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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

278 points by dirtyaura 15y ago

tokenadult 15y ago
Previous submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988
gamechangr 15y ago
Oh the Irony..... You lost me on the quote above the picture: "The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  I could see how that line would tempt people to check-out of the article (and I can't blame you). But I think there's a reality to it we should pay attention to. In a previous HN thread regarding this topic I asked why countries like Finland haven't overtaken the U.S. as far as success. Given their education system has been touted as dramatically better than ours for at least 20 years. One of the replies I got was that these countries generate more well-rounded individuals and that's why these countries tend to do better on happiness surveys and such. And maybe that's true. Maybe it's time to accept the reality that not all people want the same thing. That Americans have been taught to strive for excellence and that inevitably leaves others behind. While Finland values equality over all and is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of societal wealth so as to not have kids who think they need to work day and night to succeed.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    Finland's entire population is 5.36 million, close to the population of Minnesota and a bit more than half of Los Angeles county's population of 9.86 million. Finland does have a lot of inventions and technology they export. For example, the majority of web servers in existence in the world, underlying the entire world economy run an operating system originally created by a Finn. Nokia was also a major player and innovator in cell phone and one of the first truly widespread portable information managers. Minnesota has 3M corporation of course. Comparing Finland to the US is not a reasonable comparison. Comparing Finland to Minnesota might be justifiable though.
    - johnnyjustice 15y ago
      Would it be almost fair to compare the EU to the United States?
      - droithomme 15y ago
        That's a more reasonable comparison, sure. I'm not finding exact numbers on aggregate european population but seems to be between 731 and 857 million, about 2.5-3 times that of the US.
        Zirro 15y ago
        That doesn't make it a fair comparison though, given the massive differences in economics of European countries (to mention one thing).
    - TomOfTTB 15y ago
      You discredit your point with your examples. It doesn't take a huge population to create most of the world's success. The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S. Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.
      - Eeko 15y ago
        > The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S. Not yet. Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can. Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement. And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0 http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0) > Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation. Not yet. The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy. Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)
skylan_q 15y ago
How about "because it's full of Finns"?
yummyfajitas 15y ago
The article claims Finland focuses on equality, and that immigration hasn't had much effect on aggregate education outcomes yet. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period. This is only because there are still very few immigrants in Finland. In actuality, immigrants to Finland score about 50 points lower on Pisa than Finnish natives (about double the gap in the US). (For comparison, the gap between Americans of European descent and non-immigrant Finns in Pisa scores is 22 pts, and the gap between European Americans and Greeks (the lowest performing European nation) is 46 pts. ) http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
- fdschoeneman 15y ago
  Excellent observation. The Pisa study data shows one conclusion about education in America: Different racial groups perform at different levels. We are succeeding with some minority groups and failing with others. Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland. Where we are failing is in educating our African American kids. The entire article relies on people not reading the data from the Pisa study, and for those who have read the data to ignore what it shows, from some misplaced desire not to seem racist.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland. No. You should read the blog post I linked to. American whites scores 524 (tied with Belgium for #6-#7 in the white world), Finland is #1 at 546. Immigrants in both the US and Finland score roughly the same, about 500 pts. Finland has a larger gap, since their non-immigrants score considerably higher. Make no mistake - the inequality is caused by Finns scoring very high, not by their immigrants scoring very low.
    - fdschoeneman 15y ago
      You're right, I interpolated "finns" for "Western Europeans," which is what was said in the first paragraph of the link you chastised me for not reading: "American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students." The article you linked goes on to clarify: "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." The correct comparison is European ancestry to European ancestry, excluding first and second generation, not "American whites" vs. Finns. In any case, I've seen this study pop up for a while now, and more recently on facebook a lot of my friends have been linking The Atlantic's piece.
RandallBrown 15y ago
Are other countries really doing that much better than the United States? It seems like most of the worlds top Universities are in the US and filled with students mostly from, the US. Sure, they may score better on the tests for comparing students across the world, but it seems like the same people saying this are the same ones complaining about standardized testing in the US.
- BerislavLopac 15y ago
  They are top universities in only two aspects: they provide connections and -- particularly some, like Harvard and Stanford -- the ecosystem for making success later in life. In terms of pure education, most US universities are far below many others elsewhere.
  - impendia 15y ago
    I did a three-year postdoc in math at Stanford. I was blown away by just how good the senior faculty were in their research areas, and how successful they were in motivating, challenging, inspiring, and guiding (in short: educating) students.
  - spamizbad 15y ago
    > In terms of pure education, most US universities are far below many others elsewhere. Is there any empirical evidence supporting this assertion? If you look at Business School rankings, for example, US Universities are 5 of the top 10. Source: http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-rankings-2011 http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-ran... Quacquarelli Symonds University Rankings also have US Universities rated quite high http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni... 7 of the top 10 for CS are US: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/engineering/computer-science http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni... 6 of the top 10 for Medicine: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/life-sciences/medicine http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni... 6 of the top 10 for Philosophy: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/arts-humanities/philosophy http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...
27182818284 15y ago
Whenever a successful act is presented to Americans they tend to throw out the same generic defense we used to see on technology forums all the time: "That's good for them, but that won't scale for us!"
tokenadult 15y ago
I'll have to check the published literature for what it says about reading instruction in Finnish. Finland has a minority of native speakers of Swedish (not a closely cognate language). Finnish (Suomi) and Swedish are co-official as national languages in Finland. http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/finland-country-profile.html http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/f... Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm The late John DeFrancis http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077 http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co... and current researcher and author Stanislas Dehaene http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143118056/ http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143... develop historical and international comparisons, backed up by brain imaging in Dehaene's book, to make the argument that initial reading instruction should at its best focus students' attention to sound-symbol correspondences in the written language taught in primary reading instruction. But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way, http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html http://www.mackinac.org/5365 http://www.mackinac.org/5365 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/ and when school pupils in English-speaking countries struggle to learn to read independently, they are also likely to struggle to learn other subjects thoroughly. The best current information I have suggests that initial reading instruction in Finland, whether in Finnish or in Swedish, is better done than much reading instruction in the English-speaking world, and that advantage may account for much of the national advantage Finland enjoys (and partially explain why immigrant families who use Finnish as a second language are the bottom group found in national-level sample testing of Finland for international surveys).
