The Problem

The performance of American education has been on a steady decline throughout the decades. A system that was once the envy of the world has fallen to the wayside, surpassed by a plethora of other nations. In fact, thirty countries now outperform the United States in subjects such as mathematics and science, demonstrating not only America’s fall from educational grace but a worrying reflection of what the future holds for the next generations. 

How a child is educated in their formative years will affect all aspects of their later life. Similarly, how a nation is educated will impact how that nation functions in the future. If a country has a strong education system, it will have a stronger economy due to a more highly educated workforce. On the other hand, a country that has a poorly educated populace will face economic and social struggles.

All political parties in America have some sort of policy regarding public schools and how to save them. Of course, they disagree on both the method and practice of how schools will be saved, or what “saving” them even means, but the fact that education is a bipartisan issue demonstrates the prevalence it holds in society. Individuals in every group worry about the future of America; however, they are still unable to create successful legislation that helps improve public education. 

This has been a result of more extreme political polarization throughout the last few decades. As the two major political parties have drifted further towards the separate axes of the political spectrum, compromise on major issues has become increasingly more difficult. Many conservatives believe that failing education rates are related to moral issues in the classroom, such as discipline. Conversely, liberals might attribute it to the government’s inability to address socioeconomic issues. 

Past ‘Solutions’

Some past attempts at improving education policy can be seen in more sweeping legislation like the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act, which was an attempt to hold schools accountable for the success of their students. A poor score signals that a school might not be providing adequate education to its students. While this could be helpful on a surface level, it does not show education experts exactly what is wrong in the school. This is exemplified in Lily Eskelsen García and Otha Thornton’s article ‘No Child Left Behind’ has failed, where they state:

Under No Child Left Behind, accountability has hinged entirely on standardized test scores, a single number that has been used to determine whether students graduate or teachers keep their jobs. The problem is, a single test score is like a blinking “check engine” light on the dashboard. It can tell us something’s wrong but not how to fix it.

The authors go on to describe how a better solution would be to create a system with a “dashboard of indicators that monitor better measures of success for the whole child”. This would give educators a better picture of how to help individuals who are struggling in school.

However, similar to ‘No Child Left Behind’, this solution still does not solve the systemic issue of education in America. Only addressing the issues that individual students face is simply a bandaid put over a gaping wound. A successful system would be one which it was flexible enough to accommodate any individual's needs while still offering a structured curriculum. 

An additional problem with the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act was that it ended up taking away from teachers’ time to educate students and work with them one-on-one. Not only do students lose classroom time to take the tests themselves, but teachers are forced to “teach to the test”, or use up valuable class time to teach students methods to potentially achieve higher results on standardized tests. This aspect of ‘No Child Left Behind’ ironically prohibits children from receiving a balanced, structured education in order to test how balanced and structured their education is.

Overall, everything the American government has tried to implement in order to improve its education system has either fallen flat or backfired in ironic ways. However, they are not alone. Many other countries have had suffering education systems and have struggled to restructure themselves. However, through the correct enactment of policy, these countries have been able to vastly improve their education systems, becoming some of the best in the world. One such nation is Finland. 

How Finland Got Here

At the end of the 1960s, Finland underwent massive educational reforms in order to improve its failing education system. Before the first changes were made in 1968, the country’s education system was four years of primary school and was then split between grammar school and civic schools. The government then took initiative to combine these two programs in order to help stave off failing education rates. They created a “comprehensive school” comprised of 6 years of basic education and 3 years of lower secondary education.

However, the Finnish government didn’t stop there. They thought ahead of what would need to be done in the future in order to best act on the policy they created. They were aware of the southern part of the nation’s greater population, which would complicate the implantation of policy due to a larger and more diverse populace, so they planned for more comprehensive school reform by 1978. During the 1970s, Finnish teachers were outfitted with the resources necessary to perform their best. In 1974, teacher training colleges were changed to universities, requiring teachers to have an even higher form of education in order to teach the next generation. In Saavedra, Alasuutari, and Bernal’s article Finland’s Education System: The Journey to Success, the authors state:

In 1979, it was made even more rigorous, making a Master’s degree a prerequisite for teaching. Teachers who were already in service received extensive professional development, focusing on how to make the school an enriching experience for the student. Only 10 years later, when the reform had already expanded throughout the country, did the country start experiencing a radical change in the perception and the prestige of the teacher career, and teachers started receiving increasingly more autonomy.

