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What Americans Keep Ignoring
About Finland's School Success
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how?
One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the
West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that
Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.
The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as
the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on
global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweekranked it number one last year -- and Finland's
national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish
students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.
Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA
survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in
different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or
near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and
neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most
recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai,
China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top.
Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has
been middling, at best.
Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of
exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially
intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children
in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign
delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the
nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media
marveling at the Finnish miracle.
So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the
leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the
Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author
of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from
Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the
Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his
visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.
And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it
to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.
***
During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New
York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a
roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus
on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."
Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he
mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."
This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of
independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to
charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every
person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed
obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs highschool students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is
run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's
statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.
Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education,
because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he
grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior
high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the
Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the
OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.
Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a
year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the
secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help
answer the questions he always gets asked.
From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can
you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve
teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do
you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?
The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything
America's school reformers are trying to do.
For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's
called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a
voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high
school.
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.
As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's
no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the
Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is
left when responsibility has been subtracted."
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators
are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is
required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the
most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the
principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that
nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line
from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete."
It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education,
Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are
no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education
policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but
cooperation.
Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging
the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's
comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.
"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose
to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that
applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they
want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."
Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged,
whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.
Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the
goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success
today, was never excellence. It was equity.
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. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star
performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe
environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals,
easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when
Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the
results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very
similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular
policy focus on equity.
That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at
the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the
problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can
afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public
school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.
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. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out,
Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the
United States.
Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give
Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively
homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had
been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United
States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during
the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in
education. 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.
Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers
College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's
education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country:
Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but
unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American
than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey.
Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the
success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.
Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an
American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state
level. 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.
What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an
educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform
the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized
that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant
natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.
With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of
educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from
President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by
doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a
country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its
population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in
the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left
behind.
Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be
a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."
"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American
science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's,
many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York.
"But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a
dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a
good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or
what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it
couldn't be done."
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even
more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about
education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve
excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on
choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the
population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the
problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might
just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
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