Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.
As long as the pediatrician tells me he's healthy that's good enough for me.
My 3-month-old can say "hungry" (way ahead of the curve) but can't yet roll over (behind the curve). That's simply the nature of people -- we don't all learn every topic at the same rate. Trying to push kids into learning at the same rate simply means you'll be ineffective at teaching some fraction of them. Recognizing that some of them just aren't ready to learn such-and-such topic yet, and pacing their education according to what they are ready to learn, is a far better approach.
Related: I've really been enjoying the book "Your Child's Growing Mind"[1], which makes this very argument in its first chapter.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Growing-Mind-Development/d...
Even something which may appear isolated from other areas of development (walking, talking, holding a spoon) is an extremely superficial heuristic for the development of millions of interconnected systems within a child's body.
2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there.
A counterexample to this being especially important is the country Singapore, with four official languages (Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English in decreasing order of number of home speakers) from four different language families. Especially important to consider is that English has been the sole language of school instruction in Singapore during my lifetime, even though essentially no one before the current generation of young graduates grew up in an English-speaking home. Moreover, Modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin," called 華語 in Singapore) was not the home language of the ethnic Chinese majority of the population in Singapore, but rather Hokkien or other south Chinese languages that are as different from Mandarin as English is from German. (I speak much Mandarin and some Hokkien.) MOST students in Singapore for more than a generation were learning their school language of instruction as a second language as they attended school. (This was true of my wife's generation in Taiwan too, where Hokkien, "Taiwanese," was the home language and Mandarin the school language.) United States, and maybe British, teachers put a lot of blame on immigrants for not growing up speaking English, but an effective school system can handle a multilingual surrounding cultural environment and still DEAL WITH IT while helping the learners learn the preferred official language. See the TIMSS report
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf
for the consistent finding that the average level of Singapore pupils in mathematics is comparable to the "gifted" level of United States pupils. The population of Singapore was not selected for high IQ or high levels of schooling (the immigrants who settled Singapore were mostly indentured agricultural laborers who fled wretchedly poor parts of China or India) but today's inhabitants of Singapore show the results of sound education.
4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
Agreed with your noting of point 4 as an important issue, distinct from United States policy proposals.
They also teach English at the Finnish schools.
My eldest son goes to an English school in Helsinki and he is taught Finnish, French, and of course English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language
and Finnish (Suomi)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language
are not even cognate languages, being from two different language families. So students in Finland learning English in their school courses are learning a language with what are to them rather puzzling grammatical patterns. By contrast, many Americans don't attempt to learn any foreign language while in K-12 schooling.
Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.
Is it safe to say that doesn't reflect recent (last 25 years) immigration patterns to the U.S. or to Western Europe?
I think it's an honest perspective and would have an impact on the educational outcomes of immigrant populations.
I certainly learned a lot about physics and algebra in high school, but I learned how to learn from my parents and my family.
I grew up in NYC going to public schools with a parent and a few relatives working as public teachers, so I'm pretty intimately familiar with the struggle of fixing public education on limited budget. Most of them generally share the opinion that schools can only do so much. They are absolutely necessary, and should continue getting better, but someone who is offered every resource in the world and doesn't have a home life that can support it will throw those resources away 99% of the time (from my experience that number is actually roughly accurate).
So I would look at education as something that can and should be improved, but it's also really important to look at education as the symptom of bigger cultural issues.
Americans tend to be pretty anti-intellectual and reject unfamiliar ideas. You can't really change that with education (alone), because people will always reject what school teaches them if their family doesn't support it, and in many cases the citizens will never vote in the budgets anyway. Main point: our mediocre education system is the symptom, find the cause.
The article doesn't even pause to consider the possibility that Finnish people, a small and relatively isolated population, might just happen to be, on average, genetically just a bit smarter than world population at large. While thinking about these things is horrendously unfashionable, it should be considered before we start assuming that we can replicate their success by copying their school system.
Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve.
What they should be doing is working on the baseline students, inner city schools, poor areas. But this requires professors to get out their comfort zones and they don't want to do that.
A lot of these research schools are very competitive. They'll basically ace any test you put in front of them just because they can.
Or perhaps we need to do things which it is intuitively obvious should work, but which there is currently not the political will to implement -- eg firing bad teachers and doing more to stop student truancy.
Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated, underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S.
Doing more to stop student truancy: This is cultural. Put armed guards to stop the students from leaving, and they don't show up in the first place. We need to foster a culture such that school isn't simply a prison students are coerced into going to for 9 hours a day.
The path from here to there is difficult and there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either. It's a lot more difficult problem than your simplistic world view admits.
That was my point, these are two examples of ways in which education which can be solved with political will alone rather than requiring complicated new research.
