What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

It's important to remember that the Finns implemented their new system for <i>moral</i>, 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>immoral</i>.

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?<p>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?<p>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?<p>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?

The article claims Finland focuses on equality, and that immigration hasn't had much effect on aggregate education outcomes yet.<p><i>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.</i><p>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).<p>(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. )<p><a href="http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html" rel="nofollow">http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...</a>

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.<p>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 <i>read</i> and <i>write</i>.<p>Mike Schmoker has addressed this in his excellent book <i>Focus</i>, where he writes:<p>"[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"..."<p>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 <i>grades</i> behind, and have often not been assigned <i>any writing or reading of any kind</i> during their time in the "mainstream" public school district.<p>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.

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

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.<p>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.

"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. "<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize/images/James_Fulford/121910_ss001c.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize...</a>

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.<p><a href="http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/finland-country-profile.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/f...</a><p>Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences.<p><a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm</a><p>The late John DeFrancis<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...</a><p>and current researcher and author Stanislas Dehaene<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143118056/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143...</a><p>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.<p>But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way,<p><a href="http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html" rel="nofollow">http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html</a><p><a href="http://www.mackinac.org/5365" rel="nofollow">http://www.mackinac.org/5365</a><p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/</a><p>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.<p>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).

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!"

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.<p>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.

Out of curiosity, did the PISA study compare the level of parental involvement in a child's education between the countries? This NYT, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-about-better-parents.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho...</a> , 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.<p>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.

One thing that many commentators seem to ignore is what exactly the PISA tests measure. For example, the PISA math problems (<a href="http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf</a>) 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 <a href="http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN" rel="nofollow">http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN</a>) which measures how well the very best students do on very hard problems.<p>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.

I can't find it, but there was a great post on HN awhile back about how Finland doesn't really know <i>what</i> makes its schools so successful. Thus, articles like this pull some facet out of the hat as the key differentiator.<p>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.

Previous submission:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988</a>

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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/</a>

- No standardized tests (except one) - Individualized grading by teachers - Less homework and days of school - More emphasis on creative play - etc.<p>No, I don't think "equality" is the main thing we Anericans are overlooking. <i>We're overlooking freedom.</i> 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.

What Americans are really ignoring is the idea that maybe someone can "hack" education for the better.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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, <i>you are discouraged from sending your child to said school</i>.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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)."

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

There is actually a very strong structural argument for why public goods such as education and health, should be distributed equally:<p>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.<p>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).

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>I think many things are best learned not by directly focusing on them but by creating paths of learning that subconsciously teach "supporting" skills.

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

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".

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

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.<p>However, I got tired of reading U.S. educational-silver-bullet fantasy writing a long time ago.

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

This is my quote of the day:<p>&#62; Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.

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."<p>In the US, if a teacher is bad and the school is public, not much can be done. They certainly won't be fired.<p>Private schools, on the other hand, have more freedom in this regard.<p>I think the article made a lot of good points regarding creative play and avoidance of heavy standardized testing.