REEP

A coworker told me she had heard on the news that Finland topped first in education. Curious about the subject, I found out that Finland’s style of teaching is amazingly the opposite of that from United States. I was also able to confirm that when it came to International results Finland’s Schools scored consistently at the top.

While checking the “Organization for Economic Co-operation and Economic Development,” OECD and looking for the “Program for International Student Assessment.” PISA results I found out the following. Finland and Asian countries were among the top ten. The United States rank 17 in reading, 23 in Science, just one notch above the average score, and dropped below the OECD average in mathematics ranking 32 in 2009.

Could it be possible that longer days and school years is a solution to our low performance? Could it be that shortening summer vacation helps children do better in school? HISD has now developed a new teacher evaluation system called EVAAS “Evaluating Value-Added Models for Teacher Accountability” which measure the growth of students at the classroom level. They also have a program called ASPIRE that helps determine teacher and campus awards based on EVAAS results and data.

Be ready to be puzzled by what the Finns do and please let me know what you think about it when you are done reading.  I was baffled by our differences.

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