11 ms·

Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).

223 points by ABR 15y ago

Osiris 15y ago
This article contrasts well with the failure of No Child Left Behind in the U.S. That program has failed to deliver any statistically significant impact on the skills and knowledge of students. What is has done is pushed teachers towards teaching the test rather than teaching critical thinking. Standardized tests are multiple-choice questions and don't leave room for critical thinking, or help demonstration how a child reached a certain conclusion. The Finnish method of empowering teachers through education and training to allow them to teach and help their particular students seems to be a much better way to help individual students succeed as opposed to trying to stick everyone in a box defined by an academic or bureaucrat.
- mbyrne 15y ago
  If you say No Child Left Behind pushed teachers to teach to a test (easy) rather than teaching critical thinking, etc. (hard) and then you say No Child Left Behind failed to deliver any statistically significant impact on test scores, aren't you just saying teachers can't even teach the easy stuff? How do you think they can teach the hard stuff if they can't even move the needle on the easy things (in this scenario of yours)?
  - da-bacon 15y ago
    What makes you think teaching to a test is easy? If the sole motivation of teaching is to increase a students score on a narrowly defined set of metrics, how motivated do you think students are going to be? I'm curious because in my experience the hardest learning I've done is when it's been aimed at achieving some hurdle for a narrow externally defined subject.
  - gerrys0 15y ago
    Yes, teaching to a test should be easy, and it is easy to your median 15-year-old. The gigantic problem with NCLB - and something I've not seen mentioned in this HN story - is that NCLB is a one-size-fits-all mandate, and there is NOTHING about education in the US or anywhere that is one-size-fits-all. Hundreds of factors influence the raw material (children) that teachers have to work with every day. Countries like Finland do not try to graduate all of their children in the same way. 43% of Finland's HS graduates graduate from vocational schools (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...). The US has slowly moved further and further away from this type of "tracking" since the 70's. Things like NCLB and the over-valued notion of a college degree has only accelerated this problem. I am not optimistic.
forkandwait 15y ago
Here is my worthless .02c: One sure way to know you have failed at managing a process is when you measure employee performance by their adherence to rules rather than their record on delivering results. NCLB is all about rules... ... as are most US institutions, public and private.... It isn't that rules and standardized processes don't have their place, but (1) if rules have to be enforced regularly, you have totally f'ed your incentive structure and (2) if you build "standardized processes" the right way, employees "naturally" follow (and contribute to) them because they are the best way to deliver results (see above), not because some hardass is enforcing them. So, we should reward teachers who have good results, collectively and continuously make their best processes into standards, and punish the teachers with bad results (by which I mean fire them, and eliminate tenure, at least in the extreme). Not so easy to do, but I think we need to get away from more and more rules, while never rewarding individual results.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  There are a lot of people bouncing around ideas about how we can magically improve the U.S. school system, but I think fundamentally the problem is that we expect unreasonable results. We want to be able to pay $5000/pupil/year for a quality of education that properly costs at least $10,000 if not $15,000.
  - tuukkah 15y ago
    Somehow the Finnish school system costs less per pupil per year than the U.S. one. I don't see why a suggestion to concentrate on more important things is responded to by demanding more money. Money can improve some things, some things can be improved without money.
    - thyrsus 15y ago
      I suspect an abundance of social infrastructure (4% of children living in poverty vs 15%, per the article) acts as an unaccounted for subsidy for education - and for much else as well.
chrismealy 15y ago
From TNR: Today, teaching is such a desirable profession that only one in ten applicants to the country’s eight master’s programs in education is accepted. In the United States, on the other hand, college graduates may become teachers without earning a master’s. What’s more, Finnish teachers earn very competitive salaries: High school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what their fellow university graduates do. In the United States, by contrast, they earn just 65 percent. -- http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-F...
- makecheck 15y ago
  Gaining a master's degree doesn't automatically make you a better teacher. I'd much rather be assured that a teacher has other basic abilities (e.g. good communication skills, patience, fairness, organization skills, and even some creativity).
  - Androsynth 15y ago
    no, but its a good way to gate on intelligence
    - jaredmck 15y ago
      In the US, getting a master's in education probably says more negative than positive things about your intelligence - there are a ton of degree farms handing out paper.
      - LeafStorm 15y ago
        That's why you check what school the degree is from.
  - Orva 15y ago
    To get masters from "teaching track" in Finland (which is _very_ appreciated during job interviews) you need quite hefty load of padagogy and sosiology studies on top of your usual master's.
gmichnikov 15y ago
Perhaps "they did not understand the idea of 'merit pay'" because many of the teachers in Finland are of a different breed than many of the people who end up teaching in the US: "McKinsey's work with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests this is an important gap in the U.S. debate, because the world's top performing school systems--Singapore, Finland, South Korea--make a different choice. They recruit, develop and retain what this report will call 'top third+' students as one of their central education strategies, and they've acheived extraordinary results. These systems recruit 100% of their teacher corops from the top third of the academic cohort, and then screen for other important qualities as well. In the U.S., by contrast, 23% of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14% in high poverty schools, which find it especially difficult to attract and retain talented teachers. It is remarkably large difference in approach, and in results." [1] Taking this into account, it's silly to argue that since they have tenure, too, tenure isn't the problem here. They already have the right people teaching. We need to fire many of the people who are currently teaching. Also, the U.S. spends a higher percent of GDP on education, so blaming spending seems odd. [2] Finally, I'm really sick of the way Diane Ravitch constantly slams Teach For America. The U.S. needs better people teaching. TFA makes some of those people think about teaching. It's getting teaching in the same ballpark of prestige as consulting, banking, law school, medical school, etc for students coming out of top colleges. Nothing else comes close to doing that on the same scale. Even if it is true that TFA teachers aren't noticeably better in years 1-2 than a typical experienced teacher (and I don't believe that is the case), it's still a great program. [1] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_talent_gap_appendix.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...
- kiba 15y ago
  I would think that people in Singapore and South Korea considers education very important and thus students in these countries try very hard to get really good grade.
  - tuukkah 15y ago
temphn 15y ago
Finland's schools are great because they are full of Finns, in the same way that schools with many Finns in the US do very well. Hong Kong and Singapore's schools are great because they are full of Chinese, in the same way that schools with many Chinese in the US do very well, even in poor neighborhoods: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/16/local/me-lincoln16 To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families. According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. But most articles don't even consider such explanations, preferring to keep looking under the streetlight for that quarter.
- kalleboo 15y ago
  This article does consider that though: They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one points out that Finland has the same demographics as Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior results. I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities.
  - temphn 15y ago
    "Superior" is only one bit of information, in that it only says "x is greater than y"...but not by how much, and with no measure of statistical significance. Finland's technological and industrial output clusters with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to a far greater extent than it does with countries outside Northern Europe. In the same way, when you look at the TIMSS, intra-European variance exists and is nontrivial, but European and East Asian nations do tend to cluster together quite a bit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf See Table 3 on page 19. Top 5 countries in grade 8 in math: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. The very top European countries are towards the lower end of the East Asian distribution in math, and are only close in 4th grade (before puberty onset).
