Posted on January 23, 2013 | by Sam | 2 Comments

The reviews are in — in 2013, inequality is out, and equality is in.

“Each time we gather to inaugurate a president,” President Obama began on Monday morning, “we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.

“What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth.”

Those of us who work to improve American public education no doubt heard his words through a certain lens. Indeed, public education has always been — and remains — unequal, inequitable, and incomplete (as I have written here, here and here). Unless we start behaving differently, so it will remain.

If you want illuminating statistics about the extent of this inequality, check out this video from the National Civil Rights Museum. And if you want something to chew on, consider this: standardization, as a word, is not actually “dirty” in and of itself. Indeed, standardization is a useful way to ensure quality control across a system.

The problem is this: here in the United States, the thing we have chosen to make uniform in order to ensure quality control are content standards. (I’m not opposed to content standards per se, though it seems somewhat anachronistic at this particular point in human history.) By contrast, in Finland, they chose to standardize two other things: school funding, and teacher preparation.

What would happen if we followed suit? Might we put ourselves in a better position to fulfill the lofty aspirations of Obama’s second inaugural address?

OK, Obama Won. Now What?

Posted on November 7, 2012 | by Sam | 2 Comments

It’s official. Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected.

Now what?

When it comes to public education, let’s start by recognizing that Race to the Top was well-intentioned — and ultimately out of step with a truly transformational vision of where American schooling needs to go. Yes, we need better ways to improve teacher quality and capacity; no, we can’t do it by doubling down on what we currently measure. Yes, we need to find a way to ensure equity across all schools; no, we can’t do it by ignoring the ways in which schools are inequitably funded and resourced. And yes, we need to ensure that every young person is prepared to be successful in life by the time they graduate; and no, we can’t do it by continuing to assume that the endgoal of schooling is a discrete set of content knowledge at the same time the new Industrial Revolution is removing all the barriers from knowledge acquisition — and accelerating the need for an essential set of lifeskills and habits.

The definition of leadership I offered in American Schools is the ability to balance a distant vision (“One day . . .”) and an up-close focus (“Every day . . .”). Great organizations, whether they’re schools or Fortune 100 companies, see, nurture, and respond to both mission and vision in everything they do. That’s the tension. That’s the art. And that’s the way to ensure that we’re not just solving the practical problems on our plate; we’re also working towards the aspirational goals that animate our efforts.

In Obama’s first term, we received a series of education policies that addressed the problems on our plate; and we were driven by a mission to perfect our ability to succeed in an Industrial-era system that no longer serves our interests.

What would a healthy tension between vision and mission look like in an ideal second term when it comes to public education? I’d suggest three things:

1. Vision (“One day, every teacher in America will be a special education teacher.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and teacher preparation program will work to deepen its capacity to prepare teachers for the 21st century classroom and its emphasis on greater personalization and customization.”)

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: every child has special needs, and every child deserves an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Here’s something else that’s equally obvious: we are responsible for creating the “short-bus” stigma around special education, and we can change it.

Finland is instructive here. By investing deeply in the capacity of its teachers to diagnose and address the individual needs of children, Finland helped ensure that, in effect, every kid ended up in Special Ed. This removed the stigma, so much so that by the time they reach 16, almost every child in Finland will have received some sort of additional learning support. We could do the same. President Obama can’t require traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs from overhauling what they do, but he can certainly put public pressure on them to do so. And individual schools and districts can certainly shape their own professional development calendars with an eye toward that long-term vision, and a step toward the short-term goal of equipping teachers to become more fluent in the full range of student needs.

2. Vision (“One day, every child will be equipped to use his or her mind well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and classroom will identify, and assess, the skills and habits it believes its graduates will need in order to use their minds well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”)

As I’ve said before, it’s time for teachers to stop defining themselves as passive victims of the policies of No Child Left Behind. It’s been a decade, and no one has stopped us from identifying — and then piloting — a better, more balanced way to assess student learning and growth.

Actually, that’s not true. The New York Performance Standards Consortium has been doing this for awhile now, and with great results. Individual schools like The Blue School in New York City or Mission Hill School in Boston have been doing it. And forward-thinking districts like Montgomery County in Maryland are exploring ways to do it more.

What are the rest of us waiting for?

The future of learning is one in which content knowledge stops being seen as the end, and starts being understood as the means by which we develop and master essential skills and habits — the real endgoal — that will help us navigate the challenges and opportunities of work, life and global citizenship. This future will require us to do more than merely give lip service to the skills we value; it will demand that we find ways to concretely track and support each child’s path to mastery, while maintaining our awareness and appreciation for the nonlinearity of learning and of human development. And the good news is the art and science of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive. We can do this. In fact, many of us have already begun.

