美國人何以一再忽視芬蘭教育的成功?(下)

 

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美國人何以一再忽視芬蘭教育的成功?(上)

 

作者/Anu Partanen

編譯/李明洋

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美國人何以一再忽視芬蘭教育的成功?(下)

早在幾十年前，當芬蘭的學校體系糟到急需改革時，他們設立了一個目標，也因為該目標的確立，才會有今日如此豐碩的成果，那個目標就是”永遠不要追求卓越，而是要追求公平。”

自1980年代以來，主導芬蘭教育政策的主要想法就是，每個孩子，無論其身家背景、家庭收入或居住位置，都應該擁有完全相同的學習機會。芬蘭人一直都認為，教育並非用以培育出明星學生，而應該是用以擺脫社會的不公平。

就芬蘭人的看法，這意味著，學校對孩童來說應該是個既健康又安全的環境。這是最起碼的要求。芬蘭學校提供所有學生免費的餐點，便於獲取醫療保健、心理輔導，以及提供學生個別化的指導。

事實上，芬蘭從來就沒有特別把追求卓越列為優先項目，所以當芬蘭學生在2001年的第一屆PISA獲得如此高的成就時，許多芬蘭人都認為一定是搞錯了。但隨後的PISA評量結果，證實了芬蘭正因為特別著眼於公平性的政策，而能獲得如此優異的成就。

然而，針對這一點，美國人似乎永遠置之不理，即使在歷經經融危機，以及”佔領華爾街運動(Occupy Wall Street movement)”將美國境內社會不公平的問題推到頂點的這一刻，橫亙在那些支付得起一個學生每年35000美元學費，抑或負擔得起好學區附近房價的家庭，以及剩下的99%的家庭中間的，是一條痛苦且顯而易見的深淵。

Sahlberg表示，任何國家都是不同的，如同許多美國人所說的，芬蘭是個小國，他的人口組成同質性甚於美國。但是Sahlberg認為美國人不能把國土大小和人口組成當成不能仿效芬蘭的理由。就2010年的資料顯示，人口組成上，相較於美國擁有12.7%的移民人口，芬蘭只有4.6%的移民。然而，芬蘭在過去10年以來的移民人口增加了兩倍，但政府並沒有因此而讓教育的品質打折。移民家庭往往聚居在同一區，使得某些學校的學生組成比其他學校更複雜，但是從PISA的結果可知，芬蘭學校間的差異並沒有很大的差別。

對於國土大小和人口組成對國家教育成就的影響，哥倫比亞大學師範學院(Columbia University’s Teachers College)的訪問學者Samuel Abrams提出了解釋，他指出，和芬蘭同屬於北歐國家的挪威國土面積也和芬蘭一樣很小，人口組成更同質，但是和芬蘭不同的是，挪威的教育較傾向於美國模式。結果如何呢?在PISA的表現平平。因此，Abrams認為，教育政策對於國家教育的影響程度遠比國土大小或種族組成還要重要。

的確，芬蘭的人口只有540萬，相當於美國許多州的人口，而且，美國大多數的教育是由州政府管理。而根據位於華盛頓的移民政策研究所(Migration Policy Institute)的資料顯示，在2010年，美國有18個州的移民人口和芬蘭相當，甚至比芬蘭還少。

更重要的是，儘管芬蘭和美國有許多不同之處，但兩者的教育目標卻是相同的。當1970年代芬蘭的決策者決定進行教育改革時，他們說到做到，因為他們意識到，芬蘭不能總是依賴製造業或有限的天然資源，而是應該將投資放在以知識為基礎的經濟上，唯有這麼做才能讓芬蘭具有競爭力。

如今，美國製造業的景氣下滑，美國教育政策的目標，如同Obama總統所說的，就是要採用相同的方法來維持美國的競爭力。芬蘭經驗讓我們知道，一個國家若要在這場新的經濟競賽中獲勝，那麼就不能只是讓部分國民做好準備，而是要讓全體國民都做好準備。如果只是擁有幾所世界首屈一指的學校，但卻有許多孩子落後了，那就不足以算是好。

這是個遙不可及的目標嗎?

Sahlberg表示，他的書不是一本教導人如何去實現目標的書，而是一本帶給人希望的書。Sahlberg說，”當年美國總統Kennedy發願，要全力發展美國的科學和技術，預計在1960年代末把人類送上月球，結果許多人認為那是痴人說夢。…但他懷抱著夢想，就像幾年後金恩博士(Martin Luther King)所發表的”我有一個夢想”一樣。那些夢想真的實現了。芬蘭的夢想是，不論孩子就讀的是哪一所學校，不論孩子來自於什麼樣的家庭，我們都能給他一個良好的公校教育，當初也有許多芬蘭人說那是癡人說夢。”

很顯然的，這些人都錯了。

要創造公平是可能的。對美國人來說，要從這點切入教育改革或許是個挑戰，但卻是更加重要的。芬蘭經驗讓我們知道，要達到卓越是可能的，但不是靠競爭，而是相互合作，不是靠選擇學校，而是公平的教育機會。

美國教育所面臨的問題不在於人口組成的多樣性，而是社會經濟地位的不公平，而這正是芬蘭教育改革所解決的問題。美國人想要更有競爭力，那麼，讓家家戶戶的社經地位更加平等可能才是他們需要的。

【作者介紹】

本文作者Anu Partanen為芬蘭籍駐紐約記者，為”The New York Times“和”The Atlantic“等報紙撰文，目前正籌畫出版一本分析美國該如何從北歐諸國的教育汲取經驗的書，經營有部落格ANU PARTANEN。

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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success 2

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West’s reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known — if it was known for anything at all — as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life — Newsweekranked it number one last year — and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland’s schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation’s education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn’t clear that Sahlberg’s message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

* * *

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather’s TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an “intriguing school-reform model.”

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. “Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it’s true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg’s making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America’s best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend — not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg’s statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he’s become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland’s success. Sahlberg’s new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students’ performance if you don’t test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master’s degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal’s responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: “Real winners do not compete.” It’s hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland’s success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg’s comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don’t exist in Finland.

“Here in America,” Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, “parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It’s the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.”

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn’t a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland’s students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland — unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway — was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year — or even just the price of a house in a good public school district — and the other “99 percent” is painfully plain to see.

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn’t think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country — as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn’t lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College,has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation’s education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country’s school system than the nation’s size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland’s population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state — after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What’s more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country’s education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn’t rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America’s manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. — as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down — is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland’s experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn’t meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a “pamphlet of hope.”

“When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960’s, many said it couldn’t be done,” Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. “But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland’s dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn’t be done.”

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important — as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform — Finland’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

【Author：Anu Partanen】

Anu Partanen is a Finnish journalist based in New York City. She is writing a book about what America can learn from Nordic societies.

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圖片來源：The Atlantic

原文刊登於《theatlantic.com》，經作者Anu Partanen授權編譯，未經許可不得轉載