pacala 15y ago
"I was asked about current trends in U.S. education, and Finnish educators were astonished by the idea that our governments intend to evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores; that made no sense to them. They were also surprised that we turn children over to “teachers” who have only a few weeks of training and no masters’ degree. They did not understand the idea of “merit pay.” They are paid more if they do more work for the community, but they can’t understand why teachers should get a bonus to compete with one another for test scores. Since they don’t have comparative test scores for their students, our practices don’t make sense to them. Nor do they understand the benefits of competition among teachers who ought to be collaborating." This will not last. The anglo corporatist cancer with its insanely frequent "performance reviews" and bogus metrics will eat them alive. Long live exacerbated competitiveness and backstabbing your peers. Long live natural selection and the annual culling of the herd.
- olliesaunders 15y ago
  > ...will eat them alive Why will it? > Long live natural selection and the annual culling of the herd. How does that occur in the Finish model?
  - pacala 15y ago
    Mindshare in the global age. Finland is a 5M country. The world is 1000 times larger. They can't go against the tide of globalization. They may have the better product, it doesn't matter. The global mindshare battle is already won by anglo capitalism.
    - vukk 15y ago
      The original comment used "anglo corporatism", which I understand, but why are you hopping to "anglo capitalism"?
      - pacala 15y ago
        Thanks for the attention to terminology detail. The anglo corporation is the finest outcome of the anglo capitalism. If you build a system around anglo capitalist rules, you end up with anglo corporations. The reason is that the anglo capitalism prides itself economic freedom and turns a blind eye to the political aspect of the economy. The fundamental problems with anglo capitalism are: 1. Money, an economic concept, and the freedom to accumulate as much money as one can possibly do, an economic freedom, wield real political power. The political power then acts as a positive feedback over the economic field resulting in an unstable polarized system. 2. The system assumes infinite resources. This is blatantly false both in the short term, economy grows only at X% annually, and in the long term, there is just one Earth and one Sun. This places people on the lower rungs of the economic system on an intrinsic inferior bargaining position, as their very existence is under question. This time the effect is that people on the top ownership rungs have more economic power, which acts as a positive feedback resulting in an unstable polarized system. Historically, anglo capitalism has been controlled via a number of negative feedback loops: A. Democracy, as a counterweight to point 1. The 99% used to have a significant share of the political power. Not anymore. There is no more democracy in America, it's a political market where the deepest pockets but the most representatives. B. Trade unions, as a counterweight to point 1 and 2. Trade unions used to have enough money to match the 1% contributions to politics. Trade unions used to give the 99% some bargaining power. Thanks to Reagan and the modern Republicans, there are no more trade unions to speak of. C. Taxes, as a counterpoint to 1 and 2. There used to be taxes, that both detracted from the ability of 1% to wield unfettered political power and served at building a safety net that improved the bargaining power of the 99%. Not anymore, we now raise about 25% less in taxes as a share of GDP as we used to (19& -> 15%), and the trend towards "smaller government" is only accelerating. We observe how the finest anglo capitalism economic entities have more and more power, both economic and politic. These economic entities are called "corporations".
BlackJack 15y ago
" I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities." I don't agree with this. The "lacks diversity" argument doesn't imply that minorities can't benefit from experienced teachers - it means that teachers have more trouble with a heterogeneous population compared to a homogeneous one, which is reasonable if you consider the diversity of backgrounds in a classroom and how they impact the mental models that children have.
- pjscott 15y ago
  This is why discussing issues involving racial or cultural diversity is so hard: indignation temporarily destroys people's reading comprehension and ability to think straight.
arsatiki 15y ago
Whee, Finland is at the top of an international ranking. How groovy! It makes my white-and-blue heart beat with pride. Except it doesn't, really. The purpose of a school, any school, in any country, is to prepare the students for the road ahead. "We do not learn for the school, but for life." So while it is fascinating to study the performance of teenagers in a small selection of topics, the test does not tell whether they will grow up as happy and/or fulfilled adults. If the PISA tests measured presentation skills or perhaps essay writing, I'd bet USA would just leave Finland in the dust. However, some parts of the article just fill me with dread. Child-poverty rate of 22%? That's disgraceful. Merit pay? I just can't wrap my head around that. Also, sounds like you've gone bonkers with the standardized testing. The common complaint here is that the last year (or year and a half) of high school is too focused on the matriculation examination. I can only imagine what happens if you're tested once a year or every two years or so. You'd get nothing of substance into the young minds, only tricks and tips for the next test.
- pdelgallego 15y ago
  >> So while it is fascinating to study the performance of teenagers in a small selection of topics, the test does not tell whether they will grow up as happy and/or fulfilled adults According to some studies [1] the 20 happiest nations in the World are: 1. Denmark 2. Switzerland 3. Austria 4. Iceland 5. The Bahamas 6. Finland 7. Sweden 8. Bhutan 9. Brunei 10. Canada 11. Ireland 12. Luxembourg 13. Costa Rica 14. Malta 15. The Netherlands 16. Antigua and Barbuda 17. Malaysia 18. New Zealand 19. Norway 20. The Seychelles [1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.ht...
mushishi 15y ago
As a Finn, I restrain myself comparing us to others but I just want to say that most schools here are not well suited for non-superficial learning. I would hope the future brings a system that is driven by the need of individual pupil and by her potential and interests rather than giving equivalent, non-inspiring curriculum for all. Also, learning should have more meaningfulness in it; something along the lines of what Papert talks in his Mindstorms book http://www.papert.org/ http://www.papert.org/ What I have observed is that people are not much interested in learning in schools; those with passion get bored and creativity is not encouraged, at all. In my opinion, it's a horrible state what we are in but I don't think many will do anything about it. And in universities, it's even worse. Studying e.g. Computer Science is much of theory without not enough practical learning, as departments lack proper funding (e.g. assistants for helping with assignments). People learn basic concepts barely, and are not excited by them. It's just something to get through so that they get the diploma which is too highly appreciated by companies' HR. Also, the content what is taught, is not what should be. The whole culture is short-sighted, and people who get out of universities are not well-equipped but are suited for trivial web-development of current age, i.e. what the industry is in need of. This makes me sad as learning and teaching should be fun, and could be much more effective. I see some hope with interactive, visual tools that let people learn by themselves but I am not so sure the people responsible for these kind of things really are multitalented and experienced enough to do the proper thing.
- arkx 15y ago
  You seem to mainly address universities, which were out of scope for this article. OECD PISA is measuring 15-year-old students. There is a huge difference in the level of teaching at compulsory schools and universities in Finland. "People are not much interested in learning in schools" is a gross overstatement and generalization. There are those who are very motivated, those who are not motivated at all and the majority who fall somewhere in between. I saw firsthand how even the least motivated students were engaged by one really good biology teacher. Everyone was interested when the teacher did his job well. On the other hand, with terrible teachers even the best students tended to zone out. I imagine this is the same everywhere in the world. As for the needs of individual pupils, I couldn't agree more. When I first entered school I already knew how to read and add numbers together. I was not allowed to progress at my own pace, and subsequently got really, really bored twiddling my thumbs during those first few years. I think this catering to the lowest common denominator and lack of individual care is something that the Finnish school system really suffers from. Sadly with all these articles out many observers seem to think the Finnish school system is infallible, and they're only aiming at replicating the success of Finnish schools instead of thinking how to do even better.