Teacher salaries aren't as low as often assumed, by the way; the average teacher's salary in the US in 2006 was a surprisingly respectable $51,009 (with all sorts of perks) which, while no path to riches is certainly a ticket to a good middle-class lifestyle, especially in a two-income household. I personally wonder if part of the low attractiveness of teaching as a profession can be attributed to the fact that teachers' unions spend so much time whining about how low teachers' salaries are.
You don't need to put armed guards to stop 'em leaving, you just need to make sure they're punished when they don't show up. I never once played truant from my school; not because it was such a fabulous caring-sharing environment that I never wanted to leave (this is impractical, children will get bored at school) but because I knew if I might get caught and if I got caught I'd be punished. Now for me personally, the threat of detention and having my parents find out was a scary enough punishment, but I realise that this won't work on every kid... which is why I strongly believe that every school needs a form of punishment which every kid is afraid of; and if suspension won't do it for some kids then we need to bring back the cane.
I have read that the number of American adults of working age who have teaching credentials is something like double the number of currently working teachers. But studies of teacher incompetence
http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-921/incompetent.htm
show that the least capable teachers stay in the occupation the longest, and sometimes their very presence drives out the most competent teachers.
I agree that making schools less like prisons would be better both for teachers and for learners.
You said it's "tricky to run experiments in education." I would modify that to say that it's tricky to run proper experiments. What they are doing is running experiments without using controls or metrics. How can they get away with this? I believe it is because of the unpopularity of the idea that differences exist and should be taught to differently.
If you take PISA scores to be a good indicator than there are homogeneous and non-homogeneous societies near the top and bottom.
Canada ranks right up there with Finland every year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA sometimes topping Finland in a category. It is easy to find countries that are culturally homogeneous near the bottom of the rankings as well.
Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings?
Finns do not make up a large or even a moderate proportion of Canada's population.
If I had to guess: yes. I honestly do believe that winters and environmental controls (like pavement) affect your approach to a wide variety of problems, and are immersive enough to do so on a nationwide scale. Not so sure about language, but a lot of other people seem to be.
This might manifest in educational systems more prominently than other parts of culture, or it might not. The thread of discussion is mostly about why the US is feeling inferior to Finland in one particular aspect, and grandparent stated that Canada also tests better there, so I would figure there might be something that Canada and Finland have but the US (and UK?) don't. Like, say, some aspect of culture.
Although obviously bordering cultures tend to affect each other greatly, my first instinct is always to look at a nation's climate.
One of the top Canadian provinces educationally is British Columbia. The majority of the province lives in Vancouver and Victoria. Those two cities have an extremely mild climate that is similar to Seattle and bears no resemblance to Finland or the rest of Canada.
If climate was the underlying reason for education going well in Canada, then you would not expect British Columbia to do as well as it does.
(Disclaimer. I'm biased because I grew up in Victoria.)
Destroying this hypothesis entirely, though, we have the high educational achievement of Singapore, which is hot and humid as heck every single day of the year.
It's not about assuming we can replicate their success with a direct copy. It's about looking at what their system does better than ours, and working to improve our system. Now THAT is politically unfashionable and unlikely to be done any time soon, but it's what needs to happen.
cf. Guns, Germs and Steel.
It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ, then Finland's superior education can be explained in part by the fact that it's full of Finns.
That is untrue, and is known to be untrue by the leading researchers on human behavioral genetics.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1177649
The current view by the researchers most familiar with the data is that broad heritability figures report, for a given sample, simply that monozygotic twins tend to be more similar than dizygotic twins, and close relatives tend to be more similar (across a HUGE range of human behavioral traits) than more distant relatives. But the pre-Mendelian methodology of compiling broad heritability figures FAILS as a prediction of how subject one trait or another is to environmental influences. It is well known that some traits with very high heritability (physical stature is the classic example) are nonetheless very subject to variance in differing environments. No one should take one heritability figure or another as a statement about how much or how little a trait can vary if the environment is manipulated experimentally. Any good, current genetics textbook mentions this.
The system is derived from their cultural values and works because of the cultural values. It's been shown again and again in educational studies: some systems are certainly better than others, but culture is the primary factor.
The detailed reading I am doing currently in The Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Need to Know
http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083
draws together research from various countries in various parts of the world that don't have a common "culture," but do have common teacher training curricula in teacher training programs (which are not even at university level in some of those countries) and common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures.
After edit:
It's been shown again and again in educational studies
What particular studies do you have in mind? Citations, please?
Is that philosphy actually unique? (Since Finland is relatively small, I'm willing to believe that that philosophy is uniformly applied, but real scientists would check.)
> common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures.
