REPOST: What the U.S. could learn from the Polish education system

Coming from the bottom ranks in education, Poland has risen to the top in the past decade. And with the difficulties that the U.S. education system is currently facing, it may be good to learn some things from the Polish. Read more about this in this article from USA Today.

Image Source: usatoday.com

Is it time for the student to offer the teacher a few lessons?

Twenty-five years ago, Americans like economist Jeffrey Sachs were running around Poland helping to turn moribund socialism into a vibrant market economy. Now, with the U.S. trying to fix its lagging educational system, it might just learn a thing or two from Poland, which in the past decade has moved sharply forward from the rear of the international pack and beats the U.S. on most performance measures. And it didn't even spend a lot money to get there.

Poland now has the fourth-highest number of higher education students in Europe, behind the U.K., Germany and France. Reading, once an obstacle, became an asset — more so than in the U.S., the U.K., Germany or France. And 19th place in math on a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has helped it produce some of Europe's brightest talent in the technology field. The U.S. ranked a "below average" 27th.

"Our curriculum is mostly based on the effects of education — not just what students know but what they can do, and how they can use their knowledge practically," Ewa Dudek, Poland's undersecretary of state for education, tells OZY. Dudek believes Poland's success comes from allowing students more scope for feedback on their education.

Of course, it's much more than that.

It was 1998, almost a decade after the fall of communism, and the country was flying in the aftermath of Sachs' market reforms. Deregulation and privatization made Poland's economy one of Europe's fastest growing.

But its schools lagged far behind and continued to rely on course materials barely changed since the Stalinist 1950s. Kids osmosed ideology and vocational training, grooming them for careers in heavy industry that had largely disappeared.

Leaders in the capital, Warsaw, saw a growing generation of underserved and uninspired students as an economic bear trap. Without drastic reforms, the country could kiss its decade of prosperity goodbye.

"We have to move the entire system — push it out of its equilibrium," urged then-Education Minister Mirosław Handke.

Handke got his green light. With remarkable speed, in a year academia in Poland was unrecognizable. The demagoguery was ditched and in came a new form of general education that resisted specialization. Just a year after that, in 2000, Poland began to leap up the international league tables.

By 2012, the last time the OECD conducted its survey, Poland was one of the best teaching countries on earth.

In fact it's the only one to have gone from below average in the chart, which now measures 510,000 15-year-olds in 65 territories, to above — with a GDP ranking just 46th globally. On key indicators — math, science, reading — it came from behind to rank well ahead of the United States.

How did Poland do it?

Back in 1998, Handke, a former chemistry teacher, was staring at a horrible formula. Polish children went to primary school for eight years before being funneled into vocational training at age 14.

Under the revamped system, primary school lasts six years, followed by three years of a new comprehensive lower secondary school, before a decision is made on whether to send a student to vocational training. Knowledge — reading, writing, 'rithmetic — is valued above technical skill. Foreign language — especially English — became a key component. In 2000 only 1 percent of kids received four hours or more of language classes. By 2006 that figure was 76 percent.

But it's not about money. Poland spends around $5,000 per student annually from primary through tertiary education, but outperforms the United States, which spends around three times that amount.

Poland has its socialist past to thank for the rapid progress, says Izabel Olchonowicz, an education consultant: "People were very eager to modernize; they were waiting such a long time," she says. "Right now is the result of that."

The economy has continued to be strong. When Europe's economies were tumbling in 2009, Poland was its only island of growth, getting a 1.6 percent lift. Poland is far better off than when Handke had his say.

Teachers might disagree. Poland remains a low payer — around $650 a month for teachers compared with the national average for all workers of $945. Slawomir Broniarz, the country's most senior teachers unionist, warns that low pay might put Poland's trajectory in doubt, primarily because of slipping standards of training. "We've asked many times for the reform of teacher training, because they are not good enough for these times. We need new attitudes, programs and better preparations for future challenges."

"Teaching is very demanding," says Olchonowicz, "and I think that what they get for it is not enough. It is not motivating, and if Poland needs to advance its education system, the salaries of teachers have to come with it."

Poland's rapid development of foreign language training may also have a negative side effect. Many Poles are leaving home to gain skills abroad. While that helps the technology sector if they return, many don't.

But despite the cracks, Poland's educational system is an example to most other countries, and proof that it's not just money that makes good students.

Ken Von Kohorn is a socio-political writer and a big believer in quality education for all. Follow this Twitter account to keep track of the reforms in the U.S. education system.

REPOST: What The U.S. Can Learn From Finland, Where School Starts At Age 7

NPR correspondent Claudio Sanchez delves into Finland’s primary education system, where all teachers have a bachelor’s degree and all kids under 7 enjoy the right to child care and preschool.

