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

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

theatlantic.com

53 pointskayoone67 comments

It's interesting that the PISA scores are always used to declare that the school system of X is vastly superior to Y, (usually some other country in comparison to America), a conclusion that ignores the fact that test scores are affected by variables other than the educational system of a country.

If you correct for ethnic background, America holds up very well. Asian-Americans (including Asian-Americans from developing nations like Vietnam and Cambodia) score as high as Asians in the wealthy countries of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. European-descended Americans score in the upper third of the pack when compared to other White Europeans (ahead of Australia, Denmark, France, and the EU average, below Finland, Switzerland, Canada, Germany) [1]. In this comparison, Finland does stand above the rest, admittedly. But what drags down our scores? Disadvantaged ethnic minorities. The same applies to European countries: "In almost all European countries, immigrants from third world countries score lower than native born kids."

Even immigrants to Finland score poorly compared to native Finns; it's just that only 4% of Finns are immigrants. In fact, the gap between immigrant and native PISA scores is greater in Finland than the USA.

With all the institutional and socioeconomic baggage that comes with being Hispanic or black in America, you cannot seriously compare the raw PISA scores of a nation of immigrants that is 13% black and 16% Hispanic (America) with a nation that is by and large culturally and ethnically homogenous (Finland), and use that to draw meaningful conclusions about the educational system.

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

EDIT (reply to below): No, because even immigrants/minorities in Finland score lower than average; the gap between immigrants to Finland and native Finns is even greater than the gap between immigrants to America and native Finns. Furthermore it is very hard to make a comparison because it's pretty easy to have "equity" when your entire society is largely ethnically/culturally homogenous, and when you only have to scale that equity across a very small population.

This just underscores the headline statement of the article though, wouldn't you say? If e.g. US education policy were strongly focused on equity, chances are that those immigrants wouldn't score lower than the average. And since powerful groups would still want their children to score well, chances are that the system would change in a way that pulls everybody up rather than pushing anybody down.

From the other perspective, it seems perfectly possible to have a culturally and ethnically homogenous country with high inequality (along class lines rather than racial lines) and hence worse education results.

Ethnic issues aside, I think the OP's most important point is that schools are not the only thing that goes into education. Their family, community and friends might even be more important. Imagine you took a school performing in the top 5% academically and swap the students with a school performing in the bottom 5%. Which do you think will perform better?

Universities ares someplace where this is widely accepted. Go to a good Uni because that's where the good students are. It probably works for primary schools too.

That's assuming there is a way to have equality without pulling everybody down to some moronically bad level. That's the only way I've ever known equality to work.

What I always enjoy is the "Standardized tests are bad, as this standardized test proves!" schtick.

Moving beyond that, though, this article (in German, use google translate if needed) seems to say that Finland's performance can be wholly accounted for by their focus on pulling up the weakest performers.

http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/finnlands-pisa-geh...

EDIT- google translate changes "unteren zehntausend" in the title to "pocketful of miracles", seemingly because there was a film with those titles in each language. I think the literal translation of "lower (or bottom) ten thousand" is more accurate in this case. Ah, machine learning.

So, to improve PISA scores, do not let children immigrate.

Is there a country which drastically changed their immigration policy in the last 20 years and does regular PISA tests? Your theory predicts a corresponding change in the PISA scores.

You seem to flip between immigration and "race" (I don't think it's a helpful social construct, hence the scare quotes) somewhat randomly in your post. Immigrants scoring lower makes some intuitive sense to me, they've just shifted country and probably need to learn a new language etc. which will hold them back at first. But what's that got to do with African-Americans?

Finland does not collect data on the ethnic makeup of its population, so I had to flip around with race and immigrants.

I think the article misses some of the scaling issues. Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children, while the US has ~84 million to educate.

I'm far more interested in the classroom "flipping" model[0] coming out of Colorado. It combines the scaling advantages of online video lectures with supervised group practice. I don't think it has been fully studied yet, but it sounds very interesting.

[0] http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166748835/more-teachers-flippi...

But doesn't schooling pretty much scale horizontally? Is schooling 84M really any more complex then schooling 1.5M?

