People have been seeking ways to improve the quality of teachers in this country for as long as most of us can remember. S.M. has forwarded to First Teachers a column by Amanda Ripley from the June 17 issue of the Arizona Daily Star that contends that Finland has come up with an effective answer to the problem. Ripley is the author of The Smartest Kids in the World — and How They Got That Way.
Ripley calls our attention to “something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education. . . . In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher.”
Ripley points to reforms being made in Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Rhode Island to “raise the bar” for admission to the their states’ schools of education. In Rhode Island, a state “which once had one of the nation’s lowest entry-bars for teachers,” its education colleges will be required by 2016 “to admit classes of students with a mean SAT, ACT or GRE score in the top one-half of the national distribution.” By 2020, “the average score must be in the top one-third of the national range, which would put Rhode Island in line with education superpowers like Finland and Singapore.”
The implications of this change cannot be overestimated. Instead of trying to improve the quality of those currently teaching in our schools by coming up with improved evaluation procedures, tinkering with tenure rules, and a greater willingness to fire ineffective teachers, the new goal is to “reboot from the beginning” by securing a higher quality of student in our schools of education.
Riley uses Sonja Stenfors, a teacher-in-training in Finland, as an example:
“Stenfors’ father is a physical education teacher, and she’s training to be one too. In Finland, Stenfors had to work very hard to get into her teacher-training program. After high school, like many aspiring teachers, she spent a year as a classroom aide to help boost her odds of getting accepted. The experience of working with 12 boys with severe behavioral problems almost did her in. ‘It was so hard,’ she told me, ‘I worried I could not do it’.”
After her year as an aide, Stenfors began “the application process for the University of Turku’s elementary education program. After submitting her scores from the Finnish equivalent of the SAT, she read a dense book on education published solely for education-school applicants. Several weeks later, she took a two-hour test on what she had read. The content of the book was beside the point, Stenfors says. ‘I think it really measures your motivation’.”
After she passed the test, Stenfors was required to go through an “intense in-person interview with two education professors. They described a real-world classroom scenario involving disengaged students and asked how she would respond. They probed her experience in the classroom. Stenfors went home worried, unsure how she’d done. Unlike most American students, she knew many people who had been rejected from education schools. A month later, she got her letter. Like all of Finland’s teacher-training colleges, the university accepted only about 10 percent of applicants for elementary education in 2010, and Stenfors was one of them.”
Would this work in the United States? Do we want to limit the number of applicants to schools of education? Ripley says yes. “By accepting so few applicants, Finnish teacher colleges accomplish two goals — one practical, one spiritual: First, the policy ensures that teachers-to-be like Stenfors are more likely to have the education, experience, and drive to do their jobs well. Second (and this part matters even more), this selectivity sends a message to everyone in the country that education is important — and that teaching is challenging. Instead of just repeating these claims over and over like Americans, the Finns act like they mean it.”
An interesting angle to the story developed when Stenfors came to the United States to study for a year at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Riley tells us that Stenfors noticed a “subtle but powerful distinction” when she met Americans her age at social gatherings. “Every time I told them I am studying to be a teacher, people said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting’.” And then changed the conversation. “I was very proud when I said it,” Stenfors says. “But they were not so excited.” She noticed that when her friend told people she was studying business, the friend got asked follow-up questions about what she wanted to do with her degree. “I didn’t get any extra questions.”
In a blog post, she described her experience to her friends in Finland: “Here it’s not cool to study to be a teacher. They perceive a person who is studying to be a teacher as a little dumber.… Could you imagine being ashamed when telling people you are studying to be a teacher?” Writes Riley, “Stenfors felt this rebuke like a polite slap to the face. Without realizing it, she’d grown accustomed to people finding her studies impressive in Finland. There, studying to be a teacher was equivalent to studying to be a lawyer or a doctor. Even though teachers still earned less than those professionals, prestige served as its own kind of compensation — one that changed the way she thought of her work and herself.”
Is Riley correct in attributing the greater prestige for teachers in Finland to the greater difficulty in gaining admission to schools of education in that country? Riley has no doubts: “Why did the Finns respect teachers more? Well, one reason was straightforward: Education college was hard in Finland, and it wasn’t usually very hard in America. Respect flowed accordingly. The University of Missouri-Kansas City admits two-thirds of those who apply. To enter the education program, there is no minimum SAT or ACT score. Students have to have a B average, sit for an interview and pass an online test of basic academic skills.”
Beyond that, “Once enrolled, Stenfors’ American peers had to do just two semesters of student teaching — compared to her four semesters in Finland. They had a lot of multiple-choice quizzes (a first for Stenfors). Unlike her Finnish professors, her American instructors encouraged discussion, which Stenfors admired. But overall, the university offered less rigorous, hands-on classroom coaching from experienced teachers — the most important kind of teacher preparation.”
The bottom line for Riley: “Parents and politicians in Finland do not pity teachers or treat them like charity cases the way so many do in the U.S. They treat them like grown-up professionals with a very hard job to do. The lesson for America is obvious: No one gets respect by demanding it. Teachers and their colleges must earn the prestige they need by being the same kind of relentless intellectual achievers they’re asking America’s children to be.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The email address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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