

Why do Finland's schools get the best results?  - evancaine
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm

======
roboneal
Summary:

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.

~~~
r7000
Canada also scores highly in PISA rankings. However it is officially
bilingual, has high immigration, many ESL and FSL students.

Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than
the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.

~~~
fhars
Finland is officially bilingual, too, and a significant number learn finnish
as a second language (like this Thorvalds guy you might have heard about). The
rest start learming swedish as the second language in grade 3, IIRC.

~~~
r7000
Yes Linus is from the Swedish-speaking minority - about 5% of the population
right? However, I don't think you are disagreeing that Canadian schools have
much more ethnic and linguistic diversity than Finnish schools.

------
hugh3
Genetics?

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.

~~~
Adrock
Equally unfashionable is the idea that there are advantages to homogeneous
societies and classrooms.

~~~
drunkpotato
Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to
homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which
the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but
what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are
deficient?

Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and
how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run
experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely
because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to
be done to improve.

~~~
hugh3
_Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and
how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run
experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely
because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to
be done to improve._

Or perhaps we need to do things which it is intuitively obvious _should_ work,
but which there is currently not the political will to implement -- eg firing
bad teachers and doing more to stop student truancy.

~~~
drunkpotato
The problem with your intuitionist approach is that you are myopically
focusing on some issues without proposing any real solutions. You are not
proposing a path from here to there.

Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers
at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated,
underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S.

Doing more to stop student truancy: This is cultural. Put armed guards to stop
the students from leaving, and they don't show up in the first place. We need
to foster a culture such that school isn't simply a prison students are
coerced into going to for 9 hours a day.

The path from here to there is difficult and there isn't currently any money
in improving education, so there isn't any political will either. It's a lot
more difficult problem than your simplistic world view admits.

~~~
hugh3
_there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any
political will either_

That was my point, these are two examples of ways in which education which can
be solved with political will alone rather than requiring complicated new
research.

Teacher salaries aren't as low as often assumed, by the way; the average
teacher's salary in the US in 2006 was a surprisingly respectable $51,009
(with all sorts of perks) which, while no path to riches is certainly a ticket
to a good middle-class lifestyle, especially in a two-income household. I
personally wonder if part of the low attractiveness of teaching as a
profession can be attributed to the fact that teachers' unions spend so much
time whining about how low teachers' salaries are.

You don't need to put armed guards to stop 'em leaving, you just need to make
sure they're punished when they don't show up. I never once played truant from
my school; not because it was such a fabulous caring-sharing environment that
I never wanted to leave (this is impractical, children will get bored at
school) but because I knew if I might get caught and if I got caught I'd be
punished. Now for me personally, the threat of detention and having my parents
find out was a scary enough punishment, but I realise that this won't work on
every kid... which is why I strongly believe that every school needs a form of
punishment which _every_ kid is afraid of; and if suspension won't do it for
some kids then we need to bring back the cane.

------
roc
Culture.

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.

~~~
tokenadult
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/13083>

draws together research from various countries in various parts of the world
that don't have a common "culture," but do have common teacher training
curricula in teacher training programs (which are not even at university level
in some of those countries) and 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.

After edit:

 _It's been shown again and again in educational studies_

What particular studies do you have in mind? Citations, please?

~~~
roc
Absolutely, methods matter. But there appears to be a very real limit at which
changing the method doesn't notably change the results.

I don't have a quick cite list. But it's been consistent across literally
every single study I've seen that controls for parental involvement/cultural
value of education. It's more predictive than parents' education level,
neighborhood, curriculum, socioeconomic status, etc.

The only off-hand references I have to get you started are what the Michigan
Department of Education has been beating my sister-in-law over the head with
since she's enrolled my niece in public school.

[http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:www.michigan.gov/documents/Final_Parent_Involvement_Fact_Sheet_14732_7.pdf+educational+study+parents+more+importan+than+schools&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi1Zf8LcSmR43Wnxipj42z7ixpTyG8-rvBRrI-
TrZKhKvWYI0OSbgB7PRg0VPNR38poxOKygnqH6Qsty4QS__X-Y6oWU11Mcmqe95elMRX4Hm6volQBcfD892V6Z5OZ-
nJh6J6L&sig=AHIEtbQ9gadEneSnbwTjpWyQ1a0MqwZGgg)