- notahacker 15y ago
  I agree that there's probably some credibility to arguments that English students underperform because of difficulties in learning to read an unusually inconsistent written language. That said, Finns themselves tend to learn speak and read English rather well as a second language by the time they leave school; a practical necessity for international business or travel but not very easy considering the lack of cognates shared between the languages. And despite its consistent orthography Finnish has enough other sources of complexity to be rated as a fiendishly difficult language to pick up as a second language. On the subject of phonics, it sounds like UK primary education is due to head in the opposite direction to US with compulsory phonics instruction for youngsters, including the hugely controversial recommendation for standardised tests on the ability to pronounce made-up words. I doubt we'll be overtaking Finland any time soon though.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Assuming there's something here, which is a bit of a stretch for me, let's ask the obvious question: where else has this been tried? Did it work? Better still, how do we know we're being equal enough? This is not Marxist by any means, but I have to use Marxism as an example. The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough. In the examples where it does work, there's always some special attribute or thing that causes it to, like a very small sample size. Yes it works in some cases and at some scale, but it never really works in a practical way. It's just a cluster of feelings about fairness in search of an practical application. This is, by definition, a "loose analogy". Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we? I love Finland, and I admire the Fins I've worked with. But I think we can play this game of "If we were only like Europe" only so much without actually having to apply some critical thinking skills. We are not like Europe -- as much as we'd like to be. I've been reading articles that claim we can improve various parts of society if we were only like some European country my entire life. If I didn't know better, I'd think a lot of academics spend time in Europe and become Europhiles the rest of their lives, much to the rest of our detriment. Seems like no matter how hard we try at these things, we can never be like European country X. There's probably a good reason for that. My best guess is that this has something to do with culture, but I'm not sure. If you want a country of Fins, perhaps you should consider moving to Finland? So yes, maybe there's something here, but I have no idea what it is. Does the author suggest outlawing private schools? Perhaps indoctrinating our national culture with pithy slogans like "accountability is what's left when you take responsibility away"? Tighter control over immigration so the culture is more cohesive? Greater oil revenues? Decrease our population to 1/70th of its current size? More alcohol consumption? What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?
- eru 15y ago
  > What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is? The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.
  - 15y ago
aiscott 15y ago
Personally, I think this one sentence from the article has a lot to do with why US schools are less than good: [In Finland] "If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it." In the US, if a teacher is bad and the school is public, not much can be done. They certainly won't be fired. Private schools, on the other hand, have more freedom in this regard. I think the article made a lot of good points regarding creative play and avoidance of heavy standardized testing.
- rmc 15y ago
  If you think the public sector is bad in the USA, it's nothing like the EU. Y'know the way all EU workers have employment benefits that put USA workers to shame? Well EU public sector workers have employment benefits that put private sector EU workers to shame.
- nosse 15y ago
  It's really difficult to fire a teacher in Finland too. Practically impossible if the teacher in question doesn't do violence to kids or come to work drunk.
  - rapala 15y ago
    It is not easy to lay off a public servant in Finland, but I think it is mainly so because of the procedure required. Several written warnings need be given that state the reason in plain text. Too often it just takes too much balls from the principal to write down "n. n. does not perform his/hers duties as a teacher in the required way because: ...". And a public servant can be fired because of inappropriate behavior in his/hers free time.
- DasIch 15y ago
  In Germany a teacher, like most people working in the public sector, cannot be fired. You are either stuck with them or you promote them so that someone else has to deal with them.
MaxGabriel 15y ago
I can't find it, but there was a great post on HN awhile back about how Finland doesn't really know what makes its schools so successful. Thus, articles like this pull some facet out of the hat as the key differentiator. There was a good comment, suggesting that instead of modeling who has the highest test scores, instead model who is most successful at climbing the ranks of PISA. That's probably a better way of figuring out what contributes to success, because there are fewer independent variables.
hack_edu 15y ago
Has anyone here had any experience hiring or working with grads of Finnish schools? How about Master's/PhD level grads? I'm curious how an employer or co-worker would view the quality of their school's end product.
- bergie 15y ago
  I employ a few Finns, but also lack the comparison to other cultures to be able to tell. An interesting factor is that most Finnish men have also been through military service sometime after high school.
  - Ironballs 15y ago
    Yes. Military service is compulsory in Finland. About 80% of males undergo military service. The rest is either exempt for various reasons (medical) or opt for a "civil" service in which one is essentially employed somewhere for 12 months with pay coming from the government. As 80% is quite a high number, most is indeed correct here. Thus you will find that regardless of one's education or background, it is safe to assume he also has military training. (Myself, a Finn, I have a Master of Science in mathematics and also a 2nd lieutenant in the Finnish Air Force.)
swaits 15y ago
The author ignores the power and idiocy of public unions in public education. Anyone interested in this topic should really watch the movie "Waiting for Superman".
- Cadsby 15y ago
  All teachers in Finland are unionized.
  - swaits 15y ago
    Have you seen "Waiting for Superman"? Is what you saw in that documentary the same in Finland?
Jun8 15y ago
One interesting thing about student performance in the US is that on the average it's not that bad early on (e.g. in grade school) but then takes a sharp dive. It is amazing to me what such comparison articles do not take into account: the toxic, sports-based culture in American highschools. As a foreigner, when I encountered how sports culture derives high school and, in continuation, college student mindset. In high school, athletes and cheerleaders pretty much rule. Every high school in all countries have popular, good looking kids but the the esteem these kids have in the US, I think, is unheard of in other places.
- tdfx 15y ago
  I don't really think it's limited to high school and college. The average Joe Sixpack American is likely more concerned with his nearest professional football team's performance than any other singular element of his life. I was born and raised in the northeast US, played sports in high school and college, but still have not come to terms with how obsessed most people seem to be with sports (both their kids' sports and professional sports). I did receive social benefits from sports for quite some time, but I was never able to understand it.
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hugh4life 15y ago
"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. " This is absolute complete nonsense... America does worse than Finland because America is racially diverse... and Finalnd is the most "bigoted" of all the Scandinavian countries. America's education system is just fine... actually it is excellant. Just look at the 2009 PISA scores. American Whites do better than all other "white countries" except for Finland. America Asians do better than all other Asian countries except for the elite part of China(Shanghai). American blacks do better than all other black countries. American Hispanics do better than all other Hispanic countries. http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize/images/James_Fulford/121910_ss001c.png http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize...
