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Comment by 1123581321 | Hacker News Reader

Finland is an excellent model but it required weeding out bad teachers who couldn’t do better in the classroom or who couldn’t handle more difficult education and certification. This will never broadly happen in the US.

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I think this is misleading. There simply are not enough teachers in the us, largely because in a relative sense the pay is low.

It’s easy to point the finger at unions- mostly because it is a narrative that has been pushed hard for years.

The issues are way larger than the person in front of the classroom. Bad teachers don’t help but thinking I can just take test data at the end of the year and figure out which teachers are bad is wildly useless

It's not just a pay issue (although I do not want to under-emphasize its importance) but also of a professionalization and standards aspect. Both the Baltics and Finland have strict competency requirements for teachers, and national standards of quality.

The US in many places is still arguing endlessly about Charter schools and homeschooling to allow 'teaching' the most woo-woo nonsense, and offer endless bloviating about testing batteries but nothing about curriculum/pedagogy requirements. Textbook publishers cater to opposing markets (California and Texas) and its just as adversarial as every other element of US society these days.

I see your point, but think your jumping to arguments about unions and data illustrates the issue in the US. Finland has sidestepped much of the need for complicated centrally legislated or regulated reforms by elevating the professional stature of teachers, which lets more problems be solved entirely within the classroom. As you point out, our approach in the US requires the solutions to be more complicated and less trusting of the individuals best placed to make a difference.

Finland has stronger employment protections than the US, so it seems unlikely this kind of "weeding out" (at least in the way its advocates usually mean it) is what they're doing better.

Genuinely only speaking theoretically: the US's combination of teachers' unions, state, and national programmes could all conspire to deliver stronger protections to bad teachers than Finland does.

It does sound unlikely, but increasing the seriousness and prestige of the teaching profession was core to Finland’s improvement in global education rankings. This short article will introduce you to their system. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-tra...

Indeed, both made masters level pedagogical degrees and regular upskilling mandatory. The salaries are also decent but not actually extravagant in comparison to other jobs. They do of course have six weeks summer vacation, which certainly helps to make it attractive :-)

I always thought this is the most critical idea for America to incorporate.

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