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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

#21

Post by flexie »

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.…

The flipping of classrooms is promising but Colorado has around 1 million school age children so if you dismiss the idea of learning from Finland because of its size you may want to ignore Colorado as well.

On a related note, saying that the US can't learn from smaller countries is the standard reply every time someone suggests that Americans could learn something from another country. Since only a handful of developing countries, Russia and Japan are in the +100 million population class, it's a convenient argument for not learning from anyone else :-)

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

#22

Post by nhaehnle »

brianchu wrote: post #17

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 develop…

This just underscores the headline statement of the article though, wouldn't you say? If e.g. US education policy were strongly focused on equity, chances are that those immigrants wouldn't score lower than the average. And since powerful groups would still want their children to score well, chances are that the system would change in a way that pulls everybody up rather than pushing anybody down.

From the other perspective, it seems perfectly possible to have a culturally and ethnically homogenous country with high inequality (along class lines rather than racial lines) and hence worse education results.

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

#23

Post by flexie »

penny500 wrote: post #13
adamt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.

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

#24

Post by vixen99 »

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…

Trying to figure out what 'Here's a comparison that mostly factors scale out: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN/co.... - again, the primary intention of the medical system in Canada is equality.' means. Primary intention? Really?

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

#25

Post by penny500 »

rtpg wrote: post #14
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 c…

America's demographics are far from homogeneous. Students in Palo Alto need a different approach than students 30 miles away in Oakland. You're dealing with different cultures, values, English-speaking abilities, math levels, reading levels, and on and on.

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

#26

Post by nhaehnle »

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…

I wouldn't say that it's quite that simple, but it rings true if you think about it from the perspective of the de facto power groups.

When private schools exist, those power groups send their children to the best private schools, and few "important" people care about the public system.

However, when private schools do not exist, and those power groups have to send their children into the public system, then suddenly a whole lot of "important" people will care about the state of the public system, which is to everybody's benefit. (Also to the benefit of those "important" people, because they also benefit from the positive externalities of a well-educated society.)

Obviously, it is possible for a public school system to degenerate into a de facto-tiered system, where schools in poorer districts fare much worse than schools in rich districts. So this is just one factor among many, but it is a factor.

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

#27

Post by smutticus »

Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat. We know that academic performance correlates closely with the economic conditions parents. So why don't we talk about it more?

Schools are in many ways just reflections of a society and its values. Schools don't exist in a vacuum, so comparing American schools to Finnish schools can not be done as an apples to apples comparison.

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

#28

Post by maigret »

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.

I found this scale excuse used multiple times (in European countries as well, and for all kinds of topics) but never got any proof for it, rather the opposite. If scale was an issue, how could the US have become such a technology leading nation? Usually, that's is just another way to tell "we don't want to know about it, we have no will to change anything because we hate change, or we screwed up but we don't want to acknowledge it."

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

#29

Post by argonaut »

flexie wrote: post #23
penny500 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.

I bet students in South Los Angeles start off with a lower Finnish level than students in Finland.

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

#30

Post by waterlesscloud »

brianchu wrote: post #17

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 develop…

What I always enjoy is the "Standardized tests are bad, as this standardized test proves!" schtick.

Moving beyond that, though, this article (in German, use google translate if needed) seems to say that Finland's performance can be wholly accounted for by their focus on pulling up the weakest performers.

http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/finnlands-pisa-geh...

EDIT- google translate changes "unteren zehntausend" in the title to "pocketful of miracles", seemingly because there was a film with those titles in each language. I think the literal translation of "lower (or bottom) ten thousand" is more accurate in this case. Ah, machine learning.

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