- brown9-2 15y ago
  Is this your idea of excellence? Every individual race in America scoring better than the "original" countries they came from dozens or hundreds of years ago? What about the disparity of scores between the races, or income levels, within America? Is this of no concern?
- deleted 15y ago
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ender7 15y ago
It's important to remember that the Finns implemented their new system for moral, rather than competitive reasons. Their resulting academic performance was a pleasant side-effect. This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over. I went to the best private high school in my state. Before that, I attended an elementary school whose tuition cost more than many people pay for a college education. My parents were by no means rich, but were willing to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on the education of their only child. I have also worked in schools of the other kind. The ones with metal detectors. The ones where the administration's main preoccupation is not which college their students will get into, but whether their students will graduate high school at all. Arguments that competition between schools and school systems is necessary in order to maintain academic quality do not impress me. The quality of a child's education should not be determined by how much money a parent is willing to or is capable of paying. I am quite willing to let children to be buffeted by the inequalities of capitalism in every other aspect of their lives (except, perhaps, healthcare), but our current system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral.
- wnewman 15y ago
  You write, in comparing "our" (presumably US) system to the Finns that our system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral. Are you saying that non-internationalist socialism is inherently moral while individual property rights and exchange are not? That morally speaking someone's education should not be determined by who their parents are, but should be determined by the nation to which their parents are subject? Would you like to give a hint why? The notion that individual economic rights are void while national economic rights are valid is delicious for people whose most valuable asset is their inherited citizenship or their power in nationalist institutions, so over the last century or so enormous effort has been expended in trying to justify this notion. However, the state of the art in such moral justifications does not impress me. Is there a particular justification that you are not embarrassed to be associated with? The old internationalist socialism was screwed up in various vital ways, but at least I can understand how an idealist could be attracted to it. In this particular policy question, I can see how an idealist would attracted to the idea of opening an educational program to everyone in the world. But you seem to see clear moral superiority in a system which is open only to those who inherited Finnish citizenship. As socialist ideas spread in practical politics, internationalist ideas were almost completely abandoned. (See e.g. how large transfer payments within nations are compared to how large foreign aid is, or how interested people are in Gini coefficients within nations compared to globally.) This doesn't stop modern noninternationalist socialists from regularly appealing to the old internationalist rhetoric for justification, but that's dishonest. (It's also circumstantial evidence for how weak the moral arguments for noninternalist socialism are, or more precisely, how the ones which aren't hopelessly weak tend to be strong enough to "justify" various of the horrors of the twentieth century, or various older nastiness like heriditary aristocracy or slavery. Classical liberalism and universalist socialism differ in whether "positive rights" and equality of outcome are better than ordinary negative rights and equality under the law, but justifications for both tend to appeal to a general idea of equal rights of all humans. To justify noninternationalist socialism of the usual heritable citizenship sort, you have to break that and find a way to justify hereditary privilege.) Note also that essentially all those moral arguments for national economic rights are subject to various classic moral questions against how to get individual economic rights quite right. E.g., it is a classic difficult question how to assign individual property rights initially in a morally satisfying way. This question doesn't get any easier when it comes to assigning property rights to individual noninternalist socialist nations in a morally satisfying way. (And to it is added the new question of how individual people are to be assigned to such nations in a morally satisfying way.) There are defensible practical justifications for the conclusion that individual people shouldn't have individual economic rights but that individual nations should, in particular the observation that strongly collectivist nations punched above their weight in some of the wars of the 20th century. (There are also arguments based on the supposed inefficiency of a free market, but those have fared so poorly in reality that most people no longer advance them, at least without couching them in calculated vagueness or doublespeak.) But you seem to be appealing not to some empirical practical justification, but to some abstract moral justification, and I am unable to guess which you might have in mind.
davekinkead 15y ago
There is actually a very strong structural argument for why public goods such as education and health, should be distributed equally: If those in power have to use the same system as those they hold power over, then they have a strong incentive and self interest to ensure that those public goods are of a high standard. This is not to say that public goods must be delivered by the state, but rather there should no difference in opportunity of access (such as the Finnish private schools that don't charge tuition).
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pg 15y ago
The article mentions another difference between the Finland and the US that is equally extreme and probably more directly related to results: "teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country"
- bhoung 15y ago
  Here's Singapore as another example. http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/how-singapore-developed-high-quality-teacher-workforce http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/how-singapor...
- brc 15y ago
  That is exactly what I thought when I read the article. Nobody seems to be mentioning the high status for teachers, high pay and selective intake. Given that the teachers interact with the students more than anything else, and most people would agree that better teachers produce better students, the chances of this making material impacts on the educational outcomes seems quite obvious to me at least. After all, we're just talking about a variation on the old 'pay peanuts get monkeys' meme. I'm sure if the average teaching salary doubled, the positions would be more sought after by young graduates. And if the positions were more sought after, there would be more competition and thus less problems with teacher performance.
  - GFischer 15y ago
    I remember it being mentioned the last time Finland's success was discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2917303 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2917303 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249852 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249852 (in an interview I linked): "Asked the key to success, (Finnish ambassador) Seppo Tunturi did not hesitate to answer: "The educator is highly appreciated by society. Young people see it as a profession with a future. "Statistics show that 10% of the top high school students choose this route. (Uruguayan university rector) Grünberg said this is a feature shared by other high quality educational systems, including South Korea, where teaching attracts 5% of the top high school graduates. "In other countries they would be brain surgeons or lawyers, but they are teachers or teachers in Finland," said the rector." "In addition, training is very demanding. It takes a college degree (4 years) and an Masters in education (2 years). In 2010, more than 6,600 applicants competed for 660 seats to prepare as primary school teachers." http://rigofa2011.blogdiario.com/1292241206/ http://rigofa2011.blogdiario.com/1292241206/ (in Spanish)
valgaze 15y ago
Sal from Khan Academy said it best: "I would make the US Education system more American (promoting creativity, ownership of learning, and independence) and less Prussian (moving together in an assembly line)."
icarus_drowning 15y ago
