There Is No Homework In Finland
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There is homework in Finland. I have no clue where that idea came from. The Finnish education system doesn't really match up well enough with the USA that "high school" can be compared. A Finnish student typically starts elementary school at 7, and spends 6 years in lower elementary. Then they move to upper elementary and spend 3 years there. This is where the "responsibility to learn" ends, and every school past that is voluntary. Past those 9 years, students generally choose between vocational school or a lukio, which is sort of like high school that provides general teaching. I have no clue what that 93% number means, but it is certainly not "proportion of age class that completes lukio", as less than that sign up for one.
Finnish PISA scores, and all other lower educational metrics are anomalously high when compared to similar peers worldwide. A lot of things are pointed out as reasons for this, but most of those features are also valid, for example, for other Nordic countries whose students don't perform nearly as well.
Personally, I think the difference is mostly the language. Finnish language is notoriously hard to learn, but Finnish written language is very regular and phonetic. This means that elementary school students spend a lot less time learning to read and write than students in almost any other countries. This saves much time at an early age, which can then be used to learn other useful subjects, giving Finnish students a head start on their foreign peers. A lot of us, including me, actually taught ourselves to read before school with little more than repeatedly annoying our parents by asking "What does this letter sound like?".
Then again, I might just be another idiot assigning my pet cause for a measured effect of uncertain origin.
I wonder how students fare in other countries with phonetic written languages? As I understand, Turkey is one, and their scores are not very high. Could someone describe the Turkish education system a little?
In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2]
Homework or no homework, Finnish students are learning directly from -- and personally interacting with -- some of the brightest minds in their country, every day.
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[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...
[2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...
I'm surprised they didn't mention that Finnish students start school at 7 years old. [1]
I would be interested to find out about the dispersion of the Finnish results. Do they huddle around the mean, or are there very positive outliers? I don't have any personal data points, and haven't seen anything published on this.
[1] http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-...
I'm a Finn and I have three issues with that:
(A) I think high school would be a better translation for the upper secondary school, or gymnasium (1), in Finland. People usually graduate at age 19, and then apply to universities and other places.
(B) Well yes, the acceptance rates for B.Sc. and M.Sc. in education (to become a schoolteacher) are 5%–10%, but a lot of people, if not accepted, will reapply the next years, so this inflates the statistics.
(C) People who apply to study education, may not have been in the top 10% of their high school to begin with. (Some may have been, but a majority, no.)
If you assume students are at school for 10 years (always), teachers for 30 (some dropout), this puts the staff:student ratio to 1:36, or 6% of the top graduates (if as stated, top 10%) a year. This is pretty much the lower bound of staff:student in a stable population, it can only get worse with factors such as college drop-outs and top graduates choosing other career paths.
So either the demographics are rapidly changing , the numbers or fudged or the majority of top graduates in Finland choose teaching.
22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1]
Strange.
Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data by presenting it in a misleading fashion, or they don't know enough about mathematics to understand why their graph is misleading. Neither one presents a reliable source.
[1]http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Ec...
This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".
What I don't get is how people in the US pay 25% income tax and don't get outraged for getting almost nothing back. Heck, we just put our daughter in public school, and even though it's a public school we have to pay $360 a month for full Kindergarten, otherwise she can only attend 2 hours a day. Besides that, the school has to promote fundraisers to cover their costs, because apparently the only thing the state pays for is teachers' salaries. At least 911 is free.
To me it feels like all taxes I pay in the US are mostly just for funding wars :( Even in a shitty country like Brazil you get free education (up to grad school - and state universities are the best in the country), free healthcare and a state pension when you retire. Sure, it all sucks one way or another [1], not because there's not enough money but because politicians down there are extremely corrupt - fix the corruption and you get a tremendous quality of life with a 27,5% income tax.
[1] Public healthcare varies from place to place - where I lived (Porto Alegre, RS) it was ok, but in poorer places they don't have a lot of necessary equipment and are understaffed. Although state universities have a lot of research funding and the best professors, the facilities are quite poor. And the state pension is very low, but that could be fixed by fixing the high level of corruption we have first.