Abundnce10 15y ago
I taught English in the public school system in South Korea last year. There were a few stark differences that I couldn't help but notice and I feel they shed light on our failing education system here in America. They have a curriculum that is set forth on a national level. This accomplishes two important things: One, teachers can now collaborate and share resources on topics that all teachers around the country are preparing for (I did this with my fellow Native English Teachers and ended up saving a lot of time not having to reinvent the wheel for every lesson). Secondly, it helps eliminate the unnecessary spending that accompanies the insanely large amount of school districts that we have scattered around our country. Washington State alone has almost 300 school districts! The board members of these schools districts are in charge of determining the curriculum for their specific locality, mean while others are doing the same exact thing in the next town over. Furthermore, the majority of those board members have a Masters or PhD and require a hefty salary - which could be going towards funding intelligent, passionate teachers. I'd love to be a teacher but you won't see me entering a public school classroom anytime soon. If we can eliminate the redundancy of our school district issue and provide the framework for a nationalized curriculum, we could pay teachers more (thereby attracting a higher talent pool), lower class sizes, increase spending on classroom necessities (pens, pencils, paper, books, COMPUTERS!), and allow teachers the opportunity to share resources on predetermined, upcoming lessons. Tackling these issues will put us on the right track towards getting our school system out of this steady decline we've been on for the last couple of decades.
- nhebb 15y ago
  I've always wondered why the US has a Department of Education but it doesn't produce a national curriculum. It's mission isn't directly tied to teaching itself [1]. Looking at the rise of sites like the Khan Academy and other services, it seems clear to me that content creation and delivery of core subjects could be centralized, and tutoring, homework, testing, and assessment could be localized. I know that would threaten some politically powerful interest groups (teacher unions and publishers), but I think it's a logical progression if we want to provide students across the country the same learning materials. [1] http://www2.ed.gov/about/what-we-do.html http://www2.ed.gov/about/what-we-do.html
aboyeji 15y ago
I think the biggest undisputable difference between the Finnish and American systems from the article is their high quality teachers and small engaged classes but I wonder if that is simply a direct result of their having a small population (less than 6mm). I can't see some of these methods (having a master's teach in schools, paying very competitive salaries) scaling well in the American system (more than 60-70mm+). There just aren't those kind of funds available anywhere. Another thought that comes to mind is if we already know finish teachers are the best, then why don't we use the internet to scale their teaching. It might not be as good as in class teaching but I reckon it would be better than what we have now.
shareme 15y ago
Something out of whack.. Let me explain...about 24 years ago mid beginning 1980s the testing and tests for pre-engineering was the same level as most HS students face now for non-engineering.... I can remember taking additional tests on top of my HS standards tests to see if I could get qualified to enter engineering college classes..yes this was the USA.. my scores was 98 percentile range.. It would seem the author is comparing apples and oranges to display their political trappings rather than a factual article on what can be compared and contrasted.
3dFlatLander 15y ago
I enjoy reading about education here in the US, and in other countries. It's all well and good to compare our system to others. But, I can't help but wonder what the chances will be that the system here will ever actually be reformed.
joelthelion 15y ago
Every time I read an article about why XYZ's schools are so great, I cannot help but think, wouldn't it simply be because XYZ's children are great? At least I think that's a factor we fail to control for. Designing a good school for well brought-up children is far easier than designing it for children who grew up in a hostile environment watching TV all day long.
SNK 15y ago
"Finnish educators were astonished ... made no sense to them... surprised ... did not understand the idea ... can’t understand ... don’t make sense to them. Nor do they understand ...." Ignorance and stupidity are nothing to be proud of. Disagreeing with us is one thing - they could be right. Willful disingenuous bug-eyed goggling is something else altogether.
- sjwright 15y ago
  Is the Finnish educators' ignorance of the American education system any more a sign of "ignorance and stupidity" than American educators' almost certain ignorance of the Finnish education system? Given that Finnish educators appear to be doing a better job, I'd argue the latter is the more "ignorant and stupid".
- cromulent 15y ago
  I don't think they are engaged in "willful disingenuous bug-eyed goggling". I think the author is using the term "didn't understand" as in "I don't understand why you use LOC as a measure of a developer's productivity". Being a little deliberately obtuse can be nicer, less judgmental, and less confrontational way of disagreeing with someone than saying outright "that's a bad way of doing it". And Finns do tend to avoid social confrontations, in my experience.
nhebb 15y ago
It's funny that the article starts off criticizing standardized testing but immediately turns to international standardized test results (PISA) as the foundation for the rest of the article. It could well be that Finland has a better educational system, but - playing devil's advocate here - how do we know that it's not just (inadvertently) optimized for the PISA?
- Eeko 15y ago
  Well, the PISA testing started at 2000 and the current Finnish system was established back in the 1970's. Finland has always been pretty much at the top of the class with PISA studies. The fame came mostly as a shock for the nation, as we have always had pretty common lil'brother & grass-is-greener attitudes towards the rest of the world. Also: the stuff measured by PISA (Math, sciences & reading) is only around 50% of the national curricula. The rest are about foreign languages, arts & excercise, religion, philosphy, history etc... There are more art, craft & music classes than say, mathematics. While wasting less time teaching and learning in classroom than most (http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/04/09/less-school-higher-scores-in-finland/ http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/04/09/less-school-higher-...). If I were to engineer a PISA-breaking education system, I would probably not approach it like that. (The curricula (.pdf): http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Koulutus/yleissivistaevae_koulutus/perusopetus/perusopetus/tuntijakotaulukko/tuntijako20122001.pdf http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Koulutus/yleis...)
  - nhebb 15y ago
    Just to be clear, I am not a proponent of standardized-test-based curricula. I just thought it was odd that they used an international standardized test as a basis for criticizing US standardized tests. The curricula you linked to looks similar to the curricula that my children's schools use. The difference is in how the subjects are taught. I'm old enough to have gone to school before standardized testing was widespread in the US, and since my children go to school near where I grew up, I can compare the quality of education between then and now. The reading and writing requirements today (including vocabulary and grammar), are much weaker than I was exposed to. They rarely even read full books and do in depth reports. Instead, they simply read excerpts from anthologies and write in-class paragraphs. It's pretty sad, because writing teaches you a lot about how to think. In all, I would say the science curriculum is broader and better. I was dismayed to learn that proofs are no longer taught in math, and I think that may be a result of the test-driven mentality of education.
ig1 15y ago
The problem is that what works in Finland won't necessarily work elsewhere. For example in Finland teach is a high prestige job in a large part because Finland doesn't have the range or number of alternative professional careers available that countries like the US have.
- pedrolll 15y ago
  What is this based on? For someone living in Finland, this seems very far from the truth.
  - ig1 15y ago
    http://www.stat.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_tyoelama_en.html http://www.stat.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_tyoelama_en.html The education sector in Finland employs a disproportionately large number of professionals compared to many other countries. In comparison a male graduate in the uk chosen at random is more likely to be a software developer than a teacher.
    - gerrys0 15y ago
      I find that hard to believe, but even if true, so what? There are about half as many teachers in the US as there should be right now.
      - ig1 15y ago
        Competition for the top graduates is incredibly tough in many countries. In many countries the education system can't compete with the private sector (in terms of salaries and opportunities) in hiring the best, in Finland the competition is smaller due to fewer opportunities existing for top-tier graduates so they can afford to hire them.
