Advancing the Teaching Profession

Finland Travel Log: It's All About the Women

Below is the sixth and final in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we've been immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. 

Finland's Parliament House

Walking into the Parliament of Finland, I was struck by simple splendor and symbolic symmetry. I quickly learned a lot about the “House,” Finnish representative democracy, and the role the 200-member legislative body plays in relationship to its appointed prime minister and elected president. 

Without getting into a Finnish civics lesson (don’t worry, I know too little to take a stab), what impressed me was the role that female leaders played in the early days of governance. For example, in 1907, when the country's first parliament was elected, 19 of its 200 members were women. Finnish women were the first in the world to be able to both vote and be elected to parliament. And today, the female MPs (Members of Parliament) total 85.

In 2000, Tarja Kaarina Halonen became the nation’s eleventh, and first female, president. President Halonen had been an MP for more than 20 years after a career in trade unions and NGOs. She had very high approval ratings—over 80 percent—during her twelve-year tenure as president, a time that coincided with deepening investments in Finland’s teaching profession.

I am convinced that Finnish success on PISA (Program for International Assessments of Student Achievement) has a lot to do with the kind of leadership women have brought to bear on education policy, especially teacher preparation and support.

Bronze statues in Finland's Session Hall

Unlike in America, the Finns’ respect for women and the children they bear is visible and palpable. Walking into the Session Hall, in Parliament House, chatting with my fellow U.S. delegates, I was immediately drawn to a group of bronze statues: four men facing forward and one woman—turned backward but holding a baby gazing ahead, waving to those who sit and deliberate on the future of Finland. Indeed, the male statues are named “The Pioneer,” “Intellectual Work,” “Faith,” and “The Harvester.” In the middle, the woman, proudly and boldly holding up her child, is “The Future.”

"The Future"

Worldwide, teaching is generally a female-dominated profession (67 percent of Finland's teachers are women, and 76 percent of America's teachers are female). But unlike in Finland, America’s policymakers—and our incoherent system of teacher development—show little respect for those who teach. And in part, teaching still is beset by gender discrimination. Such disparities have been historically linked to misconceptions that teaching is an unskilled job that does not warrant higher salaries, responsibilities, or leadership.*

In America, teachers are typically appreciated for serving children but mocked for their assumed lack of intellectual ability and their perceived inability to compete in the larger labor market. Indeed, the younger the student, the less status his or her teachers hold. Even in prestigious professions, like medicine, pediatricians earn less than any number of specialists. In America, taking care of the young has never generated much prestige for any occupational group.

This is not the case in Finland.

I learned from Raija Vahasalo, who chairs the Education and Culture Committee, that the Finnish government, a coalition of six political parties, has “quite a good consensus over how to improve our education system.” MP Vahasalo is a conservative, not a social democrat (or other left-leaning Finnish party member), but she was far more trusting and respectful of Finnish teachers than most U.S. government representatives—from both political parties.

Raija Vahasalo

Currently, 28 of Finland’s MPs are educators, and as MP Vahasalo told us, "know how it is to work in schools.” As a result, she continued, “we know we have so many good teachers; they all have master’s degrees in education.”

In Finland, the respect for teaching and teachers is profound. It runs deep in its culture, but it is also rooted in the nation’s respect for women. This respect aligns with the nation’s intellectual, forward-looking leadership, and its search for consensus—not conflict. And inland places emphasis on professional responsibility, not rigid accountability. As MP Vahasalo reminded us, “Our teachers are good, not bad.”

In America, we have many women who know teaching and learning as well as Raija Vahasalo does in her country. We need to make sure these knowledgeable women are the people leading our country's charge to professionalize teaching.

*Grant, G. & Murray, C. (1999). Teaching in America: The slow revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Finland Travel Log: Preparing Teachers for the Classroom

Below is the fifth in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. (Read parts one, two, and three, and four for more reflections.)

Students at the Viikki Teacher Training School

Today’s focus has been on teacher education, and I have learned a lot--and have much to think about. With the U.S. delegation, I visited the Viikki Teacher Training School of the University of Helsinki. The training school serves almost 1,000 elementary, secondary, and upper secondary students and has 102 teachers who have been specially credentialed to prepare new teachers.

