In her New York Review of Books article, The Myth of Charter Schools, author Diane Ravitch reviews the film Waiting for Superman along with two other similar documentary-style films:
The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
According to Ravitch, director/producer Davis Guggenheim ignores mediocre and underperforming charter schools to highlight a few “superstar” charter academies. She asserts that he cherry-picks evidence favoring his opinion and ignores counter-evidence in order to discredit teachers, teachers’ unions, and the US public education system as a whole:
Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?
Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty, even though there are countless studies that demonstrate the link between income and test scores. He shows us footage of the pilot Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, to the amazement of people who said it couldn’t be done. Since Yeager broke the sound barrier, we should be prepared to believe that able teachers are all it takes to overcome the disadvantages of poverty, homelessness, joblessness, poor nutrition, absent parents, etc. [...]
Guggenheim skirts the issue of poverty by showing only families that are intact and dedicated to helping their children succeed. One of the children he follows is raised by a doting grandmother; two have single mothers who are relentless in seeking better education for them; two of them live with a mother and father. Nothing is said about children whose families are not available, for whatever reason, to support them, or about children who are homeless, or children with special needs. Nor is there any reference to the many charter schools that enroll disproportionately small numbers of children who are English-language learners or have disabilities.
Ravitch notes that Guggenheim also fails to mention that the cost-per-student at one high-performing charter school is $35,000. Contrast that to the average for public schools, which averages a little over $10,000 per student. Ravitch makes a strong case that federally-funded, privately run educational institutions set the stage for financial incentives that foster abuse. She describes something else that Guggenheim left out: the despicable practice of expelling underperforming students in order to artifically boost test scores.
In contrast to American schools, Finland’s schools consistently perform at the top of the developed world. Guggenheim omits important details about the Finnish paradigm as well (I’ll come back to the Finnish model in a moment):
Guggenheim ignored other clues that might have gotten in the way of a good story. While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force. His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students. Any Finnish educator will say that Finland improved its public education system not by privatizing its schools or constantly testing its students, but by investing in the preparation, support, and retention of excellent teachers. It achieved its present eminence not by systematically firing 5–10 percent of its teachers, but by patiently building for the future. Finland has a national curriculum, which is not restricted to the basic skills of reading and math, but includes the arts, sciences, history, foreign languages, and other subjects that are essential to a good, rounded education. Finland also strengthened its social welfare programs for children and families. Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system.
In her final paragraphs, Ravitch concludes:
There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector. Waiting for “Superman” is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the “free market” and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
Ravitch has a powerful working knowledge of education in America, and she cites credible sources to make her case. I am no education expert, but I have conducted some basic research into Ravitch’s credentials. Absent any glaring red flags I’m fairly comfortable deferring to her judgement. I find her expertise even more credible because she has engaged in reflective self-examination and her opinions have evolved as a result--the hallmark of a critical thinker. During her tenure in GW Bush’s administration, she lobbied strongly in favor of the now-discredited No Child Left Behind legislation. She has since emphatically changed her mind. I think she makes a compelling argument that these films inaccurately portray both the public and charter systems in the US.
Back to the Finnish system.
I view a good education as a basic human right. It seems both intuitively and empirically obvious to me that successful pubic education depends on a social and political culture that fosters a strong egalitarian society. By this I mean that all citizens should enjoy a basic standard of living as a jumping-off point for greater success. No one should be homeless or lack access to healthcare. No one should be hungry. No school should lack functioning toilets and lack of heat as William Ayers described schools in inner-city Chicago in a speech I attended at the University of Wyoming this spring. He advocated movingly for strong standards and opportunities for all of our students rather than standardization of mediocrity.
The Myth of Charter Schools feeds right into my own views mirrored in this article in the Washington Post: “[...] a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all.” I decided to check out whether the success of the Finnish educational system supports my own bias favoring quality, free public education underpinned by a strong network of social services.
The BBC has a great overview of the Finnish system here.
“The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.
Counterintuitively, Finnish students spend fewer hours at school and study in a relaxed informal environment. The higher-performing students help the struggling ones, and there is an air of egalitarian learning--all of which mirrors my son’s very positive experience in our local Montessori school.
In significant contrast with the US, teaching is a prestigious career in Finland, and both the BBC video and the Washington Post article stated that all Finnish teachers hold Master’s degrees.
Obviously the Washington Post article resonates with me. Here’s author Robert G. Kaiser’s entire quote from above:
Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn't controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can't we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?
Why indeed. There are far fewer people in Finland, around 5.3 million, with a population density of 40/square mile. In the US there are around 310 million people with a population density of 83/square mile. (I live in a large rural state, so even 40/sq.mi. sounds like a lot of people to me.) All that breathing room in Finland has produced a political culture that is very different than the American paradigm:
Finns have one of the world's most generous systems of state-funded educational, medical and welfare services, from pregnancy to the end of life. They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little. (Finns devote 7 percent of gross domestic product to health care; we spend 15 percent.) Finnish senior citizens are well cared for. Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely.