3. Vision (“One day, it will be universally agreed-upon that education in America is a public good, not a private commodity.”); Mission (“Every day, every policymaker and decision-maker will repeat this vow: whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children.”)

In America, we hold two definitions of freedom in creative tension: the first is the capitalistic definition, in which freedom means choice and consumption; the second is the democratic definition, in which freedom means conscience and compassion.

This will never change; our challenge will always be to manage the tension between the two in ways that serve both. But it’s foolish to unleash choice and consumption in American public education and expect that it will deepen our capacity to exercise conscience and compassion. We can either see education as a private commodity or as a public good. And we must choose.

That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of charter schools or choice; in fact, I’d say it’s undeniable that almost every great school I’ve visited has become great in part because it had greater freedom to chart its own path. But it does mean any investments in school choice need to be proactively made in light of the original vision of charter schools, and that we stop pretending that schools with smaller class sizes, better-trained teachers, and richer learning options are only appealing or viable for the families of the wealthy or the well-located. Simply put, a great learning environmentis challenging, relevant, engaging, supportive, and experiential — no matter who the kids are, and no matter where the community is located.

If I were in charge, those would be my marching orders.

What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

This is what Special Education (in America) Looks Like

Posted on September 18, 2012 | by Sam

Imagine if the goal in America was to make every teacher a “special ed” teacher – and to give every student specialized attention? I bet we’d see less stigma, more individual and collective capacity to diagnose and meet the needs of each child, and a deeper investment in our nation’s teachers.

If that sounds like a pipe dream, bear one thing in mind — that’s how Finland already does it. Why not us?

USC Rossier Online

Mission Accomplished? What the U.S. Can Learn from China

Posted on September 21, 2011 | by Sam | 1 Comment

I just returned from my first visit to China in 15 years, and I still can’t get over how aligned the Middle Kingdom remains around its core “mission statement” – and how misaligned we remain in the United States.

In China, the mission that directs the priorities of its private, public and social sectors is the one first laid out by former premier Deng Xiaoping back in 1984 – “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng’s vision was an unlikely pairing – on one hand, robust financial freedoms and a willingness to welcome foreign economic influences (like McDonald’s and Microsoft); on the other, sharply circumscribed social freedoms and a determination to forbid foreign cultural influences (like Facebook and Twitter).

Back in 1994, when I taught at a university in Beijing, this shared purpose was already well ingrained: the schools existed to instill a dialectical pair of aspirations in young people: the homogeneity of ideas, and the heterogeneity of the marketplace.

Regardless of how one feels about its mission, China’s ability to align the myriad aspects of its society around such a clearly defined goal is a major contributor to its current position as an ascendant power. And not surprisingly, this sort of clarity is characteristic of other global success stories. Take Finland – just thirty years ago a Soviet backwater, and now, after steadily following through on a thoughtful 20-year vision of reform, the unquestioned home of the world’s best schools.

When I look at countries like China and Finland, I see more starkly the misalignment between America’s historic vision as a nation and the current mission of its public schools. Ask anyone to describe the former, and you’ll hear slight variations on the same foundational theme: E Pluribus Unum – Out of many, one. Ask folks to describe the latter, and you’ll hear everything under the sun.

To some degree, mission misalignment is to be expected in a country of 50 states, 15,000 school districts, one overarching federal policy, and a chaotic, inchoate marketplace of reforms du jour. Yet if we take federal policy as our guide, the central mission of public education since 2000 has actually been quite clear: to eliminate the achievement gap between white students and students of color.

Will such a mission help America move closer to its larger vision of an equitable democratic society? In theory, definitely. And yet in a new article for National Affairs, education policy expert Rick Hess carefully chronicles how our decade-long obsession with the achievement gap, and our willingness to evaluate that gap based on a single metric – basic skills standardized test scores in reading and math – “has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. And it has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform.”

Unquestionably, these efforts have crippled our collective capacity to enact a shared mission for the public schools that is aligned with our shared vision for the public good. We all know we need schools that help children become more confident and creative – and yet we overvalue a small subset of academic skills to the detriment of all other forms of learning. We all know we need schools that nurture the needs of all children – and yet we pursue policies that prioritize the needs of some children more than others. And we know we need schools that pledge fidelity to the same overarching mission and fulfill that mission in myriad ways – and yet we impose stifling evaluative controls that hinder the ability of educators to make real-time decisions about how best to engage and inspire the children under their care.

The good news, I believe, is that we have reached the point in our history where the pendulum’s motion is about to swing back. A growing chorus of unlikely allies, from a wide range of perspectives, is saying ENOUGH – it’s time to restore our collective focus on the intellectual, emotional and vocational needs of children, and it’s time to align the overarching vision of our society with the shared mission of our public schools.