 

Jyrki Loima, administrative principal and professor at the university, explained the what, why, and how of the preparation of new recruits in his school. In his one-hour talk, he used the words “judgment” and “trust” a total of 38 times—such qualities are the basis of how teacher candidates are selected (in addition to a 100-item test that measures the ability to analyze research articles). Judgment and trust are also the foundation of how preservice teachers are trained and evaluated in tightly sequenced basic, applied, and advanced training programs.  

The Teacher Training School prepares 200 “student teachers” a year, which means that, combined with the 102 full teachers, there are 300 adults in a school building that works with only 1,000 children and teenagers—providing rich opportunities for both students and new recruits to the profession. The student teachers take pedagogical courses at Viikki, and record and analyze videos of lessons. A team of school and university faculty assesses the student teachers.

Perhaps most important, the teaching faculty at Viikki engage in a variety of research projects in collaboration with their university colleagues. Together, they study topics such as the effects of multi-language acquisition and the impact of various approaches to teacher education. And the 200 student teachers learn how to conduct research themselves, preparing to assemble evidence, develop and analyze formative assessments, and collaborate with colleagues. “Teachers have to make lots of decisions, and what they decide to do needs to be based on evidence of what works,” Professor Leena Krokfors told us.  

And we heard clearly from Pertti Kansanen, Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education, that “all of our graduates can justify their decisions.”

As we dug deeper at our University of Helsinki debrief, we explored the role that teacher education has on Finland’s extraordinary performance on PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Here is what we talked about:

1. Finland selects teachers carefully, based on motivation, personality, and educability (related to the pedagogical skill they will have to master);
2. Research methods are part of every course future teachers take (“We research what we teach, and teach what we research”);
3. The university faculty conducts research on the effects of their efforts to prepare new teachers (identifying various learning patterns, resources, and challenges of learning and teaching);
4. Prospective teachers have more time to learn more deeply about how to teach their subjects differently; and
5. Faculty are developing new tools that allow teacher candidates to use new technologies to manage student learning.

And while the teacher education curriculum may look traditional “on paper,” there is a lot to be said for how it’s executed—and for the plans the university and school faculty have for the future. To prepare teachers for tomorrow’s schools, they’re developing modules that will include:

The University of Helsinki's HUB Magazine

 

1. Koulou 3.0: social media and “exploitation of blogs and wikis”
2. Second Life Viikki: virtual worlds and modeling
3. Kodu: game programming project
4. Sormet, Molla: projects involving tablet computers
5. Antivirus: a sick child’s right to education
6. Pietari ICE: collaborative project between Finland and St. Petersburg

And the university is proud of its decision to invest heavily in teacher education and future teachers—made visible by recently publishing three articles in its glossy magazine, HUB, focused on “Designing the Future.” As a city, Helsinki is all about design—and the university’s education school is right in the middle of it.

What the PDK/Gallup Poll Says About U.S. Education (And How It Compares to Finland)

I can’t help but consider my Finnish Lessons as I examine the latest PDK/Gallup poll about Americans’ attitudes toward education. Below I take on a few themes.

The Role of Curriculum in Teaching and Learning

There’s much to be encouraged about in the recent poll. The vast majority of Americans (75%), for example, think that the Common Core will provide more consistency in the quality of education.

The Common Core promises to frame more integrated and deeper learning opportunities for students. But I wonder if, in our implementation (or execution) of the Common Core, we will take a page out of the Finnish playbook. Finnish administrators and teachers embrace their national curriculum because it represents the nation’s educational values, rather than narrow prescriptions for learning. 

And, importantly, in Finland, teachers and principals are the ones who determine whether their students have met the standards.

Standardization vs. Professionalism

Most Americans say that a third of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on standardized tests. But when asked to list words that describe the teachers who had the most positive influence on them, Americans responded with words like “caring,” “encouraging,” and “attentive.” Those adjectives hardly coincide with the impersonal and stressful multiple-choice standardized tests students must take, regardless of background or ability level.