If anything, I'd suggest there is a fairly large fixed overhead for a country to set up a school system (teacher training, set curriculum, exam structure etc) and beyond that it becomes fairly cookie-cutter to scale out each school.

My thoughts exactly, the article does explain that US schools are managed on a state level, and then it becomes much more comparable.

It doesn't work that way. Students in South Los Angeles, for instance, need a different curriculum than students in wealthy Cambridge. Students at the former still struggle with English, while the latter are scions of Harvard and MIT.

I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.

I bet students in South Los Angeles start off with a lower Finnish level than students in Finland.

Well, that's an easy bet to settle. 97 percent of Finns have either Finnish, Swedish, Russian or Estonian as native language and only 0.26 percent of Finns are native English speakers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland

It's as easy to settle as your bet. That was the point I was demonstrating with my sarcasm.

Sorry. Got lost on me :-)

I found this scale excuse used multiple times (in European countries as well, and for all kinds of topics) but never got any proof for it, rather the opposite. If scale was an issue, how could the US have become such a technology leading nation? Usually, that's is just another way to tell "we don't want to know about it, we have no will to change anything because we hate change, or we screwed up but we don't want to acknowledge it."

If you're going to indulge in flights of imagination, maybe try to imagine why what this guy, who seems to have every attribute of an expert in the field, says, might be true. Or even, attempt some introspection to see why you'd prefer to dismiss the article, even on a basis that is addressed in the article.

Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.

Why assume that person is an expert? Can he prove causality, or is he confusing correlation with causation? I see no methodology. Why do students in Singapore, for instance, achieve among the highest test scores in the world with a merit-based system? Shouldn't you expect different results if the author's thesis is correct?

You misunderstood the argument.

Finland has a merit-based system just like Singapore. And Singapore has, just like Finland, made a concerted effort to provide equal access to education to all its citizens.

The argument is not to drop merit-based tests and chances based on merit. Nobody is arguing that.

The argument is that society as a whole should focus on providing equal access and chance to citizens (in this context children that go to school/university).

So whilst Singaporean education certainly is far more focussed on rote learning and the typical 'Asian Tiger' approach to labor, the system built around those approaches is very 'euro-socialist', if you will: equal access for everyone.

Trying to figure out what 'Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co.... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.' means. Primary intention? Really?

It's a nationally delivered service and one of the primary mandates is equality; of availability, of quality, etc. So, yes, really. If you're suggesting that this overlooks 'positive medical outcomes' I think you're missing the point.

> Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children

Fewer, I expect - their total population is around 5.4 million.

I have never understood this argument very well. It's not like there's some sort of centralized bottleneck, schools can scale pretty well.

I would argue (this is completely speculative), however, that cities in the US are (maybe?) denser than those in Finland, and that urban planning has a tendency to lay out infrastructure in terms of area more than in terms of population in itself. Hence big cities having stuffed classes. The same effect can be seen in DMVs or polling centers.

America's demographics are far from homogeneous. Students in Palo Alto need a different approach than students 30 miles away in Oakland. You're dealing with different cultures, values, English-speaking abilities, math levels, reading levels, and on and on.

East Palo Alto exists.

Also, there are the Oakland hills, Rockridge, Claremont.

Poverty and wealth exist near each other because one depends on the other.

The flipping of classrooms is promising but Colorado has around 1 million school age children so if you dismiss the idea of learning from Finland because of its size you may want to ignore Colorado as well.

On a related note, saying that the US can't learn from smaller countries is the standard reply every time someone suggests that Americans could learn something from another country. Since only a handful of developing countries, Russia and Japan are in the +100 million population class, it's a convenient argument for not learning from anyone else :-)

"Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools."

Children aren't being taught to pass tests. They're being educated. Teaching quality is maintained using sampling. Could this be the key?

"Teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves."

So, they do testing. They probably test more often than standardized testing.

Presumably that testing is catered to the specific children the teachers are teaching, rather than testing that is catered to some kind of national standardized performance metric.

Not all testing is equal, it might be worth looking into the following concepts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formative_assessment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summative_assessment

Standardised testing tends to be summative, if the teacher is setting his or her own tests then then I would assuming the assessment would be more formative.

