Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm

by evancaine • 16 years ago

42 91 16 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

roc2• 16 years ago

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.

tokenadult7• 16 years ago

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?

anamax3• 16 years ago

> 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.

Is that philosphy actually unique? (Since Finland is relatively small, I'm willing to believe that that philosophy is uniformly applied, but real scientists would check.)

> 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.

Yup. Also, one might want to look at what works in different cultures. (It may be that some things work in a lot of cultures, but not all. It may be that some things only work in certain cultures. And so on.)

roc2• 16 years ago

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://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch1...

roboneal3• 16 years ago

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.

lotharbot2• 16 years ago

You missed what I think is the key point:

5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.

yardie3• 16 years ago

^^^^^ As a parent you'd be amazed at how many people think their kid is special because they can do one thing that other babies at that age don't. Things like, "He walked before other babies","She started talking at a few months","She eats normal food and can hold a spoon". My wife fell into this trap when kids his age were walking or talking and he was just scooting along. I told her I'd worry about it if he's still crawling at 18.

As long as the pediatrician tells me he's healthy that's good enough for me.

tokenadult7• 16 years ago

You have provided a good summary of the submitted article, without expressing an opinion on its conclusions. Allow me to respond to quoted point 2.

2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there.

A counterexample to this being especially important is the country Singapore, with four official languages (Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English in decreasing order of number of home speakers) from four different language families. Especially important to consider is that English has been the sole language of school instruction in Singapore during my lifetime, even though essentially no one before the current generation of young graduates grew up in an English-speaking home. Moreover, Modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin," called 華語 in Singapore) was not the home language of the ethnic Chinese majority of the population in Singapore, but rather Hokkien or other south Chinese languages that are as different from Mandarin as English is from German. (I speak much Mandarin and some Hokkien.) MOST students in Singapore for more than a generation were learning their school language of instruction as a second language as they attended school. (This was true of my wife's generation in Taiwan too, where Hokkien, "Taiwanese," was the home language and Mandarin the school language.) United States, and maybe British, teachers put a lot of blame on immigrants for not growing up speaking English, but an effective school system can handle a multilingual surrounding cultural environment and still DEAL WITH IT while helping the learners learn the preferred official language. See the TIMSS report

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf

for the consistent finding that the average level of Singapore pupils in mathematics is comparable to the "gifted" level of United States pupils. The population of Singapore was not selected for high IQ or high levels of schooling (the immigrants who settled Singapore were mostly indentured agricultural laborers who fled wretchedly poor parts of China or India) but today's inhabitants of Singapore show the results of sound education.

4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.

Agreed with your noting of point 4 as an important issue, distinct from United States policy proposals.

cromulent2• 16 years ago

Although the article mentions the second language thing, Finland actually has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. All official documents are in both, and street signs are in both, with the local dominant language on top.

They also teach English at the Finnish schools.

My eldest son goes to an English school in Helsinki and he is taught Finnish, French, and of course English.

gaius2• 16 years ago

I was in Helsinki last weekend, actually. One of their prominent politicians was in the paper saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans do... Or else", referring to immigrants. It's by no means "not a problem there".

r70005• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

roboneal3• 16 years ago

Per Statistics Canada, Canada's immigrant population is highly educated, 90% emigrated legally, and a large percentage are Asian in origin.

Is it safe to say that doesn't reflect recent (last 25 years) immigration patterns to the U.S. or to Western Europe?

wdewind• 16 years ago

1) and 4) seem to be the most important to me (not only reading specifically, but spending time in general). #4 is simply not possible in a lot of American households where school's primary function is daycare.

I certainly learned a lot about physics and algebra in high school, but I learned how to learn from my parents and my family.

I grew up in NYC going to public schools with a parent and a few relatives working as public teachers, so I'm pretty intimately familiar with the struggle of fixing public education on limited budget. Most of them generally share the opinion that schools can only do so much. They are absolutely necessary, and should continue getting better, but someone who is offered every resource in the world and doesn't have a home life that can support it will throw those resources away 99% of the time (from my experience that number is actually roughly accurate).

So I would look at education as something that can and should be improved, but it's also really important to look at education as the symptom of bigger cultural issues.

