Poland and Us

If we want our kids to be educated we need to change the system.

Our standards need to be higher for all students; they can learn.  If we expect them to learn, and if they have well-trained, highly educated teachers, they will learn.  Just look at Finland.  Better yet, look at Poland; they struggle with deprivation, crime and pathology of all kinds.   “In a United Nations comparison of children’s material well-being, Poland ranked dead last in the developed world.”  (Loc. 1823)  If Poland can significantly improve their schools, so can we.

In Finland, there are only eight prestigious teacher training universities, and you need high test scores and good grades to get into them.  Let’s say you want to teach high school Finnish — you need to send in your graduation-exam scores, plus read four books selected by the university and sit for a special Finnish literature exam.  Today, Finland’s education programs are very selective — on the same scale of selectivity as M.I.T. here in the United States.  Getting into a teacher-training program is as prestigious as getting into medical school.  A student training to teach Finnish will spend the first three years studying Finnish literature.  She will read intensely and write many long papers.  The student will analyze novels, poems and short stories.  There are required classes, such as statistics, in the six years of study.  In the fourth year, students begin the teacher-training program.  All Finnish teachers are required to get a master’s degree, and during this time they spend one full year in one of the best public schools in the country.  There are usually three teacher mentors; trainees watch their mentors’ classes closely.  They also teach while the mentors take notes.  Trainees learn key lessons, like how important it is to motivate students at the start of each lesson.  (Loc.1222)  Teachers in training also collaborate with fellow students to design lesson plans so they can integrate material from all their subjects, including history and art.  All Finnish teachers in training have to do original research; a student, for example, may write a two-hundred page thesis on the ways that teenagers’ spoken Finnish shapes their written Finnish. (Loc.1227)

In Finland, teachers are not also football coaches. 
The top schools in the world do not mix school and sports.  Many kids play sports outside of school and find ways to be active, but the message schools send is clear— that school is for academic work.

When we label kids “disadvantaged” we often begin to expect less of them.  The rich and the poor are capable of being educated.  If we expect less of certain students because they have a tough life at home, then they will live up to our low expectations; they will underachieve.  If a student shows signs of a learning disability, we need to provide that student with a great deal of extra help from a highly qualified teacher.  Many places in the world, including Finland, see learning disabilities as temporary situations.  Most of these situations arise during the elementary years, they are dealt with, and the students move on.  They are not trapped in an endless cycle of special education.  As a parent of a child labeled severely dyslexic, I can say first hand that a huge amount of attention in the early years has paid off in that my daughter reads much faster than I do now and has no trouble writing essays as a thirteen year old.

Children who arrive at school speaking a language other than English should receive intensive language lessons to get them caught up.  Kids should not be exempt from certain material or entire classes because they have special circumstances.  It does not serve them well in the long run. 

Tracking should be delayed until age sixteen.  Everyone should take literature, history, science and math classes.  There should not be a single student taking something called “English in the Workplace” or anything else like that until after age sixteen.  Technical schools need to be top notch.  Not everyone is going to college, but everyone needs a real skill.

Math teachers should major in math. 

Schools should offer parents a much more productive way to get involved: read.  Don’t bring apple slices or cupcakes to school, don’t coach soccer, or join the PTA, don’t worry about how many class trips you’ve chaperoned, but read to your kids every single day when they’re young.  Talk to your kids about books.  Read books; kids will see that reading is an important part of life.  As kids get older, have serious conversations with them about books, movies, current events and what they’re learning in history class.  These are the things that matter, that improve a student’s ability to think critically. 

The superpowers in education believe that schools exist to help students master complex academic material.  Other things matter but nothings else matters as much.  (Loc. 1685)  The education Finland provides for its children is at the top of the world.  Many American teachers view Finland as an educator’s heaven on earth; teachers are admired and children are cared for.  It is often pointed out that Finland has a very low rate of child poverty, while the United States has a high rate of child poverty.  Many argue that we can not fix our schools until the problem of poverty is rectified.  (Loc. 136)  The child poverty rate in the United States is around twenty percent; kids are living under stress at home and are needing more help at school.  Norway spends as much as the United States on education, which is a lot compared to what the rest of the world spends.  Norwegian kids did as unimpressively as our own kids on an international test of scientific literacy in 2009. (Loc. 143)  Low child poverty rates certainly do help, but in Norway’s case, they weren’t leading to the kind of success found in Finland. Rich parents did not necessarily predict high scores, and poor parents, did not always predict low scores.  (Loc. 249)  Other factors must be at play.

