February 25, 2012
What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?
Diane Ravitsch in the New York Review of Books:
In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”
Detractors say that Finland performs well academically because it is ethnically homogeneous, but Sahlberg responds that “the same holds true for Japan, Shanghai or Korea,” which are admired by corporate reformers for their emphasis on testing. To detractors who say that Finland, with its population of 5.5 million people, is too small to serve as a model, Sahlberg responds that “about 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland.”
Sahlberg speaks directly to the sense of crisis about educational achievement in the United States and many other nations. US policymakers have turned to market-based solutions such as “tougher competition, more data, abolishing teacher unions, opening more charter schools, or employing corporate-world management models.” By contrast, Finland has spent the past forty years developing a different education system, one that is focused on
improving the teaching force, limiting student testing to a necessary minimum, placing responsibility and trust before accountability, and handing over school- and district-level leadership to education professionals.
To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:45 PM | Permalink
Comments
What exactly is the argument? That Shanghai/Japan/Korea are not homogeneous societies? In any case, the Friedmanian point is straightforward - I'm guessing Finnish Americans get even higher PISA scores than FInns.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 25, 2012 5:33:09 PM
Notice that Finland pares the testing pool by 42% in the ninth year. This is common in the European education systems. Any type of aggregate score (mean or average) is significantly skewed.
Posted by: Erich | Feb 25, 2012 5:35:36 PM
Here you go. Supposedly Finnish Americans score 50 points higher on PISA than Finns. It's only a blog post, not a paper, but I have to say my working hypothesis is that what's principally going on with American test scores is the Simpsons paradox.
Show me European test scores where Britain is combined with India, where French and Algerian statistics are merged, where Belgians drooling over their master-builder must include the Congo in their score summaries, and then see how much worse the US does than any other place. Basically, the people the US screwed live in the country still. In addition the US takes in third world immigrants at a far higher rate than any of the white-as-snow European countries, many of which have extremely restrictive, often obscene, immigration policies.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 25, 2012 6:14:59 PM
Check out Dr. Michael Marder from U of Texas (he runs Uteach).
He has great videos of NAEP and PISA data that he disaggregated that demonstrates what prasad above is talking about.
If I can find a link, I will come back and post it.
Posted by: TFT | Feb 25, 2012 8:28:38 PM
Sorry Prasad, the closest to the stat you offer in the post you link to is: "The simplest thing to do in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison is to at least correct for demography and cultural background. For instance, Finland scores the best of any European country. However first and second generation immigrant students in Finland do not outperform native Swedish, and score 50 points below native Finns (more on this later)." Can you point to where it references Finnish immigrants or post-1st generation Finns in the USA in the post?
Posted by: Robin | Feb 26, 2012 2:14:41 AM
Indeed. I misread the last figure, where he compares immigrants to natives in many countries including Finland. He doesn't break up the Europe/US comparison quite that finely. I'd be quite interested in finding an actual number. Maybe not for Finnish Americans since there's relatively few, but it could probably be done for many other cases.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 26, 2012 3:51:56 AM
Erich, 9th graders in Finland are 16 years old. Enrolment to vocational and academic high schools does not have any effect on PISA scores, which measures 15 year old students.
Posted by: alip | Feb 26, 2012 4:02:07 AM
We can't help ourselves, can we? After reading that "...there are no consequences attached to the tests administered by the PISA. No individual or school learns its score. No one is rewarded or punished because of these tests. No one can prepare for them, nor is there any incentive to cheat" we cannot resist trying to peek under the skirt.
What passes for education in America is as varied as our population. Here in the South I saw an explosion of "private schools" following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because white parents didn't want their kids in school with Negroes. To a large extent the current rise of home schooling is driven by the same impulse, but with immigrants, queers, Socialists and others added to a growing population of undesirables to be avoided.
Is it any wonder that when so many otherwise sensible and well-intentioned parents remove their children from the public pool (kidnapping some of their most promising teachers and administrators at the same time) the public school systems are faced with an increasingly uphill struggle? Education in America has problems enough without added handicaps imposed by those skimming the cream.
