The secret of Finland's stellar schools | Hacker News Reader

The secret of Finland's stellar schools

theweek.com

50 pointschrismealy67 comments

This is an excellent article, but may I suggest an alternative theory: the lack of emphasis on education in the U.S., at least historically, has been a sign of the strength of the U.S. economy, not a weakness of the culture. From World War II until the 1990's, Europe's economy was stagnant, while the American economy was dynamic.

From 1975 to 1985, Finland's annual GDP growth rate averaged from 0-2%, peaking at 4%. The U.S's averaged around 5%, peaking near 15% and nearing 10% several years. You can use this site to compare: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-growth.

Fast economic growth means that education isn't as necessary to differentiate yourself and get a good job.

> This is an excellent article, but may I suggest an alternative theory: the lack of emphasis on education in the U.S., at least historically, has been a sign of the strength of the U.S. economy, not a weakness of the culture.

A better theory might be a synthesis of those: it has been a sign of a weakness of the culture produced by the long-term strength of the economy (and which, itself, produces a prospective long-term weakness that threatens to counteract the long-term strength that produced it.)

This. A bunch of meatheads who don't feel compelled to be part of their kids education because they managed to buy homes and get solid jobs at 18 with a HS diploma is the legacy we need to correct. Fleeing to private schools or the best suburban districts has been the plan for a long time, which is nice for those who can afford it.

I'm a High School drop out with no college education. My family grew up in the inner city and was poor. I work for a large software company and have over 10 years experience in linux system administration. I still live in the inner city.

I know other people that are like me in many ways, having well paying jobs and still choosing to live in the city.

It's not everyone's plan.

Meh. I think the "meatheads=people with only HS diplomas" equation is facile. If you're speaking specifically about blue-collar workers, it's still pretty insulting, but you could probably make a better case with that differentiation up front.

Practically speaking, there is nothing sacrosanct about a college degree. It is the educational system, with its bureaucratic filtering mechanisms, elitism, and status-consciousness that has turned it into a humanist sacrament. Education need not be formal for it to be both valuable to the student and the society he/she lives in.

I think by "meatheads" GP means people who undervalue education on the basis of "I succeeded without much of it" (failing to understand the contribution of a particular social context to that success) and thereby promote a culture which undermines the context which allowed them to succeed. (The specifical example he gave was people with only a HS diploma, not people without one, but I think that example was, in any case, illustrative of the problem, not an exhaustive equivalence; nor do I think "blue collar workers" is the right generalization from the example.)

There's plenty of people (blue collar and otherwise) that succeeded with only (or even without) a HS diploma that don't undervalue education, and they don't meet GP's description of the meatheads he is talking about.

Thanks, you're right. Note: I edited it for clarity on the point you mentioned.

Well it's not like American education teaches people about social context and how much it matters.

That would be Communist.

What does this even mean? Is this a Markov criticism, or do you really think US public schools don't teach kids about "social contexts"? From what I can tell, as the parent of a high schooler and a middle schooler, social contexts and algebra problems are the core of the curricula.

I would go a layer deeper - the inescapable conclusion seems to be the focus on money itself. Without extreme discipline, these shallow economic metrics encourage myopic behaviors. And when these economic metrics become cultural pillars, welcome to Rome on the decline.

> the lack of emphasis on education in the U.S., at least historically, has been a sign of the strength of the U.S. economy, not a weakness of the culture

And when the country is suddenly not that attractive anymore for some reason, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

I'm not saying it's going to happen necessarily, I'm just saying the system is dangerously tuned to extreme levels of high-performance / high-risk.

When the engine in my Honda Civic will eventually fail (after many decades probably), it will just stop working. When the engine in an F1 car fails, it may blow up sending flames all over the vehicle and its occupant.

> The U.S's averaged around 5%, peaking near 15% and nearing 10% several years

You completely over-estimate the growth rate of US economy. You have probably read the raw GDP data that doesn't correct the growth rate with inflation which was very high in 1975-1985. (cf http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdpchg.xls )

We import the geniuses we need from abroad. Finland can't manage that.

We will be fine so long as we bring in the science and math majors we need to drive our economy. Our own kids can then be overpriced car salesman, barristas, part-time actors, aspiring playwrights, etc.

Thanks, that's a real comfort to those of us who wanted to be scientists.

You seem to labor under the misapprehension that this country should be run for the benefit of the people who already live here as well as their posterity. That's just crazy, as all enlightened thinkers know.

There is another very glaring difference between the Finnish and American educational system that the article ignores - there are no private schools in Finland. Everyone in Finland, no matter how wealthy or politically connected, sends their kids to the same schools. It shouldn't be surprising that powerful people in Finland care so deeply about the quality of their public school teachers when those teachers are responsible their own children's education. In America, nearly all of the upper class send their children to private schools, so why would our congresspeople/senators/grovernors/mayors/etc. care about public schools when their own kids don't go there?

There are many public schools with Olympic sized swimming pools, and funding that would rival the better private schools any day of the week. Money and funding are not the problem... In Detroit, teachers get paid much more than the national average. And we know how well that school system does.

The problem is that for the last 40 years in the US, to bridge the gap between student groups to 1 standard deviation: the only thing that has worked was the systematic dumbing-down of teaching content and testing material (for example: with the elimination of written answers by multiple-choice questions, and 30-40 point curves on each test). Everything else failed. No matter how much money was thrown at the problem, no matter how many teachers were fired and replaced, no matter how many experts and better management staff were brought in from other parts of the nation, it just got worse.

So now we have one of the worst public education systems in America, all because no one could go into a class-room and ask the students that wanted to learn to raise their hand. And then present more challenging material to that group (relative to the other groups).

