In all honesty, if you run an American school exactly like in the US, with American teachers, course material, homework etc, and put it in Finland and have loca

In all honesty, if you run an American school exactly like in the US, with American teachers, course material, homework etc, and put it in Finland and have local kids attend, guess what happens. You get much better outcomes than in the US and probably pretty similar to outcomes in Finland. I do agree with you though, there's things that can be learned from these countries with respect to things like demanding more of teachers (master's degrees) and rewarding teachers more (not just decent, but great salaries which involves seeing teachers like you see doctors). That makes a lot of sense. Our requirements and rewards for doctors are a lot higher, despite the fact every single child is raised and educated for half of every working day's waking hours for more than a decade, teachers have absolutely insane levels of influence on something many of us value to extreme levels (children), in Finland resources are allocated accordingly, in the US not always. So I agree there, but I still think differences between e.g. Finland and the US have much more to do with your last point: making sure kids aren't in poor broken homes, which isn't a direct educational policy theme and requires mostly deep socioeconomic policy changes outside of education.