Regardless of whether you think it is moral to abolish private educational institutions, there's good reason to look at other aspects of the Finnish education model rather than this one single point. Finland does not use multiple choice exams and has literacy standards that are clear and simple. Contrast this to the U.S. model, where literacy standards are a byzantine mess, and are often completely disconnected from a student's inability to read and write. Mike Schmoker has addressed this in his excellent book Focus, where he writes: "[Finnish] success, according to observers, is a result of how much time students spend actually reading during the school day. They found one Finnish student who, upon returning from a year in U.S. schools, had to repeat an entire grade. This is because in the United States, instead of reading and writing, she and her fellow students spent their time preparing for multiple-choice tests or working on "projects" where students were instructed to do things like "glue this to this poster for an hour"..." I teach in a charter school. We have mandated standards requiring us to assign students X numbers of hours of reading/writing per semester. Students who leave our school and then re-enroll in later years are often entire grades behind, and have often not been assigned any writing or reading of any kind during their time in the "mainstream" public school district. I suppose my argument isn't so much that private schools are/aren't a good and moral thing, but rather that there are many far less controversial methods of improving the U.S. school system than abolishing private education.
jongraehl 15y ago
Maybe there's too much homework, too many hours in class, and not enough physical movement / play in U.S. education. And it's probably true that teachers at some especially bad schools have given up entirely. However, I got tired of reading U.S. educational-silver-bullet fantasy writing a long time ago.
ggwicz 15y ago
- No standardized tests (except one) - Individualized grading by teachers - Less homework and days of school - More emphasis on creative play - etc. No, I don't think "equality" is the main thing we Anericans are overlooking. We're overlooking freedom. Trust in people and children to be curious and learn, and let them be free enough to do it. So many of the big bureaucracies put in place here in the US to "help" education just legislate the shit out of schools and regulate everything. Yikes.
- ggwicz 15y ago
  And before I here anything about "Anerican" I'm using my phone so I can't go back and adjust the typo...
  - dasil003 15y ago
    I didn't even notice until you mentioned it. That said, what kind of phone are you using? If you were using a decent American phone rather than a crappy Finnish phone I bet you would be able to ;)
jshou 15y ago
Regarding the quote on Finnish not having a word for "accountability": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3678 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3678
- Dylan16807 15y ago
  Some of the comments on there make a good argument for the idea. Interesting.
floppydisk 15y ago
Out of curiosity, did the PISA study compare the level of parental involvement in a child's education between the countries? This NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-about-better-parents.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho... , article has a link to PISA conclusions about parental involvement from a 2009 study and shows that children with involved parents tend to do better academically. While we're dealing with complex cultural systems with thousands of moving parts, reforming the education system to improve parental involvement might yield significant gains. As it stands now, the system offers little to no incentive for parents to actively get involved with their kid's education. You place the kid(s) on the bus at 7 in the morning and don't see 'em again until 3-4pm or later if they do after school activities. No incentive to get involved at the school during the day or afterwards. As a personal anecdote, I've met several people who view public education as nothing more than day care, kids in at 7, free time until 4pm or later with no involvement outside of "mandatory" meetings.
dcrom 15y ago
What Americans are really ignoring is the idea that maybe someone can "hack" education for the better. Numbers and anecdotes aside, we all know in our guts a few things that are beneficial to education: studying more, decreased distractions, (parental) encouragement, high standards for technical subjects, and nurturing of creativity. Every parent wants these things for their children. The system in Finland has some of these things, but who cares why they have them? You could copy some aspect of Finland and hope you get Finland's results. You could copy some aspect of China and hope you get China's results. We are trying to have the government build a model to explain WHY China's students study more or to explain WHY Finnish students have less distractions in the classroom. Are you confident about the government's ability to model this? I'm not sure I'd trust the world's best statisticians to figure it out. The main point is that while everyone thinks they're an expert on how to get the above mentioned qualities into a school, simply finding a school that has them and then sending your child to it is a REALLY, REALLY easy way to get your child a good education. However, under the current system, you are discouraged from sending your child to said school. Suppose your friend used a government chalkboard for a relational database. He's really upset about its performance. He hears about Oracle's fast databases, so he adds an index etc to his chalkboard, since queries with an index are faster. Maybe his chalkboard will catch up, and maybe it won't. MySQL is down the street offering what he really wants (a cheap, fast database) but he doesn't want to use it. He's worried that using MySQL will cause a decline in the quality of the chalkboards and leave all his neighbors with a piece of cardboard instead. He would rather spend his time mimicking Oracle until his chalkboard gets fast, and trying to figure out WHY Oracle is fast. Shouldn't he just let the innovative minds behind MySQL sell (or give away) what they've built, and just know that their product has all of the features he wants? If it doesn't have what he wants, then he can use his chalkboard. Are we all really afraid of that? An educational process is technology too, even if it's not software. This community is in love with software that solves problems, but is very cautious of schools that can solve problems.
jks 15y ago
One thing that many commentators seem to ignore is what exactly the PISA tests measure. For example, the PISA math problems (http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf) are very specifically meant to assess how well students can solve pretty easy problems that could occur in their lives and where basic math literacy is needed, and the PISA exam is given to a random sample of all students. Contrast this with the International Mathematical Olympiad (results at http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN) which measures how well the very best students do on very hard problems. It should not be surprising that an education system emphasizing social equality instead of individual excellence performs well when you measure how well the average student does on an easy problem. It just shows that Finland's and PISA's values align well with each other.
yason 15y ago
Here's more to cross unknown factors out: a very interesting article on how the Finnish language itself affects schooling and has significance in PISA results. Finland and Estonia share similar lingual roots and they both rank relatively great, even if Estonia is a lot poorer country than Finland. Yet, the Swedish speaking people in Finland fare relatively worse than Finnish speaking people, even if the schooling system is exactly the same. http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/ http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
This is my quote of the day: > Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.
jiggy2011 15y ago
I think that in the UK our school system's failure to set a standard of consistently adequate reading and writing skills for school leavers is a partial cause of many of our problems. I would estimate that close to 50% of our population are functionally illiterate , by that I mean they are unable to put something into written (or typed) words that can be easily parsed by the human brain with a non ambiguous meaning. Look at the comments section of any British tabloid website for evidence of this. This then causes employers to make a university degree a pre-requisite for many jobs that may not actually require one. If somebody has been able to pass a degree course which requires essay writing then they are probably able to send a professional email without looking like an idiot. This then causes the government to create targets like "50% of Britains should attend university" which of course feeds a spiral of debt that may not have needed to exist if the standard of secondary education was high enough. Personally I learned to read and write mainly by reading fiction books and computer manuals followed by writing text based games (added bonus of learning BASIC and C). I think many things are best learned not by directly focusing on them but by creating paths of learning that subconsciously teach "supporting" skills.

