A minority of Americans are passionate about our country having world-class K-12 schools. Yet imposing Finnish-style academic standards for teachers to get to the performance levels described in Smartest Kids in the World is a non-starter politically. Our revealed preference is that the first and most important function of a public school system is a welfare system for employees.
I’m wondering if there isn’t a way to satisfy both sides of the debate, thereby enabling the next generation of children to grow up with a “Finnish-grade” education. What if we fully embrace the the concept that public schools are first and foremost a welfare system for employees? Tell teachers and administrators that if they don’t feel that they are doing a great job and/or aren’t engaged by their job, they can simply go home and still collect the same paycheck and pension. Kind of like New York City’s rubber room system except that the real estate and maintenance cost will be lower (since teachers will be at home instead of in a school-provided room).
At that point there can be a clean slate for hiring new teachers and, if so desired, we can be like Finland and require high academic achievement for those going into public school teaching. (The “stay home and get paid for the next 50 years” deal wouldn’t extend to new-hires.)
Won’t it be expensive to pay both at-home teachers and in-school teachers? Yes, but maybe not as bad as it looks. The teachers who stay home to be paid will be more senior and, due to the seniority-based payscale, their paychecks correspondingly much larger than anyone newly hired. Money currently being spent on administrative and legal efforts to fire bad teachers will be saved due to the fact that, for those teachers regarded as “bad” who haven’t already gone home, a school system can just ask them to switch over to the stay-at-home status.
Readers: What do you think? It sounds a little crazy to pay teachers not to work, but isn’t it even crazier to pay teachers to come in and impair our children’s future prospects through incompetence?
That seems like a very workable solution.
There is a similar solution for getting rid of dictators of countries, can they be paid to retire comfortably to the south of France or something? Would save an enormous amount of money that would otherwise be wasted on drone strikes, backing the wrong rebels, inevitable blowback from CIA screw ups, etc.
This must be a “Two Americas” thing. Every teacher I know (California) is an expert in his field, all of them have a full year of teachers’ education and many have master’s degrees.
Note that we already do pay all teachers to sit at home for a lot of the time — there are only 180 school days out of 365 days in a year.
My son goes to a small elementary school which has a distinguished (top 10%) rating in the state. Its rated higher than many expensive private schools. In fact, I moved to a house in the school district so my son could go there and I wouldn’t have to pay six figures in private school costs.
They still jam 32-35 kids in a classroom with one teacher. There is a lot of science that says 12-15 is as high as you really want to go and 20 is where the wheels start coming off. We tried that in California and due to all of the new job openings, all the highly qualified teachers took jobs at nice schools without metal detectors and we had to hire underqualified and new teachers for the jobs the other teachers didn’t want. Grades went up in the wealthier areas and down in the poor areas, so of course we blamed that on the class size reductions and reversed it.
As far as qualifications for being a teacher, I’ll have to disagree with some of the commenters. I live in California too. Half of the teachers are pretty good. The other half range from mediocre to bad. One of my friends stay at home wife decided she wanted to be a teacher. She has a 20 year old degree in something like biology. It took her six weeks to pass the tests and certifications to become an elementary school teacher. She’s okay but obviously nobody is going to become an expert in 6 weeks.
Same with a woman I know that worked at a children’s gym I took my son to when he was little. With an unrelated online bachelors degree and about six weeks, and she’s teaching two doors down from the above mentioned.
We spend little to nothing on making sure our teachers are great and we have enough of them to keep class size small enough to actually educate. Then we spend billions on testing to see how it went.
But you’re right, its politics and union shenanigans and nothing to do with everyone trying to educate our kids as best we can.
A master’s degree in education qualifies one to teach what?
Grammar school math – up through word problems?
Basic high school science – up through solar system, tides, and seasons?
High school physics – up through Newtonian mechanics?
High school biology – up through classification, cell bio, DNA?
High school computer science – up through binary and Boolean logic?
Some of the most hopelessly clueless people I know have “master’s degrees” in education.
In my son’s middle school in NYC, generally considered one of the better ones in NYC, typically at least one of his teachers is absent each day. No explanation is ever given. It is not like that is a great tragedy though because outside of his math class most of what he does in school seems to be a complete waste of time.
