Finland : An Education Success Story by Magonsdaughter

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Finland : An Education Success Story

POSTED BY: MAGONSDAUGHTER
UPDATED: Thursday, January 5, 2012 05:32
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Tuesday, January 3, 2012 5:12 PM

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-kee
p-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen

Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET 1156

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.
finnish-kids.jpg

Sergey Ivanov/Flickr
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

* * *

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

* * *

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. 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.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."

"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

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Tuesday, January 3, 2012 5:26 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Excellent article. Thank you. A lot of food for thought.

ETA: Found this article on the same subject, but from the WSJ. Quite different take on exactly the same story. Fascinating how partisanship works.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120425355065601997-7Bp8YFw7Yy1n
9bdKtVyP7KBAcJA_20080330.html

Quote:
The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers create lessons to fit their students. "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have," says Hannele Frantsi, a school principal.

Nothing about equity at all.

-----
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 3:38 AM

DREAMTROVE

Hmm.

Quote:
The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society

...is just a subjective statement, not one which can be derived from a study of Finland.

I think it's pretty obvious but politically unpopular to say: you have a pretty laissez-faire society willed with ice people. It's like Europe's Japan. It's what Sweden could be if they didn't have socialism [/snark]

Also, I've noticed that people in states with strong nationalist tendencies tend to do better because they have pride, and they strive to succeed. In America, we range from not caring about America to actually wanting to see it fail as a nation.

IIRC, a few years back someone brought up Sweden as the ideal state and took the conclusion that we should all be socialists, and I think I said Sweden works because it's full of swedes, but they could do a lot better, they could be Finland.

I see trouble on the horizon though: Finland is part of the Euro. That's not a good place to be. Anyway, I'm planning to go this year, so I'll try to get to the schools to see.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 7:23 AM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Anyway, I'm planning to go this year, so I'll try to get to the schools to see.

Cool, but I'm curious. How do you go to Europe if you don't fly?

-----
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 7:55 AM

BYTEMITE

Quote:
Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.

Biggest impact, I think. You actually retain more and for longer when you're entertained with a subject, not bored out of your mind.

Sounds somewhat similar to the Sudberry model that Frem puts forward a lot.

While it's a commentary on Finland having no private schools while we do, that doesn't seem to be the difference in educational retention. Unless what the article is trying to say is that all the funding goes to private schools in America as is, leaving American public schools a hellhole of pecking order bullying and abuse. In which case, maybe.

EDIT: Reading further, this does seem to be the case the article is making. I would agree with it.

Though now that I think of it, pecking order mentality and abuse seems to be ingrained in our schooling system, private school or public. Maybe this is on to something about problems with American competitiveness. A student probably can't perform well if their peers sabotage and alienate them, and certainly not if the school administration encourages it to keep upstarts in their place.

Or rather, maybe not just competitiveness, but an extreme of such, an almost systematic sociopathy.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 10:19 AM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Maybe this is on to something about problems with American competitiveness.

I agree.

So far the variables I am seeing are (in order of appearance in the article):

1. Less homework
2. More creative play
3. No private schools/universities
4. Only teacher-made tests; no periodic standardized tests
5. Responsibility model vs. accountability model for teachers
6. Prestige
7. Decent pay
8. Master's degree required to teach
9. Cooperation model vs. competition model amongst schools
10. Equity model vs. academic excellence model as a goal
11. Free school meals
12. Access to health care
13. Psychological counseling
14. Individualized student guidance
15. Small country
16. Homogenous population
17. Knowledge-based economy

From the WSJ article:

18. Start school at age 7
19. No school uniforms
20. No honor societies
21. No valedictorians
22. No tardy bells
23. No gifted programs, focus on helping the weaker ones
24. No hovering, more responsibility for students
25. Lessons created to fit the student
26. No sports teams, marching bands
27. No proms
28. Few classroom rules: no iPods, no cells, no hats
29. Teaching profession is highly competitive
30. Entrepreneurial model vs. assembly line model for teachers
31. Emphasis in Finnish culture for reading: easy access to libraries, free picture book for every new parent from the govt, must read subtitles in movies, English books.
32. Very small PISA difference in Finland's best performing and worst performing schools.
33. Self-reliance encouraged in children
34. Accepting of kids as kids

I find it quite amusing that a liberal publication would focus so much on equity variables, while WSJ sees the teachers as "entrepreneurs."

To me, the few things that stand out are:

1. High teacher quality
2. Child led learning
3. Respect for children
4. Trust in children's abilities to carry responsibility
5. Cooperation emphasized over competition amongst educators and students
6. Meals and health care secure
7. Knowledge-based economy
8. Cultural embrace of reading

-----
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 1:15 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
Excellent article. Thank you. A lot of food for thought.

ETA: Found this article on the same subject, but from the WSJ. Quite different take on exactly the same story. Fascinating how partisanship works.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120425355065601997-7Bp8YFw7Yy1n
9bdKtVyP7KBAcJA_20080330.html

Quote:
The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers create lessons to fit their students. "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have," says Hannele Frantsi, a school principal.
Nothing about equity at all.

-----
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I didn't find any evidence of a partisan nature. Just slightly different focuses. Both mentioned that education was free right through to the tertiary level and the WSJ mentioned that the Finnish system focuses on the weakest, rather than pushing the gifted.