278 points by dirtyaura 15y ago

Previous submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988

Oh the Irony..... You lost me on the quote above the picture: "The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."

TomOfTTB 15y ago
I could see how that line would tempt people to check-out of the article (and I can't blame you). But I think there's a reality to it we should pay attention to. In a previous HN thread regarding this topic I asked why countries like Finland haven't overtaken the U.S. as far as success. Given their education system has been touted as dramatically better than ours for at least 20 years. One of the replies I got was that these countries generate more well-rounded individuals and that's why these countries tend to do better on happiness surveys and such. And maybe that's true. Maybe it's time to accept the reality that not all people want the same thing. That Americans have been taught to strive for excellence and that inevitably leaves others behind. While Finland values equality over all and is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of societal wealth so as to not have kids who think they need to work day and night to succeed.
- droithomme 15y ago
  Finland's entire population is 5.36 million, close to the population of Minnesota and a bit more than half of Los Angeles county's population of 9.86 million. Finland does have a lot of inventions and technology they export. For example, the majority of web servers in existence in the world, underlying the entire world economy run an operating system originally created by a Finn. Nokia was also a major player and innovator in cell phone and one of the first truly widespread portable information managers. Minnesota has 3M corporation of course. Comparing Finland to the US is not a reasonable comparison. Comparing Finland to Minnesota might be justifiable though.
  - johnnyjustice 15y ago
    Would it be almost fair to compare the EU to the United States?
    - droithomme 15y ago
      That's a more reasonable comparison, sure. I'm not finding exact numbers on aggregate european population but seems to be between 731 and 857 million, about 2.5-3 times that of the US.
      - Zirro 15y ago
        That doesn't make it a fair comparison though, given the massive differences in economics of European countries (to mention one thing).
  - TomOfTTB 15y ago
    You discredit your point with your examples. It doesn't take a huge population to create most of the world's success. The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S. Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.
    - Eeko 15y ago
      > The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S. Not yet. Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can. Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement. And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0 http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0) > Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation. Not yet. The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy. Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)

skylan_q 15y ago

How about "because it's full of Finns"?

yummyfajitas 15y ago

The article claims Finland focuses on equality, and that immigration hasn't had much effect on aggregate education outcomes yet. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period. This is only because there are still very few immigrants in Finland. In actuality, immigrants to Finland score about 50 points lower on Pisa than Finnish natives (about double the gap in the US). (For comparison, the gap between Americans of European descent and non-immigrant Finns in Pisa scores is 22 pts, and the gap between European Americans and Greeks (the lowest performing European nation) is 46 pts. ) http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

fdschoeneman 15y ago
Excellent observation. The Pisa study data shows one conclusion about education in America: Different racial groups perform at different levels. We are succeeding with some minority groups and failing with others. Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland. Where we are failing is in educating our African American kids. The entire article relies on people not reading the data from the Pisa study, and for those who have read the data to ignore what it shows, from some misplaced desire not to seem racist.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland. No. You should read the blog post I linked to. American whites scores 524 (tied with Belgium for #6-#7 in the white world), Finland is #1 at 546. Immigrants in both the US and Finland score roughly the same, about 500 pts. Finland has a larger gap, since their non-immigrants score considerably higher. Make no mistake - the inequality is caused by Finns scoring very high, not by their immigrants scoring very low.
  - fdschoeneman 15y ago
    You're right, I interpolated "finns" for "Western Europeans," which is what was said in the first paragraph of the link you chastised me for not reading: "American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students." The article you linked goes on to clarify: "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." The correct comparison is European ancestry to European ancestry, excluding first and second generation, not "American whites" vs. Finns. In any case, I've seen this study pop up for a while now, and more recently on facebook a lot of my friends have been linking The Atlantic's piece.

RandallBrown 15y ago

Are other countries really doing that much better than the United States? It seems like most of the worlds top Universities are in the US and filled with students mostly from, the US. Sure, they may score better on the tests for comparing students across the world, but it seems like the same people saying this are the same ones complaining about standardized testing in the US.

BerislavLopac 15y ago
They are top universities in only two aspects: they provide connections and -- particularly some, like Harvard and Stanford -- the ecosystem for making success later in life. In terms of pure education, most US universities are far below many others elsewhere.
- impendia 15y ago
  I did a three-year postdoc in math at Stanford. I was blown away by just how good the senior faculty were in their research areas, and how successful they were in motivating, challenging, inspiring, and guiding (in short: educating) students.
- spamizbad 15y ago
  > In terms of pure education, most US universities are far below many others elsewhere. Is there any empirical evidence supporting this assertion? If you look at Business School rankings, for example, US Universities are 5 of the top 10. Source: http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-rankings-2011 http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-ran... Quacquarelli Symonds University Rankings also have US Universities rated quite high http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni... 7 of the top 10 for CS are US: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/engineering/computer-science http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni... 6 of the top 10 for Medicine: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/life-sciences/medicine http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni... 6 of the top 10 for Philosophy: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/arts-humanities/philosophy http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

27182818284 15y ago

Whenever a successful act is presented to Americans they tend to throw out the same generic defense we used to see on technology forums all the time: "That's good for them, but that won't scale for us!"

tokenadult 15y ago

I'll have to check the published literature for what it says about reading instruction in Finnish. Finland has a minority of native speakers of Swedish (not a closely cognate language). Finnish (Suomi) and Swedish are co-official as national languages in Finland. http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/finland-country-profile.html http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/f... Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm The late John DeFrancis http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077 http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co... and current researcher and author Stanislas Dehaene http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143118056/ http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143... develop historical and international comparisons, backed up by brain imaging in Dehaene's book, to make the argument that initial reading instruction should at its best focus students' attention to sound-symbol correspondences in the written language taught in primary reading instruction. But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way, http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html http://www.mackinac.org/5365 http://www.mackinac.org/5365 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/ and when school pupils in English-speaking countries struggle to learn to read independently, they are also likely to struggle to learn other subjects thoroughly. The best current information I have suggests that initial reading instruction in Finland, whether in Finnish or in Swedish, is better done than much reading instruction in the English-speaking world, and that advantage may account for much of the national advantage Finland enjoys (and partially explain why immigrant families who use Finnish as a second language are the bottom group found in national-level sample testing of Finland for international surveys).