cavalcade 15y ago
A great education system is a means to an end. The end being the host country gains a great economic engine and generally happy citizens. Does Finland have this? Singapore? South Korea? Curious not disapproving...
- Eeko 15y ago
  So far the results have been fair. But Finland especially is somewhat prone for brain-drain. All that stuff is paid with hefty, progressive taxation which hurts the most skilled and salaried the most. Combining all the mandatory expenses, taxation etc, your wages easily end up to be less than half of what you could be gaining abroad. Especially since the level of (tuition-free and gvment-sponsored on all levels) education, language-skills and the weather-back-home makes emigration fairly easy and tempting for most Finns. But so far the system does a pretty good job on keeping competitive. You might end up driving a smaller BMW than your neighbor, but the quality of education, health, stability etc. make it very attractive target for long-term settling down, making kids etc.
  - cavalcade 15y ago
    I am more familiar with Singapore and from all signs it seems they do not have the brain drain problem so they are capturing more value from the output of their great education system than Finland.
    - Eeko 15y ago
      Sure about that? There is a nice graph at http://www.peoplemov.in/ http://www.peoplemov.in/ . Don't know about their sources, but Finland and Singapore seem to have around the same amount of emigration/capita (6.2 - 6.3%). Granted, Finns go more to United States and wealthy Europe (probably a bit more weighted towards skilled labor moving...) than singaporeans. But I would not say those levels qualify yet for significant brain drain. From Hong Kong, the percentage is closer to 10% and S-Korea has only around ~5% of emigration. I said Finland could be fairly prone for brain-drain if stuff would get significantly worse in the future. (Like what is happening at Greece these days.) But right now I'm pretty sure that the progress will be, though not outright good, less bad than most of the world. A safer bet, to say. And healthy amount of emigration is good for a nation. People go abroad for a few years or decades to make money, gain experience and positive influences and then can bring 'em back home.
tuukkah 15y ago
This article is right to the point but the discussion easily clings on some misconceptions that are hard to let go. Here's some of the facts: * No, the system in Finland doesn't cost much more. Depending on how you measure, it can actually be said to be cheaper: the US spends more of its GDP in education. * No, the teachers in Finland are not paid a big salary to motivate them. They earn more or less the average salary of workers with a university degree. * No, it's not just about Finland being more culturally and ethnically homogeneous, or just about child poverty being more rare. There are many other countries like this and they don't automatically get good results in education. * No, the Finnish children are not highly motivated to go to school, to learn and to achieve. Actually, Finland gets its results despite worse than average motivation, attitude towards school etc. * No, it's not about the Finnish language being "easier" to learn: Being "easy" is subjective and it takes the Finnish children the normal time to learn to speak. * No, it's not about the written Finnish being highly phonemic and thus easy to learn to read and write. Many other languages (such as Spanish, Swedish) are highly phonemic as well. The time saved in not having to learn the spelling of each word in the Finnish dictionary separately is spent on the efforts to learn the completely different vocabulary and highly different phonetics and grammar of English as a second language. * No, it's not just about Finnish being a highly agglutinative language where you can guess e.g. from the word for voltage that it has something to do with some kind of tension. Or maybe it is, I don't have good evidence about this... But there are other agglutinative languages, learning e.g. maths problem solving is little about guessing what words mean, the linguistics mainline theory doesn't support languages having a big effect on how people think. * No, it's not about the Finnish women having nothing else to do than concentrate on teaching. Finland ranks highly in gender equality and e.g. technology industry. * No, you don't have to come up with metrics and subject teachers to evaluations to get a good system or to improve on one. Finland doesn't have such evaluations. You can do scientific research on the issue without letting office politics in on the individual numbers. What plausible explanations remain? Clearly you need to consider many issues when designing or improving an educational system and there's no silver bullet, but perhaps you want to read the original article again to get some good ideas from an expert in the field :-)
tokenadult 15y ago
A good reality check on several of the assertions made in the article, or in the comments here, about Finland is to look at another country high in international educational rankings, namely Singapore. I have known people from Singapore (mostly students at my state's flagship university) since the mid-1970s. Always, they have been amazingly smart people. I have been curious about how schooling is done in Singapore since well before the first time that Singapore was included in an international education study. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35) http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I have lived for years in one of the other countries that regularly outperforms the United States in those studies, Taiwan, and will also comment on the Taiwan educational experience as a reality check on the comments on Finland in this thread. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. Singapore is very diverse linguistically--the MAJORITY of the population in my generation spoke NONE of the four official languages (Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, or English) in standard form at home, and certainly not the main language of school instruction, English, but Singapore has become part of the "outer circle" of use of English internationally and now maintains a high degree of multilingualism. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well both in language learning and in mathematics learning in the current generation. The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS" http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. The key aspect of Singapore's success is a MUCH better curriculum in primary school mathematics than is used in the United States. Homeschoolers in the United States, including quite a few parents of top-scoring students on the American Mathematics Competitions tests, have become aware of the Singapore curriculum materials, http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/134.htm http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1... and those are generally helpful for American families who are looking for something better than the poorly organized, often mathematically incorrect materials used in United States schools. Professor Hung-hsi Wu of the University of California--Berkeley has written about what needs to be reformed in United States mathematics education. http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NCTM2010.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NCTM2010.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf Other mathematicians who have written interesting articles about mathematics education reform in the United States include Richard Askey, http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf Roger E. Howe, http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf Patricia Kenschaft, http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf and James Milgram. ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). I have seen (and used) the textbooks from Singapore and from Taiwan. They are much more clear in their presentation and much more conceptually accurate than the typical United States textbooks. Moreover, elementary mathematics teachers tend to specialize in teaching mathematics while other elementary teachers teach other subjects, at much younger ages than when United States pupils typically encounter specialist teachers. The United States model of elementary education is to have teachers who are jacks of all trades and masters of none, and who do equally poorly (by reasonable international standards) in teaching reading, mathematics, science, and all other elementary subjects. The United States could do a lot better and reach the level of Finland by staffing reforms http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/Hanushek%202009%20CNTP%20ch%208.pdf http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads... and by using best practices http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Classroom/dp/0684852748 http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... in provision of elementary education.
Gravityloss 15y ago
This is a Swedish guy examining the issue, resolves most of the questions in comments here: "What is so special about education in Finland? An outsider’s view" By Peter Fredriksson in 2006. www.nek.uu.se/StaffPages/Publ/P949.doc (Sorry, it's a doc file). Results over time (USA has worsened), immigration (it's not about it), underachievers (less of them in Finland).

