.....Finlandia
We returned from Finland on Saturday, so here are my initial overall impressions, focused mostly on the implications for K12 education (higher education is forthcoming).
To begin, let me acknowledge that one cant draw firm conclusions about cause and effect after a short visit. Spending a week in a far-off country means you return knowing a lot more than you knew, and a lot more than most people know back home. Youre also armed with various illustrative anecdotes and quotations that are useful to bolster arguments. But I would never claim total knowledge of the American education system, and I live there, spent 19 years in school there, get paid to write and think about it full-time, etc. So my factual assertions will be limited to the obvious (e.g. its very dark in winter), first-hand observations, and expert sources. When I say, for example, that Finns are a punctual people, thats based on both experience (e.g. the senior ministry of education official who arrived at an 11:00 AM meeting at precisely 11:00 AM and said Im sorry for almost being late.) and official documents (its a direct quote from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Guide to Finnish Customs and Manners.)
Ill start by sketching out what Finland is like and how the education system works in broad strokes. Its a remote and sparsely populated nation. There are slightly fewer than 5.5 million people living in a land area about 80 percent the size of California, mostly near the southern coast. The population is racially and religiously homogenous 98 percent are native Finns and 82 percent are Lutheran. For almost 600 years, Finland was under the dominion of Sweden, which is why Swedish is still the second national language and all students are required to learn it in school, despite the fact that the Swedish-language minority comprises only 5 percent of the population. The countrys small immigrant population is growing, notably with Russians, Estonians, and Somalis. Finland has very liberal international trade policies, which is more or less a prerequisite for prosperity when youre a long way from everything and your only natural resource is wood. Labor markets, by contrast, are highly regulated, with roughly 70 percent of workers belonging to trade unions, including teachers. The biggest company is Nokia, the cellphone giant.
The Finnish sensibility is an interesting mix of individualism and cultural solidarity. On the one hand, theyre very invested in the idea of equality and seem quite comfortable with the high-tax, high-service Nordic welfare state. Because Finland is geographically and linguistically remote Finnish is a difficult language understood by few non-Finns they seem to understand the need to stick together. But that mutual support is a means of giving people space to live their lives in an individual, self-directed way. Our hosts at the Finnish embassy in America said that they were far more involved with their neighbors and local community in the U.S. than back home. Finns tend to be taciturn; the chairperson of the Education Committee in Parliament compared Finns to the allegedly indecisive, endlessly voluble Swedes by telling us that In Finland, we talk a little while, make a decision, and get to work.
Finland received the highest scores in the world on PISA, an international test of 15-year-olds in science, reading, and math. That success was repeated on the 2003 and 2006 version of the test. This was, and is, a big deal for them. For most of its history, Finland was ruled by larger, more powerful nations to the east and west. Unlike Americans, theyre not prone to think in terms of exceptionality and national greatness.
Its important to understand what Finlands PISA test-score distribution looks like beyond the world-beating average. Performance in the top 10 percent of Finnish schools is almost exactly the same as the average among the top 10 percent of all OECD schools. Performance in the bottom 10 percent of Finnish schools, by contrast, is better than the median score for the OECD. In Finland, the Lake Wobegon effect is essentially real it appears to have few if any low-performing schools. And this is perfectly congruent with the aims of its larger social and economic policies few people get very rich, but no one is truly poor.
Finnish children dont start 1st grade until theyre seven years old. But most are engaged with state-supported early childhood services from an early age.Parental leave policies are (as Dana Goldstein explains) very generous, and once parents return to work they have the choice of a receiving a child-care subsidy or enrolling their children in municipal day care (the most popular option; we visited three such facilities during the week.) Theyre not in a big hurry to teach reading, focusing more on play and socialization, but it would be inaccurate to describe Finnish day care as non-educational. Half-day preschool begins at age six.
All children attend basic primary schools through the ninth grade, when most Finns are 15 years old. All schools follow a single national core curriculum that spells out what subjects must be taught at each grade level, the content to be covered, and the minimum number of hours of instruction. (This includes religious instruction or philosophy for those who opt out.) There are no formal national tests administered to all students a la NCLB. Nor is there a British-style inspectorate system. However, as fellow junketeer Matt Yglesias notes, this doesnt mean that theres no governmental assessment or oversight. National education officials used sample-based assessments to gauge progress, and local municipalities also administer tests as a means of managing their schools. It just happens in a more low-key, non-public way.
Grade retention is virtually unheard of in Finland, homework is generally light, and after-school tutoring is rare. As I wrote earlier, Finns spend significantly less time on education than most countries, particularly the other high-performing nations. While ability grouping is officially disallowed, the principal in the primary school we visited said they try to give more instruction to high-end students in a subject like math. While there are no charter schools or vouchers per se, some parents have options among public schools, particularly in Helsinki where population density makes travel to multiple schools feasible. One principal in a school we visited spoke of the schools music and foreign language programs as being key to attracting students. But since standards, funding levels, and teachers in public schools are generally uniform and evenly distributed, and (per above) school-to-school performance variation is unusually low, there seems to be less impetus to create policies designed to engender market competition.