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

154 points by wallflower 12y ago

danso 12y ago
> 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. As a layperson, I agree with the OP...The focus on the quality of teachers -- and firing "bad" ones and hiring just the "good" ones -- has always seemed to me to be overemphasized, as it makes for a sexy, easily digestible political debate. Not that good teachers (whatever your definition of "good" is) aren't worth having, but it's doubtful that they alone can have a significant impact on student outcomes...in the way we should be doubtful that the well-behaved, well-equipped cops from a rich crime-free suburb would, when moved to the Detroit PD, would have a significant impact. I lived with a teacher and my best friend is a teacher, both are young and about my age and who work at impoverished schools, and I've been constantly amazed at how much of their talk is not about how bad the kids are, but how bad the administration is...over things such as playing favorites (among teachers) and squabbles over office space and, of course, having to buy their own supplies and books (some of which is reimbursed at the end of the year). You can chalk some of this dysfunction to the educational hot topics of the day: the power of teachers unions, teacher pay, standardized testing...but the bottom line is that passionate, effective teachers can be nullified by a weak system...in the same way that a great programmer may be ineffective in an engineering environment with poor testing/documentation processes and a terrible office environment.
- TwoBit 12y ago
  Reminds of how NFL coaches are so frequently fired when their teams do poorly. It makes for good press, but the teams usually do the same under the next coach.
  - bennettfeely 12y ago
    FiveThirtyEight examined this in the NHL. > Teams that fired their coaches performed exactly the same on average in the following season as teams that kept their coaches. Notably, teams that were sub-.400 performed 20 percent better on average the following season regardless of whether they fired their coach or not. [...] Playoff performance is no better under new coaches. Non-playoff teams go an average of 0.5 playoff rounds the following season, whether they fire their coach or not. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-predicts-if-an-nhl-coach-will-be-fired-and-whether-it-matters/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-predicts-if-an-nhl-...
    - cheepin 12y ago
      Shouldn't team performance decrease the season after a coach change since the players have to learn a new system? This seems to say that the cost of firing a poor coach is zero because at worst you will do the same as before in the short term, with a great potential upside for longer time spans.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        These teams have large coaching staffs that don't get fired and change more slowly. I would guess that a coach's impact is often more long term (in training, recruitment of players and staff).
  - philwelch 12y ago
    If anything, it would be more fair to fire the GM. It's not uncommon elsewhere in the world for management to be fired if their team as a whole performs poorly. Being held responsible for the performance of the group as a whole incentivizes the right behavior, as long as management is empowered to do what it takes. Head coaches aren't really that empowered because they can't make personnel decisions.
- maaarghk 12y ago
  Distracted by management? They don't sound passionate or effective to me. Do you think that there's no red tape in Scandinavia and their teachers ste better for administrative reasons??
  - japhyr 12y ago
    I'm not sure you know how difficult some administrators can make it for people to teach well. Teaching is hard enough, when people who have power over you actively get in your way and set you up for failure, that's pretty difficult to ignore. It takes experience and the willingness to risk your job to stand up to that kind of administration.
  - learc83 12y ago
    I'll give you an example. I have a friend who teaches 1st grade. Part of the curriculum was writing in a journal about what you did at home the day before. My friend realized that the kids were more interested in writing about what they did at home in the morning as soon as school started, so she moved journal time from after lunch to first thing in the morning. It worked out great, the kids were writing more and enjoyed writing more. Then the assistant principal observed her class and forced her to move journal time back to the old slot. Another time my friend wanted to do an interactive history lesson that took a bit longer than normal, so she took 15 extra minutes from math that she planned to make up later in the day. The same assistant principal found out and formally disciplined her for not following the approved schedule. Teachers are supposed to be professionals capable of developing their own lesson plans, but when administrators don't treat them like professionals their options are limited.
- ploxiln 12y ago
  The paying for supplies part is a bit funny when compared to small competitive software or electronics companies. As an engineer, I'm always offered monitors, computers, peripherals, test equipment... whatever I want, they'll order with next-day shipping.
- Melchizedek 12y ago
  More importantly, the thing about Finland is not mainly the teachers or the school system - it's that the students are white. _White_ American students perform about as well as Finnish (almost all white) students.
  - jpatokal 12y ago
    And by remarkable coincidence, Finland's GDP per capita is roughly equivalent to GDP per capita for white Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Maybe, just maybe, the differentiating factor is poverty, not race?
    - Melchizedek 12y ago
      No, white (and asian and jewish) students perform much better than for instance black students from equally wealthy families.
- sopooneo 12y ago
  I agree with everything you say. But how do we get better administrators? My understanding is that the job can either be cushy or horrific depending on whether you play ball with the superintendent. So perhaps in some districts, trying to be a great administrator is as difficult as trying to be a great teacher. I do realize administrators tend to get paid a lot more.
TwoBit 12y ago
Why is it that poor students fail so much more at education?
- baddox 12y ago
  Probably because most schools are public schools which are funded by local taxes.
- shawn-furyan 12y ago
  I don't think there's a simple answer to that. There are a mind-boggling number of factors at play and no major study, to my knowledge, has isolated poverty's covariants in a way that would let us say which specific factors outside of poverty itself are the primary drivers of poor outcomes among the impoverished.
- rayiner 12y ago
  My wife was briefly a teacher on an Indian reservation. There were few jobs on the reservation and many of the kids' parents were unemployed, and even the ones that were rarely were in a position that required any education. That's a huge demotivator for kids--why sacrifice for education when you can't see in front of your face that education might yield any benefits? Then there was, of course, the social ills associated with poverty, which distracted kids from school: alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. I'm personally enormously skeptical of the idea that education is a solution to poverty,[1] at a large scale. There is a game theory problem in play. The fact is that it's unlikely that education will lift an individual inner city kid "out of the hood." A relatively excellent outcome for diligence and hard work would be going into debt to attend a third rate college, for the privilege of fighting for a low-paying service job. So it's totally rational for kids to be more preoccupied with whether joining the right gang will keep them from getting harassed on the way home from school. But if everyone worked hard and got educated, what might happen is that economic opportunities could be created "in the hood." That's the prisoners dilemma--the individually rational decision to devalue diligence and education leads to a globally worse outcome. This is where culture comes in. You see this with poor immigrant communities. They have little capital, but have cultural mores that create an incentive for education and hard work. A kid might not leave the neighborhood through education, but he'll get social standing in the community, among authority figures and peers. When everyone has that incentive, that creates economic opportunities within the neighborhood. After all, there are neighborhoods in Bangladesh far poorer on an objective scale than the worst ghettos of Chicago, that nonetheless have bustling local economies. [1] Poverty is, of course, relative. But I'm not talking about utopia, but just about raising the plight of the poor here in the U.S. up to that of some places in Western Europe.
