Michael Booth talks about Finland's schools in his book, "The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia." He points out that in Finland the most revered and treasured profession is teaching. The smartest students, the most driven students, they all become teachers. Articles like this are wonderful at pointing out that relaxed and individualized teaching can succeed but they are glossing over an important cultural norm.
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.
> 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).
Nice observation! Yes, you're right. To double check, 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...) and even the custodial staff (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04... ).
The principals have little say in the results of these decisions.
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.
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.
> The smartest students, the most driven students, they all become teachers.
Part of that is the cultural status of teachers. But another large contributor is the policy status of teachers w.r.t rate of pay, autonomy, and educational requirements.
All teachers must obtain a Masters. They are paid in line with expected median or greater for those of their educational level. They are also, by policy, the main driving force and final say on curriculums and educational program design. Further, they are expected to remain current within their field and often publish throughout their career.
In other words, the pay and job preference is the type that attracts the academically minded. And does so without requiring them to assume standards of living far below their educational investment.
Society at large lends respect to fields based, by and large, on superficial reasons. In the U.S. we offer teachers pay and respect (within the job) more in line with short order cooks with a G.E.D. than professionals. Society's treatment of the profession reflects that.
Do note that lower university degrees are relatively new thing in Finland. It is still common to consider your studies "done" only after you have graduated with a master's degree. Teaching teachers in university is also relatively new, started in 1974.
By my observations, pedagogy is considered one of the most applied sciencies taught in university and I would say that it attracts the least academically mind of those applying in university.
The other important note is that the environment for teachers is good. We get lots of great people into teaching right after college through Teach for America and other programs, but they don't want to stay teachers.
Who would, when you get sent to the kind of underfunded, marginalized districts that are desperate enough to conclude that a liberal arts student who has no training in education, nor any student-teaching experience, is a reasonable option?
I have several friends that are still in education, and several more who bailed after TFA. It doesn't help that teachers get paid such shit wages, and the only way to earn more in most districts is to hang on and take your yearly bump. Or get a University of Phoenix master's degree for a little bit more of a bump.
How is teacher compensation over there? I always thought we'd see better outcomes in schools if we paid enough for the best and brightest to become teachers.
Fact is, they cannot live in many "reasonably priced" housing markets (let alone the Bay/SF) on a typical teacher salary in the US.
Thecher compensation is a bit above the national average and they have long vacations.
What is also very meaningful to notice is that due to high income taxes, income redistribution, and generally flatter pay scale overall compared to most other countries, a corporate lawyer isn't that much better off than a teacher.
> generally flatter pay scale overall compared to most other countries, a corporate lawyer isn't that much better off than a teacher.
The most important aspect of this is that when your nation's best and brightest choose a career path, massive disparities in quality of life is not a mitigating factor detracting from careers in education.
Good teachers are important, but they can only affect, what, 20 kids a year? The best and brightest should stick to engineering and finance where they can have a bigger impact.
> The best and brightest should stick to engineering and finance where they can have a bigger impact.
Many of the best and brightest stay in academia, but at the university level. Many others go into engineering and finance, but make no real lasting impact mostly working on the day to day tasks of making the cogs turn. Currently many of the smartest engineers in silicon valley have dedicated their careers to selling targeted ads.
In the scheme of things, I'd be hard pressed placing selling X more power drills a year or "yet another CRUD app" over building the foundation of a quality education system.
Yes, but a quality education system requires thousands of people who can each only affect ~20-100 people a year. It's not an efficient use of the 'best and brightest'.
Meanwhile 55 engineers at WhatsApp can write software used daily by 700m people. Or a handful of financiers can find a new way to securitize debt, lowering interest rates for 100m borrowers.
Yep, the flip side to having a massive impact is that you also have a massive impact when you're wrong. You'd still want the 'best and brightest' in those positions than not.
> Meanwhile 55 engineers at WhatsApp can write software used daily by 700m people.
First, arguably, the engineers at what's app quite possibly might not be the best or brightest. Not saying they're aren't very good, but that's not necessarily what drives an app like WhatsApp into popularity.
Second, even if it's assumed that the WhatsApp engineers are literally the best 55 engineers in their field bar none they only represent a minuscule fraction of a pool of many, many talented individuals.
In other words, there's room for WhatsApp (and all the other comparable unicorns) and the teaching profession.
The overwhelming majority of very talented engineers are not impacting 700 million users. And as I mentioned, many are impacting them only insofar as what they see in their google sidebar. . . which I'm not sure is very socially impactful.
What are you talking about? So what if WhatsApp is used by half a billion people? Good for the engineers, I guess? How is my third world country so much better off with WhatsApp than with the crappier alternative, vs. my third world country if it could attract its best and brightest into becoming teachers? I could see no better future for my country than some way to get and keep great teachers.
> with WhatsApp than with the crappier alternative
The crappier alternative(s) would have to be written by an engineer too.
Anyways, I think you're missing my point: there aren't enough exceptional 'best and brightest' to do everything. You want the 'best and brightest' to have maximum leverage as individuals over the world and that means politics, finance, and engineering, not teaching.
Those engineers won the lottery. The prize was many people switching to a marginally nicer chat app. If you're looking to make the world a better place, choosing engineering based on this result isn't really an obvious choice.
To examine the equation in the "work for an existing SV tech giant" case: a hugely smaller impact on people than what the WhatsApp engineers had. And getting a job at Facebook or another similarly impactful place is still at ~ 1:100000 odds for the world's 20 million software engineers.
Only this time you'll have even less confidence that you're actually making things better and not worse. At least in the WhatsApp case they made Facebook have $19 billion less money in the end. And if they're really out to make the world a better place they can spend that in some Bill Gates-esque way. I guess we'll see about that.
I'm not sure that the world needs yet more traders and hedge fund managers, to be honest. A bunch of competent, not-too-dishonest politicians, on the other hand...
The world doesn't need more traders and hedge fund managers. But it does need the best people to be in positions with high leverage such as hedge fund manager.