Finland, a country the size of Minnesota, beats the U.S. in math, reading and science, even though Finnish children don't start school until age 7.

Despite the late start, the vast majority arrive with solid reading and math skills. By age 15, Finnish students outperform all but a few countries on international assessments.

Krista Kiuru, Finland's minister of education and science who met with education officials in Washington recently, chalks success up to what she calls the "Finnish way." Every child in Finland under age 7 has the right to child care and preschool by law, regardless of family income. Over 97 percent of 3- to 6-year-olds attend a program of one type or another. But, says Kiuru, the key to Finland's universal preschool system is quality.

"First of all, it's about having high-quality teachers," Kiuru says. "Day care teachers are having Bachelor degrees. So we trust our teachers, and that's very, very important. And the third factor: we have strong values in the political level."

Political consensus and support help, Kiuru says.

Author Amanda Ripley says she didn't really believe it, so she went to Finland and several other top-performing countries to see for herself. She wrote The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. Compared to Singapore, South Korea or Japan, she says, Finland's approach is pretty laid back, even though its standards — like what preschoolers should know and be able to do — are set by Finland's National Curriculum Guidelines for early childcare.

Image Source: www.npr.org

"Kids are almost all in some kind of day care, all of whom are working in the same curriculum that's aligned with what they're going to learn in school," she says. "That's a level of coherence that most U.S. kids will never experience because we don't have a coherent system with highly trained people in almost every classroom."

It's a level of coherence that President Obama has repeatedly called for. Until there's a national consensus on standards and what quality preschool should look like, Ripley says early childhood education in the U.S. will remain fragmented.

Then there's the money issue. In Finland, of course, preschool and day care are basically free, because people pay a lot more taxes to fund these programs. Another glaring difference is the child poverty rate, which is almost 25 percent in the U.S. — five times more than in Finland.
"And in most countries I've traveled to, they see poverty and education as linked. You cannot separate them," Ripley says.

In Finland, children from poor families have access to high-quality preschool. In the U.S., most poor children get poor quality preschool, if they get any at all.

"It's very clear from the research in the U.S. that our problems with inequality [and] school failure are set when children walk in the school door," says Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. Sixty percent of the poorest 4-year-olds in the U.S. get no preschool. Most, says Barnett, start school 18 months behind.

"Those kids are going to be in a spiral of failure, and we set that up by not adequately investing before they get to kindergarten," Barnett says. "We certainly can learn from countries like Finland."

Kiuru says she's in no position to say why the U.S. is struggling so much with this issue, but if her country has a lesson to offer, it's this: "If you invest in early childhood education, in preschool and day care, that will lead [to] better results," Kiuru says.

That, she says, is the "Finnish way."

Ken Von Kohorn is a socio-political writer and a big believer in quality education for all. Read more about his views and advocacies on this Facebook page.

REPOST: Science Education In The U.S. Is Mediocre. Here’s

WBUR.org contributor Jacqueline Miller laments the dismal state of science education in the U.S. She then discusses in the article below concrete actions that would help develop science-literate citizens.

Jacqueline Miller: American students are simply not learning the content and skills that will help them succeed in the 21st century, where technology and science are core to everyday life.
(Image source: wbur.org)

Once again, U.S. students have performed poorly on an international test and the hand wringing has begun. This time it is the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which measures how well students can apply what they have learned in reading, mathematics, and science to practical problems. Out of 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries, United States students ranked 17th in reading, 26th in math, and 21st in science.

As observed by Diane Ravitch and other education historians, the U.S. has rarely fared well on the lineup of international tests that began in the mid-1960s. Whether these tests are a meaningful indicator of the quality of education and global economic success is subject to debate.

What is not debatable, though, is that science education for all students in this country is, in and of itself, mediocre. American students are simply not learning the content and skills that will help them succeed in the 21st century, where technology and science are core to everyday life.

Over the years, I have observed classrooms where students had already decided that science and math were not for them. “I hate science, I hate math,” came the exasperated refrain. But when I asked them what they hated and how it could be made better, I discovered that they actually loved the experimentation of science and were engaged by the relevance of math to their lives. What they hated was how these subjects were taught.

As stated in the National Research Council’s 2012 report “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century,” students thrive when they are engaged in course content that focuses in depth on core concepts within a discipline, contextualizes the learning in real-world situations relevant to their lives, and provides investigative experiences that require transfer of knowledge to address a challenge or answer a question.

Yet, for most students, the study of science is still an exercise in memorization and regurgitation. A jumble of disconnected facts is presented, unaccompanied by opportunities for investigative, problem-solving experiences. We are not educating students to succeed on international exams, but, more importantly, we’re not developing science-literate citizens or encouraging future scientists, either.