platz 12y ago
You'd need a lot of Finnish teachers
guelo 12y ago
One of the ways racism expresses itself in the US is in child poverty. We can't offer public assistance to poor children because it creates "welfare queens", which is a stereotype that whites have about blacks that they are lazy and will cheat.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - dalke 12y ago
    Huh? What does hate have to do with anything? Use it to recognize the privileges you have, and then use those privileges to help others share those privileges. It's not easy, of course. "Sharing the privilege" of being part of the dominant Christian culture in the US doesn't means helping others become Christian. But neither doesn't mean hating oneself for being Christian.
    - bicx 12y ago
      I apologize. It was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the parent comment, and I tend to get offended by statements that imply all white people are privileged racists. Maybe that's not how it was meant to be understood.
      - jacobolus 12y ago
        White people are privileged. Being privileged doesn’t imply anything about a person’s actions or beliefs. As a straight white man, I’m privileged because when I walk down the street, I don’t need to worry about men whistling at me or trying to grope me. I don’t need to worry about being detained by cops for looking “threatening” just by virtue of my skin color. I can cross the border without anyone suspecting me of forging immigration documents. I can easily get married to my partner almost anywhere in the world. I don‘t need to worry (in the workplace, or in political discourse, or just talking to strangers in the street) about being seen as an outsider, and I’m treated as an individual rather than continually judged against a stereotype. Being privileged doesn’t have anything to do specifically with my actions, and if a gay man, or a woman, or a Latino points out that I am privileged, they are not making any claim about my beliefs, and it’s nothing personal. (And they are absolutely correct, I am privileged.) You should not be offended when people call you privileged, unless you are sure that they are making a statement about your individual beliefs, rather than just neutral statements about the prevailing structure in the society (and then you should still try to avoid responding with anger; it’s almost never really personal). Instead of taking offense, you should try to talk to these people and understand where they’re coming from and why they’re frustrated. If you listen carefully and empathetically, you may find yourself just as outraged at the injustices in our society.
stcredzero 12y ago
...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. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it, "It takes a village." I suspect that it's a part of the plight of many immigrant parents who live in isolation from an ethnic/cultural community, to feel like asking, "What's wrong with you?" of their kids, because they keep noticing that things their kids don't know things that they "should know." My parents expected me to know many things I would've picked up in my environment, had I grown up in the same one my parents did. This kind of knowledge is illustrated in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes when the city born lads see a cow for the first time, and onlooking adults wonder if they are mentally deficient. "What are Cows!? Cows are cows!" Another example of this kind of knowledge: When my family engages in activities, like going somewhere, we generally imagine what all of the others are doing and optimize our activities to minimize crossing paths and causing each other wait times. This isn't something we were ever explicitly asked to do. My sister and I just picked it up from our parents. In stark contrast, an ex-girlfriend of mine would instead only perform narrowly delegated tasks and discharge whatever task I delegated as quickly and directly as possible, without regard for how that would impact my activities, even if that would mean covering a cutting board I was using with another ingredient. Apparently, her father would punish initiative as a matter of the principle of obedience, and order around his family like robots. Yet another example of this: in Japanese homes, people are expected to remove their shoes and arrange them in a neat and orderly array, optimized for exiting with a minimum of fuss and socks contact with the foyer floor. Also very significant, in Finland: "teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering." In the US, teachers are regarded as occupying a class between the working and professionals, esteemed lower than professions like medicine, law, and engineering. It says much about our society's priorities, that we say, "Those who can't do, teach." 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. This is somewhat the inherent dilemma of hiring for any skilled profession. Mentoring is probably key here.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
edthrowaway 12y ago
As someone with a spouse who has taught for over 10 years in an impoverished, inner-city school, and who has won a very impressive array of grants, awards, certifications and national-level recognition, I could not agree more strongly with this editorial. Americans are under the misapprehension that all of their school woes stem from poor teachers. But even in poor districts like the one my spouse teaches in, which have accumulated a whole layer of apathetic teachers, the impact of both poor and excellent teachers is way overestimated, and the impact of poor and excellent administrations (both the school principal and the district leadership) is tremendously underestimated. A good principal, particularly one with strong school board backing, can almost single-handedly turn an entire school around (I've seen this happen twice now). An excellent teacher with a poor principal and negligent school board can do very little other than provide a strong role model for the most promising students, and (with great effort) pull a handful more of failing students up to the barely passing level than their less talented peers. Primarily, good principals act just like good engineer managers in corporations. Just as good managers keep engineers isolated from the bullshit of upper management and adjacent managers, and give good engineers space to do their jobs, so do good principals let their good teachers do their job, and intervene when poor teachers fail to meet expectations. Regarding the other factors mentioned, I do think poverty is a major hurdle, and the author of this piece rightly underlines its importance in poor school performance, but poverty is primarily an issue in that high-levels of poverty correlate strongly with lack of parental support and engagement (and not always due to a lack of care; often it's because these are single-parent households where that one parent is working all the time). But here an excellent principal can also make a major impact by rallying formerly disengaged parents around their kids and their kids' teachers, and supporting single-parent households where the parent is working multiple jobs. It makes me sad to see all this rhetoric around teachers in the U.S., not only because it's depressing for my spouse to be so unappreciated by people outside the teaching profession, but also because I know it will do little to fix the main problem: school poor administrations. Nor will it address any of the other major contributing factors, like poverty and the lack of respect in high school academic excellent so prevalent in our culture, rich and poor alike.
- jwmerrill 12y ago