The Finns, primarily because they screen and prepare (not one or the other) each teacher so well, do not seem to care about teacher evaluation. They avoid the twisted contortions and gnashing of teeth over how to precisely use a value-added measure—based on one 20th-century standardized test—to determine 50 percent of a teacher’s effectiveness ratings.

After a couple of visits to Finnish schools, I can imagine how the Finns could leave every country behind in international measures of student achievement if they took professional development and evaluation more seriously—building on their trust of educators to make professional decisions about who is doing well and why.

But one thing is certain: Any teacher evaluation reforms in Finland would have to take into account that no one teacher is rarely, if ever, solely responsible for the education of a group (or even a class of students). It would be wise for U.S. policy to do the same.

Rating the Schools

Once again, the American public rates public schools very favorably—if they know them.

• 77% give an A or B grade to the school their eldest child attends
• 48% give an A or B grade to the schools in their communities
• 19% give an A or B  grade to the nation’s public schools as a whole

Less than half of Americans without kids in public schools have visited one in the past year. So you have to wonder—where are they getting their information?

Perhaps it was from a Newsweek cover story of late titled “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” or from reformers like Joel Klein who claim that our schools, uniformly, are failing. In Finland, there are teachers who are not teaching effectively, and there are schools that are not great. But no one—including the Finnish media reporting on student matriculation exams—classifies teachers or schools as “bad” or “failures.”

In the United States, policymakers and business leaders often point to standardized tests as the metric for judging school success and teacher effectiveness. Not in Finland. As Risto E.J. Penttila, Secretary General of the Chamber of Commerce, told us today: “The purpose of our education system is to make good citizens.”  I suspect those Americans who know the public schools can see the work they’re doing in making good citizens.  They are the same Americans who characterize effective teachers as “caring.”

The Role of the Media

Looking at the PDK/Gallup poll results, there seems to be a discrepancy between Americans’ local, individual experiences with education, and broader perceptions of the system as a whole. When it comes to thinking about education on a national scale, we rely less on our own experiences and more on what the media reports.

And when the media focuses on what’s wrong with education rather than what’s right with education, it can be easy to make assumptions that skew negative. Our media doesn’t portray educators as a group as being a “caring,” “attentive,” or “encouraging” group.

Which makes it incredibly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our positive experiences at our schools and our children’s schools are the exception, not the rule.

Along the same lines, the PDK/Gallup shows an uptick in support for using public dollars to send kids to private schools (44 percent were in favor in 2012, compared to 34 percent in 2011). However, how much media coverage shows side-by-side comparisons of student achievement in public vs. private and charter schools? In many cases, public schools still do a better job educating students, while at the same time educating all students.

Just as educators have a responsibility to their students, the media has a responsibility to cover not just hot-button issues that attract readers by causing alarm. We need to celebrate our teachers' and students' successes—not failures—so they can serve as a model in our profession and in our communities.

Finland Travel Log: Less Pressure on Teachers, More Respect for Students

Below is the fourth in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. (Read parts one, two, and three for more reflections.)

Students at Kallahti Comprehensive School

Today I visited Kallahti Comprehensive School (Grades 1-9) in Helsinki. Kallahti serves 450 students; 30 percent of whom are immigrants, from Russia, Pakistan, and Somalia. When we arrived, the school’s headmaster, Timo Heikkinen, greeted us at the front door of the horseshoe-shaped building, a structure that allowed as much of the Finnish sun as possible to shine through its many classroom windows.

A Relaxed Pace

When I walked in, I felt an “ease of pace” that is rarely found in American schools. Finnish schools are well supported with a child-development infrastructure that guarantees every child a pre-primary experience between the ages of three and six. This pre-school experience strengthens children’s self-esteem and autonomy as learners. You could see the benefits clearly in how older children and young adolescents behaved and tuned into their teachers at Kallahti. The foundations of the Finnish day care system, described briefly yesterday, show up in the perfect manners of teenagers in the school cafeteria.  