There is a talk show host here in Atlanta who has nothing but contempt for what he calls "government schools." I can always tell when it's a slow news day when that becomes his topic du jour. He knows well which of his listeners has the resources to patronize his advertisers. And a sub-text of the current GOP presidential race, clearly articulated by one of Governor Perry's famous three federal departments to be eliminated, is contempt for public education as well. (Yeah, I know well about "states rights." It was another phrase for protected bigotry back in the day.)
Posted by: John Ballard | Feb 26, 2012 10:55:49 AM
Regardless of whatever nitpicking you want to do about PISA scores, I think the undeniable point is this: the teacher-training process, combined with the foundation allowed by a generous social safety net, makes public education in Finland a totally different ballgame than it is in the U.S.
Until we change those factors in the U.S., all of the attempts at reform, whether through more regulation or less regulation, won't make a significant difference.
Posted by: Alyssa Pelish | Feb 26, 2012 2:24:33 PM
Except it *doesn't* seem like Finland's doing a particularly fine job educating its minorities or immigrants - it just keeps them out. Diane Ravitch likes the Finnish model for obvious reasons, but she makes a similar point here: once you adjust for poverty level American schools outperform their European counterparts.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 26, 2012 3:33:53 PM
So can anyone suggest what makes American schools superior?
Posted by: Levantine | Feb 26, 2012 5:41:27 PM
"Once you adjust for poverty level American schools outperform their European counterparts." I actually do think that American education is underrated. I think that resources are weirdly distributed, but the US does spend a fair bit more compared to the European average. But that distribution problem is a tricky one. There just more poverty in the US. Richer American school outperform richer European ones. Let's assume for the moment that poorer American schools outperform poorer European ones (which would be slightly surprising). But if there are just a lot more poorer American schools then focusing on the upper segment would be to obscure the possibility that America just fails a lot more people, no?
Posted by: Robin | Feb 27, 2012 12:10:20 AM
"Let's assume for the moment that poorer American schools outperform poorer European ones (which would be slightly surprising)."
But that IS the claim made. Rich/white/native kids in the US do better educationally than their counterparts in Europe. Poor/minority/immigrant kids do better educationally in the US than their counterparts in Europe. That those categories aren't equally proportioned in the two cases isn't easy to call the school's fault. It certainly IS true that "fixing education" is a harder job in the US than in say Germany, but it's not clear that the US has more to learn from the Finns than vice versa. Indeed, to any racial minority or outsider of any sort who's experienced European ways, the idea that they handle these things better than the US is ludicrous.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 29, 2012 5:04:11 AM
"But that IS the claim made."
The claim seems to me not quite that: "It shows that American students in schools with low poverty rates were first in the world when they were compared with students in nations with comparably low poverty levels." (My emphasis.) This is not the same as the poor in the US do better than the poor in Europe since the caveat behind that is European and US levels of poverty are not the same.
If richer American kids perform better than richer European kids AND poorer American kids perform better that poorer European kids, BUT levels of poverty are the same yet European performance averages are higher...it would suggest that the math on that would be strange, no, like saying the tall kids in America are taller than tall kids in Europe and short kids in America are taller than short kids in Europe but average height is greater in Europe even though the share of tall and short in each society is about the same?
As for "Indeed, to any racial minority or outsider of any sort who's experienced European ways, the idea that they handle these things better than the US is ludicrous," I have lived in Europe, and while the US handles many things better, it does not all of them, nor is the idea that it does so 'ludicrous', especially since Europe varies a lot between society to society.
Posted by: Robin | Feb 29, 2012 12:05:04 PM
I don't understand, am probably missing something.
"BUT levels of poverty are the same "
"even though the share of tall and short in each society is about the same"
Why are you saying this? This is just the thing that isn't so (ditto on immigration, minorities) - there are unusually many poor kids in the US. (Numbers here)
Glad your European experiences have been nicer than mine :)
Posted by: prasad | Feb 29, 2012 12:24:17 PM
Sorry for the confusion. My point is simply that you point to a piece that suggests that poor American kids do better than poor European kids. The piece does not say that. It says "American students in schools with low poverty rates were first in the world when they were compared with students in nations with comparably low poverty levels." Pointing to that a verification that American poor do better than European poor is invalid since the levels of poverty are not comparable. If they were, the higher European average would make no mathematical sense.
