Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

The question may be: Which aspects of the Finnish “answer” are most pertinent? Maybe we should simplify our alphabetic system, maybe we should improve healthcare, maybe we should have a more homogeneous society, maybe a national curriculum.

America’s “genius” has rested not on its fixed intellectual “tradition,” but on its enormous and equal respect for “practical smarts”—including thinking outside the box intellectually. We can force an artificial curricular consensus. But teachers forced to teach it, and students to learn it, will not succeed as well as they might in Finland—because their students are coming at the world from much more disparate views, customs, experiences, and values. And because some come from a state of poverty and ill health that Finland does not know.

I’m in the midst of reading a book that I think we would both applaud, entitled “No Place But Here, A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community” by Garret Keizer. It was first published in 1988. I read it and try to imagine how a national curriculum would have affected Mr. Keizer’s and my life.

Granted, maybe rural northern Vermont and East Harlem are more alike than we pretend. But what about our particular expertise and passions? Or a new idea! I fear we’d lose us both. But equally I think we are far from understanding the potential of public schools to reach and transform the lives of what our “friend” Charles Murray (whose views we might explore in the future) sees as the God-given natural losers. There are too few examples of “what works” if we intend to reach his “unreachables” and “unteachables”—whose votes and views impact on our culture, who serve on our juries, who we call neighbors and friends, and whose intellect thus is critical to our future.

You and I might, in short, quote from different parts of Keizer’s book. You’d note that his freshman high school class reads "Antigone," "The Odyssey," "Macbeth," and Thomas Hardy’s "Return of the Native". None abridged or paraphrased.

I’d want all our readers to underline profusely from the chapter entitled “Courtesy”. Combating the common discourtesies of our larger culture requires huge self-conscious doses of adult modeling in school. “I avoid sharing anything with a class that a student would want to share with himself or herself alone. I avoid writing comments on top of a student’s writing, or putting a grade on top of a student’s name. We work one-to-one, not one-on-one. I ask permission before quoting from a composition…. I try to be certain that no students stand for any length of time while I sit…. I apologize, privately if the offense was private, publicly, if public…. With all of its opportunities for trespass, with all of its peculiar relationships, a school is a good place for younger and older people to discover the pleasure of reciprocal acknowledgement. Which is what courtesy is.” What a lesson in democracy!

Slightly reworded, we’d both probably appreciate his reprint of the F.F.A. Creed (Future Farmers of America). Maybe the one from Finland that you told us about and the F.F.A.’s are a good place to start. I know that many readers would like to find a magic bullet that could cure us of our schools’ problems. Me, too! Just as I’d like to find one to cure our larger social mess! The latter is no more easily fixed than the former, and vice versa. But I’d love a nationwide discourse about those two documents!

The Japanese have social promotion until the end of high school, and their teaching day is only slightly more than half as long as ours. The Chinese and Indian economies are booming, even though half of their citizens barely complete elementary school. Many a well-educated American graduate cannot find a job that couldn’t be done by a high school dropout. (And Massachusetts outperformed most of the world before MCAS.) But how much smarter would we have to be to justify the standard of living we cling to?

As Keizer would say, what’s even worse is our failure to be thoughtful in the most basic senses of the world. Our tolerance of Guantanamo speaks more to my distress about our schools than international test comparisons. I can live with our being somewhere in the middle when it comes to math and science test scores, if we weren’t at the very bottom when it comes to domestic rates of incarceration, death penalties, income disparities, rates of voting, etc. Schools need to be places that are “accountable” for those comparisons, too. That I rest my hopes on “democracy” is not easy to justify by hard data, or evidence-based studies. It’s a leap of faith. But it is a leap we as citizens of this land have agreed to. That’s what makes it seem reasonable to me that we could demand that schools address it more seriously than they address calculus.

I can live with many ways to produce a democratically minded citizenry, if only we’d agree that it’s first among many noble goals! Just that. I suspect it starts with Keizer’s way of thinking about courtesy. What does it take to create school settings in which adults are responsible for that first step?

My defense of small schools was originally based on only one hope. That if the school was small enough the entire faculty could sit around one table and thrash things out—courteously. Only through such a process could the school’s adults hold themselves accountable for their impact on the young. We’ve gotten plenty of “smallish” schools, mandated ruthlessly from above, in which the faculty is still too large, too numb, or too powerless to sit around and thrash anything out, and where accountability is therefore conducted “discourteously”.