Respect for Differences

Walking down the halls, observing classrooms, and having lunch with students, teachers, and the principal, I felt the enormous amount of respect that everyone had for one another. Each student’s culture, religion, and language are honored. In fact, we learned that educators in Finland view the “mother tongue as the tool of thinking.”

In Finnish schools, differences in language, religion, and culture are respected and embraced.

Special education students are not stigmatized—at all. And at Kallahti, four special education teachers assist their colleagues in adapting instruction for students with specific needs. 

Room for Development

There are five-week crash courses on how to teach in Finland. (For a rich description of why Finnish schools are successful, see LynNell Hancock’s article published by Smithsoian.com, as well as this Channel One video clip.)

That said, Kallahti Comprehensive, as described by headmaster Timo Heikkinen (who is highlighted in LynNell’s article and the Channel One clip), is “not a school at the top. Timo would like to see more coordinated time to teach subjects in depth and not in “one sitting” (i.e., 45 minutes). He’d also like more coordinated professional development for a staff that he says is, for the most part, “very, very well prepared.”

I learned that while the Finns support a highly centralized approach to preservice teacher education, their professional development is funded solely by municipalities and can therefore vary greatly. Perhaps this is why we saw some outstanding teaching, as well as some very traditional approaches.

The Big Takeaway

The Finns have built a terrific infrastructure to support kids and their parents—allowing for solid teaching from virtually every teacher and translating that teaching to extraordinary results for students. 

As we learned today in a debrief session back at the Center for International Mobility (led by the venerable Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons), teachers want to teach in Finland because they have "big freedom.” Every teacher seemed to have so much patience—and worked at an even, unrushed pace. They weren’t pressed into frenzied teaching by high-stakes tests like so many of their American counterparts.

And parents have deep trust and confidence in the Finnish teachers—a sentiment echoed by Tuomas Kurttila, executive director of the Finnish Parents’ League.

I want to conclude by sharing what I thought was one of the most insightful analyses of the day, from Nick Donahue of the Nellie Mae Foundation (and one of the 30-plus delegates on our study tour): “In the United States, we rush to implement technical solutions and ignore the kind of community and culture context."

The Finns do the opposite. It is clear that they value children, seriously fund education and day care, and invest in teachers. In the United States, teachers are seen as an expense, not an investment, and while our policymakers say they value children, they do not back up their lofty rhetoric with the right policies and programs.

Finland Travel Log: Child-Centered Preschool Programs

Below is the third in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. Read Part One here and Part Two here.

Tuomarilan Paivakoti, a publicly funded Finnish day care

My first full day in Helsinki confirmed so much of what I have read about Finland's child-centered approach to teaching and learning. Let me also offer up a few words from Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford University), Pasi Sahlberg (Director of Finland's Center for International Mobility), Barbro Hogstrom (Director of Child Care in Education for Finland's Ministry of Education), and Dan Leeds (National Public Education Support Fund). Their words set up the context for a few of my own observations.
 
Pasi: We have learned so much about child development and the science of teaching and learning from American education researchers.
 
Linda: Teacher education is deep and intense here. It all begins with child development. It is the first class that prospective teachers take.
 
Linda: School does not start until age seven for children here. This is when they are ready to learn. It is not like in America, where we are now trying to force kids to learn at age three, four, and five—and when they don’t, we label them as failures.  All preschool programs [in Finland] are based on what we know about play and socialization in child development.
 
Barbro: Playing is the way to learning.
 
The Finnish education system's student-teacher ratios reflect the nation's values. For children under three years old, there is a 1:4 adult-child ratio. For students between three and six years old, the ratio is 1:7.  So for every 21 children there are 3 teachers—who are each fully prepared with a university degree in early childhood instruction. Soon Finland will require two-thirds of its early-childhood teachers to also have a bachelor’s or master’s in early childhood education.
 
Barbro was asked about quality control in early childhood education. "This is why we have teachers," she responded.
 
Finland is serious about being consistent research on early childhood development and learning to read. Educators here are flexible—and patient. The day care center I visited—Tuomarilan Paivakoti, funded publicly—would make Maria Montessori and advocates of the Reggio Emilia approach proud.

