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I don't think it's appropriate to complain about an article being incomplete when it was written to be a facet of a more complete series of articles. That is,

by dalke 11y ago

I don't think it's appropriate to complain about an article being incomplete when it was written to be a facet of a more complete series of articles. That is, this article 'gloss[ed] over an important cultural norm' because it is mentioned in other Atlantic articles. Specifically, the text "Finnish schools have received substantial media attention for years now" links to another Atlantic article which says: > For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it. and the text "because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA" links to another Atlantic article which says: > Teachers have a lot of autonomy. They are highly educated--they all have master’s degrees and becoming a teacher is highly competitive. Instead, and in the same paragraph, the author says that this article will more specifically provide 'coverage on Finland’s youngest students', which the author thinks has been missing, and not cover the entire topic of Finnish schooling.

ptaipale 11y ago
> If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it. Isn't this the case pretty much everywhere? In reality, if a teacher is bad, there is precious little the principal can do about it in Finland. Almost all teachers are fortunately good, but I have met a couple who were completely hopeless. The schools absolutely couldn't get rid of them once they had been hired to permanent positions. Personal experience (Finland): my grade 3-6 teacher was himself the principal in a two-teacher school, an electrician by profession, and had been quick-trained to take a teacher's job after being discharged from the army at the end of the War - no master's degree, no degree from any university. He actually did close-order drill for PE. And if I was unruly, he hit me in the head. Yes, teachers are better trained nowadays (what I describe was 1970's and the man retired in 1980's).
- dalke 11y ago
  Nice observation! Yes, you're right. To double check, http://teaching.about.com/od/Information-For-Teachers/a/Bad-Teachers.htm http://teaching.about.com/od/Information-For-Teachers/a/Bad-... says (in the US context) "A major part of a principal’s job is to identify which teachers are effective, which teachers need to improve, and which ones are ineffective and need to be dismissed." Though it's not the complete truth. In the US, some school districts have policies that a teacher can be fired for having a bad score based on a 'value added model', where the scores of the students are compared to a model of what the scores "should" have been, and used to assign an effectiveness score to teachers (including, say, the score for an biology teacher when the tests have nothing to do with biology - https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/15/lawsuit-stop-evaluating-teachers-on-test-scores-of-students-they-never-taught/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04...) and even the custodial staff (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/16/d-c-custodial-staff-were-evaluated-by-student-test-scores-really/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04... ). The principals have little say in the results of these decisions.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    Interesting - that you can actually dismiss a teacher for simply bad performance. In Finland, that does not happen. Teachers are removed only for gross misconduct. One way to do that is violence against pupils, but that is rare. Somewhat more common is repeatedly missing work or coming to work while clearly intoxicated. The first time, employer must direct the employee to get help and treatment, but being repeatedly drunk at work will get a teacher dismissed.
    - dalke 11y ago
      It's worse than that - "simply bad performance" using methods that are highly unreliable and have not been validated. The philosophy seems to be that teachers are independent, heroic, commodities. That is: "independent" - any problems can be attributed solely to the teachers (after some normalization based on the socioeconomic class of the students), and not to the school system or other large scale system; "heroic" - the teachers are the biggest factor in education, and it's up to the teachers to individually supply everything; "commodities" - a teacher can easily be replaced with another teacher, with no effect on learning, the teaching work culture, or long-term community stability. The reason for this philosophy seems to be that it's well-aligned with certain view of a free market. By casting education in this framework it encourages the idea of replacing a socialized public school system, whose goal are the long-term needs of the students and the culture, with a state subsidized for-profit system with less local democratic control that is able to transfer more money to private owners.

by dalke 11y ago

ptaipale 11y ago

> If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it. Isn't this the case pretty much everywhere? In reality, if a teacher is bad, there is precious little the principal can do about it in Finland. Almost all teachers are fortunately good, but I have met a couple who were completely hopeless. The schools absolutely couldn't get rid of them once they had been hired to permanent positions. Personal experience (Finland): my grade 3-6 teacher was himself the principal in a two-teacher school, an electrician by profession, and had been quick-trained to take a teacher's job after being discharged from the army at the end of the War - no master's degree, no degree from any university. He actually did close-order drill for PE. And if I was unruly, he hit me in the head. Yes, teachers are better trained nowadays (what I describe was 1970's and the man retired in 1980's).

dalke 11y ago
Nice observation! Yes, you're right. To double check, http://teaching.about.com/od/Information-For-Teachers/a/Bad-Teachers.htm http://teaching.about.com/od/Information-For-Teachers/a/Bad-... says (in the US context) "A major part of a principal’s job is to identify which teachers are effective, which teachers need to improve, and which ones are ineffective and need to be dismissed." Though it's not the complete truth. In the US, some school districts have policies that a teacher can be fired for having a bad score based on a 'value added model', where the scores of the students are compared to a model of what the scores "should" have been, and used to assign an effectiveness score to teachers (including, say, the score for an biology teacher when the tests have nothing to do with biology - https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/15/lawsuit-stop-evaluating-teachers-on-test-scores-of-students-they-never-taught/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04...) and even the custodial staff (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/16/d-c-custodial-staff-were-evaluated-by-student-test-scores-really/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04... ). The principals have little say in the results of these decisions.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  Interesting - that you can actually dismiss a teacher for simply bad performance. In Finland, that does not happen. Teachers are removed only for gross misconduct. One way to do that is violence against pupils, but that is rare. Somewhat more common is repeatedly missing work or coming to work while clearly intoxicated. The first time, employer must direct the employee to get help and treatment, but being repeatedly drunk at work will get a teacher dismissed.
  - dalke 11y ago
    It's worse than that - "simply bad performance" using methods that are highly unreliable and have not been validated. The philosophy seems to be that teachers are independent, heroic, commodities. That is: "independent" - any problems can be attributed solely to the teachers (after some normalization based on the socioeconomic class of the students), and not to the school system or other large scale system; "heroic" - the teachers are the biggest factor in education, and it's up to the teachers to individually supply everything; "commodities" - a teacher can easily be replaced with another teacher, with no effect on learning, the teaching work culture, or long-term community stability. The reason for this philosophy seems to be that it's well-aligned with certain view of a free market. By casting education in this framework it encourages the idea of replacing a socialized public school system, whose goal are the long-term needs of the students and the culture, with a state subsidized for-profit system with less local democratic control that is able to transfer more money to private owners.