Education's Best Country: What Can We Learn?

I definitely 1000% do not have time to not make this blog post work for my issue brief. So if any of you happen to read that paper (which you probably won't) and also read this post (which you'll probably skim), don't be surprised if you get some déjà vu. 

This week, the final week of civic issue blogging (praise jeebus), I'm going to explore which countries have the best educational systems and try to figure out what they're doing right. It might apply here in the US, where we seem to struggle with what works for improving education.

The SPI has a nice logo. (src)

The first thing I have to do is define what I mean by 'the best educational systems.' The best definition I could find bases an educational system's efficacy off of the Social Progress Index (SPI), which creates a score based off of "a country’s level of access to basic knowledge including factors like adult literacy rate, primary school enrollment, secondary school enrollment, and women’s mean years in school" (source). This is a pretty reputable ranking, so I'll look at this.

Some more basic information: the United States' current educational policy is standardized-testing and competition based, requiring states to make regular reports of student progress and awarding funding to schools that perform the best. It also awards teachers whose students receive good scores and punishes teachers whose students don't, even though the department of education acknowledges through its policy that standardized test score results are heavily influenced, if not primarily influenced, by outside factors. There are many decent aspects of current American educational policy, but it's most pertinent for me to address what's wrong with the current system. I'll go into a lot more detail in my issue brief, but that's the basics. 

I would like to look to a highly ranked country to see what it’s doing right when it comes to education. The top countries for education in 2012 based on the SPI were Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, in that order. In this post, I’ll look at Finland.

Finland, the number one country by SPI standards in 2012, has almost no standardized testing. Finnish students only take one nationwide, compulsory exam at the end of their senior year. Finnish education places an emphasis on innovative teaching techniques, equality in the classroom, lifelong learning, and variety of subjects. Homework is minimal, the school day is disjointed by mandatory 15-minute play breaks every hour in elementary school, preschools and daycares are subsidized, and teachers have incredible control over their lesson plan and teaching methods.

Wow Finland is small! (src)

Of course, these are all good things. However, there are some problems with applying Finnish educational successes to the American education system. For one, child poverty and student diversity are barely an issue in Finland, where they are ever-present problems here in the United States. Finland’s population is almost 96% Finnish, whereas only about 60% of Americans were born here in the country (stat 1, stat 2). This exemplifies the difference in diversity between the US and Finland. Also, Finland is significantly smaller than the US, making a standardized yet effective education system with loose guidelines much for feasible.

So as much as we can learn a lot from Finland, we have to take their successes with a grain of salt. We also have to consider that education in Finland has not always been stellar. They came from a different historical background than us. The educational reform that created the system the Finns have now was initially drafted and implemented decades ago. At the beginning of the reform period for educational policy in Finland, the mandated curriculum was hefty, regimented, and almost Stalinist, with teachers sitting at desks in front of students staring at their hands and jotting down notes mechanically.

Since then, Finnish educational policy has changed to become what it is today, trading in an emphasis on standardization for an emphasis on individually-focused learning and educational adaptability. If US educational policymakers learn anything from looking at the Finnish system, it should be that educational equality for all students requires an appreciation of the individuality of each student.

No Money, Mo' Problems

Instead of writing about an education issue this week, I'm going to be writing about an education issue. Specifically, I'll be talking about the issue of the high cost of post secondary education, as I went to a deliberation about that topic before spring break. 

This deliberation was really relevant for me (and most students) because we discussed the issue of college debt. This issue is almost purely financial, so I didn't expect there to be much emotional discussion going on, but I was wrong. Of course, there weren't really any moral dilemmas surrounding the topic, but there were a lot of strong emotions tied to the issue. 

I thought it was very effective of this group of RCL students to use an anecdote to open up their issue brief; it's the diary entry of someone who's elated because they were accepted at their dream school. Unfortunately, though, that celebration is tainted with stress because of the almost insurmountable problem of the high cost of post-secondary education. There were a lot of people at this deliberation who are where I am, in the middle of the middle class; we don't qualify for aid, but we also don't have enough money to pay our way through school. The first approach of the deliberation addressed the issue of high entrance costs.