notahacker 15y ago
I agree that there's probably some credibility to arguments that English students underperform because of difficulties in learning to read an unusually inconsistent written language. That said, Finns themselves tend to learn speak and read English rather well as a second language by the time they leave school; a practical necessity for international business or travel but not very easy considering the lack of cognates shared between the languages. And despite its consistent orthography Finnish has enough other sources of complexity to be rated as a fiendishly difficult language to pick up as a second language. On the subject of phonics, it sounds like UK primary education is due to head in the opposite direction to US with compulsory phonics instruction for youngsters, including the hugely controversial recommendation for standardised tests on the ability to pronounce made-up words. I doubt we'll be overtaking Finland any time soon though.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

Assuming there's something here, which is a bit of a stretch for me, let's ask the obvious question: where else has this been tried? Did it work? Better still, how do we know we're being equal enough? This is not Marxist by any means, but I have to use Marxism as an example. The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough. In the examples where it does work, there's always some special attribute or thing that causes it to, like a very small sample size. Yes it works in some cases and at some scale, but it never really works in a practical way. It's just a cluster of feelings about fairness in search of an practical application. This is, by definition, a "loose analogy". Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we? I love Finland, and I admire the Fins I've worked with. But I think we can play this game of "If we were only like Europe" only so much without actually having to apply some critical thinking skills. We are not like Europe -- as much as we'd like to be. I've been reading articles that claim we can improve various parts of society if we were only like some European country my entire life. If I didn't know better, I'd think a lot of academics spend time in Europe and become Europhiles the rest of their lives, much to the rest of our detriment. Seems like no matter how hard we try at these things, we can never be like European country X. There's probably a good reason for that. My best guess is that this has something to do with culture, but I'm not sure. If you want a country of Fins, perhaps you should consider moving to Finland? So yes, maybe there's something here, but I have no idea what it is. Does the author suggest outlawing private schools? Perhaps indoctrinating our national culture with pithy slogans like "accountability is what's left when you take responsibility away"? Tighter control over immigration so the culture is more cohesive? Greater oil revenues? Decrease our population to 1/70th of its current size? More alcohol consumption? What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?

eru 15y ago
> What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is? The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.
- 15y ago

aiscott 15y ago

Personally, I think this one sentence from the article has a lot to do with why US schools are less than good: [In Finland] "If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it." In the US, if a teacher is bad and the school is public, not much can be done. They certainly won't be fired. Private schools, on the other hand, have more freedom in this regard. I think the article made a lot of good points regarding creative play and avoidance of heavy standardized testing.

rmc 15y ago
If you think the public sector is bad in the USA, it's nothing like the EU. Y'know the way all EU workers have employment benefits that put USA workers to shame? Well EU public sector workers have employment benefits that put private sector EU workers to shame.
nosse 15y ago
It's really difficult to fire a teacher in Finland too. Practically impossible if the teacher in question doesn't do violence to kids or come to work drunk.
- rapala 15y ago
  It is not easy to lay off a public servant in Finland, but I think it is mainly so because of the procedure required. Several written warnings need be given that state the reason in plain text. Too often it just takes too much balls from the principal to write down "n. n. does not perform his/hers duties as a teacher in the required way because: ...". And a public servant can be fired because of inappropriate behavior in his/hers free time.
DasIch 15y ago
In Germany a teacher, like most people working in the public sector, cannot be fired. You are either stuck with them or you promote them so that someone else has to deal with them.

MaxGabriel 15y ago

I can't find it, but there was a great post on HN awhile back about how Finland doesn't really know what makes its schools so successful. Thus, articles like this pull some facet out of the hat as the key differentiator. There was a good comment, suggesting that instead of modeling who has the highest test scores, instead model who is most successful at climbing the ranks of PISA. That's probably a better way of figuring out what contributes to success, because there are fewer independent variables.

hack_edu 15y ago

Has anyone here had any experience hiring or working with grads of Finnish schools? How about Master's/PhD level grads? I'm curious how an employer or co-worker would view the quality of their school's end product.

bergie 15y ago
I employ a few Finns, but also lack the comparison to other cultures to be able to tell. An interesting factor is that most Finnish men have also been through military service sometime after high school.
- Ironballs 15y ago
  Yes. Military service is compulsory in Finland. About 80% of males undergo military service. The rest is either exempt for various reasons (medical) or opt for a "civil" service in which one is essentially employed somewhere for 12 months with pay coming from the government. As 80% is quite a high number, most is indeed correct here. Thus you will find that regardless of one's education or background, it is safe to assume he also has military training. (Myself, a Finn, I have a Master of Science in mathematics and also a 2nd lieutenant in the Finnish Air Force.)

swaits 15y ago

The author ignores the power and idiocy of public unions in public education. Anyone interested in this topic should really watch the movie "Waiting for Superman".

Cadsby 15y ago
All teachers in Finland are unionized.
- swaits 15y ago
  Have you seen "Waiting for Superman"? Is what you saw in that documentary the same in Finland?

Jun8 15y ago

One interesting thing about student performance in the US is that on the average it's not that bad early on (e.g. in grade school) but then takes a sharp dive. It is amazing to me what such comparison articles do not take into account: the toxic, sports-based culture in American highschools. As a foreigner, when I encountered how sports culture derives high school and, in continuation, college student mindset. In high school, athletes and cheerleaders pretty much rule. Every high school in all countries have popular, good looking kids but the the esteem these kids have in the US, I think, is unheard of in other places.

tdfx 15y ago
I don't really think it's limited to high school and college. The average Joe Sixpack American is likely more concerned with his nearest professional football team's performance than any other singular element of his life. I was born and raised in the northeast US, played sports in high school and college, but still have not come to terms with how obsessed most people seem to be with sports (both their kids' sports and professional sports). I did receive social benefits from sports for quite some time, but I was never able to understand it.