223 points by ABR 15y ago

This article contrasts well with the failure of No Child Left Behind in the U.S. That program has failed to deliver any statistically significant impact on the skills and knowledge of students. What is has done is pushed teachers towards teaching the test rather than teaching critical thinking. Standardized tests are multiple-choice questions and don't leave room for critical thinking, or help demonstration how a child reached a certain conclusion. The Finnish method of empowering teachers through education and training to allow them to teach and help their particular students seems to be a much better way to help individual students succeed as opposed to trying to stick everyone in a box defined by an academic or bureaucrat.

mbyrne 15y ago
If you say No Child Left Behind pushed teachers to teach to a test (easy) rather than teaching critical thinking, etc. (hard) and then you say No Child Left Behind failed to deliver any statistically significant impact on test scores, aren't you just saying teachers can't even teach the easy stuff? How do you think they can teach the hard stuff if they can't even move the needle on the easy things (in this scenario of yours)?
- da-bacon 15y ago
  What makes you think teaching to a test is easy? If the sole motivation of teaching is to increase a students score on a narrowly defined set of metrics, how motivated do you think students are going to be? I'm curious because in my experience the hardest learning I've done is when it's been aimed at achieving some hurdle for a narrow externally defined subject.
- gerrys0 15y ago
  Yes, teaching to a test should be easy, and it is easy to your median 15-year-old. The gigantic problem with NCLB - and something I've not seen mentioned in this HN story - is that NCLB is a one-size-fits-all mandate, and there is NOTHING about education in the US or anywhere that is one-size-fits-all. Hundreds of factors influence the raw material (children) that teachers have to work with every day. Countries like Finland do not try to graduate all of their children in the same way. 43% of Finland's HS graduates graduate from vocational schools (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...). The US has slowly moved further and further away from this type of "tracking" since the 70's. Things like NCLB and the over-valued notion of a college degree has only accelerated this problem. I am not optimistic.

forkandwait 15y ago

Here is my worthless .02c: One sure way to know you have failed at managing a process is when you measure employee performance by their adherence to rules rather than their record on delivering results. NCLB is all about rules... ... as are most US institutions, public and private.... It isn't that rules and standardized processes don't have their place, but (1) if rules have to be enforced regularly, you have totally f'ed your incentive structure and (2) if you build "standardized processes" the right way, employees "naturally" follow (and contribute to) them because they are the best way to deliver results (see above), not because some hardass is enforcing them. So, we should reward teachers who have good results, collectively and continuously make their best processes into standards, and punish the teachers with bad results (by which I mean fire them, and eliminate tenure, at least in the extreme). Not so easy to do, but I think we need to get away from more and more rules, while never rewarding individual results.

lukeschlather 15y ago
There are a lot of people bouncing around ideas about how we can magically improve the U.S. school system, but I think fundamentally the problem is that we expect unreasonable results. We want to be able to pay $5000/pupil/year for a quality of education that properly costs at least $10,000 if not $15,000.
- tuukkah 15y ago
  Somehow the Finnish school system costs less per pupil per year than the U.S. one. I don't see why a suggestion to concentrate on more important things is responded to by demanding more money. Money can improve some things, some things can be improved without money.
  - thyrsus 15y ago
    I suspect an abundance of social infrastructure (4% of children living in poverty vs 15%, per the article) acts as an unaccounted for subsidy for education - and for much else as well.

chrismealy 15y ago

From TNR: Today, teaching is such a desirable profession that only one in ten applicants to the country’s eight master’s programs in education is accepted. In the United States, on the other hand, college graduates may become teachers without earning a master’s. What’s more, Finnish teachers earn very competitive salaries: High school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what their fellow university graduates do. In the United States, by contrast, they earn just 65 percent. -- http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-F...

makecheck 15y ago
Gaining a master's degree doesn't automatically make you a better teacher. I'd much rather be assured that a teacher has other basic abilities (e.g. good communication skills, patience, fairness, organization skills, and even some creativity).
- Androsynth 15y ago
  no, but its a good way to gate on intelligence
  - jaredmck 15y ago
    In the US, getting a master's in education probably says more negative than positive things about your intelligence - there are a ton of degree farms handing out paper.
    - LeafStorm 15y ago
      That's why you check what school the degree is from.
- Orva 15y ago
  To get masters from "teaching track" in Finland (which is _very_ appreciated during job interviews) you need quite hefty load of padagogy and sosiology studies on top of your usual master's.

gmichnikov 15y ago

Perhaps "they did not understand the idea of 'merit pay'" because many of the teachers in Finland are of a different breed than many of the people who end up teaching in the US: "McKinsey's work with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests this is an important gap in the U.S. debate, because the world's top performing school systems--Singapore, Finland, South Korea--make a different choice. They recruit, develop and retain what this report will call 'top third+' students as one of their central education strategies, and they've acheived extraordinary results. These systems recruit 100% of their teacher corops from the top third of the academic cohort, and then screen for other important qualities as well. In the U.S., by contrast, 23% of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14% in high poverty schools, which find it especially difficult to attract and retain talented teachers. It is remarkably large difference in approach, and in results." [1] Taking this into account, it's silly to argue that since they have tenure, too, tenure isn't the problem here. They already have the right people teaching. We need to fire many of the people who are currently teaching. Also, the U.S. spends a higher percent of GDP on education, so blaming spending seems odd. [2] Finally, I'm really sick of the way Diane Ravitch constantly slams Teach For America. The U.S. needs better people teaching. TFA makes some of those people think about teaching. It's getting teaching in the same ballpark of prestige as consulting, banking, law school, medical school, etc for students coming out of top colleges. Nothing else comes close to doing that on the same scale. Even if it is true that TFA teachers aren't noticeably better in years 1-2 than a typical experienced teacher (and I don't believe that is the case), it's still a great program. [1] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_talent_gap_appendix.pdf http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...

kiba 15y ago
I would think that people in Singapore and South Korea considers education very important and thus students in these countries try very hard to get really good grade.
- tuukkah 15y ago

temphn 15y ago

Finland's schools are great because they are full of Finns, in the same way that schools with many Finns in the US do very well. Hong Kong and Singapore's schools are great because they are full of Chinese, in the same way that schools with many Chinese in the US do very well, even in poor neighborhoods: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/16/local/me-lincoln16 To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families. According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. But most articles don't even consider such explanations, preferring to keep looking under the streetlight for that quarter.

kalleboo 15y ago
This article does consider that though: They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one points out that Finland has the same demographics as Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior results. I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities.
- temphn 15y ago
  "Superior" is only one bit of information, in that it only says "x is greater than y"...but not by how much, and with no measure of statistical significance. Finland's technological and industrial output clusters with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to a far greater extent than it does with countries outside Northern Europe. In the same way, when you look at the TIMSS, intra-European variance exists and is nontrivial, but European and East Asian nations do tend to cluster together quite a bit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf See Table 3 on page 19. Top 5 countries in grade 8 in math: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. The very top European countries are towards the lower end of the East Asian distribution in math, and are only close in 4th grade (before puberty onset).