  Really insightful comment. > the impact of both poor and excellent teachers is way overestimated, and the impact of poor and excellent administrations (both the school principal and the district leadership) is tremendously underestimated. Why do you think this happens? I'll speculate: most people form their opinion about what's important in a school by reflecting on their experience as a student. Most students attend only one school of each kind (e.g. elementary, junior, and high school), so they don't have a great frame of reference about the results of different school administrations. But everyone experiences many different teachers, and as a student, you really perceive the differences between the better ones and the worse ones. I bet if you reflect on your own experience as a student, leaving aside the context of your spouse's experience as a teacher, you will have much more vivid memories and opinions about teachers than administrators. I totally agree that it's likely to be much more effective to try to create environments that help all teachers do their jobs more effectively than it is to try to change who we're hiring. I wonder what the best way is to make people "feel" the difference between good administrators and bad ones like they "feel" the difference between their favorite teachers and their least favorite ones.
james1071 12y ago
Haven't read the piece, but will say this (which is blindingly obvious to everyone except those in control of the system): All you need to do to get a good secondary education system is to hire good graduates,train them and support their professional development. What does not work is hiring idiots, de-skilling the job, filling the day with busy work and other pointless nonsense.
- GabrielF00 12y ago
  I am suspicious of any comment about American education that contains the words "blindingly obvious" and "all you need to do". The problems that exist in American education are incredibly complex. We've tried a lot of big new things based on a simple, reductive approach (examples: testing and accountability for schools and for teachers, small schools, charter schools, Teach for America). I don't think any of these big new ideas have transformed a low-performing urban public school system into a system where educated white professionals would send their kids.
  - vxNsr 12y ago
    Surprisingly, he's mostly on point with the article he basically summed up the article -Schools don't need better teachers-instead the teachers need better Support.
  - james1071 12y ago
    Well,each to their own. The US has proved spectacularly inept in a number of areas (healthcare, obesity, guns and education) and the causes are indeed blindingly obvious to anyone who is not an American.
    - lttlrck 12y ago
      For contrast which countries have successfully tackled obesity? Or gun control from a similar starting point?
    - omegaham 12y ago
      Seeing as how many European countries are approaching American levels of obesity[1], what is everyone else doing to combat it? [1]https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2228rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
bobcostas55 12y ago
Something worth noting whenever Finland and education come up: Finnish-Americans in America do better than Finns in Finland.
- arjie 12y ago
  Isn't that generally the case income-wise? Immigrants are a self-selecting bunch. Picking up and moving to a different country is hard and you need to be fairly dedicated to cross that gulf and put up with all the differences in order to make it work. South Asian Indian-Americans are one of the highest earning ethnic groups in the US, earning about twice the median national household income. But the median income in India is awful.
  - bobcostas55 12y ago
    That's a very interesting question, and the answer isn't straight-forward. On the one hand, obviously we should expect some selection effects. On the other hand, there is a relative status effect counter-acting it. Long story short, people prefer to be relatively rich in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country, even if their absolute level of wealth would increase. Stark & Taylor (1991)[0] for example found that, at least when it comes to Mexico, the relative preference trumps the absolute preference: poorer households were more likely to migrate. [0] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2234433?sid=21105522338573&uid=2&uid=3738128&uid=4 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2234433?sid=2110552233...
MarcScott 12y ago
I've worked as a teacher in both the UK and in Papua New Guinea, and from my perspective, the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. Maybe this is one of the reasons the Finnish education system works so well. If teaching is an occupation that is culturally considered in high esteem, then it probably follows that schools are considered an important aspect of a child's life. Children are therefore encouraged to do well in schools. In PNG, students had to pay to go to school. Often a single child was supported through their education by their extended family. Some villages could only afford to send a few students to school. Those students worked exceptionally hard, knowing that it was incumbent upon them to achieve, and eventually payback their family from the proceeds of their future careers. When working in rural schools in the UK I have encountered many students whose parents, and therefore their children, place little value on education. Often the attitude comes down to the single phrase "I've managed and I did badly at school". Regardless of whether the parent's are rich or poor, the children of these parents often struggle, and achieve below expected results in national examinations. If we want to raise standards in our schools (both in the UK and in the USA) I think the key is in changing cultural attitudes towards education. This means that we need to stop heaping blame on teachers, administrators, schools and local authorities for perceived inadequacies. We need to make sure that our children value the free education they are receiving. edit - for clarity of country name
- james1071 12y ago
  I am from the UK and,based on my experience of attitudes to education, will say that a lot of white people are going to be in for a shock as they and their children will be working for immigrant bosses.
  - peteretep 12y ago
    I suspect what you meant is: "In my experience, children of immigrants often have a better work-ethic than the children of non-immigrants" Doubt that divides as nicely down race lines as you might think, though. I'm too lazy to run the numbers, but this[1] seems to suggest 50% of foreign-born population in the UK come from predominantly white countries... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_...
Panino 12y ago
> 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. This is the exact opposite of my (previous) experience teaching high school, where the main purpose was clearly to provide daycare.
bko 12y ago
> 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. I don't think the author makes a convincing point as to why standardization is bad for students but somehow beneficial to teachers. > 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. So prospective teachers would be tested on teacher quality prior to graduation in an academic sense but not while they're actually teaching? Not sure if you can test on paper or by demonstration whether someone is an effective teacher. It is certainly more easily visible in the field. It's a shame many in America don't respect teachers. Perhaps the resentment is due to the fact that most in America don't have a choice as to the primary school they attend. Like most Americans, I've had terrible teachers in the past and did feel some resentment. It was less infuriating in college since at least I had some choice as to the classes and school I attended. Coincidentally, I notice professors get a lot more respect.
- pavlov 12y ago
  I don't think the author makes a convincing point as to why standardization is bad for students but somehow beneficial to teachers. I felt the author's case was clearly presented, so I'll try to summarize... Standardized tests for students are bad because they encourage bogus metrics like "teacher effectiveness". Requiring high qualifications for teachers is good because it improves public perception of the profession and reduces churn. (Initiatives like "fast track" teacher training increase churn, and this is bad because it can lead administrators to believe that churn is part of the solution: all they need to do is somehow weed out the bad teachers and replace them with good ones.)
