Rethinking School Leadership

"The role of the school principal in Canada is increasingly multifaceted and complex. Beyond the foundational administrative and managerial roles they are expected to master, principals are also expected to be innovators and agents of change -- all of this in a culture that increasingly challenges traditional conceptions of leadership."

~ J-C Couture

In June I wrote a post on 5 ways teachers can demonstrate leadership in the classroom.

Here are 5 ways school administrators can exhibit and inspire leadership in their schools and school districts.

1. Good leaders stick around. We know that high principal turnover often leads to greater teacher turnover and initiative fatigue. Sometimes these moves are made by the choices of senior administrators from the school district, however, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan reminds us that "regularized rotation of principals by their districts every 3-5 years has more a negative than positive effect on improvement efforts". Other times these moves are initiated by principals who "use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments". When leaders come and go in search of their own self-promotion, it's hard to see them as allies with the community. This is no more evident than in New Orleans, a city that is 65 percent black, where the corporate education reform movement is almost entirely white led. In the US, average tenure for urban superintendents is just three years, while education secretaries in England and France tend to turnover after only two years. Albertans have had 4 Ministers of Education since 2011, and we know that Canadian principals are, "at risk of burnout in an increasingly ramped up culture of performativity".

This shouldn't be our society or our schools.

2. Good leaders distribute leadership without stepping on others. Most education systems, school districts and schools are built on hierarchal systems where well intentioned fidelity too often becomes code for do as you are told. Andy Hargreaves reminds us that the best leaders "uplift those they serve by uplifting those who serve them". The best leaders know that they don't know everything, so they reject cultures of compliance built on confirmation bias and instead seek dissent to liberate the conversation. The best leaders reject comforting lies and embrace unpleasant truths. The best leaders reject the seductiveness of efficiency via fear and conformity through standardization and fatalism. Good leaders don't merely accumulate and exercise power while reminding their inferiors to follow along. Good leaders share power to grow leadership among all.

The worst leaders are Decepticons.

3. Leaders don't enslave -- they support. Some leaders empower and inspire teachers to work with children in ways that leave life long impressions while others create instruments of control to separate the powerful from the powerless that makes compliance the gold standard. Teaching is a highly relational and complex job that cannot be reduced to a one-size-fits-all standardized approach. If teachers are to have any hope in accomplishing what many people admit to be an undesirable and impossible job, they require servant leadership that puts "the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible."

4. School leaders are teachers. In his book Finnish Lessons 2.0, Pasi Sahlberg reminds us that, "Some countries allow their schools to be led by non-educators, hoping that business-style management will raise efficiency and improve performance." Most Canadians wouldn't understand how an non-teacher could possibly lead a school or school district while our American neighbours have already embraced this as common practice.

@HargreavesBC @joe_bower Also unsustainable for teachers to provide effective feedback for improvement but receive none themselves

— Ruth Sutton (@ruthsutton) June 21, 2015

 If you haven't taught, you can't give teachers the feedback they need to improve. If you haven't taught, you can't lead teachers. Period.

I found this written on my whiteboard
on the last day of school. 

5. The best leaders don't value what they measure -- they measure what they value. In their book Professional Capital: Transforming teaching in every school, Andy Hargreaves and Micheal Fullen layout how, "great schools are made up of three kinds of capital: human capital (the talent of individuals); social capital (the collaborative power of the group); and decisional capital (the wisdom and expertise to make sound judgements about learners that are cultivated over many years".

At the end of this school year, my grade 6 students wrote Provincial Achievement Tests. Their multiple choice scantrons were promptly shipped off to our provincial capital to be counted.

At the end of this school year, I found this message on my whiteboard that counted formally and officially for nothing -- but meant everything to me and to that student. Good leaders would care about this emotionally intelligent piece of data at least as much, if not more, than spreadsheet-friendly test scores. Albert Einstein said it all, " Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts".

Such a nuanced approach requires us to temper, if not abandon, our mania for reducing learning and teaching to numbers. While so many forces work to sterilize and standardize our schools, Hargreaves and Fullen lead the way to humanize education.

MYTH: You can do more with less

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg who is a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? This post first appeared here.

by Pasi Sahlberg

Governments in Alberta and Finland are under economic pressure to reduce public spending as a result of failed national politics and unpredictable global economics. When government budgets get off track, bad news for education systems follow. The recently defeated Finnish government carried out huge cuts in education infrastructure. As a result, small schools were closed, teaching staff lost their jobs and morale among educators declined. Albertans are now facing similar threats.

When the going gets tough in our wealthy societies, the powers-that-be often choose quick fixes. In search of a silver bullet instead of sustained systemic improvement, politicians turn their eyes on teachers, believing that asking them to do more with less can compensate for inconvenient reductions in school resources. With super teachers, some of them say, the quality of education will improve even with lesser budgets. While some might suggest leadership is doing more with less, I would counter that real political leadership is about getting the appropriate resources in place to create a vibrant society.

“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. It plays a visible role in the education policies of nations where there is a wide range of teacher qualifications and therefore uneven teacher quality. Measuring teacher effectiveness has brought different methods of evaluation to the lives of teachers in many countries. The most controversial of them include what is known as value-added models that use data from standardized tests of students as part of the overall measure of the effect that a teacher has on student achievement.

Alberta and Finland are significantly better off than many other countries when it comes to teacher quality and teacher policies. In the United States, for example, there are nearly 2,000 different teacher preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Canada and Finland, only rigorously accredited academic teacher education programs are available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor Finland has fast-track options into teaching (although Teach for Canada is entering the game in Alberta with 40 new recruits in 2015/2016). Teacher quality in successful education systems is a result of careful quality control at the entry stage of teacher education rather than measuring the effectiveness of in-service teachers.