On the other hand, Finns live in smaller homes than Americans and consume a lot less. They spend relatively little on national defense, though they still have universal male conscription, and it is popular. Their per capita national income is about 30 percent lower than ours. Private consumption of goods and services represents about 52 percent of Finland's economy, and 71 percent of the United States'. Finns pay considerably higher taxes -- nearly half their national income is taken in taxes, while Americans pay about 30 percent on average to federal, state and local governments.
Note how much less Finns spend on health care and yet achieve half the infant mortality rate. I found this statistic shocking. I looked it up, and yes, Finland has 3.47 deaths/1000 live births. In the US that jumps to 6.7. Note how much more they pay in taxes to support their public programs.
Because I have a bias in favor of the Finnish system, I wanted to ignore this part of Kaiser’s article:
I found Finnish society beguiling on many levels, but in the end concluded that it could not serve as a blueprint for the United States. National differences matter. The Finns are special and so are we. Ours is a society driven by money, blessed by huge private philanthropy, cursed by endemic corruption and saddled with deep mistrust of government and other public institutions. Finns have none of those attributes.
Kaiser concludes that America would benefit from emulating the Finnish educational system but leaving behind the egalitarian society business. I fear educational reforms in the US won’t be very effective without some level of basic social support systems addressing poverty and inequality.
The complicated Finnish language includes the word talkoot, which means, roughly, "doing work together." It's a powerful Finnish tradition, and reflects a national sense that "we're all in the same boat," as numerous Finns said to me. This idea has always appealed to Americans, but in this country it has nearly always been an abstraction. Finns seem to make it real.
Talkoot sounds like a very good place for America to begin reforming education.
The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
According to Ravitch, director/producer Davis Guggenheim ignores mediocre and underperforming charter schools to highlight a few “superstar” charter academies. She asserts that he cherry-picks evidence favoring his opinion and ignores counter-evidence in order to discredit teachers, teachers’ unions, and the US public education system as a whole:
Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?
Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty, even though there are countless studies that demonstrate the link between income and test scores. He shows us footage of the pilot Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, to the amazement of people who said it couldn’t be done. Since Yeager broke the sound barrier, we should be prepared to believe that able teachers are all it takes to overcome the disadvantages of poverty, homelessness, joblessness, poor nutrition, absent parents, etc. [...]
Guggenheim skirts the issue of poverty by showing only families that are intact and dedicated to helping their children succeed. One of the children he follows is raised by a doting grandmother; two have single mothers who are relentless in seeking better education for them; two of them live with a mother and father. Nothing is said about children whose families are not available, for whatever reason, to support them, or about children who are homeless, or children with special needs. Nor is there any reference to the many charter schools that enroll disproportionately small numbers of children who are English-language learners or have disabilities.
Ravitch notes that Guggenheim also fails to mention that the cost-per-student at one high-performing charter school is $35,000. Contrast that to the average for public schools, which averages a little over $10,000 per student. Ravitch makes a strong case that federally-funded, privately run educational institutions set the stage for financial incentives that foster abuse. She describes something else that Guggenheim left out: the despicable practice of expelling underperforming students in order to artifically boost test scores.
In contrast to American schools, Finland’s schools consistently perform at the top of the developed world. Guggenheim omits important details about the Finnish paradigm as well (I’ll come back to the Finnish model in a moment):
Guggenheim ignored other clues that might have gotten in the way of a good story. While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force. His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students. Any Finnish educator will say that Finland improved its public education system not by privatizing its schools or constantly testing its students, but by investing in the preparation, support, and retention of excellent teachers. It achieved its present eminence not by systematically firing 5–10 percent of its teachers, but by patiently building for the future. Finland has a national curriculum, which is not restricted to the basic skills of reading and math, but includes the arts, sciences, history, foreign languages, and other subjects that are essential to a good, rounded education. Finland also strengthened its social welfare programs for children and families. Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system.
In her final paragraphs, Ravitch concludes:
There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector. Waiting for “Superman” is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the “free market” and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
Ravitch has a powerful working knowledge of education in America, and she cites credible sources to make her case. I am no education expert, but I have conducted some basic research into Ravitch’s credentials. Absent any glaring red flags I’m fairly comfortable deferring to her judgement. I find her expertise even more credible because she has engaged in reflective self-examination and her opinions have evolved as a result--the hallmark of a critical thinker. During her tenure in GW Bush’s administration, she lobbied strongly in favor of the now-discredited No Child Left Behind legislation. She has since emphatically changed her mind. I think she makes a compelling argument that these films inaccurately portray both the public and charter systems in the US.
