Sami Vedisco English 112 Research Paper Draft # 2 Due: 12-8-17 at 11:59 pm Should the U.S. Follow Finland Education System In Where to Invade Next starring filmmaker Michael Moore who “invades” European countries. “These countries including Italy, France, Finland, Slovenia, Germany, and a few more. He visits European schools, workplaces, hospitals and prisons” (Holden). He talks to workers about paid time off, workers rights and wellbeing, paternity leave, sex education, free college tuition, health care, women's rights, equality, school lunches, and the education system such as homework and standardized tests. One country in particular was Finland. In Finland he speaks with Krista Kiuru, the Finnish Minister of Education about the schools. Moore and Kiuru discuss how she wants the children to have more time to be kids, be happy, learn, and one very important thing is in this number one education system all schools are equal. In this paper I will argue that the American education system should follow Finland's education system because in Finland all schools are equal, there is no homework,their school days are shorter, teacher education requirements are higher, there is no standardized testing, and Finland most importantly just wants the children to be be kids and live happy lives. Imagine you're a student and there's no homework no standardized tests, free tuition, and less hours of school each day. Sounds like a “in your dreams” moment right? Well not for students in Finland. Their education hasn’t always been number one, though. Moore says “back in the day Finland’s schools sucked on the levels that we suck on now.” In a chart on the movie screen it shows we were about the same but Finland didn’t like that so they tried some new ideas and in no time they shot to the top of the world. “In Finland the students complete a unified nine year basic school: the first six years mostly with form (class or year) teachers and the last three years with subject teachers” (Teikari). “At age sixteen, students there either enter upper general secondary or upper vocational secondary schools. Primarily upper general secondary education is required for studies such as law, medicine, and so forth in universities. Finland has very flexible secondary school structures” (Teikari). Finnish schools have little to no homework. This is not true in American schools. When talking to students Michael Moore asked them how much homework they had the night before. A few said ten minutes, one person said twenty, and the rest said none. In an article on students in America titled Do our Kids have too much Homework? It says many students and their parents are frazzled by the amount of homework being piled on in schools. One parent wrote, “Kids today are overwhelmed! She also said her first grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. She asked, “How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids” (Wilde). A San Francisco fifth grade teacher named Diane Garfield agrees. “I believe that we’re stressing children out,” she says (Wilde). Even a teacher agrees schools and teachers are stressing these children out with so much homework when they also have other things to do after school hours. Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University conclude in their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, that American middle-schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea or Taiwan. Wilde states that one of the most surprising finding of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. In contrast to the United States Finland has little to no homework as I previously stated. Moore speaks to the Finnish Minister of education at the time, Krista Kiuru. He asks about why they have no homework and she states that “They should have more time to be kids and enjoy their life.” They understand and realize that kids have other things to do after school such as spending time with family, doing sports, reading, and just experiencing life, which is something you don’t see often in the United States. This is something that I believe Americans should take into consideration and follow the Finnish school system. In American school systems students usually have hours and hours of homework that leads many of the U.S. teen students sleep deprived. According to The National Sleep Foundation teens are the least likely to get enough sleep; while on average they need 9 ¼ hours of sleep a night, teens average fewer than seven hours per school night by the end of high school. A lot of teens get even less sleep than that sometimes maybe three or four hours because of the time they get done school and all the stuff they have to do after. The consequences of sleep deprivation during the teen years are very serious. “They can develop emotional and behavioral problems such as irritability, depression, poor impulse control and violence; health complaints; tobacco and alcohol use; impaired cognitive function and decision-making; and lower overall performance in everything from academics to athletics” (National Sleep Foundation). On average a school day in the U.S is about seven hours. In Finland schools Michael Moore talks to a first grade teacher and she tells him that they have less time in the school day and less school years. She says that “the younger kids on Mondays go to school for three hours, Tuesday for four hours it varies. It’s twenty hours a week.” Finland has the shortest school days and years in the entire western world. “Some kids have to wake up before the sun even shines just so they can travel to a place they don’t want to be. All of this makes kids unmotivated” (Montgomery). Students feel as though schools try to contain them and they are not able to be themselves, says a article on the Huffington Post titled High School Pressure: Why students Need Shorter Days. Teachers assign hours of homework every night. Something that really stuck with me that I can, and I’m sure many other people can relate to is in the post titled Shorter School Days Montgomery said while assigning these homework's they also say you should still get 8 hours of sleep. When you don’t get 8 hours of sleep you are told to go to bed earlier, all while trying to complete the homework. With these two factors, getting homework done and still getting a good amount of sleep where you can still function just becomes a cycle of endless impossibilities. Another reason why the United States should consider less school days is they could save money and put the money somewhere else such as the arts. “Just cutting off one day from school would save millions of dollars for school districts. To keep schools running five days a week is such a high cost that really isn’t affordable. This causes budget cuts and that makes for a lower quality learning experience” (Montgomery). Such budget cuts include art, music, poetry, sports, drama, and cooking. All of these programs were cut and still being cut from many of the United Schools because they can’t afford it. These programs are a big part of these children's lives and help shape them into the person they will become. “In Finland, the system is not set up for the kids to be the best, but to be the best version of themselves. Art and music have been proven to increase student performance and help engage students on an intellectual level, as well as an emotional level. The Finns are using this research to devote more time to the arts in the school, not less” (Frank). Shortening the school week would also help with activity development says