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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
