That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [71]
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
All must have prizes! Krista Taubert is the Washington-based correspondent for Finnish Broadcasting Company. She has two children in the Washington, D.C., school system, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old. Since Finland has one of the highest-rated school systems in the world and Tom met her at a movie about Finland’s schools, he could not resist asking her to compare her daughters’ educational experiences in America and in Finland.
In America, Taubert remarked, “I noticed sometimes in talking to other parents that they reward their kids for effort, not for excellence. My daughter plays soccer and as a nine-year-old she already has these huge trophies, and she actually hasn’t won anything. My brother played professional hockey in Finland for a number of years, and he doesn’t have any trophies as big as the trophies my daughter has.”
Andreas Schleicher oversees the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), to which we referred above. The program is administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that includes the world’s thirty-four major industrial countries. Schleicher said in an interview that one of the things that the program tested in 2009 for the first time was the impact of parental involvement. “We interviewed between three thousand and five thousand parents of the fifteen-year-olds that we tested in sixteen different countries,” said Schleicher. “There was a clear connection between parental involvement in their children’s education and their PISA scores. Those young people whose parents were involved with their education—doing as little as asking them each day ‘How was school?’ or ‘What did you do in school today?’—or read books to them clearly performed better on the PISA test than those whose parents were not involved. In some countries it was also clear that the involvement of parents was more important than many traditional school factors.” Public policy in education tends to be all focused on institutions, Schleicher added, “but what we have seen in our work is that schools that are really open to parents, that are really community centers that invite parental involvement, like those in Scandinavia,” generate more parental involvement in their children’s education, and that translates into better performance on tests. “You cannot just call for more parental involvement,” said Schleicher. “Parents don’t want to be involved in a closed institution. Schools have to be part of the community. People have to feel that. The trick is to get the parents from the less-well-educated backgrounds involved in the school and their children’s learning.” In Finland, up to high school, said Schleicher, “students meet with their teacher and parents together at the end of the year” and “discuss what they have accomplished and what they should have accomplished and set their goals for the next year.”
A December 2005 study by four researchers in the United States and Australia entitled Scholarly Culture and Educational Success in 27 Nations, based on twenty years’ worth of data, found that
children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class. This is as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father. It holds equally in rich nations and in