Montgomery. She says students are encouraged to go out and try new things that will benefit them, but never have the time because school take up most of their time. In the article An American Teacher’s Thoughts on the Finnish Education System it says Finnish schools encourage unstructured playtime, inside and outside of the classroom. Which is where children engage in open-ended play that has no specific learning objective, informally referred to as simply letting kids by kids. “For every hour of class, the students are told to go outside and engage in physical play” (Frank). She says “Can you imagine how my administration might react if I said 25 percent of the school day should be playtime for my American high school students?” This playtime is a very important not only to help the students focus and get some fresh air, but it helps them develop the important social skills they will need in life. Frank says this is starkly different from the limited American recess time and the organized, and often ultra-competitive team sports. Most children in American schools only get recess right after lunch and maybe for thirty mins to an hour, which is not a lot. “In a 2007 report called Recess Rules, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation determined that only 36% of American children currently engage in the recommended amount of daily physical activity. Especially considering just how many schools are now blowing the final whistle on recess altogether” (Tomar). It’s also more of a organized play time like when the writer of An American Teacher’s Thoughts on the Finnish Education System says I believe the children should play what they want, interact with their peers, and use their imagination. This is another thing America can take from Finland, or I should say take back because according to an article titled How the Finnish school system outshines U.S. education ironically, inspiration for many of Finland’s changes came from research in the United States. Another benefit to a shorter school week according to Shorter School Days is attendance. Students who are chronically absent means that they missed at least 15 days of school in a year. According to the U.S. Department Of Education over six million U.S. students missed 15 or more days of school in 2013-14. That's 14 percent of the student population—or about 1 in 7 students. If students didn’t have to go as often then maybe the students would want to actually come to school because they had a day off. This could help US. schools a lot by following this. Another major difference between United States schools and Finland schools is in Finland “teachers are required to obtain three-year master’s degree, state funded, before even teaching. Only one in ten primary-school teacher applications are accepted” (Tung). In the U.S. “many preschool teachers hold an associate or bachelor's degree and as you advance in the age of your students, your degree requirements will also likely increase. If you plan to teach kindergarten or elementary, middle, or high school levels, a bachelor's degree is generally mandatory, and a master's degree is desirable” (Quinn), But to start teaching you do not need a masters unless you are a college professor. For example I work in a daycare and I don’t have a degree or a lot of experience and I still am in a classroom with preschoolers. You may also have your CDA to be certified, which is one class that lasts about 5 months. If we had teachers that had more schooling our quality of learning may be better. In the movie Where to Invade Next they talked about a very trending dilemma, standardized tests. In Finland they do not exist. Michael Moore states that the most thing he heard from the Finnish about U.S. schools was they would want no more standardized tests in the states. “In the twenty-first century, the use of standardized tests as the primary method to evaluate schools and teachers has contributed to severe problems in the United States. This approach of assessment is particularly harmful towards disadvantaged students” (Morgan). In many schools teachers teach with memorization and recall tactics to try and drill them to enhance their performance of the standardized tests. According to the article Relying on High-stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea Since teachers face pressure to improve scores and since poverty-stricken students generally underperform on high-stakes tests, schools serving low-income students are more likely to implement a style of teaching based on drilling and memorization that leads to little learning which isn’t fair to the students. These tests don’t accurately measure the students intelligence and potential. “By rarely using them like in Finland, or implementing them as only one method combined with other types of assessments, the United States can dramatically improve its school system and create more opportunities for all students to succeed” (Morgan). In the article Relying on High-stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea it says in Texas, high school teachers noticed that although they raised their students’ scores for the reading section of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test through drills and practice, many of the students could not apply what they learned to content other than that appearing on the state test. What’s the point of school when all you're doing is repeated stuff and not actually absorbing information that you will need to know for life, not for these tests. These standardized tests are also apart of a unhealthy competition between teachers, schools, and administrators. They want to have the highest scores to receive bonuses or grants but it should be about learning not passing some test to get money. “One of the nation’s largest cheating scandals took place in the Atlanta Public Schools, resulting in the indictment of 35 employees in 2013 including the superintendent. Prosecutors accused educators of participating in a scheme consisting of artificially raising test scores, at times by erasing wrong answers and replacing them with the correct ones (Fausset).” That shows how far they are willing to go to get these scores up for their schools. There is so much more information on these tests but this is a good amount of evidence to make you think twice about students taking them. Lastly and most importantly Finnish schools care about the students well being and happiness. In the movie Where to Invade Next Moore talks to teachers and one says they think school is about finding what makes you happy. In the U.S. education is more of a business but in Finland it’s more student centered. All of these teachers and people apart of their education system is there because they want these children to be kids and live a happy and fulfilled life. The principal at the school Moore went to said “I want children to play. There’s so much more to life than just school….” and that was the principal. As you can see if we took back some ideas from Finland we could rise back to top of the education system. I have discussed the ideas of no homework, shorter school days, budget cuts in the arts in the U.S., teacher education requirement differences, the problems of standardized testing, and how Finland just want the children to be children and live happy lives. I have gave you evidence to back up my argument with each subject to convince you that the American Education system should start to follow the Finnish Education system.
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