American Education Has Been Hindered

        Many American’s are just watching helplessly as other countries overtake America’s spot as the top education system in the world. It has been a little while since America has been the top but contrary to popular belief, education in America has not gone down at all. It has actually been increasing, but just at a slower rate than other countries. This is because of a few reasons: for one, education is too broad in America; we do not focus on particular subjects that will be applicable to the careers we have already chosen. Two, Teachers and education in general is not as important as in the countries with top notch education. And three, standardized testing destroys education.

        The top education in the world right now is Finland. There are many things about Finland that make its education system accomplish many great feats. Finland’s graduation rate is at 93% compared to the United States which is at 75%. About two in three students in Finland will go to college which is the highest rate in all of Europe. And their test score dominate everyone else’s’ in the world, there’s really no comparison. So you may be asking yourself what makes their education system so successful. Well for one the students get plenty of teacher interaction, an example is that Finland and New York City have around the same number of teachers but Finland has half the number of students. Finland has 600,000 students with a teacher-student ratio of about 1 to 12. New York City has 1.1 million students with a student to teacher ratio of 1 to 24. So as you can see, a student in Finland gets double the learning that a New York City kid does. There was a recent study on divergent thinking which is basically seeing lots of answers to a question; people get this by thinking of different ways to interoperate the question. So an example of a question like this would “be how many uses can you think of for a rubber band?” Most people could come up with about 8 or so, but people who are good could come up with 200. They do this by thinking “could the rubber band be 100 feet around and made out of plastic?” They did a study of this in an article called “breaking point and beyond” in which they tested 1500 people to see if they were a genius at divergent thinking, and these were kindergarten children. 98% of them were genius level. They tested the same children 5 years later, 50% were genius, and 5 years later only 14%. I would think it should go the other way, but it doesn’t and this is because kids are told that there is only one answer for each question. This is because in public schools, the government would rather have higher test scores and easier tests than vice versa, and this is not the way to go. Everyone is not on the same ability level to start with so they should not be held to the same level as everyone else. Finland knows this and sees that it’s detrimental to their society to destroy creativity, which is why Finland only takes ONE standardized test when they turn 16 which is similar to the SAT, compared to New York City kids who would have taken 10 standardized tests by the same age. Another reason Finland has such a great education system is because when they are growing up, the kids have more time to be kids. The average U.S fifth grader has 50 minutes of homework per day while Finnish children rarely ever get homework until their teens. U.S elementary school kids average 27 minutes of recess while Finnish students get around 75 minutes per day.

But arguably the most important of all is that Finland knows that good teachers are absolutely essential for a good education. This is why ALL teachers are required to have a master’s degree, and even at that, only the top 10% of the graduation class actually becomes a teacher. The teachers are paid much better than that of America and are held to the same level as doctors or lawyers. There are no standardized tests in Finland because there is no need to test the students when the teachers are so good because they are among the most selective of profession schools there is.  The teachers need no merit pay because the teachers are given prestige and good pay so most of the teachers there are good.  If there is a bad teacher (which there almost never is) then it is the principal’s job to deal with it.

According to Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility, there are also no private schools in Finland, which doesn’t seem like much but it is a lot. This means that everything is the same. Say Harvard and Yale are shops; there are many options for different levels of education in the U.S that parents can choose from. In Finland, everyone gets a Harvard level education, and the parents can also choose what school they would like to send their child to, but the options are all the same. So from Kindergarten to your Ph.D., everything is free and the same to everyone. If America wants to get ahead, Finland is the way to go.

No child left behind was introduced in 2002 by George W. Bush. He signed it into law and made it the law of the land, which issued a new era of standardized test-based schools. A review of a decade of evidence shows that No Child Left Behind has failed so badly that it has dropped the U.S from an educational superpower to number 25 on the list. In fact, standardized testing has misguided schooling to be flat out reliant on standardized testing. So much that many schools, especially low-budget schools who have become nothing more than test-preparation programs. This is not education. This will not teach us to be what we want to be. Standardized testing destroys education and even worse, it annihilates creativity and critical thinking.