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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,

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.
- niklasl 15y ago
  > The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try. That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).
  - tuukkah 15y ago
    By that argument, everything is bound to fail because there are a thousand variables in a society and a school system. And yet another sidetrack not based on facts to add to my list: * No, Finland's schools are not more disciplinarian than elsewhere. The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation: watching TV and hanging out with friends etc. is more fun than studying and everybody gets a good education for free anyway. And no, the rest of Europe definitely doesn't match Finland in equality (income equality, gender equality, whatever you mean), let alone their schools doing that.
    - eru 15y ago
      Interestingly, the German state of Saxonia does nearly as well as Finland in the PISA tests.
      - tuukkah 15y ago
        No-one is claiming the Finnish system is the only way to get high PISA scores. Although, the PISA scores aren't the thing to strive for anyway. How about a school system that is relatively cheap, comparatively equal, produces great learning results as measured by multiple studies, takes up relatively little of the students' time etc.? I don't think Finland is trying to force it on anyone but it could give some people ideas about what's allegedly "just not possible" and what to possibly concentrate on. The success of Saxonia can be another interesting data point along Finland, Singapore, Japan etc.
Tycho 15y ago
Another thing usually missing in comparisons with European countries is that all of Europe benefits from America inventing/pioneering so much stuff that they can adopt.
- Eeko 15y ago
  Yeah. It's super ironic to read all the "these socialist solutions of small nations can't scale for big US". And then from the other side "this silly anarchistic free-trade capitalistic solution can't scale for mighty China." I thought Europeans had the "not-invented-here" syndrome.
- macco 15y ago
  Two questions: 1. What has this to do with education? 2. Doesn't America benefits from European / (or Asian, etc) innovations?
  - Tycho 15y ago
    1. Nothing much (you could bring up eLearning and multimedia learning aids, I guess), it was tangentially related to the meta-topic of articles which compare European successes and American failures (usually in the domain of 'social programs') 2. Yes, but America innovates far more. A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention. Put bluntly, we all get a free ride off America's investment in R&D. Just something to keep in mind when you think about 'changing the system' or even just measuring it.
    - bergie 15y ago
      A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention At least before February 11th that wasn't true. While the first-ever cell phone may have been built in the US, Nokia has contributed quite a bit to how modern phones work. You may remember Apple for instance paying patent royalties on 3G tech to them. USA puts more money to R&D than anybody else, but it isn't like the rest of the world is just stealing innovation.
    - notahacker 15y ago
jordanb 15y ago
I think the crux of your argument is that there's a danger in isolating any part of one culture and trying to compare it to another. I completely agree. A culture is a highly complex set of interactions and taking one piece of it and trying to isolate it in a lab, as it were, is pretty difficult. I think you're being unfair to "academics" though by accusing them "europhilia" (in fact, the author of this article is a Finnish journalist living in the US). I think Europe is an attractive place to look for comparisons because there are so many countries there that it's easy to find a lot of contrast. And the cultures there do have more in common with ours than those in other parts of the world. But it's not like these sorts of comparison are made exclusively with Europe. In fact, it seems as if there have been a deluge of comparisons made in recent years between Asian (and especially Chinese) education and that in the US; with the conclusion being that US students aren't challenged or judged harshly enough and therefore are far behind their Chinese counterparts in STEM. If anything this article seems to be written as a response to those people making comparisons with China: demonstrating a system that seems to be excelling with less rather than more standardization.
- brc 15y ago
  This is my point. Finland is a much more socialist country than just about anywhere else, as most Scandinavian countries are. They (as a society) have already agreed to much higher income taxes, plus completely nationalised healthcare, transport and many other industries. I don't mention this to say whether Finland is right or wrong in these respects - it's a democracy so I support their decisions in any case. However, it would be foolish to say that a model of nationalised education in a country where a lot of other things are state-provided can necessarily be exported to a country where things are much-less state provided. To me, there is too much focus on the school part of the education - education is clearly the output of parenting, societal attitudes as well as the school curriculum and teaching methods. Schools aren't an island - they live in a national culture, economy and even geography. You can't just import a different teaching style into a society that may value education differently (eg is being a truant a taboo thing to do, or something that is secretly valued in an anti-hero way) and expect to get the same results. Even the amount of time parents spend with their children will have a different result. The best outcome to take from Finland is that there are many different ways to Educational outcomes - probably the most important is that the best fit between national culture and resources should be explored. Perhaps the national (or state?) culture needs to be slowly changed before the educational system can follow. Perhaps the idea that Federal input of education into 50 different states is a bad idea. There are many things to look at.
arkx 15y ago
Is public school teacher a desireable profession in the US? Is it anywhere near the level of prestige associated with lawyers or doctors? How is the pay? This is one of they key differences that's repeated in nearly every one of the numerous articles I've read about the Finnish school system, and it's the one single thing US really could do a lot about.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Teachers are government employees, unionized no less. That is to a great many Americans a double whammy. The relationship between Americans and their government has always been -- and will always be -- adversarial.
- drumdance 15y ago
  Teachers are held in high regard in China too.
- afterburner 15y ago
  US teachers get crap pay.
  - learc83 15y ago
    That is a myth. You may believe they should be paid more, but when you account for the amount of hours the work and benefits their total compensation is very competitive with private sector jobs that require similar levels of education.
    - afterburner 15y ago
      "Account for"? The pay reflects the requirements. I never claimed crap pay was a cause. But it is clear it demonstrates that the American system does not prioritize quality in teaching positions.
      - learc83 15y ago