In recent years the “no excuses” argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse used to avoid insisting that all schools should reach higher standards. With this argument, the silver bullet is better teachers. In Finland, education policies have concentrated more on school improvement than on teacher effectiveness, indicating that schools are expected to improve by having everyone work together rather than teachers working individually. Lessons from the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) were identical. Effective school development is equally about system-wide social capital and developing strong individual human capital.

THREE Fallacies

When education budgets are questioned or cut, teachers are often asked to do more with less. Some economists have calculated how much students’ achievement could be improved by enhancing the quality of the teaching force. An efficient way to do that, they argue, is to find poorly performing teachers and get rid of them. Then, bringing young, enthusiastic talent into these classrooms will actually lead to the betterment of education at the same time when resources diminish. Within this logic lie three fallacies that, if taken as facts, will be harmful for the teaching profession and thereby for the entire education system.

The first fallacy is to believe that the best way to elevate the teaching profession is to attract the best and the brightest to become teachers. In many countries the teaching profession has suffered from declining social respect, trust and thereby popularity among young people as prospective and admired lifelong career. Education system leaders, such as Arne Duncan in the U.S. and Michael Gove in the U.K., have suggested that recruiting academically smarter people to teach in schools would enhance the quality of teaching and improve academic outcomes in schools.

Those who rely on the idea of “the best and the brightest” often point to Finland and Singapore as examples of education systems that have built their success on that principle. We frequently hear that the best education systems systematically recruit new student teachers from the top 10 per cent of their applicant pool. But a closer look at how students are selected into initial teacher education programs reveals that the truth is not that straightforward.

The University of Helsinki in Finland selects 120 new students from approximately 2,000 applicants each year for its primary school teacher education program. This pool is large enough to actually pick up all 120 students from the best quintile. But that doesn’t happen.

In 2014, as I have shown elsewhere, only one of four students selected into the teacher education program at the University of Helsinki came from the top quintile. Furthermore, one in four students had an academic record that placed her or him in the bottom half of the pool, as measured by their performance in diploma examinations. Clearly it is important that criteria beyond strictly defined academic qualifications must be considered in selecting teacher candidates.

Singapore follows similar academic admission procedures for students who study at the National Institute of Education.

The second fallacy is that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report entitled How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out On Top. It has since appeared in the 2012 reports of the Programme for International Student Assessment — by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — as well as several policy reports and documents. Although these documents often take a broader view of enhancing the status of teachers through better pay and careful recruitment, this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by the quality of its teachers.

Many educators, and certainly experienced teachers and school principals, perceive teaching in school as team play. The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team or musician in an orchestra: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports and performing arts offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit.

Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both the Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team U.S.A certainly exceeded the quality of its players. Or take Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse. Without five-star musicians that always hit all the chords perfectly they have performed better than the quality of each player and created music enjoyed by millions for almost half a century. So can an education system.

The third fallacy is that the most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers. This is the driving principle of former New York City public schools’ chancellor Joel Klein in his new book as well as many other education “reformers” today. If a teacher were the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school. But we have known since the mid-1960s that that isn’t so.

Research on what explains students’ measured performance in school remains mixed. However, researchers generally agree that up to two-thirds of the variation in student achievement is explainable by individual student characteristics like family background and such variables. The American Statistical Association concluded recently that teachers account for about 1 per cent to 14 per cent of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in system-level conditions. In other words, most of what explains student achievement is beyond the control of teachers or even schools, and therefore arguing that teachers are the most important factor in improving the quality of education is simply wrong.

This doesn’t mean that teachers would not be important or that individual teachers could not turn the course of children in school. Of course they do. But it is often a combination of powerful factors that makes the most positive impact on students. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of good schools, equally important to powerful teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having a shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.

HANDLE WITH CARE

At a time of austerity, education policymakers have to be very careful in changing and also protecting current conditions that influence the teaching profession. It is tempting to suggest that, by enhancing teacher effectiveness, we can maintain current levels of teaching quality in schools. It is also far too convenient to suggest that, on top of all other duties, teachers should contribute more to struggling national economies by creating innovators, active citizens and a skilled labour force to emerging new occupations. In this respect, Alberta and Finland stand before a similar challenge. Searching for super teachers is not the right solution.

Instead, leaders in Alberta and Finland need to be reminded that schools must have appropriate, well-researched policies supported by adequate resources to be part of the campaign to bring our economies back on track. Finnish schools are now redesigning their curricula to match the National Curriculum Framework 2016. All schools must have at least one extended study period for all students, and all the school subjects are merged into integrated, phenomenon-based teaching and learning. Municipalities and schools may choose to have more than one such study period per year, and they may also decide the duration of these periods. This renewal has the potential to become a revolutionary step forward in building the ideal future school in Finland.

Educational reform won’t happen without sustained investments in schools, appropriate support to teachers, and changing some of the current regulations that stand in the way of planned change. Bilateral research partnerships like that between Finland and Alberta (FINAL) can play a pivotal role in making necessary changes possible. As we have learned from FINAL, it is through the internationalization of education research and evidence gathering that we can create the kinds of schools our students deserve.

1 The entire March 2015 issue of Educational Researcher, the journal of the American Educational Research Association, was dedicated to teacher evaluations and value-added models.

2 Sahlberg, P. 2015. “Q: What makes Finland’s teachers so special? A: It’s not brains.” The Guardian, March 31. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/31/finnish-teachers-special-train-teach (accessed on April 24, 2015).

3 McKinsey & Company. 2010. How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top. London: McKinsey & Company.

4 American Statistical Association (ASA). 2014. ASAStatement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment. Alexandra, Va: ASA.

From Detesting to De-Testing

This post was featured in Cathy Rubin's The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Teacher Blogs.

How do you balance preparation for high stakes assessments with teaching and learning in your classroom?


In my classroom, I have replaced tests and grades with projects and performances collected in portfolios. It’s been 10 years since I used a multiple choice test to assess my students, so it’s safe to say that I do not agree with having to administer a standardized multiple choice test for the government at the end of an entire year of making learning visible via blogging.