Studies have shown that curriculum and teachers are the two most important determinants of student learning and achievement. Effective curriculum shapes not only what content is taught but how it is taught. This, in turn, affects student achievement of the learning goals. Today, far too few schools are using pre-K through 12 science curricula that:

• Build students’ understanding of big, fundamental concepts over time in a coherent conceptual flow
• Explore fewer topics in greater depth
• Promote understanding and use of the practices and competencies required of scientific investigations
• Incorporate ongoing assessment to inform instruction
• Motivate students to learn by engaging them in hands-on investigations and real-world problems

Simultaneously, far too few teachers have the opportunities or support they need to implement these types of materials. Extensive testing requirements have driven too many teachers to cover massive amounts of content and teach to the test. A lack of instructional and pedagogical resources thwarts their chances to move their own practices to a more ambitious teaching model. And although we know that digital tools can enhance student learning and extend teaching practice, few teachers have access to training and support in using these tools appropriately.

Achieving deeply rooted change that ensures students’ success and equips them for life in the 21st century starts with our teachers. Providing these dedicated individuals with ongoing professional development experiences that help build a strong content background, knowledge of effective teaching strategies, and understanding of appropriate uses of digital resources should be the standard, not the exception.

We also need policymakers who are more concerned with what students are learning than how they are performing on international exams. If, as a nation, we make a concerted effort to improve the learning and teaching of science, then better test results will surely follow. Policy-making groups who will lead this effort must include teachers who, more than anyone, understand the reality of the classroom and can lead U.S. science education from mediocrity to excellence.

This indictment of science education goes far deeper than PISA scores. But we know how to fix what’s wrong. Let us start now — and not lose a generation of science-literate citizens, mathematicians, and scientists to a failure in teaching when the inspiration to explore, to experiment, and to learn is all around us.

Nonfiction writer and philanthropist Ken Von Kohorn believes that literacy helps shape the future of America. Follow this Twitter account to keep track of the reforms in the U.S. education system.

REPOST: Gifted, Talented and Separated

This article published in The New York Times explores how students in a school in New York City are divided by the gifted label--and race.

Image source: The New York Times

IT is just a metal door with three windows, the kind meant to keep the clamor of an elementary school hallway from piercing a classroom’s quiet. Other than paint the color of bubble gum, it is unremarkable.
But the pink door on Room 311 at Public School 163 on the Upper West Side represents a barrier belied by its friendly hue. On one side are 21 fourth graders labeled gifted and talented by New York City’s school system. They are coursing through public school careers stamped accelerated.

And they are mostly white.

On the other side, sometimes sitting for reading lessons on the floor of the hallway, are those in the school’s vast majority: They are enrolled in general or special education programs.

They are mostly children of color.

“I know what we look like,” Carolyn M. Weinberg, a 28-year veteran of P.S. 163, said of the racial disparities as she stood one day in the third-floor hallway between Room 318, where she and a colleague teach a fourth-grade general education class, and the one where Angelo Monserrate teaches the gifted class, Room 311.

“I know what you see,” said Ms. Weinberg.

There are 652 students enrolled at P.S. 163 this year, from prekindergarten through fifth grade. Roughly 63 percent of them are black and Hispanic; whites make up 27 percent; and Asians account for 6 percent.

This reflects the flavor of the neighborhood, and roughly matches the New York City school system’s overall demographics.

Yet in P.S. 163’s gifted classes, the racial dynamics of the neighborhood, the school itself and the school system are turned upside down.

Of the 205 children enrolled in the nine gifted classes, 97, or 47 percent, are white; another 31 of the students, or 15 percent, are Asian. And a combined 65 students, or 32 percent, are black and Hispanic.

In the 21 other classes that enroll the school’s remaining 447 students, only 80, or 18 percent, are white.

The disparities are most apparent in the lower grades.

Of the 24 students in Karen Engler’s kindergarten gifted class, one is black and three are Hispanic. Ayelet Cutler’s first-grade gifted class has 21 students, one of them black and two Hispanic. There are two blacks and two Hispanics among the 26 students in Athena Shapiro’s second-grade gifted class.

On a recent morning, a line of Ms. Cutler’s students moved from the classroom to the corridor, ahead of the general education class of Linda Crews. A string of mostly white faces and then a line of mostly black and Hispanic ones walked down the hall of a school named for a New York politician who sought to end inequities in education: Alfred E. Smith.

It was 11:25 a.m., and the classes wound their way to the cafeteria, a cavernous room at the school’s western edge. Once there, the children sat with those in their own class, each one at a separate long white table that, for a moment, froze the divisions.

For critics of New York City’s gifted and talented programs, that image crystallizes what they say is a flawed system that reinforces racial separation in the city’s schools and contributes to disparities in achievement.

