What Americans Keep Ignoring

What Americans keep ignoring about Finland’s school success
The USA’s school system needs to be improved, and they can look up to Finland. Finland is always one of those lands who has the highest scores in PISA tests, and that means that there is something all other countries can learn from Finland. In Finland’s school they don’t exhaust the pupils through several hours, but they assign the pupils less homework and teach them through creative play. We can also take notice of the fact that they don’t have any private schools in Finland, there are some independent schools but they are publicly financed. There is not any private university either, so everyone has to go to a public school.
The article is about the man called Pasi Sahlberg. He is Finnish and he has of course he parents who both are school teachers. He went to school in Finland, so he knows what he is talking about. He has spent a lot of years being an education expert for several international organizations. From Sahlberg’s point of view the Americans are thinking about education in another way. Americans think that they need to test their students all the time, so that they know how good they are. They are also thinking about the teachers whether they are good enough, and that should improve by time too. The Americans are thinking too much about competition, where they should think about what’s best for the students, how they learn the best.
The Finnish has only one test, which you need to take after having attended a voluntary upper-secondary school. The tests they take in the meantime are tests made by the teacher, who is trained to make these tests themselves. At the end of a semester each student gets a report card, where every teacher from the classes has written a report.
In Finland it is not as easy to become a teacher like in the USA. You need a master degree, and if there is a bad teacher, the headmaster of the school has to take notice and deal with it. The teachers have gained a lot of responsibility, and they are also more decent paid than teachers in the USA.
A thing which is one of the most important facts from the article, is that the Finnish school system’s goal always has been equity not anything else. In Finland you can choose whether your child should go the school in the city or the school in the neighbor city but either way there would not be any difference in what the child would be taught. That is not how it is in the USA, because the schools there are, like they in the article, like shops. The parents can buy anything they want, and the teachers’ skills are not the same at every school. Even the public schools are so different, that the students at one school can be a lot better than the students from a school in another city. In the USA there are a lot more different things which also has a role to play ex. where you live, uptown or downtown, in the slum, or in the country.
When it is equity which has the most important role to play in Finland’s school system, it makes it easier for every kind of child to get an education, no one gets treated different from each other. Everybody has the same opportunities to educate. It does not matter what your family does, where you live or how much money you make. Finland sees education as a way to even out the inequality.
Finland’s test results have not even moved especially much after the immigrant percent has grown, even though it has caused a larger amount of mixed schools than before.
America and Finland have, despite their differences, the same goal. Finland found out that they could not trust their manufacturing or natural resources, so they had to make money on knowledge. And if you want to make money by something, you have to be good at it, so the politicians decided to invest in the school system. By doing this they have become more competitive in this area.
In the USA people think of their own happiness before others, and they are also acting like this considering education. It’s a fact, that if the USA wants their school system to improve they need to invest. But not just invest in the schools, they also need to invest in the teachers so that they can improve. Plus if they want the school system improved they would have to have all kinds of children going to the public school; whether it is a boy or black, black or white, rich or poor etc.
All this can be done. Finland has done it, so it is not impossible. Even though many Finnish people didn’t believe it could happen, but then it did. It is about having a dream and making it come true. The Americans just have to focus on cooperation and equity instead of competition and so on. Some of the Americans are so good at living their “American dream”, so what could be just wonderful, would be if the Americans had the same dream. Better cooperation, equity resulting in a better school system. A school system with space for all children, despite some are poor, some are rich, some black and some white.