This demonstrates how forward-thinking the policymakers of Finnish education were. They were not only thinking about what would improve education at the given moment but were attempting to enact policy that would benefit education over time and ultimately lead to a more stable system. This way of thinking is a critical foundation for passing any form of policy, especially something as societally important as education. Therefore, it is this kind of thinking that would be most pivotal to keep in mind when attempting to draft education reform policy. 

The effect that this reform has had is monumental. Finnish schools have since taken drastic measures in order to be student-forward. Teachers only spend four hours a day in class and two hours a week in professional development. Additionally, students generally do not receive any homework, do not take standardized tests until 16, and do not start school until the age of 7. This is because it is seen as a “violation of children’s rights to be children.” It is clear the Finnish government has kept the well-being of both teachers and students in mind when crafting their education system, ensuring that every individual is functioning at their best. 

However, there are always individuals who struggle no matter what environment they are put in. Some students will undoubtedly need extra help, even in a foundationally strong educational setting. In instances like these, Finnish schools allow teachers to take any measures they deem necessary in order to help students succeed. In a very personal introduction to her article, Lynnell Hancock provides a particular example in which a student needed extra help and attention from teachers in order to pass. However, instead of being held back and left to suffer through another year of not understanding key concepts, he was given extra assistance from teachers to ensure that he was learning what his fellow classmates were and that he would be on track for the rest of his life. 

The Difficulties

Education reform won’t happen overnight. There is not one bill or law that can be passed to help amend all past wrongs and create a strong system for decades to come. Instead, it is a system that must be pieced together like crafting a fine-tuned machine. Like crafting an intricate watch, each piece should have a purpose, all while keeping time at the forefront. Like each cog works with the other cogs to help the watch run, there will be just as many "cogs" that will need to fit together to improve our educational system.

When attempting to implement policy similar to Finland’s in a country as different as America, one has to think of all the barriers that might arise in the process. Some glaring differences are the size and diversity of America, something that Finland notably lacks.  Obviously, it is much easier to pass sweeping change in a nation that’s about 60 times smaller than America, with a great majority of the population being the same race. 

The Solution

In order to implement any education policy in America, it will have to start small. Through the use of the states, the fifty “laboratories of democracy”, the American government can test certain policies on a smaller scale, as well as a variety of socio and economic areas, before implementing them nationally. The population of Finland is about 5.5 million people; this falls between the populations of Minnesota and South Carolina. While South Carolina is about 5,191,000 people, with 64% being white, Minnesota is 5,640,000 people and 84% white. Therefore, with Minnesota acting as a substitute for Finland and South Carolina as a representation of America, both states would be good testing grounds for implementing new policies and testing to see if they could work at a national scale. 

The policy itself is the most important part of implementing a successful education policy. Ideally, the American government could structure its education system exactly like Finlands. However, America is clearly not Finland. Without even considering the difference in size and diversity, American ideals are far different from Finnish ideals. They are two different cultures. There are some factors of Finnish education policy that legislators can draw from, such as the importance of educating teachers; however, the overall structure of the policy will have to be different.

Of course, this is how Finnish education reform was successful in the first place. It was not just because they educated teachers for free and required them to have Master's degrees. It was not just because they required children to wait to start schooling until they were seven years old. Their education reform was successful because they recognized that they had a uniquely Finnish problem that required a uniquely Finnish solution. In a similar manner, the American government needs to work within the parameters of the Constitution and the will of the American people to come up with a uniquely American solution. 

While the ideal situation would be that teachers can go to school for free and gain a Master’s degree, many Americans would be worried about people taking advantage of that kind of program, where people can gain university-level education for free and then not become a teacher afterward. 

