There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland. How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?
Why wouldn't it? The per-taxpayer cost ratio would remain the same.
Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
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Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#12There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland. How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?
I don't see how it wouldn't. It's not like if you have 10 times as many students then you'll build a school 10 times as big. You'll instead build 10 times as many schools, all operating more or less independently at roughly the same scale as each other. There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#13Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
You have provided a good summary of the submitted article, without expressing an opinion on its conclusions. Allow me to respond to quoted point 2.
2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there.
A counterexample to this being especially important is the country Singapore, with four official languages (Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English in decreasing order of number of home speakers) from four different language families. Especially important to consider is that English has been the sole language of school instruction in Singapore during my lifetime, even though essentially no one before the current generation of young graduates grew up in an English-speaking home. Moreover, Modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin," called 華語 in Singapore) was not the home language of the ethnic Chinese majority of the population in Singapore, but rather Hokkien or other south Chinese languages that are as different from Mandarin as English is from German. (I speak much Mandarin and some Hokkien.) MOST students in Singapore for more than a generation were learning their school language of instruction as a second language as they attended school. (This was true of my wife's generation in Taiwan too, where Hokkien, "Taiwanese," was the home language and Mandarin the school language.) United States, and maybe British, teachers put a lot of blame on immigrants for not growing up speaking English, but an effective school system can handle a multilingual surrounding cultural environment and still DEAL WITH IT while helping the learners learn the preferred official language. See the TIMSS report
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf
for the consistent finding that the average level of Singapore pupils in mathematics is comparable to the "gifted" level of United States pupils. The population of Singapore was not selected for high IQ or high levels of schooling (the immigrants who settled Singapore were mostly indentured agricultural laborers who fled wretchedly poor parts of China or India) but today's inhabitants of Singapore show the results of sound education.
4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
Agreed with your noting of point 4 as an important issue, distinct from United States policy proposals.
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#14perhaps delaying the mind-warping effects of school for a few extra years really helps.
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#15Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
I was in Helsinki last weekend, actually. One of their prominent politicians was in the paper saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans do... Or else", referring to immigrants. It's by no means "not a problem there".
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#16There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland. How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?
I don't see how it wouldn't. It's not like if you have 10 times as many students then you'll build a school 10 times as big. You'll instead build 10 times as many schools, all operating more or less independently at roughly the same scale as each other. There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.
> I don't see how it wouldn't.
Let's see if we can think of some reasons.
> There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.
How do we know that the two "may" s cancel each other out.
Moving organization-wide decision-making one level further away from the base often has an effect.
Let's put Finland's 5 million in context. Ohio is just over 11M and Los Angeles County is just under 10M.
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#17Genetics? The article doesn't even pause to consider the possibility that Finnish people, a small and relatively isolated population, might just happen to be, on average, genetically just a bit smarter than world population at large. While thinking about these things is horrendously unfashionable, it should be considered before we start assuming that we can replicate their success by copying their school system.
Why should we think about that? What the U.S. is doing currently isn't working, there's very little disagreement on that. While there is a certain amount of "golden age of the past" syndrome going on, it's clear that results in terms of educational outcome and school discipline are going down. Looking at other systems that are having success is the rational approach. "No child left behind" (Keep testing! Keep testing! Test more!) is not.
It's not about assuming we can replicate their success with a direct copy. It's about looking at what their system does better than ours, and working to improve our system. Now THAT is politically unfashionable and unlikely to be done any time soon, but it's what needs to happen.
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#18Higher education in Finland is free, therefore education level is high. If I remember right, almost 60% of people have some kind of higher education, university or polytechnic. Education is valued here. And it is also said that entrepreneurship is not that valued in Finland because of high education... Most of the grads want to work for big companies & goverment positions.
Yes but that is a meaningless statistic. Here in the UK the present gov has the target of 50% of school-leavers to go to university. What this means is diploma mills turning out media studies graduates who immediately go to work in fast food and retail with 20 grand of debt.
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#19Culture. The system is derived from their cultural values and works because of the cultural values. It's been shown again and again in educational studies: some systems are certainly better than others, but culture is the primary factor.
But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons. The detailed reading I am doing currently in The Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Need to Know http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/1308…
> But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons.
Is that philosphy actually unique? (Since Finland is relatively small, I'm willing to believe that that philosophy is uniformly applied, but real scientists would check.)
> common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures.
Yup. Also, one might want to look at what works in different cultures. (It may be that some things work in a lot of cultures, but not all. It may be that some things only work in certain cultures. And so on.)
Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?
#20Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
You missed what I think is the key point: 5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.
^^^^^ As a parent you'd be amazed at how many people think their kid is special because they can do one thing that other babies at that age don't. Things like, "He walked before other babies","She started talking at a few months","She eats normal food and can hold a spoon". My wife fell into this trap when kids his age were walking or talking and he was just scooting along. I told her I'd worry about it if he's still crawling at 18.
As long as the pediatrician tells me he's healthy that's good enough for me.