Relatable ecards are the lifeblood of 40+ Facebook moms,
but this one is actually relevant to this post (and there's no minions so it's fine). (src) 

The biggest thing people talked about was FASFA, a beast we all have struggled with; my estimated family contribution (EFC), which determines the aid you’re eligible for, was $40,000, meaning that the government thinks my parents are paying my tuition every year and then buying me a really nice car to put my diploma in. If you didn’t catch that, it was sarcasm; they’re not going to do that. We don’t have that money. So this was a pretty heated issue.    

The second approach, which I thought was the most interesting, was destigmatizing non-4-year post-secondary education. I’m not a perfect person and I know I’ve judged people when they said they’re going to a technical college or a community college; I think it’s probably a universal thing, at least in America, to treat your local community college as a joke, as a place where dumb kids and poor kids go because they can’t cut it at a 4-year university. (I know that sounds terrible, but stigmata aren’t usually positive).

memegenerator.net is where dreams go to die. There's
so much wrong with this. I'll let you unravel
its majesty on your own. (src)

Someone at the event talked about how their state has a 2+2 program where you can go to a community college for two years and then finish at a university. I thought that sounded like a good idea. I would’ve gone to a branch campus for at least a year if it weren’t for Schreyer money.

The third approach talked about reducing exit costs, which basically means getting rid of debt after you have a degree in your hand. This one hits home for me because my mom and dad both got their debt reduced or eradicated through loan forgiveness programs, whether that meant working for the military or working in economically depressed areas. I think there should be more loan forgiveness programs out there.

Overall, this deliberation was really interesting, even though I’m still not totally used to a deliberation-style discussion when we are usually driven to debate.

Though I don't want to end on a dismal note, I think it's kind of a shame that a lot of the deliberations were almost fully populated by students. I was hoping the deliberation would be a big opportunity for community involvement, but everyone that I've talked to said their deliberation events were heavily attended by students. Some of the deliberations didn't even have more than one person who wasn't a part of the project in attendance. What do you think? Do you wish there was more community involvement? Why do you think there wasn't a lot? Is it just that most of the State College community is students? Or possibly that there's not much motivation for civic engagement among non-student State College residents? 

The Gender Gap in Education: A Two-Way Street

When you hear the words 'gender gap,' you probably just assume that it's a gap where the women are below the men, like the wage gap (not getting into that here). But the gender gap in education is multi-faceted in that both boys and girls are at a disadvantage in certain respects. 

 THE FEMALE DISADVANTAGE

Last week, I talked about how America is falling behind in math education. This, of course, isn’t the only issue with math education. More upsetting than our national issue is the worldwide problem; women fall behind in math on a global scale. This issue was first introduced to the public sphere in 1980, when Johns Hopkins researchers suggested that ‘superior male mathematical ability’ was to blame for the gap.

Of course, this more than ruffled some feathers. And years of research have found that women aren’t inherently bad at math. A few things inhibit female success in mathematics, and all of those reasons are cultural.

The problem begins where it always does, in primary school. In this stage of math education, the main goal is to master the basics with enough skill to be able to apply them down the road. Doing so with aplomb requires a certain amount of math confidence that girls are lacking.

When you google 'elementary school teacher,' 97% of the
pictures show a female teacher (image source).

This lack of confidence isn’t born, but bred. Knowing “that young children are more likely to emulate adults of the same gender," that 87.16% of primary school teachers are women, and that “elementary education majors have the highest rate of mathematics anxiety of any college major," it makes sense that girls would start to lose math confidence very early on.

If this self-doubt is imbued early on, it can follow girls all the way up to secondary education and beyond. This means less women in mathematics, which means less role models for girls, which means less women in mathematics, and so on.

I believe that some ways to improve this aspect of the education gap are to remove stereotyping from the elementary classroom and to encourage a heavier emphasis on math literacy among education majors. What do you think?

Of course, this is only one part of the gender gap problem in education. Where girls fall behind in math education, more alarmingly, boys are falling behind in all other subjects.

THE MALE DISADVANTAGE

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A study of academic proficiency among children of the world’s industrialized nations shows that 60% of these nations’ underachievers are boys. And the gap between boys and girls at the bottom is even bigger; American girls in the bottom 94^th percentile of reading tests scored 15% higher than their male counterparts (source).

Basically, this means that the majority of underachievers are male, and that those underachievers are truly underachieving. But even more concerning is that in 70% of countries tested, girls’ averages were higher than boys’ in math, reading, and science, regardless of the degree to which the country has attained gender equality.

But why are boys now falling behind?