Yup. Also, one might want to look at what works in different cultures. (It may be that some things work in a lot of cultures, but not all. It may be that some things only work in certain cultures. And so on.)
I don't have a quick cite list. But it's been consistent across literally every single study I've seen that controls for parental involvement/cultural value of education. It's more predictive than parents' education level, neighborhood, curriculum, socioeconomic status, etc.
The only off-hand references I have to get you started are what the Michigan Department of Education has been beating my sister-in-law over the head with since she's enrolled my niece in public school.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:w...
http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch1...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...
It is regrettable that United States school officials are not more curious about what is going on successfully in other countries.
I don't mean to boast, but as technology director at this school, I'm always being asked about laptops, SmartBoards, and other cool and popular education technology things that we have decided not to use. I think it's important to carefully consider how technology can best be used, and to know when to stay with low-tech methods that work well.
For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in the top one hundred.
The University of Auckland (my alma mater) ranks 61.
A much more accurate test would be to find those of us in the United States that have been afforded the same living amenities as those living in Finland. I would bet that we are not far off at all.
Obviously, Finland should be spending more money on defense, corporate welfare, and privatized healthcare so that their education budget should shoulder the cuts and they can brought down to the US level.
And it is also said that entrepreneurship is not that valued in Finland because of high education... Most of the grads want to work for big companies & goverment positions.
Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and arithmetic.
By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning younger. There are some statistics indicating that this trend has been strongly correlated with increased gender disparities in school motivation and performance in favor of girls. Which makes sense since boys tend to hit that initial spurt later, and so are more likely to have bad experiences with the start of school. That could easily lead to long-lasting bad attitudes towards school that will guarantee poor performance later on.
Also the Finnish attitude of less school makes perfect sense for me. Because the key is to maintain interest and motivation. The actual hours of instruction we need are not that great, but increasing hours at some point brings diminishing returns on instruction at the cost of frustration and pain for the students.
This brings me to homework for obvious reasons. Research on the benefits of homework show an interesting mixed effect. Homework is practice, but practice can as easily fix wrong ideas as right ones. So homework drives responsibility for teaching to the ability of the home to ensure correct practice. The result is a strengthening of socioeconomic factors on school performance but little net difference in learning. Of course the strongest correlation found is that quantity of homework correlates with conflict at home. With said conflict arising due to the attempts of parents to get kids to do homework they don't want to do.
So summarizing, delaying instruction until kids are ready to learn, giving them sufficient high quality instruction that they do learn, and then limiting the quantity enough to prevent frustration is likely to lead to sustained learning. And sustained learning has good results. Makes perfect sense and makes you wonder why the USA takes the opposite approach on each of those things.
It seems to me that mainstream schooling is like mainstream corporate employment. top-down control, mind-numbing meetings all day and the killing of individual initiative.
we need more Montessori schools and more startups!
I asked her about it the other day, and the reason was "kids need time to be kids".
I cannot thank her enough - I never had problems learning throughout my school career, and I was never behind the physical curve either, so did reasonably well in sports as well.
I know it's anecdotal but it's something I'd strongly consider if I had kids as well.
> "Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition from one school to another."
This is exactly contrary to the truth. Nearly everyone does change schools at age 13 and it is disruptive.
"Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high."
Yeeaaah, I don't know. Most teachers (even comprehensive school) are MSc or BSc the very least. Their pay doesn't reflect that.
> "Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. "
What?! You guys put your kids into schools earlier than that? But why?
Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big.
"in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject"
There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish system comes from this method of teaching.
A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from societies where the average result is not so high.
Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out the same and there is little diversity of thought.
So I really don't think the world should aim towards using the finish system.
I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by-committee' products built right into the core of S60.
For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff. Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far away from the iPhone in a lot of ways.
It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).
My other point was the focus on linguistics. This could cause the Finish people to see things in a more lateral way as they have more linguistic tools to describe problems expressly because of the focus on languages. This leads to greater communication and understanding.
How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?
I don't think the cost/size relationship in any government is linear.
(Not sure what my point was, but it was interesting to find the data :))
[0] http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_ti... (Basic comprehensive school education, compulsory education school)
[1] http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-26.pdf (adding elementary and high school columns together for K-12)
Let's see if we can think of some reasons.
> There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.
How do we know that the two "may" s cancel each other out.
Moving organization-wide decision-making one level further away from the base often has an effect.
Let's put Finland's 5 million in context. Ohio is just over 11M and Los Angeles County is just under 10M.
The main factor at work here seems to be that education is highly valued in Finnish culture, as opposed to the US, where for a large segment of the population, it is not a priority. You can scale processes, but you can't scale culture.
I seriously doubt that. Large organizations are qualitatively different from small ones.
Then again South Korea's culture values education highly as well.