A very interesting read on the subject of equality and competition in education is Lorenzo Milani students' book 'Lettera a una professoressa' (Letter to a Teacher) [1].

Milani was a catholic priest that was deemed a bit too radical by the church establishment and was sent in a tiny rural community as a teacher so that he would stay away from the workers in large cities. There he developed a full time school, where older students would teach the younger and there was no notion of marks, testing or even holiday.

Learning was a collective experience that relied on critical thinking and research rather than rote learning. The book is also seminal (at least in Italy) since it uses hard numbers to show the social inequality of the school system. The statistical and economical analysis was performed by his students as a research project.

[1] http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/LTAT_Final.pdf

"The statistical and economical analysis was performed by his students as a research project."

That is the way to do it, thanks for this reference. Paulo Freire has had a similar influence in adult teaching. One quick quote from the PDF...

"I'd have you paid by piecework. So much for each child who learns one subject. Or,even better, a fine for each child who does not learn a subject. Then your eyes would always be on Gianni.

You would search out in his inattentive stare the intelligence that God has put in him, as in all children. You would fight for the child who needs you most, neglecting the gifted one, as they do in any family. You would wake up at night thinking about him and would try to invent new ways to teach him - ways that would fit his needs. You would go to fetch him from home if he did not show up for class."

Er - no, I'd just go and find another job, subject to a definition of what 'learn a subject' means! I'll print and read the whole PDF carefully but this is exactly the opposite of what the Finnish system does.

I think this quote is more of an hyperbole, however the principle of the quote would be: spend most of your energies on the most difficult students, not on the gifted ones; probably the most gifted student will find something to satiate their interests anyway and their families are already providing them tangentially with learning material.

An educator I know likes to say that's not the really worst students you should spend your energies on, but the ones just a little better, that's where the best return on investment is, according to him.

Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat. We know that academic performance correlates closely with the economic conditions parents. So why don't we talk about it more?

Schools are in many ways just reflections of a society and its values. Schools don't exist in a vacuum, so comparing American schools to Finnish schools can not be done as an apples to apples comparison.

"Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat."

I've worked with inner city youths, and that is completely false. If that were true, we'd expect a very skinny poor population. Instead, a large percentage of America's poor are overweight.

A large percentage of the poor are overweight or obese because of the low nutritional value of cheap, readymade food.

I don't think that's the cause. I think that's just some middle class bias in the debate.

I think the real reason is that food generally costs a lot less than it used to cost, relative to housing and other expenses.

Poor people often know how to cook, out of necessity, and make the food taste better by retaining more of the fat, adding carbs like rice, and plenty of meat.

Food is sustenance, culture, entertainment, and reward all in one experience. And the price is relatively low. If you have $10, you can dine very well if you can cook.

Any references to support that assertion?

[NB Genuinely interested - not being snarky]

This completely ignores changes in lifestyle, elimination of physical education at school and other factors. My wife teaches at a school with about a 40% homeless population. Health issues including obesity are just as common at this school as the rest of the district. 100% of the children receive breakfast and lunch at the school and all are welcome to come back for dinner which a large percentage take advantage of. The school hasn't had PE in at least five years, and many of the kids will tell you flat out that when they are at home they sit around and watch tv.

No, we can't talk about poverty. That requires critically examining the American fetishes for proprietarian, neoliberal capitalism and the inequality it drives. In fact, the problem is even deeper: it requires Americans to critically examine the cultural assumption that Life Itself is a competitive game to win or lose as individually as possible.

Anyone in the world can tell you that Americans behave like animals. A friend of mine went to the U.S.A. and came back after he witnessed how they let a poor man die in front of the hospital because he didn't have health insurance, with full disregard of the Hippocratic oath (if they even have that thing over there). I bet he'll never visit again.

Anyways, we'll just have to wait and see whether co-operation is more effective than competition. For now, it seems like competition is winning, but the question is at what price.

I wouldn't say like animals. Animals have all kinds of social arrangements, and in fact only some very few large predators or insects are ever entirely individualistic.