I love some of the ideas about education that the northern europeans make into a reality, they certainly correlate with my values about education, which unfortunately are not in flavour here.

I like the idea of starting kids in formal education later and I despise the early push into academia that is currently in vogue. I was talking to someone about this the other day, how kindergartens obsess with pushing kids into 'correct finger position' for holding scissors. I mean, honestly? How many adults struggle to hold scissors because they weren't taught.

I also have had lots of arguments about homework because I don't support it.\

It appears to me that currently parents and teachers are hellbent on making their children's lives as awful as possible.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 1:57 PM

BYTEMITE

Sometimes in America it seems like some teachers and schools are less so much about actually teaching the kid, and more about forcing a standard of conformity onto them. Repetition to make it stick, punishment if it doesn't. Eventually a lot of kids just give up trying because few teachers try to adjust their style and approach from a different angle to get through to a kid. This is probably due to the focus on standardized testing, because teachers don't have time to make sure the kids understand, so they have to settle for kids being able to recite without meaning.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 2:05 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Sometimes in America it seems like some teachers and schools are less so much about actually teaching the kid, and more about forcing a standard of conformity onto them. Repetition to make it stick, punishment if it doesn't. Eventually a lot of kids just give up trying because few teachers try to adjust their style and approach from a different angle to get through to a kid. This is probably due to the focus on standardized testing, because teachers don't have time to make sure the kids understand, so they have to settle for kids being able to recite without meaning.

The problems with too much standardised testing - children are taught to pass tests, not necessarily the same as learning. Testing does not take into consideration that children learn at different rates. Testing too early can mean that children are pegged at being low achievers and the damage to self esteem actually hinders their capacity to learn.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 2:07 PM

BYTEMITE

Funny story. One time one of our teachers had us cut out paper turkeys for Thanksgiving. We were given a detailed sheet of instructions, coloured paper with the lines already drawn out where to cut, where to fold, where to glue. Thirty cute flat little turkeys.

My parents came in for consultation, and my teacher asked if they could pick out my turkey from the rest of them.

It was the only one that was three dimensional. Kind of a paper sculpture, with a funny little bobbing head and feet. I'd completely ignored all the instructions.

My parents, they kind of had to ask the school to give me teachers that had a sense of humour...

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 2:13 PM

BYTEMITE

Quote:
The problems with too much standardised testing - children are taught to pass tests, not necessarily the same as learning. Testing does not take into consideration that children learn at different rates. Testing too early can mean that children are pegged at being low achievers and the damage to self esteem actually hinders their capacity to learn.

The funny thing is, most of the teachers I know KNOW this, and they hate the standardized testing, but the school system and some of the Federal Laws kind of force it. One reason why bureaucrats and politicians who know nothing about children probably shouldn't be making education policy.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 3:29 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Sometimes in America it seems like some teachers and schools are less so much about actually teaching the kid, and more about forcing a standard of conformity onto them.

Exactly. We don't give a shit about academic excellence. We are more interested in training obedience.

I am truly awed that the Finnish people made not only their education a priority, but also their humanity a priority.

I am awed they found a formula for *institutional* success that did not involve sucking the souls out of young children.

I am most impressed that they discovered the relationship between physical and emotional security/equity and better learning. This fascinates me to no end.

-----
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 3:30 PM

DREAMTROVE

Sky,

Thanks for the list, that was well done.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 5:51 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

Interesting article.

I can't say I approve of no private school choices, no extracaricular activities and no choices for parents and kids, but they do a lot that does sound good, focus on individual learning etc.

I loved your turkey story Byte. :))

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 6:45 PM

WISHIMAY

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
Exactly. We don't give a shit about academic excellence. We are more interested in training obedience.

All my kid has been saying this year is I hate school, I HATE school. All they do all freaking year is WORKSHEETS, over and over and over.

I think the institution here has become more of a daycare than anything else...

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 9:24 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

When I was little my mom had a chat with the teacher and, since it took me longer to do things, not academically but just logistically, I got exempt from some of the mindless busywork, I learnt what I was supposed to learn anyways and did fine on tests, scored well etc.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Thursday, January 5, 2012 3:55 AM

FREMDFIRMA

I'll have more to say on this in time, but I am out of that resource at the moment, so you get a placeholder...

I will say that it resembles the sudbury system mainly cause that's mostly where it was copied from, but there's more TO it than that, starting with not screwing their kids out right outta the cradle, but I lack time to discuss...

-F

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Thursday, January 5, 2012 5:32 AM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:

The funny thing is, most of the teachers I know KNOW this, and they hate the standardized testing, but the school system and some of the Federal Laws kind of force it. One reason why bureaucrats and politicians who know nothing about children probably shouldn't be making education policy.

Those decisions should be made locally, like most, but the kids have to have choice in order for it to evolve, otherwise it will just be random.

Oh, and yet, the turkey story was cute.

Also thanks Riona, I missed it.

Wish,

I entirely agree. If I had to be in that situation again, I think I'd do something like this:

1. Find the underlying topic and learn it off hours in a more efficient way.

2. Once I knew the thing, find a way to automate the homework

3. Flirt with the teachers shamelessly, even if it was like 2nd grade. It's a way to be bad while being adored by the teachers, but to be adored by the teachers while not being a pet but rather something of a troublemaker.

ETA: oh, and of course, be really bad, but you can't get away with it until you've set it up socially and academically.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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