Teachers are repeatedly told that the best way to prepare students for standardized tests is to teach the curriculum, but this is at best misleading. We know that multiple choice tests require a certain amount of test taking skills, and that students who have a better understanding for the nuances of multiple choice tests can score well without having learned what the tests claim to be measuring.

So how do I live with myself when I have an obligation to administer standardized tests that I don’t support?

In his article Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools, Alfie Kohn writes:

Whenever something in the schools is amiss, it makes sense for us to work on two tracks at once. We must do our best in the short term to protect students from the worst effects of a given policy, but we must also work to change or eliminate that policy. If we overlook the former – the need to minimize the harm of what is currently taking place, to devise effective coping strategies — then we do a disservice to children in the here and now. But (and this is by far the more common error) if we overlook the latter – the need to alter the current reality — then we are condemning our children’s children to having to make the best of the same unacceptable situation because it will still exist.

In the short term, I teach the curriculum the best I can, and I waste as little time as possible preparing students to fill in bubbles. However, as test day approaches we do a practice test in small groups to reduce anxiety and increase familiarity. The best teachers act less like conduits for the tests and more like a buffer that protects students from the harmful effects of testing, so I also assure students and parents that I do not use the standardized test as a part of their report card.

In the long term, I tweet, blog, write articles and talk with anyone and everyone about how and why standardized tests are broken and how and why the alternatives to the tests are far more authentic. I go out of my way to make the alternatives to standardized tests so obviously better that parents and students see the tests as an unfortunate distraction from real learning.

To advocate for authentic alternatives to standardized tests I actively work with my Alberta Teachers’ Association to create local public events with speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, Pasi Sahlberg, Yong Zhao and Andy Hargreaves. I’ve joined a political party in Alberta and influenced their education policies. I wrote Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized testing and co-edited De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Standardization and Accountability.

Together parents, students and teachers join together to opt-out of testing.

Classroom Technology: Nightmare or Dream?

Technological advances in our schools in the last 10 years have been remarkable, and there is no doubt that technology will continue to disrupt our schools in both helpful and harmful ways. To be clear, I love technology and use it every single day. I teach with it and learn with it. It's important to remember, however, that technology cannot be allowed to have a monopoly on innovation in our schools. If public education is to survive the next 10 years, we need to see how technology and personalization can be read as either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who is writing the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee are writing the plot, then personalization in learning is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the rich get a computer and a teacher but the poor get just a computer. Herein, technology and personalization isn't about learning – it’s about money. In this story’s final chapter technology functions as a Trojan horse, sneakily shouldering an army of economists and shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time, waiting for an in.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Pasi Sahlberg, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond, Will Richardson and Diane Ravitch are writing the plot, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, all children are given computers and teachers, even when it’s cheaper to deny some students the latter. Herein, personalization and technology is used for the purposes of universal education not subordinated to the interests of big business.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions (the dream) but it can also be about competing over profits (the nightmare). Worse still, personalization can turn into a kind of hyper-personalization, where computers are given to students with zero facilitation from real life teachers. This is akin to pilotless flying and surgeonless surgery and yet this is precisely the vision of many in power, a vision where technology uses the learner, instead of the learner using the technology. However, this can only become a reality if good people remain silent. Classroom innovators and public educators must speak out against the nightmare narrative of technological implementation (of Gates and Murdoch) so that technology and personalization can assist the dream of learning for all.

Diane Ravitch's Forward for Finnish Lessons 2.0

This was written by Diane Ravitch as the forward to Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?

by Diane Ravitch

Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons was published exactly when it was most needed. When it appeared, the so-called education "reform" movement was ascendant in the United States and elsewhere and growing stronger.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were enthusiastic supporters of "reform." Their program, called Race to the Top, was launched in 2009, and it contained the key ingredients of the reform paradigm: testing, accountability and choice. Educators were caught by surprise, as they had been led to expect that President Obama would end President George W. Bush's much-hated No Child Left Behind (NCLB). But the Obama program was built directly on the shaky foundation of NCLB. Instead of jettisoning high stakes testing, Race to the Top increased the importance of testing. Now, not only would students and schools be held accountable for student test scores, but teachers would be given a bonus or fired based on test scores.

The reform movement moved into high gear in 2010. Newsweek magazine ran a cover story that spring declaring "we must fire bad teachers," as though schools were overrun by "bad" teachers. That fall, the film Waiting for "Superman" was released with massive publicity. Its message: our public schools are failing, and the only hop for children stuck in "failing" public school sis to escape to a privately managed charter school. The then-chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools, Michelle Rhee, became a media sensation, with her tough talk about the schools and the pleasure she took in firing teachers and principals.

Some of the nation's richest foundations -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and many others -- poured millions into this reform movement, encouraging high-stakes testing, Teach for America, charter schools, and even (in the case of the Walton Foundation) vouchers for religious schools.

Several states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, rolled back collective bargaining rights, and teachers' unions became scapegoats, blamed for low test scores and for driving up the cost of education because of their health care and pensions. Surveys showed that teachers were demoralized -- as well they should be -- by the attacks upon them and upon their profession.

Thus it was that when Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons was published, it injected a new dimension into education debates. Finland had high test scores in international student assessments, and it was not doing anything that our American reformers demanded. It had a strong public school system. It did not have charters or vouchers. It had very high standards for entry into teaching; there was no such thing as Teach for Finland that would allow inexperienced young college graduates to teach in Finnish schools. Sahlberg described a 5-year teacher preparation program that all teachers must complete to teach in Finnish schools.

Teachers and principals belong to the same union, which not only negotiates wages and working conditions, but advocates on behalf of children and schools. Although Finland has a national curriculum, teachers have wide latitude to shape it to their own needs and strengths. Best of all, Finland does not subject students to standardized tests until the end of their high school years. As Sahlberg writes, the schools are a standardized testing-free zone.

