5 ms·

I think the article misses some of the scaling issues. Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children, while the US has ~84 million to educate. I'm far

I think the article misses some of the scaling issues. Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children, while the US has ~84 million to educate. I'm far more interested in the classroom "flipping" model[0] coming out of Colorado. It combines the scaling advantages of online video lectures with supervised group practice. I don't think it has been fully studied yet, but it sounds very interesting. [0] http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166748835/more-teachers-flipping-the-school-day-upside-down http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166748835/more-teachers-flippi...

adamt 14y ago
But doesn't schooling pretty much scale horizontally? Is schooling 84M really any more complex then schooling 1.5M? If anything, I'd suggest there is a fairly large fixed overhead for a country to set up a school system (teacher training, set curriculum, exam structure etc) and beyond that it becomes fairly cookie-cutter to scale out each school.
- maigret 14y ago
  I found this scale excuse used multiple times (in European countries as well, and for all kinds of topics) but never got any proof for it, rather the opposite. If scale was an issue, how could the US have become such a technology leading nation? Usually, that's is just another way to tell "we don't want to know about it, we have no will to change anything because we hate change, or we screwed up but we don't want to acknowledge it."
- tzaman 14y ago
  My thoughts exactly, the article does explain that US schools are managed on a state level, and then it becomes much more comparable.
- penny500 14y ago
  It doesn't work that way. Students in South Los Angeles, for instance, need a different curriculum than students in wealthy Cambridge. Students at the former still struggle with English, while the latter are scions of Harvard and MIT.
  - flexie 14y ago
    I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.
    - argonaut 14y ago
      I bet students in South Los Angeles start off with a lower Finnish level than students in Finland.
      - flexie 14y ago
        Well, that's an easy bet to settle. 97 percent of Finns have either Finnish, Swedish, Russian or Estonian as native language and only 0.26 percent of Finns are native English speakers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland
        argonaut 14y ago
        It's as easy to settle as your bet. That was the point I was demonstrating with my sarcasm.
        flexie 14y ago
        Sorry. Got lost on me :-)
Kroem3r 14y ago
If you're going to indulge in flights of imagination, maybe try to imagine why what this guy, who seems to have every attribute of an expert in the field, says, might be true. Or even, attempt some introspection to see why you'd prefer to dismiss the article, even on a basis that is addressed in the article. Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/compare?country=us#country=ca:us http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.
- penny500 14y ago
  Why assume that person is an expert? Can he prove causality, or is he confusing correlation with causation? I see no methodology. Why do students in Singapore, for instance, achieve among the highest test scores in the world with a merit-based system? Shouldn't you expect different results if the author's thesis is correct?
  - mcpie 14y ago
    You misunderstood the argument. Finland has a merit-based system just like Singapore. And Singapore has, just like Finland, made a concerted effort to provide equal access to education to all its citizens. The argument is not to drop merit-based tests and chances based on merit. Nobody is arguing that. The argument is that society as a whole should focus on providing equal access and chance to citizens (in this context children that go to school/university). So whilst Singaporean education certainly is far more focussed on rote learning and the typical 'Asian Tiger' approach to labor, the system built around those approaches is very 'euro-socialist', if you will: equal access for everyone.
- vixen99 14y ago
  Trying to figure out what 'Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co.. http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co.... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.' means. Primary intention? Really?
archangel_one 14y ago
> Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children Fewer, I expect - their total population is around 5.4 million.
rtpg 14y ago
I have never understood this argument very well. It's not like there's some sort of centralized bottleneck, schools can scale pretty well. I would argue (this is completely speculative), however, that cities in the US are (maybe?) denser than those in Finland, and that urban planning has a tendency to lay out infrastructure in terms of area more than in terms of population in itself. Hence big cities having stuffed classes. The same effect can be seen in DMVs or polling centers.
- penny500 14y ago
  America's demographics are far from homogeneous. Students in Palo Alto need a different approach than students 30 miles away in Oakland. You're dealing with different cultures, values, English-speaking abilities, math levels, reading levels, and on and on.
  - wildgift 14y ago
    East Palo Alto exists. Also, there are the Oakland hills, Rockridge, Claremont. Poverty and wealth exist near each other because one depends on the other.
flexie 14y ago
The flipping of classrooms is promising but Colorado has around 1 million school age children so if you dismiss the idea of learning from Finland because of its size you may want to ignore Colorado as well. On a related note, saying that the US can't learn from smaller countries is the standard reply every time someone suggests that Americans could learn something from another country. Since only a handful of developing countries, Russia and Japan are in the +100 million population class, it's a convenient argument for not learning from anyone else :-)

adamt 14y ago

But doesn't schooling pretty much scale horizontally? Is schooling 84M really any more complex then schooling 1.5M? If anything, I'd suggest there is a fairly large fixed overhead for a country to set up a school system (teacher training, set curriculum, exam structure etc) and beyond that it becomes fairly cookie-cutter to scale out each school.

