What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

tldr; Finland educational policy is driven mainly by ensuring equity to all, and is the primary factor in producing the excellent PISA results.

Executive summary:

- Focus on equity ("every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location"); all pupils get free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

- Lack of standardized testing (only exception is the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school).

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

- Periodic testing of a few sample groups across a range of different schools to track national progress.

- Lack of institutionalized accountability of teachers and administrators; if a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

- Teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility; a master's degree is required to enter the profession.

- Finland is a relatively homogeneous country (Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland : Finnish education system consists of: (1) daycare programs for babies and toddlers; (2) one-year "pre-school" (or kindergarten for six-year olds); (3) nine-year compulsory basic comprehensive school starting at age seven and ending at the age of sixteen; (4) post-compulsory secondary general academic and vocational education; (5) University and Polytechnical higher education; and adult (lifelong, continuing) education.