In a post at EdWeek’s Inside School Research, guest blogger Debra Viadero points us toward more evidence of the failure of this simplistic narrative in a study that attempts to flesh out the importance of student motivation and academic success.

“Learning, Performance and Improvement,” in the latest issue of the London-based Institute of Education journal Research Matters finds students learn and behave differently if they—and their teachers—focus on improving their knowledge and competence rather than proving it. Yet simply talking about learning won’t overcome a classroom atmosphere focused on meeting test benchmarks.

In a review of more than 100 studies from the U.S. and across the globe, Chris Watkins, Institute reader in education at the University of London, ties the current discussion over how to teach modern critical thinking and problem-solving skills back to the decades-old discussion of students’ motivation in the classroom.

The research suggests two parallel motivations drive student achievement: “learning orientation,” the drive to improve your knowledge and competency; and “performance orientation,” the drive to prove that competency to others. Watkins found the highest-achieving students had a healthy dose of both types of motivation, but students who focused too heavily on performance ironically performed less well academically, thought less critically, and had a harder time overcoming failure.

Two guesses which orientation develops under a U.S.-style assessment accountability system, and the first doesn’t count.

As I and many others have repeatedly pointed out, the obsession of American education reformers with assessment and accountability is not simply mis-guided in the sense that it does not raise student achievement but that, more importantly, it undermines students ability to develop the critical and constructive thinking skills they will need to be successful in what reformers refer to as the 21st century knowledge economy. The education reformers populating the D.C. vortex inhabit a world of almost pure contradiction, and yet they continue to win the day. The reason for the dominance of this cabal of edu-philanthropists and think tank trolls…? There is a lot of money to be made in public education. It really is that simple. Follow the money and all will become clear.

Detroit Public Schools is set to open its first school without a principal — teachers will be running the day-to-day operations and making all pertinent decisions.

They won’t have to wait for the central office’s OK to purchase needed items or increase their emphasis on fractions or writing, for instance.

Founded on the belief that those within the building know best what their students need, Barbara Jordan Elementary will be the district’s first teacher-led school, open only to students whose parents agree to be involved. State officials know of no teacher-led schools in Michigan.

The Detroit school, for students in kindergarten through fourth grade, is modeled after teacher-led schools in Boston, Milwaukee, Denver and Los Angeles.

It’s too early to know test results, said Michael McLaughlin of the Boston Teachers Union School. But he can name one indicator of the Boston school’s success: “The families in the area, they’re clamoring to get into this school.”

In Detroit, the high-profile experiment in school reform could have long-reaching implications, said Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

“It’s an unprecedented opportunity,” Johnson said. “We cannot fail.”

Other nations have been transforming their school systems to meet the new demands of today’s world. They are expanding educational access to more and more of their people, and they are revising curriculums, instruction and assessments to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the twenty-first century. Starting in the 1980s, for example, Finland dismantled the rigid tracking system that had allocated differential access to knowledge to its young people and eliminated the state-mandated testing system that was used for this purpose, replacing them with highly trained teachers educated in newly overhauled schools of education, along with curriculums and assessments focused on problem-solving, creativity and independent learning. These changes have propelled achievement to the top of the international rankings and closed what was once a large, intractable achievement gap.

In the space of one generation, South Korea has transformed itself from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that graduates more than
95 percent from high school and ranks third in college-educated adults, with most young people now completing postsecondary education. Egalitarian access to schools and a common curriculum, coupled with investments in well-prepared teachers, have been part of the national strategy there as well.

Similarly, starting in the 1970s, Singapore began to transform itself from a collection of fishing villages into an economic powerhouse by building an education system that would assure every student access to strong teaching, an inquiry curriculum and cutting-edge technology. In 2003, Singapore’s fourth and eighth grade students scored first in the world in math and science on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessments. When children leave their tiny, spare apartments in high-rises throughout the nation, they arrive at beautiful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects and awards are displayed throughout; libraries and classrooms are well stocked; instructional technology is plentiful; and teachers are well trained and well supported…

It is easy to forget that during the years following Brown v. Board of Education, when desegregation and school finance reform efforts were launched, and when the Great Society’s War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities, substantial gains were made in equalizing educational inputs and outcomes. Childhood poverty was reduced to levels almost half of what they are today. Investments were made in desegregation, magnet schools, community schools, pipelines of well-qualified teachers, school funding reforms and higher education assistance.