pacala 15y ago

"I was asked about current trends in U.S. education, and Finnish educators were astonished by the idea that our governments intend to evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores; that made no sense to them. They were also surprised that we turn children over to “teachers” who have only a few weeks of training and no masters’ degree. They did not understand the idea of “merit pay.” They are paid more if they do more work for the community, but they can’t understand why teachers should get a bonus to compete with one another for test scores. Since they don’t have comparative test scores for their students, our practices don’t make sense to them. Nor do they understand the benefits of competition among teachers who ought to be collaborating." This will not last. The anglo corporatist cancer with its insanely frequent "performance reviews" and bogus metrics will eat them alive. Long live exacerbated competitiveness and backstabbing your peers. Long live natural selection and the annual culling of the herd.

olliesaunders 15y ago
> ...will eat them alive Why will it? > Long live natural selection and the annual culling of the herd. How does that occur in the Finish model?
- pacala 15y ago
  Mindshare in the global age. Finland is a 5M country. The world is 1000 times larger. They can't go against the tide of globalization. They may have the better product, it doesn't matter. The global mindshare battle is already won by anglo capitalism.
  - vukk 15y ago
    The original comment used "anglo corporatism", which I understand, but why are you hopping to "anglo capitalism"?
    - pacala 15y ago
      Thanks for the attention to terminology detail. The anglo corporation is the finest outcome of the anglo capitalism. If you build a system around anglo capitalist rules, you end up with anglo corporations. The reason is that the anglo capitalism prides itself economic freedom and turns a blind eye to the political aspect of the economy. The fundamental problems with anglo capitalism are: 1. Money, an economic concept, and the freedom to accumulate as much money as one can possibly do, an economic freedom, wield real political power. The political power then acts as a positive feedback over the economic field resulting in an unstable polarized system. 2. The system assumes infinite resources. This is blatantly false both in the short term, economy grows only at X% annually, and in the long term, there is just one Earth and one Sun. This places people on the lower rungs of the economic system on an intrinsic inferior bargaining position, as their very existence is under question. This time the effect is that people on the top ownership rungs have more economic power, which acts as a positive feedback resulting in an unstable polarized system. Historically, anglo capitalism has been controlled via a number of negative feedback loops: A. Democracy, as a counterweight to point 1. The 99% used to have a significant share of the political power. Not anymore. There is no more democracy in America, it's a political market where the deepest pockets but the most representatives. B. Trade unions, as a counterweight to point 1 and 2. Trade unions used to have enough money to match the 1% contributions to politics. Trade unions used to give the 99% some bargaining power. Thanks to Reagan and the modern Republicans, there are no more trade unions to speak of. C. Taxes, as a counterpoint to 1 and 2. There used to be taxes, that both detracted from the ability of 1% to wield unfettered political power and served at building a safety net that improved the bargaining power of the 99%. Not anymore, we now raise about 25% less in taxes as a share of GDP as we used to (19& -> 15%), and the trend towards "smaller government" is only accelerating. We observe how the finest anglo capitalism economic entities have more and more power, both economic and politic. These economic entities are called "corporations".

BlackJack 15y ago

" I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities." I don't agree with this. The "lacks diversity" argument doesn't imply that minorities can't benefit from experienced teachers - it means that teachers have more trouble with a heterogeneous population compared to a homogeneous one, which is reasonable if you consider the diversity of backgrounds in a classroom and how they impact the mental models that children have.

pjscott 15y ago
This is why discussing issues involving racial or cultural diversity is so hard: indignation temporarily destroys people's reading comprehension and ability to think straight.

arsatiki 15y ago

Whee, Finland is at the top of an international ranking. How groovy! It makes my white-and-blue heart beat with pride. Except it doesn't, really. The purpose of a school, any school, in any country, is to prepare the students for the road ahead. "We do not learn for the school, but for life." So while it is fascinating to study the performance of teenagers in a small selection of topics, the test does not tell whether they will grow up as happy and/or fulfilled adults. If the PISA tests measured presentation skills or perhaps essay writing, I'd bet USA would just leave Finland in the dust. However, some parts of the article just fill me with dread. Child-poverty rate of 22%? That's disgraceful. Merit pay? I just can't wrap my head around that. Also, sounds like you've gone bonkers with the standardized testing. The common complaint here is that the last year (or year and a half) of high school is too focused on the matriculation examination. I can only imagine what happens if you're tested once a year or every two years or so. You'd get nothing of substance into the young minds, only tricks and tips for the next test.

pdelgallego 15y ago
>> So while it is fascinating to study the performance of teenagers in a small selection of topics, the test does not tell whether they will grow up as happy and/or fulfilled adults According to some studies [1] the 20 happiest nations in the World are: 1. Denmark 2. Switzerland 3. Austria 4. Iceland 5. The Bahamas 6. Finland 7. Sweden 8. Bhutan 9. Brunei 10. Canada 11. Ireland 12. Luxembourg 13. Costa Rica 14. Malta 15. The Netherlands 16. Antigua and Barbuda 17. Malaysia 18. New Zealand 19. Norway 20. The Seychelles [1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.ht...

mushishi 15y ago

As a Finn, I restrain myself comparing us to others but I just want to say that most schools here are not well suited for non-superficial learning. I would hope the future brings a system that is driven by the need of individual pupil and by her potential and interests rather than giving equivalent, non-inspiring curriculum for all. Also, learning should have more meaningfulness in it; something along the lines of what Papert talks in his Mindstorms book http://www.papert.org/ http://www.papert.org/ What I have observed is that people are not much interested in learning in schools; those with passion get bored and creativity is not encouraged, at all. In my opinion, it's a horrible state what we are in but I don't think many will do anything about it. And in universities, it's even worse. Studying e.g. Computer Science is much of theory without not enough practical learning, as departments lack proper funding (e.g. assistants for helping with assignments). People learn basic concepts barely, and are not excited by them. It's just something to get through so that they get the diploma which is too highly appreciated by companies' HR. Also, the content what is taught, is not what should be. The whole culture is short-sighted, and people who get out of universities are not well-equipped but are suited for trivial web-development of current age, i.e. what the industry is in need of. This makes me sad as learning and teaching should be fun, and could be much more effective. I see some hope with interactive, visual tools that let people learn by themselves but I am not so sure the people responsible for these kind of things really are multitalented and experienced enough to do the proper thing.

arkx 15y ago
You seem to mainly address universities, which were out of scope for this article. OECD PISA is measuring 15-year-old students. There is a huge difference in the level of teaching at compulsory schools and universities in Finland. "People are not much interested in learning in schools" is a gross overstatement and generalization. There are those who are very motivated, those who are not motivated at all and the majority who fall somewhere in between. I saw firsthand how even the least motivated students were engaged by one really good biology teacher. Everyone was interested when the teacher did his job well. On the other hand, with terrible teachers even the best students tended to zone out. I imagine this is the same everywhere in the world. As for the needs of individual pupils, I couldn't agree more. When I first entered school I already knew how to read and add numbers together. I was not allowed to progress at my own pace, and subsequently got really, really bored twiddling my thumbs during those first few years. I think this catering to the lowest common denominator and lack of individual care is something that the Finnish school system really suffers from. Sadly with all these articles out many observers seem to think the Finnish school system is infallible, and they're only aiming at replicating the success of Finnish schools instead of thinking how to do even better.