  - mattmcknight 12y ago
    You have to understand that the publisher of this piece (the blog curator, Valerie Strauss) is a paid supporter of the teacher unions. That is her primary agenda, and the agenda of many opposed to teacher evaluation via job effectiveness. If teacher effectiveness can't be measured, teachers can't be fired for performance. Union win.
xacaxulu 12y ago
There was an interesting study of IQs by college major, showing disciplines such as social work, education and gender studies being at the lowest end of the IQ spectrum. Seems like it would be counter intuitive to ask quite so much from members of those demographics when it comes to educating our children. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
- djur 12y ago
  The post you link to points out that the IQ values are estimated from SAT or GRE scores, and that most of the difference is explained by the quantitative section of the SAT. What that ends up showing is that social work and education are low-paid, low-prestige fields, which tend to employ more women.
tiatia 12y ago
"Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough" Let me guess. They give their teachers a decent pay?
icantthinkofone 12y ago
I would presume they would teach as well as great teachers from the US.
MisterMashable 12y ago
If Finland's great teachers were to teach in U.S. schools, they would encounter significant pressure to conform from students, parents and administrators. The ones who tow the line and preserve the status quo would get to keep their jobs while the others would be mobbed, manipulated and discarded. Administrators would fabricate a false narrative using negative performance review. Parents would blame the teacher for failing to "teach" which means graciously ignore their child's poor behavior and hand out high grades. This is what would happen to the great majority of great Finnish teachers were they to work here in America. The few who by good fortune places themselves in American school communities which closely resemble Finland would fit right in.
mschuster91 12y ago
I believe that the background of students is the most important factor when it comes to education success. When you put a "world-class teacher" in front of 30 students who have totally different things on their mind that are NOT school-related - like e.g. having to support their drug-addicted parents, their own addictions, having to care for siblings, for food or sometimes even for a place to sleep - then even a squad of the best teachers will not help any of these kids achieve "good grades". Putting the blame for fucked up environments on teachers (like it seems to be done very often in the US) is unfair and stupid, because the teachers are in no position to change their situation.
thrownaway2424 12y ago
The author's case is sensible and clearly presented but lacks context for the intended audience of the USA. It's pointless to say that Finland has a unified teacher preparation program, implying that other countries do not. There are in fact uniform teacher training regimes in the USA that are comparable in scale to the one in Finland. The New York City Department of Education has as many students as Finland has. LAUSD isn't much smaller. So instead of asking what lessons we could learn from Finland, would it make as much sense to cherry-pick some successful school districts from within our own country and learn lessons from them? Because that's essentially what you're doing when you use Finland as your exemplar instead of a similar-population area of Europe. How are the schools doing in Slovenia these days?
tokenadult 12y ago
I wonder what really would happen if the experiment were tried. It would be difficult indeed to find any credentialed United States schoolteachers who speak Finnish well enough to teach in Finland (but not insuperably difficult to find Finnish teachers who speak English well enough to teach in the United States, which tells us something right there). I would like to include a few more countries in the mix. Indeed, that is what I like about the new book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way,[1] because the book follows some American exchange students over to other countries (Finland, yes, but also Korea and Poland) and examines a lot of different trade-offs that different school systems around the world have to deal with. The boy who traveled over to Korea to be an exchange student and was profiled in the book traveled over from the same school district in Minnesota I have lived in since I had children. Finland is not the only model of a different system, and we should be studying a lot of different models to make sure we aren't missing out on lessons we can learn from practice elsewhere. P.S. I am a teacher by occupation, and I know that the research shows that teacher characteristics matter for learners. The parental involvement or value placed on education by parents mentioned in several comments that preceded mine here are important, but I deal often (just today, in fact) with trying to help parents who are involved in their children's educations but are frustrated by what's happening to their children in United States public school classrooms. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Smartest-Kids-World-They/dp/145165443X http://www.amazon.com/The-Smartest-Kids-World-They/dp/145165...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cryptlord 12y ago
It always amazes me when these articles about the finnish education system pop up. I'm finnish and I've dropped out of high school twice, I don't consider myself dumb and have done very well in my life (Thank you, internet). A lot better than my peers, most of them are dropouts as well. The only people who have even got to an university level are people who already were from wealthy/academic families. It's the same thing everywhere, but I admit that education being free is a big deal, but it doesn't fix social problems.
saranagati 12y ago
there's a lot of talk here about teacher/school standardization but I dont see any talk of what that standardization is, only whos at fault. students dont do poorly in school because the information to learn isnt there or even because its not encouraged by the students parents (speaking of the us education system). students fail at school because of how much its geared to teach square pegs when many students arent a square peg. sure some teachers may teach for square pegs while others teach for round pegs but the students dont get the option of attending the class for round pegs instead of the square peg class. instead the student is thrown into a teachers class and has to conform to however that teacher wants to structure and grade the class. class A may be graded mostly on tests while class B may be mostly on homework and even still class C may be a mix of both homework and tests. then other teachers like to throw artifacts such as attendance to skew the grade even more. finally theres the problem of subjects that people just arent good at or dont care for because they provide little real world use. subjects such as history or soke more advanced english or math. these turn into something that a student is not only forced to attend and contribute to but also be judged on. for a personal anecdote and one of ky sources of critisms, when I was a freshman in high school I was in an algebra class and aced both finals with the highest grade in the class while getting A's and B's on all of my tests. one thing I never did though was the homework (I turned in maybe two homework assignments the entire year). end of the year comes and I fail the class because I didnt turn in the homework and I had a habit of sleeping in the class. to top off all of that there are teachers who just suck and/or dont get along with certain students. teachers who are condescending to soke students or try to keep students in class during lunch. its not a teachers job to punish kids in any way. if the student is disruptive to the class then they should dismiss the student from the class and have the school take care of problem students.

