What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success | Hacker News Reader

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

theatlantic.com

278 pointsdirtyaura186 comments

It's important to remember that the Finns implemented their new system for moral, rather than competitive reasons. Their resulting academic performance was a pleasant side-effect. This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over.

I went to the best private high school in my state. Before that, I attended an elementary school whose tuition cost more than many people pay for a college education. My parents were by no means rich, but were willing to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on the education of their only child.

I have also worked in schools of the other kind. The ones with metal detectors. The ones where the administration's main preoccupation is not which college their students will get into, but whether their students will graduate high school at all.

Arguments that competition between schools and school systems is necessary in order to maintain academic quality do not impress me. The quality of a child's education should not be determined by how much money a parent is willing to or is capable of paying. I am quite willing to let children to be buffeted by the inequalities of capitalism in every other aspect of their lives (except, perhaps, healthcare), but our current system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral.

I think it's unfair to say the article glosses over this point. It's the theme of a section that starts with the sentence: Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location.

"This is a critical distinction that even this article seems to gloss over."

It actually seemed heavily emphasized, just with few words. Perhaps that's the point. Competition is so ingrained into the "American" psyche that we can't conceive of something that is not fueled by competition.

You write, in comparing "our" (presumably US) system to the Finns that our system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral.

Are you saying that non-internationalist socialism is inherently moral while individual property rights and exchange are not? That morally speaking someone's education should not be determined by who their parents are, but should be determined by the nation to which their parents are subject? Would you like to give a hint why?

The notion that individual economic rights are void while national economic rights are valid is delicious for people whose most valuable asset is their inherited citizenship or their power in nationalist institutions, so over the last century or so enormous effort has been expended in trying to justify this notion. However, the state of the art in such moral justifications does not impress me. Is there a particular justification that you are not embarrassed to be associated with?

The old internationalist socialism was screwed up in various vital ways, but at least I can understand how an idealist could be attracted to it. In this particular policy question, I can see how an idealist would attracted to the idea of opening an educational program to everyone in the world. But you seem to see clear moral superiority in a system which is open only to those who inherited Finnish citizenship.

As socialist ideas spread in practical politics, internationalist ideas were almost completely abandoned. (See e.g. how large transfer payments within nations are compared to how large foreign aid is, or how interested people are in Gini coefficients within nations compared to globally.) This doesn't stop modern noninternationalist socialists from regularly appealing to the old internationalist rhetoric for justification, but that's dishonest. (It's also circumstantial evidence for how weak the moral arguments for noninternalist socialism are, or more precisely, how the ones which aren't hopelessly weak tend to be strong enough to "justify" various of the horrors of the twentieth century, or various older nastiness like heriditary aristocracy or slavery. Classical liberalism and universalist socialism differ in whether "positive rights" and equality of outcome are better than ordinary negative rights and equality under the law, but justifications for both tend to appeal to a general idea of equal rights of all humans. To justify noninternationalist socialism of the usual heritable citizenship sort, you have to break that and find a way to justify hereditary privilege.)

Note also that essentially all those moral arguments for national economic rights are subject to various classic moral questions against how to get individual economic rights quite right. E.g., it is a classic difficult question how to assign individual property rights initially in a morally satisfying way. This question doesn't get any easier when it comes to assigning property rights to individual noninternalist socialist nations in a morally satisfying way. (And to it is added the new question of how individual people are to be assigned to such nations in a morally satisfying way.)

There are defensible practical justifications for the conclusion that individual people shouldn't have individual economic rights but that individual nations should, in particular the observation that strongly collectivist nations punched above their weight in some of the wars of the 20th century. (There are also arguments based on the supposed inefficiency of a free market, but those have fared so poorly in reality that most people no longer advance them, at least without couching them in calculated vagueness or doublespeak.) But you seem to be appealing not to some empirical practical justification, but to some abstract moral justification, and I am unable to guess which you might have in mind.

My use of the word "immoral" was meant to be within the context of a single society, not with the world at large. My argument is that current US society has created a de-facto class system where a significant percentage of the population is forced to go to schools that are so bad that they're barely better than not going to school at all. Here, "forced" means that one's parents either can't afford to send you to a good private school or move to a location with good public schools, or is unwilling to do so.

Students at these schools are, through no fault of their own, largely disenfranchised from participating in society in anything but a menial manner. The ideal image of the guy who didn't even go to high school but went on to found a corporate empire is fading - the people who are founding the empires nowadays tend to have had at least a little college schooling, much less a high school diploma.

Meanwhile, the positions of wealth and respect in our society are reserved for the relatively small portion of society who get a good education (exception: professional athletes & music stars). I classify this system as immoral, as it involves one part of a society preying upon another part, and then using its advantage to ensure continued advantage in the future. I would not shed a single tear if such groups lost the economic right to continue doing so.

More practically, however, it's hard to spend any amount of time in an average public high school (yes, there are some very good ones, but I'm talking about the average here) and not come to the conclusion that something is very, very wrong with the education system in this country. The sad fact is that a really bad school can seriously damage the rest of a child's life. Some few might escape the damage and go on to do great things, but most will carry the mark until they die, working in a series of soulless shitty jobs that they neither enjoy nor respect.

"forced" and "unwilling to do so" seem at odds to me.

[edit] I don't get the downvote, but this discussion is getting so emotional for so many, I guess I should have expected it. My point is, I agree with his point, up until he starts redefining words to mean completely opposite what they normally mean. Forced being used to describe "too poor to move" - fine, but being used to describe "don't want to", that's just tailoring language to fit your preconceived notion.

> in a system which is open only to those who inherited Finnish citizenship.

False.

In Finland, basic education is a legal obligation for every resident. If you come from abroad and are of sufficient age, you will be placed into school if you don't have a very good reason to not be in one. There are not always enough decent international school places (and most young people lack the language skills to efficiently study in most international facilities), but we do our best to provide the opportunity to learn for every visitor and citizen alike.

Sometimes the mandatory nature of basic schooling puts us in odds with some visitors, since schooling or the school values (e.g. evolution in curricula) is at odds with the visitor families. In those cases, the families might face custody disputes (ignoring proper education is seen as child abuse) vs. the state or deportation. Or both. Home-schoolers are obliged to follow the same standard frame of curricula and I understood they are tested in some extent by authorities.

You make a good point, but it's a non-sequitur. Finland created an education system under its own jurisdiction. It is absolutely obtuse and preposterous to suggest that there can not be a valid moral imperative within this framework. You are hijacking the thread for your own agenda which is a bit offensive.

The moral argument is that a society should do what it can for its members. The concept of internationalism is orthogonal to that agument.

You seem to know what you are trying to say, but I'm having a terrible time wading through your prose. Can you boil this down bit?

Hey ams6110, I'll take a shot at summarizing his argument because I find it interesting.

Ender7 has claimed that a child's education shouldn't vary by his or her parents' wealth, but should be provided by society.

Wnewman's point is basically that when Ender7 says "society" he really means the specific nation that child belongs to. But by Ender7's logic this still isn't fair, because some nations are poorer than others. So unless Ender7 is willing to argue that it's immoral for some societies to provide better education for their children that others, than Ender7 is being inconsistant.

Though it's a good point I don't think it's valid counter-argument to the moral imperative "we should provide good education to our nation's children." Globalism may be around the corner, but until then, "our" nation's society is the one "we" are responsible for.

The scope is a single unit in which education is organised. It's pretty clear that that is the state, not the family.

Assuming there's something here, which is a bit of a stretch for me, let's ask the obvious question: where else has this been tried? Did it work? Better still, how do we know we're being equal enough?

This is not Marxist by any means, but I have to use Marxism as an example. The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough. In the examples where it does work, there's always some special attribute or thing that causes it to, like a very small sample size. Yes it works in some cases and at some scale, but it never really works in a practical way. It's just a cluster of feelings about fairness in search of an practical application. This is, by definition, a "loose analogy". Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?

I love Finland, and I admire the Fins I've worked with. But I think we can play this game of "If we were only like Europe" only so much without actually having to apply some critical thinking skills. We are not like Europe -- as much as we'd like to be. I've been reading articles that claim we can improve various parts of society if we were only like some European country my entire life. If I didn't know better, I'd think a lot of academics spend time in Europe and become Europhiles the rest of their lives, much to the rest of our detriment. Seems like no matter how hard we try at these things, we can never be like European country X. There's probably a good reason for that. My best guess is that this has something to do with culture, but I'm not sure. If you want a country of Fins, perhaps you should consider moving to Finland?

So yes, maybe there's something here, but I have no idea what it is. Does the author suggest outlawing private schools? Perhaps indoctrinating our national culture with pithy slogans like "accountability is what's left when you take responsibility away"? Tighter control over immigration so the culture is more cohesive? Greater oil revenues? Decrease our population to 1/70th of its current size? More alcohol consumption? What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?

Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?

You ask about take-aways that might apply to other countries from the PISA findings about Finland. One way to get a reality check on how Finland's experience might guide policy in the United States is to look at countries with similarities to and differences from both. Seeing the flood of comments here that consist of people expressing their opinions (which is everyone's right on the Internet), I thought it might be helpful to go back to the PISA website to see how the PISA scholars themselves have been analyzing the data. One interesting brief write-up I found on the PISA site

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf

explores the issue of "resilient" students--students who do better than you would expect from their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It is no surprise to me, because I have lived in more than one country, that countries vary in how well their school systems help even students from disadvantaged background succeed in school. The data chart about different countries at the link shows that Finland (and also Korea, Singapore, Canada, and Taiwan) overperform in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. I can well believe this about Singapore, having studied a lot about the school system there

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

and knowing people from there. By looking at multiple countries for meaningful commonalities like this, we in the diverse United States could learn a thing or two about how to improve schools here.

I think the crux of your argument is that there's a danger in isolating any part of one culture and trying to compare it to another. I completely agree. A culture is a highly complex set of interactions and taking one piece of it and trying to isolate it in a lab, as it were, is pretty difficult.

I think you're being unfair to "academics" though by accusing them "europhilia" (in fact, the author of this article is a Finnish journalist living in the US). I think Europe is an attractive place to look for comparisons because there are so many countries there that it's easy to find a lot of contrast. And the cultures there do have more in common with ours than those in other parts of the world.

But it's not like these sorts of comparison are made exclusively with Europe. In fact, it seems as if there have been a deluge of comparisons made in recent years between Asian (and especially Chinese) education and that in the US; with the conclusion being that US students aren't challenged or judged harshly enough and therefore are far behind their Chinese counterparts in STEM.

If anything this article seems to be written as a response to those people making comparisons with China: demonstrating a system that seems to be excelling with less rather than more standardization.

This is my point. Finland is a much more socialist country than just about anywhere else, as most Scandinavian countries are. They (as a society) have already agreed to much higher income taxes, plus completely nationalised healthcare, transport and many other industries.

I don't mention this to say whether Finland is right or wrong in these respects - it's a democracy so I support their decisions in any case. However, it would be foolish to say that a model of nationalised education in a country where a lot of other things are state-provided can necessarily be exported to a country where things are much-less state provided.

To me, there is too much focus on the school part of the education - education is clearly the output of parenting, societal attitudes as well as the school curriculum and teaching methods. Schools aren't an island - they live in a national culture, economy and even geography. You can't just import a different teaching style into a society that may value education differently (eg is being a truant a taboo thing to do, or something that is secretly valued in an anti-hero way) and expect to get the same results. Even the amount of time parents spend with their children will have a different result.

The best outcome to take from Finland is that there are many different ways to Educational outcomes - probably the most important is that the best fit between national culture and resources should be explored. Perhaps the national (or state?) culture needs to be slowly changed before the educational system can follow. Perhaps the idea that Federal input of education into 50 different states is a bad idea. There are many things to look at.

Not to mention demographics. Most of these studies pretty much overlook that dimension entirely, and it's usually the most critical.

In the case of Finland, we're looking at a country with a total population of 5.4 million people, 92% of which share the same native language and ethnic background. By comparison, the USA has 313 million people and a heck of a lot more diversity of income, class, race, ethnicity, linguistic background, country of origin, etc. It's also got a much higher variance in population density per city, state, region, etc.

If ever there were a case of comparing apples to oranges, this would be it. There are vanishingly few analogs between the two countries on almost any dimension, and most of the education statistics I've seen over the years have not been weighted accordingly.

I'd be much more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons. How does Finland perform against countries like Finland? How does the US perform against similar countries (of which there probably aren't many)? Even comparing the US to a country like China is problematic, given that only the top some-single-digit percent of Chinese children take these tests in the first place.

The article specifically describes a comparison of Finland with Norway, similiar in size and ethnic composition. Apples-to-apples, as you say. Norway's education policy is much more similar to the US, and Norway's PISA results are mediocre, also similar to the US.

Actually, after controlling for ethnic composition, the US and Norway are not similar. In fact the US outperforms Norway by roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

The US and Norway are not similar. Norway and Finland are similar.

Finland is similar to many US states, the level of government responsible for education.

Your "authority" is crap. The original article explicitly compared Finland not only with Norway but with individual US states that had similar population and percentage of immigrants. That's about as apples to apples as you can get, considering that US schools are primarily subject to state rather than federal guidelines, and Finland still came out ahead.

By way of supposed refutation, you present a source that is full of strong claims substantiated by little more than the most blatant cherry-picking. The author's "correcting for demography" is no more than throwing out the data he doesn't like. Ignoring the fact that the immigrant factor has already been examined, he pulls tricks like comparing second- and third-generation immigrants in Finland to native Swedes. Notice how the obvious comparison between native Finns and native Swedes isn't made, because it wouldn't support his conclusions. Then he goes on to say "In the case of America, 99% of the population originates from other countries" and suggests that we compare such loosely-defined American immigrants to people in their home countries - without regard for such things as economic differences between the countries. After arbitrarily excluding Asians because they pull the results up, Hispanics because they pull the results down, and undeclareds for no methodologically sound (or even fully explained) reason, he comes up with a highly suspect graph purportedly showing how the US "beats" most of Europe.

Here's the kicker: even after cooking the data that much, Finland still comes out well ahead of the US. No matter how hard he tries, he still can't manage to reverse the original conclusion. In the end, citing that does more to discredit your position than to support it.

Um, I wasn't disputing the fact that Finland comes out way ahead of everyone else. I would have expected the phrase "...roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US..." to be a tipoff.

I was disputing the idea that the US and Norway are somehow equivalent. They aren't. The US does far better than Norway.

The exclusion of Asians, Hispanics and Blacks is not arbitrary - it is done because Finland, the UK, Sweden and the other nations discussed by Sanandaji have very few of those groups. Since there are strong correlations between ethnicity and school performance, this is necessary - otherwise we might confuse the effect of the school system with effects of the student body. He has another blog post where he compares the US to Asian nations and excludes non-Asian ethnicities for the same reason - Singapore and Japan don't have many Whites/Blacks/Hispanics.

The goal of Sanandaji's blog post is to compare educational systems, holding student body constant.

But student body is not held constant, not even ethnically. Even within the "white European" demographic bucket there's huge variation among ethnic groups - most relevantly regarding attitudes toward education itself, teachers, and relative levels of funding or social priority given to either. Treating US whites the same as European whites is wrong on a whole bunch of levels. For one thing, we're not all white. For another, the American population is drawn from specific subsets of the European population, and has experienced different patterns of population change since then (particularly evident wrt Jews with their known unique educational profile). Lastly there's the fact that even if non-whites aren't included in the sample their effects are still felt because many white students still share schools with non-whites, and not a few of those "white" students in fact have mixed heritage.

Of course, treating ethnicity - and particularly just white vs. non-white - as the only variable other than the educational system itself is itself offensive. One might also consider the effects that 300+ years of distinctly US culture and history have had on attitudes toward education, teachers, or the relative social/economic priority accorded to either. Or the effects that wealth distribution within the US or wealth differences between the US and other nations might have. The US student body is simply not the same as the Finnish one, so if Sanandaji really wanted to isolate the effect of the educational system then he'd have to adjust for more than one other variable.

Alternatively, he or you might take note of the fact that the current Finnish results are the result of change to the system while holding demographics relatively constant. What works in Finland might not work in the US for all sorts of reasons, but claiming that it won't work specifically because of ethnic makeup is both intellectually and morally dubious.

If you have a data set that distinguishes between different flavors of European, or somehow controls for attitudes towards education, I'd love to see it.

In the meantime, I'll control for the factors I have data on, while recognizing that even more of the variation than I can see might be caused by non-school system factors.

...you might take note of the fact that the current Finnish results are the result of change to the system while holding demographics relatively constant.

This is incorrect. Because the Finns don't do standardized tests (according to the article), and because PISA is relatively recent, we don't know how good or bad the Finns did before these changes.

"I'll control for the factors I have data on"

Of course you will, even though - or perhaps because - the intermediate result is far more inflammatory than informative.

"Because the Finns don't do standardized tests"

The fact that they don't do standardized tests doesn't mean it's impossible to know whether they're doing better. They embarked on these reforms because of a perceived problem, and seem quite satisfied with the results. If educators and researchers believe there has been improvement, based on other evidence, then I'm disinclined to second-guess them based on one semi-informed and heavily biased blogger's commentary.

