What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success [New]
Anu Partanen has a nice article in the Atlantic about the U.S. education system:
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West’s reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.
… So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.
And yet it wasn’t clear that Sahlberg’s message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.
During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather’s TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an “intriguing school-reform model.”
Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. “Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”
This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it’s true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
“Difficult for an American” say the NY Times! That should be “Difficult for the 1%.” And speaking of the 1%:
Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
In fact, since academic excellence wasn’t a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland’s students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland — unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway — was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.
That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year — or even just the price of a house in a good public school district — and the other “99 percent” is painfully plain to see.
Remember the ‘child poverty’ graph I posted earlier from the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality:
Relative Poverty Rates in Twenty-One Rich Nations at the Turn of the Century for Children
Here’s an updated version of the the graph from the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality:
Relative Poverty Rates in Forty Nations in the Mid-to-Late 2000s
Look where Finland is and where the U.S. is in both graphs. But discussing this in America is not to the interest of the 1% and their lackeys.
What Do You Think?
9 Responses to 'What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success'
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Emocrat [New]
Wednesday, 11 Jan, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Nice post, TBH.
Public education has been a target of elitists of all stripes for a very long time. Now that idiot conservatives, along with idiot “liberals”, have bought into the Neo-Liberal line about “innovation” (without any thought at all about what they mean by that), “meritocracy” (an obscenely hollow term in a period of deep cronyism) and “technocratic governance” (oh, if people only understood what that means!), it seems the sky is the limit in terms of privatization. What a smashing buy-partisan success story education malform is. Oops, meant “reform.”
Primary education has always been largely about enforcing social norms. As that goes, it has also always been problematic. But what we’re seeing now is a new set of social norms, based solely on imposing Hierarchy, Privilege and Mindless Authority. It’s a conservative Disneyland of intellectual austerity. Mission Accomplished, as the shrubby one used to say.
For all the mindless chatter about education, if there’s one thing this country doesn’t care about, it’s producing educated people.
Americans are rejecting their own futures. How bizarre is that?
David [New]
Thursday, 12 Jan, 2012 at 3:02 pm
This is my favorite part.
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Emocrat [New]
Thursday, 12 Jan, 2012 at 7:41 pm
I have a sudden urge to learn Finnish. Seems like a language I could live with!
Tim [New]
Thursday, 12 Jan, 2012 at 8:34 pm
One day I’d like to hear a Presidential candidate stand up and say he or she wants to be the Equality President, to fight for equality for all of us not just the extremely wealthy or the politically insane. Then go out, get elected, and make it happen for real.
And this piece also reinforces the idea that as you eliminate poverty you increase equality and opportunity. That’s a rather obvious but conveniently forgotten point.
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David [New]
Friday, 13 Jan, 2012 at 6:49 pm
A great deal of energy goes into arguments about how to mitigate the consequences of inequality instead of dealing with inequality.
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Emocrat [New]
Friday, 13 Jan, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Bill Clinton and other Neo-Libs perfected this way of not dealing with the obvious almost 20 years ago, well before things actually started falling apart as they well knew would happen.
The whole point is to deflect the issue by placing it on a tangent and spinning it off on meaningless fobs. Rhetorically, it’s still working absurdly well, if one looks at the “liberal” reaction to Obama’s transparently insipid Teddy Roosevelt paean. But in terms of reality, it still, after a couple decades, will not result in any policies which will do anything other than preserve the status quo or worsen it.
So Clinton said we should retrain all the displaced workers that would result from NAFTA. Okay, but that never happened did it?
Mitigation in this sense is an excuse to do nothing in real terms. Mitigation after all, has nothing to do with the root problem. It’s merely about lessoning it’s impact in some vague way.
David [New]
Friday, 13 Jan, 2012 at 7:33 pm
I’ve recently been reading a lot of John Kenneth Galbraith – he skewers the idea that we can focus on growth rather then distributional issues.
It was wrong then, it was wrong under Clinton and it is still wrong.
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Emocrat [New]
Wednesday, 18 Jan, 2012 at 10:30 am
JKG has been a favorite of mine since high school. A great writer of a dismal subject. Largely ignored by liberals in the latter half of the 20th century. But he was also right about pretty much everything.
Neo-Libs have been studious about avoiding distributional issues because otherwise, they would have to defend their own preferences in that department. They know that would be a loser with a large swath of the polity. So they just use magical language by throwing up “growth” without any discussion of what they actually mean by that.
Now that that is falling apart, I’m hoping JKG makes a comeback.
David [New]
Thursday, 19 Jan, 2012 at 4:52 pm
I hope so too.
Jamie could use a good deal more attention as well.