With all of these restrictions in mind, the government actually already has a similar program in place that it can use as a guideline: the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or ROTC. The ROTC program, according to TBS Staff, does the following:

The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) is a college-to-military program that trains students to become commissioned officers while also earning their academic degrees. In exchange for employment as a commissioned officer post-graduation, cadets pledge to serve eight years of military service.

Policymakers can use the already successful ROTC program as a guide on how to approach creating a teacher-to-school program. 

Like ROTC, this program will be a government-funded program. It would use funding from the Education department. In fact, federal funds that are usually used for things like standardized tests could be diverted to help fund teacher programs. Since most education is funded through state and local governments, the federal government could also give states categorical grants stating that they had to be used to fund state universities. 

Since individuals who want to become teachers would then receive government funding to go to school, more people would be incentivized to enter education careers. This is because teachers would not have to worry about handling years of debt after receiving a quality education. However, there is still the issue of incentivizing people to enter the workforce as teachers after they graduate college. 

Similar to ROTC, this teacher program would require graduates of the program to essentially “serve” their country as teachers for at least eight years. This not only works within the limits of American values, such as serving one's country but would also work for the values of both liberals and conservatives. While liberals value education and may fight for free education, conservatives believe that nothing should be free without service. Therefore, this program would play on both sides of the political arena, raising its chances of being passed into law. 

During their time “serving”, teachers could be provided apartments to reside in whatever area they happen to be teaching in. This would most likely have to stray away from the ROTC structure and lean on another American program as a guide: Income-Based Apartments. As stated in Tricia Chaves article How Do Income-Based Apartments Work?, landlords would be incentivized with “a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for the first 10 years of their participation in the program”, which would then allow for teachers to be able to leave near where they teach.

Additionally, teachers could receive food credits to use at local restaurants and grocery stores in order to feed themselves. In a similar aspect, they would receive credits in order to buy clothes. Finally, during their eight years of service, teachers would be paid similarly to how much junior officers are compensated in the Military, about $45k to $65k per year, depending on where they are located. While someone might argue that teachers would then be receiving more benefits than military personnel during their respective service, the funds that would usually be used for room and board in the military are simply being turned into credits that teachers can use on their own. 

However, even though teachers would then be highly educated and made to serve as teachers for at least eight years, there still remain a few complications. New teachers are not necessarily incentivized to continue teaching after their service times run out. This is most notable due to the low wages teachers often receive in America. On average, teachers only earn $65k, while in some states teachers made less than $50k. Therefore, teachers would have to be much more highly compensated for their work. Not only would this encourage more people to become teachers, but it would also make them want to actually stay teachers. It would also might motivate them to work harder at their jobs, as they would be appropriately compensated for the work they are doing. 

Concluding Thoughts

This legislation is not as drastic as how Finnish education is in the modern day. Children would still start school at the age of four or five years old. Teachers would probably not be required to get Master’s degrees in every state, at least not right away. Schools would still be five days a week and children would still receive homework. In fact, it’s likely that standardized testing would stay after this type of legislation is passed. However, the changes it does make are crucial and do not prohibit making any future changes. Passing policy that completely reforms a system is not about turning something upside down overnight. It’s about getting to the roots of a problem and trying to address them in the most effective and efficient way possible and avoiding the disruption of other facets of life. 

Just as the reformation of the Finnish education system took decades, so too will the reformation of the American education system. Based on what education experts say, children should not have to take standardized tests for governments to check if schools are succeeding. Instead, they should create a system that will measure and analyze its success to some level. Over time, more legislation should and will be passed in order to perfect the American education system; perhaps it will one day resemble the Finnish system or perhaps it will be something else entirely. However, at the current moment, the most important and arguably the easiest problem to address is that of American teachers. Therefore, by giving an advantage to those who are on the front lines of education, a teacher-based policy would lay the groundwork for sprawling education reform that spans decades, leading to a stronger America.