        >"Account for"? Yes teachers work around 190 days per year and in my area (metro Atlanta), they start off at $40k+ and around $50k with a Masters degree. They are guaranteed raises so that they can easily get up to $60k (in today's money--more if they have graduate degree) by the time they retire, and after 30 years they can retire with 60% pay (most of them can retire in their very early 50s instead of 60+ like the rest of us). They get more time off than nearly any other profession. Based on salary alone the average teacher makes 57% more than the overall state average salary, and when you add in their benefits package it goes up even higher. With cost of living in my area that is definitely not "crap" pay.
scrod 15y ago
>The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough. You see, that's funny, because a much more obvious example can be found in free-market austrian-school economic policies.
- bjcy 15y ago
  I'm not terribly familiar with free market Austrian-school economics, could you expound on what you mean?
  - scrod 15y ago
    It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek. Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273 http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.
    - magoghm 15y ago
      The book seems interesting. But Neoliberal economists, even though they talk a lot about free markets, have a very different world view than that of Austrian economists. One example: Neoliberals promote treaties like NAFTA that allow the free flow of goods and capital between countries, but don't allow the free flow of people between countries.On the other hand, Austrian economists would insist on the importance of also letting people choose were they want to live and work. Furthermore, despite its name, NAFTA is not really about free trade. NAFTA is a huge set of regulations.
      - scrod 15y ago
        Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward. Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".
jonnathanson 15y ago
Not to mention demographics. Most of these studies pretty much overlook that dimension entirely, and it's usually the most critical. In the case of Finland, we're looking at a country with a total population of 5.4 million people, 92% of which share the same native language and ethnic background. By comparison, the USA has 313 million people and a heck of a lot more diversity of income, class, race, ethnicity, linguistic background, country of origin, etc. It's also got a much higher variance in population density per city, state, region, etc. If ever there were a case of comparing apples to oranges, this would be it. There are vanishingly few analogs between the two countries on almost any dimension, and most of the education statistics I've seen over the years have not been weighted accordingly. I'd be much more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons. How does Finland perform against countries like Finland? How does the US perform against similar countries (of which there probably aren't many)? Even comparing the US to a country like China is problematic, given that only the top some-single-digit percent of Chinese children take these tests in the first place.
- bellaire 15y ago
  The article specifically describes a comparison of Finland with Norway, similiar in size and ethnic composition. Apples-to-apples, as you say. Norway's education policy is much more similar to the US, and Norway's PISA results are mediocre, also similar to the US.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Actually, after controlling for ethnic composition, the US and Norway are not similar. In fact the US outperforms Norway by roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
    - CPlatypus 15y ago
      Your "authority" is crap. The original article explicitly compared Finland not only with Norway but with individual US states that had similar population and percentage of immigrants. That's about as apples to apples as you can get, considering that US schools are primarily subject to state rather than federal guidelines, and Finland still came out ahead. By way of supposed refutation, you present a source that is full of strong claims substantiated by little more than the most blatant cherry-picking. The author's "correcting for demography" is no more than throwing out the data he doesn't like. Ignoring the fact that the immigrant factor has already been examined, he pulls tricks like comparing second- and third-generation immigrants in Finland to native Swedes. Notice how the obvious comparison between native Finns and native Swedes isn't made, because it wouldn't support his conclusions. Then he goes on to say "In the case of America, 99% of the population originates from other countries" and suggests that we compare such loosely-defined American immigrants to people in their home countries - without regard for such things as economic differences between the countries. After arbitrarily excluding Asians because they pull the results up, Hispanics because they pull the results down, and undeclareds for no methodologically sound (or even fully explained) reason, he comes up with a highly suspect graph purportedly showing how the US "beats" most of Europe. Here's the kicker: even after cooking the data that much, Finland still comes out well ahead of the US. No matter how hard he tries, he still can't manage to reverse the original conclusion. In the end, citing that does more to discredit your position than to support it.
vasco 15y ago
Being from an European country myself I find it ever so amusing that all my life I've been hearing that "If we were only like the USA" in some regards. Ironic isn't it?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  The grass is always greener.
  - brazzy 15y ago
    But that's because they use more manure over there.
jules 15y ago
An interesting TED talk on the more general effects of equality that talks about many of the issues you raise. It is titled "How economic inequality harms societies" [1] (link below). Looks at correlations between income inequality (defined as the average income of the top 20% / average income of the bottom 20%) versus measures such as homicide rate, mental illness, social mobility, high school dropout rates, prisoner counts, infant death, etc. All the data is both compared on a country level and on a US state level. [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
tokenadult 15y ago
Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we? You ask about take-aways that might apply to other countries from the PISA findings about Finland. One way to get a reality check on how Finland's experience might guide policy in the United States is to look at countries with similarities to and differences from both. Seeing the flood of comments here that consist of people expressing their opinions (which is everyone's right on the Internet), I thought it might be helpful to go back to the PISA website to see how the PISA scholars themselves have been analyzing the data. One interesting brief write-up I found on the PISA site http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf explores the issue of "resilient" students--students who do better than you would expect from their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It is no surprise to me, because I have lived in more than one country, that countries vary in how well their school systems help even students from disadvantaged background succeed in school. The data chart about different countries at the link shows that Finland (and also Korea, Singapore, Canada, and Taiwan) overperform in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. I can well believe this about Singapore, having studied a lot about the school system there http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf and knowing people from there. By looking at multiple countries for meaningful commonalities like this, we in the diverse United States could learn a thing or two about how to improve schools here.