IIRC, this was the same solution that they hit upon in Newark when Zuckerberg made his donation to the school system there. It would be costly to implement on a nationwide basis – not enough billionaires.
The other problem is that even if you had Finnish quality teachers, you wouldn’t have Finnish quality students. Many big city public school systems are mostly (or sometime virtually all) black and Hispanic. Nowhere on earth is there a population of black or Hispanic students who perform at Finnish levels (in academics).
Jack D: If you look at https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2014/06/25/smartest-kids-in-the-world-finland/ you’ll see that Finland expects high achievement from students regardless of race, background, and original language. And the students, at least on average, meet these expectations. From that posting…
Vuorinen proudly reported that he had kids from nine different countries that year, including China, Somalia, Russia, and Kosovo. Most had single parents. Beyond that, he was reluctant to speculate. “I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much,” he said, … Compared to the rest of Finland, the Tiistilä kids performed above average.
Ripley also noted in The Smartest Kids in the World that American schools that were almost exclusively white and at least middle-income grossly underperformed Finnish public schools. Even most American private schools that are stuffed with rich white students will underperform the average Finnish public school.
We can’t blame non-white Americans for our status as the fat, drunk, and stupid nation!
@Anon: Some of the most hopelessly clueless people I know have “master’s degrees” in education.
I love when school administrators with a PhD in Education insist on being addressed as Dr. —-
@philg: We can’t blame non-white Americans for our status as the fat, drunk, and stupid nation!
Who can we can blame for the astronomically high crime rates in many of America’s cities?
The anecdote that you cited was just that – an anecdote. The interviewed teacher was teaching 5th grade. The real problems usually start once the hormones kick in. How many 11 year old thugs do you know?
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13147#.VuiSp6crLDc
Finland performs significantly better in PISA studies than neighbouring Sweden. Why? Sweden has an immigrant population that is 10 times bigger. When these socially and economically similar countries are compared, omitting first and second generation immigrant children from sample groups, the results become almost identical.
Isn’t it strange that when the rich white students who perform so badly in high school attend college, they suddenly get smart? – America has most of the top universities in the world.
“We can’t blame non-white Americans for our status as the fat, drunk, and stupid nation!”
I don’t know about fat and drunk, but non-Asian minorities create a significant drag on average American IQ:
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2009/04/iq-by-nation-iq-by-race-us-iq-inherited.html
The gap has been remarkably consistent over time and space and has proved resistant to any attempt to erase it. Usually, the wonderful, happy “just so” stories about how the gap can be erase thru better teaching (as in Finland) or some other magic (early intervention, free preschool, etc.) do not bear out statistically. Just as with Communism, the response of true believers is that we just haven’t been trying hard enough and if only we would REALLY implement their system wholeheartedly the gap would disappear, but it never does. Since the best guess is that IQ is perhaps 50% hereditary/50% environmental, we could quickly erase at least HALF of the gap by taking ghetto kids away from their crack addict single mothers at birth and have them raised by nice Asian tiger mothers, but this doesn’t seem to be a popular idea.
@ Jack D.: […] “taking ghetto kids away from their crack addict single mothers at birth and have them raised by nice Asian tiger mothers doesn’t seem to be a popular idea.”
Never mind lack of popularity; any wannabe economist equal to or above Phil’s level will tell you that this would be a daft idea because these mothers would simply give birth to new ghetto kids at their earliest opportunity (children are a replenishable resource, if not commodity). Also, unless well paid, the Asian mothers might like to object.
But there is some sliver of hope on the horizon… acc. to this recent dispatch by L.A. Times via Medium, in a book-reading group of Latina immigrant mothers, two titles stood out: “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” – the latter seemingly as a template to compare themselves with, that there were worse fates than their own.
Paying some people to stay at home is a good idea, it should be expanded to most corporate and government jobs in general. I’ve witnessed first hand far too many IT projects where the outcome would have been at least as good (and cost far, far less in the long run) if 1/2 the analysts, project managers, and “agile coaches” had been paid to never set foot inside the office.
This probably has something to do with puritanism, but American culture is really adverse to just handing people an income if they have no obvious productive role in society. But creating make-work jobs for people, where the work consists essentially creating problems for the people who are actually productive, and then kinda sorta solving them, seems to be fine. My father, who was a liberal, always complained about the government bureaucrats in obvious patronage and make-work jobs that he had to deal with in New York City, and maintained he would be more than happy to pay them to stay at home. But as billg points out, you increasingly encounter this in what is supposed to be the private sector as well.