While there’s no way to be 100% sure about the exact reasons why, analyzation of data allows some speculation. Because this gender gap is the widest in poorer countries, socioeconomic development would reasonably help to narrow the gap; in the United states, it was found that boys from single-mother homes performed the worst, so improving the socioeconomic conditions here in America would likely narrow the gap here.

The gap is also somewhat caused by social factors. Where girls face math anxiety at an early age, they also face a more general challenge; most girls, including me, are told that ‘it’s a man’s world, and you’re going to have to work harder than them to do as well as they do.’ This might be a generalization, but it’s likely universal. Girls have this fear-motivated drive to do better than boys, but boys don’t.

This article suggests that boys are less motivated than girls due to schools becoming boy-unfriendly, due to a false sense of accomplishment propagated by video games, and due to the normalization of pornography use at young ages.

Personally, I think this problem is a larger concern than that of the math gender gap, as it shows that boys are less motivated to do well in school in general, whereas the math gap is only one subject area.

What do you think? Both problems should be addressed, but which do you think is more alarming? A lot of us are Schreyer scholars; what motivated you to do well in high school and what motivates you now? 

Math Education in America: It Doesn't Add Up

Next week, I have my first official college math exam, and to be completely honest, I’m not sure how ready I can be. I know that if I want to study thoroughly, I’m going to have to start early because I’ll have to go through the book’s questions and do all of them, possibly twice, to fully memorize the material. It’s pretty stressful knowing that the only way I’ll be completely prepared is through memorizing tables and formulas; it’s even more nerve-wracking knowing that, if I forget a table or formula, I’m guaranteed to do poorly on the exam.

My anxiety surrounding this exam is just a microcosm of a bigger issue: the sub-par state of mathematics education in the United States.

THE PROBLEM

This isn’t a new issue; the United States has consistently scored low on international rankings of student proficiency, with its top performers below the international average for math proficiency. Where the mean score on the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) was 490 in mathematics, US students scored an average of 470. You might think this doesn’t sound too bad, but the top five highest-scoring regions scored above 500 on the test. Even more interesting is that the US scores have been consistently decreasing since 2009.

Looking at the data, there’s no denying that there is a problem. So what are the causes?

POLICY

As expected, one of the biggest causes of a lack of math proficiency lies within the system itself, and within the policy that runs the system. In previous years, standards for math education have been criticized as too “voluminous, scattered, and repetitive." I’m sure most of us can back up this statement with personal experience; I can remember times in high school when we would, in the words of my teacher, “spend too much time understanding this concept” and then have to rush through the next one on the curriculum.

Another policy problem concerns graduation requirements, which have increased within the past decade. The requirement for math isn’t particularly lofty, but having the requirement encourages a ‘check-the-box-then-forget-it’ method of learning. This leads to a cyclical memorize it, test it, forget it cycle that doesn’t facilitate true learning. Again, I think we have all experienced this. But policy isn’t the only problem in math education.

EDUCATORS AND CULTURE

Educators themselves also pose a problem. This isn’t to say that American teachers are inherently bad at teaching math, but they were typically taught under the same system they now propagate, a system which is obviously flawed. Math educators who only understand math on the memorization level will not be able to inspire deeper understanding in their students. But this isn’t a completely futile situation; given the right materials and training, math educators can have the ability to teach math the right way.

Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t happen. American math textbooks are thousands of pages thick and drily written, covering a plethora of subjects but never exploring them in-depth; they are merely a reflection of the nebulous curriculum for which they are written.

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If you are like most students in the United States, that first day of calculus in high school, you were handed a 1,000-page book, and you sighed as you lamented about having to carry it around. Your calculus teacher asked the classroom full of forlorn faces: “who’s excited for calculus?”

There might have been that one kid who was, but most people weren’t, and a lot of people were already reserved to not doing well, stating, simply, “I’m just not a math person.” The fact that no one bats an eye at that statement is the root of the cultural problem surrounding math education in the US. It’s okay here to just be ‘bad at math.’

So you can see that there are obviously a lot of problems with math education in the United States. So how can we fix the problems?

THE SOLUTION

It’s a lot easier to pick out what’s wrong than to figure out how to solve it. There have been a lot of attempts to reform math education, and education in general, in the US in the past, but most of them have failed. 