Best,
Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Time to disagree. Finland is the answer. No, I don't mean that we should or can copy Finland, but that we can learn from the remarkable synthesis that Finland has achieved. Their schools meet all or most of your pedagogical criteria—they "focus on a playful and wonder-filled childhood," and they prize teacher autonomy and school autonomy. Yet they do so within the context of a specific and carefully wrought national core curriculum. What is essential for children in urban areas is also essential for children in the remote rural areas. Teachers are free to be creative and passionate because they are clear about what their job is. Their autonomy is freedom to teach, not curricular anarchy.

I would not suggest that we copy the Finnish core curriculum. It is theirs, not ours. But the lesson to be learned is that a common core curriculum is necessary so as to establish clear understandings within which pedagogical creativity can bloom and prosper.

I also do not agree with you about the curriculum in New York state. New York has had mandated Regents' examinations for high school graduation for the past century, but with these differences from a genuine core curriculum: First, only the highest-achieving students took those examinations until about 10 years ago; second, when the Regents' exams became a universal requirement, the content and expectations of the exams were dumbed down; third, a testing regime is not the same as a specific, coherent curriculum that shows a progression of ideas, knowledge, and skills from the earliest elementary grades to high school graduation.

Nor do I agree about the example of Massachusetts. That state developed excellent statewide curriculum frameworks after the passage of the 1993 education reform act, an act that pumped billions of new dollars into the schools in return for an agreement to set statewide standards and to develop examinations based on those standards. And you are right about this: Since the adoption and implementation of its superb curriculum frameworks, Massachusetts has soared to #1 in the nation on the tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The latest test results show that students in Massachusetts are #1 in reading and in mathematics. This was no accident, nor did it evolve from the independent, uncoordinated actions of the elected school boards. It is the fruit of an educational strategy that was tried and succeeded.

Certainly, as I pointed out, Finland is a homogeneous nation. It does not have anything like our religious, cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity.

I maintain that our diversity makes it hard for us to forge a national core curriculum, but our diversity makes it necessary that we do so. In a nation as diverse as ours, we need a common language and a large fund of shared values and references in order to talk to people who do not share our religious, cultural, ethnic, or racial background. In order to maintain a democratic society, we need to be able to communicate and exchange ideas, to sustain diverse coalitions, and to recognize our common goals and work together with others who are different from us. Collaboration requires some mutuality, and such mutuality is not possible without the ability to communicate and to recognize that "we are all in the same boat," we are part of the same community even as we are members of many other, different communities. This communication would be greatly facilitated, I believe, by a coherent curriculum that spans the years from elementary school through high school.

Without a national core curriculum, our schools are at the mercy of the low-level national curriculum created willy-nilly by test publishers and textbook publishers. Now, I know people in this business and know that they are upstanding citizens who are trying to give the states more or less what they want, while not stirring up any hornets' nests and not provoking any controversy. In effect, our highly decentralized system of schooling has left the issue of what to teach to commercial interests, those who write the standardized tests (they have to ask about something, they have to make assumptions about what students have learned) and those who compile (not write, but compile) the textbooks that are sold in every state (they too must assume what should be taught).

So, I would contend that we have a national curriculum; that it is in the hands of the marketplace and the educational publishing industry; and that it is no substitute for the national core curriculum that would emerge if we set our collective minds to the task of writing it. We have a default curriculum. I think we can do much better.

What Finland's example proves, I think, is that it is possible for a nation to have both what you believe in and what I believe in at the same time; that our ideas and agendas are not mutually exclusive. No, we should not copy Finland's curriculum. We should create our own. But yes, every school of education should have a course in which students read the national curricula of half a dozen other nations. We can all learn by studying how other nations, with different cultures and different challenges, managed to do it. It can be done. If done well, it works well. It does not sacrifice anything you care about, it does not destroy the creativity and passion of teachers, and it helps to improve the quality of education across the nation.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (44) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I agree, Finland is not the answer. That’s my point! There isn’t one. Or even two or three. We can learn from others, but in the end we are responsible for using what we learn in our own setting—place, time, history and, of course, values.