Finland values small student-teacher ratios, especially in early childhood.

The school supports 90 young children for 190 days a year with 20 adults in the building. The teachers work different schedules, so that the school can open at 6:30 a.m. and close at 6:00 p.m. The teachers I observed deliberately taught colors and sorting and how to make educated guesses. They were careful to make sure the students were included and valued, despite any disability. They made a fun-filled game in their small gym an opportunity to coordinate and collaborate.

I loved watching three-year-olds, carefully supervised, serve themselves lunch (and seconds) and clear their plates. I was thrilled to see teachers not rushing them. These precious young humans were barely 36 months old. Each teacher, you could see, was so proud of their knowledge of young children and the independent and autonomous learners they are helping them to be.
 
Dan: You cannot translate every Finnish lesson for improving America’s public education system. But you can, like the world’s great cuisines, adapt from others and meld it with your own recipes.
 
I overheard many people from our U.S. delegation comment that what they saw in these high-quality day care programs in Helsinki and Espoo was similar to what they experienced with their own young children.

Is it not time to do for all children what we want for our own?

Below is the second in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. Read Part One here.

As I begin my weeklong dive into the Finnish education system, and the theory of change that guides it, I was struck by two New York Times pieces I read today—one on getting tough on teachers from Frank Bruni, and one from Paul Tough on hard questions about President Obama and his commitment to addressing the “deep poverty” in which one in ten school children live. 

I will learn a great deal over the next five days about Finland and its comprehensive approach to early learning, transitions to public school, and social safety nets (Monday); primary school and the role of afterschool and summer programs (Tuesday); secondary education and preparation for career and college (Wednesday); the teaching profession (Thursday); and building and sustaining public will for investments in children and public education (Friday). 

But what I do know now is that in Finland policymakers do not build false divisions between improving the teaching profession and addressing the human condition.  Granted, there are parts of what Frank Bruni writes in his piece, “Teachers on the Defensive,” that resonate with me — for instance, teachers’ unions being out of step with much-needed reforms (cases in point: seniority and quality-blind hiring and placements). But Mr. Bruni’s call to get tough on unions suggests that by getting better teachers, we don’t have many good ones now. And his analysis, centered on the release of the new film Won’t Back Down, suggests that if only tenure and seniority rules were jettisoned, and policymakers could hire smarter teachers who worked harder, our public schools could overcome the ravages of deep poverty.  

On the other hand, Paul Tough challenges this assertion ever so poignantly in his piece “What Does Obama Really Believe In?”  Mr. Tough’s 6,000-word essay paints a rich portrait of our nation’s failed social and economic policies that have yet to address the deep poverty that affects so many like Jasmine and Damien who live in the South Side of Chicago, where President Obama worked as a community organizer. Tough questions Secretary Duncan’s well-meaning belief that the “only way to end poverty is through education”—a belief that has put educators on the defensive.  

Tough points out that Jasmine and Damien attended Christian Fenger High School—the target of many reforms under both Duncan and his predecessor, but never improved. Tough reminds us how “early stress” in children’s lives—including a “paralyzing mix of unforgiving economic conditions” and “destructive social influences”—make it “almost impossible” for young people like Jasmine and Damien to “escape.” He points to the neuroscience that shows how those early stresses on children “disrupt the healthy growth of the prefrontal cortex” and how the “absence of strong and supportive relationships with stable adults inhibits a child’s development of a crucial set of cognitive skills called executive functions.”

Tough has written extensively on the power and potential of the Harlem’s Children Zone and its comprehensive approach that, in addition to high-quality education, encompasses parenting programs, preschools, a medical clinic, a farmers’ market, and family counseling.  He questions why President Obama promised to invest in a billion dollars in the HCZ model, but has only come up with a mere $40 million over the last three years.

Mr. Tough reminds us that President Obama once said that to overcome poverty, of which failing schools is only a symptom, we must “heal the entire community.” It is time for us to think about teacher quality reforms in light of a teaching- and learning-development system.