What many American educators loved about Finnish Lessons is that it portrays an alternative universe, one that respects educators and enables them to do their best work, one that recognizes that society has an obligation to ensure the health and well-being of children. Sahlberg knew that the Finnish story stoop in sharp contrast with what was happening in the United States and other countries. He refers to this movement for testing and choice as GERM: the Global Educational Reform Movement.

Yes, indeed, the United States, Britain, and many other countries are infected with GERM. Finnish Lessons 2.0 is a disinfectant. It reminds us that nation can consciously build an admirable school system if it pays close attention to the needs of children, if it selects and prepares its educators well, and if it builds educational communities that are not only physically attractive but conducive to the joys of teaching and learning.

David Berliner and Pasi Sahlberg

I'm in Calgary at the Calgary Teachers' Convention and I am listening to David Berliner and Pasi Sahlberg talk about The Roots of Success for All Children: It's in the context of their lives, not just in their classroom experiences.

David Berliner

• Despite what you might hear, teachers do not affect standardized test scores very much
• Teachers do affect student's lives but not their scores
• Standardized test are influenced by socio-economic circumstances and less by classroom instruction.
• Want to improve scores? Improve children's lives outside of school.
• As the context of children's lives changes, so do their standardized test scores.
• Children who live in chaos tend to be chaotic. Remove the chaos --  
• Societies affect on children's performance is intense.
• The Problem is Poverty.
• There are many school variables that teachers can't control: class size, administrators, collective empathy of the faculty, teacher turn over, students coming and going.
• We can not trust standardized tests to tell us what we want to know about our schools.
• Want to find the school with the highest test scores? Buy an expensive house.
• When governments cut education, they make inequality and inequity worse, and the poorest people pay the most.
• There is a huge difference in the number of books in the richest homes and the poorest homes.
• Affluent parents tend to speak more with their children than the poorest parents who are struggling to make ends meet.
• The best education systems care as much about what happens outside of the classroom as what happens inside.
• Standardized tests are insensitive to teacher instruction.
• Alberta needs to pay closer attention to the research on school improvement
• Here are all of my posts on David Berliner

Pasi Sahlberg

• In 2000, many school systems thought that they had found the secret elixir to fix all schools: Accountability through standardized tests. PISA's influence was born.
• Since 2000, the focus of school improvement has been focused intensely on teachers.
• The United States is a good example of how not to improve education.
• Finland's reaction to school improvement and PISA is unique and paradoxical.
• Finland did not react or allow PISA to affect their system until 2008. 8 years after they were lauded as the best in the world. Finland was reluctant to share their story.
• Two Global Paths of Inquiry: What makes education systems perform well? What prevents system-wide improvement?
• Traditional Policy Logic: Should we focus on quality or equity? We know that we don't have to choose.
• Canada does very well with high quality and equity, but we are going in the wrong direction.
• While Canada and Alberta has traditionally compared well with their equity and equality, they are going in the wrong direction.
• Finland has had an inclusive education system for two decades.

Five things to learn from Finland:

1. Resourcing Policy: Schools with more needs, need more resources.
2. Early Childhood Care: This isn't really about education -- it's about childcare. 
3. Health and Wellbeing: Universal healthcare inside and outside of school. In the US, the number 1 reason why students miss school is because of problems with their teeth.
4. Special Education: A system that is proactive and preventative with students with special needs. Prevention is always cheaper than repair. 
5. Balanced Curriculum: Children need to learn about the arts and physical education as much as numeracy and literacy.

Pak Tee Ng (Singapore): Teach Less, Learn More

Here are 5 points that stand out for me:

1. Focusing on PISA scores, or scores on any other test, is not the same as focusing on student learning in the classroom. Too often, a focus on standardized testing can actually have a harmful affect on teaching and learning.

2. Education is an investment -- not an expenditure. Cutting education is like a farmer who sells his top soil.

3. Teachers don't need surveillance -- they need support. You don't improve the education system by firing individual bad teachers -- you improve the education system by creating good teachers and then trust them to do their job.

4. Teach Less -- Learn More. Pasi Sahlberg writes about Finland and Gary Stager writes about the Maker Movement. Pak Tee Ng reminds us that, "more of the same teaching is not the way to inspire better learning." Efforts to "teacher-proof" education via standardization is not the solution, it's the problem. 

5. You say you want this, so why are you doing that? Unfortunately, myths are often more satisfying to us than the truth - in education we are satisfyingly distracted by a great many myths. If we are to improve school, we have to allow it to change. And if we want to make the right change, we need to be evidence and research based.

Excellence in education requires equity, not elitism

Here are 5 of my favourite posts that include the brilliant work of Pasi Sahlberg. If you aren't following Pasi on Twitter, you should.

Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon

3 Myths of Teacher Quality

Dispelling the Corporate Reform Agenda

The Problem is Poverty

Sahlberg's Ten Big Ideas on Finland

What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools?

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg who is the author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? You can follow Pasi Sahlbeg on Twitter here and read his blog here. This post first appeared here.

by Pasi Sahlberg

Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.

“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested.Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.

In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.

In recent years the “no excuses”’ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school. Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.

For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being. Among 29 wealthy countries, the United States landed second from the last in child poverty and held a similarly poor position in “child life satisfaction.” Teachers alone, regardless of how effective they are, will not be able to overcome the challenges that poor children bring with them to schools everyday.

Finland is not a fan of standardization in education. However, teacher education in Finland is carefully standardized. All teachers must earn a master’s degree at one of the country’s research universities. Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough; only “the best and the brightest” are accepted. As a consequence, teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering. There is another “teacher quality” checkpoint at graduation from School of Education in Finland. Students are not allowed to earn degrees to teach unless they demonstrate that they possess knowledge, skills and morals necessary to be a successful teacher.

