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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
Anu Partanen

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 -- Newsweek ranked 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 Co-operation 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 high-school 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 Puronen: "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.

Do you think there is any merit to this model?  Do you think this approach to education should be implemented by the states?

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I dont know.  There are a few statements in this article that are curious.

1.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:

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.

In other words, its up to the individual teachers to decide how students in her class are doing?

2.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

So the Ministry only samples a few groups of their own choosing?  Could they conceivably manipulate the average test scores by choosing to test certain groups and ignoring other groups?  

3.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

  

I'm beginning to see a trend here...

4.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility.

By a Ministry, who doesnt believe in standardized testing or accountability?

5.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

Hmm...we know that sometimes bosses can also be manipulated by an employee.  Given there is no accountability to the Ministry, what keeps a Principal from getting sued by a disgruntled teacher?

5.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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 Puronen: "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.

So if there are no lists of best schools, then how are the people to know how well a school is doing?  Everything seems to based on a student's test score, which is given by teachers, who have no accountability to anyone but a Principal (who may or may not have ulterior motives for keeping a particular teacher).

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

I like the idea that everyone has the same opportunity to learn.  But the goal (IMO) should be that the student is prepared to move on to a successful life when he leaves.  Not that all kids are socially equal.  School uniforms can even out the students if thats all we were to worry about.  But what good does that do if the student cant read or do math when he leaves?  The student needs to be prepared to enter the workforce and be able to compete.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

I like this too.  I do think our public schools offer similar services though.  Under privlages kids can get free meals (though I'm not convinced our schools prved healthy meals).  In our state the 'All Kids' program allows underprivlaged kids access to good health care.  I dunno about other states.  And most schools I think provide school counselors.  So we do ok there I think.  But I do agree that those basic things need to be there.  

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

I would too.  This article has to be leaving out something...some reason other than those given as the reason students scores are so high.  

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

See, I dont understand this.  How does one's personal financial situation prevent a kid from academic excellence when he or she has the very same teachers, the very same books and access to all the same classdroom materials that the rich kid sitting next to him has?

I went to public school and we had kids go on to become doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, etc.  Those kids sat right next to the ones who now work in sawmills or at Wal-mart or do common labor.  We all had the same access to the same material, had the same teachers, had the same homework, etc.  I dont have a high-paying career, but I dont blame that on my family's financial situation.  I went to the same school that those other kids went to.

This is a good article.  I would submit, however, that while Newsweek USED to be a top-notch magazine, it has seen hard times of late.  IT was recently sold for $1.  (Yes....$1).  That's not a typo.  

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Wow, it really sounds like they went and instituted tUSA's model of education. We all go to the same schools and have the same chance at getting the same education. We all have medical services while at school. We all get counselors who give us the very amount of individual attention the student desires. We also have no accountability. Our teachers all have degrees. All are well payed considering the amount they actually work.

I could have kept going, but sarcasm wasn't really what you wanted. The real message to the article is the very last paragraph.

As long as we still believe that central government can answer all questions, then we will continue to fail.

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Originally Posted by Dennis Young:
I dont know.  There are a few statements in this article that are curious.

1.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:

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.

In other words, its up to the individual teachers to decide how students in her class are doing?

Why not?  Thats how our universities do it, and unlike our lower education system these are still some of the best in the world.  I think the insistence on standardized tests as the mercator for student performance is one of the primary issues with our education system.  

2.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

So the Ministry only samples a few groups of their own choosing?  Could they conceivably manipulate the average test scores by choosing to test certain groups and ignoring other groups?  

Why not?  These internal tests are just a way for the Ministry to gauge how good students are doing on average.  I would imagine that they follow some of the same best practices employed by sociologists.  An important point to raise here is that these internal tests administered to a sample of students are not the same tests that were used to rank Finnish students to their peers in other countries, those were separate tests administered by an indispensable third party organization.

3.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

  

I'm beginning to see a trend here...

4.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility.

By a Ministry, who doesnt believe in standardized testing or accountability?

I think the point is that the Finnish system goes to great pains to insure instructors are competent enough to be allowed some independence in teaching (must have a masters degree, and teaching programs there are about as hard to get into as most American nursing programs).  If you have a highly competent workforce its not really necessary to constantly have administrators breathing down their necks.

5.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

Hmm...we know that sometimes bosses can also be manipulated by an employee.  Given there is no accountability to the Ministry, what keeps a Principal from getting sued by a disgruntled teacher?

I disagree with that being a significant issue.  What I would be concerned about would be tyrannical administrators abusing their power to manipulate the instructors.  I know, at least, that this is a big problem at many American schools.  I'd be curious to see what provisions they have in place to prevent abuse of power.

