das contradanças (mais públicas!) na educação [lá pelo 'states']... 'overhaul of schools is the wrong diagnosis'... no the boston globe...!

"Monday’s hot-off-the-press report on “The New Opportunity to Lead: A Vision for Education in Massachusetts in the Next 20 Years,” commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, presents an erroneous diagnosis of the state of education in the Commonwealth and proposes remedies that are based on ideology, not evidence. While there certainly are areas for improvement in Massachusetts, Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester is right to disagree with the report’s finding that school improvement in the state is stagnating.

What’s wrong with the report? First, its grudging acknowledgement of positive educational outcomes in Massachusetts and grim portrait of the state’s shortfalls have little to do with the facts. Massachusetts is the leading state in the United States on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It is the only state in the United States with an “A” grade in the highly regarded Quality Counts 2014 State Report Card. It is also one of the world’s top-performing systems on a number of international assessments. Its rate of recent progress may be slower than some countries, but they’ve started from farther behind — Massachusetts literally has less room for improvement. To view the state’s school system as suffering from “complacency,” as the report claims, confounds all the findings of United States and international research on school achievement.

Moreover, the report draws many of its recommendation from the United Kingdom, where its lead author, Michael Barber, once worked as an advisor on education to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. England has made massive investments in “academies,” similar to government-supported charter schools here. It has explored various ways to prepare new teachers outside of a university setting. There have been targets and tests galore. Yet, results from the 2012 Program of International Assessment put England merely at the international average, 499, compared to Massachusetts students’ score of 524. For Bay State policymakers to follow England’s lead in education would be like the Red Sox taking coaching tips from the lowly Kansas City Royals.

Most of the solutions proposed in this report are out of line with the world’s best performers. The expansion of charter schools, less university-based teacher preparation, and putting digital technology before superb teaching as a way to personalize learning for students do not characterize the policies of international educational leaders like Canada, Finland, or Singapore.

Which is not to say the report is altogether wrong. Every school system needs to keep searching for improvement, and the MBAE is right to explore new ways of moving forward.

But it is not necessary to conjure up flaws to improve or to innovate. Although the England’s overall performance on PISA remains only adequate, some of the turnaround schools in London, which we have studied, have been spectacular. This has been due, in no small part, to Barber’s inspirational promotion of schools working with other schools to take collective responsibility for results. More professional collaboration in the Commonwealth, along with fairer and better funding to support it, would undoubtedly be a positive. And no one can quarrel with the argument that the school of the future will need better education in science, technology, engineering, and math. 

Still, Massachusetts deserves a smarter reform agenda than what “The New Opportunity to Lead” is able to offer. Earlier this month, Chester met with Krista Kiuru, Finland’s Minister of Education, in Boston. Kiuru invited Massachusetts to join fellow high performers in Finland, Singapore, and the Canadian province of Alberta as leaders in a new global partnership for educational innovation. It would be a good first step."

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Overhaul of schools is the wrong diagnosis - Opinion - The Boston Globe

coisas de reformas na educação (4) [lá pelos 'states']...what if finland’s great teachers taught in u.s. schools?... no the answer sheet...!

"Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.

He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C.  He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu.

By Pasi Sahlberg

Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.

“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher.  This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.

In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service."

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What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools?

diz quem sabe... 'the pisa 2012 scores show the failure of 'market based' education reform'... de pasi sahlberg... no the guartdian...!

"When PISA results were first presented 12 years ago, the participating countries were excited to see how their school systems perform compared to one another. Now the launch of the fifth PISA results is accompanied by more criticism than before due to the issues with cross-country comparisons and the dominant role that PISA plays in determining priorities for national education policies. Whatever its limitations are, the data from more than half a million 15-year-olds around the world is now here, and we should try to make the best out of them. 

An appropriate use of PISA data is not to create global league tables that praise or shame countries for their performances in standardized mathematics, reading literacy and science tests. But this is still the most common way to report PISA results. In Finland, media bluntly concluded that Finnish school system has collapsed pointing to country's drop from 6th best in the world in mathematics in 2009 to 12th three years later. Swedish newsagents went even further stating that Sweden's all-time-low PISA scores are a "national disaster" that puts the future of the nation at risk. It was a similar story of concern in Canada. In the US, authorities were concerned about widening learning gap between American and Asian youth and how it is harmful to America's economic competitiveness. Many others seem to draw their conclusions of PISA by a glance at the league tables.

Another handicap of using PISA to inform national policies is to admire the highest scoring school systems and thereby fail to see the common patterns from the data. PISA consumers should note that not every high-scoring school system is successful. A school system is "successful" if it performs above the OECD average in mathematics, reading literacy and science, and if students' socio-economic status has a weaker-than-average impact on students' learning outcomes. The most successful education systems in the OECD are Korea, Japan, Finland, Canada and Estonia.