154 points by wallflower 12y ago

danso 12y ago

> 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. As a layperson, I agree with the OP...The focus on the quality of teachers -- and firing "bad" ones and hiring just the "good" ones -- has always seemed to me to be overemphasized, as it makes for a sexy, easily digestible political debate. Not that good teachers (whatever your definition of "good" is) aren't worth having, but it's doubtful that they alone can have a significant impact on student outcomes...in the way we should be doubtful that the well-behaved, well-equipped cops from a rich crime-free suburb would, when moved to the Detroit PD, would have a significant impact. I lived with a teacher and my best friend is a teacher, both are young and about my age and who work at impoverished schools, and I've been constantly amazed at how much of their talk is not about how bad the kids are, but how bad the administration is...over things such as playing favorites (among teachers) and squabbles over office space and, of course, having to buy their own supplies and books (some of which is reimbursed at the end of the year). You can chalk some of this dysfunction to the educational hot topics of the day: the power of teachers unions, teacher pay, standardized testing...but the bottom line is that passionate, effective teachers can be nullified by a weak system...in the same way that a great programmer may be ineffective in an engineering environment with poor testing/documentation processes and a terrible office environment.

TwoBit 12y ago
Reminds of how NFL coaches are so frequently fired when their teams do poorly. It makes for good press, but the teams usually do the same under the next coach.
- bennettfeely 12y ago
  FiveThirtyEight examined this in the NHL. > Teams that fired their coaches performed exactly the same on average in the following season as teams that kept their coaches. Notably, teams that were sub-.400 performed 20 percent better on average the following season regardless of whether they fired their coach or not. [...] Playoff performance is no better under new coaches. Non-playoff teams go an average of 0.5 playoff rounds the following season, whether they fire their coach or not. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-predicts-if-an-nhl-coach-will-be-fired-and-whether-it-matters/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-predicts-if-an-nhl-...
  - cheepin 12y ago
    Shouldn't team performance decrease the season after a coach change since the players have to learn a new system? This seems to say that the cost of firing a poor coach is zero because at worst you will do the same as before in the short term, with a great potential upside for longer time spans.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      These teams have large coaching staffs that don't get fired and change more slowly. I would guess that a coach's impact is often more long term (in training, recruitment of players and staff).
- philwelch 12y ago
  If anything, it would be more fair to fire the GM. It's not uncommon elsewhere in the world for management to be fired if their team as a whole performs poorly. Being held responsible for the performance of the group as a whole incentivizes the right behavior, as long as management is empowered to do what it takes. Head coaches aren't really that empowered because they can't make personnel decisions.
maaarghk 12y ago
Distracted by management? They don't sound passionate or effective to me. Do you think that there's no red tape in Scandinavia and their teachers ste better for administrative reasons??
- japhyr 12y ago
  I'm not sure you know how difficult some administrators can make it for people to teach well. Teaching is hard enough, when people who have power over you actively get in your way and set you up for failure, that's pretty difficult to ignore. It takes experience and the willingness to risk your job to stand up to that kind of administration.
- learc83 12y ago
  I'll give you an example. I have a friend who teaches 1st grade. Part of the curriculum was writing in a journal about what you did at home the day before. My friend realized that the kids were more interested in writing about what they did at home in the morning as soon as school started, so she moved journal time from after lunch to first thing in the morning. It worked out great, the kids were writing more and enjoyed writing more. Then the assistant principal observed her class and forced her to move journal time back to the old slot. Another time my friend wanted to do an interactive history lesson that took a bit longer than normal, so she took 15 extra minutes from math that she planned to make up later in the day. The same assistant principal found out and formally disciplined her for not following the approved schedule. Teachers are supposed to be professionals capable of developing their own lesson plans, but when administrators don't treat them like professionals their options are limited.
ploxiln 12y ago
The paying for supplies part is a bit funny when compared to small competitive software or electronics companies. As an engineer, I'm always offered monitors, computers, peripherals, test equipment... whatever I want, they'll order with next-day shipping.
Melchizedek 12y ago
More importantly, the thing about Finland is not mainly the teachers or the school system - it's that the students are white. _White_ American students perform about as well as Finnish (almost all white) students.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  And by remarkable coincidence, Finland's GDP per capita is roughly equivalent to GDP per capita for white Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Maybe, just maybe, the differentiating factor is poverty, not race?
  - Melchizedek 12y ago
    No, white (and asian and jewish) students perform much better than for instance black students from equally wealthy families.
sopooneo 12y ago
I agree with everything you say. But how do we get better administrators? My understanding is that the job can either be cushy or horrific depending on whether you play ball with the superintendent. So perhaps in some districts, trying to be a great administrator is as difficult as trying to be a great teacher. I do realize administrators tend to get paid a lot more.

TwoBit 12y ago

Why is it that poor students fail so much more at education?

baddox 12y ago
Probably because most schools are public schools which are funded by local taxes.
shawn-furyan 12y ago
I don't think there's a simple answer to that. There are a mind-boggling number of factors at play and no major study, to my knowledge, has isolated poverty's covariants in a way that would let us say which specific factors outside of poverty itself are the primary drivers of poor outcomes among the impoverished.
rayiner 12y ago
My wife was briefly a teacher on an Indian reservation. There were few jobs on the reservation and many of the kids' parents were unemployed, and even the ones that were rarely were in a position that required any education. That's a huge demotivator for kids--why sacrifice for education when you can't see in front of your face that education might yield any benefits? Then there was, of course, the social ills associated with poverty, which distracted kids from school: alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. I'm personally enormously skeptical of the idea that education is a solution to poverty,[1] at a large scale. There is a game theory problem in play. The fact is that it's unlikely that education will lift an individual inner city kid "out of the hood." A relatively excellent outcome for diligence and hard work would be going into debt to attend a third rate college, for the privilege of fighting for a low-paying service job. So it's totally rational for kids to be more preoccupied with whether joining the right gang will keep them from getting harassed on the way home from school. But if everyone worked hard and got educated, what might happen is that economic opportunities could be created "in the hood." That's the prisoners dilemma--the individually rational decision to devalue diligence and education leads to a globally worse outcome. This is where culture comes in. You see this with poor immigrant communities. They have little capital, but have cultural mores that create an incentive for education and hard work. A kid might not leave the neighborhood through education, but he'll get social standing in the community, among authority figures and peers. When everyone has that incentive, that creates economic opportunities within the neighborhood. After all, there are neighborhoods in Bangladesh far poorer on an objective scale than the worst ghettos of Chicago, that nonetheless have bustling local economies. [1] Poverty is, of course, relative. But I'm not talking about utopia, but just about raising the plight of the poor here in the U.S. up to that of some places in Western Europe.