But education policies in Finland concentrate more on school effectiveness than on teacher effectiveness. This indicates that what schools are expected to do is an effort of everyone in a school, working together, rather than teachers working individually.

In many under-performing nations, I notice, three fallacies of teacher effectiveness prevail.

The first belief is that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report titled “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. Although the report takes a broader view on enhancing the status of teachers by better pay and careful recruitment this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by its teachers. By doing this, the report assumes that teachers work independently from one another. But teachers in most schools today, in the United States and elsewhere, work as teams when the end result of their work is their joint effort.

The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit. Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team USA certainly exceeded the quality of its players. So can an education system.

The second fallacy is that “the most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers.” This is the driving principle of former D.C. schools chancellor Michele Rhee and many other “reformers” today. This false belief is central to the “no excuses” school of thought. If a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.

Research on what explains students’ measured performance in school remains mixed. A commonly used conclusion is that 10% to 20% of the variance in measured student achievement belongs to the classroom, i.e., teachers and teaching, and a similar amount is attributable to schools, i.e., school climate, facilities and leadership. In other words, up to two-thirds of what explains student achievement is beyond the control of schools, i.e., family background and motivation to learn.

Over thirty years of systematic research on school effectiveness and school improvement reveals a number of characteristics that are typical of more effective schools. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.

The third fallacy is that “If any children had three or four great teachers in a row, they would soar academically, regardless of their racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall further and further behind”. This theoretical assumption is included in influential policy recommendations, for instance in “Essential Elements of Teacher Policy in ESEA: Effectiveness, Fairness and Evaluation” by the Center for American Progress to the U.S. Congress. Teaching is measured by the growth of student test scores on standardized exams.

This assumption presents a view that education reform alone could overcome the powerful influence of family and social environment mentioned earlier. It insists that schools should get rid of low-performing teachers and then only hire great ones. This fallacy has the most practical difficulties. The first one is about what it means to be a great teacher. Even if this were clear, it would be difficult to know exactly who is a great teacher at the time of recruitment. The second one is, that becoming a great teacher normally takes five to ten years of systematic practice. And determining the reliably of ‘effectiveness’ of any teacher would require at least five years of reliable data. This would be practically impossible.

Everybody agrees that the quality of teaching in contributing to learning outcomes is beyond question. It is therefore understandable that teacher quality is often cited as the most important in-school variable influencing student achievement. But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.

Lessons from high-performing school systems, including Finland, suggest that we must reconsider how we think about teaching as a profession and what is the role of the school in our society.

First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools. Singapore, Canada and Finland all set high standards for their teacher-preparation programs in academic universities. There is no Teach for Finland or other alternative pathways into teaching that wouldn’t include thoroughly studying theories of pedagogy and undergo clinical practice. These countries set the priority to have strict quality control before anybody will be allowed to teach – or even study teaching! This is why in these countries teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation are not such controversial topics as they are in the U.S. today.

Second, the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways inaccurate and unfair. It is inaccurate because most schools’ goals are broader than good performance in a few academic subjects. It is unfair because most of the variation of student achievement in standardized tests can be explained by out-of-school factors. Most teachers understand that what students learn in school is because the whole school has made an effort, not just some individual teachers. In the education systems that are high in international rankings, teachers feel that they are empowered by their leaders and their fellow teachers. In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance would be determined by their student’s standardized test results.

Third, other school policies must be changed before teaching becomes attractive to more young talents. In many countries where teachers fight for their rights, their main demand is not more money but better working conditions in schools. Again, experiences from those countries that do well in international rankings suggest that teachers should have autonomy in planning their work, freedom to run their lessons the way that leads to best results, and authority to influence the assessment of the outcomes of their work. Schools should also be trusted in these key areas of the teaching profession.

To finish up, let’s do one theoretical experiment. We transport highly trained Finnish teachers to work in, say, Indiana in the United States (and Indiana teachers would go to Finland). After five years—assuming that the Finnish teachers showed up fluent in English and that education policies in Indiana would continue as planned—we would check whether these teachers have been able to improve test scores in state-mandated student assessments.

I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning. Actually, I have met some experienced Finnish-trained teachers in the United States who confirm this hypothesis. Based on what I have heard from them, it is also probable that many of those transported Finnish teachers would be already doing something else than teach by the end of their fifth year – quite like their American peers.

Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland—assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish—stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.



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UNICEF, 2013. Child well-being in rich countries. A comparative overview. Innocenti Report Card 11. Florence: UNICEF.

McKinsey & Company (2010). “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. London: McKinsey & Co.

Teddlie, C. (2010). The Legacy of the School Effectiveness Research Tradition, in A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan & D. Hopkins (Eds.). The Second International Handbook of Educational Change. Dordrecht: Springer.

3 Myths about Teacher Quality

Here are three popular statements about teacher quality. Would you say they are fact or fiction?

1. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. 

2. The most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers. 

3. If any children had three or four great teachers in a row, they would soar academically, regardless of their racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall further and further behind.

If you are convinced that these are true, then I would ask that you read Pasi Sahlberg's post "What if Finland's great teachers taught in U.S schools?"

The best education systems understand that school culture matters more than teacher quality. 

No school or school system has ever become great without great teachers, but what can an excellent teacher do about a child who needs glasses, has cavities or is hungry? To say that teacher or school quality is the most important variable in education is at best naive. Education historian Diane Ravitch writes, "Reformers tell us that teachers are the most important influence within the school on student scores, and that is right. But the teacher contribution to scores is dwarfed by the influence of family and other out-of-school factors."

Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can't do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society. If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.

Dispelling the Corporate "Reform" Agenda

Finland's Pasi Sahlberg has sounded the alarm about the focus on competition, standardization and test-based accountability around the world. He warns, "education has become a commodity where the efficiency of service delivery ultimately determines performance."