So your suggestion is to disregard all data without perfect controls? In that case, we have no evidence whatsoever that any nation outperforms any other nation.

The fact that they don't do standardized tests doesn't mean it's impossible to know whether they're doing better.

How can one possibly know this, even in principle?

If you are being intellectually honest, your answer should agree with your principle of ignoring all data unless perfect controls are used.

"How can one possibly know this, even in principle?"

Are you seriously suggesting that standardized tests are the only way to measure school or student performance? What about non-standardized tests showing improvement within the same region or district? What about measuring achievement differences after leaving school? There are plenty of other options besides standardized tests.

In addition to cherry-picking and strawman, you've just added the the excluded middle to your list of fallacies. There are more than two options here, not just standardized tests or mere guesswork. Just because something can't be measured by one yardstick, even if it's the most accurate one (which itself is debatable in this case), doesn't mean other yardsticks won't suffice. Do you really want to turn this into a discussion about intellectual honesty? I'd relish the opportunity to cast your disreputable claims and tactics even further into oblivion.

Hmm. So you trust the results of non-standardized non-normed tests, even though no such tests have actually been cited.

You are unwilling to trust the results of an internationally normed and standardized test (PISA) after controlling for some but not all exogenous variables?

But nevertheless, you are willing to trust the results of the internationally normed and standardized test without controlling for any exogenous variables?

Heh, you had me going for a while. Now I realize you are trolling.

> demographics

Canada scores in the top 10 in all PISA categories, not far off from Finland, and shares much more demographically and geographically with the United States than with Finland.

The provinces of Canada with higher ethnic diversity and immigration (the more prosperous ones) tend to score higher within Canada than the ethnically homogeneous provinces.

> "The provinces of Canada with higher ethnic diversity and immigration"

What kind of immigration? The USA has the unfortunate status of being home to a huge population of generally impoverished immigrants, thanks to its over-focus on family reunification and humanitarian immigration paths, the ease/prevalence of illegal immigration, and combined with a complete ignorance of skilled immigration.

This is the opposite of Canada, where the immigration policy has for decades strongly favored skilled immigrants - and have let them in in far greater numbers (and greater ease) than humanitarian immigrants. Similarly, Canada has for the past decade or so slowly shut the door and raised the bar on family reunification. It should also be no surprise that illegal immigration is a substantially smaller problem here than it is in the USA.

The somewhat inconvenient and blunt way to put it is: Canada has, for the most part, received a socially desirable demographic of immigrants, and the USA has not.

On top of this, America has to deal with the legacy of slavery - which has created a huge population that continues to be marginalized (despite advancements) to this day. You can't oppress and systematically destroy a population's chances of success for nearly 200 years in a row and then magically expect them to pick right back up a mere 4-5 decades later. This race dynamic drives a huge part of American demographics, and in Canada this issue may as well not exist.

The issue of race in the US is a labyrinthine beast that the vast majority of Canada could not even begin to imagine. And for that Canadians are lucky.

It's misleading to discuss matters of ethnic demographics in such terms as "diversity" and "immigration." The fact of the matter is, while immigrant and/or minority status can be a variable in its own right, it's usually just a proxy for effects that are specific to the minority and/or immigrant group in question.

The US and Canada have vastly different demographics. In the US black and hispanic children perform far worse than white and asian children.

Wikipedia says that black and hispanic Canadians comprise less than 4% of the population.

It's not obvious that this statistic is an argument against the success of the Finnish system being translatable to America, though. Black and Hispanic children are disproportionately likely to be poor and subject to underfunded schooling, and may in fact be the demographics who would stand to improve the most under a system more interested in equalizing such disadvantages than the current one.

An interesting TED talk on the more general effects of equality that talks about many of the issues you raise. It is titled "How economic inequality harms societies" [1] (link below). Looks at correlations between income inequality (defined as the average income of the top 20% / average income of the bottom 20%) versus measures such as homicide rate, mental illness, social mobility, high school dropout rates, prisoner counts, infant death, etc. All the data is both compared on a country level and on a US state level.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

Is public school teacher a desireable profession in the US? Is it anywhere near the level of prestige associated with lawyers or doctors? How is the pay? This is one of they key differences that's repeated in nearly every one of the numerous articles I've read about the Finnish school system, and it's the one single thing US really could do a lot about.

Teachers are government employees, unionized no less. That is to a great many Americans a double whammy. The relationship between Americans and their government has always been -- and will always be -- adversarial.

More to the point, it isn't at all selective--the necessary academic certification to be a schoolteacher is way, way, way easier than the academic certification necessary to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or accountant.

Now, it's held in very low esteem and has very poor pay. It is assumed that if they were any good they would take private sector jobs where they can make a lot more.

Teachers are held in high regard in China too.

US teachers get crap pay.

That is a myth. You may believe they should be paid more, but when you account for the amount of hours the work and benefits their total compensation is very competitive with private sector jobs that require similar levels of education.

"Account for"? The pay reflects the requirements. I never claimed crap pay was a cause. But it is clear it demonstrates that the American system does not prioritize quality in teaching positions.

>"Account for"?

Yes teachers work around 190 days per year and in my area (metro Atlanta), they start off at $40k+ and around $50k with a Masters degree.

They are guaranteed raises so that they can easily get up to $60k (in today's money--more if they have graduate degree) by the time they retire, and after 30 years they can retire with 60% pay (most of them can retire in their very early 50s instead of 60+ like the rest of us). They get more time off than nearly any other profession.

Based on salary alone the average teacher makes 57% more than the overall state average salary, and when you add in their benefits package it goes up even higher.

With cost of living in my area that is definitely not "crap" pay.

You misunderstood my quote marks. I don't care if you account for hours worked, the net pay in the end doesn't seem to attract the quality you need in teachers, nor give them the respect they deserve. Also, your numbers seem suspect. The median pay for teachers is around $40,000 in the US. Median, not starting.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

> What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?

The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.

> The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.

That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).

By that argument, everything is bound to fail because there are a thousand variables in a society and a school system.

And yet another sidetrack not based on facts to add to my list:

* No, Finland's schools are not more disciplinarian than elsewhere. The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation: watching TV and hanging out with friends etc. is more fun than studying and everybody gets a good education for free anyway.

And no, the rest of Europe definitely doesn't match Finland in equality (income equality, gender equality, whatever you mean), let alone their schools doing that.

The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation

In fairness though, I'm sure the same applies to pupils in other European countries, yet the point you were replying to said that Finnish pupils are enjoying school less than pupils in other European countries. That is not explained away by your response.

That said, it's kind of obvious that a competitive environment, especially one that is stressfully though, is going to be problematic for intellectual achievement, and a focus on equity can help. There are plenty of studies that demonstrate that stress impairs lateral thinking etc.

Please don't confuse discipline with not enjoying school. The point I was replying to said:

the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe

This is not a fact. Instead, the opposite is the fact: I looked up an OECD study and Japan and Finland are on the opposite ends of the scale with Japan having the most school discipline.

Interestingly, the German state of Saxonia does nearly as well as Finland in the PISA tests.

No-one is claiming the Finnish system is the only way to get high PISA scores. Although, the PISA scores aren't the thing to strive for anyway. How about a school system that is relatively cheap, comparatively equal, produces great learning results as measured by multiple studies, takes up relatively little of the students' time etc.?

I don't think Finland is trying to force it on anyone but it could give some people ideas about what's allegedly "just not possible" and what to possibly concentrate on. The success of Saxonia can be another interesting data point along Finland, Singapore, Japan etc.

Yes, indeed. Also comparison with a number of countries, instead of just Finland, can give you a better idea of what works and what is just an accidental feature.

For example, in Germany pupils who fail two (or so) classes, have to repeat the entire year. That ends up costing the economy way more than giving those weak students special attention, and extra teacher time, to get them up to speed again. Also the German school system segregates people into university-bound and not university-bound at age ten. Switching between tracks later is possible, but hard.

Being from an European country myself I find it ever so amusing that all my life I've been hearing that "If we were only like the USA" in some regards. Ironic isn't it?

The grass is always greener.

But that's because they use more manure over there.

>The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough.

You see, that's funny, because a much more obvious example can be found in free-market austrian-school economic policies.

East/West Germany is the clearest example around.

West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way. This is the clearest A/B test ever devised of implementing two different economic strategies on a homogenous population. North/South Korea is also similar, but less so.

Most people don't even understand what the Austrian school actually says. That's not surprising, most people who comment on Marx have never opened his book, either.

For the record, it's based on the freedom to trade backed with strong rule of law using sound money. It also prescribes a lack of intervention by the government in the economy, mainly due to misallocation of productive resources and the likelihood of government intentionally or inadvertently creating monopolies that harm the consumer.

