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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

theatlantic.com

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Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#11

Post by fizz_and_buzz »

Svip wrote: post #3

I know I might be a bit pedantic, but Finland is not part of Scandinavia; only Sweden, Denmark and Norway are. Finland is part of the Nordic countries, along with Scandinavia and Iceland. This tiny bit of research makes me concerned about the rest of the article's content. And as jared314 correctly points out; things are different in Finland compared to the United States. Moreover; remember, what is good for Finland,…

Those kind of geographical terms are hardly ever well defined (same with continents etc.), mostly because there is no rigorous way to define them.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#13

Post by penny500 »

adamt wrote: post #4
jared314 wrote: post #2

I think the article misses some of the scaling issues. Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children, while the US has ~84 million to educate. I'm far more interested in the classroom "flipping" model[0] coming out of Colorado. It combines the scaling advantages of online video lectures with supervised group practice. I don't think it has been fully studied yet, but it sounds very interesting. [0] http://www.…

But doesn't schooling pretty much scale horizontally? Is schooling 84M really any more complex then schooling 1.5M? If anything, I'd suggest there is a fairly large fixed overhead for a country to set up a school system (teacher training, set curriculum, exam structure etc) and beyond that it becomes fairly cookie-cutter to scale out each school.

It doesn't work that way. Students in South Los Angeles, for instance, need a different curriculum than students in wealthy Cambridge. Students at the former still struggle with English, while the latter are scions of Harvard and MIT.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#14

Post by rtpg »

jared314 wrote: post #2

I think the article misses some of the scaling issues. Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children, while the US has ~84 million to educate. I'm far more interested in the classroom "flipping" model[0] coming out of Colorado. It combines the scaling advantages of online video lectures with supervised group practice. I don't think it has been fully studied yet, but it sounds very interesting. [0] http://www.…

I have never understood this argument very well. It's not like there's some sort of centralized bottleneck, schools can scale pretty well.

I would argue (this is completely speculative), however, that cities in the US are (maybe?) denser than those in Finland, and that urban planning has a tendency to lay out infrastructure in terms of area more than in terms of population in itself. Hence big cities having stuffed classes. The same effect can be seen in DMVs or polling centers.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#15

Post by azov »

The article makes it sound as if public vs private is the only way in which schools differ. Even if all schools are public, some of them are good while others are bad, and you still have to somehow select students who get to attend good ones.

Soviet Union had a similar system, and selection was driven by a combination of merit exams, social status/personal connections, and corruption. This actually worked reasonably well. But "equal access for everyone" was more of a propaganda bs then reality, and I doubt it is much different in Finland.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#16

Post by droithomme »

The author of this article would have his readers believe that out of all the things about Finland which make sense regarding their better achievement, the only element that really matters is that Finland doesn't have private schools.

Stated another way, the only thing that is causing public schools to fail in the US is the existence of private schools.

Eliminate private schools and suddenly the US will have achievement on par with Finland, if we are to believe this analysis.

Is it really that simple?

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#17

Post by brianchu »

It's interesting that the PISA scores are always used to declare that the school system of X is vastly superior to Y, (usually some other country in comparison to America), a conclusion that ignores the fact that test scores are affected by variables other than the educational system of a country.

If you correct for ethnic background, America holds up very well. Asian-Americans (including Asian-Americans from developing nations like Vietnam and Cambodia) score as high as Asians in the wealthy countries of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. European-descended Americans score in the upper third of the pack when compared to other White Europeans (ahead of Australia, Denmark, France, and the EU average, below Finland, Switzerland, Canada, Germany) [1]. In this comparison, Finland does stand above the rest, admittedly. But what drags down our scores? Disadvantaged ethnic minorities. The same applies to European countries: "In almost all European countries, immigrants from third world countries score lower than native born kids."

Even immigrants to Finland score poorly compared to native Finns; it's just that only 4% of Finns are immigrants. In fact, the gap between immigrant and native PISA scores is greater in Finland than the USA.

With all the institutional and socioeconomic baggage that comes with being Hispanic or black in America, you cannot seriously compare the raw PISA scores of a nation of immigrants that is 13% black and 16% Hispanic (America) with a nation that is by and large culturally and ethnically homogenous (Finland), and use that to draw meaningful conclusions about the educational system.

[1] http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

EDIT (reply to below): No, because even immigrants/minorities in Finland score lower than average; the gap between immigrants to Finland and native Finns is even greater than the gap between immigrants to America and native Finns. Furthermore it is very hard to make a comparison because it's pretty easy to have "equity" when your entire society is largely ethnically/culturally homogenous, and when you only have to scale that equity across a very small population.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#18

Post by rtpg »

A point that seems to come out of this:

> Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

Schools should be more about this. Creating a good environment for kids, especially those from poorer backgrounds. We somehow delude ourselves into thinking that schools are about test scores, but it's about forming children into decent human beings.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#19

Post by penny500 »

Kroem3r wrote: post #8
jared314 wrote: post #2

I think the article misses some of the scaling issues. Finland has, I think, 1.5 million school age children, while the US has ~84 million to educate. I'm far more interested in the classroom "flipping" model[0] coming out of Colorado. It combines the scaling advantages of online video lectures with supervised group practice. I don't think it has been fully studied yet, but it sounds very interesting. [0] http://www.…

If you're going to indulge in flights of imagination, maybe try to imagine why what this guy, who seems to have every attribute of an expert in the field, says, might be true. Or even, attempt some introspection to see why you'd prefer to dismiss the article, even on a basis that is addressed in the article. Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/c…

Why assume that person is an expert? Can he prove causality, or is he confusing correlation with causation? I see no methodology. Why do students in Singapore, for instance, achieve among the highest test scores in the world with a merit-based system? Shouldn't you expect different results if the author's thesis is correct?

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#20

Post by penny500 »

droithomme wrote: post #16

The author of this article would have his readers believe that out of all the things about Finland which make sense regarding their better achievement, the only element that really matters is that Finland doesn't have private schools. Stated another way, the only thing that is causing public schools to fail in the US is the existence of private schools. Eliminate private schools and suddenly the US will have achievem…

America's top schools are privately-run (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Andover, Exeter, etc). If we eliminated private schools, does the author expect better test scores?
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