Dana Goldstein recently returned from a trip to Finland, where she examined what most education experts agree to be the most effective and sophisticated system in the world. Folks on the right laud the Finnish system for its emphasis on schools choice and vocational education. Folks on the left praise its commitment to early childhood education and national curriculum standards and strong unions. And Dana's conclusion was that they're both right, and that this has implications for broadening the American conversation over education:
The point of studying other nation's school systems is not to find the silver bullet, but to realize that there isn't one. In the United States, the education debate has been framed as a zero sum game. We've been told again and again that we need to make hard choices between labor protections and doing what is best for children. But a good education system can include merit pay, as well as strong unions and tenure. It can have relatively short school days and large classes, but also national curriculum guidelines. Teachers can have autonomy in lesson-planning while simultaneously being held to high professional standards. Universal day care and pre-school on one end of the education spectrum can be matched by a commitment to vocational preparedness on the other.The truth is that if the United States committed politically and socially, at the national level, to taking education seriously -- as the Finns do -- the universe of possibilities would open up wider than most of us can imagine.
The American conversation over education has a tendency to become a proxy argument over other things: unions, say, or religion. We battle over merit pay as if someone, somewhere, believes it the actual answer to our woes, even though no one would dare admit to such an absurd view. We've managed to reach levels of extreme contention over policy changes that are, in fact, very small, because the real fight, for now, is between which political coalition will hold power. Indeed, if you read the Education Equality Project's statement of principles, they speak more of political economy than curricula policy. The space for discussion is small indeed.
