<story><title>What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland&apos;s School Success</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/#.Tv4NA-e7HkY.mailto</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>Assuming there&apos;s something here, which is a bit of a stretch for me, let&apos;s ask the obvious question: where else has this been tried? Did it work? Better still, how do we know we&apos;re being equal enough?&lt;p&gt;This is not Marxist by any means, but I have to use Marxism as an example. The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn&apos;t work, people say it wasn&apos;t tried enough. In the examples where it does work, there&apos;s always some special attribute or thing that causes it to, like a very small sample size. Yes it works in some cases and at some scale, but it never really works in a practical way. It&apos;s just a cluster of feelings about fairness in search of an practical application. This is, by definition, a &quot;loose analogy&quot;. Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?&lt;p&gt;I love Finland, and I admire the Fins I&apos;ve worked with. But I think we can play this game of &quot;If we were only like Europe&quot; only so much without actually having to apply some critical thinking skills. We are not like Europe -- as much as we&apos;d like to be. I&apos;ve been reading articles that claim we can improve various parts of society if we were only like some European country my entire life. If I didn&apos;t know better, I&apos;d think a lot of academics spend time in Europe and become Europhiles the rest of their lives, much to the rest of our detriment. Seems like no matter how hard we try at these things, we can never be like European country X. There&apos;s probably a good reason for that. My best guess is that this has something to do with culture, but I&apos;m not sure. If you want a country of Fins, perhaps you should consider moving to Finland?&lt;p&gt;So yes, maybe there&apos;s something here, but I have no idea what it is. Does the author suggest outlawing private schools? Perhaps indoctrinating our national culture with pithy slogans like &quot;accountability is what&apos;s left when you take responsibility away&quot;? Tighter control over immigration so the culture is more cohesive? Greater oil revenues? Decrease our population to 1/70th of its current size? More alcohol consumption? What is there that&apos;s here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tokenadult</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You ask about take-aways that might apply to other countries from the PISA findings about Finland. One way to get a reality check on how Finland&apos;s experience might guide policy in the United States is to look at countries with similarities to and differences from both. Seeing the flood of comments here that consist of people expressing their opinions (which is everyone&apos;s right on the Internet), I thought it might be helpful to go back to the PISA website to see how the PISA scholars themselves have been analyzing the data. One interesting brief write-up I found on the PISA site&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;explores the issue of &quot;resilient&quot; students--students who do better than you would expect from their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It is no surprise to me, because I have lived in more than one country, that countries vary in how well their school systems help even students from disadvantaged background succeed in school. The data chart about different countries at the link shows that Finland (and also Korea, Singapore, Canada, and Taiwan) overperform in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. I can well believe this about Singapore, having studied a lot about the school system there&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;and knowing people from there. By looking at multiple countries for meaningful commonalities like this, we in the diverse United States could learn a thing or two about how to improve schools here.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland&apos;s School Success</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/#.Tv4NA-e7HkY.mailto</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>Assuming there&apos;s something here, which is a bit of a stretch for me, let&apos;s ask the obvious question: where else has this been tried? Did it work? Better still, how do we know we&apos;re being equal enough?&lt;p&gt;This is not Marxist by any means, but I have to use Marxism as an example. The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn&apos;t work, people say it wasn&apos;t tried enough. In the examples where it does work, there&apos;s always some special attribute or thing that causes it to, like a very small sample size. Yes it works in some cases and at some scale, but it never really works in a practical way. It&apos;s just a cluster of feelings about fairness in search of an practical application. This is, by definition, a &quot;loose analogy&quot;. Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?&lt;p&gt;I love Finland, and I admire the Fins I&apos;ve worked with. But I think we can play this game of &quot;If we were only like Europe&quot; only so much without actually having to apply some critical thinking skills. We are not like Europe -- as much as we&apos;d like to be. I&apos;ve been reading articles that claim we can improve various parts of society if we were only like some European country my entire life. If I didn&apos;t know better, I&apos;d think a lot of academics spend time in Europe and become Europhiles the rest of their lives, much to the rest of our detriment. Seems like no matter how hard we try at these things, we can never be like European country X. There&apos;s probably a good reason for that. My best guess is that this has something to do with culture, but I&apos;m not sure. If you want a country of Fins, perhaps you should consider moving to Finland?&lt;p&gt;So yes, maybe there&apos;s something here, but I have no idea what it is. Does the author suggest outlawing private schools? Perhaps indoctrinating our national culture with pithy slogans like &quot;accountability is what&apos;s left when you take responsibility away&quot;? Tighter control over immigration so the culture is more cohesive? Greater oil revenues? Decrease our population to 1/70th of its current size? More alcohol consumption? What is there that&apos;s here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonnathanson</author><text>Not to mention demographics. Most of these studies pretty much overlook that dimension entirely, and it&apos;s usually the most critical.&lt;p&gt;In the case of Finland, we&apos;re looking at a country with a total population of 5.4 million people, 92% of which share the same native language and ethnic background. By comparison, the USA has 313 million people and a heck of a lot more diversity of income, class, race, ethnicity, linguistic background, country of origin, etc. It&apos;s also got a much higher variance in population density per city, state, region, etc.&lt;p&gt;If ever there were a case of comparing apples to oranges, this would be it. There are vanishingly few analogs between the two countries on almost any dimension, and most of the education statistics I&apos;ve seen over the years have not been weighted accordingly.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d be much more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons. How does Finland perform against countries like Finland? How does the US perform against similar countries (of which there probably aren&apos;t many)? Even comparing the US to a country like China is problematic, given that only the top some-single-digit percent of Chinese children take these tests in the first place.</text></comment>