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I disagree with the way the article frames the issue. It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea o

I disagree with the way the article frames the issue. It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools. So, like many other American issues, the argument reminds me of two people in a tiny parking lot squabbling angrily over who is at fault for boxing the other in. If the business that designed and painted the lot allocated insufficient space, neither driver should blame the other. The premise that there are groups in America who need saving from poverty and lousy schools is true, but why save only a few of them by sending them to a school for gifted students? Deal with the inequality of income and of the school system. Last time I checked, Finland does pretty well with that strategy.

notabene77 6y ago
Unless Finland had similar demographics to the US, which it does not, it's hard to try to transplant policy decisions from there to the US and expect similar outcomes. Maybe as Finland's non-Finnish population grows significantly in the coming decades, the two countries can compare notes more easily.
- rfrey 6y ago
  It seems like every attempt to learn from other systems when discussing American issues, from education to public transit to healthcare to gun control, is met with a wave of “yeah that could never work here because we’re too [big, diverse, spread out, individualistic]. Have some humility and consider that other countries might have better outcomes in some things due to better policy choices, not just because they’re smaller, more homogeneous, colder, warmer, or whatever.
  - darkhorse13 6y ago
    I am not American but the parent comment definitely has a great point: homogeneity, population size, and various other factors can drastically affect the outcome of such policies. So this may not be a lack of humility, but simply naivety on your part.
    - rfrey 6y ago
      Certainly, but blanket, reflexive dismissal of other experiences is just exceptionalism. I’m not saying every foreign approach would work without modification, or even at all, but sheesh... at least have a look at them.
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      I've heard people use the two rebuttals — but America's bigger; but America's more diverse — to justify many of America's failings. They're effective, not because they are clearly correct, but because a good counter to them requires answers to many difficult-to-answer questions: How does a large population affect policy? How much do economies of scale make things easier? How much does bureaucracy make things harder? What does diversity mean? How much is in the eye of the beholder? To what extent does diversity cause division? To what extent does diversity spark innovation? In addition to these questions, the debate entails comparisons and contrasts of nations, most of which you hasn't visited. You end up trading pairs of statistics, without intimate knowledge of their correctness and equivalence. For such reasons, I just avoid arguing about size and diversity. I'd have to write a book to provide a solid answer.
  - epicureanideal 6y ago
    Note: Finland has the population of Wisconsin. Both have a population of about 5 million. And even Wisconsin is more diverse at 86% white to Finland's 96%. Another fun note: The population of Finland is only 20% bigger than the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 4.1 million. If we add in the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale, California MSA at 1.9 million, what we tend to consider the "San Francisco Bay Area" has a greater population than Finland.
    - ericd 6y ago
      How is this relevant? None of those areas you describe are uniformly academically excellent.
      - yostrovs 6y ago
        Is Finland uniformly academically excellent? Are Finns in America performing similar to Finns in Finland? Wouldn't it matter?
  - stephenhuey 6y ago
    Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      What makes you think that "educational funding" is a problem, or that other countries have "centralized control and funding of schools?" In all but a few states, poorer school districts receive similar funding to rich ones: https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-with-the-neediest-students-get-less-money-than-the-wealthiest https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-wit.... In several, poor school districts receive more funding. Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).
      - 6y ago
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - kyrieeschaton 6y ago
    Explanations that are explanatory tend to be used to explain things.
  - ericd 6y ago
    Yeah, frankly I think it’s because we do a horrible job of maintaining a basic level of economic security and opportunity for huge swathes of our population. Western European countries generally do a much better job of that.
  - zepto 6y ago
    As someone who moved to the US from Europe and has spent decades living in both, I would say that it’s not a lack of humility driving these comments. The US really does have different characteristics and a different society, based on different values. It’s very easy to overlook the complexity of US society and culture. It’s a trope in itself to see the US as dumb for not simply adopting ‘sensible’ policies that seem to work elsewhere.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I think you've gotten faulty information. Finland's high schools are explicitly tracked, as is common in Europe; about half of students attend vocational schools that don't offer college preparatory education.
stale2002 6y ago