5.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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 Puronen: "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.

So if there are no lists of best schools, then how are the people to know how well a school is doing?  Everything seems to based on a student's test score, which is given by teachers, who have no accountability to anyone but a Principal (who may or may not have ulterior motives for keeping a particular teacher).

Parents should be able to tell if their student is doing well (of course, this would require parents to actually be engaged in their child's education).  Also, I would expect the no list policy actually helps schools. Parents will often try to get their children into the better schools (no surprise there), however when they pull the better students out of their current schools, the performance of that school drops.  What comes out of this is typically the innercity schools loose the good students and those who are left behind do worse than they normally would have (a 'bad' student is more likely to perform better if surrounded by 'good' students rather than only other low performing kids).

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

I like the idea that everyone has the same opportunity to learn.  But the goal (IMO) should be that the student is prepared to move on to a successful life when he leaves.  Not that all kids are socially equal.  School uniforms can even out the students if thats all we were to worry about.  But what good does that do if the student cant read or do math when he leaves?  The student needs to be prepared to enter the workforce and be able to compete.

Thats the curious result of the Finnish system, isn't it?  Their goal wasn't necessarily to achieve these targeted results, yet they ended up with better literary and mathematical competency than students in most other countries.  At least based off this article, I would say that despite pulling emphasis off preparing students for the workforce they have actually made them much more valuable for it.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

I like this too.  I do think our public schools offer similar services though.  Under privlages kids can get free meals (though I'm not convinced our schools prved healthy meals).  In our state the 'All Kids' program allows underprivlaged kids access to good health care.  I dunno about other states.  And most schools I think provide school counselors.  So we do ok there I think.  But I do agree that those basic things need to be there.  

Healthy meals?  Hah, these are the folks who consider pizza sauce an adequate substitution for veggies (twice as funny when you point out tomato's are a fruit)!  I believe it was 'Supersize Me' that did a brief expose on school lunches where they contrasted the performance of regular high school students who received 'traditional' pre-prepared school lunches with a continuation school (for the kids who got kicked out of the main school for discipline problems) who were provided with home made, healthy lunches.  You know what happened?  By taking all the sugar and other crap out of the kids food their behavior and grades improved.  The real kicker was that the continuation school did it one the same per-student budget!  I think this is the point Jammie Oliver has been trying to make as well.  As for the free meals, California has them for low income students too, however it was seen as an embarrassment to actually need them.  I think there would be merit to providing all students with free, actually healthy meals (ie should see improvement in behavior, learning, and obesity). Unfortunately, like Jamie Oliver discovered in LA, there is a lot of culture and corruption preventing this.

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

I would too.  This article has to be leaving out something...some reason other than those given as the reason students scores are so high.  

Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:
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.

See, I dont understand this.  How does one's personal financial situation prevent a kid from academic excellence when he or she has the very same teachers, the very same books and access to all the same classdroom materials that the rich kid sitting next to him has?

American towns are usually divided into different districts based on socio-economic factors (ie south-west Fresno is a low income drug haven with high crime rates, north Fresno is relatively affluent with a much lower crime rate), and where one lives often dictates where one goes to school.  No surprise, the low performing schools in Fresno are mainly in the southern half of town where the poor people live.  If you contrast these schools with the ones in more affluent neighborhoods in the north side of town you'll see that the schools in the bad part of town are usually more run down and have fewer resources than those up north.  So in most of these intercity cases there is a big contrast in opportunity between rich and poor areas.

I went to public school and we had kids go on to become doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, etc.  Those kids sat right next to the ones who now work in sawmills or at Wal-mart or do common labor.  We all had the same access to the same material, had the same teachers, had the same homework, etc.  I dont have a high-paying career, but I dont blame that on my family's financial situation.  I went to the same school that those other kids went to.

  

Did you go to school in a big city (say pop <250,000), a small city, or out in the country?  I would expect that this may make a big difference.  I grew up in a middle class household in a small town in the mountains (pop 3000).  There was only one elementary school, so all the kids (rich, poor, or in between) went to the same place.  The high school I went to likewise drew all the students from several different towns.  All of us had the same opportunities in school regardless of socio-economic background and many of us have gone to do either great things or to become trailer trash.  So far as I can tell these are not necessarily the same opportunities some of my intercity peers have had.

This is a good article.  I would submit, however, that while Newsweek USED to be a top-notch magazine, it has seen hard times of late.  IT was recently sold for $1.  (Yes....$1).  That's not a typo.