As Dan Leeds, president of the National Public Education Support Fund and a very successful international businessman, told us this evening, "I learned a long time ago that you learn more from other companies sometimes than your own."

It's time to learn from Finland.

I’m sitting in the Charlotte airport, minutes from embarking on a trip to Helsinki to study the Finnish education system, with a delegation of U.S. foundation officials, policy wonks, and top-level government officials.  Finnish students, in international comparisons of student achievement, hold top academic rankings at the same time their nation’s schools are being filled with increasingly diverse children and adolescents.

A huge kudos to the National Public Education Support Fund (and the leadership of Dan Leeds and Terri Shuck) for sponsoring five-plus days of school and classroom visits as well as intensive work sessions with top-ranking policy officials in both education and child care, teachers and teacher educators, union and ministry leaders.

Leading our week’s work will be Linda Darling-Hammond, author of Teacher Education Around the World, and Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons. I just finished reading both these books and was struck by the fact that in Finland, teacher education is viewed as a paramount investment, not an unnecessary expense (LDH). Finnish policymakers and the public view teachers with respect, and put a teaching, learning, and assessment system in place that is built on trust in those who teach.

Most media reports of the Finnish miracle focus on the selectivity involved in becoming a teacher. But rarely do we hear about the respect that’s paid to Finnish teachers, both pre-service and in the classroom. I wonder why.

In Finland, there is no need for high-stakes accountability (including rigid measures of teaching effectiveness) because all teachers are well prepared (at government expense) and are afforded the time (only 19 hours a week of direct instruction of students compared to 32+ in America) to develop and adapt curriculum, design and score student assessments, collaborate around problems of practice, and build school-community partnerships.

I am thinking a lot about what I will witness firsthand about the Finns’ respect for teachers—and my thoughts turn to my colleague, Jon Eckert, teacher education professor at Wheaton College, and one of his recent top-flight graduates (scored over a 1350 on her SAT) who recently graduated with honors (cum laude) with a K-9 certificate, fluent in Spanish, and with student-teaching experience in Illinois schools as well as in Guatemala and Ecuador.

But Morgan cannot find a teaching job, as she describes in this transformED blog post, because of aloof district administrators as well as apathetic principals. She had to consider part-time positions and ones that paid incredibly low salaries—without benefits.

Would Finnish school leaders allow a highly qualified teacher candidate like Morgan to teach a sample lesson without listening to or even watching her? I doubt it.

I’ll be posting my thoughts and observations on my blog from Finland all next week—check back for more posts, and follow me on Twitter at @BarnettCTQ. I’m eager to share what I learn.

Finland Travel Log: Teachers, Poverty, and Policy

Below is the second in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. Read Part One here.

As I begin my weeklong dive into the Finnish education system, and the theory of change that guides it, I was struck by two New York Times pieces I read today—one on getting tough on teachers from Frank Bruni, and one from Paul Tough on hard questions about President Obama and his commitment to addressing the “deep poverty” in which one in ten school children live. 

I will learn a great deal over the next five days about Finland and its comprehensive approach to early learning, transitions to public school, and social safety nets (Monday); primary school and the role of afterschool and summer programs (Tuesday); secondary education and preparation for career and college (Wednesday); the teaching profession (Thursday); and building and sustaining public will for investments in children and public education (Friday). 

But what I do know now is that in Finland policymakers do not build false divisions between improving the teaching profession and addressing the human condition.  Granted, there are parts of what Frank Bruni writes in his piece, “Teachers on the Defensive,” that resonate with me — for instance, teachers’ unions being out of step with much-needed reforms (cases in point: seniority and quality-blind hiring and placements). But Mr. Bruni’s call to get tough on unions suggests that by getting better teachers, we don’t have many good ones now. And his analysis, centered on the release of the new film Won’t Back Down, suggests that if only tenure and seniority rules were jettisoned, and policymakers could hire smarter teachers who worked harder, our public schools could overcome the ravages of deep poverty.  