Probably the best introductory book on the subject is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson - Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Even if you oppose the idea, it's good to read and understand the theories and supporting arguments properly.

For the record, West Germany abandoned this model during the 1960s and moved towards a more social democratic model, and the USA hasn't tried it since before the 1930s. The current economies of the west are nothing like an economy under Austrian principles, in the same way the Chinese economy is nothing like an economy under Marxist/Maoist principles.

>West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way.

One of the most predictable things about Austrian advocates is their inability to conceive of alternatives beyond some kind of cartoon-stereotype Soviet command-economy. You seem to be aware of social democracy, so you are knowingly assuming a false dichotomy to make your point. I'd say it's even more intellectually dishonest when one considers that no one ever argues for a centrally-planned economy. At the very best, such a comparison holds no value today in evaluating Austrian-school thinking.

It's not my fault the East Germans chose the Soviet model so I hardly think it's fair to suggest I came up with a false dichotomy to prove a point.

One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.

You can compare and contrast post-war West Germany and Great Britain if you like - the latter made great strides towards a more socialist governance probably as a direct result of the largely increased Government functions during the war, and the rise of those who thought that centrally planned economies would do better.

The point of bringing up West Germany is that the country prospered as a result of the liberal economic policies introduced in the immediate post-war period, both absolutely and relative against their East German counterparts, although the differences were small in the early years. It would be foolish to suggest that this is entirely down to the policy choices - all growth from zero looks impressive - however, it certainly did no harm and a lot of good.

It also helped that a lot of money was poured into Western Germany with the Marshall plan while the Soviet Union took large parts of the industrial production machinery of Eastern Germany in retribution for the war.

The preconditions were so different I think the example doesn't really show anything.

The Marshall plan was a tiny drop in the ocean of capital needed to reconstruct the West German economy. At most you could consider it a bit of pump-priming.

The Marshall plan was also equally applied to other war-torn Western European nations which didn't experience the same growth.

I agree that you can't isolate a specific economic philosophy from the general population and culture - the German people have always been very engineering minded and hard working - but something very interesting happened to post-war Germany, and it's always a good idea to look at this (same as the Finnish school example) and see what might have contributed.

>One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.

That fact doesn't validate Austrian-school-thinking — merely that it worked better than Soviet central-planning given the global political and economic environment at the time, which says almost nothing. And even if you're arguing merely in favor of increased economic liberalization, this comparison still holds no value because social democracy has nothing to do with central planning! The points don't even exist along a linear axis — they are apples and oranges. The debate all over the world right now is about how best to implement social democracy, and comparing those two extreme economic philosophies doesn't contribute anything at all. To pretend it does is disingenuous.

The worst thing about right-wing followers of Austrian school thinking is that they refuse to consider the social outcomes when "market freedom" is taken too far; they are bent on destroying society as it exists and recreating a weak image of it inside their economic framework. Even von Hayek himself acknowledged the need for a basic social support system. This type of thinking is highly simplified, almost always ideologically-applied, and extremely toxic to our social fabric.

Free-market austrian school is generally "hands-off, believe the price system".

I've generally seen the "not enough" argument in conjunction with Keynesian "government stimulus" (e.g., google "not enough stimulus" and the first half-dozen articles arguing that the recent $700B + stimulus was not big enough).

I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough. I think the chinese experiment opening up to capitalism is a great endorsement of additional freeing of markets "at the margin" increasing economic benefit.

I should clarify: I think the "stimulus not big enough" argument is fallacious. I think that government spending substitutes for private spending, rather than stimulating it. (e.g., dollars the government spends on tanks are not spent on goods desired by consumers. It may stimulate economic activity, but it reduces aggregate well-being.)

>I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough.

Well, then I'm glad to find someone else who isn't under the impression that continuing and intensifying de-regulation and privatization will somehow solve our present economic crisis.

Yeah I've noticed that too. Extreme types on both sides think this way. My favorites are the ones who swing from one to another. Lots of hard core right wingers started out as communists. David Horowitz comes to mind. PJ O'Rourke too, though he seems more sensible.

Some say the political spectrum is a circle.

I'm not terribly familiar with free market Austrian-school economics, could you expound on what you mean?

I would ignore the inflammatory language and just educate yourself.

The wikipedia page is informative, if a little heavy going for the non-economist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School

As I posted above, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a simple, easy to read book that encapsulates most of the arguments put forth by the Austrian school.

It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek.

Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.

The book seems interesting. But Neoliberal economists, even though they talk a lot about free markets, have a very different world view than that of Austrian economists. One example: Neoliberals promote treaties like NAFTA that allow the free flow of goods and capital between countries, but don't allow the free flow of people between countries.On the other hand, Austrian economists would insist on the importance of also letting people choose were they want to live and work. Furthermore, despite its name, NAFTA is not really about free trade. NAFTA is a huge set of regulations.

Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward.

Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".

If people actually saw what went on "free enough" would have been put to bed years ago. The Chicago boys were given free reign in Chile under Pinochet and nearly destroyed the country. They had to back off of their "free enough" goals to start the trend upwards again to be able to write their "The Chilean Miracle" propaganda piece [1].

[1] http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC11 (sorry for a link that originates from the Anarchist FAQ but this is the best aggregated source on the subject I've found).

If you're equating the Chicago school and the Austrian school, you don't know the first thing about either and you're not qualified to start the moronic, off-topic flame war about the subject you've gotten everyone into.

Another thing usually missing in comparisons with European countries is that all of Europe benefits from America inventing/pioneering so much stuff that they can adopt.

Two questions:

1. What has this to do with education? 2. Doesn't America benefits from European / (or Asian, etc) innovations?

America benefits from the innovations of other nations, but Americans are worried. Looking at history, America's rise to prominence in the 20th century seems to have been largely fueled by being the innovator, the inventor. The worry thus being, what will happen to them when they aren't anymore?

1. Nothing much (you could bring up eLearning and multimedia learning aids, I guess), it was tangentially related to the meta-topic of articles which compare European successes and American failures (usually in the domain of 'social programs')

2. Yes, but America innovates far more. A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention. Put bluntly, we all get a free ride off America's investment in R&D. Just something to keep in mind when you think about 'changing the system' or even just measuring it.

Which American invention did Nokia "get a free ride off"? The telephone? (invented by a Scot) Radio? (an Italian) The battery? (also Italian)

Or do you mean the next generation stuff, like the computer, specifically ARM chips these days? (both British ideas), touchscreens (also British), GSM (pan-European project pioneered in Finland).

Or is it the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of patents Apple licensed from Nokia last year?

To put it bluntly, American exceptionalists would have a lot less room for triumphalism if they hadn't got a free ride off European investment in R&D. Or we could decide that claiming part of the process of invention on behalf of a nation and claiming everyone else was just copying is a bit silly?

A cursory glance at Google search results gives an idea of how much American contributes to science (which is just the starting point, you've then got the whole process of industrialisation and market-making): http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/news/2007-06/8392239/ http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php

EDIT: for people who didn't click the links, it shows America has more scientific papers among the top 1% of most-cited papers... than all the other countries put together

Bell invented the telephone, but where did he go to get funding and start a company/industry? Where did Marconi and Daniell go ? To Britain, which occupied about the same spot as US as industrial/scientific leader once upon a time.

The point is that a country like Norway say could do nothing but sit on their oil income - and every year life would still get better as they buy new technology from America. But for America, of whoever the world leader is, this is not an option. It's got nothing to do with copying or taking credit or whatever - it's just recognising that the flow of benefit from innovation is not symmetrical.

If you'd take the population differences into account, the numbers would be a bit different. Given that Sweden has only 10 million habitants, it seems to push around twice the amount of US scientific output/capita. (Norway and Finland achieve similar efficiency with 5m people) Yeah, what US is doing is pretty impressive, but it's not like Europeans have been much of freeriding either.

And then there was the whole World War thing, snatching top scientists for cold war etc... The polarization of world during the recent history is a bit more complicated issue than the US just kicking ass in everything. And the future is kind of interesting too. (youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

The per capita figures make the other countries look better (although ultimately that doesn't change the underlying point), although the fact that USA has more of the top 1% of papers than all the other countries put together tells a different story. And the other countries do get to free-ride on this... I mean you could set up a communist state with a religious dictatorship, and still it would get the benefit of what the American economy comes up with. You have to question how much of someone's quality of life is down to the chosen system of government, and how much is down to technology (and possibly other things like foreign investors and foreign buyers) they have access to.

What is the point of your pro-US trolling? You've already admitted that the falsehoods you've stated have nothing to do with the thread anyway.

>The per capita figures make the other countries look better

lol, classic.

