I read an article back in 2011 in The Atlantic and they wrote about other countries which we as Americans can look at when it comes to testing our children. It is not always about excellence and we as parents, educators, and educational administrators, etc. are setting our kids up for failure because we focus on excellence instead of EQUALITY.
All of our children do not think alike and neither do we as adults and so, therefore, we are setting ourselves up for failure as well as our children making them think that something is wrong with them when clearly, it is our way of testing and the American standards is demeaning and bias if you ask me!
I always failed very low on math and reading I as slow only because of being dyslexic but I loved to read even though it took me longer to comprehend than most others! These tests are timed and all kids like me who were dyslexic needed more time to prepare for and/or during taking the tests needed one on one help.
So what happens to the ones who are slower, we get pushed on to the next grade without really getting the potential aptitude of the previous grades to work?
As a child, I thought something was wrong with me because I could not pass those bias tests and the teachers still pass the kids along when they know fool well those standardized tests do not work and you wonder why some kids get to high school and cannot read and what is even worse is when I tutored students in the community college who could not read, write or spell.
So, I still ask almost 7 years later what are we waiting for?
For what reason do we as Americans continue disregarding about Finland’s school achievement?
The Scandinavian nation is a training superpower since it esteems EQUALITY more than greatness ore excellence.
Our kids are already born great with amazing and different ways of thinking which is excellence in itself!
In America, even when I was a kid I was often led to believe something was wrong with me because I did not think like everybody else! Even today at age 65, when having discussions oddly with many who think something is wrong with me because I don’t think like the so called who think this is normal to think like everybody else, when clearly it is not anything wrong with me quite the contrary!
Everybody concurs the United States needs to enhance its instruction framework drastically, yet how? One of the hottest trends in education reform of late is taking a look at the incredible achievement of the West’s dominant training superpower, Finland. Trouble is, with regards to the lesson plan that Finnish schools bring to the table, the vast majority of the discourse is by all accounts overlooking the main issue.
Be that as it may, of late Finland has been drawing in consideration on worldwide studies of personal satisfaction – Newsweek positioned it number one final year – and Finland’s national training framework has been getting specific acclaim, on the grounds that as of late Finnish understudies have been turning in the absolute most noteworthy test scores on the planet.
Finland’s schools owe their recently discovered distinction principally to one examination: the PISA overview led like clockwork by the Organization for Economic Co-task and Development (OECD). The review thinks about 15-year-olds in various nations in reading, math, and science.
Finland has positioned at or close to the best in each of the three capabilities on each overview since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers, for example, South Korea and Singapore. In the latest overview in 2009, Finland slipped marginally, with understudies in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, yet the Finns are still close to the exceptionally top.
All through a similar period, the PISA execution of the United States has been mediocre, best case scenario.
So there was significant enthusiasm for an ongoing visit to the U.S. by one of the main Finnish experts on instruction change, Pasi Sahlberg, chief of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and writer of the new book Finnish Lessons:
What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Not long ago, Sahlberg ceased by the Dwight School in New York City to talk with instructors and understudies, and his visit got national media consideration and produced much exchange.
But then it wasn’t certain that Sahlberg’s message was really traversing. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are sure things no one in America truly needs to discuss.
Moral: “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. This is what the American standardizing testing does to our children and it is time for a change. All of our children are valuable if you learn to appreciate them for who they are, and not who society says they should be. God made us all beautiful and different.” – Valerie Cheers Brown