It’s instructive—for me—to realize that the Finns focus on a playful and wonder-filled childhood, and postpone teaching reading until kids are 7 or older. It might be, as one blogger commented, that Finnish phonemes are simpler and thus one can learn to read faster there. Or it may be that they learn to read better because they haven’t been bored and defeated by too early an introduction to a passive learning process.

It may be that the common core curriculum that the Finns use could work anywhere or it may be that it’s a different thing altogether to discuss a common core for a country smaller than NYC (5 million), in which almost everyone is native born—and has been so for generation upon generation—versus a nation of 300-plus million in which the majority cannot trace their history in the USA back more than a hundred or so years.

(NY State has had a common core (with exams) for a century, and Massachusetts has had no state regulation—just elected school boards. Yet Massachusetts test scores compare well with most OED nations!)

It may be that the Finns’ common core of academics is assessed in ways so different from ours, and far less frequently, that to call them both “tests” is to confuse matters.

It may be that in a nation in which 80 percent are members of the same state-established church one can presume a level of “consensus” that a religiously divided nation like ours can’t.

It may be that the fullness of Finland’s welfare system—universal health care, relative income equality, etc.—would make them successful regardless of any of the above.

What we agree about, Diane, is the need to discuss the purposes of schooling. What shared criteria might we “answer to”? There are many ways to get at the latter without developing a detailed curriculum about what should be taught (at what age, in what sequence, and in what detail). Democracy is a form of accountability and maybe we can develop acceptable public bodies that we agree to answer to.

The quoted three paragraphs of Finland’s “mission statement” sound fine to me. Central Park East Secondary School and Mission Hill would be happy to defend our work as a response to such a mission. But supporting “his or her mother tongue” and “cultural identity” is a mission, for example, that some Americans might not support. “Develop a democratic society”—would such a phrase appear in many a U.S. mission statement, rather than the paler “be a good citizen”? The Finnish mission suggests skills like “evaluate critically”, “create new culture”, “revitalize ways of thinking and acting” that some conservatives would argue don’t belong in mandatory K-12 schooling. It’s a radical statement that might not sit comfortably in our culture. (Sol Stern of The Sun might be nervous, for example.) (Editor's note: See this guest column by Sol Stern in eduwonkette.)

I can hear a lot of folks to the right and left of me feeling that Finland’s mission is insufficient/ wrong-headed or even evil. (Humph: “self-esteem!) Let’s put it out there for discussion for starters.

But even if we could unite behind a similar statement, it hardly leads to a single approach to either pedagogy or curriculum! Then, comes the hard part—of course—what subjects and pedagogies best achieve such ends? My solution? Let schools and districts defend how their solutions meet such a broad description of the role of K-12 education. Erin and Diana (two of our readers) raise the importance of “external” reviewers. Both make good points, and perhaps what was important about CPESS and MH’s graduation requirements was the way they included such public reviewers. It’s not a “do your own thing”—it’s the responsibility of any public institution to defend its “own” solution to democratically selected bodies in a publicly agreed upon manner.

Note also, Diane, that when I urge us to include the cultures that surround us, I am not suggesting that we applaud—or condemn them. What I’m arguing is that we won’t influence the minds of the young if we insist they park their ideas outside our schools, to be picked up at 3 p.m.. We don’t want to perpetuate the idea that there is a strictly “academic” way of reading, writing, and thinking. Persistently ignoring the cultural norms they are exposed to leaves them defenseless.

Making room for these realities (which includes the “ideology” of the market place, the political scene, and the arts) is risky. It’s safer to avoid them. But it’s precisely when teachers and students are passionate that their best and worst habits of mind emerge. That’s when I can really “assess” how my colleagues and my students use their minds! Sometimes it scares me, but it’s also what “educating” for democracy needs to tackle. I fear that it won’t happen “somewhere” else if we are afraid to let it happen within our schools.

Best,
Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

As you know, Americans have a long history of looking to other countries for answers to our educational problems. In the 19th Century, American educators traveled to Prussia to see the wonders of its national education system. In the 1960s, the British education system became the American educational Mecca because of its demonstrations of infant education and open classrooms (with an occasional side trip to Summerhill).

Recently, Finland has won admiration for its educational accomplishments—not long ago in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal, and now in your address to your colleagues at the Forum for Education and Democracy. I note that you and the Journal identify Finland as a success because of its performance on international assessments; without those assessments, how would we know that Finland’s education system was worthy of discussion and emulation? We would be in the dark.

