While I recognize that Freudian psychology has little credibility within the profession any more, I believe if we put the new reformers in education--Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Billionaire Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and their ilk--on the psychiatrist's couch we'd be likely to diagnose them all with Finnish Envy, and a considerable degree of delusion as well.
First, we should be clear that the current psychoses among the new reformers in education are nothing new. Consider the Golden Age of U. S. education (as praised by Michelle Rhee herself), the 1950s.
Well, according to Rudolf Flesch, author of Why Johnny Can't Read--And What You Can Do About It (1955):
And Admiral Hyman Rickover's Swiss Schools and Ours: Why Theirs are Better (1962) and American Education, a National Failure; The problem of our schools and what we can learn from England (1963) offered even more bashing of U.S. schools, including making (not a surprise) international comparisons and calling for national standards:
Half a century
later, the country is being bombarded once again with charges that U.S. schools
are failing, but the messages have changed little except they come in
documentaries and through the left-wing media perpetuating false information about
international results on tests.
Earlier in the first decade of the twenty-first century, under the George W. Bush administration when Margaret Spellings held the position of Secretary of Education, we saw what was coming--Political misinformation to protect political agendas when Spellings exposed herself as either incompetent or dishonest by claiming that NAEP test scores proved NCLB a success. Pallas, Bracey, and Ravitch called her out for her distortions, but those facts found little traction in the press.
More recently,
the stakes and the misinformation have morphed even further into the absurd
because we have little distinction now among the many interests using our
public schools as political, corporate, and ideological footballs--Secretary
Duncan, Rhee, Gates, corporate charters (KIPP), Teach for America, and
celebrities (Oprah, John Legend, Andre Agassi).
An interesting refrain they all seem to share is a fascination with Finland, specifically the much praised Finnish schools.
But when we hear
U.S. schools criticized and Finland held up as the gold standard for reform, we
rarely hear that U.S. children suffer under the weigh of poverty (22%) that is significantly
higher than the childhood poverty rate in Finland (4%). The new reformers like
to show selected rankings (test scores comparing apples to oranges) while
hiding others (childhood poverty).
And those same new reformers who have identified bad teachers and protective teachers unions as the central problems with U.S. schools also fail to share that 95-98% of teachers in Finland belong to unions, have their graduate education paid by the government, and work collaboratively within a system that does not use high-stakes testing. The blog Schools Matter struck the nail on the head by characterizing the use of Finland by the new reformers as cartoonish, except this isn't funny at all.
While the contradictions and distortions currently being promoted by the new reformers and reinforced by every aspect of the media are proving to be a disservice to U.S. schools, its students, and the entire country, those of us who care about those schools and children should take a moment to call the reformers' bluff: Let's be like Finland, except we can't just focus on schools alone.
Somehow, I believe if we join hands with the new reformers' as they call for our schools being like Finland, we'll experience yet another psychological condition--likely Schizophrenia?