> It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools. Ok, sure, but we don't need to destroy the great schools in order to work on making more pretty good schools. If you want to turn bad schools into pretty good ones, please leave the great ones alone, while you go about that.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Yes, but the "pretty good" schools come from kids and families taking academics seriously. In Finland that's the default, but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out. It's no surprise that middle-class white kids are underrepresented and would like to get in without all the hard work and discipline.
- hrktb 6y ago
  Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate ? That’s the system in France, where public schools can’t refuse kids, but those kids can only move classes if they passed. If you aren’t interested in studying you’ll spend your life in middle school until you’re 16 and just drop out.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    In the US, graduation rate is seen as the primary metric of public school quality, so policies that encourage people not to graduate aren't feasible. (One of our most famous educational reforms was named the No Child Left Behind Act, on the principle that in an ideal world not a single child would fail to graduate high school.)
  - csa 6y ago
    > Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate Theoretically this can happen, but in practice it is very rare.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    A school not graduating a child essentially admits its teachers are not good enough to put some basic knowledge into this child's head. No school wants to be in such position.
    - ericd 6y ago
      Are you saying that the students bear no responsibility, or that it’s our current attitude that teachers can somehow coerce people to learn?
tupputuppu 6y ago
I'm from Finland and I don't understand what you're talking about. There are no gifted options in elementary school but immediately from high school onwards standardised tests rank students into better and worse schools. Everyone knows which ones are which and the entrance scores are widely publicized in the media. And you can bet your ass the best schools and universities only have kids from upper middle class parents. Turns out free education just means subsidising rich kids' education with public money here, just like everywhere else.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  It's relative. America's disadvantaged are not like Finland's. There's an underclass in the US straight out of Oliver Twist. The essay stresses the unfairness of depriving a subset of that underclass — ie: strivers — of a chance to pull themselves up. The goal instead should be universally to lower American inequality. We should bring it closer to Finnish levels, even if Finnish levels are imperfect.
  - tupputuppu 6y ago
    I'm confused - are you talking about inequality of opportunities (social mobility) or inequality of outcomes? Yes, we have really high income taxes which means our income equality is less in Nordics than in the USA. However, that also means that strivers are unable to get rich. You can't get rich by working. That means our wealth inequality is just as bad as in the US. Our 1% has just as much of the wealth and power as in the US. Whereas in the US, that 1% is mostly entrepreneurs with minority having inherited, in Nordics it's the opposite. Happy to dive deeper into statistics if you want to. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wealth-inequality-in-sweden.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/we...
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      There is definitely some kind of miscommunication here. I know the area well enough (Sverige lite bättre än ditt land men iaf...) that your comments puzzle me. I know that you know that poverty in your country, compared to the US, is a non-issue. I know that you know that citizens in your country don't have basic educational deficits that many Americans have. I know that you know that your country is very capable of competing in the world market. As a reminder of the scope of the differences, see: https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo or https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk So, I too am confused.
rayiner 6y ago
Fairfax County has excellent schools. In the 2013, the county participated along with several others in a cross-country PISA comparison. Herndon High school, which is not in a particularly wealthy area, performed right between Germany and Canada, and a bit below Finland: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schools%20-%20Herndon%20High%20School.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schoo... (see page 104).
ausjke 6y ago
are you selling socialism? or I misunderstand you? if you're selling it, there are many places for you to go. they're all screwed up, badly.
kyrieeschaton 6y ago
Finland has a major advantage of being full of Finns, as opposed to American demography. In broad swathes of the country there are not enough "good students" to go around.
biggermike 6y ago
Students need to be clustered according to their abilities and interests. Not doing so is impractical at best and wasteful at worst. Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Certainly, and, to the extent that it (ie: separating into classes according to aptitude) doesn't railroad disadvantaged students into bad schools, I have no issue with that.
hechang1997 6y ago
Agreed. I think schools that turns bad students into good ones deserve more funding and publicity than schools that turns good students into excellent ones.