In some ways, Finland is not exactly a fitting role model for the United States. For one thing, it is a tiny nation, with about 5.3 million inhabitants (smaller than New York City). And unlike New York City, it is not notably diverse in ethnicity and religion: The population is overwhelmingly homogeneous, ethnically and religiously. More than 80 percent of Finns are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is recognized by the government as an established church (Finland has school prayer). More than 90 percent speak Finnish as their native language. Less than 3 percent of the population is foreign-born. Finland also has a demographic problem that we do not share: The birthrate is very low, and the population is aging. Perhaps this is an advantage for children, because they are prized. Finland is one of the most sparsely populated nations in Europe.

You are right about the wonderful schools and conditions for teaching in Finland. There is considerable local autonomy, school autonomy, and teacher autonomy. Finland has a very egalitarian school system, and its results on international assessments are impressive in every subject. The number of dropouts is small; the variance between high achievers and low achievers is also small. Another point that you might have made: Most of Finland’s schools are small. The majority of students are in schools with fewer than 500 students.

But there is yet another aspect of the Finnish education system that you did not mention. Finland has a strong and coherent national core curriculum. The core curriculum describes the general principles of instruction, as well as the specific knowledge and skills that students will acquire over the course of their basic education (from grades 1 through 9).

Finland doesn’t get great results by hiring excellent teachers and then leaving them to do whatever they choose. It specifies the subjects that will be studied, the objectives for each academic subject, and the assessment criteria for 8th grade. One reason, perhaps, that Finnish students excel in science is that there is a national course of study in physics for grades 7 through 9. The children study motion and force, vibrations and wave motion, heat, electricity, natural structures (including “radioactive decay; fission and fusion; ionizing radiation and its effect on animate nature; protection from radiation”). The national core curriculum has a carefully specified format of concepts, knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are to be taught not only in physics, but chemistry, biology, history, geography, social studies, languages, health, religion, ethics, music, visual arts, crafts, physical education, and home economics. (To learn more, click here and here.)

The content and objectives of each subject are thoughtfully detailed. Teachers have wide leeway in how they teach and in formulating their lessons. But the core content does not appear to be controversial or disputed.

This is precisely what I have been advocating in our dialogues for the past year, as well as for many years before that. I do not presume that a national core curriculum would solve all our problems, far from it. One need only look at eduwonkette’s recent post about violence in Chicago to see that our social problems are not confined to curricular issues, or to Richard Rothstein’s many writings about how issues of poverty restrict the ability of schools to teach children.

What I take from all this is that a nation will have more successful schools if it can arrive at a fundamental agreement about what the schools are supposed to do. If we leave matters at the disposal of every school and every teacher, to do as they see fit, we will not be following the Finnish model of success.

It is worth noting here the “mission statement” of the Finish education program: “Basic education is part of fundamental educational security. It has both an educational and an instructional mission. Its task on the one hand is to offer individuals the chance to acquire a general education and complete their educational obligations; and, on the other, to furnish society with a tool for developing educational capital and enhancing equality and a sense of community.”

“Basic education must provide an opportunity for diversified growth, learning, and the development of a healthy sense of self-esteem, so that the pupils can obtain the knowledge and skills they need in life, become capable of further study, and, as involved citizens, develop a democratic society. Basic education must also support each pupil’s linguistic and cultural identity and the development of his or her mother tongue. A further objective is to awaken a desire for lifelong learning.”

“In order to ensure social continuity and build the future, basic education assumes the tasks of transferring cultural tradition from one generation to the next, augmenting knowledge and skills, and increasing awareness of the values and ways of acting that form the foundation of society. It is also the mission of basic education to create new culture, revitalize ways of thinking and acting, and develop the pupil’s ability to evaluate critically.”

Tiny Finland cares about its children and its future. There is much here to admire.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Let's pursue, over time, these topics: (1) the way we see "popular" culture and "the street" as sources for learning, (2) the notion of a "consensus" on curriculum—and the idea that we can insure that it only takes 50 percent of our time, and, finally, (3) that it doesn't matter whether we put the moral and social purposes of society or each individual's success on the job market as the public purpose of education. Alas, the latter isn't even within our means—as the economy doesn't produce more good, decent-paying jobs just because there are well-educated people who want them! I suspect we aren't so far apart on the latter.