It's just a society that has spent decades in the thrall of a bloody-stupid ideology, to the point that America is only now recovering the vocabulary to talk about its problems clearly.

A point that seems to come out of this:

> Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

Schools should be more about this. Creating a good environment for kids, especially those from poorer backgrounds. We somehow delude ourselves into thinking that schools are about test scores, but it's about forming children into decent human beings.

> but it's about forming children into decent human beings.

This used to be the parents' job.

I know I might be a bit pedantic, but Finland is not part of Scandinavia; only Sweden, Denmark and Norway are. Finland is part of the Nordic countries, along with Scandinavia and Iceland.

This tiny bit of research makes me concerned about the rest of the article's content. And as jared314 correctly points out; things are different in Finland compared to the United States. Moreover; remember, what is good for Finland, may not be good for Colorado. Hell, what is good for Colorado may not be good for Maine. Or Finland versus Denmark, for that matter.

Each country and/or state is different, and should - appropriately - be treated that way. Don't be too swayed by success, also learn from failure.

I'm not sure what you're saying... There's no point in making comparisons because the U.S. and Finland are different?

Canada is much closer to Finland in PISA rankings than the U.S., but probably has more in common with the U.S. in most respects than Finland. Of course, Canada is not Finland or the U.S., and what is good for Canada may not be good for the U.S. ...

Seriously, look no further than the text-book industry in the U.S. It's a friggin' mess. If I were designing a curriculum in Canada, my #1 criteria for choosing a text-book would be "must not be used in Texas or California".

Not that bold. We should not ignore what others are doing, but we should not think that because someone else is doing well, a carbon copy of their solution will fit here. I am just saying that things are never simple.

According to an English dictionary, Scandinavia may also refer to Finland.

From Merriam-Webster, Scandinavia: 1) peninsula N Europe occupied by Norway & Sweden 2) Denmark, Norway, Sweden --sometimes also considered to include Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, & Finland

Your dictionary is wrong. Frankly, I've never trusted Merriam-Webster, so I don't consider that a valid source.

Including Iceland is beyond ridiculous, that's the Nordic countries!

This comparison is way too vague to have any significant meaning. So what if Finland is different from Denmark/US? You're different than me (I'm not US), but we both need to eat to survive, exercise to stay fit and read to learn. We probably share similar ambitions (health, family, financial stability) and have similar fears (health, family, financial stability), so why not education?

Those kind of geographical terms are hardly ever well defined (same with continents etc.), mostly because there is no rigorous way to define them.

The article makes it sound as if public vs private is the only way in which schools differ. Even if all schools are public, some of them are good while others are bad, and you still have to somehow select students who get to attend good ones.

Soviet Union had a similar system, and selection was driven by a combination of merit exams, social status/personal connections, and corruption. This actually worked reasonably well. But "equal access for everyone" was more of a propaganda bs then reality, and I doubt it is much different in Finland.

> Soviet Union had a similar system, and selection was driven by a combination of merit exams, social status/personal connections, and corruption

I gather that you've also attended one of these schools :) Anyway, I also come from that part of the world and I remember how my parents had to pull a lot of strings to enroll me in a better school compared to the one I had been automatically assigned to.

What I do like in the Finnish schoolsystem is that it gives an equal chance for everyone from every background to aim for their individual dreams and goals. It does not rank people based on their welfare, but the equality in the schoolsystem gives every single child an equal chance to be whatever they want. You are not judged on your social status and income, but how hard you work for your grades and goals. Children and teenagers are not restricted when it comes to applying to schools and universities. You can even apply to the top universities of Finland if you have studied hard and have good grades. Tuition fees? Nope. And how's your income? - The schools don't care as long as you've proven that you're hardworking or talented. System takes care of the funding, students can focus on the studying.

Maybe in some countries, changing to this kind of system might be considered just an idealistic nonsense, but I believe that's what has made the Finnish schoolsystem as strong as it is - equal chance for everyone to be whatever they want to be and work hard for.

My sister is a teacher in elementary school, in a somewhat diverse school community, and achieves high scores by focusing on equity and a community outreach to get parents involved in the classroom.