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hugh4life 15y ago

"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. " This is absolute complete nonsense... America does worse than Finland because America is racially diverse... and Finalnd is the most "bigoted" of all the Scandinavian countries. America's education system is just fine... actually it is excellant. Just look at the 2009 PISA scores. American Whites do better than all other "white countries" except for Finland. America Asians do better than all other Asian countries except for the elite part of China(Shanghai). American blacks do better than all other black countries. American Hispanics do better than all other Hispanic countries. http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize/images/James_Fulford/121910_ss001c.png http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize...

brown9-2 15y ago
Is this your idea of excellence? Every individual race in America scoring better than the "original" countries they came from dozens or hundreds of years ago? What about the disparity of scores between the races, or income levels, within America? Is this of no concern?
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ender7 15y ago

It's important to remember that the Finns implemented their new system for moral, rather than competitive reasons. Their resulting academic performance was a pleasant side-effect. This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over. I went to the best private high school in my state. Before that, I attended an elementary school whose tuition cost more than many people pay for a college education. My parents were by no means rich, but were willing to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on the education of their only child. I have also worked in schools of the other kind. The ones with metal detectors. The ones where the administration's main preoccupation is not which college their students will get into, but whether their students will graduate high school at all. Arguments that competition between schools and school systems is necessary in order to maintain academic quality do not impress me. The quality of a child's education should not be determined by how much money a parent is willing to or is capable of paying. I am quite willing to let children to be buffeted by the inequalities of capitalism in every other aspect of their lives (except, perhaps, healthcare), but our current system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral.

wnewman 15y ago
You write, in comparing "our" (presumably US) system to the Finns that our system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral. Are you saying that non-internationalist socialism is inherently moral while individual property rights and exchange are not? That morally speaking someone's education should not be determined by who their parents are, but should be determined by the nation to which their parents are subject? Would you like to give a hint why? The notion that individual economic rights are void while national economic rights are valid is delicious for people whose most valuable asset is their inherited citizenship or their power in nationalist institutions, so over the last century or so enormous effort has been expended in trying to justify this notion. However, the state of the art in such moral justifications does not impress me. Is there a particular justification that you are not embarrassed to be associated with? The old internationalist socialism was screwed up in various vital ways, but at least I can understand how an idealist could be attracted to it. In this particular policy question, I can see how an idealist would attracted to the idea of opening an educational program to everyone in the world. But you seem to see clear moral superiority in a system which is open only to those who inherited Finnish citizenship. As socialist ideas spread in practical politics, internationalist ideas were almost completely abandoned. (See e.g. how large transfer payments within nations are compared to how large foreign aid is, or how interested people are in Gini coefficients within nations compared to globally.) This doesn't stop modern noninternationalist socialists from regularly appealing to the old internationalist rhetoric for justification, but that's dishonest. (It's also circumstantial evidence for how weak the moral arguments for noninternalist socialism are, or more precisely, how the ones which aren't hopelessly weak tend to be strong enough to "justify" various of the horrors of the twentieth century, or various older nastiness like heriditary aristocracy or slavery. Classical liberalism and universalist socialism differ in whether "positive rights" and equality of outcome are better than ordinary negative rights and equality under the law, but justifications for both tend to appeal to a general idea of equal rights of all humans. To justify noninternationalist socialism of the usual heritable citizenship sort, you have to break that and find a way to justify hereditary privilege.) Note also that essentially all those moral arguments for national economic rights are subject to various classic moral questions against how to get individual economic rights quite right. E.g., it is a classic difficult question how to assign individual property rights initially in a morally satisfying way. This question doesn't get any easier when it comes to assigning property rights to individual noninternalist socialist nations in a morally satisfying way. (And to it is added the new question of how individual people are to be assigned to such nations in a morally satisfying way.) There are defensible practical justifications for the conclusion that individual people shouldn't have individual economic rights but that individual nations should, in particular the observation that strongly collectivist nations punched above their weight in some of the wars of the 20th century. (There are also arguments based on the supposed inefficiency of a free market, but those have fared so poorly in reality that most people no longer advance them, at least without couching them in calculated vagueness or doublespeak.) But you seem to be appealing not to some empirical practical justification, but to some abstract moral justification, and I am unable to guess which you might have in mind.

davekinkead 15y ago

There is actually a very strong structural argument for why public goods such as education and health, should be distributed equally: If those in power have to use the same system as those they hold power over, then they have a strong incentive and self interest to ensure that those public goods are of a high standard. This is not to say that public goods must be delivered by the state, but rather there should no difference in opportunity of access (such as the Finnish private schools that don't charge tuition).

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pg 15y ago

The article mentions another difference between the Finland and the US that is equally extreme and probably more directly related to results: "teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country"

bhoung 15y ago
Here's Singapore as another example. http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/how-singapore-developed-high-quality-teacher-workforce http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/how-singapor...
brc 15y ago
That is exactly what I thought when I read the article. Nobody seems to be mentioning the high status for teachers, high pay and selective intake. Given that the teachers interact with the students more than anything else, and most people would agree that better teachers produce better students, the chances of this making material impacts on the educational outcomes seems quite obvious to me at least. After all, we're just talking about a variation on the old 'pay peanuts get monkeys' meme. I'm sure if the average teaching salary doubled, the positions would be more sought after by young graduates. And if the positions were more sought after, there would be more competition and thus less problems with teacher performance.
- GFischer 15y ago
  I remember it being mentioned the last time Finland's success was discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2917303 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2917303 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249852 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249852 (in an interview I linked): "Asked the key to success, (Finnish ambassador) Seppo Tunturi did not hesitate to answer: "The educator is highly appreciated by society. Young people see it as a profession with a future. "Statistics show that 10% of the top high school students choose this route. (Uruguayan university rector) Grünberg said this is a feature shared by other high quality educational systems, including South Korea, where teaching attracts 5% of the top high school graduates. "In other countries they would be brain surgeons or lawyers, but they are teachers or teachers in Finland," said the rector." "In addition, training is very demanding. It takes a college degree (4 years) and an Masters in education (2 years). In 2010, more than 6,600 applicants competed for 660 seats to prepare as primary school teachers." http://rigofa2011.blogdiario.com/1292241206/ http://rigofa2011.blogdiario.com/1292241206/ (in Spanish)

valgaze 15y ago

Sal from Khan Academy said it best: "I would make the US Education system more American (promoting creativity, ownership of learning, and independence) and less Prussian (moving together in an assembly line)."