A cursory glance at Google search results in... ENGLISH... ?

for people who didn't click the links, it shows... either A) ENGLISH speaking countries dominate the most-cited papers (tah dahhh). B) American papers cite American papers (parochialism versus merit).

Tycho: bias, correlations, and network effects...

I think you're clutching at straws. 90% of scientific papers are published in English anyway, plus the study never said it excluded non-English papers. And the figures show that America dominates the most cited papers - it shows England, Canada and Australia doing fairly well but not really better than non-English-speaking countries. Sure you could remove some bias if you really tried... But we could also look at other metrics such as, say, what investors put their money in: like how the iShares ETF based on the S&P Global Technology Index concentrates a massive 77% of its holdings on US companies http://us.ishares.com/product_info/fund/overview/IXN.htm . Or basically just pay attention to the breakthroughs that get reported by the press: top ten discoveries of the decade, http://news.discovery.com/human/discoveries-of-the-decade.ht..., almost all American researchers; best inventions of the decade, http://www.inventhelp.com/Newsletter/2009_12/time-magazine-b... , mostly american companies; or look at pharmaceutical companies by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmaceutical_compani... ; I mean I'm just picking the first such articles that pop up. You'll probably say that these are biased to Americans... but really, if you just pay attention to what gets reported in something like New Scientist (British publication) you'll see how much America contributes.

Plus, the counter points that people cite tend to be lone inventors who either left their home nation to set up shop in the US (or UK when it was the leader), or whose inventions/discoveries were not capitalised upon. Whereas America is full of not just great research, but the rise of entire industries that other nations can then participate in.

Is this the part where people are supposed to start chanting "USA! USA! USA!"?

A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention

At least before February 11th that wasn't true. While the first-ever cell phone may have been built in the US, Nokia has contributed quite a bit to how modern phones work. You may remember Apple for instance paying patent royalties on 3G tech to them.

USA puts more money to R&D than anybody else, but it isn't like the rest of the world is just stealing innovation.

What part of calculus came out of US R&D? Or do they skip that and go directly to cell phone engineering in high school now?

Yeah. It's super ironic to read all the "these socialist solutions of small nations can't scale for big US". And then from the other side "this silly anarchistic free-trade capitalistic solution can't scale for mighty China."

I thought Europeans had the "not-invented-here" syndrome.

The article claims Finland focuses on equality, and that immigration hasn't had much effect on aggregate education outcomes yet.

Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

This is only because there are still very few immigrants in Finland. In actuality, immigrants to Finland score about 50 points lower on Pisa than Finnish natives (about double the gap in the US).

(For comparison, the gap between Americans of European descent and non-immigrant Finns in Pisa scores is 22 pts, and the gap between European Americans and Greeks (the lowest performing European nation) is 46 pts. )

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Excellent observation. The Pisa study data shows one conclusion about education in America: Different racial groups perform at different levels. We are succeeding with some minority groups and failing with others. Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland. Where we are failing is in educating our African American kids. The entire article relies on people not reading the data from the Pisa study, and for those who have read the data to ignore what it shows, from some misplaced desire not to seem racist.

Whites in America test higher than Finns in Finland.

No. You should read the blog post I linked to. American whites scores 524 (tied with Belgium for #6-#7 in the white world), Finland is #1 at 546.

Immigrants in both the US and Finland score roughly the same, about 500 pts. Finland has a larger gap, since their non-immigrants score considerably higher.

Make no mistake - the inequality is caused by Finns scoring very high, not by their immigrants scoring very low.

You're right, I interpolated "finns" for "Western Europeans," which is what was said in the first paragraph of the link you chastised me for not reading:

"American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."

The article you linked goes on to clarify: "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." The correct comparison is European ancestry to European ancestry, excluding first and second generation, not "American whites" vs. Finns.

In any case, I've seen this study pop up for a while now, and more recently on facebook a lot of my friends have been linking The Atlantic's piece.

The correct comparison is European ancestry to European ancestry, excluding first and second generation, not "American whites" vs. Finns.

True. But since the number of European immigrants to the US and non-white native Finns is very low, the correct comparison is unlikely to differ significantly from the numbers given. So technically you are right, but I don't think there will be much difference in practice. Do you disagree?

It's also the best comparison currently possible, since I don't know of any data set that provides more granular data than what Sanandaji used. Do you?

A really interesting finding in studies of homeschooled kids is that blacks and whites do pretty much the same, whereas in school blacks do much worse. This is also completely decorrelated from whether the parent teachers have any background in education, how much they spend, or even whether they have college degrees. I see this as evidence that outcomes are not because of intrinsic genetic factors but because of systematic bias within institutional education. Bias is unlikely to be intentional, but it likely does exist and has significant influence on results.

That follows the studies in cited in Freakanomics showing it's the parental involvement which is the real factor. If the parent cares about education the child is much more likely to end up well educated.

ISTR several years ago seeing a study showing that racial differences are practically nonexistent for students at military schools (that is, children of military parents who go to schools on base).

Wonder If this is explained away by huge gap in socioeconomic status of average black home schoolers, compared to the average black public school family; while status differences for white homeschool compared to white public school fama wouldn't be that pronounced.

First, the article seems to contradict your claim of there being very few immigrants in Finland:

According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

Second, the part you quote talks about variation between schools, and there definitely are Finnish schools with 0% immigrants as well as ones with 30% immigrants. Yet, a "remarkable lack of variation" in test scores.

Yes, the article claims Finland focuses on equality, but it also explains that socio-economic background is a major source of inequality and the Finnish schools have been able to diminish that effect.

According to the article, the percentage of immigrants went from 2.3% to 4.6% between 2000 and 2010. According to Wikipedia, the number is 2.7%.

The fact that the variation between schools is low tells us very little. Supposing Finns score 546, and immigrants score 500, you'd expect the average score of a school with 30% immigrants to be 532. That's not so far off from 546, in spite of the fact that immigrants are scoring 46 pts worse.

Like it or not, the data says there is a huge gap between immigrants and non-immigrants. Maybe the vague wording of a reporter suggests differently, but so what?

Ok, so your primary concern here is that there's a huge gap between immigrants and non-immigrants in Finland? (I thought you wanted to argue like many others before you that the immigrants in the US caused the non-immigrants to perform badly.)

First, I know little about this gap in Finland or what's causing it.

However, I can hypothesise that it has to do with the immigrant children having attended school in Finland for less time. Further, the Finnish school system has been developed for Finnish citizens and is less prepared to attend to the needs of different ethnicities than to different socio-economic backgrounds. For starters, the immigrants need to learn the non-Indo-European language.

The gap you refer to, probably has more to do with Finish immigration policy than the ability of the Finish education system to adapt to the needs of immigrant children.

Both Australia and Canada practise a Skills-based immigration policies. In Australia in paticular, the children of immigrants do better at school than native children. Teriary educated immigrantion applicants are far more likely to be accepted, and seems to have a large effect on PISA scores.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-EMpadQx4hM/TRKZ5kB-49I/AAAAAAAAAY...

"Probably"? Of course it has to do with both, and it's practically impossible to say what it has more to do with objectively.

If the immigrants were exactly like the natives, their school results would be exactly the same as well. Or, if the school was perfectly adapted to the immigrants, they would score the best in the world.

In reality, you can look more into how to keep "undesirable" people out of your country (and deport the disadvantaged people who lower the average scores?), or you can look more into how to develop the school system so that even the disadvantaged people get a good education out of it. Finland chooses the latter, more constructive, more humane, more equal, and as far as we believe the PISA and similar studies, more efficient stance. Ethics aside, you're free to choose otherwise.

Yes, I'm merely pointing out that Finland is not all that equal, and in many ways is less equal than the US. It's just hard to see this effect, due to Finland's homogeneity.

I've never made the claim that immigrants cause non-immigrants to perform badly, nor have I heard anyone else make this claim. What is the proposed mechanism? Bad study habits of non-immigrants rub off on native children or something? (I've heard of some yuppies in NYC trying to do the opposite, and make their kids socialize with Asian kids, but I've never seen data on this.)

The Finnish schools are equal in the sense that socio-economic background has a smaller effect on study outcomes than elsewhere (and the difference between worst and best performers is small). If the US schools would pay more attention to this, it would be one significant attempt to improve their study outcomes. This could affect both the immigrant and the non-immigrant lower social classes (as well as "underachievers").

As to immigrants causing non-immigrants to perform badly, that's how I understand the arguments that concentrate on the immigration differences while that's hardly the only difference between the two countries (as if the poor in the US didn't lower the average as well, and as if the scores of the Caucasian students weren't below Finland as well).