Alongside the rush to introduce unproven technologies into classrooms, standardized testing has become a political instrument wielded by organizations such as Students First, Democrats for Education Reform and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Linking teacher pay to student test scores and eliminating tenure and collective bargaining is nothing less than a direct assault on the teaching profession and public education. Standardized test scores are used to undermine confidence in public schools so that education entrepreneurs can pour private equity and venture capital into companies that aim to profit from the public.

After a decade of intense standardized testing and sanctions under No Child Left Behind, California Democrats passed a resolution that aims at supporting public education and dispelling the corporate ‘reform’ agenda by stating, “the reform initiatives of Students First, rely on destructive anti-educator policies that do nothing for students but blame educators and their unions for the ills of society, make testing the goal of education, shatter communities by closing their public schools, and see public schools as potential profit centers and children as measurable commodities.”

In the face of tough economic times, some governments might see this as a way of easing pressure on their beleaguered budgets; however, Diane Ravitch warns us that, "Our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises. Schools are not businesses; they are a public good. The goal of education is not to produce higher scores, but to educate children to become responsible people with well-developed minds and good character."

Over the last two decades, the United States has proven to be a cautionary tale for how Canada, and the world, should not reform education, and Canadians would be wise not to think that the 49th Parallel offers any kind of inherent insulation from the corporate education reformers’ agenda.

Why Finland's public schools are so successful

Check out this interview with Pasi Sahlberg on CBC's Sunday Edition with Michael Enright.

Here's why #kohnandsahlberg matter

This post is a part of the #kohnandsahlberg blogathon and their public education event in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, on February 20, 2013.

Merely extending the length of the school day is an example of a clear, simple and wrong solution to the complex problem of creating a great school for all children.

Too many children dislike school, so why would we subject them to more of the same?

Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg are important because they challenge us to question the preconceived notions we have about what school should look like. As progressive educators, their role is to engage and challenge us all to reconsider our assumptions about education.

Too many of us are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence. Too many children experience school as something done to them rather than with them. Kohn and Sahlberg challenge us to move beyond our primitive forms of achievement such as testsandgrades and to make school about what matters most -- our children's desire to go on learning.

Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg Blogathon

I am putting out a call for people to participate in an Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg Blogathon.

This blogathon is in response to the “Creating a great school for all - an evening with Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg,” Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada.

Click here for tickets.

Rather than have Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg simply show up and talk for a couple hours just so we can all go back to work the next day like nothing happened, I really wish to encourage us all to participate in a public blogathon. This way, Kohn and Sahlberg's talks will act as a catalyst for others to talk and learn.

What is a blogathon?

• A blogathon is just a bunch of people who want to write about something and then collect all the links in one, easily accessible place for all to see. It's a way of starting and continuing an important conversation.

How to participate:

• Between now and February 20, blog about something related to education, Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg.
• Write as few or as many posts as you like.
• You don't have to attend the Red Deer event to participate. Anyone and everyone is welcome to give this a go.
• If you do not have a place to publish your thoughts, you can e-mail me, and I will share your post here on my blog. My e-mail is joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com
• See that picture at the top of the post? If you like, you can use it in your post.
• If you are on Twitter, share your post by using the hashtag #kohnandsahlberg
• If you are a blogger, I challenge you to find a colleague who does not blog and get them to participate.
• If you have your own blog or website, go ahead and publish your post. To ensure that I find your post, please fill out the online participation form (bottom of this post). This will allow me to collect and link to your post when I do up the summary for this event. If you want to link back to this post or leave a link to yours in the comment area, that would be groovy! The form is at the bottom of this post.

Prompts to spark your thinking:

• What elements of Kohn and/or Sahlberg's work inspires you?
• What should be the role of homework in a student's development?
• In what ways does school need to change?
• Why does testing and comparing schools continue to be over-emphasized?
• What is the appropriate balance of local and government in shaping curriculum, instruction and school life?

If you don't know much about Alfie Kohn or Pasi Sahlberg, you could check out some of the links below:

Alfie Kohn's website

Pasi Sahlberg's website

Books by Alfie Kohn

Finnish Lessons by Pasi Sahlberg

Schooling Beyond Measure by Alfie Kohn

Sahlberg's Ten big ideas on Finland

Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon 

The problem is poverty

Online participation form

Complete this after you have posted a blog of your own.

Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg speaking in Alberta

You are invited to join in a public lecture “Creating a great school for all - an evening with Alfie Kohn and Pasi Sahlberg,” Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada.

For too long Alberta schools have been over-managed and under-imagined. The evening presentations will bring together two of the world’s preeminent educational reformers to explore the opportunities to improve Alberta’s already high performing school system. Based on their research and experiences internationally, the two speakers will explore timely issues facing educators, parents and policy-makers. 

Some of the questions they will engage include: 

• What should be the role of homework in a student’s development? 
• Why does testing and comparing schools continue to be over-emphasized? 
• What is the appropriate balance of local and government in shaping curriculum, instruction and school life?

Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The latest of his twelve books are “Feel-Bad Education and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (2011), and The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (2006) and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason (2005).

Pasi Sahlberg is Director General of CIMO (of the Ministry of Education and Culture) in Helsinki, Finland. He has experience in classroom teaching, training teachers and leaders, coaching schools to change and advising education policy-makers around the world. He is an international speaker and writer who has given more than 250 keynote speeches and published over 100 articles, chapters and books on educational change.

Doors open at 6:30 with a reception until 7:00 pm. The lecture will run to 9:00 pm. The evening is sponsored by the Central Alberta Teachers’ Convention Board in partnership with its provincial Alberta Teachers’ Association.

Click here for tickets.

New GERM outbreak in Scotland

This was written by Niall MacKinnon who is a Scottish school principal Niall MacKinnon highlights the need for rigorous GERM infection control measures in education reform programs. You can read Niall MacKinnon's extended version on this article here.

