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09 Jun 09

Finland: It’s Not Just For Reindeer Anymore. | The Line

theline.edublogs.org/...-not-just-for-reindeer-anymore - Preview

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31 Dec 08

The Quick and the Ed: Finlandia

Informative, in-depth comparison of Finnish and US socio-economic and educational systems.

www.quickanded.com/...lessons-from-finland.html - Preview

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Labor markets, by contrast, are highly regulated, with roughly 70 percent of workers belonging to trade unions, including teachers.
It's important to understand what Finland's 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.
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- Once they hit the classroom, teachers' salaries are fairly modest, roughly equal those in America. Tenure isn't as automatic as in the states, but all teachers are unionized and enjoy substantial job security. While base salaries are determined by a uniform national schedule, teachers can get paid more to teach in the frozen north or on small islands in the eastern archipelago. Locally-funded performance pay is also an option—in the Helsinki upper secondary school we visited, the municipal government sent the entire faculty on a vacation to Rome as reward for meeting pre-defined (and partially test-based) performance goals. The national student / teacher ratio is slightly below the OECD average, but classes can sometimes be quite large. Teachers are said to enjoy a great deal of autonomy in the classroom—as long as they stick to the national curriculum. "Teachers are told what to teach," one Board of Education official told us, "but not how."
  - So performance pay is not at odds with belonging to a union. - on 2008-12-31
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20 Dec 08

Matthew Yglesias » More Serious Friday Nordic Blogging

Short and powerful report of how things ARE in Finland (socially just), and how things ARE NOT in the USA. Great catalogue of obvious solutions to the US education system.

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...ous_friday_nordic_blogging.php - Preview

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For my own part, visiting Finland mostly confirms things that I think we already knew about education. But what’s interesting about visiting a prosperous, egalitarian social democracy with a high level of education is less that it teaches us things we didn’t know, but that it shows that certain kind of theoretical constructs we all understand can be realized in practice. I think if you asked just about anyone “would our school achievement be better if the child poverty rate were dramatically lower?” they would say that it would. Similarly, if you ask if school achievement would be more even if school funding were even, they would say that it would. And if you asked if providing higher-quality early childhood education more broadly would enhance achievement, everyone would say yes. And if you asked what would happen if we drastically increased the number of people who want to be teachers, such that slots in teacher training programs were highly competitive, people would tell you that student achievement would improve. And if you asked people whether higher levels of educational attainment would boost prosperity, people would tell you yes. And if you asked whether more equal education outcomes would lead to a more even distribution of income, they would tell you it would. And if you asked whether a more even distribution of income would lead to more even education outcomes, people would tell you it would.
But even though I don’t think anyone would really dispute any of that, we don’t just do that stuff. Instead, we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems. And when you point out to people that there are countries where the political system has taken decisive action to tackle these challenges, people kind of shrug and observe that the United States is very big. Which is true. But the country was also big years ago when we were building the world’s first mass literacy society. Indeed, it used to be considered advantageous to the United States that we were so big and people used to wonder whether small countries weren’t just inherently stuck in poverty.

The truth of the matter, however, isn’t that our problems couldn’t be solved it’s that we’re not seriously trying. And we’ve developed a political culture in which that’s considered okay.