The most recent attempt at a total reform on how we teach math is the Common Core reform. An extremely controversial policy, Common Core for mathematics aims to “provide clarity and specificity rather than broad general statements.” It’s proven that where Common Core standards are put into place, students learn more and perform better. However, they must be implemented properly, and this is where the controversy lies. Common Core is an undeniably effective method of teaching, and its core principles can be seen at work in the countries ranking in the top ten on the PISA.

But confused teachers blindsided by a new way of educating, expected to implement standards with little to no training and a background solidly embedded in the antiquated math education methods of the past are guaranteed to fail.

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What do you think? Have you ever felt hindered by our current mathematical education system? Are you opposed to the Common Core way of learning? Do you think that we should strive to score higher on the PISA in years to come?

Betsy DeVos and Why Cramming for the Test Doesn't Work

It’s no doubt that Trump’s cabinet picks so far have been contentious; he appointed a climate change skeptic as secretary of energy and the former chairman of ExxonMobil as secretary of state. However, as a student, I’m most concerned about his pick for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

DeVos at her Jan. 17 hearing

Last Tuesday,January 17, 2017, DeVos sat for four hours in front of senators at her confirmation hearing in Washington D.C. It would be an understatement to say that it did not go very smoothly. DeVos had trouble answering questions surrounding well-known education policy.

It would be easy to think that DeVos is being targeted so heavily as unfit to serve simply because she is connected to Trump; Shikha Dalmia of The Week blames DeVos' ineptitude at her hearing on the "Democratic crusade against [her]," stating that "hyperventilating liberals" are making DeVos' nomination a bigger scandal than it really is. 

However, considering DeVos’ objective lack of experience in education, I believe that a healthy amount of concern is warranted. For me, the most pressing concern I have about DeVos having influence over education policy is that she has never attended public school. She received her high school education from a private Christian high school and a liberal arts degree from Calvin College, also a private educational institution (src). Even more concerning is that DeVos has no teaching experience.

However, she does have experience in education policy. She is an active proponent of ‘school choice,’ which is the belief that varied educational programs should be available to K-12 students. This basically means that DeVos believes charter and private schools should be a viable alternative to public school throughout the US. On the surface, this seems like a fairly reasonable position to have; however, DeVos doesn’t believe in accountability for charter and private schools.

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Seem like a problem? That’s because it is. Charter schools are not required to provide transportation for students, nor are they held accountable for school conditions. They can also close down without any warning, leaving kids stranded. Michele Phillips, a Detroit mother, describes how her kids have had to cope with growing up in the “Wild West” of the school system in Michigan, where DeVos’ idea of school choice without oversight is a reality.

Phillips states: “No one wants their child to grow up in the Wild West. Betsy DeVos is the wrong choice for education secretary.”

Considering the above, it is easy to understand why there is such concern surrounding DeVos’ appointment as education secretary. The concern is even more understandable when Arne Duncan, the education secretary from 2009-2015, is considered.

Like DeVos, Duncan went to a private school for K-12. Knowing that ten times more American children go to public school than to private school, it should be a concern that the person governing public schools has no personal experience in one. Also, Duncan

plans on his children attending a private school, which is telling. He did serve as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, however, giving him more experience than DeVos (even if his time as CEO was also marked by controversy concerning the closing of neighborhood public schools).

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Duncan’s time as secretary was controversial, as well, primarily because of his endorsement of common core standards and the ‘test-and-punish’ method of keeping schools accountable. This method of accountability, supported under the ‘Race to the Top’ competition, gives federal funding to schools with teachers whose students perform well on common-core based standardized tests. As the child of a public school teacher subjected to this accountability and as a former high school student subjected to common core standards, I know very personally that Duncan’s policy does not work.

In July, 2014, the National Education Association called for Duncan’s resignation as secretary of education, and in 2016, they were vilified. Duncan’s extremely pervasive and controversial education policy throughout his seven years as education secretary are a part of the reason why people are so wary about Betsy DeVos.

DeVos' clumsiness in her hearing and her lack of ability to answer questions about education are proof that you can't cram before the test. Without previous experience as an educator, without previous experience as a beneficiary of public school, without extensive knowledge of education policy, serving as the education secretary, and serving well, is impossible. 

At least, that's what I think.

What do you believe? Do you think DeVos has the capacity to be informed about public education? Do you think common core standards are reasonable and effective? Do you believe in school choice? Let me know in the comments below.