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.
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.
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.
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.