Changes to K-12 Education in the United States – Teachers

The teacher training schools in Finland can be compared to university teaching hospitals for medical students. The teacher’s profession is highly respected in Finland. A teacher is an expert, comparable to an engineer, lawyer or a medical doctor.

In Finland, to be a K-12 teacher you have to earn a master’s degree specific to who/what you’re going to teach. In the U.S. you just need to have a college degree in whatever you studied and pass a low level certification test.

In Finland, 90% of applicants to the teaching programs at the university level are rejected. In the U.S. we keep lowering the bar farther and farther to the point that things like Teach for America are necessary.

In Finland, 20 of your credit hours to become a teacher are spent creating lesson plans and teaching under the direction of a guiding teacher. In the U.S. you might, maybe, if we can fit it in the schedule and the budget this year, potentially get some sort of minor amount of lip service towards professional development. Maybe.

In Finland, teachers are paid like they’re doing a job that’s critical to a well functioning society. In the US we have things like the teacher of the year in Oklahoma moving to Texas so he can afford to live.

In Finland, teachers are trained to identify and help students with needs if they can, but then hand them off to more specifically trained professionals for whatever learning or social struggle they’re facing. In the U.S., you better hope you’ve got funding for that, and most states still fund schools based on property taxes of surrounding neighborhoods.

In the latest PISA testing, Finland outperformed the US across the board. Finland was 5th in reading to 13th for the US. Finland was 14th in Math to 35th for the US. Finland was 5th in Science to 16th for the US. Finland accomplished this without any standardized testing at all, and the “countries” that finished above them – China is split in 3 but I count them as 1 – mostly either have questionable practices towards the international test or based their system on Finland (Estonia). Finland did all of this while, as I mentioned in my last post, basing the majority of their education system on research from US universities.

How do we fix this in the US? I recommend three increases to the profession along with two adjustments to how things are presented.

Increase Teacher Education Requirements

I worked with someone who was an elementary school teacher despite having never taken a single education course throughout college and having no expertise in the subject matter she taught. Even so, she was able to teach for several years in part because she could pass the low level certification test and because her dad was the superintendent for a small, rural school district. When a principal came along that expected her to use appropriate pedagogy and student engagement skills, she quit in the middle of the school year.

We may not need a full master’s degree requirement the way that Finland has done (and Estonia has mimicked), but plugging any schlep into a position because they’re willing to do it or they think they’re “serving the community” through a program like Teach for America has helped send our education system into a spiral. What’s worse is that, despite the fact that there are many high quality educators with real educational credentials, there’s little differentiation made in our school systems between the good and the inept.

Increase Teacher Pay

Seriously, what are we doing? The average salary for a teacher varies widely across the US with most states starting in the low to mid $30k range regardless of local cost of living. 31 states have lowered their pay since 1999-2000 when adjusted for cost of living and other expenses. According to one evaluation just a few years ago, “If we wanted to raise the relative salaries of American teachers to the level seen in Finland, we’d require a 10 percent raise for primary school teachers, an 18 percent raise in lower secondary, and a 28 percent raise for upper secondary school teachers.”

We should expect our teachers to be qualified professionals, and we should pay them accordingly. This isn’t a revolutionary idea, it’s one that is practiced in most of the advanced nations of the world today. We are lagging far behind and losing even more ground every year.

Increase Teacher Autonomy

If they’re well educated and well paid, why don’t we get out of the way and let them do their job? Finland has no school rankings. They have no outside evaluators. They have highly skilled professionals who are compensated accordingly and then allowed to do their jobs with minimal interference. The full K-12 mathematics requirements for teachers in Finland is shorter than any single year in the Common Core standards adopted in the US.

If you’ve trained teachers well, and they have subject matter knowledge along with pedagogical understanding, then get out of their way and let them do their job. Part of why we’ve over-managed our educational system in the last 40 years is our refusal to put the highest quality people in place and pay them enough to stay there. Change that and then give them the freedom to do their job the way a doctor or lawyer would.

Shorter Days for Teachers and Students

In one example, “The school day starts between 8 and 9am in the morning and finishes between 1 and 2pm in the afternoon. The class has 25 lessons a week. Each lesson is 45 minutes long. There are 3 hours and 45 minutes of instruction each day on average. In the Aurora school this class (5th grade) has one four-lesson day, one six-lesson day and the other days are five lessons long.”

Despite those days being much shorter than what we attack our teachers and students with in the US, 9 of those 25 units are focused on arts, music, crafts, and sports. Teachers are allowed to focus on teaching the whole student and vary their studies while giving an average of less than one hour of homework per day.

Ditch Traditional Subject-Based Teaching for Topics

Starting in 2013, high schools in Helsinki moved towards teaching topics such as the formation of the European Union, combining multiple subjects into a comprehensive whole, instead of the traditional, math and science approach used for so long. This approach is expected to be adopted nationwide in Finland in the next year or two.

“Early data shows that students are benefiting too. In the two years since the new teaching methods first began being introduced, pupil ‘outcomes’ – they prefer that word to standards – have improved.” One benefit being seen is that teachers can co-teach these subjects, both lessening their own teaching load while gaining perspective from other subject experts on a topic they know from their own perspective quite well, thus continuing their education and helping them grow professionally.