Back to the Finnish system.
I view a good education as a basic human right. It seems both intuitively and empirically obvious to me that successful pubic education depends on a social and political culture that fosters a strong egalitarian society. By this I mean that all citizens should enjoy a basic standard of living as a jumping-off point for greater success. No one should be homeless or lack access to healthcare. No one should be hungry. No school should lack functioning toilets and lack of heat as William Ayers described schools in inner-city Chicago in a speech I attended at the University of Wyoming this spring. He advocated movingly for strong standards and opportunities for all of our students rather than standardization of mediocrity.
The Myth of Charter Schools feeds right into my own views mirrored in this article in the Washington Post: “[...] a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all.” I decided to check out whether the success of the Finnish educational system supports my own bias favoring quality, free public education underpinned by a strong network of social services.
The BBC has a great overview of the Finnish system here.
“The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.
Counterintuitively, Finnish students spend fewer hours at school and study in a relaxed informal environment. The higher-performing students help the struggling ones, and there is an air of egalitarian learning--all of which mirrors my son’s very positive experience in our local Montessori school.
In significant contrast with the US, teaching is a prestigious career in Finland, and both the BBC video and the Washington Post article stated that all Finnish teachers hold Master’s degrees.
Obviously the Washington Post article resonates with me. Here’s author Robert G. Kaiser’s entire quote from above:
Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn't controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can't we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?
Why indeed. There are far fewer people in Finland, around 5.3 million, with a population density of 40/square mile. In the US there are around 310 million people with a population density of 83/square mile. (I live in a large rural state, so even 40/sq.mi. sounds like a lot of people to me.) All that breathing room in Finland has produced a political culture that is very different than the American paradigm:
Finns have one of the world's most generous systems of state-funded educational, medical and welfare services, from pregnancy to the end of life. They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little. (Finns devote 7 percent of gross domestic product to health care; we spend 15 percent.) Finnish senior citizens are well cared for. Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely.
On the other hand, Finns live in smaller homes than Americans and consume a lot less. They spend relatively little on national defense, though they still have universal male conscription, and it is popular. Their per capita national income is about 30 percent lower than ours. Private consumption of goods and services represents about 52 percent of Finland's economy, and 71 percent of the United States'. Finns pay considerably higher taxes -- nearly half their national income is taken in taxes, while Americans pay about 30 percent on average to federal, state and local governments.
Note how much less Finns spend on health care and yet achieve half the infant mortality rate. I found this statistic shocking. I looked it up, and yes, Finland has 3.47 deaths/1000 live births. In the US that jumps to 6.7. Note how much more they pay in taxes to support their public programs.
Because I have a bias in favor of the Finnish system, I wanted to ignore this part of Kaiser’s article:
I found Finnish society beguiling on many levels, but in the end concluded that it could not serve as a blueprint for the United States. National differences matter. The Finns are special and so are we. Ours is a society driven by money, blessed by huge private philanthropy, cursed by endemic corruption and saddled with deep mistrust of government and other public institutions. Finns have none of those attributes.
Kaiser concludes that America would benefit from emulating the Finnish educational system but leaving behind the egalitarian society business. I fear educational reforms in the US won’t be very effective without some level of basic social support systems addressing poverty and inequality.
The complicated Finnish language includes the word talkoot, which means, roughly, "doing work together." It's a powerful Finnish tradition, and reflects a national sense that "we're all in the same boat," as numerous Finns said to me. This idea has always appealed to Americans, but in this country it has nearly always been an abstraction. Finns seem to make it real.
Talkoot sounds like a very good place for America to begin reforming education.
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Comments
You might be making some new treaties with the native Americans. Ones you'll want to keep this time.
As for Finland, it's important to keep in mind that it is a very egalitarian society - as are all the Nordic countries (the Norwegian for "talkoot" is "dugnad"...). That usually translates into well-funded public schools, and the differences between schools in rich and poor areas, or between public and private schools, are likely to be small. But I'm not entirely sure that we would have been able to build consensus for such a system if our societies were more ethnically diverse. It's interesting to note that the political parties in Europe who tend to oppose the traditional welfare state are usually also the ones that are most hostile to immigration. Like the Tea Party, they "want their country back"...
Norwonk: Great points--esp. about the challenges of egalitarian consensus and ethnic diversity. I have the impression that many of the Nordic countries are also hostile to immigration. My great-grandparents were Norwegian...maybe there is some sort of ancestral tribal affiliation clause in the immigration policy? (Just as a plan B in case Skypixie's dystopia looms;)
I'm saddened to learn that the Tea Party style of regression to an imaginary history is not limited to the US.