Last week, Chicago experienced its first teacher strike in 25 years. Instead of heading to school on Monday, more than 26,000 teachers gathered to strike. The strike left 350,000 Chicago public school children out of school for the entire week.
A lot of the trouble here is the result of what is being called the Race to the Top initiative, which establishes the standard of teachers being evaluated based on the standardized test scores of their students. The initiative, according to Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, will end with 6,000 Chicago teachers being discharged within the next two years.
The unions and government officials reached a deal last week, but the fact remains — our education system needs serious reform. And the reform needs to come in a way that does not involve hundreds of thousands of children being forced out of schools, parents scrambling for child care and poor children who depend on school lunches going hungry.
The Finnish system of education became popular after the criticism of the American educational system in the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” Finland began education reform about 40 years ago. The reform acted as an economic recovery, much as the investments in the G.I. Bill assisted the American economy. According to a 2011 article in Smithsonian Magazine by LynNell Hancock, an educational study that drew from more than 40 different global venues showed Finnish students outperforming many of the world’s top nations in almost every academic subject.
“Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union,” Hancock reported. “Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.”
Finnish teachers focus on students who are struggling and adopt the mindset of doing whatever it takes to help the student succeed. Currently, there is only one mandated standardized test at the end of a student’s senior year of high school. In addition, teachers are “professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education.”
According to a CBS News article, American education majors, on average, enter school with the lowest SAT scores of any of their classmates in other majors. However, the education majors usually graduated with GPAs that were, on average, higher than their classmates’. So not only is the field of education slacking in recruitment, it’s also handing out easy A’s.
The American system is failing because it does not work to recruit its best and brightest to the field of education. Incentives for good, intelligent, hard-working teachers are rare in the American system. Meanwhile, Finland is recruiting their best and brightest to educate the next generation and teach them to become mature, thinking adults. Most importantly, Finnish teachers honestly care about the good of every one of their students. As mentioned before, they work to help the least common denominator to succeed no matter what the circumstances. The American system focuses on making our highest achieving students the best in the world. Our drive for competition leaves the disadvantaged in the dust. Instead of creating incentives for intelligent students to become educators, we instead shuffle them along to Goldman Sachs.
Moral of the story: The American education system has fallen into the rhythm of a systematic and standardized scoring of success. Lawmakers are encouraging the premium placed on impersonal standardization instead of working to fix the problem we all know is there. Unionized teachers are striking and begging for change despite the guilt of knowing 350,000 kids are being forced out of school. Something radical must be done.