[Edit: In Scandinavia] If you pay taxes for health care etc -- then someone else decides the priorities. This is potentially very bad for you. After paying taxes, you won't have enough money/insurance to go do expensive treatments in other places.
(Edit: Let me put it like this. Health care is centrally planned. Consider the size of that system per million people and realize it is very, very hard to make it work.)
My standard example, from me and others I know:
Sweden (and probably Finland) are internationally acknowledged to be bad at catching health problems. Doctors have lots of administration and just don't have enough time to do diagnosis for individual patients.
The worst part is that the doctors will tell you something, anything, to get you out of their hair.
(Anecdotally, Swedish doctors take jobs in Norway partly to get a chance to do their d-mn job.)
Me and others I know have had decades with e.g. losing your favorite sports (easily treated knee problems), tiredness (undiagnosed food allergies with few symptoms, lack of X, etc). And so on.
I have no idea if 0.5% or 10% of the population get their life quality seriously lowered by this. And no one else know either, since that question just isn't examined...
I haven't lived in Scandinavia, but my observations of other parts of the world lead me to suspect that politicians and bureaucrats in that blessed region are simply less corrupt and inept than those in the USA. Given more resources, they deliver more benefits. In the same situation, their American counterparts just inspire more outrage.
No, I don't have a solution for these depressing observations.
I strongly disagree. It's misleading to shift the bottom of the graph some, because it still looks like an unshifted graph. But if you shift the bottom of the graph all the way up to the lowest value, it does not look at all like an unshifted graph, and should not mislead anyone. Finnish children are obviously not getting scores 20 times higher than other countries.
The point of a graph is to convey information in a concise and useful manner. The pencil graph does no such thing; it obfuscates. It's objectively worse than giving the reader the actual numbers.
edit: That said, for any standardized tests, the scores generally don't follow a linear pattern. (From what I understand, they usually follow a normal distribution.) I don't know enough about PISA to even say what a 563 means, and neither does the vast majority of this thing's audience. Without more detail, even that 7.9% isn't helpful.
While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."
Whether it actually happens or not, I don't know.
Research: http://rer.sagepub.com/content/76/1/1.abstract Press info on research: http://today.duke.edu/2006/03/homework.html
http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm
But many parents report that their kids require far longer to complete the assignments. When my son had more than 15 - 20 minutes of homework in 1st grade (5 repetitions of "write a sentence in Spanish that includes the following word") last year we told him to stop and we sent a note to the teacher. I have a friend whose kid takes 2 - 3 times longer than his classmates to finish his homework. It's hard to tell if it is helpful or not for him, but he's definitely not happy about it and he's still a small kid.
- A finn
I study in upper class secondary school and my peers seem to have no idea that they could educate themselves here and get high salary job aboard. Instead, they rather play video games all day and get drunk during weekend without committing any homework. This of course doesn't apply to everybody, but those who do make me feel like we do not deserve our education.
The flaw is this: We need a certain number of teachers. Teachers are required to get a masters degree or they stop getting raises. So teaching colleges make it easy for anybody to get teaching masters degrees.
http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-rev...
http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popula...
This might also explain the mystery of why Finland scores so much higher than Sweden and Norway. There are much higher levels of third world immigration in the latter countries. The school system is not the only difference.
[1] http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...
Because that says that Finnish-Americans do better than Finnish people in Finland?
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. All the authors who write on this issue, whether they grew up in the United States or grew up somewhere else, ignore the fact that educated persons in most other countries have acquired English as a working language for personal communication. It amazes me that commenters on international educational comparisons don't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.
3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"
http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/
dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."
The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf
with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...
The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems,
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf
and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.
4. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "American ethnic groups" are causally related to comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.
Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf
Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf
Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,
Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...
so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States.
1. Sure high school graduation rates are higher in Finland than in the U.S., can you actually compare those across the board? Is what a high schooler studies in Finland the same as what they study in the U.S.? Maybe there are other societal issues why people drop out in the U.S. compared to Finland which I understand has a homogenous largely white population.