Abundnce10 15y ago

I taught English in the public school system in South Korea last year. There were a few stark differences that I couldn't help but notice and I feel they shed light on our failing education system here in America. They have a curriculum that is set forth on a national level. This accomplishes two important things: One, teachers can now collaborate and share resources on topics that all teachers around the country are preparing for (I did this with my fellow Native English Teachers and ended up saving a lot of time not having to reinvent the wheel for every lesson). Secondly, it helps eliminate the unnecessary spending that accompanies the insanely large amount of school districts that we have scattered around our country. Washington State alone has almost 300 school districts! The board members of these schools districts are in charge of determining the curriculum for their specific locality, mean while others are doing the same exact thing in the next town over. Furthermore, the majority of those board members have a Masters or PhD and require a hefty salary - which could be going towards funding intelligent, passionate teachers. I'd love to be a teacher but you won't see me entering a public school classroom anytime soon. If we can eliminate the redundancy of our school district issue and provide the framework for a nationalized curriculum, we could pay teachers more (thereby attracting a higher talent pool), lower class sizes, increase spending on classroom necessities (pens, pencils, paper, books, COMPUTERS!), and allow teachers the opportunity to share resources on predetermined, upcoming lessons. Tackling these issues will put us on the right track towards getting our school system out of this steady decline we've been on for the last couple of decades.

nhebb 15y ago
I've always wondered why the US has a Department of Education but it doesn't produce a national curriculum. It's mission isn't directly tied to teaching itself [1]. Looking at the rise of sites like the Khan Academy and other services, it seems clear to me that content creation and delivery of core subjects could be centralized, and tutoring, homework, testing, and assessment could be localized. I know that would threaten some politically powerful interest groups (teacher unions and publishers), but I think it's a logical progression if we want to provide students across the country the same learning materials. [1] http://www2.ed.gov/about/what-we-do.html http://www2.ed.gov/about/what-we-do.html

aboyeji 15y ago

I think the biggest undisputable difference between the Finnish and American systems from the article is their high quality teachers and small engaged classes but I wonder if that is simply a direct result of their having a small population (less than 6mm). I can't see some of these methods (having a master's teach in schools, paying very competitive salaries) scaling well in the American system (more than 60-70mm+). There just aren't those kind of funds available anywhere. Another thought that comes to mind is if we already know finish teachers are the best, then why don't we use the internet to scale their teaching. It might not be as good as in class teaching but I reckon it would be better than what we have now.

shareme 15y ago

Something out of whack.. Let me explain...about 24 years ago mid beginning 1980s the testing and tests for pre-engineering was the same level as most HS students face now for non-engineering.... I can remember taking additional tests on top of my HS standards tests to see if I could get qualified to enter engineering college classes..yes this was the USA.. my scores was 98 percentile range.. It would seem the author is comparing apples and oranges to display their political trappings rather than a factual article on what can be compared and contrasted.

3dFlatLander 15y ago

I enjoy reading about education here in the US, and in other countries. It's all well and good to compare our system to others. But, I can't help but wonder what the chances will be that the system here will ever actually be reformed.

joelthelion 15y ago

Every time I read an article about why XYZ's schools are so great, I cannot help but think, wouldn't it simply be because XYZ's children are great? At least I think that's a factor we fail to control for. Designing a good school for well brought-up children is far easier than designing it for children who grew up in a hostile environment watching TV all day long.

SNK 15y ago

"Finnish educators were astonished ... made no sense to them... surprised ... did not understand the idea ... can’t understand ... don’t make sense to them. Nor do they understand ...." Ignorance and stupidity are nothing to be proud of. Disagreeing with us is one thing - they could be right. Willful disingenuous bug-eyed goggling is something else altogether.

sjwright 15y ago
Is the Finnish educators' ignorance of the American education system any more a sign of "ignorance and stupidity" than American educators' almost certain ignorance of the Finnish education system? Given that Finnish educators appear to be doing a better job, I'd argue the latter is the more "ignorant and stupid".
cromulent 15y ago
I don't think they are engaged in "willful disingenuous bug-eyed goggling". I think the author is using the term "didn't understand" as in "I don't understand why you use LOC as a measure of a developer's productivity". Being a little deliberately obtuse can be nicer, less judgmental, and less confrontational way of disagreeing with someone than saying outright "that's a bad way of doing it". And Finns do tend to avoid social confrontations, in my experience.

nhebb 15y ago

It's funny that the article starts off criticizing standardized testing but immediately turns to international standardized test results (PISA) as the foundation for the rest of the article. It could well be that Finland has a better educational system, but - playing devil's advocate here - how do we know that it's not just (inadvertently) optimized for the PISA?

Eeko 15y ago
Well, the PISA testing started at 2000 and the current Finnish system was established back in the 1970's. Finland has always been pretty much at the top of the class with PISA studies. The fame came mostly as a shock for the nation, as we have always had pretty common lil'brother & grass-is-greener attitudes towards the rest of the world. Also: the stuff measured by PISA (Math, sciences & reading) is only around 50% of the national curricula. The rest are about foreign languages, arts & excercise, religion, philosphy, history etc... There are more art, craft & music classes than say, mathematics. While wasting less time teaching and learning in classroom than most (http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/04/09/less-school-higher-scores-in-finland/ http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/04/09/less-school-higher-...). If I were to engineer a PISA-breaking education system, I would probably not approach it like that. (The curricula (.pdf): http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Koulutus/yleissivistaevae_koulutus/perusopetus/perusopetus/tuntijakotaulukko/tuntijako20122001.pdf http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Koulutus/yleis...)
- nhebb 15y ago
  Just to be clear, I am not a proponent of standardized-test-based curricula. I just thought it was odd that they used an international standardized test as a basis for criticizing US standardized tests. The curricula you linked to looks similar to the curricula that my children's schools use. The difference is in how the subjects are taught. I'm old enough to have gone to school before standardized testing was widespread in the US, and since my children go to school near where I grew up, I can compare the quality of education between then and now. The reading and writing requirements today (including vocabulary and grammar), are much weaker than I was exposed to. They rarely even read full books and do in depth reports. Instead, they simply read excerpts from anthologies and write in-class paragraphs. It's pretty sad, because writing teaches you a lot about how to think. In all, I would say the science curriculum is broader and better. I was dismayed to learn that proofs are no longer taught in math, and I think that may be a result of the test-driven mentality of education.

ig1 15y ago

The problem is that what works in Finland won't necessarily work elsewhere. For example in Finland teach is a high prestige job in a large part because Finland doesn't have the range or number of alternative professional careers available that countries like the US have.

pedrolll 15y ago
What is this based on? For someone living in Finland, this seems very far from the truth.
- ig1 15y ago
  http://www.stat.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_tyoelama_en.html http://www.stat.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_tyoelama_en.html The education sector in Finland employs a disproportionately large number of professionals compared to many other countries. In comparison a male graduate in the uk chosen at random is more likely to be a software developer than a teacher.
  - gerrys0 15y ago
    I find that hard to believe, but even if true, so what? There are about half as many teachers in the US as there should be right now.
    - ig1 15y ago
      Competition for the top graduates is incredibly tough in many countries. In many countries the education system can't compete with the private sector (in terms of salaries and opportunities) in hiring the best, in Finland the competition is smaller due to fewer opportunities existing for top-tier graduates so they can afford to hire them.

cavalcade 15y ago

A great education system is a means to an end. The end being the host country gains a great economic engine and generally happy citizens. Does Finland have this? Singapore? South Korea? Curious not disapproving...

