Prof. Chester Finn: gemeenschappelijke lagere cyclus s.o. in
Finland e.d. is nivellerend!
Education Week 4
november:
A Different Kind of Lesson From Finland: By Chester E. Finn Jr. & Brandon L.
Wright (Gedifferentieerde lagere cyclus
s.o. beter dan nivellerende gemeenschappelijke cyclus in Finland e.d.)
Basisstelling: Kritiek op comprehensieve, gemeenschappelijke
lagere cyclus in Finland, VS
Pleidooi voor meer gedifferentieerde lagere
cyclus s.o. (cf. situatie in Vlaams
onderwijs).
Meer aandacht en
uitdaging voor betere leerlingen nodig ook in Finland. Amper 15% Finse toppers voor PISA-wiskunde
2012. Why assume that every 11-year-old belongs in 5th grade and that all 5th
graders should learn the same things at the same speed? Above all, we need a
new policy regime that gives teachers and schools ample incentive to press for
academic growth in all their students, just as we need a culture that embraces
excellence as well as equity and demands that its education system raise the
ceiling on achievement even as it also lifts the floor.
Toch wel aantal
elite-scholen voor 7 à 15-jarigen in Finland - haaks op officiële Finse beweringen en beweringen van Pasi
Sahlverg: Besides Finland's 50-plus "special" high schools (which a
local expert says "can just as well be called schools for the gifted and
talented"), we foundespecially in metropolitan Helsinkian underground
network of families jockeying to get their little ones into primary and middle
schools that have impressive track records of high school and university
admission.
"Finland and the United States and would both be wise
to adopt systematic policies designed to improve the education of high-ability
learners beginning well before high school."
Whether it's explicit and policy-based, as in Singapore, or
officially shunned but parent-driven, as in Finland, some souped-up educational
opportunities for high-ability children can be spotted in most advanced
countries.
Bijdrage
Finland has been lauded for years as this planet's grand
K-12 education success story, deserving of study and emulation by other
nations. The buzz began with its impressive Program for International Student
Assessment results in 2000, which stayed strong through 2006. Educators
hastened to Helsinki from far and wide to sample the secret sauce, hoping they
might recreate it back home. And most of them loved the taste, as Finland's
recipe contained many ingredients that educators generally like and shunned
those they typically find repugnant. It was all about teachers,
professionalism, and equity, rather than jarring notions like standards,
choice, assessments, and accountability.
Gradually, however, the sauna cooled a bit. Finland's PISA
scores and rankings slipped in 2009, and again in 2012, followed by a scathing
report from the University of Helsinki that led the program's uber-advocate
Pasi Sahlberg to warn that the time had come for Finns "to concede that
the signals of change have been discernible already for a while and to open up
a national discussion regarding the state and future of the Finnish
comprehensive school that rose to international acclaim due to our students'
success in the PISA studies."
He was right. There had, indeed, been earlier signals:
evidence of weak achievement by the country's small but growing immigrant and
minority populations, as well as boys lagging way behind girls.
Finland's brightest kids weren't exactly thriving, either.
In 2009 and 2012, Finland saw drops in all three subjectsreading, math, and
scienceamong its high-scoring test-takersthose who reached level 5 or 6 on
PISA's six-point scale. In math and reading specifically, these percentages
dropped below 2003 levels, marking the country's worst high-level performance
in a more than a decade.
Had the secret sauce lost its kick? Was the world misled
from the get-go, at least regarding how well that sauce works for smart kids?
Finland makes a point of doing nothing special for them. Rather, its recipe
deals with them, as with other kids, via inclusive, child-centered instruction
delivered in similar schools by exceptionally well-prepared teachers whose
skills are supposed to include differentiating their instruction according to
the needs, capacities, and prior achievement of all their pupils.
Differentiated instruction certainly aligns with the Finnish
culture and self-concept, and it's plenty popular among other educators, too,
thanks to its obvious allure on grounds of both fairness and individualization.
It's a very big deal among U.S. educators, and we found some of it in all 11
countries that we profile in our recently published book, Failing Our Brightest
Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. Everywhere we
went, we encountered some version of this assertion: "We don't need to
provide special programs or schools for gifted children, because we expect
every school and teacher to adapt their instruction to meet the unique
educational needs of all children, including the very able."
But such solemn, wishful affirmations don't necessarily
accord with reality on the ground. Besides Finland's 50-plus
"special" high schools (which a local expert says "can just as
well be called schools for the gifted and talented"), we foundespecially
in metropolitan Helsinkian underground network of families jockeying to get
their little ones into primary and middle schools that have impressive track
records of high school and university admission.