As to the proposed mechanism, I could imagine school funds and teacher resources being directed towards integrating the immigrants in the school. At least in Finland it is a concern, as the schools have less funds than the US ones.

>The Finnish schools are equal in the sense that socio-economic background has a smaller effect on study outcomes than elsewhere

Wouldn't Finland's flatter income distribution be a potential confounding variable in this case? When the difference between the 25th and 75th percentile in income means less in absolute terms, there are probably a whole lot of things that are associated with income in the US that show less of an association in Finland. For example, high-IQ types might be less likely to strive for high-income occupations in Finland than in the US, lessening the correlation between income and IQ. With child IQ being strongly correlated to parental IQ, it's easy to see how this could lessen the correlation between school performance and economic background.

Of course, you may have been comparing Finland to other countries with similarly flat income distributions, which would make my above point moot. Even then though, it's not clear that Finland's education system is necessarily "more equal" than other countries -- it could just be more effective. If the school system in, say, Norway is less effective than in Finland, higher-income students are likely to see less of a drop in scores because they have more educational resources outside of the system.

Almost every comment you make is to support your superior race theory. The article compared finnland to its neighbours.

This is the second post you've made ascribing views to me that I never expressed. Please go reread whatever posts you believe I wrote about a "superior race theory", I believe you'll discover that I didn't write them.

Sure:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353557

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340794

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340315

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321549

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321511

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315126

The words "superior race" don't appear anywhere. The most you've shown is that I've cited the same Sanandaji blog post a few times.

Your second and third links don't even mention race, though the second does conditionally postulate a superior gender (i.e., "if the post I'm replying to is correct, then women are inferior").

>The words "superior race" don't appear anywhere.

Ridiculous. Of course those specific words don't appear there, but that would be the most appropriate summarization of several of those posts.

Actually the OP was being charitable. He didn't even mention your superior gender arguments.

If you bothered to read the threads maxklein cited, you'll note I'm quite explicitly agnostic as to "superior race" [1] theories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3316062

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315959

But I guess it's easier to call me racist than to actually dig up some hard numbers, right?

[1] I'm assuming that by "superior race theory" you mean something along the lines of "genetic variation in intelligence causes some races to outperform others in school".

Wow, really ugly maxklein. He cites studies that try to figure out how to improve American schools, with a focus on ethnic differences in academic achievement, in a discussion about ethnic and national differences in academic achievement, and you call him a race warrior?

Absolutely uncalled for.

Flagged.

He has been citing the same figures, always favoring the same group and against the same group for years now. I just went through 5 pages of his posts to find gems. Yes, he avoids be overt, but it's obvious.

Then the onus is on you to find and cite studies supporting whatever the hell your alternate hypothesis is or refuting his. Then have a polite debate about it.

HN is not the kind of place to resort to racebaiting and it's unacceptable and you know that.

I'm not going to waste my time and energy trying to refute someone who believes black people are not as clever as white people, and wraps it up in nice words. Go through his comments or any article on HN that mentions race. He tries to make the same point over and over again.

I'm not interested in any kind of debate about this. It just wastes my energy and brings me nothing. I will just point out that that's what he does when he chooses to do it. The onus is not on me to prove that black people are not dumb.

You still have yet to exhibit a post where I state the belief that "black people are not as clever as white people" or that "white people are not as clever as asians" [1]. (Note: I'm not asian. Am I racist against myself?)

You have, however, exhibited two posts where I explicitly state that I don't know the cause of the school performance gap and that cultural factors are one possible explanation. But I guess that those are part of my secret plan to appear non-racist, right?

Seriously dude, get a grip. There are far fewer secret racists out there than you think, and I'm basically the last person to be secretive about his views. If I thought blacks were, e.g., genetically less intelligent, I'd clearly state my hypothesis and link to data backing it up.

[1] Unless by "clever", you mean "do better in school". If that's what you mean, then I'm guilty as charged - just like PISA, TIMMS, the College Board, etc.

You are clearly someone who is obsessed with racial issues and in particular, issues that have some kind of data backing up what seems to be your theory that blacks are inferior to others. Sure, wrap it up in fancy round-about sentences and quotes from well known race-baiting sites, but do expect to be called out on it. Wrapping up racist statements in PC words doesn't make them any better.

I'm done with this argument, I don't think you deserve much more of my time.

Finland has very few immigrants compared to its neighbouring countries. (Many immigrants are from places like Somalia with low literacy.)

Please note that the size of organisatorical problems increase more than linearly with the number of involved people. I seriously doubt it would work to copy Scandinavian solutions to countries like the US, with more than 50 times the population...

I don't think anyone has suggested copying Scandinavian solutions to the US.

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries.

What the article says is you can't use the differences in immigration to blanket-deny all other findings. The US and Finland have their socio-economic issues but the Finnish school system has been able to diminish their effect on education outcomes.

The effect of immigrants on average scores is (% of immigrants) x (size of individual effect). Finland has minimized (% of immigrants), not (size of individual effect).

The only lesson the US can really draw from this is that if we reduced the number of immigrants we have, our average scores would go up. So what? Raising averages due to composition changes is pointless.

> The only lesson the US can really draw from this is that if we reduced the number of immigrants we have, our average scores would go up. So what? Raising averages due to composition changes is pointless.

Nowadays, Finland has much of the same rate of immigration than US. Historically it has not been so. But today, around 20000 people move into Finland every year. Whereas the US gets a bit more than one million new inhabitants. Finland has 1/60th of the population of US. The performance is still better, though there is the same ratio of first-generation immigrants.

And I'd guess a lot less people relocating around the world know Finnish than the dominant teaching language in the US...

Canada scores in the top 10 of all PISA categories and has a higher proportion of its population that are immigrants than the USA.

Yes, but the quality of the immigrant is different. Immigrants to the US are primarily south and central American peasants with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak English. Canada has much better control over who it lets in.

As usual, you make another statement trying to pin the problems of your country on foreigners. Read the article - it makes the comparison to American states and to Norway, both of which do not have this 'non-european menace' you seem so scared of.

"Another"? Please reread both the post you replied to, and whichever previous post you believe I made pinning the problems of the US on foreigners. I can't recall ever making this claim, and it's so wildly divergent from my general world view that I suspect you clicked "reply" on the wrong post.

Let me just point out that:

a) I don't consider variation in average performance due to composition changes to be a problem (in this post I explicitly disavow that view: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378157 )

b) in the post you reply to I said that composition changes were too small to affect average performance anyway - i.e., I'm saying Finland has too few immigrants to significantly move their averages.

When I looked at Finlands school system awhile back, I also wondered how their lack of immigrants play into it, but also if it could really scale to US size.

Regardless of whether you think it is moral to abolish private educational institutions, there's good reason to look at other aspects of the Finnish education model rather than this one single point.

Finland does not use multiple choice exams and has literacy standards that are clear and simple. Contrast this to the U.S. model, where literacy standards are a byzantine mess, and are often completely disconnected from a student's inability to read and write.

Mike Schmoker has addressed this in his excellent book Focus, where he writes:

"[Finnish] success, according to observers, is a result of how much time students spend actually reading during the school day. They found one Finnish student who, upon returning from a year in U.S. schools, had to repeat an entire grade. This is because in the United States, instead of reading and writing, she and her fellow students spent their time preparing for multiple-choice tests or working on "projects" where students were instructed to do things like "glue this to this poster for an hour"..."

I teach in a charter school. We have mandated standards requiring us to assign students X numbers of hours of reading/writing per semester. Students who leave our school and then re-enroll in later years are often entire grades behind, and have often not been assigned any writing or reading of any kind during their time in the "mainstream" public school district.

I suppose my argument isn't so much that private schools are/aren't a good and moral thing, but rather that there are many far less controversial methods of improving the U.S. school system than abolishing private education.

The article mentions another difference between the Finland and the US that is equally extreme and probably more directly related to results:

"teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country"

That is exactly what I thought when I read the article. Nobody seems to be mentioning the high status for teachers, high pay and selective intake.

Given that the teachers interact with the students more than anything else, and most people would agree that better teachers produce better students, the chances of this making material impacts on the educational outcomes seems quite obvious to me at least. After all, we're just talking about a variation on the old 'pay peanuts get monkeys' meme.

I'm sure if the average teaching salary doubled, the positions would be more sought after by young graduates. And if the positions were more sought after, there would be more competition and thus less problems with teacher performance.

I remember it being mentioned the last time Finland's success was discussed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2917303

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1249852

(in an interview I linked):

"Asked the key to success, (Finnish ambassador) Seppo Tunturi did not hesitate to answer: "The educator is highly appreciated by society. Young people see it as a profession with a future. "Statistics show that 10% of the top high school students choose this route. (Uruguayan university rector) Grünberg said this is a feature shared by other high quality educational systems, including South Korea, where teaching attracts 5% of the top high school graduates. "In other countries they would be brain surgeons or lawyers, but they are teachers or teachers in Finland," said the rector."