My personal takeaway from the PISA 2012 study is how it proves that fashionable Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) is built on wrong premises. GERM, that emerged from England's Education Reform Act 1988 and was further accelerated by the No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top reforms in the US, assumes that market mechanisms are the best vehicles for whole system improvements. GERM has acted like a virus that "infects" education systems as it travels around the world. The infection can be diagnosed by checking the state of the following five symptoms."

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The PISA 2012 scores show the failure of 'market based' education reform | Pasi Sahlberg | Comment is free | theguardian.com

leitura... da educação... lições finlandesas... de pasi sahlberg...!

"Finland has come to be known as a nation where educational quality, equity, and productivity exist simultaneously. Those interested in understanding how the Finns have managed to achieve this level of educational performance often point to good teachers, rigorous curricula, and small class sizes. Indeed, some believe that there is a set of such factors that make education systems work well. Then there are those who claim that Finland is too different because of its size and demographics to be taken seriously as a model for large-scale education reforms in countries like the United States, Canada or England. Yet all of these attempts to explain good educational performance in Finland fail to see the big picture. 

When trying to understand Finnish schools’ success it is good to keep in mind that Finland scores high in many other international comparisons besides education. Finland is one of the most competitive market economies in the world according to the World Economic Forum, which also rates Finland’s innovation system as a global leader. Corruption is likewise rare in Finland, reports Transparency International. Finally, people often forget that Finland is among the most equal countries in how wealth is distributed and in how women and men are empowered.

Gender equality is a particularly relevant variable to be included in the analysis of a country’s child welfare and education policies. Finnish women were the first in the world to have equal political rights. Since 1906, women in Finland have had the right to vote and stand for elections, 14 years before the United States issued these rights to women. Women and men don’t have equal political rights only in theory in Finland but women have exercised them actively since the beginning. 

At the moment, 43% of the members of Parliament and 47% of the government ministers are female in Finland. In 2000, the Finns elected the first woman to be the president of the country. Three years later, the first female prime minister took office. Today Finnish women enjoy unquestioned public respect as political leaders. In local governments, however, women are less represented; currently only one-third of elected representatives are women.

Countries vary significantly in gender equality, especially in politics. In the U.S. Senate and House, the power of female representation, at the moment, is the same, 17%. This means that men have six times the political weight of women in making policy. In England 22% of the Parliament is represented by women, barely exceeding the world’s average. Given the intimate understanding most women have of children’s needs, it stands to reason that women legislators probably make better policy for children. This is evident in not only Finland but also in its Nordic neighbors, which are likewise home to considerable female empowerment in both political and corporate spheres."

para ler o resto do artigo... aqui.

da educação... o sistema educativo finlandês... visto por terras de sua majestade...!

""Human nature is not like a machine that is built like a model and set to the do the work exactly proscribed for it, but, should be seen as a tree that uniquely grows depending on the diverse and inward forces that make it a living thing".

Sitting in a packed room in the House of Commons recently I thought of John Stuart Mill listening to Pasi Sahlberg Director of CIMO (an organisation providing expertise and services to clients at home and abroad. Established in 1991, CIMO is an independent agency under the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture) talk about how and why Finland consistently has topped the OECD tables for continued excellence in education.

A broader package than just education: Pasi pointed to the fact that it requires a broader more subtle and complex package of things that delivers a good education system. He pointed particularly to happiness and well being as a caveat.

Background: Finnish society as a whole is based upon more egalitarian, humanistic and mutual values than we have in Britain it is part of the Finnish DNA. Finland has no private schools, or private healthcare as we would know it. In fact private schools were abolished in 1970, and it is illegal to charge for fee-paying tuition that leads to a qualification. It is also illegal to stream children by ability. I might add Finland is a social democracy - it has a high taxation system, but this model is designed for well-managed wealth re-distribution. We wont be going there any time soon.

Policy drivers: There were a number of policy drivers, the first was 'enhancing equity'. This was explained as the need to mitigate socio/economic backgrounds. That might become at some stage more divisive and resource(s) delivered where it is most critically needed. Plus the view that each and every child has a unique learning journey, the system desires and is designed for diversity not a monoculture.

This was a key point. Which broke down to [1] Resources [2] Access [3] Support [4] Early Childhood. So every child is entitled these from the very beginning of their schooling which starts at 7 years rather than our 5 years.

Special needs: there is no such thing as special needs: Pasi also pointed to the fact that 30% of the children have some kind of extra support - but this is NOT identified as special needs. It is necessary extra help and is supplied for as long as the child needs it.