By Niall MacKinnon

In his speech to the Scottish Learning Festival this September, cabinet secretary Michael Russell claimed that GERM is not for Scotland. The Global Education Reform Movement is a concept of Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg, presented in his recent book Finnish Lessons. The features of GERM are standardizing teaching and learning, a focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching a prescribed curriculum, management models from the corporate world and test-based accountability and control.

Scotland’s recent tightly controlled educational landscape of attainment targets, performance indicators and inspection judgements was an example of GERM. But Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) opened up a different pathway in the central “four capacities” concept, emphasizing and integrating wider focuses of linkage and personal development in revisioning pedagogy. CfE showed close affinity with the Finnish Way, outlined by Sahlberg as the antidote to GERM.  Finland encouraged risk-taking, learning from the past, owning innovations, shared responsibility and trust through professional dialogue. A central feature of decluttering for CfE was to focus on innovative approaches, emphasizing practice innovation and local professionalism, termed ‘building the curriculum’.

But just as this was coming together, linking proactive innovation, evaluation, and school systems to CfE, it fell apart. This was because of layers of prescription to different performance criteria in new multiple audit schedules, inspection templates and standards and quality reporting, to non-CfE criteria. The main emphasis was not exploring pedagogy, but micro-specification to serve the needs of external control and standardized calibration of schools. Then came hundreds of  “Es and Os” (experiences and outcomes) as a curriculum specification ‘painting by numbers’ kit. CfE was further lashed down to seven “required characteristics of successful implementation” framed in a product model of curriculum, delivery model of schooling and behaviorist model of audit. Self-evaluation split two ways, one as evaluation taking the concepts, principles and purposes, applying them evidentially yet discursively – GERM-free. The other, calibrating audit prescription to fixed, outdated notions and applying these in absolutist terms – GERM. This set up a huge conflict within CfE in Scotland, one which Sahlberg took from me in the chapter defining GERM in Finnish Lessons:

“Niall MacKinnon, who teaches at Plockton Primary School, makes a compelling appeal for “locally owned questions and purposes in realising practice within the broader national policy and practice frameworks.” He gets right to the point of how GERM affects teachers and schools: “There is the real practical danger that without an understanding of rationale and theoretical bases for school development, practitioners may be judged by auditors on differing underlying assumptions to their own developmental pathways, and the universalistic grading schemas come to be applied as a mask or front giving pseudoscientific veneer to imposed critical judgments which are nothing more than expressions of different views and models of education. Through the mechanism of inspection, a difference of conceptual viewpoint, which could prompt debate and dialogue in consideration of practice, is eliminated in judgmental and differential power relations. One view supplants another. Command and control replaces mutuality, dialogue and conceptual exploration matched to practice development. Those who suffer are those innovating and bringing in new ideas.” ” (p 104)

The paragraph came from my 2011 paper ‘The Urgent Needs for New Approaches in School Evaluation to enable Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’ in the international journal Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. My argument there was that specifications, grading and judgementalism destroy conceptual innovation and local practice professionalism, thereby negating CfE. Torridon Primary School and its headteacher Anne Macrae was my inspiration for that paragraph, now the case exemplar of GERM worldwide in Finnish Lessons.

Sahlberg shows how Finnish education placed central focus on professional dialogue, enabling pedagogy to link modern innovations to a long history of educational ideas. The central conceptual genius of CfE was the “four capacities” concept. It is not a slogan but a clarion call to get to know our pupils, and construct learning pathways by reaching out and revealing the dispositions latent in their potentials. These extend in so many ways out beyond conventional notions of learning, set in terms of delivery, targets and specifications.

We need to unpack learning, garner systemic understanding and enable formative development progression, for pupils, educators and institutions working together, not a “clear plan from A to B” as the Scottish schools’ inspectorate currently mandates. Scotland is now in the midst of GERM warfare between specifications compliance and pedagogic innovation, fought out over the morale and professionalism of Scotland’s teachers. As Dr Sahlberg said of GERM on his blog (30 June) “As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less”.

Sadly GERM is for Scotland, and the case study of GERM is Scotland. But it could so readily not be, once this is ‘seen’ and something done about it, or rather undone, simply by removing the specificatory shroud and control freakery of judgmental absolutism to outdated notions. Let us ‘build the curriculum’ as intended and envisaged.

The central lesson from Finnish Lessons is not what Finland did, but rather what Finland did NOT do to its education system. “Transformational” change in the nature of curriculum and its realization in school education, which Scotland “says” it is undertaking, is not going to come about without similarly transformational change in the means of getting there.

The problem is poverty

Take three and a half minutes and watch this...




The question isn't whether public education can be improved -- rather, it's how can it be improved. But before we implement a solution, we need to be clear about the real problems that are plaguing public education and, more generally, society.

The problem with Public Education is not low test scores. Poverty is the single largest problem that plagues most education systems.

In his post What the U.S can't learn from Finland, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.

• Funding of schools:
Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.

• Well-being of children:
All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.

• Education as a human right:
All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Linda Darling-Hammond writes in the Nation:

Inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford. 

Alfie Kohn on the Majority Report puts it this way:

Talking about American education is like talking about the quality of American air. It depends where you are standing. The rich areas of this country do very, very well in comparison to people in any other part of the globe -- assuming you want to use test scores as your criteria. The reason we have problems on those rankings is mostly because the U.S has more poor children than almost any other industrial country. And in the poorer areas, the kids are in desperate trouble... The issues of inequity of a gap cannot be defined in terms of a gap in test scores, because when you try and correct that by pushing up the test scores in the inner cities, you make their education worse because the tests measure what matters least.

Even when we choose to use narrow measurements like the scores on international tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it's important to recognize the effects poverty have on a country's ranking. Scores and rankings for countries like the United States are deceiving. When you include all students, the United States doesn't score well because 1 in 4 American children live in poverty.