[http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch1...](http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch13.html)

~~~
tokenadult
Those are some very weak correlations reported in that second link, and of
course observational studies of the kind reported there have nothing to say
about causation.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

It is regrettable that United States school officials are not more curious
about what is going on successfully in other countries.

------
greggraham
Notice that technology is not a critical part of their success. I didn't see a
lot of shots of kids in front of computers, but rather, teachers and students
interacting with each other. I work at a private school that has a similar
philosophy, which contrasts with the other private schools in the area with
which we compete. We're not interested in 1-1 laptop programs because we don't
want devices getting in the way of personal relationships. Of the upper tier
private schools in the area, we have the highest scores and the lowest
tuition, and very good acceptance rates in top colleges. We invest in teachers
who are well educated (all at least masters, several PhDs) and are happy (very
high retention rate).

I don't mean to boast, but as technology director at this school, I'm always
being asked about laptops, SmartBoards, and other cool and popular education
technology things that we have decided not to use. I think it's important to
carefully consider how technology can best be used, and to know when to stay
with low-tech methods that work well.

------
hugh3
One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in all the handwringing about the US
educational system is that the US still has by far the best universities in
the world. Whatever ranking system you look at, US universities dominate the
top of the leagues table (along with a few foreign universities like Oxford,
NUS and the Ecole Polytechnique). While there are many reasons for this, it
seems like crummy performance in a few primary-school level tests certainly
isn't crippling the entire education system.

For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the
University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with
UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among
the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in
the top one hundred.

~~~
heresy
Just a nit, New Zealand is also in that list of small countries.

The University of Auckland (my alma mater) ranks 61.

------
charlesju
I never thought these tests were fair comparisons. The United States has a lot
more people than Finland and as a corollary the United States has to help a
lot of people get through the educational process that are not as well off as
the average citizen of Finland. In other words, we have a lot more ghettos
than Finland and that hurts our aggregate scores.

A much more accurate test would be to find those of us in the United States
that have been afforded the same living amenities as those living in Finland.
I would bet that we are not far off at all.

~~~
yardie
So what your saying is the more socially stratified US is falling behind the
socialist (compared to the US) Finland. There shouldn't be a lot more ghettos
compared to Finland but there is. And the priorities are all screwed up.

Obviously, Finland should be spending more money on defense, corporate
welfare, and privatized healthcare so that their education budget should
shoulder the cuts and they can brought down to the US level.

------
jerguismi
Higher 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.

~~~
tome
I don't get it. Why would entrepreneurship not be valued _because of_ high
education?

~~~
sesqu
More education is less time in the workforce prior to parenthood, which
probably has a lot to do with founding startups (less work experience,
frustrations, capital, confidence).

------
stretchwithme
perhaps delaying the mind-warping effects of school for a few extra years
really helps.

~~~
btilly
That leaped out at me as well.

Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are
closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in
the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete
mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and
arithmetic.

By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning
younger. There are some statistics indicating that this trend has been
strongly correlated with increased gender disparities in school motivation and
performance in favor of girls. Which makes sense since boys tend to hit that
initial spurt later, and so are more likely to have bad experiences with the
start of school. That could easily lead to long-lasting bad attitudes towards
school that will guarantee poor performance later on.

Also the Finnish attitude of less school makes perfect sense for me. Because
the key is to maintain interest and motivation. The actual hours of
instruction we need are not that great, but increasing hours at some point
brings diminishing returns on instruction at the cost of frustration and pain
for the students.

This brings me to homework for obvious reasons. Research on the benefits of
homework show an interesting mixed effect. Homework is practice, but practice
can as easily fix wrong ideas as right ones. So homework drives responsibility
for teaching to the ability of the home to ensure correct practice. The result
is a strengthening of socioeconomic factors on school performance but little
net difference in learning. Of course the strongest correlation found is that
quantity of homework correlates with conflict at home. With said conflict
arising due to the attempts of parents to get kids to do homework they don't
want to do.