Posted by: Robin | Feb 29, 2012 12:39:10 PM
Now I'm not seeing it at all.
Re. "levels of poverty are not comparable" certainly it's not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, (For that matter you have an easier way of making that point - eligibility for free lunch in school is probably not perfectly calibrated poverty measure for these purposes) but you seem to be claiming a mathematical impossibility, and that seems weird to me.
Look, let's divvy up American schools into those with <10%, 10-25%, 25-50% and >50% poverty levels as in the linked post. Let's call the first two groups, respectively, Jinland and Janada. (At least at the country level there's nothing in Europe with more than that level of poverty. The US also has Jexico etc) I say Jinnlandians do better than Finns, and Janadians better than Canadians. That simply doesn't in any way imply that Jinns and Janadians together must do better than Finns and Canadians together. I hope that's not what you're arguing, cuz that at least just ain't so!
Posted by: prasad | Feb 29, 2012 1:00:48 PM
I notice in the photograph that the kids are out in the snow for recess. I suppose putting kids outdoors in the snow here would elicit lawsuits for child abuse.
It is really very simple. Finland has excellent schools because it is an excellent society. It has universal health care. Universal day care. The rich pay their fair share of taxes so everyone can live a decent life. The welfare of Finns is more important than the profits of corporations. The United States is not like that and never will be.
Posted by: Nice Nihilst | Feb 29, 2012 1:45:12 PM
Hmmm.
Prasad, What I'm saying is very simple.
1. The article you linked to states that poor students in the United States do better than poor student in other societies with comparable levels of poverty.
2. The United States and Europe have very different levels of poverty, which you seem to acknowledge. If they had (a) comparable levels of poverty (b) rich americans peforming better than rich europeans and (c) poor americans performing better than poor europeans, then they wouldn't have the european average be higher than the american one. In your example, if Jinnlandians are the same share of the total Jinnlandian-Janadian population as Finns are of the Finn-Canadian population, then the former must perform better than the latter.
Therefore 3, the article does NOT therefore imply that poor students in the US perform better than poor students in Europe since it refers to countries with similar distribution of classes. (They may in fact do so, but the piece you point to, which offers no numbers on the issue anyway, does not say that.)
Posted by: Robin | Feb 29, 2012 2:01:28 PM
Gah, the less educationally relevant the discussion is, and the more we're doing arithmetic, the more I want to thrash it out :)
Re. "In your example, if Jinnlandians are the same share of the total Jinnlandian-Janadian population as Finns are of the Finn-Canadian population, then the former must perform better than the latter."
Well, good job for me I'm NOT assuming this, no? My entire output on this thread, from first post to here, has been the explicit rejection of this assumption you bizarrely want to pin on me. I am saying as clearly as I can, I think Jinn/(Jinn+Janadian) < Finn/(Finn+Canadian). That's not just my point, it's also Ravitch's, and is a persistent criticism of PISA hand-wringing by lots of people - check Wikipedia for example. (If low test scores are explained by features of the student body, not those of the school, then various politically charged arguments for school reform/ breaking up teacher unions/creating charters/avoiding standardized tests yada yada lose some of their bite.) I find it hard to believe this demographic criticism is asserting a *mathematical* impossibility, but am willing to try and understand why.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 29, 2012 3:24:06 PM
*My* criticism of Diane Ravitch, since I'm criticizing a Ravitch article here after all, is that she's being self-serving and inconsistent. She helps herself to the inappositeness of cross-country PISA comparisons when she wants to oppose teacher tenure reform or Charter schools. There she says (correctly) that low US scores don't signify because they're low for reasons of poverty. Here, however, when she's boosting the Finn system of high teacher pay and no tests, she happily uses Finnish PISA scores against the US. She's having it both ways.
Posted by: prasad | Feb 29, 2012 3:34:51 PM
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