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.

niklasl 15y ago
> The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try. That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).
- tuukkah 15y ago
  By that argument, everything is bound to fail because there are a thousand variables in a society and a school system. And yet another sidetrack not based on facts to add to my list: * No, Finland's schools are not more disciplinarian than elsewhere. The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation: watching TV and hanging out with friends etc. is more fun than studying and everybody gets a good education for free anyway. And no, the rest of Europe definitely doesn't match Finland in equality (income equality, gender equality, whatever you mean), let alone their schools doing that.
  - eru 15y ago
    Interestingly, the German state of Saxonia does nearly as well as Finland in the PISA tests.
    - tuukkah 15y ago
      No-one is claiming the Finnish system is the only way to get high PISA scores. Although, the PISA scores aren't the thing to strive for anyway. How about a school system that is relatively cheap, comparatively equal, produces great learning results as measured by multiple studies, takes up relatively little of the students' time etc.? I don't think Finland is trying to force it on anyone but it could give some people ideas about what's allegedly "just not possible" and what to possibly concentrate on. The success of Saxonia can be another interesting data point along Finland, Singapore, Japan etc.

Tycho 15y ago

Another thing usually missing in comparisons with European countries is that all of Europe benefits from America inventing/pioneering so much stuff that they can adopt.

Eeko 15y ago
Yeah. It's super ironic to read all the "these socialist solutions of small nations can't scale for big US". And then from the other side "this silly anarchistic free-trade capitalistic solution can't scale for mighty China." I thought Europeans had the "not-invented-here" syndrome.
macco 15y ago
Two questions: 1. What has this to do with education? 2. Doesn't America benefits from European / (or Asian, etc) innovations?
- Tycho 15y ago
  1. Nothing much (you could bring up eLearning and multimedia learning aids, I guess), it was tangentially related to the meta-topic of articles which compare European successes and American failures (usually in the domain of 'social programs') 2. Yes, but America innovates far more. A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention. Put bluntly, we all get a free ride off America's investment in R&D. Just something to keep in mind when you think about 'changing the system' or even just measuring it.
  - bergie 15y ago
    A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention At least before February 11th that wasn't true. While the first-ever cell phone may have been built in the US, Nokia has contributed quite a bit to how modern phones work. You may remember Apple for instance paying patent royalties on 3G tech to them. USA puts more money to R&D than anybody else, but it isn't like the rest of the world is just stealing innovation.
  - notahacker 15y ago

