1. Customizing teaching and learning
2. Focusing on creative learning
3. Encouraging risk taking
4. Learning from the past and owning innovations
5. Sharing responsibility and trust
The Finnish way is a cooperative endeavor that takes into consideration that the school system is a very important part of a network of systems, including economic, political, social, and health. The government had a vested interest in working with schools in a collaborative partnership to improve their performance, which in turn, would improve society. Their destinies were linked, and they created policies and conditions that improved their schools’ performance.
Sahlberg (2011) is critical of the approach of the United States, England, Canada, and many other industrialized nations, which he calls the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM). The five principles of GERM are in direct contradiction to the Finnish way.
1. Standardized teaching and learning
2. Focus on literacy and numeracy
3. Prescribed curriculum
4. Market-oriented reform ideas
5. Test-based accountability and control
Sahlberg (2011) points out that GERM is based on external drivers, like fear of punishment or the benefit of public praise associated with performance on standardized academic tests. These drivers isolate schools as independent units, left on their own to improve and solely motivated by rewards or punishments that their government administers. NCLB sought to ensure student proficiency in mathematics and reading in every American public school by 2014, but the drivers of fear and reward are not good drivers, especially in motivating educators to embrace the changes in practice necessary to ensure this noble goal. This approach disconnects the government from its schools, rather than using an integrated approach with mutual respect and accountability like Finland practices. As Michael Fullan (2011) writes:
There is no way that these ambitions and admirable nationwide goals will be met with the strategies being used. No successful system has ever been led with these drivers. They cannot generate on a large scale the kind of intrinsic motivational energy that will be required to transform these massive systems. The US and Australian aspirations sound great as goals, but crumble from a strategy or driver perspective. (p. 7)
The major difference between the Finnish way and GERM is an investment in cultivating an environment of change through investments in people. Michael Fullan warns in his statement that no successful system has ever been led by these drivers (fear and reward). Although, the United States chose GERM principles, and the results have been very dismal based on the ever-increasing achievement gap data cited earlier in this chapter.
From No Child Left Behind to Every Student Succeeds
The reauthorization in 2001 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), symbolized a huge shift in the focus of American schools. This law, which required all students in America’s public schools to perform at a proficient level on each state’s standardized assessment in reading and mathematics by 2014 or face sanctions, sent a shockwave through the U.S. public school system. NCLB guided U.S. education policy until 2015, when it was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which President Barack Obama signed on December 10, 2015. Many view ESSA as the state version of NCLB and not much different than its predecessor (Greene, 2017).
Implementing NCLB meant that for the first time in U.S. history, schools would be judged based on student outcomes, not educator intentions. Many wondered if a government mandate was enough to change long-standing gaps in student achievement and change the nature of teaching and learning in the classroom. That was a very good question. In fact, during NCLB’s implementation, students, parents, and educators saw no significant progress in closing achievement gaps in student performance, and have made no real progress in realizing the fair and equitable system the legislation claimed to champion.
As a historical look at the impact of NCLB, and its transition to ESSA, consider the 2007 NAEP. According to the data, students from inner-city schools were making modest gains in the areas of mathematics and reading, especially in the early grades, compared to NAEP achievement levels over the previous seven years, but absolutely no progress in secondary grades in the same period. These incremental gains in the early grades were admirable, but they were not growing at the same rate as gains made in economically affluent suburban schools with majority white and Asian populations, so even small signs of progress did little to close performance gaps between inner-city and suburban students (Zuckerbrod, 2007). And the fear of accountability and public embarrassment over decreasing student test scores under NCLB created a high level of data anxiety among school officials (Earl & Katz, 2006). Under NCLB, districts became increasingly savvy at hiding their struggling students or finding ways to omit them from their test results altogether. A 2006 study finds that over two million student scores, almost exclusively minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, were “mysteriously omitted” from state test reporting data to the federal government (Dizon, Feller, & Bass, 2006).
To add insult to injury, an Associated Press poll finds that the majority of teachers (58 percent) felt that being expected to ensure that all of their students read and perform mathematics at grade level was unrealistic and impossible to accomplish (Feller, 2006). Organizational protection for marginally performing teachers also made implementing NCLB’s goals difficult. The New York Teacher Project Fund’s study of five large school systems finds that union staffing rules often allow veteran teachers to transfer to new assignments without giving administrators a say in the matter (Helfand, 2005). Because it is difficult to fire poorly performing teachers, principals often move such employees from school to school. As a result, many urban schools were forced to staff their schools with teachers who are not wanted elsewhere. Michelle Rhee, the founder of the study’s sponsoring organization, states that “without changing these labor rules, urban schools will never be in a position to sustain meaningful school reform” (Helfand, 2005, p. 1). These facts should make us question our seriousness as a profession and as a nation about creating schools that guarantee learning for all students.
NCLB’s goals were admirable and morally correct, but we must acknowledge that breaking a system of normally distributed achievement was not going to end with the stroke of a legislative pen. In Tinkering Toward Utopia, a watershed book on the history of educational reform in the United States, David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) clearly establish that educational reform is very difficult to establish, and very little has changed in the American education system since its original construction in the late 19th century. Tyack and Cuban (1995) point to the complex nature of our society along with the ever-changing definition of the public schools’ purpose as causing a stalemate that is very difficult to overcome. These issues are woven into the fabric of American public education. A solid, realistic plan of action that aggressively addresses these issues is necessary for true reform.
By all accounts, NCLB was a miserable failure, as FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing notes in its 2012 analysis, NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn From This Policy Failure? (Guisbond, 2012). Its analysis reveals that NCLB has not improved student performance in mathematics and reading, and the law led to some unintended consequences that created even more problems.
• An overemphasis on standardized test scores as the primary measure of student achievement led to underfunding arts education in school, teaching to the test, states lowering academic rigor to improve passage rates, and schools manipulating student test scores (cheating).
• An overemphasis on school accountability ratings associated with standardized test scores led to massive student push-outs. Students who were unlikely to pass state standardized tests saw an increase