"In addition, training is very demanding. It takes a college degree (4 years) and an Masters in education (2 years). In 2010, more than 6,600 applicants competed for 660 seats to prepare as primary school teachers."

http://rigofa2011.blogdiario.com/1292241206/ (in Spanish)

Here's Singapore as another example.

http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/how-singapor...

One interesting thing about student performance in the US is that on the average it's not that bad early on (e.g. in grade school) but then takes a sharp dive. It is amazing to me what such comparison articles do not take into account: the toxic, sports-based culture in American highschools.

As a foreigner, when I encountered how sports culture derives high school and, in continuation, college student mindset. In high school, athletes and cheerleaders pretty much rule. Every high school in all countries have popular, good looking kids but the the esteem these kids have in the US, I think, is unheard of in other places.

I don't really think it's limited to high school and college. The average Joe Sixpack American is likely more concerned with his nearest professional football team's performance than any other singular element of his life. I was born and raised in the northeast US, played sports in high school and college, but still have not come to terms with how obsessed most people seem to be with sports (both their kids' sports and professional sports). I did receive social benefits from sports for quite some time, but I was never able to understand it.

"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. "

This is absolute complete nonsense... America does worse than Finland because America is racially diverse... and Finalnd is the most "bigoted" of all the Scandinavian countries. America's education system is just fine... actually it is excellant.

Just look at the 2009 PISA scores. American Whites do better than all other "white countries" except for Finland. America Asians do better than all other Asian countries except for the elite part of China(Shanghai). American blacks do better than all other black countries. American Hispanics do better than all other Hispanic countries.

http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize...

Is this your idea of excellence? Every individual race in America scoring better than the "original" countries they came from dozens or hundreds of years ago?

What about the disparity of scores between the races, or income levels, within America? Is this of no concern?

I'll have to check the published literature for what it says about reading instruction in Finnish. Finland has a minority of native speakers of Swedish (not a closely cognate language). Finnish (Suomi) and Swedish are co-official as national languages in Finland.

http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/f...

Finnish, by far the majority language, has an alphabetic writing system that is recently reformed enough that it has very consistent sound-symbol correspondences.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/finnish.htm

The late John DeFrancis

http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...

and current researcher and author Stanislas Dehaene

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/0143...

develop historical and international comparisons, backed up by brain imaging in Dehaene's book, to make the argument that initial reading instruction should at its best focus students' attention to sound-symbol correspondences in the written language taught in primary reading instruction.

But initial reading instruction in the United States specifically and in English-speaking countries in general is only half-heartedly done that way,

http://learninfreedom.org/readseri.html

http://www.mackinac.org/5365

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024599/

and when school pupils in English-speaking countries struggle to learn to read independently, they are also likely to struggle to learn other subjects thoroughly.

The best current information I have suggests that initial reading instruction in Finland, whether in Finnish or in Swedish, is better done than much reading instruction in the English-speaking world, and that advantage may account for much of the national advantage Finland enjoys (and partially explain why immigrant families who use Finnish as a second language are the bottom group found in national-level sample testing of Finland for international surveys).

I agree that there's probably some credibility to arguments that English students underperform because of difficulties in learning to read an unusually inconsistent written language.

That said, Finns themselves tend to learn speak and read English rather well as a second language by the time they leave school; a practical necessity for international business or travel but not very easy considering the lack of cognates shared between the languages. And despite its consistent orthography Finnish has enough other sources of complexity to be rated as a fiendishly difficult language to pick up as a second language.

On the subject of phonics, it sounds like UK primary education is due to head in the opposite direction to US with compulsory phonics instruction for youngsters, including the hugely controversial recommendation for standardised tests on the ability to pronounce made-up words. I doubt we'll be overtaking Finland any time soon though.

Not only do everyone learn English as a second language, most students also study a third language like German, Spanish or French for five or six years. Which is not to say that everybody becomes a fluent speaker in that language, but it is the norm to make an effort.

What about Spanish speaking countries? Spanish also has a very direct link between writing and pronunciation (I can't compare to Finnish, since I don't know it).

Whenever a successful act is presented to Americans they tend to throw out the same generic defense we used to see on technology forums all the time: "That's good for them, but that won't scale for us!"

Are other countries really doing that much better than the United States? It seems like most of the worlds top Universities are in the US and filled with students mostly from, the US.

Sure, they may score better on the tests for comparing students across the world, but it seems like the same people saying this are the same ones complaining about standardized testing in the US.

They are top universities in only two aspects: they provide connections and -- particularly some, like Harvard and Stanford -- the ecosystem for making success later in life. In terms of pure education, most US universities are far below many others elsewhere.

> In terms of pure education, most US universities are far below many others elsewhere.

Is there any empirical evidence supporting this assertion?

If you look at Business School rankings, for example, US Universities are 5 of the top 10. Source: http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-ran...

Quacquarelli Symonds University Rankings also have US Universities rated quite high http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

7 of the top 10 for CS are US: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

6 of the top 10 for Medicine: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

6 of the top 10 for Philosophy: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

Oh get out of here with your facts, everyone "knows" how bad the US education system is.

Part of the deal is the US is not at all like most other countries, I've mentioned we provide public schooling for all children, which some countries don't. The US is also very large and diverse. Texas, for instance, is generally quite low on the public educations scores for public schools overall, but some of the best schools in the entire US, regardless of public or private, are public schools in Texas! You just have to live in the right school district, which almost always mean you live in the right family with a lot of money.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/features/2011/americas...

I'm not sure about the #1 and #2 schools, but further down, Highland Park in Dallas and Westwood and Westlake in Austin are all public schools.

I think it is almost impossible to have a good talk about education on HN, because we are essentially part of the 1% as far as abilities go, and most of us probably got along fine in school with any effort (or even no effort). So the bias tends to be against education. However, I've now had a son who is dyslexic, and the lack of good options even for people with money is dissapointing. The US school system is still very good for the top of the class, it's the bottom that gets let down. At any school system of any size that I've encountered (and I haven't been to very poor inner-city school), opportunities for the smart kids are always there. It's the rest of the kids that are going to struggle, and those that can't find the motivation.

I did a three-year postdoc in math at Stanford. I was blown away by just how good the senior faculty were in their research areas, and how successful they were in motivating, challenging, inspiring, and guiding (in short: educating) students.

Up through high school, yes.

Out of curiosity, did the PISA study compare the level of parental involvement in a child's education between the countries? This NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho... , article has a link to PISA conclusions about parental involvement from a 2009 study and shows that children with involved parents tend to do better academically.

While we're dealing with complex cultural systems with thousands of moving parts, reforming the education system to improve parental involvement might yield significant gains. As it stands now, the system offers little to no incentive for parents to actively get involved with their kid's education. You place the kid(s) on the bus at 7 in the morning and don't see 'em again until 3-4pm or later if they do after school activities. No incentive to get involved at the school during the day or afterwards. As a personal anecdote, I've met several people who view public education as nothing more than day care, kids in at 7, free time until 4pm or later with no involvement outside of "mandatory" meetings.

One thing that many commentators seem to ignore is what exactly the PISA tests measure. For example, the PISA math problems (http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/51/33707192.pdf) are very specifically meant to assess how well students can solve pretty easy problems that could occur in their lives and where basic math literacy is needed, and the PISA exam is given to a random sample of all students. Contrast this with the International Mathematical Olympiad (results at http://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=FIN) which measures how well the very best students do on very hard problems.

It should not be surprising that an education system emphasizing social equality instead of individual excellence performs well when you measure how well the average student does on an easy problem. It just shows that Finland's and PISA's values align well with each other.

I can't find it, but there was a great post on HN awhile back about how Finland doesn't really know what makes its schools so successful. Thus, articles like this pull some facet out of the hat as the key differentiator.

There was a good comment, suggesting that instead of modeling who has the highest test scores, instead model who is most successful at climbing the ranks of PISA. That's probably a better way of figuring out what contributes to success, because there are fewer independent variables.

Previous submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405988

Here's more to cross unknown factors out: a very interesting article on how the Finnish language itself affects schooling and has significance in PISA results.

Finland and Estonia share similar lingual roots and they both rank relatively great, even if Estonia is a lot poorer country than Finland. Yet, the Swedish speaking people in Finland fare relatively worse than Finnish speaking people, even if the schooling system is exactly the same.

http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/

- No standardized tests (except one) - Individualized grading by teachers - Less homework and days of school - More emphasis on creative play - etc.