This is I would argue in complete contrast to the UK. We have to say our kids are special, they then often get streamed 'corralled' into the special needs classes. The legal costs to get a 'Statement of Special Need' for dyslexia for example is £15,000 as the LEA's will fight to ensure the child is not officially recognized as having a special need, as they then do not have to provide resource in the same way required by law.

These children suffer a certain subtle pervasive and ongoing prejudice, which will further erode their self confidence - I should know I have seen it happen to both my sons in the state education system.

Policy driver #1 Equity needs quality: Equity however does not deliver quality, so the key elements here is [1] infrastructure, [2] leadership [3] assessment [4] curriculum

The school and the child needs good infrastructure, the teachers need to be able to lead well, assessment is not made by inspection and the curriculum is geared towards the skills, abilities and the passion of the child. Quality is also achieved, consistently by not pitching schools against each other, in the experience of Finnish education, higher quality is achieved when the standards are self directed and that comes down to an evolved sense of professionalism and a personal desire to teach well and to be given the trust to do that.

Policy driver #2 Less is more: less teaching time leads to a better quality education. Finnish Teachers spend 60 minutes each day less than their UK counterparts and 120 minutes less than US teachers.

Less homework more play - the consensus is work is done during the day: children and teachers take a collective responsibility.

Policy driver #3: Teacher, leader professionalism = high quality of teaching, and level of respect. Teaching and teachers in Finland are a highly respected, there are high demands on the people that want to teach, they perceive their role as a professional like a doctor or a lawyer, and such is the standard that many primary school teachers could easily have followed that path. But they followed their calling.

Demand for places is high: The academic standards are high, but it is not enough. Another question carries great weight, what is your personal quest that leads you to teaching? So the profession for the last 20 years has been oversubscribed even though these people have qualifications to take them into law, medicine and other professions.

No School inspectorate: So the really hard work of quality over long periods has as much to do with a rigorous selection process, in the understated way that only a Finn could deliver Pasi observed we have no need for such top down control as we trust we have the very best people and they know what needs to be done.

What defines the Finnish system overall? Four points were made:
[1] collaboration [2] personalisation [3] equity [4] trust based professionalism were defining features on which consistent success had been achieved. What are the enemies of such success? Simply put:

• Competition


• Standardisation


• School Choice


• Test based accountability

So how does one assess students?: The assessments are individualised based upon the students own abilities and performance. At this point a senior member of the NUT observed, "It's not a different world, it's a different planet".

The OECD report of 2012 called Equality and Quality in Education states, 'that the highest performing education systems are those that combine quality and equity.

Summary: In his closing remarks, Pasi made these personal observations
"More collaboration less competition"
"More personalisation less standardisation (diversity vs monocultures).
"Trust based responsibility, less test based accountability"
"More pedagogy, less technology"
"More professionalism, less bureaucracy"

The Finnish system is first and foremost designed to be effective - the efficiency comes as a natural consequence - but its key performance indicators speak for themselves; well educated, well balanced (on the whole), multilingual children that top the OECD table, whilst we languish. My question is are we capable of planning and designing a long-term view of education that is not based upon an industrial model of command and control, a life-sapping tourniquet of bureaucracy and management speak. That could deliver true and valuable education to our children?

So what to do? A mass emigration to Finland is obviously out of the question, and we are not about to close Eton and Harrow etc., it also begs the question what do we want? Do we want a more egalitarian society, or are we always to be a country dominated by class, which ultimately translates to stratified power and control? Or do we want more opportunity, freedom, empowerment, mutualism, diversity, independence and even beauty?

Send a delegation from your local council / school / teachers and parents to understand how this system works in day-to-day practice.

Read Pasi Sahlberg's book, share it with your friends, colleagues and perhaps more importantly with those that are still stuck with the birch and rote learning.

Understand that designing for humanity, and allowing it to grow and flourish, is common sense and intelligent. It requires some joined up long-term thinking / planning that cannot be based upon monoculture, political dogma and a slide rule."

daqui. 

já por diversas vezes deixei referências à finlândia e a pasi sahlberg... é só... procurar...!

da educação... da sintomatologia 'tóxica' dos sistemas educativos modernos... de pasi sahlberg...!

"How GERM is infecting schools around the world

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg, author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? and director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation. He has served the Finnish government in various positions, worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and for the European Training Foundation in Italy as senior education specialist. Sahlberg has also advised governments internationally about education policies and reforms. He is also an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi.

 

By Pasi Sahlberg

Ten years ago — against all odds — Finland was ranked as the world’s top education nation. It was strange because in Finland education is seen as a public good accessible to all free of charge without standardized testing or competitive private schools. When I look around the world, I see competition, choice, and measuring of students and teachers as the main means to improve education. This market-based global movement has put many public schools at risk in the United States and many other countries, as well. But not in Finland.