platz 12y ago

You'd need a lot of Finnish teachers

guelo 12y ago

One of the ways racism expresses itself in the US is in child poverty. We can't offer public assistance to poor children because it creates "welfare queens", which is a stereotype that whites have about blacks that they are lazy and will cheat.

deleted 12y ago
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- dalke 12y ago
  Huh? What does hate have to do with anything? Use it to recognize the privileges you have, and then use those privileges to help others share those privileges. It's not easy, of course. "Sharing the privilege" of being part of the dominant Christian culture in the US doesn't means helping others become Christian. But neither doesn't mean hating oneself for being Christian.
  - bicx 12y ago
    I apologize. It was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the parent comment, and I tend to get offended by statements that imply all white people are privileged racists. Maybe that's not how it was meant to be understood.
    - jacobolus 12y ago
      White people are privileged. Being privileged doesn’t imply anything about a person’s actions or beliefs. As a straight white man, I’m privileged because when I walk down the street, I don’t need to worry about men whistling at me or trying to grope me. I don’t need to worry about being detained by cops for looking “threatening” just by virtue of my skin color. I can cross the border without anyone suspecting me of forging immigration documents. I can easily get married to my partner almost anywhere in the world. I don‘t need to worry (in the workplace, or in political discourse, or just talking to strangers in the street) about being seen as an outsider, and I’m treated as an individual rather than continually judged against a stereotype. Being privileged doesn’t have anything to do specifically with my actions, and if a gay man, or a woman, or a Latino points out that I am privileged, they are not making any claim about my beliefs, and it’s nothing personal. (And they are absolutely correct, I am privileged.) You should not be offended when people call you privileged, unless you are sure that they are making a statement about your individual beliefs, rather than just neutral statements about the prevailing structure in the society (and then you should still try to avoid responding with anger; it’s almost never really personal). Instead of taking offense, you should try to talk to these people and understand where they’re coming from and why they’re frustrated. If you listen carefully and empathetically, you may find yourself just as outraged at the injustices in our society.

stcredzero 12y ago

...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. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it, "It takes a village." I suspect that it's a part of the plight of many immigrant parents who live in isolation from an ethnic/cultural community, to feel like asking, "What's wrong with you?" of their kids, because they keep noticing that things their kids don't know things that they "should know." My parents expected me to know many things I would've picked up in my environment, had I grown up in the same one my parents did. This kind of knowledge is illustrated in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes when the city born lads see a cow for the first time, and onlooking adults wonder if they are mentally deficient. "What are Cows!? Cows are cows!" Another example of this kind of knowledge: When my family engages in activities, like going somewhere, we generally imagine what all of the others are doing and optimize our activities to minimize crossing paths and causing each other wait times. This isn't something we were ever explicitly asked to do. My sister and I just picked it up from our parents. In stark contrast, an ex-girlfriend of mine would instead only perform narrowly delegated tasks and discharge whatever task I delegated as quickly and directly as possible, without regard for how that would impact my activities, even if that would mean covering a cutting board I was using with another ingredient. Apparently, her father would punish initiative as a matter of the principle of obedience, and order around his family like robots. Yet another example of this: in Japanese homes, people are expected to remove their shoes and arrange them in a neat and orderly array, optimized for exiting with a minimum of fuss and socks contact with the foyer floor. Also very significant, in Finland: "teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering." In the US, teachers are regarded as occupying a class between the working and professionals, esteemed lower than professions like medicine, law, and engineering. It says much about our society's priorities, that we say, "Those who can't do, teach." 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. This is somewhat the inherent dilemma of hiring for any skilled profession. Mentoring is probably key here.

fennecfoxen 12y ago

edthrowaway 12y ago

As someone with a spouse who has taught for over 10 years in an impoverished, inner-city school, and who has won a very impressive array of grants, awards, certifications and national-level recognition, I could not agree more strongly with this editorial. Americans are under the misapprehension that all of their school woes stem from poor teachers. But even in poor districts like the one my spouse teaches in, which have accumulated a whole layer of apathetic teachers, the impact of both poor and excellent teachers is way overestimated, and the impact of poor and excellent administrations (both the school principal and the district leadership) is tremendously underestimated. A good principal, particularly one with strong school board backing, can almost single-handedly turn an entire school around (I've seen this happen twice now). An excellent teacher with a poor principal and negligent school board can do very little other than provide a strong role model for the most promising students, and (with great effort) pull a handful more of failing students up to the barely passing level than their less talented peers. Primarily, good principals act just like good engineer managers in corporations. Just as good managers keep engineers isolated from the bullshit of upper management and adjacent managers, and give good engineers space to do their jobs, so do good principals let their good teachers do their job, and intervene when poor teachers fail to meet expectations. Regarding the other factors mentioned, I do think poverty is a major hurdle, and the author of this piece rightly underlines its importance in poor school performance, but poverty is primarily an issue in that high-levels of poverty correlate strongly with lack of parental support and engagement (and not always due to a lack of care; often it's because these are single-parent households where that one parent is working all the time). But here an excellent principal can also make a major impact by rallying formerly disengaged parents around their kids and their kids' teachers, and supporting single-parent households where the parent is working multiple jobs. It makes me sad to see all this rhetoric around teachers in the U.S., not only because it's depressing for my spouse to be so unappreciated by people outside the teaching profession, but also because I know it will do little to fix the main problem: school poor administrations. Nor will it address any of the other major contributing factors, like poverty and the lack of respect in high school academic excellent so prevalent in our culture, rich and poor alike.