Eeko 15y ago
So far the results have been fair. But Finland especially is somewhat prone for brain-drain. All that stuff is paid with hefty, progressive taxation which hurts the most skilled and salaried the most. Combining all the mandatory expenses, taxation etc, your wages easily end up to be less than half of what you could be gaining abroad. Especially since the level of (tuition-free and gvment-sponsored on all levels) education, language-skills and the weather-back-home makes emigration fairly easy and tempting for most Finns. But so far the system does a pretty good job on keeping competitive. You might end up driving a smaller BMW than your neighbor, but the quality of education, health, stability etc. make it very attractive target for long-term settling down, making kids etc.
- cavalcade 15y ago
  I am more familiar with Singapore and from all signs it seems they do not have the brain drain problem so they are capturing more value from the output of their great education system than Finland.
  - Eeko 15y ago
    Sure about that? There is a nice graph at http://www.peoplemov.in/ http://www.peoplemov.in/ . Don't know about their sources, but Finland and Singapore seem to have around the same amount of emigration/capita (6.2 - 6.3%). Granted, Finns go more to United States and wealthy Europe (probably a bit more weighted towards skilled labor moving...) than singaporeans. But I would not say those levels qualify yet for significant brain drain. From Hong Kong, the percentage is closer to 10% and S-Korea has only around ~5% of emigration. I said Finland could be fairly prone for brain-drain if stuff would get significantly worse in the future. (Like what is happening at Greece these days.) But right now I'm pretty sure that the progress will be, though not outright good, less bad than most of the world. A safer bet, to say. And healthy amount of emigration is good for a nation. People go abroad for a few years or decades to make money, gain experience and positive influences and then can bring 'em back home.

tuukkah 15y ago

This article is right to the point but the discussion easily clings on some misconceptions that are hard to let go. Here's some of the facts: * No, the system in Finland doesn't cost much more. Depending on how you measure, it can actually be said to be cheaper: the US spends more of its GDP in education. * No, the teachers in Finland are not paid a big salary to motivate them. They earn more or less the average salary of workers with a university degree. * No, it's not just about Finland being more culturally and ethnically homogeneous, or just about child poverty being more rare. There are many other countries like this and they don't automatically get good results in education. * No, the Finnish children are not highly motivated to go to school, to learn and to achieve. Actually, Finland gets its results despite worse than average motivation, attitude towards school etc. * No, it's not about the Finnish language being "easier" to learn: Being "easy" is subjective and it takes the Finnish children the normal time to learn to speak. * No, it's not about the written Finnish being highly phonemic and thus easy to learn to read and write. Many other languages (such as Spanish, Swedish) are highly phonemic as well. The time saved in not having to learn the spelling of each word in the Finnish dictionary separately is spent on the efforts to learn the completely different vocabulary and highly different phonetics and grammar of English as a second language. * No, it's not just about Finnish being a highly agglutinative language where you can guess e.g. from the word for voltage that it has something to do with some kind of tension. Or maybe it is, I don't have good evidence about this... But there are other agglutinative languages, learning e.g. maths problem solving is little about guessing what words mean, the linguistics mainline theory doesn't support languages having a big effect on how people think. * No, it's not about the Finnish women having nothing else to do than concentrate on teaching. Finland ranks highly in gender equality and e.g. technology industry. * No, you don't have to come up with metrics and subject teachers to evaluations to get a good system or to improve on one. Finland doesn't have such evaluations. You can do scientific research on the issue without letting office politics in on the individual numbers. What plausible explanations remain? Clearly you need to consider many issues when designing or improving an educational system and there's no silver bullet, but perhaps you want to read the original article again to get some good ideas from an expert in the field :-)

tokenadult 15y ago

A good reality check on several of the assertions made in the article, or in the comments here, about Finland is to look at another country high in international educational rankings, namely Singapore. I have known people from Singapore (mostly students at my state's flagship university) since the mid-1970s. Always, they have been amazingly smart people. I have been curious about how schooling is done in Singapore since well before the first time that Singapore was included in an international education study. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35) http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I have lived for years in one of the other countries that regularly outperforms the United States in those studies, Taiwan, and will also comment on the Taiwan educational experience as a reality check on the comments on Finland in this thread. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. Singapore is very diverse linguistically--the MAJORITY of the population in my generation spoke NONE of the four official languages (Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, or English) in standard form at home, and certainly not the main language of school instruction, English, but Singapore has become part of the "outer circle" of use of English internationally and now maintains a high degree of multilingualism. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well both in language learning and in mathematics learning in the current generation. The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS" http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. The key aspect of Singapore's success is a MUCH better curriculum in primary school mathematics than is used in the United States. Homeschoolers in the United States, including quite a few parents of top-scoring students on the American Mathematics Competitions tests, have become aware of the Singapore curriculum materials, http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/134.htm http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1... and those are generally helpful for American families who are looking for something better than the poorly organized, often mathematically incorrect materials used in United States schools. Professor Hung-hsi Wu of the University of California--Berkeley has written about what needs to be reformed in United States mathematics education. http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NCTM2010.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NCTM2010.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf Other mathematicians who have written interesting articles about mathematics education reform in the United States include Richard Askey, http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf Roger E. Howe, http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf Patricia Kenschaft, http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf and James Milgram. ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). I have seen (and used) the textbooks from Singapore and from Taiwan. They are much more clear in their presentation and much more conceptually accurate than the typical United States textbooks. Moreover, elementary mathematics teachers tend to specialize in teaching mathematics while other elementary teachers teach other subjects, at much younger ages than when United States pupils typically encounter specialist teachers. The United States model of elementary education is to have teachers who are jacks of all trades and masters of none, and who do equally poorly (by reasonable international standards) in teaching reading, mathematics, science, and all other elementary subjects. The United States could do a lot better and reach the level of Finland by staffing reforms http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/Hanushek%202009%20CNTP%20ch%208.pdf http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads... and by using best practices http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Classroom/dp/0684852748 http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class... in provision of elementary education.

Gravityloss 15y ago

This is a Swedish guy examining the issue, resolves most of the questions in comments here: "What is so special about education in Finland? An outsider’s view" By Peter Fredriksson in 2006. www.nek.uu.se/StaffPages/Publ/P949.doc (Sorry, it's a doc file). Results over time (USA has worsened), immigration (it's not about it), underachievers (less of them in Finland).