These investments paid off in measurable ways. For a brief period in the mid-’70s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable with whites, the only time this has happened before or since. By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially. Federally funded curriculum investments transformed teaching in many schools. Innovative schools flourished, especially in the cities. Large gains in black students’ performance throughout the 1970s and early ’80s cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just fifteen years. Had this rate of progress continued, the achievement gap would have been closed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Unfortunately, that did not occur. While nations that today are high-achieving built on the progressive reforms they launched in the 1970s, the United States backpedaled in the Reagan years, cutting the education budget in half, ending most aid to cities and most supports for teacher recruitment and training while also slashing health and human services budgets and shifting costs to the states. This caused states to reduce equalization aid to schools in order to pick up other social service costs…

Clearly we need more than a new set of national goals to mobilize a dramatically more successful educational system. We also need more than pilot projects, demonstrations, innovations and other partial solutions. We need to take the education of poor children as seriously as we take the education of the rich, and we need to create systems that routinely guarantee all the elements of educational investment to all children.

What would this require? As in high- and equitably achieving nations, it would require strong investments in children’s welfare—adequate healthcare, housing and food security, so that children can come to school each day ready to learn; high-quality preschool to close achievement gaps that already exist when children enter kindergarten; equitably funded schools that provide quality educators and learning materials, which are the central resources for learning; a system that ensures that teachers and leaders in every community are extremely well prepared and are supported to be effective on the job; standards, curriculums and assessments focused on twenty-first-century learning goals; and schools organized for in-depth student and teacher learning and equipped to address children’s social needs, as the community schools movement has done [see David L. Kirp, "Cradle to College," page 26]…

While the administration’s blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (whose most recent iteration was No Child Left Behind) carries some hints of such strategies, its framework still envisions competition and sanctions as the primary drivers of reform rather than capacity-building and strategic investments. If this remains the primary frame for federal and state policy, it is unlikely that we will rebuild good schools in every community.

To meet twenty-first-century demands, the United States needs to move beyond a collection of disparate and shifting reform initiatives to a thoughtful, well-organized and well-supported set of policies that will enable young people to thrive in the new world they are entering. We must also finally make good on the American promise to make education available to all on equal terms, so that every member of this society can realize a productive life and contribute to the greater welfare. This is the challenge that Obama pledged to take on, and the one we should hope he will vigorously pursue.

In 2006, Finland’s pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD’s exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.

The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.

A tactic used in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject. But the pupils are all kept in the same classroom, regardless of their ability in that particular subject.

There’s a video to go with the article… go check it out!

The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were first conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put in effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.

Don’t get me wrong… It’s not an either/or kind of thing… Both the public and private sectors are necessary elements of capitalist development. This has always been the case. A more current example of this dynamic comes to us from China. The significant public investment China made in developing high-speed rail is now going to pay off as it begins to sell its expertise on the global marketplace.

The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build [high-speed rail] lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years.

You see… The public sector is capable of doing what the private sector cannot; it can make significant investments in long-term projects with little hope of short term viability. However, making those investments on the front-end opens up possibilities for the private sector to build off of those investments. And, if you look at China’s competitors for the California market, you will see a list of nations who followed the same path.

China is not the only country interested in selling high-speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached California’s High Speed Rail Authority.

Let’s be clear… I’m making this argument based on the logic of capitalism. That the free marketeers of the early 21st century dismiss these ideas out of hand as ’socialist tripe’ demonstrates how out of whack the body politic has become.

Vanderbilt University is partnering with Metro Schools to offer a free masters degree to 24 middle school teachers willing to take on an urban school assignment.

The teachers have to agree to work in Metro Schools for five years. Two of those years will be spent earning a master’s degree in teaching and learning in urban schools.

The district is hoping to raise private funds to cover the tuition, which is valued around $32,000. Vanderbilt is offering a discount to the district, and will also offer in-classroom mentoring and support to teachers going through the program.

Greg Mankiw links a former student courageously trying to protect the rights of Millionares not to pay more taxes here.

Here’s the thing — there are no reputable studies on the elasticity of the effect of tax changes on total taxes collected, and there’s no logical reason that that number should necessarily, a priori, be less than one. [...]

Peyton Manning makes about $30 million a year — let’s explore his potential behavioral responses to changes in taxes. Let’s raise Peyton’s taxes by 10%. Under the logic of Alan Liard, Greg Mankiw’s student, and under the logic that all economists know to be the truth, people respond to incentives. Peyton Manning is a person, so he responds to this tax hike by working 6% less, and decides now he’s going to sit for the Colts playoff games since he makes less money per game, and he enjoys watching Tom Brady play in the playoffs more than being there himself. Doesn’t really sound likely, does it?