notabene77 6y ago

Unless Finland had similar demographics to the US, which it does not, it's hard to try to transplant policy decisions from there to the US and expect similar outcomes. Maybe as Finland's non-Finnish population grows significantly in the coming decades, the two countries can compare notes more easily.

rfrey 6y ago
It seems like every attempt to learn from other systems when discussing American issues, from education to public transit to healthcare to gun control, is met with a wave of “yeah that could never work here because we’re too [big, diverse, spread out, individualistic]. Have some humility and consider that other countries might have better outcomes in some things due to better policy choices, not just because they’re smaller, more homogeneous, colder, warmer, or whatever.
- darkhorse13 6y ago
  I am not American but the parent comment definitely has a great point: homogeneity, population size, and various other factors can drastically affect the outcome of such policies. So this may not be a lack of humility, but simply naivety on your part.
  - rfrey 6y ago
    Certainly, but blanket, reflexive dismissal of other experiences is just exceptionalism. I’m not saying every foreign approach would work without modification, or even at all, but sheesh... at least have a look at them.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    I've heard people use the two rebuttals — but America's bigger; but America's more diverse — to justify many of America's failings. They're effective, not because they are clearly correct, but because a good counter to them requires answers to many difficult-to-answer questions: How does a large population affect policy? How much do economies of scale make things easier? How much does bureaucracy make things harder? What does diversity mean? How much is in the eye of the beholder? To what extent does diversity cause division? To what extent does diversity spark innovation? In addition to these questions, the debate entails comparisons and contrasts of nations, most of which you hasn't visited. You end up trading pairs of statistics, without intimate knowledge of their correctness and equivalence. For such reasons, I just avoid arguing about size and diversity. I'd have to write a book to provide a solid answer.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  Note: Finland has the population of Wisconsin. Both have a population of about 5 million. And even Wisconsin is more diverse at 86% white to Finland's 96%. Another fun note: The population of Finland is only 20% bigger than the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 4.1 million. If we add in the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale, California MSA at 1.9 million, what we tend to consider the "San Francisco Bay Area" has a greater population than Finland.
  - ericd 6y ago
    How is this relevant? None of those areas you describe are uniformly academically excellent.
    - yostrovs 6y ago
      Is Finland uniformly academically excellent? Are Finns in America performing similar to Finns in Finland? Wouldn't it matter?
- stephenhuey 6y ago
  Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    What makes you think that "educational funding" is a problem, or that other countries have "centralized control and funding of schools?" In all but a few states, poorer school districts receive similar funding to rich ones: https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-with-the-neediest-students-get-less-money-than-the-wealthiest https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-wit.... In several, poor school districts receive more funding. Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).
    - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kyrieeschaton 6y ago
  Explanations that are explanatory tend to be used to explain things.
- ericd 6y ago
  Yeah, frankly I think it’s because we do a horrible job of maintaining a basic level of economic security and opportunity for huge swathes of our population. Western European countries generally do a much better job of that.
- zepto 6y ago
  As someone who moved to the US from Europe and has spent decades living in both, I would say that it’s not a lack of humility driving these comments. The US really does have different characteristics and a different society, based on different values. It’s very easy to overlook the complexity of US society and culture. It’s a trope in itself to see the US as dumb for not simply adopting ‘sensible’ policies that seem to work elsewhere.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I think you've gotten faulty information. Finland's high schools are explicitly tracked, as is common in Europe; about half of students attend vocational schools that don't offer college preparatory education.

stale2002 6y ago

> It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools. Ok, sure, but we don't need to destroy the great schools in order to work on making more pretty good schools. If you want to turn bad schools into pretty good ones, please leave the great ones alone, while you go about that.