jwmerrill 12y ago
Really insightful comment. > the impact of both poor and excellent teachers is way overestimated, and the impact of poor and excellent administrations (both the school principal and the district leadership) is tremendously underestimated. Why do you think this happens? I'll speculate: most people form their opinion about what's important in a school by reflecting on their experience as a student. Most students attend only one school of each kind (e.g. elementary, junior, and high school), so they don't have a great frame of reference about the results of different school administrations. But everyone experiences many different teachers, and as a student, you really perceive the differences between the better ones and the worse ones. I bet if you reflect on your own experience as a student, leaving aside the context of your spouse's experience as a teacher, you will have much more vivid memories and opinions about teachers than administrators. I totally agree that it's likely to be much more effective to try to create environments that help all teachers do their jobs more effectively than it is to try to change who we're hiring. I wonder what the best way is to make people "feel" the difference between good administrators and bad ones like they "feel" the difference between their favorite teachers and their least favorite ones.

james1071 12y ago

Haven't read the piece, but will say this (which is blindingly obvious to everyone except those in control of the system): All you need to do to get a good secondary education system is to hire good graduates,train them and support their professional development. What does not work is hiring idiots, de-skilling the job, filling the day with busy work and other pointless nonsense.

GabrielF00 12y ago
I am suspicious of any comment about American education that contains the words "blindingly obvious" and "all you need to do". The problems that exist in American education are incredibly complex. We've tried a lot of big new things based on a simple, reductive approach (examples: testing and accountability for schools and for teachers, small schools, charter schools, Teach for America). I don't think any of these big new ideas have transformed a low-performing urban public school system into a system where educated white professionals would send their kids.
- vxNsr 12y ago
  Surprisingly, he's mostly on point with the article he basically summed up the article -Schools don't need better teachers-instead the teachers need better Support.
- james1071 12y ago
  Well,each to their own. The US has proved spectacularly inept in a number of areas (healthcare, obesity, guns and education) and the causes are indeed blindingly obvious to anyone who is not an American.
  - lttlrck 12y ago
    For contrast which countries have successfully tackled obesity? Or gun control from a similar starting point?
  - omegaham 12y ago
    Seeing as how many European countries are approaching American levels of obesity[1], what is everyone else doing to combat it? [1]https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2228rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

bobcostas55 12y ago

Something worth noting whenever Finland and education come up: Finnish-Americans in America do better than Finns in Finland.

arjie 12y ago
Isn't that generally the case income-wise? Immigrants are a self-selecting bunch. Picking up and moving to a different country is hard and you need to be fairly dedicated to cross that gulf and put up with all the differences in order to make it work. South Asian Indian-Americans are one of the highest earning ethnic groups in the US, earning about twice the median national household income. But the median income in India is awful.
- bobcostas55 12y ago
  That's a very interesting question, and the answer isn't straight-forward. On the one hand, obviously we should expect some selection effects. On the other hand, there is a relative status effect counter-acting it. Long story short, people prefer to be relatively rich in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country, even if their absolute level of wealth would increase. Stark & Taylor (1991)[0] for example found that, at least when it comes to Mexico, the relative preference trumps the absolute preference: poorer households were more likely to migrate. [0] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2234433?sid=21105522338573&uid=2&uid=3738128&uid=4 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2234433?sid=2110552233...

MarcScott 12y ago

I've worked as a teacher in both the UK and in Papua New Guinea, and from my perspective, the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. Maybe this is one of the reasons the Finnish education system works so well. If teaching is an occupation that is culturally considered in high esteem, then it probably follows that schools are considered an important aspect of a child's life. Children are therefore encouraged to do well in schools. In PNG, students had to pay to go to school. Often a single child was supported through their education by their extended family. Some villages could only afford to send a few students to school. Those students worked exceptionally hard, knowing that it was incumbent upon them to achieve, and eventually payback their family from the proceeds of their future careers. When working in rural schools in the UK I have encountered many students whose parents, and therefore their children, place little value on education. Often the attitude comes down to the single phrase "I've managed and I did badly at school". Regardless of whether the parent's are rich or poor, the children of these parents often struggle, and achieve below expected results in national examinations. If we want to raise standards in our schools (both in the UK and in the USA) I think the key is in changing cultural attitudes towards education. This means that we need to stop heaping blame on teachers, administrators, schools and local authorities for perceived inadequacies. We need to make sure that our children value the free education they are receiving. edit - for clarity of country name

james1071 12y ago
I am from the UK and,based on my experience of attitudes to education, will say that a lot of white people are going to be in for a shock as they and their children will be working for immigrant bosses.
- peteretep 12y ago
  I suspect what you meant is: "In my experience, children of immigrants often have a better work-ethic than the children of non-immigrants" Doubt that divides as nicely down race lines as you might think, though. I'm too lazy to run the numbers, but this[1] seems to suggest 50% of foreign-born population in the UK come from predominantly white countries... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_...

Panino 12y ago

bko 12y ago

> 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. I don't think the author makes a convincing point as to why standardization is bad for students but somehow beneficial to teachers. > 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. So prospective teachers would be tested on teacher quality prior to graduation in an academic sense but not while they're actually teaching? Not sure if you can test on paper or by demonstration whether someone is an effective teacher. It is certainly more easily visible in the field. It's a shame many in America don't respect teachers. Perhaps the resentment is due to the fact that most in America don't have a choice as to the primary school they attend. Like most Americans, I've had terrible teachers in the past and did feel some resentment. It was less infuriating in college since at least I had some choice as to the classes and school I attended. Coincidentally, I notice professors get a lot more respect.