They contend that gifted admissions standards favor middle-class children, many of them white or Asian, over black and Hispanic children who might have equal promise, and that the programs create castes within schools, one offered an education that is enriched and accelerated, the other getting a bare-bones version of the material. Because they are often embedded within larger schools, the programs bolster a false vision of diversity, these critics say, while reinforcing the negative stereotypes of class and race.

Despite months of repeated requests, the city’s Education Department would not provide racial breakdowns of gifted and talented programs and the schools that house them. But the programs tend to be in wealthier districts whose populations have fewer black and Hispanic children, and far more children qualify for them in affluent districts than in poorer ones.

For the full version of the Times article, click here.

Through writing, Ken Von Kohorn campaigns for academic excellence in the country.   Learn more about his works and advocacies from this Facebook page.

How to bring our schools out of the 20th Century

By Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe 
Read the full article here.

There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."

American schools aren't exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries and business, government and other education leaders releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.

Right now we're aiming too low. Competency in reading and math--the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing--is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here's what they are:

Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages"--not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Viewpoint: The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

This article discusses how the 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform, written by Andrew J. Rotherham and published on November 08, 2012 by TIME.com.


The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools. In other words, Nov. 6 left the country with an education mandate as unclear as the electoral mandate overall. Still, what happened in various states will influence what happens in Washington during President Obama’s second term. Here are four key education issues to watch:

Standards for teachers and students
The biggest omen for the Obama Administration is, ironically, the defeat of a high-profile Republican, Indiana state schools superintendent Tony Bennett. He has been a quiet Obama ally, most notably in the fight to reform teacher evaluations and develop common academic standards in all 50 states. The latter effort didn’t endear him to conservatives, and Bennett’s Democratic opponent said she’d pull the state out of the standards initiative. Bennett also angered teachers’ unions with his blunt talk and his support for one of the toughest teacher-evaluation laws in the country. This left-right convergence led to Bennett’s losing on the same night that a conservative Republican won the governorship, and that doesn’t bode well for Obama’s centrist approach to education reform. Or for that matter, for GOP leaders on these issues, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who has championed many of the initiatives that got trounced on Tuesday night.

In other Republican-on-Republican violence, Idaho schools chief Tom Luna wasn’t on the ballot, but all three of his big education-reform measures were roundly defeated by voters in this solidly red state. Luna, who is a Republican and also the president of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the national organization representing state education agencies, had pushed hard for initiatives that would have instituted merit pay for teachers, weakened collective bargaining and mandated more online education and use of laptops in public schools. All bombed at the ballot box, despite an influx of donations to support them from out-of-state donors including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Meanwhile, South Dakota voters rejected a new state law that would have incorporated test-score data into teacher evaluations, added merit pay and weakened teacher tenure. The bill had passed the state’s legislature by just one vote, and defeating it was a top priority of teachers’ unions.

Unions didn’t win everywhere, however. In Michigan, which Obama carried, voters rejected a measure that would have expanded collective-bargaining rights for teachers and other workers. Bottom line: Just as we saw in Wisconsin last year, organized labor is not viewed sympathetically by many voters from either party, but teachers’ unions can still pack a punch when their back is against the wall. No one wants to be perceived as offending teachers. And that message won’t be lost on state and local elected officials — who will all be on the ballot in the next few years — as they debate how much risk they’re willing to take to carry out the President’s agenda.

Charter schools
Publicly funded charter schools were the night’s big education winner, scoring two hard-fought victories on opposite sides of the country. In Georgia, after the state supreme court struck down a charter-school law as unconstitutional, reformers took their case directly to voters, who by a decisive 58% to 41% margin approved a modification to the state’s constitution that will enable a special commission to authorize charter schools. In Washington, voters narrowly approved a referendum allowing the creation of charter schools, after rejecting similar initiatives in 1996, 2000 and 2004. Charter-school supporters like me see these wins as a sign that giving families more choices in education is no longer a question of if but of when and how.

Immigration reform
Maryland voters passed a state version of the controversial DREAM Act, granting in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants at public colleges and universities, provided they meet certain conditions. Long stalled in Congress, the measure sailed through on the ballot, with 59% of Maryland voters in favor of it and 41% opposed. That lopsided result, along with the growing importance of Latino voters in national politics, should embolden skittish politicians elsewhere in the country to help Obama tackle the issue of comprehensive immigration reform.

Education spending
The other big issue, in addition to immigration reform, that the President will face early in his second term is the deficit. In California, the prospect of additional education budget cuts helped prompt voters to pass a temporary increase in sales and income taxes. Fiscally, California is running on fumes, but the difficulty of doing something about it previews the coming debate in Washington over balancing spending cuts and tax increases to get the federal budget under control.

The fiscal cliff will now dominate politics in Washington. But the real education story of the 2012 election is the fragility of the reform consensus and the high-wire act the President and Republican reformers have ahead of them.