Americans tend to be pretty anti-intellectual and reject unfamiliar ideas. You can't really change that with education (alone), because people will always reject what school teaches them if their family doesn't support it, and in many cases the citizens will never vote in the budgets anyway. Main point: our mediocre education system is the symptom, find the cause.

hugh36• 16 years ago

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.

Adrock2• 16 years ago

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

drunkpotato3• 16 years ago

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.

r70005• 16 years ago

Are there any reasons to believe that is relevant?

If you take PISA scores to be a good indicator than there are homogeneous and non-homogeneous societies near the top and bottom.

Canada ranks right up there with Finland every year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA sometimes topping Finland in a category. It is easy to find countries that are culturally homogeneous near the bottom of the rankings as well.

drunkpotato3• 16 years ago

Why should we think about that? What the U.S. is doing currently isn't working, there's very little disagreement on that. While there is a certain amount of "golden age of the past" syndrome going on, it's clear that results in terms of educational outcome and school discipline are going down. Looking at other systems that are having success is the rational approach. "No child left behind" (Keep testing! Keep testing! Test more!) is not.

It's not about assuming we can replicate their success with a direct copy. It's about looking at what their system does better than ours, and working to improve our system. Now THAT is politically unfashionable and unlikely to be done any time soon, but it's what needs to happen.

vdm• 16 years ago

That's a slippery slope, next stop is saying that large poor families are just lazy and want to have sex instead of work and be smart. And that has nothing to do with being PC.

cf. Guns, Germs and Steel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

_h4xr• 16 years ago

That is definitely not an answer. Grandparent suggested that genetics plays a role in why people in one country are different from people in another. And you respond by saying that if he says that, he might say something else, which you find even more unacceptable!

It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ, then Finland's superior education can be explained in part by the fact that it's full of Finns.

someone_else• 16 years ago

Oh I can assure you we have at least as many idiots here as anywhere else, but I'd be willing to believe that Asians are a bit smarter on average than white people.

jerguismi• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

I don't get it. Why would entrepreneurship not be valued because of high education?

sesqu5• 16 years ago

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).

gaius2• 16 years ago

Yes but that is a meaningless statistic. Here in the UK the present gov has the target of 50% of school-leavers to go to university. What this means is diploma mills turning out media studies graduates who immediately go to work in fast food and retail with 20 grand of debt.

cromulent2• 16 years ago

The education level is very high. However, the relatively low level of entrepreneurship is more likely due to the high cost of employing people. As the social benefits (such as parental leave, etc) are very high, it is difficult to be a small businessman with few employees. A couple of babies and an illness and your entire workforce is gone for months. You need to be a big company to balance it out.

shin_lao• 16 years ago

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?

RyanMcGreal3• 16 years ago

Why wouldn't it? The per-taxpayer cost ratio would remain the same.

yellowbkpk2• 16 years ago

As the bureaucracy got bigger, wouldn't it cost more? More levels of management, more paperwork, more time spent on oversight.

I don't think the cost/size relationship in any government is linear.

LargeWu2• 16 years ago

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.

anamax3• 16 years ago

> 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.

sesqu5• 16 years ago

Actually, Finland has been shutting down small schools in favor of less bigger ones for a while now, for administrative and financial reasons. So I guess you build three schools three times as big, or something.

Glide• 16 years ago

At the top it says they were behind South Korea in a test score. And South Korea is around 50 million... But South Korea's system is basically studying 24/7. Two very different systems with great results.

Then again South Korea's culture values education highly as well.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

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

btilly5• 16 years ago

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.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

because we have adopted the "no child not dragged behind" system where all we need to do is test and measure everything relentlessly.

It seems to me that mainstream schooling is like mainstream corporate employment. top-down control, mind-numbing meetings all day and the killing of individual initiative.

we need more Montessori schools and more startups!

heresy2• 16 years ago

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.

acg2• 16 years ago

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

Kliment2• 16 years ago

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.

acg2• 16 years ago

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.

greggraham• 16 years ago

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.

charlesju• 16 years ago

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.

yardie3• 16 years ago

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.

maxklein• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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).

zppx• 16 years ago

Better results in school measures what exactly?

ippisl• 16 years ago

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.

hugh36• 16 years ago

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.

heresy2• 16 years ago

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

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

known3• 16 years ago

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

vegai• 16 years ago

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___• 16 years ago

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.

known3• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

known3• 16 years ago

Ditto here.

Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

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