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.