pavlov 12y ago
I don't think the author makes a convincing point as to why standardization is bad for students but somehow beneficial to teachers. I felt the author's case was clearly presented, so I'll try to summarize... Standardized tests for students are bad because they encourage bogus metrics like "teacher effectiveness". Requiring high qualifications for teachers is good because it improves public perception of the profession and reduces churn. (Initiatives like "fast track" teacher training increase churn, and this is bad because it can lead administrators to believe that churn is part of the solution: all they need to do is somehow weed out the bad teachers and replace them with good ones.)
- mattmcknight 12y ago
  You have to understand that the publisher of this piece (the blog curator, Valerie Strauss) is a paid supporter of the teacher unions. That is her primary agenda, and the agenda of many opposed to teacher evaluation via job effectiveness. If teacher effectiveness can't be measured, teachers can't be fired for performance. Union win.

xacaxulu 12y ago

There was an interesting study of IQs by college major, showing disciplines such as social work, education and gender studies being at the lowest end of the IQ spectrum. Seems like it would be counter intuitive to ask quite so much from members of those demographics when it comes to educating our children. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

djur 12y ago
The post you link to points out that the IQ values are estimated from SAT or GRE scores, and that most of the difference is explained by the quantitative section of the SAT. What that ends up showing is that social work and education are low-paid, low-prestige fields, which tend to employ more women.

tiatia 12y ago

"Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough" Let me guess. They give their teachers a decent pay?

icantthinkofone 12y ago

I would presume they would teach as well as great teachers from the US.

MisterMashable 12y ago

If Finland's great teachers were to teach in U.S. schools, they would encounter significant pressure to conform from students, parents and administrators. The ones who tow the line and preserve the status quo would get to keep their jobs while the others would be mobbed, manipulated and discarded. Administrators would fabricate a false narrative using negative performance review. Parents would blame the teacher for failing to "teach" which means graciously ignore their child's poor behavior and hand out high grades. This is what would happen to the great majority of great Finnish teachers were they to work here in America. The few who by good fortune places themselves in American school communities which closely resemble Finland would fit right in.

mschuster91 12y ago

I believe that the background of students is the most important factor when it comes to education success. When you put a "world-class teacher" in front of 30 students who have totally different things on their mind that are NOT school-related - like e.g. having to support their drug-addicted parents, their own addictions, having to care for siblings, for food or sometimes even for a place to sleep - then even a squad of the best teachers will not help any of these kids achieve "good grades". Putting the blame for fucked up environments on teachers (like it seems to be done very often in the US) is unfair and stupid, because the teachers are in no position to change their situation.

thrownaway2424 12y ago

The author's case is sensible and clearly presented but lacks context for the intended audience of the USA. It's pointless to say that Finland has a unified teacher preparation program, implying that other countries do not. There are in fact uniform teacher training regimes in the USA that are comparable in scale to the one in Finland. The New York City Department of Education has as many students as Finland has. LAUSD isn't much smaller. So instead of asking what lessons we could learn from Finland, would it make as much sense to cherry-pick some successful school districts from within our own country and learn lessons from them? Because that's essentially what you're doing when you use Finland as your exemplar instead of a similar-population area of Europe. How are the schools doing in Slovenia these days?

tokenadult 12y ago

I wonder what really would happen if the experiment were tried. It would be difficult indeed to find any credentialed United States schoolteachers who speak Finnish well enough to teach in Finland (but not insuperably difficult to find Finnish teachers who speak English well enough to teach in the United States, which tells us something right there). I would like to include a few more countries in the mix. Indeed, that is what I like about the new book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way,[1] because the book follows some American exchange students over to other countries (Finland, yes, but also Korea and Poland) and examines a lot of different trade-offs that different school systems around the world have to deal with. The boy who traveled over to Korea to be an exchange student and was profiled in the book traveled over from the same school district in Minnesota I have lived in since I had children. Finland is not the only model of a different system, and we should be studying a lot of different models to make sure we aren't missing out on lessons we can learn from practice elsewhere. P.S. I am a teacher by occupation, and I know that the research shows that teacher characteristics matter for learners. The parental involvement or value placed on education by parents mentioned in several comments that preceded mine here are important, but I deal often (just today, in fact) with trying to help parents who are involved in their children's educations but are frustrated by what's happening to their children in United States public school classrooms. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Smartest-Kids-World-They/dp/145165443X http://www.amazon.com/The-Smartest-Kids-World-They/dp/145165...

deleted 12y ago

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cryptlord 12y ago

It always amazes me when these articles about the finnish education system pop up. I'm finnish and I've dropped out of high school twice, I don't consider myself dumb and have done very well in my life (Thank you, internet). A lot better than my peers, most of them are dropouts as well. The only people who have even got to an university level are people who already were from wealthy/academic families. It's the same thing everywhere, but I admit that education being free is a big deal, but it doesn't fix social problems.

saranagati 12y ago

there's a lot of talk here about teacher/school standardization but I dont see any talk of what that standardization is, only whos at fault. students dont do poorly in school because the information to learn isnt there or even because its not encouraged by the students parents (speaking of the us education system). students fail at school because of how much its geared to teach square pegs when many students arent a square peg. sure some teachers may teach for square pegs while others teach for round pegs but the students dont get the option of attending the class for round pegs instead of the square peg class. instead the student is thrown into a teachers class and has to conform to however that teacher wants to structure and grade the class. class A may be graded mostly on tests while class B may be mostly on homework and even still class C may be a mix of both homework and tests. then other teachers like to throw artifacts such as attendance to skew the grade even more. finally theres the problem of subjects that people just arent good at or dont care for because they provide little real world use. subjects such as history or soke more advanced english or math. these turn into something that a student is not only forced to attend and contribute to but also be judged on. for a personal anecdote and one of ky sources of critisms, when I was a freshman in high school I was in an algebra class and aced both finals with the highest grade in the class while getting A's and B's on all of my tests. one thing I never did though was the homework (I turned in maybe two homework assignments the entire year). end of the year comes and I fail the class because I didnt turn in the homework and I had a habit of sleeping in the class. to top off all of that there are teachers who just suck and/or dont get along with certain students. teachers who are condescending to soke students or try to keep students in class during lunch. its not a teachers job to punish kids in any way. if the student is disruptive to the class then they should dismiss the student from the class and have the school take care of problem students.