“Most successful or improving countries seemed to fit into three basic categories: 1) The utopia model of Finland, a system built on trust in which kids achieved higher-order thinking without excessive competition or parental meddling; 2) the pressure-cooker model of South Korea, where kids studied so compulsively that the government had to institute a study curfew; and 3) the metamorphosis model of Poland, a country on the ascent, with about as much child poverty as the United States, but recent and dramatic gains in what kids knew.” (Loc. 349) 
Yes, Finland is a small country full of white people but we have some pretty small, pretty white states here, like New Hampshire, which is 96 percent white, has the highest median income in the nation and one of the lowest child poverty rates.  New Hampshire doesn’t do what Finland does — which is to provide all children with a decent education no matter how much money their parents make.  (Loc. 568)  Some defenders of our education system blame poverty and dysfunction for our problems.  Poland has poverty and hardship, yet they have turned their schools around.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Poland experienced hyperinflation; their grocery stores were empty.  Parents couldn’t find food for their children.  The country was in a chaotic situation, perhaps headed toward civil war.  Poland went through a transformation and emerged as a free-market democracy.  Still, one in six Polish children live in poverty. 
Poland is a big country, like the United States, and one where its people distrust the centralized government, again, like us.  Despite this, between 2000 and 2006 the average reading score of Polish fifteen year olds rose 29 points on the PISA exam.  “In less than a decade, they had gone from below average for the developed world to above.  Over the same period, U.S. scores had remained flat.” (Loc. 1830)
In 1997, Poland got a new minister of education, Miroslaw Handke.  He implemented dramatic reform, cutting to the core, changing the  structure and substance of education in Poland.  Adults in Poland didn’t have the skills to compete in the modern world.  Only half of rural adults finished primary school.  They would have no choice but to do the low-skilled, low-wage jobs that no other Europeans wanted.  Handke came up with four major areas of reform that he felt would “give students a chance.” (Loc. 1898) 
1) A new curriculum: No longer would teachers have to cover too many topics too briefly.  The new curriculum set fundamental goals but left the details to the schools.  At the same time a quarter of teachers were required to go back to school to improve their own education. 
2) Accountability: To ensure students were learning they would start taking standardized tests at the end of elementary, junior high, and high school.  The tests would be the same all over the country.  Test scores of younger children helped to identify which students, teachers and schools needed more help.  “For the first time, all students would take the university entrance exam at the end of high school.”  (Loc. 1898)
3) Delay Tracking: This was the most important reform, because it raised the expectations for what kids could accomplish.  It forced all kids to stay together in the same academic setting for an extra full year (through the equivalent of freshman year in high school).  They could not be streamed into vocational or academic programs until after the extra year together.  This meant Poland had to build four thousand new junior high schools. 
4) Autonomy: Teachers could choose their own textbooks and their own specific curriculum from over one hundred approved options, plus they could choose their own professional development courses.  They would also start earning bonuses based in part on how much professional development they did.  (Loc. 1917)

On September 1, 1999, four thousand new junior high schools opened across Poland.  It was a chaotic day; many teachers and principals were not ready, plus there were parents, teachers, and principals who complained and criticized the changes.  While this was happening, Handke was deciding if Poland should participate in the first ever PISA test.  He decided to do it, because he didn’t want Poland to be “left behind.”  (Loc. 1944) 

“The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial international survey which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students. To date, students representing more than 70 economies have participated in the assessment. PISA is unique because it develops tests which are not directly linked to the school curriculum. The tests are designed to assess to what extent students at the end of compulsory education, can apply their knowledge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society. The information collected through background questionnaires also provides context which can help analysts interpret the results.”  (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/)


In 2000, Polish fifteen year olds took the PISA.  These first kids who took PISA had grown up under the old system.  They ranked twenty-first in reading and twentieth in math, below the United States and below average for the developed world.    Three years later, in 2003, another group of Polish fifteen year olds took PISA, ones who had gone to elementary school in the old system but were attending the new gymnasia schools; they were not yet tracked.   This group ranked thirteenth in reading and eighteenth in math, just above the United States in both subjects.  By 2009, Poland was outperforming the United States in math and science, even though they spent less than half as much money per student.  “Poland’s poorest kids outscored the poorest kids in the United States.  That was a remarkable feat, given that they were worse off, socioeconomically, than the poorest American kids.” (Loc. 1957)

The rest of the world can look to Poland.  Education is possible, even for the poor kids.  Every single kid in this country deserves the very best education.  Nobody is a lost cause.  Our system needs reform.  In 2009, 85 percent of Polish students graduated from high school, compared to 76 percent in the United States.  We can do better.
Poland still needs more rigorous standards and improved teaching quality if they want to reach Finland’s success rates, but they have proven that even troubled countries can do better for their children. 
Let Poland be our guide.
We can change.

Sources:
1. Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids In The World And How They Got That Way (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).  Kindle Edition
2. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/