But I'm rushing off to Washington, D.C., for a press conference of a group we started a few years ago—our own smoke-and-mirrors "think-tank"—the Forum for Education and Democracy. We've issued our own statement: about "Democracy At Risk" 25 years after the seminal A Nation at Risk.

Here's my contribution to it.

Editor's note: The following are Deborah Meier's prepared remarks for the Forum's April 23 press conference:

What are the “basics”, the ABCs of a democracy? Among others, they involve the exercise of thoughtfulness and wise judgment on the part of its citizens. We cannot expect to teach this to our youngsters if they are keeping company with adults who are not able to exercise such habits—and do so in the presence of their students.

We propose—in short—schools that operate on the basis of both the collective and individual judgment of the adults most important in young people’s educational lives. Both their families and their teachers. There is no shortcut that leaves them out.

But this also means a well-educated teaching force, accustomed to exercising such thoughtfulness and judgment.

Imagine schools where educators work together to address students needs, not federal mandates, where the decisions are made by those closest—not farthest—from the real action. Where student engagement and responsibility for their work is mirrored in the attitudes of their faculty.

These are the schools that we need today. Some of them exist. I helped establish several in New York City’s East Harlem and Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. In the deepest sense of accountability, few schools have made their work more open for public review and critique. Each developed a set of authentic and meaningful standards and then designed every aspect of the school so that students could meet them.

They are designed so that teachers are powerful adults who make decisions that continually improve the school—who work in teams that share students, and who have time every week to plan a curriculum together that responds to the realities on the ground as well as in the subject disciplines, to develop and evaluate portfolio assessments, and to talk about kids and what they need and how to support them.

These schools and others created since have succeeded with students who were previously written off in urban schools. And they have succeeded because teachers had the expertise and the authority to design powerful instruction responsive to kids’ needs. And they had the time. The latter is the much forgotten and ignored ingredient essential for schools designed for democracy.

Schools like these are widespread in some nations like Finland, which rose to first in the world in reading, math, and science after making massive investments in highly expert teachers who are prepared to teach all kinds of students and to teach for inquiry and problem solving. Having developed such teachers, Finland allows them great latitude in designing schools and curriculum that can meet the needs of their students.

Unlike the U.S., where teachers either go into debt to prepare for a profession that will pay them poorly or enter with little or no training, high-achieving countries like Finland and others recruit top candidates and pay them to go through a top-quality preparation program. Beginners are supported by expert mentors, and teachers routinely have 10 to 20 hours a week to work and learn together—supports that are non-existent in most parts of the United States. We consider ourselves lucky in the USA if we set aside an hour or two a week. Mission Hill and Central Park East Secondary School went to the extraordinary length of building in five hours a week—less than half of what most nations in the world provide.

The report we are releasing today provides a realistic plan to make powerful and continuously well-prepared teachers available to all children through what we call a Marshall Plan for teaching.

Like the original Marshall Plan that rebuilt a democratic Europe after World War II, this is a strategy for moving beyond the half-measures that have characterized the last 25 years.

For an annual investment of $4 billion—or less than what we are currently spending for a week in Iraq—we could underwrite strong preparation for 40,000 teachers in high-needs fields annually—enough teachers to fill every vacancy currently filled by an unprepared teacher—seed 100 top-quality urban teacher education programs, ensure mentors for every new teacher hired each year, provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools, and, above all, strengthen ongoing on-site professional development for teachers and principals.

To dramatically improve schools, we need to transform the profession—making it attractive to thinkers and do-ers. Our plan will support this while developing new career pathways that help teachers extend their abilities and share their knowledge with others.

Finally, we propose a major initiative to improve school leadership. This includes proactively recruiting expert teacher leaders—rather than just waiting to see who shows up in administrative credential programs or wooing people from unrelated fields. Once again, it must rest on a full-year internship under the wing of principals whose work apprentices want to emulate.

I’ve never believed there was one best system for educating children, or adults. But if we have the preservation of democracy in the front of our minds, then we have no choice but to build schools where children experience what a democratic community of adults can produce.

There may not be one right way, but there are also many wrong ways. Every time we issue mandates that effectively remove power and responsibility from the adults who surround kids we remove the ingredients needed for them to become powerful and responsible adults.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (86) | TrackBacks (0)