

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - mebe
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

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rskar
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 (<5% born in another country);
however, PISA comparison with Norway suggests that educational policy "is
probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the
nation's size or ethnic makeup". ("Like Finland, Norway is small and not
especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to
education that is more American than Finnish.")

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.