On the other hand, Paul Tough challenges this assertion ever so poignantly in his piece “What Does Obama Really Believe In?”  Mr. Tough’s 6,000-word essay paints a rich portrait of our nation’s failed social and economic policies that have yet to address the deep poverty that affects so many like Jasmine and Damien who live in the South Side of Chicago, where President Obama worked as a community organizer. Tough questions Secretary Duncan’s well-meaning belief that the “only way to end poverty is through education”—a belief that has put educators on the defensive.  

Tough points out that Jasmine and Damien attended Christian Fenger High School—the target of many reforms under both Duncan and his predecessor, but never improved. Tough reminds us how “early stress” in children’s lives—including a “paralyzing mix of unforgiving economic conditions” and “destructive social influences”—make it “almost impossible” for young people like Jasmine and Damien to “escape.” He points to the neuroscience that shows how those early stresses on children “disrupt the healthy growth of the prefrontal cortex” and how the “absence of strong and supportive relationships with stable adults inhibits a child’s development of a crucial set of cognitive skills called executive functions.”

Tough has written extensively on the power and potential of the Harlem’s Children Zone and its comprehensive approach that, in addition to high-quality education, encompasses parenting programs, preschools, a medical clinic, a farmers’ market, and family counseling.  He questions why President Obama promised to invest in a billion dollars in the HCZ model, but has only come up with a mere $40 million over the last three years.

Mr. Tough reminds us that President Obama once said that to overcome poverty, of which failing schools is only a symptom, we must “heal the entire community.” It is time for us to think about teacher quality reforms in light of a teaching- and learning-development system.

As Dan Leeds, president of the National Public Education Support Fund and a very successful international businessman, told us this evening, "I learned a long time ago that you learn more from other companies sometimes than your own."

It's time to learn from Finland.

Finland Travel Log: Pre-Departure Notes

I’m sitting in the Charlotte airport, minutes from embarking on a trip to Helsinki to study the Finnish education system, with a delegation of U.S. foundation officials, policy wonks, and top-level government officials.  Finnish students, in international comparisons of student achievement, hold top academic rankings at the same time their nation’s schools are being filled with increasingly diverse children and adolescents.

A huge kudos to the National Public Education Support Fund (and the leadership of Dan Leeds and Terri Shuck) for sponsoring five-plus days of school and classroom visits as well as intensive work sessions with top-ranking policy officials in both education and child care, teachers and teacher educators, union and ministry leaders.

Leading our week’s work will be Linda Darling-Hammond, author of Teacher Education Around the World, and Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons. I just finished reading both these books and was struck by the fact that in Finland, teacher education is viewed as a paramount investment, not an unnecessary expense (LDH). Finnish policymakers and the public view teachers with respect, and put a teaching, learning, and assessment system in place that is built on trust in those who teach.

Most media reports of the Finnish miracle focus on the selectivity involved in becoming a teacher. But rarely do we hear about the respect that’s paid to Finnish teachers, both pre-service and in the classroom. I wonder why.

In Finland, there is no need for high-stakes accountability (including rigid measures of teaching effectiveness) because all teachers are well prepared (at government expense) and are afforded the time (only 19 hours a week of direct instruction of students compared to 32+ in America) to develop and adapt curriculum, design and score student assessments, collaborate around problems of practice, and build school-community partnerships.

I am thinking a lot about what I will witness firsthand about the Finns’ respect for teachers—and my thoughts turn to my colleague, Jon Eckert, teacher education professor at Wheaton College, and one of his recent top-flight graduates (scored over a 1350 on her SAT) who recently graduated with honors (cum laude) with a K-9 certificate, fluent in Spanish, and with student-teaching experience in Illinois schools as well as in Guatemala and Ecuador.

But Morgan cannot find a teaching job, as she describes in this transformED blog post, because of aloof district administrators as well as apathetic principals. She had to consider part-time positions and ones that paid incredibly low salaries—without benefits.

Would Finnish school leaders allow a highly qualified teacher candidate like Morgan to teach a sample lesson without listening to or even watching her? I doubt it.

I’ll be posting my thoughts and observations on my blog from Finland all next week—check back for more posts, and follow me on Twitter at @BarnettCTQ. I’m eager to share what I learn.