The finnish model sounds very much like the swedish model, and Sweden is constantly slipping in the PISA studies. 2009 we were below Norway, and even behind United States in reading and mathematics.

The author of this article would have his readers believe that out of all the things about Finland which make sense regarding their better achievement, the only element that really matters is that Finland doesn't have private schools.

Stated another way, the only thing that is causing public schools to fail in the US is the existence of private schools.

Eliminate private schools and suddenly the US will have achievement on par with Finland, if we are to believe this analysis.

Is it really that simple?

America's top schools are privately-run (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Andover, Exeter, etc). If we eliminated private schools, does the author expect better test scores?

The use of "school" here is about primary and secondary education, not University/College level tertiary education.

So? My point still stands. The best secondary schools, like Andover, Exeter, Harvard-Westlake, St. Paul's, Horace Mann, to name a few, are privately-run.

I wasn't disagreeing with your point, merely pointing out that in this context those were poor examples.

I wouldn't say that it's quite that simple, but it rings true if you think about it from the perspective of the de facto power groups.

When private schools exist, those power groups send their children to the best private schools, and few "important" people care about the public system.

However, when private schools do not exist, and those power groups have to send their children into the public system, then suddenly a whole lot of "important" people will care about the state of the public system, which is to everybody's benefit. (Also to the benefit of those "important" people, because they also benefit from the positive externalities of a well-educated society.)

Obviously, it is possible for a public school system to degenerate into a de facto-tiered system, where schools in poorer districts fare much worse than schools in rich districts. So this is just one factor among many, but it is a factor.

Nope, you are completely misinterpreting the article. Perhaps, if you studied in a Finish school, you would have a better understanding of what the author was trying to say.

Finland has a very quirky school system, it's nigh impossible to apply in other countries. It's also a matter of a concerted PR effort - the paper reality often looks better than what actually happens in schools. While it's very interesting and certainly still a role model, many educational professionals are slowly dropping the 'Be Finland' chorus and are starting to look elsewhere.

New Zealand seems to be the new hype.

Take some people and 'partition' them, that is, for some positive integer n, have n boxes and put each person in some one of the n boxes. Each box is a 'partition'. Have no empty boxes.

Okay, pick a measure. Might pick accuracy with a bow and arrow, skill at adding a column of numbers, ability to memorize a passage of music, distance on a broad jump -- you get it, essentially anything.

Now apply the measure to each of the people, and for each partition get an average for the measures of the people in that partition.

Now rank the partitions on the averages. Typically will have no ties -- assume no ties. So, there is no ambiguity in the ranking.

Note: Likely picking a different measure will result in a different ranking.

Now pick one more box, A, and move some people from the partitions into box A from some of the other boxes, and get the score of the people in box A.

So, here we have an experiment with any people with any partitions with any measure and have said nothing, zip, zilch, zero, about ethnicity, race, income, parent's education, school systems, teachers unions, school budgets, etc.

Claim: Essentially always, the score of box A will be significantly lower than the score of the best partition and significantly higher than the score of the worst partition. That is, the score of box A will be, in the word of the OP, 'middling'.

So, just this little thought experiment is enough to explain the fact that the US is not either the best or the worst in the world on the PISA tests.

But, if in each partition the people are homogeneous, then typically the result will be the same except the difference between partition at the top of the ranking and the bottom of the ranking will be larger. Net, both the top and the bottom of the rankings will have homogeneous populations, and the diverse partition A will be middling.

For more, if want to compare the school, home life, etc. of Finland what those aspects of the US, then compare PISA scores of students in Finland, native to Finland, with the PISA scores of US students of recent, native Finnish descent.

Of course, there was

"McKinsey's report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools"

of 2009. The URLs of the PDFs are no longer live.

There in the "supporting materials" on page 24 is a bar graph of

"PISA Science Literacy Scale for 15-year-old students, 2006"

with

     Finland      563
     Hong Kong    542
     Canada       534
     Japan        531
     Australia    527
     US whites    523
     ...
     US average   489
     ...
     Greece       473
     Israel       454
     US Latinos   439

Now, how can Israel be so low?

Exercise for the reader!

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