I’ve heard before the idea that the first commentator proposes of just paying off dictators to retire to the south of France. I used to like the idea, but the problem is that you now create an incentive to become a dictator so you can get your villa on the riviera.
We can’t blame non-white Americans for our status as the fat, drunk, and stupid nation!
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son!”
This is of course a good idea, but don’t restrict it to teachers. Incompetent or unmotivated people of any profession should be encouraged to stay home. It’s called “basic income”.
We can’t blame non-white Americans for our status as the fat, drunk, and stupid nation!
Looks like out host won’t tolerate any criticism, no matter how small or how true, of non-White Americans. I guess, like anyone that criticizes or disagrees w/ Pres. Obama, that would be raaayyciss!
It looks like our host thinks that only non-elite White Americans are to blame for America’s slovenliness. You deserve Cambridge, MA and Cambridge, MA deserves you!
Disclaimer: I’m not American; not even a westerner.
How do you Americans square this desperate inferiority complex about your educational system with the fact that these supposedly superior Finns and Koreans all use Intel, Google, Apple, etc. Sure the Koreans make smartphones too, but the only reason they started was to follow in Apple’s footsteps (think back to IBM and the personal computer; same thing).
Are all of these American engineering companies a fluke? Are they all powered by foreigner on the inside?
When was the last time anyone reading this used a Finnish product in their day to day life? Where are all of these super-smart kids going and what are they doing if we never hear of it?
“When was the last time anyone reading this used a Finnish product in their day to day life?”
2012 – when Nokia was the largest cell phone company in the world.
Reha: I guess they weren’t smart enough to keep it that way.
Before anyone else decides to pick another defunct foreign tech company as a counterexample, let me restate my question:
If these kids are so much smarter, why aren’t their country’s products and services correspondingly overrepresented in the West?
Yoni, that’s only because the smartest people at Intel, Google, etc come from abroad. The US is able to take advantage for the time being to attract foreign talent but the bulk of creative work is not being done by born US citizens. If you look at the best graduate students in engineering and the hard sciences, you will also note that they are overwhelmingly international.
A finnish born woman now living in the US is sort of backing up your seemingly preposterous idea.
If the taxpayers are providing excellent education for the kids and 99 weeks of xbox for burned out teachers, the nation as a whole may thrive.
It’s a long read, but definately worth it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-nordic-countries/473385/
@Anon: that’s only because the smartest people at Intel, Google, etc come from abroad.
Oh, come on! Surely, there must be more than a few very smart American-born engineers and scientists at these companies
If you look at the best graduate students in engineering and the hard sciences, you will also note that they are overwhelmingly international.
Though, on the other hand, I was the only American-born student in most of my graduate Computer Science classes at the University of Florida almost twenty years ago. The foreign students were not, however, all that impressive.
And, twenty-five years ago, there were zero foreign engineers working at my large government defense contractor.
As I recall, a Canadian previously employed by Microsoft drove mighty Nokia straight into the ground. Microsoft then acquired the wreck, and after a change of strategy towed it to the scrap yard.
I have numerous friends who either work or have worked in Silicon Valley, or are employed by companies owned by US/SV companies. It’s a bit like running a local hockey league in Europe. After a while you realize you have three or more national teams over in the NHL and your local league is just a feeder. Finland has a population of just 5.5 million, as compared to, say, Israel’s 8 million (notable products: ?) or the 330 million of America. Yet Linus Torvalds, a Finn, was the one who produced Linux. He’s now in the US, of course.
I think it’s more or less the same for India and China (combined population: more than 2000 million) and perhaps others, possibly more since they to a much greater degree outsource their higher studies to America. A quite substantial number of tech workers in SV are Indians and Chinese, as one can see with some googling.
Technology leadership aside, international comparisons usually show that the US education system isn’t working very well. The PISA 2012 evaluation of 15-year-olds’ abilities in math, reading, and science had Finland and Canada at #12 and #13, while the US was at #36. Among large countries, South Korea was at #5, Japan at #7, Germany at #16. These are rankings, of course, but they reflect some pretty significant differences in test scores. Canadian report on the PISA 2012 results.
Honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is that there’s a significant gap between Canadian and US teacher salaries (not just because of post-2008 austerity, this is a long-standing difference). Globe and Mail story on teacher pay, based on an OECD report:
It seems like a Catch-22 situation: if teachers aren’t paid well, the profession won’t tend to attract good people, making the education system worse. But when the education system isn’t performing well, it’s hard to justify paying teachers more.
In the US context, with the gridlocked federal political system struggling to govern a giant country, any kind of Poland-style national reform seems wildly ambitious. A more feasible path would be to start by improving things at a single school. Change is always painful, of course; you’d need to build consensus among teachers, parents, students, and administration, perhaps by using Ripley’s book as a starting point (or some other vision of school reform, I like Harold Stevenson). If the reforms are successful at a single school, then you can try getting other schools to follow suit.
Wikipedia on past education reform efforts.
The Anu Partanen article is quite interesting: Partanen argues that support for Nordic social programs isn’t based on altruism, but on the concrete benefits they provide. A similar argument (the public-goods model of the welfare state).
@philg – Have you ever read this?
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-reading-scores-by-race-america.html
Seems like Massachusetts was beating Finland, even with all your family court crazed friends there.
Thanks, Alan, for that link. If you read the fine print up at the top doesn’t the author say that he is picking Reading, the category in which Americans did the best? “American 15-year-olds tended to do best on Reading Literacy, medium on Science Literacy, and worst on Mathematics Literacy. … Here’s our strong suit Reading…”
So Massachusetts comes out 3 points ahead of Finland in Reading. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_3a.asp shows that Massachusetts was 5 points behind Finland in Math. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_4a.asp shows that Massachusetts was 18 points behind Finland in Science.
Now that I think a little more about it, a score in Reading says a lot less about a school than a score in Math or Science. Many children teach themselves to read. Certainly nearly all children can improve their own reading ability if simply left to themselves in a library. Math and Science, on the other hand, are things that most people need to be taught.
For cross-cultural comparisons, math scores are probably best. Looks like Massachusetts is already doing reasonably well compared to Finland and Canada on that score, certainly much better than the US as a whole.
I wouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of reading, though! For fluent readers, it’s easy to forget just how unnatural and painstaking it is at first. Some kids may be reading before they enter school, but definitely not the majority. Steven Pinker:
Russil: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read agrees with you regarding conventional wisdom: “The evidence from the standard schools is that reading does not come easily to kids. Huge amounts of time and effort go into teaching reading, from preschool on through most of the elementary school years.”
However, the article reports that “unschooled” children also learn to read and that it is a social phenomenon (if surrounded by readers, a child will learn to read).
This reminds me of a friend whose wife is a speech language pathologist. The SLP talked about the importance of intervention if a young child has any speech difficulties. The husband asked “Since there aren’t any adults with these problems and not all children get SLP intervention, can’t we infer that a human will outgrow this kind of problem?” The SLP agreed, but said that it was still valuable to have therapy because then a child wouldn’t be teased on the playground, etc.
[In short, it is undisputed that we put a lot of effort into teaching reading, but I don’t think that we can infer that we would have a nation of illiterates if we put zero effort into this activity.]
See this summary of the history of the “reading wars” between advocates of phonics (reading is difficult and unnatural and must be taught slowly) and advocates of whole language (reading is natural and should be discovered). According to the author, James Kim, research appears to come down on the side of the phonics approach.
Do some kids learn to read without being taught? Sure, about 5% of them. (For most kids, I assume videogames are much more engaging than reading.) So if the US put zero effort into teaching reading, only about 95% of Americans would be illiterate.
I’m always impressed at how much Americans love innovation, but you can’t run in two opposite directions at the same time. Unschooling and looking at what Finnish schools do (spoiler: they use phonics, although they’re happy to incorporate concepts from the whole-language approach as well) are both different from current US practice — but they would move you in two very different directions. I think you need to pick one.
Thanks, Russil, for the links. I did not mean to suggest that American schools abandon their efforts to teach reading. My point was that, since children can learn to read in a variety of ways, including self-study and from peers, reading proficiency is not a good way to evaluate the quality of a school.