icarus_drowning 15y ago

Regardless of whether you think it is moral to abolish private educational institutions, there's good reason to look at other aspects of the Finnish education model rather than this one single point. Finland does not use multiple choice exams and has literacy standards that are clear and simple. Contrast this to the U.S. model, where literacy standards are a byzantine mess, and are often completely disconnected from a student's inability to read and write. Mike Schmoker has addressed this in his excellent book Focus, where he writes: "[Finnish] success, according to observers, is a result of how much time students spend actually reading during the school day. They found one Finnish student who, upon returning from a year in U.S. schools, had to repeat an entire grade. This is because in the United States, instead of reading and writing, she and her fellow students spent their time preparing for multiple-choice tests or working on "projects" where students were instructed to do things like "glue this to this poster for an hour"..." I teach in a charter school. We have mandated standards requiring us to assign students X numbers of hours of reading/writing per semester. Students who leave our school and then re-enroll in later years are often entire grades behind, and have often not been assigned any writing or reading of any kind during their time in the "mainstream" public school district. I suppose my argument isn't so much that private schools are/aren't a good and moral thing, but rather that there are many far less controversial methods of improving the U.S. school system than abolishing private education.

jongraehl 15y ago

Maybe there's too much homework, too many hours in class, and not enough physical movement / play in U.S. education. And it's probably true that teachers at some especially bad schools have given up entirely. However, I got tired of reading U.S. educational-silver-bullet fantasy writing a long time ago.

ggwicz 15y ago

- No standardized tests (except one) - Individualized grading by teachers - Less homework and days of school - More emphasis on creative play - etc. No, I don't think "equality" is the main thing we Anericans are overlooking. We're overlooking freedom. Trust in people and children to be curious and learn, and let them be free enough to do it. So many of the big bureaucracies put in place here in the US to "help" education just legislate the shit out of schools and regulate everything. Yikes.

ggwicz 15y ago
And before I here anything about "Anerican" I'm using my phone so I can't go back and adjust the typo...
- dasil003 15y ago
  I didn't even notice until you mentioned it. That said, what kind of phone are you using? If you were using a decent American phone rather than a crappy Finnish phone I bet you would be able to ;)

jshou 15y ago

Regarding the quote on Finnish not having a word for "accountability": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3678 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3678

Dylan16807 15y ago
Some of the comments on there make a good argument for the idea. Interesting.

floppydisk 15y ago

Out of curiosity, did the PISA study compare the level of parental involvement in a child's education between the countries? This NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-about-better-parents.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho... , article has a link to PISA conclusions about parental involvement from a 2009 study and shows that children with involved parents tend to do better academically. While we're dealing with complex cultural systems with thousands of moving parts, reforming the education system to improve parental involvement might yield significant gains. As it stands now, the system offers little to no incentive for parents to actively get involved with their kid's education. You place the kid(s) on the bus at 7 in the morning and don't see 'em again until 3-4pm or later if they do after school activities. No incentive to get involved at the school during the day or afterwards. As a personal anecdote, I've met several people who view public education as nothing more than day care, kids in at 7, free time until 4pm or later with no involvement outside of "mandatory" meetings.

dcrom 15y ago

What Americans are really ignoring is the idea that maybe someone can "hack" education for the better. Numbers and anecdotes aside, we all know in our guts a few things that are beneficial to education: studying more, decreased distractions, (parental) encouragement, high standards for technical subjects, and nurturing of creativity. Every parent wants these things for their children. The system in Finland has some of these things, but who cares why they have them? You could copy some aspect of Finland and hope you get Finland's results. You could copy some aspect of China and hope you get China's results. We are trying to have the government build a model to explain WHY China's students study more or to explain WHY Finnish students have less distractions in the classroom. Are you confident about the government's ability to model this? I'm not sure I'd trust the world's best statisticians to figure it out. The main point is that while everyone thinks they're an expert on how to get the above mentioned qualities into a school, simply finding a school that has them and then sending your child to it is a REALLY, REALLY easy way to get your child a good education. However, under the current system, you are discouraged from sending your child to said school. Suppose your friend used a government chalkboard for a relational database. He's really upset about its performance. He hears about Oracle's fast databases, so he adds an index etc to his chalkboard, since queries with an index are faster. Maybe his chalkboard will catch up, and maybe it won't. MySQL is down the street offering what he really wants (a cheap, fast database) but he doesn't want to use it. He's worried that using MySQL will cause a decline in the quality of the chalkboards and leave all his neighbors with a piece of cardboard instead. He would rather spend his time mimicking Oracle until his chalkboard gets fast, and trying to figure out WHY Oracle is fast. Shouldn't he just let the innovative minds behind MySQL sell (or give away) what they've built, and just know that their product has all of the features he wants? If it doesn't have what he wants, then he can use his chalkboard. Are we all really afraid of that? An educational process is technology too, even if it's not software. This community is in love with software that solves problems, but is very cautious of schools that can solve problems.

jks 15y ago

One thing that many commentators seem to ignore is what exactly the PISA tests measure. For example, the PISA math problems (http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf) are very specifically meant to assess how well students can solve pretty easy problems that could occur in their lives and where basic math literacy is needed, and the PISA exam is given to a random sample of all students. Contrast this with the International Mathematical Olympiad (results at http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN) which measures how well the very best students do on very hard problems. It should not be surprising that an education system emphasizing social equality instead of individual excellence performs well when you measure how well the average student does on an easy problem. It just shows that Finland's and PISA's values align well with each other.

yason 15y ago

Here's more to cross unknown factors out: a very interesting article on how the Finnish language itself affects schooling and has significance in PISA results. Finland and Estonia share similar lingual roots and they both rank relatively great, even if Estonia is a lot poorer country than Finland. Yet, the Swedish speaking people in Finland fare relatively worse than Finnish speaking people, even if the schooling system is exactly the same. http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/ http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

This is my quote of the day: > Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.

jiggy2011 15y ago

I think that in the UK our school system's failure to set a standard of consistently adequate reading and writing skills for school leavers is a partial cause of many of our problems. I would estimate that close to 50% of our population are functionally illiterate , by that I mean they are unable to put something into written (or typed) words that can be easily parsed by the human brain with a non ambiguous meaning. Look at the comments section of any British tabloid website for evidence of this. This then causes employers to make a university degree a pre-requisite for many jobs that may not actually require one. If somebody has been able to pass a degree course which requires essay writing then they are probably able to send a professional email without looking like an idiot. This then causes the government to create targets like "50% of Britains should attend university" which of course feeds a spiral of debt that may not have needed to exist if the standard of secondary education was high enough. Personally I learned to read and write mainly by reading fiction books and computer manuals followed by writing text based games (added bonus of learning BASIC and C). I think many things are best learned not by directly focusing on them but by creating paths of learning that subconsciously teach "supporting" skills.