2. So there is no homework in Sweden? So fucking what? There is lots of homework in India and China. If I understand correctly, those guys are supposed to be eating our lunch?
3. The teachers have masters degrees; yet it is not clear to me how adding two more years of education is going to magically transform our education system?
4. The only thing that seems intriguing to me is individual attention. Good classroom ratios. Yet is that feasible to scale up in the U.S.?
2. According to the article, Finland's average PISA scores are higher than Hong Kong or Japan.
3 & 4. Since the degrees are subsidized by the sate, there are a lot more people getting them. This helps recruit enough teachers to maintain the 12:1 student/teacher ratio.
There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in order to make their own statistics look good so they won't be punished.
However, the true reason behind the success of Finnish school system is yet unclear. One thing that certainly plays an important role is that teacher as a profession has traditionally been highly regarded in Finnish society, and it's not trivial to get in to universities to study teaching.
There are other interesting aspects, for example does the language play a role: Finland has an affluent Swedish-speaking minority. There a separate schools for Swedish speakers, but they follow similar practices as the rest of the Finnish schooling system. However, for some odd reason doesn't fare as well in Pisa tests than Finnish speaking students, despite that family background of Swedish speakers have traditionally been more stable.
Uh, considering the high immigration into Norway -- can you back that up? (Finland is more like the rest of the EU in immigration.)
3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries.
4. I can not answer your question. But yes its proven over and over again smaller classes gives better results.
Something that happened at my High school was your were sorted into classes by your marks and that really helped the kids to compete in the higher mark classes, but it also demoralised the kids in the lower mark classes. I know my mothers high school tries to follow the same kind of strategy but for technical reasons its not that possible and thus not so obvious.
I am not clear how taking graduate courses in Mathematics which can range anything from Measure Theory, Abstract algebra to Grad. Real Analysis helps you become a better teacher to high schoolers whose interaction with mathematics should ideally have enough coverage from the basic level.
The respect thing is not clear to me. Lawyers and Investment bankers are not respected here in the U.S., yet they flourish. Ultimately, if you are passionate about what you do, what people think of you (or not) shouldn't matter so much.
My personal hypothesis is that people in America (parents) give way too much responsibility to the school to educate their children and expect magic to happen from people who are merely paid to take care of your children. Quit having kids or take more responsibility in teaching them. My mother is a teacher too and I recall she spent more time teaching me stuff at home before I even went to kindergarten and that definitely helped keep me ahead of the curve. Sure, her ability to teach helped her a bit but surely it is not that hard as a parent to take more of an active interest in your child's education rather than flopping helplessly and whining about schools and such. /end rant
Do you have kids? It's not that simple. Picture this: you're a smart (at least according to the people around you) guy tht wants to give the best possible education to your kid by teaching them things at home to give them an advantage at school. You like learning and knowing things, and can't wait to pass this on to your kid. And then your kid turns out to be the complete opposite of you: an extroverted, extremely social creature that has a short attention span and who only wants to be around people and has very little interest in learning about how things work and stuff. It's really hard to connect to a kid like that - no way to spend hours teaching them things.
I used to say things like what you said until I experienced it myself. I was a bright kid who was always willing to learn, and thought I'd grow up to be the adult that teaches that bright kid things. Well, it didn't turn out that way. When your child shows so little interest in learning new things, you just give up after a while and hope it will somehow work out after a few years of going to school.
What's left out of the analysis is the cost, especially the cost per student. That would include the fully subsidized master's degrees for teachers. In the US the spending per student can be pretty high in some areas, but performance seems low.
Does anyone have a fairly detailed comparison of education practices, spending, and outcomes from various countries?
I do note the irony of proclaiming the greatness of a lack of standardized tests (because they're useless, right?) in one infographic while using a standardized test to prove how great the Finnish education system is.
In text: "Finnish students rarely do homework until their teens"
This is an extremely misleading title. In the UK I didn't start doing homework until I started secondary school at 11 (apart from the odd fun project) so it's hardly different to that.