How do we get there? I propose a simple starting point: Since the main factor hindering our efforts is the ongoing exclusive emphasis on reading and math scores – and since the fecklessness of our elected officials suggests it may take a while before we see any serious revisions to federal education policy – let’s invite schools and communities across the country to do two things: opt out of the current system and its myopic metrics of success, and opt in to an open network of innovators that all pledge to find – and share – a better way of evaluating their capacity to equip young people to fulfill our shared vision as a nation? The goal would be twofold: to free schools from feeling like they can’t be innovative; and then, by doing so, to challenge ourselves to proactively chart a better way forward.

I say it’s time for the United States to align itself more proactively around the vision that has animated our history and inspired the world. So who’s in? And what simple structures would such a movement need in order to be effective, inspiring, and mission-driven?

The Fake Revolution

Posted on October 5, 2010 | by Sam

If you spent any time in front of the TV last week, you may believe a revolution is underway in America’s classrooms. NBC dedicated a week of its programming to seed in-depth conversations about how to improve our schools. A new documentary about public education opened across the country to sold-out audiences. And a young billionaire – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – pledged $100 million of his own money (on Oprah no less!) to help the city of Newark transform its public schools.

I wish I could participate fully in the optimism, yet I keep thinking of the old adage that says there are three types of reform efforts: traditional, transitional, or transformational. And despite the high-powered pomp and circumstance of last week, two moments in particular convinced me that our current path is likely, at best, to yield cosmetic changes to a system in dire need of an extreme makeover.

Continue reading . . .

Education Nation & Finland

Posted on September 30, 2010 | by Sam | 1 Comment

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 . . .

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Posted on July 21, 2010 | by Sam | 6 Comments

Today, a Washington Post story reported that the push for common national standards in reading and math is gaining ground. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have now agreed to adopt the standards as their own.

This is notable progress when one considers how all prior efforts to promote a common set of academic standards in the United States have failed. But as the Post’s Nick Anderson reports, the Obama administration, working in concert with the National Governors Association, has been effective where others have failed by “encouraging the movement and dangling potential financial incentives for states to join.” The administration has also opted not to fund the actual work of the groups that drafted the standards, relying instead on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private donors.

As with many other major issues, the question of standards has become a polarizing issue with starkly divided camps. On one side are advocates like Massachusetts state education commissioner Mitch Chester, who believe the proposed standards would provide “clearer signals to K-12 students about their readiness for success at the next level, including readiness for college or careers.” On the other side are folks like the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, who worry that the push for common standards “is opening the door to federal control. It is the most alarming centralization of power in education you can come up with.”

Who’s right?

Well, as is usually the case, I think you can quickly dismiss the folks who inhabit the extreme poles of each camp. Clearly, standards by themselves will achieve nothing but, well, a new set of standards. Just as clearly, a set of common standards need not mean the end of local control and teacher autonomy, or the arrival of full-scale standardization.

Looking around the world is instructive here. Finland, the country with the best education system in the world, has national standards (in all subjects), but it uses them to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. Furthermore, standards are viewed as indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction. In fact, Finland has no national exams, and student assessments are devised and implemented locally, thanks to the deep investments that country has made in its teachers.

This is a good model for how national standards should be used, says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis Division in Paris. “The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” he said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.” Schleicher also points out how the U.S. relies disproportionately on “external accountability, ” or tests and consequences for poor performance, to improve schools. By contrast, other countries do more to build their schools’ overall capacities for success, and rely on a variety of measures to gauge their progress.

Viewed in this way, national standards become helpful guideposts that contribute to a greater sense of shared clarity about what children should generally know and be able to do, not hurtful hitching posts that circumscribe local creativity, personalization, and autonomy.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous. We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. (Just look at the recent financial reform bill, and the last-minute changes made to it that will continue to allow banks to engage in the sorts of activities that led to the global economic crisis in the first place!)

Princeton economist Allan Blinder echoes a similar note of caution. “It is clear that the U.S. and other rich nations will have to transform their educational systems so as to produce workers for the jobs that will actually exist in their societies. Simply providing more education is probably a good thing on balance, especially if a more educated labor force is a more flexible labor force that can cope more readily with non-routine tasks and occupational change. But it is far from a panacea. In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.”

Done correctly, I believe a new set of national standards (in all subjects) can help us clarify both how and what we teach our children, just as it has in other countries around the world. But if the end result of this movement is little more than a new set of national exams, we will do little more than fall further behind.

What No One Else Will Say About Teach for America

Posted on July 15, 2010 | by Sam | 1 Comment

There’s an interesting debate unfolding on the New York Times web site today around this question: Does Teach for America Improve the Teaching Profession?

Unfortunately, too many of the featured contributors — who have sparked hundreds of readers to offer their own feedback — chose to cast TFA in one of two terms: as either the White Knight of education reform (e.g., Donna Foote’s “A Corps of True Reformers”) or as the down-n-dirty Devil himself (e.g., Margaret Crocco’s “A Threat to Public Schools”).