jordanb 15y ago

I think the crux of your argument is that there's a danger in isolating any part of one culture and trying to compare it to another. I completely agree. A culture is a highly complex set of interactions and taking one piece of it and trying to isolate it in a lab, as it were, is pretty difficult. I think you're being unfair to "academics" though by accusing them "europhilia" (in fact, the author of this article is a Finnish journalist living in the US). I think Europe is an attractive place to look for comparisons because there are so many countries there that it's easy to find a lot of contrast. And the cultures there do have more in common with ours than those in other parts of the world. But it's not like these sorts of comparison are made exclusively with Europe. In fact, it seems as if there have been a deluge of comparisons made in recent years between Asian (and especially Chinese) education and that in the US; with the conclusion being that US students aren't challenged or judged harshly enough and therefore are far behind their Chinese counterparts in STEM. If anything this article seems to be written as a response to those people making comparisons with China: demonstrating a system that seems to be excelling with less rather than more standardization.

brc 15y ago
This is my point. Finland is a much more socialist country than just about anywhere else, as most Scandinavian countries are. They (as a society) have already agreed to much higher income taxes, plus completely nationalised healthcare, transport and many other industries. I don't mention this to say whether Finland is right or wrong in these respects - it's a democracy so I support their decisions in any case. However, it would be foolish to say that a model of nationalised education in a country where a lot of other things are state-provided can necessarily be exported to a country where things are much-less state provided. To me, there is too much focus on the school part of the education - education is clearly the output of parenting, societal attitudes as well as the school curriculum and teaching methods. Schools aren't an island - they live in a national culture, economy and even geography. You can't just import a different teaching style into a society that may value education differently (eg is being a truant a taboo thing to do, or something that is secretly valued in an anti-hero way) and expect to get the same results. Even the amount of time parents spend with their children will have a different result. The best outcome to take from Finland is that there are many different ways to Educational outcomes - probably the most important is that the best fit between national culture and resources should be explored. Perhaps the national (or state?) culture needs to be slowly changed before the educational system can follow. Perhaps the idea that Federal input of education into 50 different states is a bad idea. There are many things to look at.

arkx 15y ago

Is public school teacher a desireable profession in the US? Is it anywhere near the level of prestige associated with lawyers or doctors? How is the pay? This is one of they key differences that's repeated in nearly every one of the numerous articles I've read about the Finnish school system, and it's the one single thing US really could do a lot about.

mattdeboard 15y ago
Teachers are government employees, unionized no less. That is to a great many Americans a double whammy. The relationship between Americans and their government has always been -- and will always be -- adversarial.
drumdance 15y ago
Teachers are held in high regard in China too.
afterburner 15y ago
US teachers get crap pay.
- learc83 15y ago
  That is a myth. You may believe they should be paid more, but when you account for the amount of hours the work and benefits their total compensation is very competitive with private sector jobs that require similar levels of education.
  - afterburner 15y ago
    "Account for"? The pay reflects the requirements. I never claimed crap pay was a cause. But it is clear it demonstrates that the American system does not prioritize quality in teaching positions.
    - learc83 15y ago
      >"Account for"? Yes teachers work around 190 days per year and in my area (metro Atlanta), they start off at $40k+ and around $50k with a Masters degree. They are guaranteed raises so that they can easily get up to $60k (in today's money--more if they have graduate degree) by the time they retire, and after 30 years they can retire with 60% pay (most of them can retire in their very early 50s instead of 60+ like the rest of us). They get more time off than nearly any other profession. Based on salary alone the average teacher makes 57% more than the overall state average salary, and when you add in their benefits package it goes up even higher. With cost of living in my area that is definitely not "crap" pay.

scrod 15y ago

>The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough. You see, that's funny, because a much more obvious example can be found in free-market austrian-school economic policies.

bjcy 15y ago
I'm not terribly familiar with free market Austrian-school economics, could you expound on what you mean?
- scrod 15y ago
  It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek. Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273 http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.
  - magoghm 15y ago
    The book seems interesting. But Neoliberal economists, even though they talk a lot about free markets, have a very different world view than that of Austrian economists. One example: Neoliberals promote treaties like NAFTA that allow the free flow of goods and capital between countries, but don't allow the free flow of people between countries.On the other hand, Austrian economists would insist on the importance of also letting people choose were they want to live and work. Furthermore, despite its name, NAFTA is not really about free trade. NAFTA is a huge set of regulations.
    - scrod 15y ago
      Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward. Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".