You may ask what has made Finland’s schools so extraordinary. The answer has taken many by surprise. First, the Finns have never aimed to be the best in education but rather to have good schools for all of children. In other words, equity in education comes before a ‘race to the top’ mentality in national school reforms. 

Second, Finns have taken teachers and teaching seriously by requiring that all teachers must be well trained in academic universities. All teachers should enjoy professional autonomy and public trust in their work. As a consequence, teaching has been a popular career choice among young Finns for three decades now. Today the Finnish government invests 30 times more in professional development of its teachers and administrators than testing its students’ performance in schools.

Third, Finnish educators have learned systematically from other countries how to reform education and improve teaching in schools. The United States has been a special source of inspiration to Finland since John Dewey a century ago. Such American educational innovations as cooperative learning, problem-based teaching and portfolio assessment are examples of the practices invented by teachers and researchers in the United States that are now commonly found in many Finnish classrooms.

One thing that has struck me is how similar education systems are. Curricula are standardized to fit to international student tests; and students around the world study learning materials from global providers. Education reforms in different countries also follow similar patterns. So visible is this common way of improvement that I call it the Global Educational Reform Movement or GERM. It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus. It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less."

para continuar a ler [pois tem interesse]... aqui .

da 'finlândia'... para os estados unidos [e resto do mundo... já agora]... nas palavras de pasi sahlberg...!

"In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students. The United States really cannot leave curriculum design and student assessment in the hands of schools and teachers unless there is similar public confidence in schools and teachers. To get there, a more coherent national system of teacher education is one major step.

Finland is home to such a coherent national system of teacher education. And unlike in the United States, teaching is one of the top career choices among young Finns. Teachers in Finland are highly regarded professionals — akin to medical doctors and lawyers. There are eight universities educating teachers in Finland, and all their programs have the same high academic standards. Furthermore, a research-based master’s degree is the minimum requirement to teach in Finland.

Teaching in Finland is, in fact, such a desired profession that the University of Helsinki, where I teach part-time, received 2,300 applicants this spring for 120 spots in its primary school teacher education program. In this teacher education program and the seven others, teachers are prepared to design their own curricula, assess their own pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching and their school. Until the United States has improved its teacher education, its teachers cannot enjoy similar prestige, public confidence and autonomy."

daqui.

finlândia... os 'mesmos' problemas que cá enfrentamos... não será...?

apesar de tudo a reforma fez-se e perdura... com as adaptações que o tempo torna necessárias mas em que o 'projecto' mantém a 'concertação' política necessária à sua exequibilidade... certo...?

os mesmos problemas e perspectivas de actuação diversas... por cá legisla-se no carnaval e em férias... os parceiros são irrelevantes... para a coisa... como se percebe...!

"

1. The population of Finland is aging

2. The high retirement rate

3. Too high a school-life expectancy

4. Too extensive higher education

5. Geographical education disparities increase

6. Too many small municipalities

7. Lack of teachers

8. External problems are entering schools

"

o documento original... aqui.

finlândia... contextos de mudança...!

o documento original... aqui.

finlândia... breves apontamentos, tabela resumo... segundo hargreaves e fink...!!

o documento original... aqui.

finlândia... breves apontamentos III...!

o documento original... aqui.

finlândia... breves apontamentos II...!

o documento original... aqui.

finlândia... breves apontamentos I...!

o documento original... aqui.

finlândia... como andou na berra uns tempos... o melhor é perceber o porquê do sucesso do sistema educativo...!

não se lê de uma assentada mas... com calma vai-se lá...!

para se perceber que uma reforma se fez com uma margem de manobra de [cerca] de 20 anos, com consensos e condições de pilotagem política... um [quase] pacto de 'regime'...

os resultados falam por si...! 

por cá a única 'reforma' que parecia ter condições para se 'efectivar' [e se o tivesse sido talvez o nosso panorama de hoje fosse diverso...?] foi a do fraústo da silva e roberto carneiro [já que a do veiga simão é para 'esquecer' dados os tempos por que passou...]... e depois generalizou-se o eduquês pedagógico [perenemente...?]...

e toda a minha gente [ministros... e não só] querem a sua impressão digital no sistema, logo as 'reformas' [claro que não se trata de verdadeiras reformas] no nosso sistema educativo têm sido meros emplastros remediativos e não profilácticos...

fica aqui o trabalho de pasi sahlberg [e outros] sobre a reforma do sistema educativo na finlândia... boas leituras...! 

Pasi Sahlberg Et Al 2006_policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary Education in Finla...