HarryHirsch 6y ago

Yes, but the "pretty good" schools come from kids and families taking academics seriously. In Finland that's the default, but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out. It's no surprise that middle-class white kids are underrepresented and would like to get in without all the hard work and discipline.

hrktb 6y ago
Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate ? That’s the system in France, where public schools can’t refuse kids, but those kids can only move classes if they passed. If you aren’t interested in studying you’ll spend your life in middle school until you’re 16 and just drop out.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  In the US, graduation rate is seen as the primary metric of public school quality, so policies that encourage people not to graduate aren't feasible. (One of our most famous educational reforms was named the No Child Left Behind Act, on the principle that in an ideal world not a single child would fail to graduate high school.)
- csa 6y ago
  > Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate Theoretically this can happen, but in practice it is very rare.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  A school not graduating a child essentially admits its teachers are not good enough to put some basic knowledge into this child's head. No school wants to be in such position.
  - ericd 6y ago
    Are you saying that the students bear no responsibility, or that it’s our current attitude that teachers can somehow coerce people to learn?

tupputuppu 6y ago

I'm from Finland and I don't understand what you're talking about. There are no gifted options in elementary school but immediately from high school onwards standardised tests rank students into better and worse schools. Everyone knows which ones are which and the entrance scores are widely publicized in the media. And you can bet your ass the best schools and universities only have kids from upper middle class parents. Turns out free education just means subsidising rich kids' education with public money here, just like everywhere else.

uniqueid 6y ago
It's relative. America's disadvantaged are not like Finland's. There's an underclass in the US straight out of Oliver Twist. The essay stresses the unfairness of depriving a subset of that underclass — ie: strivers — of a chance to pull themselves up. The goal instead should be universally to lower American inequality. We should bring it closer to Finnish levels, even if Finnish levels are imperfect.
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  I'm confused - are you talking about inequality of opportunities (social mobility) or inequality of outcomes? Yes, we have really high income taxes which means our income equality is less in Nordics than in the USA. However, that also means that strivers are unable to get rich. You can't get rich by working. That means our wealth inequality is just as bad as in the US. Our 1% has just as much of the wealth and power as in the US. Whereas in the US, that 1% is mostly entrepreneurs with minority having inherited, in Nordics it's the opposite. Happy to dive deeper into statistics if you want to. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wealth-inequality-in-sweden.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/we...
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    There is definitely some kind of miscommunication here. I know the area well enough (Sverige lite bättre än ditt land men iaf...) that your comments puzzle me. I know that you know that poverty in your country, compared to the US, is a non-issue. I know that you know that citizens in your country don't have basic educational deficits that many Americans have. I know that you know that your country is very capable of competing in the world market. As a reminder of the scope of the differences, see: https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo or https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk So, I too am confused.

rayiner 6y ago

Fairfax County has excellent schools. In the 2013, the county participated along with several others in a cross-country PISA comparison. Herndon High school, which is not in a particularly wealthy area, performed right between Germany and Canada, and a bit below Finland: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schools%20-%20Herndon%20High%20School.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schoo... (see page 104).

ausjke 6y ago

are you selling socialism? or I misunderstand you? if you're selling it, there are many places for you to go. they're all screwed up, badly.

kyrieeschaton 6y ago

Finland has a major advantage of being full of Finns, as opposed to American demography. In broad swathes of the country there are not enough "good students" to go around.

biggermike 6y ago

Students need to be clustered according to their abilities and interests. Not doing so is impractical at best and wasteful at worst. Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.

uniqueid 6y ago
Certainly, and, to the extent that it (ie: separating into classes according to aptitude) doesn't railroad disadvantaged students into bad schools, I have no issue with that.

hechang1997 6y ago

Agreed. I think schools that turns bad students into good ones deserve more funding and publicity than schools that turns good students into excellent ones.