So summarizing, delaying instruction until kids are ready to learn, giving
them sufficient high quality instruction that they do learn, and then limiting
the quantity enough to prevent frustration is likely to lead to sustained
learning. And sustained learning has good results. Makes perfect sense and
makes you wonder why the USA takes the opposite approach on each of those
things.

~~~
heresy
My mom held me back from going to school until I was 7, when the average
person went to school at age 5 or 6.

I asked her about it the other day, and the reason was "kids need time to be
kids".

I cannot thank her enough - I never had problems learning throughout my school
career, and I was never behind the physical curve either, so did reasonably
well in sports as well.

I know it's anecdotal but it's something I'd strongly consider if I had kids
as well.

------
vegai
A Finn here. I noticed a couple of mistakes there.

> "Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to
> change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition
> from one school to another."

This is exactly contrary to the truth. Nearly everyone does change schools at
age 13 and it _is_ disruptive.

"Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and
teaching standards are high."

Yeeaaah, I don't know. Most teachers (even comprehensive school) are MSc or
BSc the very least. Their pay doesn't reflect that.

> "Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. "

What?! You guys put your kids into schools earlier than that? But why?

~~~
guano___
Highly valued is not the same as being adequately rewarded. Being a teacher in
finland is valued in the way that it is respected and prestigious, something
that shines through in the high grades needed to become one. In alot of
countries, this is not at all the case.

------
ippisl
One of the bigger factors that differentiate between average teachers and
great teachers is the ability of great teachers to give a lot of personalized
feedback to every student.

Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and
others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big.

"in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps
those who struggle in a particular subject"

There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish
system comes from this method of teaching.

------
maxklein
They may get the best results, but there are a lot of contributions to society
that have come from less educated people.

A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from
societies where the average result is not so high.

Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that
Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out
the same and there is little diversity of thought.

So I really don't think the world should aim towards using the finish system.

~~~
enjo
I'm sure neither of us are going to be receiving a lot of upvotes, but I don't
think your completely wrong.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at
Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making
always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're
emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by-
committee' products built right into the core of S60.

For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability
nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff.
Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no
real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of
decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch
of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far
away from the iPhone in a lot of ways.

It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms
of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).

------
acg
People also say that Finish is fiendishly difficult to learn. Perhaps there's
some ground in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

~~~
Kliment
Finnish is not insanely difficult to learn. It is however very difficult to
teach using traditional methods. It is nott an Indo-European language, shares
next to no vocabulary base with other language groups in the region, and is
incompatible with the standard (historically Latin-derived) models of grammar.
This makes a formal description of the language much more complex than the
language itself. It is possible for non-natives to acquire Finnish (I did it,
and natives have problems telling I am non-native) and it doesn't take much
longer than it does to acquire any other European language. People who take
Finnish lessons, however, tend to be unable to make the leap from passive
understanding to active usage, and I suspect this is because language course
present the grammar formally, making it much more complex than it really is in
order to explain it.

~~~
acg
You refute that it is difficult to learn in the first sentence then go on to
explain why it's difficult to learn. Finish may help with second language
acquisition.

My other point was the focus on linguistics. This could cause the Finish
people to see things in a more lateral way as they have more linguistic tools
to describe problems expressly because of the focus on languages. This leads
to greater communication and understanding.

~~~
Kliment
I state none of this. Finnish is difficult to teach, not difficult to learn.
My point was that Finnish is easy to acquire, or at least not significantly
more difficult than other languages, but courses that teach Finnish do a worse
job at it than those for most languages because the abstractions they use to
explain grammar do not fit the language. Finnish does not have more linguistic
tools than other languages (it has, arguably, less) and Finns are not more
language-focused than other cultures, though there is a strong focus on
foreign language teaching in Finnish schools (as there is in almost every
country with a small population and a country-specific language).

------
known
Let child _teach_ the parent. I _pretend_ that I don't know how to kick a
soccer ball. And my 3 yr old child _teaches_ me how to kick his soccer ball
and how to play with his remaining toys.

~~~
dan1123
My 3 year old teaches me how to operate my cell phone... it's a little scary.

~~~
known
Ditto here.

------
shin_lao
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?

~~~
LargeWu
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.

~~~
anamax
> 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.

~~~
LargeWu
You're right that I don't know that the two would cancel each other out. But
even if there is some non-zero effect at work, when you spread it out over all
taxpayers, any additional costs/savings are probably trivial.

The main factor at work here seems to be that education is highly valued in
Finnish culture, as opposed to the US, where for a large segment of the
population, it is not a priority. You can scale processes, but you can't scale
culture.

~~~
anamax
> But even if there is some non-zero effect at work, when you spread it out
> over all taxpayers, any additional costs/savings are probably trivial.

I seriously doubt that. Large organizations are qualitatively different from
small ones.

------
zppx
Better results in school measures what exactly?

------
known
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone

