There is another quality that allows the 100 avg IQ American whites and other groups to consistently outperform higher IQ Asians in Science and Technology, % of households with toilets or what have you. The G Factor…

http://www.isteve.com/jensen.htm

High IQ (above 125??) can have it’s own kind of toxicity. It is good for many things while being a liability in others. Funny how that works. Maybe it takes all kinds in correct proportion.

Back to the thread. Studying the Finns might tell you something of how to manage a white school district like Medford OR or the like. It will no more help managing Oakland black public school students than importing welfare policy from Scandinavia to the slums of Chicago in the ’60s.

The Finns do not manage a distinct population within their society with an average IQ of 85, a standard deviation below the majority average. Other nations do. Try Malaysia which is a more diverse population. Or Singapore. Or any other diverse multicultural developed society. Now how do they run their schools?

Apples and Oranges.

By refusing to acknowledge this, the “researchers” involved here quite simply are willing to do harm and not good. Our you could put it as a willingness to do evil. There is a reason why someone would try to pass a Finland educational policy study on clueless people here in setting educational policy, and that reason is not wholesome.

Brave New World.

What a great project based learning activity for your students! Relevant to their experiences and engaging to them on an everyday level. Well done!

The “we will leave the USA” comment came from the parents now long dead. The children – my classmates – are now older adults with adult children.

I am informed that their extended family has now secured German Passports (they speak no German) for all their family members. This allows their children and descendants to move freely and work throughout the European Union. Although the grandparents came in with only the clothes on their backs, the descendants are now multi millionaires. They grew up in the Bay Area. These German Passports will come in handy. And their money is being diversified also. My generation of these friends went to public schools K-University, but their later generations go to private k-12 and Ivy League.

Funny how things work out.

An important difference between my Jewish classmates and the Whites I know (including white immigrants). The Whites are arming themselves, and taking their kids to ranges. My Jewish friends do not have a single gun in their homes. Virtually all my non-jewish friends do especially blacks,. including elderly.

Funny how things work out. Good luck telling other people what to do and what to do with their children’s education and associations. People do have feet, you know.

Brave New World.

That is why this entire thread is so silly.

The USA is a racially diverse nation made more so by government policy of importation of 3rd worlders. IQ averages differ wildly around the world. Sub-Sahara Africa has an average of 70, below that needed to sustain civilization (check out Haiti as well!). Various researchers have made charts of the various nations and regions of the world – go take a look. Try “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”. And before you try to claim the numbers are unreliable because of language difficulties – remember, IQ can be calculated in many different ways and by proxy testing (for example, SAT scores normed by the year given, etc), Army entrance tests, NFL Wonderlic testing, DMV driver’s license written exams??, any time pressure tests involving calculating – blinking lights..)

Your efforts to compare Oakland to Finland in education is a joke that can only work with the clueless – or the willfully blind.

Your vision of a socialist paradise where the children of German Jews sit next to the children of single mother crack addicts in the same classroom and are expected to do as well is demented. Exactly who do you expect to sell that fantasy to? The German Jews I went to high school with said openly that they would leave the USA before it fell when the time came – just like their family walked out of Germany, Israel and other nations they lived in previously. So do you think they can be stopped from sending their children to the $20k/year schools they select? Do you believe you have the power to force them to associate with people they don’t want to sit next to?

Comrade, please!

Be a communist, be a collectivist, but don’t be a clown.

Here’s a fact for your class- there are no private schools in Finland. Gee I wonder if scores would go up in Oakland if parents didn’t send their kids to O’Dowd, Head Royce, College Prep, St. Mary’s, Bentley, Redwood Christian, St. Joseph’s or other private schools? Finland has a student population which high performing with low unemployment and high parent education levels. All teachers are required to have masters degrees and teaching is a prestigious profession. So what Finnish schools are “doing” is that they are dealing with a totally different, much less diverse population, with few language differences.

By comparison, Skyline is ranked as a 2 on the academic performance rating system, and only a 3 when compared to other schools, with 59% of its student population on free or reduced lunch.

Can the class design something on poster paper that changes that or is this project really not well thought out? I think your kids already know the answer. Of course you could really prepare them for college by teaching them how to write a 10 page research paper in MLA style, but that could not be done as group work.

Good question. Finland has been touted since 2000 as a world leader in education. This is due, in large part, to their top performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam.

Normally, I’m pretty anti-test. In my history class, for example, my students write essays rather than take tests and quizzes. I’m much more interested in teaching them how to research primary-source documents, analyze them, find evidence, and use that evidence to write essays that answer deep, complex questions. Right now, these classes are exploring how the Hawaiians and the Fante resisted imperialism from the USA and England.

My Introduction to ED students haven’t just assumed that the Finnish system is better, per se. Instead, we read sample questions from the PISA before I left the country and compared the challenges of that exam with their experience, that same week, with the PSAT (Pre-SAT) exam. They definately felt that the short answer and short essay parts of the PISA was more challenging that the fill-in-the-bubble tasks of the PSAT.

When asked if their experiences at Skyline was preparing them for college and career, their responses were mixed. Over simplified, they thought that Oakland schools were preparing them for community colleges like Merrit and Laney. They didn’t knock those two schools, but they did feel like they would not be ready to succeed in the UC or CSU systems right after high school.

So rather than say that Finnish schools are better than Skyline, we’re asking these questions. What are Finnish schools doing that seem more effective?
What Skyline practices are fine the would like to see stay the same. At the end, my classes are only going to propose 2-3 reforms that they think would improve Skyline. So rather than wish Skyline was more like Finland, we would rather see an improved Skyline.

I, for one, an really excited to see what reforms they come up with.