What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Executive summary:
- Focus on equity ("every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location"); all pupils get free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
- Lack of standardized testing (only exception is the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school).
- Teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
- Periodic testing of a few sample groups across a range of different schools to track national progress.
- Lack of institutionalized accountability of teachers and administrators; if a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.
- Teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility; a master's degree is required to enter the profession.
- Finland is a relatively homogeneous country (<5% born in another country); however, PISA comparison with Norway suggests that educational policy "is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup". ("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.")
Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland : Finnish education system consists of: (1) daycare programs for babies and toddlers; (2) one-year "pre-school" (or kindergarten for six-year olds); (3) nine-year compulsory basic comprehensive school starting at age seven and ending at the age of sixteen; (4) post-compulsory secondary general academic and vocational education; (5) University and Polytechnical higher education; and adult (lifelong, continuing) education.