maigret 14y ago
I found this scale excuse used multiple times (in European countries as well, and for all kinds of topics) but never got any proof for it, rather the opposite. If scale was an issue, how could the US have become such a technology leading nation? Usually, that's is just another way to tell "we don't want to know about it, we have no will to change anything because we hate change, or we screwed up but we don't want to acknowledge it."
tzaman 14y ago
My thoughts exactly, the article does explain that US schools are managed on a state level, and then it becomes much more comparable.
penny500 14y ago
It doesn't work that way. Students in South Los Angeles, for instance, need a different curriculum than students in wealthy Cambridge. Students at the former still struggle with English, while the latter are scions of Harvard and MIT.
- flexie 14y ago
  I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.
  - argonaut 14y ago
    I bet students in South Los Angeles start off with a lower Finnish level than students in Finland.
    - flexie 14y ago
      Well, that's an easy bet to settle. 97 percent of Finns have either Finnish, Swedish, Russian or Estonian as native language and only 0.26 percent of Finns are native English speakers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland
      - argonaut 14y ago
        It's as easy to settle as your bet. That was the point I was demonstrating with my sarcasm.
        flexie 14y ago
        Sorry. Got lost on me :-)

Kroem3r 14y ago

If you're going to indulge in flights of imagination, maybe try to imagine why what this guy, who seems to have every attribute of an expert in the field, says, might be true. Or even, attempt some introspection to see why you'd prefer to dismiss the article, even on a basis that is addressed in the article. Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/compare?country=us#country=ca:us http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.

penny500 14y ago
Why assume that person is an expert? Can he prove causality, or is he confusing correlation with causation? I see no methodology. Why do students in Singapore, for instance, achieve among the highest test scores in the world with a merit-based system? Shouldn't you expect different results if the author's thesis is correct?
- mcpie 14y ago
  You misunderstood the argument. Finland has a merit-based system just like Singapore. And Singapore has, just like Finland, made a concerted effort to provide equal access to education to all its citizens. The argument is not to drop merit-based tests and chances based on merit. Nobody is arguing that. The argument is that society as a whole should focus on providing equal access and chance to citizens (in this context children that go to school/university). So whilst Singaporean education certainly is far more focussed on rote learning and the typical 'Asian Tiger' approach to labor, the system built around those approaches is very 'euro-socialist', if you will: equal access for everyone.
vixen99 14y ago
Trying to figure out what 'Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co.. http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co.... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.' means. Primary intention? Really?

archangel_one 14y ago

> Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children Fewer, I expect - their total population is around 5.4 million.

rtpg 14y ago

I have never understood this argument very well. It's not like there's some sort of centralized bottleneck, schools can scale pretty well. I would argue (this is completely speculative), however, that cities in the US are (maybe?) denser than those in Finland, and that urban planning has a tendency to lay out infrastructure in terms of area more than in terms of population in itself. Hence big cities having stuffed classes. The same effect can be seen in DMVs or polling centers.

penny500 14y ago
America's demographics are far from homogeneous. Students in Palo Alto need a different approach than students 30 miles away in Oakland. You're dealing with different cultures, values, English-speaking abilities, math levels, reading levels, and on and on.
- wildgift 14y ago
  East Palo Alto exists. Also, there are the Oakland hills, Rockridge, Claremont. Poverty and wealth exist near each other because one depends on the other.

flexie 14y ago

The flipping of classrooms is promising but Colorado has around 1 million school age children so if you dismiss the idea of learning from Finland because of its size you may want to ignore Colorado as well. On a related note, saying that the US can't learn from smaller countries is the standard reply every time someone suggests that Americans could learn something from another country. Since only a handful of developing countries, Russia and Japan are in the +100 million population class, it's a convenient argument for not learning from anyone else :-)