There's no straightforward way of
going about diagnosing our country's current quandary with the Department of
Education. With the failure of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Policy,
enacted in 2001, we can only hope that more meticulous, successful education
reforms will surface in time to be implemented while we as high school students
are still able to enjoy and beneficially reap any remuneration of said
aforementioned changes- that is, if any are to come. Finland, a Scandinavian
country, is categorically well-known and repeatedly referenced to wintry sports
such as skiing and snowboarding, mostly due in part to Finland’s culture
resulting from geography and native climate- mountainous and frosty. However,
there’s another reason for Finland’s rising fame amongst the global community,
and it has nothing to do with extreme winter sports. No, Finland has one of the
best reading and math scores amongst millions of other contending students in
the world, all especially thanks to an educational reform that was put into effect
some forty years ago. In one article published from the Smithsonian, it states:
“The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as
the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had
little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test
given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to
be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By
2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In
the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science,
third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students
worldwide.” Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html#ixzz1np6rttDc.
Now, take into consideration our countries current stance on education. John
Hood wrote an excellent post on the United States report card from the turn of
the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first century, and dishes out
evidence that there is in fact a diagnosis for our country’s problem when it
comes to education and fruitless attempts at reform- just look at the
statistics. Read more: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-failure-of-american-public-education/.
Numbers, unlike the new arrangements of data recently obtained by the media
that attempted to configure the best and the worst teachers according to a spurious
and unwarranted formula, as trite as it may sound, don’t lie. Just today, twenty-six
states, including the District of Columbia, submitted requests to the DOE for abdications
from the NCLB, “[adding] to the 11 states that the Obama Administration
announced earlier this month had developed and agreed to implement bold
education reforms in exchange for relief from burdensome federal mandates.“
Read more: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/26-more-states-and-dc-seek-flexibility-nclb-drive-education-reforms-second-round.
We consistently try to fix the problem with reform after reform, with little to
no results to show for. If one were to Google a Regents exam dating back to the
year 1900, they would be shocked at the level of difficulty that was presented
within reading and math. Speaking as a student myself, I found the 1900 Regents
exam substantiating and hard. At one section in the test, it was required that
a replication of the geography of Europe was known to pass the exam. If this
test were administered today, I feel that a good 70%-80% of students taking the
test would fail, and that is just a guesstimation on my part. It’s sad to say
but it’s the compelling truth: the Regents has been dumbed down significantly
year after year since the 1900’s, perhaps, in my opinion, to allow a greater
percentage of ridiculously lazy students the opportunity to pass the exam subsequently
because the level of difficulty is virtually non-existent, so as to not really exhibit any signs that something
is wrong with the way our students are being taught, and their deteriorating
interest for even receiving an education to begin with! Now, I’m not
admonishing the Regents for being too easy- because there is some, although
little, difficulty present within the actual test. But I feel as though the
biggest problem we have has nothing to do with class size, or money, or ethnicity,
means of income, etc. My take on the whole dilemma is that we as students have
truly lost something great thinkers of past generations once had in terms of
getting a good education: interest. I might be wrong on this, but if you were
to ask any child about what they’re learning in school these days, they
probably would have to hesitate or refer back to their notes, simply put,
because there is no INTEREST existing within the subjects that child is taking.
He/she may have a particular interest in one or two subjects, but in regards to
subjects that child might not be so remarkable at, there is no interest within
that subject, because in that child’s head, that subject is probably the ineptest
subject that could be undertaken, and that’s a scary thought to cogitate. One teacher
in West Virginia actually tried implementing the similar teaching techniques
found in Finland to his school as an experiment to see if what worked for a
homogenous group of people would work for a heterogonous group of culturally diverse
students. Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/29/education.wv.finland/index.html.
Although it’s not certain that copying their educational system, which has no
existing charter schools, would work for a country so politically and socially different
from the Finns. However, their value and appreciation for teacher’s, and the level
of interest the students have in the classroom, is something to both admire and
delve more deeply into. Who knows, perhaps the solution to this complex problem
our great country is facing is one that is paradoxically simple in juxtaposition.
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