Editorial:
When you think of Finland, what comes to mind? Chances are if it's not a vodka bottle artfully decorated with a stag, it's Nokia, the former furniture company that reinvented itself as a cell phone giant.
After reading Anu Partanen’s article in
The Atlantic entitled "
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success,", however, I'm surprised we aren't talking more about Finland's education system.
With 5.4 million citizens, Finland is the size of many U.S. states and has, over the last dozen years, produced some of the highest-testing students in the world. According to
The Atlantic story:
"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.
...Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best."
Partanen goes on to explain that decades ago Finland's education system was in bad need of reform. Its economy was based on manufacturing and its schools were under performing when compared to the rest of the world. Recognizing that there was a global shift toward a knowledge-based economy, the country decided to overhaul its education system. But instead of pursuing a system that prioritized excellence, it made equity its main goal. The results have been both dramatic and instructive. Not only do Finns spend less money per pupil, have shorter school days, abstain from standardized tests, and assign less homework, but achievement has gone through the roof, with performance differences among its schools hovering around five per cent.
More interestingly, there are almost no private schools in Finland. The few that exist cannot charge tuition and are publicly funded. There are no private universities, either. Nor lists of "best" schools. Equity and cooperation are the defining features of the Finnish system.
Interviewing Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who went on to positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education and now is an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations, Partanen articulates the profound differences between Finland's approach to education and the U.S.'s current notions of reform.
During a recent visit to the U.S., captured in an
article by the New York Times, Sahlberg pointed out how Americans ask questions like:
"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?"
Sahlberg answers:
"...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.
...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."
Sahlberg contends that a school's priority should be to create a healthy, safe, and positive environment for kids. Meals are free, easy access to health care and individualized student guidance is provided, and there is an emphasis on creative play. More importantly, Finland views its teachers as highly trained and highly compensated professionals. An article posted on the
Silicon Valley Education Foundation website sums up Finland's approach to teachers thusly:
"The Finns focused on teaching as a key driver of reform and of the education system, and made it a noble and attractive profession by making salaries commensurate with other professionals such as doctors and lawyers, by requiring teachers to earn a research-based master’s degree and making it tuition free, by providing high-quality professional development, by giving teachers a lot of autonomy and time to work collaboratively with their colleagues, by offering career development paths that don’t just include administration, and by not evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores. As a result, they created one of the most, if not the most, competitive teacher education systems in the world. The acceptance rate into colleges of education is about one-in-ten, and only ten to fifteen percent of teachers leave the profession before retirement, compared to about 50 percent for teachers in urban schools and a third for other areas in the United States."
Skeptics of importing Finland's ideas about education to the U.S. point out how it is a small, not particularly diverse country. However, when compared to many states -- where education standards are established and funded -- the argument carries less weight. And even with Finland's recent and dramatic uptick in immigration population, it has seen no compromise in scholastic performance.
Given the current dissatisfaction with the American education system, it becomes interesting to contemplate whether Finland's approach could be tested here. I can't help but wonder how our own state would respond to such a proposal for reform. Given recent reactions to plans for regionalization, I can't help but think that the opposition would be significant. It's notable that neither local leaders nor politicians are discussing reforms that prioritize equity or professional-grade standards and compensation for teachers. It seems likely that the biggest hurdle is more a matter of culture than rigorous analysis. Much of our country's character centers around ideas of individualism and competitiveness, that excellence is reserved for the exceptional. Finland's focus on equity, collective effort, and social cooperation may simply be too "European" for us to embrace.
If you would like to read more on the topic, Pasi Sahlberg has written a book entitled:
Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?