No, I don't think "equality" is the main thing we Anericans are overlooking. We're overlooking freedom. Trust in people and children to be curious and learn, and let them be free enough to do it. So many of the big bureaucracies put in place here in the US to "help" education just legislate the shit out of schools and regulate everything. Yikes.

And before I here anything about "Anerican" I'm using my phone so I can't go back and adjust the typo...

I didn't even notice until you mentioned it. That said, what kind of phone are you using? If you were using a decent American phone rather than a crappy Finnish phone I bet you would be able to ;)

What Americans are really ignoring is the idea that maybe someone can "hack" education for the better.

Numbers and anecdotes aside, we all know in our guts a few things that are beneficial to education: studying more, decreased distractions, (parental) encouragement, high standards for technical subjects, and nurturing of creativity. Every parent wants these things for their children.

The system in Finland has some of these things, but who cares why they have them? You could copy some aspect of Finland and hope you get Finland's results. You could copy some aspect of China and hope you get China's results.

We are trying to have the government build a model to explain WHY China's students study more or to explain WHY Finnish students have less distractions in the classroom. Are you confident about the government's ability to model this? I'm not sure I'd trust the world's best statisticians to figure it out.

The main point is that while everyone thinks they're an expert on how to get the above mentioned qualities into a school, simply finding a school that has them and then sending your child to it is a REALLY, REALLY easy way to get your child a good education. However, under the current system, you are discouraged from sending your child to said school.

Suppose your friend used a government chalkboard for a relational database. He's really upset about its performance. He hears about Oracle's fast databases, so he adds an index etc to his chalkboard, since queries with an index are faster. Maybe his chalkboard will catch up, and maybe it won't. MySQL is down the street offering what he really wants (a cheap, fast database) but he doesn't want to use it. He's worried that using MySQL will cause a decline in the quality of the chalkboards and leave all his neighbors with a piece of cardboard instead. He would rather spend his time mimicking Oracle until his chalkboard gets fast, and trying to figure out WHY Oracle is fast.

Shouldn't he just let the innovative minds behind MySQL sell (or give away) what they've built, and just know that their product has all of the features he wants? If it doesn't have what he wants, then he can use his chalkboard.

Are we all really afraid of that? An educational process is technology too, even if it's not software. This community is in love with software that solves problems, but is very cautious of schools that can solve problems.

Sal from Khan Academy said it best: "I would make the US Education system more American (promoting creativity, ownership of learning, and independence) and less Prussian (moving together in an assembly line)."

Has anyone here had any experience hiring or working with grads of Finnish schools? How about Master's/PhD level grads?

I'm curious how an employer or co-worker would view the quality of their school's end product.

I employ a few Finns, but also lack the comparison to other cultures to be able to tell. An interesting factor is that most Finnish men have also been through military service sometime after high school.

Yes. Military service is compulsory in Finland. About 80% of males undergo military service. The rest is either exempt for various reasons (medical) or opt for a "civil" service in which one is essentially employed somewhere for 12 months with pay coming from the government.

As 80% is quite a high number, most is indeed correct here. Thus you will find that regardless of one's education or background, it is safe to assume he also has military training. (Myself, a Finn, I have a Master of Science in mathematics and also a 2nd lieutenant in the Finnish Air Force.)

There is actually a very strong structural argument for why public goods such as education and health, should be distributed equally:

If those in power have to use the same system as those they hold power over, then they have a strong incentive and self interest to ensure that those public goods are of a high standard.

This is not to say that public goods must be delivered by the state, but rather there should no difference in opportunity of access (such as the Finnish private schools that don't charge tuition).

I think that in the UK our school system's failure to set a standard of consistently adequate reading and writing skills for school leavers is a partial cause of many of our problems.

I would estimate that close to 50% of our population are functionally illiterate , by that I mean they are unable to put something into written (or typed) words that can be easily parsed by the human brain with a non ambiguous meaning. Look at the comments section of any British tabloid website for evidence of this.

This then causes employers to make a university degree a pre-requisite for many jobs that may not actually require one. If somebody has been able to pass a degree course which requires essay writing then they are probably able to send a professional email without looking like an idiot.

This then causes the government to create targets like "50% of Britains should attend university" which of course feeds a spiral of debt that may not have needed to exist if the standard of secondary education was high enough.

Personally I learned to read and write mainly by reading fiction books and computer manuals followed by writing text based games (added bonus of learning BASIC and C).

I think many things are best learned not by directly focusing on them but by creating paths of learning that subconsciously teach "supporting" skills.

How about "because it's full of Finns"?

The author ignores the power and idiocy of public unions in public education. Anyone interested in this topic should really watch the movie "Waiting for Superman".

All teachers in Finland are unionized.

Have you seen "Waiting for Superman"? Is what you saw in that documentary the same in Finland?

Oh the Irony.....

You lost me on the quote above the picture:

"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."

I could see how that line would tempt people to check-out of the article (and I can't blame you). But I think there's a reality to it we should pay attention to.

In a previous HN thread regarding this topic I asked why countries like Finland haven't overtaken the U.S. as far as success. Given their education system has been touted as dramatically better than ours for at least 20 years.

One of the replies I got was that these countries generate more well-rounded individuals and that's why these countries tend to do better on happiness surveys and such. And maybe that's true.

Maybe it's time to accept the reality that not all people want the same thing. That Americans have been taught to strive for excellence and that inevitably leaves others behind. While Finland values equality over all and is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of societal wealth so as to not have kids who think they need to work day and night to succeed.

Finland's entire population is 5.36 million, close to the population of Minnesota and a bit more than half of Los Angeles county's population of 9.86 million.

Finland does have a lot of inventions and technology they export.

For example, the majority of web servers in existence in the world, underlying the entire world economy run an operating system originally created by a Finn.

Nokia was also a major player and innovator in cell phone and one of the first truly widespread portable information managers.

Minnesota has 3M corporation of course.

Comparing Finland to the US is not a reasonable comparison. Comparing Finland to Minnesota might be justifiable though.

Would it be almost fair to compare the EU to the United States?

That's a more reasonable comparison, sure. I'm not finding exact numbers on aggregate european population but seems to be between 731 and 857 million, about 2.5-3 times that of the US.

That doesn't make it a fair comparison though, given the massive differences in economics of European countries (to mention one thing).

You discredit your point with your examples. It doesn't take a huge population to create most of the world's success. The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

I'd say that his examples did a per capita output of significant innovations was perfectly respectable per capita, unless you can list a comparatively impressive list of achievements for Minnesota, which certainly benefits more from national network effects like a large domestic market than Finland.

China being less innovative than the US over the last 20 years might owe much to their population starting the era in absolute poverty, and is largely irrelevant to whether a linguistically isolated small country ought to be leading the world in more fields of R&D other than telephony.

A little further research suggests that Finland also invented IRC and one of the first graphical web browsers. If you were going to draw any conclusions about the impact on educational emphasis on equality on Finnish inventiveness it would surely be that their software engineers weren't as focused on monetising as their US counterparts.

> The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Not yet.

Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can.

Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement.

And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

> Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

Not yet.

The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy.

Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)

The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago.

Not to mention that the bilateral trade with Soviet Union (that employed much of the country until late 80s) didn't really promote innovation.

Maybe there's too much homework, too many hours in class, and not enough physical movement / play in U.S. education. And it's probably true that teachers at some especially bad schools have given up entirely.

However, I got tired of reading U.S. educational-silver-bullet fantasy writing a long time ago.

Regarding the quote on Finnish not having a word for "accountability": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3678

Some of the comments on there make a good argument for the idea. Interesting.

This is my quote of the day:

> Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.

Personally, I think this one sentence from the article has a lot to do with why US schools are less than good: [In Finland] "If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it."

In the US, if a teacher is bad and the school is public, not much can be done. They certainly won't be fired.

Private schools, on the other hand, have more freedom in this regard.

I think the article made a lot of good points regarding creative play and avoidance of heavy standardized testing.

It's really difficult to fire a teacher in Finland too. Practically impossible if the teacher in question doesn't do violence to kids or come to work drunk.

It is not easy to lay off a public servant in Finland, but I think it is mainly so because of the procedure required. Several written warnings need be given that state the reason in plain text. Too often it just takes too much balls from the principal to write down "n. n. does not perform his/hers duties as a teacher in the required way because: ...". And a public servant can be fired because of inappropriate behavior in his/hers free time.

If you think the public sector is bad in the USA, it's nothing like the EU. Y'know the way all EU workers have employment benefits that put USA workers to shame? Well EU public sector workers have employment benefits that put private sector EU workers to shame.

In Germany a teacher, like most people working in the public sector, cannot be fired. You are either stuck with them or you promote them so that someone else has to deal with them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com