Of course, Peyton Manning is going to play 16 NFL games and the playoffs even if you raise his taxes considerably. The same is true of a wide variety of other professions — corporate execs usually have two choices, they can choose to work or not work — there are no part-time CFO jobs, and it’s probably tough to be a “part-time” hedge-fund manager as well… So, let’s say Greg the textbook publisher or Chuck the hedge-fund manager decides, due to higher taxes, that they are just going to retire. In that case, the government loses 100% of the taxes Chuck or Greg would have paid! The multiplier is -10!!!

Except, according to logic which is totally obvious to a pre-schooler, if Greg the textbook author doesn’t sell textbooks, then Thorstein the textbook publisher will. If Peyton the quarterback doesn’t play in the playoffs or appear in Gatorade commercials, then Tom the quarterback will. If the CEO of Anthem, who routinely makes $40 million, quits due to high taxes, Anthem will pay the next CEO extravagantly. If Chuck the hedgefund manager doesn’t manage Peyton’s money, then Emilio the hedgefund manager will manage Tom’s money… [...]

The study I’d really like to see is if, since the early 1980s, as wages on Wall Street have gotten out of control, what has happened to the average age of retirement at firms such as Goldman Sachs. “Standard theory” of course does not even predict whether the income or substitution effect dominates, but I suspect that there are quite a few I-bankers on Wall Street who do not exactly love their jobs or working 100 hours a week, and will just retire once they’ve put away $10 million in the bank. Tax them more and that just delays retirement. And to the extent higher taxes preclude the possibility of putting away $10 million for your average I-banker and talent shifts out of finance (or NFL quarterbacking), I fail to see how this is such a bad thing for society…

Put another way, suppose the CEO of Anthem made $4 million rather than $40 million due to high tax rates on multi-million dollar incomes (which we do not currently have). While in the micro context, this would greatly reduce the government’s revenue, in this case, Anthem would have higher profits, or could afford to pay it’s other workers more, could cut prices to gain more market share, or might even be able to deny fewer claims. In other words, it wouldn’t make the whole pie smaller, it would just make it more equally distributed. And, to the extent that the Anthem CEO no longer flies around in a private Jet, owns 6 houses, and drinks $1000 bottles of wine, redistributive taxes would quite likely make the pie bigger…

Prior to the 2000’s, Finland’s education system had been considered average by Western, post-industrial standards. In terms of literacy, mathematics, and scientific reasoning, there was little that distinguished Finland from other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] nations in academic performance. However, in the past decade, Finland has excelled in international comparisons in all three of these measures. In reading, math, and science, Finland now outperforms not only the OECD average but also much larger and wealthier nations that have long histories with public education, such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Interestingly, Finland has been able to accomplish these academic gains while its education expenditures for primary and secondary education remain below the OECD average as measured by percentage of GDP. Deemed by many the “Finnish Miracle,” this dramatic surge in academic achievement emerged from a series of reforms implemented during a financial crisis in the 1990’s in which Finland forged an alternate path to international trends in educational reform. Like other nations, Finland sought to realign its education system to the demands of a globalizing world so as to build a foundation for a vibrant information- and technology-based economy. However, the Finnish approach to this problem provides us with an alternative model of policy and reform to the market-based approaches now en vogue.

As national policy, Finland focuses its resources on primary education. It is a policy decision based on rich bodies of research suggesting that investment in primary education as children learn basic knowledge and adopt attitudes of lifelong learning pays off in later grades. Beginning at age seven, children complete six years of primary schooling and three years of secondary schooling that emphasizes foundational knowledge, intellectual skills, and life-long learning. Primary and secondary schools in Finland are generally small, well-equipped, staffed by well- educated and well-respected teachers, and geared toward a whole child approach to education. Students generally have the same teacher through their first years of schooling and relations between students and teachers are often characterized as being close and caring.  For educators on this side of the pond, Finland sounds down right beautiful.

Basic education is free of charge for pupils. Textbooks and other materials, tools etc. are free of charge and pupils are offered a free daily meal. In addition, school health care and other welfare services are free to the pupils…

The objective of basic education is to support pupils’ growth towards humanity and ethically responsible membership of society and to provide them with the knowledge and skills needed in life. The education should promote learning and equality in society as well as acquiring knowledge and skills that the students need in studying and developing themselves later in life. Education also aims at guaranteeing sufficient equality in education throughout the country.