As I wrote last week, in a piece titled “What Gandhi would think of The Lottery“, this sort of polarized rhetoric is the latest iteration of the “I/It” way of seeing public education, and it will get us nowhere. So as someone who neither loves nor hates TFA, let me offer a succinct summary of how I see them, since no one seems to want to acknowledge the fuller picture of what they represent:

First, the good news: TFA is closer to a key recipe for systems improvement than any other entity in either the traditional or alternative teacher certification route — they have figured out how to make their program among the most highly competitive in the country. As the Times reported earlier in the week, 18% of Yale’s most recent crop of seniors applied to TFA — nearly one out of every five graduates — and 46,359 candidates across the country applied for just 4,500 spots.

It may seem odd to praise TFA via the research of Linda Darling-Hammond, but LDH’s most recent book, The Flat World and Education, cites as a key component of the Finnish success story its ability to raise the competitiveness of its teacher preparation programs (which now accept only ~15% of those who apply). So we should all celebrate — and learn from — TFA’s ability to attract so many bright and passionate young people to a profession that still scores low on the prestige scale.

Now, the bad news: One thing TFA does NOT do that has also been essential to Finland’s success is invest deeply in preparing teachers for a research-based professional career. Finland’s teachers don’t drink from a fire hose and then inherit a classroom of high-needs children — their preparation includes both extensive (and excellent) coursework on how to teach, and a full year of clinical experience in a school associated with their university of study.

This is not a foreign concept in the United States — it’s called medical school. Or law school (with its summer internships). Or just about any other graduate degree that’s designed to prepare people for a top profession. Which gets us to the crux of the problem with TFA — on the whole it takes us further from, not closer to, the establishment of teaching as a truly prestigious profession, rather than merely a noble way to gain valuable experience as an individual on the evolving path of twenty-something life. We would never tolerate Doctors for America in our most overused emergency rooms. We would never send Architects for America to Haiti to experiment on earthquake-resistant housing design. Why then do we not only embrace the concept of placing our smartest and least experienced teachers before our neediest children, but go even further and suggest that the TFA model is actually what all teacher preparation should look like?

To be fair, part of the void that was filled by TFA existed because so many of our graduate education programs are, well, sucky. And until they change and get better, we can’t begin to aspire to the sorts of transformations other countries have been able to bring about.

If we really value learning and teaching, as Finland and other countries do, we need to invest deeply in the creation of a true long-term teaching profession, and not just a short-term teaching force. That means both traditional and alternative certification programs need to raise their game. And while TFA has much to teach the field about attracting the best and the brightest to our nation’s classrooms, until it revises its preparation model it will unintentionally perpetuate the illusion that reforming our education system simply means smarter, younger teachers. It’s just not that simple. And we can do better.

How to Build a School System That Nurtures Creativity

Posted on July 13, 2010 | by Sam | 7 Comments

In case you missed it, there’s an important new piece in Newsweek about the declining capacity of Americans to think creatively — and what we can do about it.

This is, of course, the primary issue that has driven Sir Ken Robinson’s work (if you’re among the few who haven’t yet seen his hilarious and insightful 2006 TED talk on the subject, check it out). As Ken puts it, the problem is that our current system of education is more apt to “mine our minds” of its most precious materials than it is to plant fertile seeds that can sprout new ideas and ways of seeing the world. The Newsweek piece picks up on this theme, noting that “around the world, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.” Meanwhile, our focus in the U.S. remains on clarifying what exactly we need to put into all children’s minds, rather than how we can best pull out their individual talents and passions.

In addition to what Newsweek outlines as constructive steps to address the creativity crisis (hint: cognitive science and a deeper understanding of how the brain really works), I’d like to remind everyone what Finland did to become the world’s leader in public education: an intensive investment in teacher education (NOT performance pay), and a complete overhaul of the curriculum and assessment system in order to create a true “thinking curriculum” for all students.

More specifically, teachers in Finland receive 2 or 3 years of high-quality training completely at state expense. The program is extremely competitive, and it is followed by a full year of clinical experience and studying under a master teacher. All teachers also engage in critical friends group work throughout their careers, ensuring that they engage in continual self-reflection, evaluation, and proactive efforts to improve the quality of their professional practice.

The result of this deep investment in teaching, and in a curriculum that is focused on inquiry (as opposed to facts)? A learning environment that encourages both students and teachers to try new ideas and methods, learn about and through innovations, and cultivate creativity in schools. As Linda Darling-Hammond says in her excellent new book The Flat World and Education, “Over the past 40 years, Finland has 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 the thoughtful guidance about goals, can unleash the benefits of local creativity in the cause of common, equitable outcomes.”

Why can’t we do this? WHY AREN’T WE DOING THIS?

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