Shop Talk: SUNY at Albany’s Fountain Is Due for Major Renovation

Finland moved from a national curriculum to its current system with NO external testing. Today, all of their tests are teacher-written, as was the case in the U.S. before “Nation at Risk.”

What is not discussed is the fact that the U.S. has led in creativity with science Nobels, under pre-reform teaching where the American K-12 teacher decided what,when and how to teach.
That academic freedom or responsibility is now gone atthe K-12 level. Now the movement to standardize general education at the university level and require uniform syllabi and even exams threatens to destroy your curricular academic freedom/responsibility at the university level as well.

John Richard Schrock   

The US, upon wanting to improve an impoverished classroom or school, invariably ends up with a scenario which involves inordinately expensive solutions: dump lots of money onto the stage in the form of additional teachers, technological revamping, monitoring of student performance, continuous attention to the extent of spoiling the students, etc. Zakaria’s program gave prototypically superb examples: Bill Gates to the rescue, Khan Academy with personalized video monitoring to the rescue. Create a labor- and resource-intensive  “showcase” classroom or school here and there, then stand back and admire the result. Try to apply this approach nationwide in every classroom, however, and the resources would simply be prohibitive. Additionally, students and teachers not part of such expensive experiments are off the hook: how could they possibly be expected to learn and teach without such luxurious facilities?

Similarly, what is seen in Finland–teachers paid on a par with physicians–may also mislead us into thinking more resources in the form of higher teacher salaries alone is the sure “fix” for the problem.

What Finland as well as any expensive rescue attempt might instead have to teach us is that cultures that signify the importance of serious education to their young people will have young people serious about their education. If a “cohesive educational philosophy” in the US will involve anything it must first of all be expectation-driven at the broader level of culture. The US currently sends too many mixed messages to its young people for any one of them to be taken seriously. When anything goes, everything goes–down the drain, that is.