What strikes me about the Finnish model is not only its success but that this success is intimately linked to the Finns commitment to equal educational opportunity, or comprehensiveness. From Sahlberg:

In 2004, more than one third of Finnish comprehensive schools had fewer than 50 pupils, just 4% of all schools had 500 or more pupils. Many primary schools therefore have become learning and caring communities rather than merely instructional institutions that prepare pupils for the next level of schooling. The fact that all children enroll in identical comprehensive schools regardless of their socioeconomic background or personal abilities and characteristics has resulted in a system where schools and classrooms are heterogeneous in terms of pupil profiles and diverse in terms of educational needs and expectations. Comprehensiveness, the leading idea in implementing the basic values of equity in education, also means that all students receive a free two-course warm meal daily, free health care, transportation, learning materials, and counseling in their own schools.

At the macro level, Finland’s educational success is a result of sound policy decisions that targets resources toward basic education in small neighborhood schools and provides equality of opportunity. It is a successful system based on solid educational research that offers a powerful alternative to the corporate nightmare threatening the American system.

So what’s the take-away? Several points jump out…

First, small neighborhood schools with low student-teacher ratios in which students work with the same teacher for the first years of schooling is an ideal learning environment. In such settings, teachers get to know their students… how they learn, work, play, etc… and can attend to their educational needs, and small class sizes ensures that they have the time to do so. Our current obsession with teachers specializing in specific grades at the elementary level and filling their classrooms with 25-30 students at a time is a product of the industrial age more so than sound pedagogical research.

Second, for those of you who would dismiss the above because of the costs involved, note that basic education in Finland takes only nine years! [7-16] I know this might sound heretical in the US, but reducing the total number of years students attend basic education could make it possible to transition to a small-school model. Remember: Finland spends significantly less that other OECD nations but is kicking their butts academically!

Third, related to the above, basic education begins at age 7 by which time even late bloomers have had the opportunity to hone their language skills and [god forbid] be kids! There is a wealth of learning that takes place outside of the schoolhouse that directly benefits intellectual growth, but it requires that students have the time to enjoy those experiences.

Finally, make note of the educational objectives Finland has adopted for its students… To foster their humanity and for them to become ethically responsible members of society. No mention of economic goals… no globalization… international competition… nada. Basic education is geared toward teaching students the foundational knowledge of literacy, mathematics, and scientific reasoning; critical thinking skills; and a love of learning. I’ll cover this more in later postings, but it is important to note that in Finland classroom instruction is inquiry-based in collaborative settings in which critical thinking and collaboration are just as important as the curricular content involved. There is an emphasis on students actually working together and enjoying the learning process! As we shall see, this approach to learning is largely responsible for Finland’s success in academic achievement, but it also has made Finland economically competitive in the information age of the global economy.

Next week: Teacher Professionalism & Training

Sources:

- OECD, Briefing Note for Finland, September 9, 2008, www.oecd.org/dataoecd/31/46/41277828.pdf [accessed 10/21/08].

- Pasi Sahlberg, “Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach”, Journal of Education Policy, 2007, Volume 22, Number 2, 147-171.

- Martha A. Brueggeman, “An Outsider’s View of Beginning Literacy in Finland: Assumptions, Lessons Learned, and Sisu”, Literacy Research and Instruction, 2008, Volume 47, Number 1, 4.

- Ian Westbury, Sven-Erik Hansen, Pertti Kansanen and Ole Bjorkvist, “Teacher Education for Research-based Practice in Expanded Roles: Finland’s experience”, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 2005, Volume 49, Number 5, 477.

Is there another education model that is out there now that we can advocate or is this going to take an enormous redirection of the national discussion into places unknown?

Since my dissertation took up this question, it is only appropriate that I begin to share some of my findings here, and [more practically] nobody wants to read a blog that is written almost exclusively in the negative. Point taken…

To begin to answer the question… The model that stood out in my research is the Finnish model. Since a series of education reforms enacted during the financial crisis of the 1990’s, Finland has scored at the top of international comparisons in literacy, mathematics, and science. And, interestingly, Finland’s education expenditures is among the lowest of OECD nations. There is a lot to discuss in regard to Finland, so I’d like to begin this series of posts with a brief introduction from a scholar who has been at the forefront of getting the word out about Finland: Pasi Sahlberg.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next week, I’ll pull out some text from my dissertation to talk about one of the keys to the success of public education in Finland… Significant investment in primary schooling. Stay tuned.