If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the data. Instead of waging war on poverty, we end up waging war on teachers and schools. The shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time need the public as an accomplice. Profiteers like Joel Klein and Organization's like Michelle Rhee's Students First are:

promoting an agenda that many educators see as de-legitimizing the teaching profession; making standardized tests a holy grail of assessing students, teachers and schools, allowing private foundations to set the education agenda; and inviting for-profit companies to come into the public sector with programs that are designed primarily to make money for investors, not help kids.

You'll notice that the likes of Michelle Rhee and her minions at Students First never mention poverty.

As long as we continue to misidentify the problem as low scores on standardized tests, and ignore the real problem of poverty, we will continue to apply solutions that actually make the problem worse. It's important to note that the United States has never done well on these international tests so to claim they are some how falling behind in the test score race is a lie.

People who say poverty is no excuse are making excuses about doing nothing about poverty. Children never choose to live in poverty, but we can choose to provide all children with a more equitable education system.

If we want to make school and the world a better place for our children, we need to be better informed. And to get you started, here are but a few people and organizations you should familiarize yourself with in order to stay properly informed:
Diane Ravitch blog - twitter
Yong Zhao blog - twitter
Deborah Meier blog - twitter
Susan Ohanian blog - twitter
Stephen Krashen website - twitter
Alfie Kohn website - twitter
Valerie Strauss blog
Anthony Cody blog - twitter
Pasi Sahlberg blog - twitter
Will Richardson blog - twitter
Phil McRae website - twitter
Carol Burris twitter
Paul Thomas blog - twitter
Gary Stager blog - twitter
Fairtest website - twitter
Schools Matter blog
Alberta Teachers' Association website - twitter

How GERM is infecting schools around the world

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg, author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? and director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation. He has served the Finnish government in various positions, worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and for the European Training Foundation in Italy as senior education specialist. Sahlberg has also advised governments internationally about education policies and reforms. He is also an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi. You can follow Pasi Sahlbeg on Twitter here and read his blog here.

by Pasi Sahlberg

Ten years ago — against all odds — Finland was ranked as the world’s top education nation. It was strange because in Finland education is seen as a public good accessible to all free of charge without standardized testing or competitive private schools. When I look around the world, I see competition, choice, and measuring of students and teachers as the main means to improve education. This market-based global movement has put many public schools at risk in the United States and many other countries, as well. But not in Finland.

You may ask what has madeFinland’s schools so extraordinary. The answer has taken many by surprise. First, the Finns have never aimed to be the best in education but rather to have good schools for all of children. In other words, equity in education comes before a ‘race to the top’ mentality in national school reforms.

Second, Finns have taken teachers and teaching seriously by requiring that all teachers must be well trained in academic universities. All teachers should enjoy professional autonomy and public trust in their work. As a consequence, teaching has been a popular career choice among young Finns for three decades now. Today the Finnish government invests 30 times more in professional development of its teachers and administrators than testing its students’ performance in schools.

Third, Finnish educators have learned systematically from other countries how to reform education and improve teaching in schools. The United States has been a special source of inspiration to Finland since John Dewey a century ago. Such American educational innovations as cooperative learning, problem-based teaching and portfolio assessment are examples of the practices invented by teachers and researchers in the United States that are now commonly found in many Finnish classrooms.

One thing that has struck me is how similar education systems are. Curricula are standardized to fit to international student tests; and students around the world study learning materials from global providers. Education reforms in different countries also follow similar patterns. So visible is this common way of improvement that I call it theGlobal Educational Reform Movement or GERM. It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus. It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less.

GERM infections have various symptoms. The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

Healthy school systems are resistant to GERM and its inconvenient symptoms. In these countries, teaching remains an attractive career choice for young people. My niece Veera is a good example of this.

Seven years ago, when she was graduating from a high school in Helsinki, she called me and asked my advice on how to get into the teacher education program in the university where I had been working as teacher educator earlier. I told her that as a straight-A graduate, she should feel comfortable with the entrance examination and be herself in the interview.

In Finland primary school teacher education is a master’s level academic research-based degree similar to degrees in law, economics or medicine. She read required books, took the exam and was invited to the final interview where only the top candidates were selected. A month later, she called me in tears and told me she was not accepted. I asked her what was the toughest question in the interview. She said: “Why do you want to become a teacher when you could become a lawyer or doctor instead?”

Afterwards she wrote me a letter about her interest in teaching. This is what she wrote: “First is the internal drive to help people to discover their strengths and talents, but also to realize their weaknesses and incompleteness. I want to be a teacher because I want to make a difference in children’s lives and for this country. My work with children has always been based on love and care, being gentle and creating personal relations with those with whom I work. This is the only way that I can think will give me fulfillment in my life.”

The following spring she applied again. She was accepted from a ten-fold number of applicants and she recently earned her master’s degree as a primary school teacher. If the Finnish education system had been infected by GERM like many other countries, Veera and many of her peers would never have chosen teaching as their life career.

Addressing pandemic disinterest in the teaching profession with Teach for America and Teach First programs may be a solution to local shortcomings but will not cure the systemic infections that cause current educational underperformance in many countries. We should instead restore the fundamental meaning and values of school education. Without public schools, our nations and communities are poorly equipped to value humanity, equality and democracy. I think we should not educate children to be similar according to a standardized metric but help them to discover their own talents and teach them to be different from one another. Diversity is richness in humanity and a condition for innovation.

A growing number of students in Korea and Japan are taking their own lives because they can’t take the pressure by the adults anymore. Recent suicides of two 14-year-old Kenyan schoolgirls, Mercy Chebet and Sylvia Wanjiku, add a sad chapter in the book of the victims of GERM.

We must stop the GERM that puts such a pressure on children in schools through competition, choice, and accountability. Choosing collaboration, equity and trust-based responsibility as the main drivers in education reforms enhance immunity of our school systems to stop GERM and have good school for all children.