International Models for Success
I had the opporutnity to attend a Professional Development hour with Finnish Educator and educational analyst Pasi Sahlberg. He posts all of his presenations at his website. I attended the TIES Talk in 2021, this was a fascinating presentation about the different international models in educaion and how some of the West were driven by a business model of education and the idea that educaiton can be measured and assessed for its success in easily quanitifiable numbers and data.
What we see is rather than a successful “race to the top” and best scores for the power players of the West, we instead see a fall in the scores and the emergence of underdogs. We see Finland and then other unexpected countries emerge as leaders. While some don’t seem surprising such as South Korea and China, which focus on high-stakes testing and drilling, there were eybrows raised at Finalnd and later Estonia and Norway climbing the charts of best scores. These countries have a more holistic view on educaiton and a student-centered and directed idea of education. While we continued to tie funding rewards to the best test scores and added more and more quanitatitive assessment to teachers’ plates in the United States we saw counter-parts around the world consider the models that take into account all of a student’s well being.
Slide from Pasi Sahlberg’s TIES talk 2021.
What the data suggests is that schools that have higher quality outcomes tend to also have higher equity outcomes. This means that your school down the street should be the same quality as the school across town. Both schools will be funded equally considering the needs of the students within the walls. Therefore support is also considered in funding. Who needs language support? Who needs support for learning differences? Who needs counseling for trauma? These questions are considered in the funding of the schools and basic needs are also a consideration, specifically when looking at the Finnish school system we see the consideration of equity. Success cannot happen if students are worried about other basic needs and we are all familiar with Maslows hierarchy of what takes up space in students heads. Therefore Finland and countries that are like-minded decided to equal out as much as they could those layers that could be stoppping students from reaching that upper portion of the pyramid.
Finland and those like it know students are able to focus on inquiry and learning if they aren’t stuck in fulfilling the first two layers of needs.
What we see and the key takeaways from Pasi’s presentation is that the business model that focuses on competition and rigidly set standards that focus on memorization, googleable curriculum, and one-off testing is no match for more individualized, collabroation, and adapatbale models. The models that succeed are more nimble and able to adapt to changing conditions when teachers are trusted and professionals who are trained in concept-driven models of education. The current US structure has teachers held hostage to tests and standards that are created by those who have very little background in educaion themselves and value the quantifiable measurements of school while neglecting the more useful and telling qualitative data that educators collect daily. We want to move our country from the red to the green if we would like to join the international models of success.