jonnathanson 15y ago

Not to mention demographics. Most of these studies pretty much overlook that dimension entirely, and it's usually the most critical. In the case of Finland, we're looking at a country with a total population of 5.4 million people, 92% of which share the same native language and ethnic background. By comparison, the USA has 313 million people and a heck of a lot more diversity of income, class, race, ethnicity, linguistic background, country of origin, etc. It's also got a much higher variance in population density per city, state, region, etc. If ever there were a case of comparing apples to oranges, this would be it. There are vanishingly few analogs between the two countries on almost any dimension, and most of the education statistics I've seen over the years have not been weighted accordingly. I'd be much more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons. How does Finland perform against countries like Finland? How does the US perform against similar countries (of which there probably aren't many)? Even comparing the US to a country like China is problematic, given that only the top some-single-digit percent of Chinese children take these tests in the first place.

bellaire 15y ago
The article specifically describes a comparison of Finland with Norway, similiar in size and ethnic composition. Apples-to-apples, as you say. Norway's education policy is much more similar to the US, and Norway's PISA results are mediocre, also similar to the US.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Actually, after controlling for ethnic composition, the US and Norway are not similar. In fact the US outperforms Norway by roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
  - CPlatypus 15y ago
    Your "authority" is crap. The original article explicitly compared Finland not only with Norway but with individual US states that had similar population and percentage of immigrants. That's about as apples to apples as you can get, considering that US schools are primarily subject to state rather than federal guidelines, and Finland still came out ahead. By way of supposed refutation, you present a source that is full of strong claims substantiated by little more than the most blatant cherry-picking. The author's "correcting for demography" is no more than throwing out the data he doesn't like. Ignoring the fact that the immigrant factor has already been examined, he pulls tricks like comparing second- and third-generation immigrants in Finland to native Swedes. Notice how the obvious comparison between native Finns and native Swedes isn't made, because it wouldn't support his conclusions. Then he goes on to say "In the case of America, 99% of the population originates from other countries" and suggests that we compare such loosely-defined American immigrants to people in their home countries - without regard for such things as economic differences between the countries. After arbitrarily excluding Asians because they pull the results up, Hispanics because they pull the results down, and undeclareds for no methodologically sound (or even fully explained) reason, he comes up with a highly suspect graph purportedly showing how the US "beats" most of Europe. Here's the kicker: even after cooking the data that much, Finland still comes out well ahead of the US. No matter how hard he tries, he still can't manage to reverse the original conclusion. In the end, citing that does more to discredit your position than to support it.

vasco 15y ago

Being from an European country myself I find it ever so amusing that all my life I've been hearing that "If we were only like the USA" in some regards. Ironic isn't it?

sliverstorm 15y ago
The grass is always greener.
- brazzy 15y ago
  But that's because they use more manure over there.

jules 15y ago

An interesting TED talk on the more general effects of equality that talks about many of the issues you raise. It is titled "How economic inequality harms societies" [1] (link below). Looks at correlations between income inequality (defined as the average income of the top 20% / average income of the bottom 20%) versus measures such as homicide rate, mental illness, social mobility, high school dropout rates, prisoner counts, infant death, etc. All the data is both compared on a country level and on a US state level. [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

tokenadult 15y ago

Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we? You ask about take-aways that might apply to other countries from the PISA findings about Finland. One way to get a reality check on how Finland's experience might guide policy in the United States is to look at countries with similarities to and differences from both. Seeing the flood of comments here that consist of people expressing their opinions (which is everyone's right on the Internet), I thought it might be helpful to go back to the PISA website to see how the PISA scholars themselves have been analyzing the data. One interesting brief write-up I found on the PISA site http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf explores the issue of "resilient" students--students who do better than you would expect from their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It is no surprise to me, because I have lived in more than one country, that countries vary in how well their school systems help even students from disadvantaged background succeed in school. The data chart about different countries at the link shows that Finland (and also Korea, Singapore, Canada, and Taiwan) overperform in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. I can well believe this about Singapore, having studied a lot about the school system there http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf and knowing people from there. By looking at multiple countries for meaningful commonalities like this, we in the diverse United States could learn a thing or two about how to improve schools here.