Reflections on Teaching

The title comes from a trope of jokes about the hilarity that results from dissimilar groupings of people (usually a rabbi, a priest, and a minister). Sometimes the joke is how alike they all are and sometimes, the dis-congruity of groupings makes that joke. That’s how I like to think about comparisons between the U.S. and countries like Finland and Singapore on international tests. The issue came up recently on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog in his response to a particularly brain-dead and specious argument about teacher quality (Do Teachers REALLY Come From The Bottom Third Of Colleges? Or Is That Statistic A Bunch Of Baloney?). I was going to write a whole post just about the comparisons to Singapore and Finland, but I’ve decided to put up links because really all I would be doing is using information easily gotten from the posts of others:

• Tuttle SVC: America : EU :: Minnesota : Finland
  Brilliant and short, it takes apart the comparison of America to the EU (or Finland for that matter). I won’t give away the punchline, just click and have a chuckle.

• My Own Private Finland | LFA: Join The Conversation – Public School Insights
  Where Claus von Zastrow points out the reality of teacher evaluation and autonomy in Finland in contrast to the reality being offered by so-called “reformers”.

• Lessons from the North: A Conversation with Canadian Education Leader Raymond Théberge | LFA: Join The Conversation – Public School Insights
  Claus again on our neighbor to the north, and the great job they’ve done on PISA. Their secret, social services for immigrant families that are centered in the child’s school.

• Learning Is Messy – Blog » Blog Archive » “Are We Fixing the Wrong Things?” By Yong Zhao

  Where visiting administrators from Singapore go to Brian’s Title One classroom to find out how to teach mathematics

• The Return Of Jay Greene And The United Cherry Pickers – EdWize
  Diane Ratvich and other point out that countries (Finland) and states (Massachusetts) with the strongest teachers unions seem to have better scores than places (like Texas) that don’t.

• The Bracey Report 2009
  Bracey takes apart  international score data to show that the U.S. may have lower average scores on math and science, but because we have a large number of students, and we have a large number of students at the high end of the distribution (offset in the average by the large number in the cellar of scores), we have more high-end math and science graduates, than countries that score higer on PISA. He also does a nice job on the breakdown of our scores by school poverty-level which yields and unsurprising correlation.