I think that your [1] Smithsonian mag is painting a bit too rosy picture. I live close to the place, Kirkkojärvi, where the interviewed teachers work, and not e

I think that your [1] Smithsonian mag is painting a bit too rosy picture. I live close to the place, Kirkkojärvi, where the interviewed teachers work, and not everyone is quite as happy as that. I know someone who moved away from the area to another school district just because he said he wanted his kids to learn Finnish at school, instead of teaching schoolmates to speak and write. The Smithsonian piece was published after Finland scored high in the 2009 PISA rankings. In 2012 rankings, Finland had dropped quite a lot: 12th place in maths, 5th in science, 6th in reading. That's not very bad either, but it's far from the top, now occupied by Shanghai, China. Did the quality of Finnish teachers drop in three years so much that the academic achievement of pupils fell sharply? Of course not. It's the same teachers, largely similar population, achieving similar results, but the PISA ranking was weighted slightly differently, and the results changed immediately. This shows how things are perhaps more sensitive to how you measure them, not how they actually change.