Back in the United States, we find a dizzying assortment of
gifted and talented programs in many districts, a handful of states that
require "gifted" students to be "identified" (though not
necessarily "served"), and a small but distinguished array of super
high schools such as New York's Stuyvesant High School and Virginia's Thomas
Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. We also found
selective-admission high schools and schools-within-schools in every other land
that we examined; plus, in some, we found highly structured gifted-education
offerings in the middle grades.
"The United States and Finland would both be wise to
adopt systematic policies designed to improve the education of high-ability
learners beginning well before high school."
Whether it's explicit and policy-based, as in Singapore, or
officially shunned but parent-driven, as in Finland, some souped-up educational
opportunities for high-ability children can be spotted in most advanced
countries. The problem is that they're typically more accessible to middle- and
upper-middle-class kids than to equally bright children from disadvantaged
circumstances.
Students with prosperous, education-savvy parents generally
have help in navigating the education systemand the means to extract the best
it has to offer. They are willing to move when necessary and supplement regular
schools with tutors, summer opportunities, and more. Disadvantaged youngsters,
however, depend far more on what the system provides them. The schools that
serve students in poverty are also likely to be serving many disadvantaged
students with many needs and challenges. These schools are also under policy
pressure to get more of their students up to the "proficient" bar,
with few resources to spare for fast learners who have already reached it.
In the 11 countries that we studied, we compared the numbers
of top- and bottom-quartile students (using a measure of social and economic
status formulated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
who made it into the high-scoring ranks on PISA in 2012.
No country has achieved anything like equity on this front,
but several nations, often dubbed the "Asian tigers," get more than
10 percent of their disadvantaged students into the top-scoring levels in math,
alongside more than 30 percent of their affluent youngsters. Switzerland does
almost as well. By contrast, the data for the United States show fewer than 3
percent of disadvantaged youngsters attaining levels 5 or 6, and just 20
percent of more advantaged kids, the worst ratio in our study. Finland's ratio
is betterless than 4-to-1but only 15 percent of its 15-year-olds reach the
top ranks.
Why do some countries do better at this? Culture obviously
matters, as do attitudes toward education, parent aspirations, and much more.
No school system can make the most of every child's potential without support
from elsewhere. But it's a mistake to place the entire obligation of formal
education on teachers' shoulders and assume that they'll meet every child's
needs via classroom differentiation. Most teachers find that next to
impossible. What's more, other strategies work better: Acceleration, for
instance, is good for smart kids, and a well-designed tracking system is good
for high-ability minority youngsters and harms nobody.
The United States and Finland would both be wise to adopt
systematic policies designed to improve the education of high-ability learners
beginning well before high school. One approachas we saw in Singapore and
Western Australiais to screen all 3rd or 4th graders for signs of outstanding
ability or achievement, then provide enrichment options, even separate
classrooms and schools, for the ablest among them. American schools already
have achievement data for every child starting in 3rd gradeand universal
screening yields a more diverse population of "gifted" students than
waiting for teacher recommendations and pushy parents.
Having spotted them, we should do those things that help
them, and others, by edging toward mastery-based progress through school. (Why
assume that every 11-year-old belongs in 5th grade and that all 5th graders
should learn the same things at the same speed?) Above all, we need a new
policy regime that gives teachers and schools ample incentive to press for
academic growth in all their students, just as we need a culture that embraces
excellence as well as equity and demands that its education system raise the
ceiling on achievement even as it also lifts the floor.
Finland might be smart to do something similar.
Chester E. Finn Jr. is a senior fellow of the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University and a distinguished senior fellow and
president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Brandon L. Wright is the
managing editor at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Finn and Wright co-authored
Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability
Students, which was published in September by Harvard Education Press.
Reactie van dajba
"Above all, we need a new policy regime that gives
teachers and schools ample incentive to press for academic growth in all their
students, just as we need a culture that embraces excellence as well as equity
and demands that its education system raise the ceiling on achievement even as
it also lifts the floor."
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Now if somebody just knew
how to do that. . . My two cents: focus less on the latest fads, and more on
ways to attract more of our best and brightest into teaching. My experience of
30 years in the profession is that fads come and fads go, and very little
changes. The only thing that really succeeds in education is having smart,
dedicated teachers who are passionate about their field and passionate about
teaching. If we had more of those, a lot of our more intractable problems in
education would take care of themselves.
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