And I'm not talking about what we already have now - a few Advanced Placement classes, I'm talking about the entire education system being free to cater differently to A) students that want to learn and compete, B) students that need simpler material, and C) students that want to clown around.

Instead, we have a system that caters to the lowest-common-denominator (C) in the room at the expense of every other student. So no one get's taught anything that enhances the mind or prepares him/her for the challenges ahead.

This is simply not true. Private schools do exist, they have to follow the state program though. Also the politicians do not like to allow new licenses for private schools, thus many private schools operate under the licence of another private school, which distorts some statistics.

Another difference between Finnish and American schools that make it difficult for both easy 1:1 comparisons and reproducing Finnish results is the fact that the US, unlike Finland, is not a homogeneous culture (BTW, I know there are Swede-speaking Finnish citizens, but that's an ethnolinguistic difference and not quite the same thing).

So making such comparisons isn't quite so simple. This has been discussed endlessly in previous HN threads. I encourage you to search for them and read them; there's some interesting discussion there about this, so I won't rehash it here.

In my opinion a more important effect of this is that the upper class children with better role models do not become role models for the other children.

In my opinion a more important effect of this is that the lower class children do not become role models for the other children.

I did my junior high ("lukio") in one of these schools that also double as teacher graduate training ground. There's one thing in the article which I feel bares a mention.

"For one full year of her master's program, Stara got to train in one of the best public schools in the country. She had three teacher mentors there, and she watched their classes closely. When she taught her own classes, her mentors and fellow student teachers took notes."

There's one very important bit missing: the _students_ also give their own feedback. In writing.

I didn't understand how valuable this is while I was still in the school, but have begun to appreciate it in later age. These schools the teacher graduates are mentored in are among the elite in Finland. So not only are the mentoring teachers some of the best in country, the students are too.

And believe me, in the ripe age of 16-18, we're a cruel bunch. Feedback from that kind of target audience, on what works or doesn't, and why... That's valuable. Even to the current staff.

The best feedback we got in turn was that some of the other graduates had actually changed their teaching plans. And the mentoring teachers were proud of that!

These "news" of giving Finland's school system praise seem to surface all the time and every time they do, they are also big headlines in Finnish yellow press news, glorified to a massive extent "C'MON, WE CAN DO IT!". I'm a 25 year old finnish man, my only education is grade school, I've been to high school twice, both times resulting in my dropping out, because I just haven't had a clue what to do. This isn't rare, most of the people I know have no education . Even companies such as Rovio have made a program of recruiting specifically people who've fallen off the education system, teaching them from ground up what to do for the task they are hired for. Not even going to talk about youth employment in general.

Every time I read these news, I become sad, like there's some hidden secret that's never been told to me.

My assumption is that news reporters or whatever are taken to few elite schools, so, pretty basic journalism.

I'm sorry, what was your point again? Tens of thousands graduate from high school every single year in Finland. From all kinds of backgrounds. If you didn't graduate, are you sure the system is to blame?

My point is that these news and/or articles are bullshit propaganda and their sole purpose is reassign the blame of the decline of American or whatever education system elsewhere. Whatever the ulterior motive is.

And no, the system isn't the only thing to blame, if I would've gone to the summer long paid coaching courses, I'm sure I would've done a lot better.

If you compare Finland to Massachusetts, which is a more reasonable comparison, it does not look quite as stellar. Conversely if you compare Massachusetts to all Europe including the south and east then Europe looks pretty bad.

The secret of Finland's stellar schools is Finns[1], combines with an immigration policy that borders on xenophobia. Why do Finnish students score better than Swedish students?

[1] http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...

This blog [1] claims, and the reference 11 therein (or directly [2]) shows, that the Swedish-speaking Finns score lower than Finnish-speaking Finns. It pretty much cannot be explained by socio-economic status, as Swedish-speaking Finns have higher socio-economic status than Finnish-speaking Finns. So the blog conjectures that it might be related to the languages.

[1] http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/ [2] http://ktl.jyu.fi/img/portal/8317/PISA_2003_screen.pdf

Finland had below-average schools until the 1970s, then they got serious about reforming them, and now they're on top. So none of this bullshit applies.

> immigration policy that borders on xenophobia

You can't be serious.

> In Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States.

Immediate implication: teachers are actually paid well over there. The job is actually desirable and respected.

> At the education college, Bethel discovered that he didn't have to major in math to become a high school math teacher. So he didn't. Nationwide, less than half of American high school math teachers majored in math. Almost a third did not even minor in math.

Quick note: I've a degree in Physics. They pumped so much math into us all in college, I could easily teach high-school math. Easily.

Of all the non-math degrees that there are, I would expect that Physics would be the very next best thing for teaching mathematics, if for no other reason than because of physics' privileged position when it comes to mathematics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_... and the intertwined history of physics and mathematics.)

As a counterpoint, I have a degree in Computer Science, which I personally consider to be a slightly "vocationally oriented" field of mathematics, but I am currently reteaching myself trigonometry that I should have learned in highschool. The math that I needed for my degree I still have down pretty solidly, but for the most part the mathematics that is taught in high-schools I am fairly rubbish at. I currently would have no business teaching a high-school mathematics course; I could probably get through the lectures but would be completely unable to help any student that actually had an interest in mathematics.

A physics guy teaching highschool mathematics seems perfectly reasonable to me. A linguistics guy though? Ehhh...

> They pumped so much math into us all in college, I could easily teach high-school math. Easily.

I'm from Finland and we have bunch of such teachers here. In my school there's a teacher whose major is physics, but he also teaches chemistry and B (short term) math. I'm still unsure whether is it because of my school is so small (circa 150 pupils) or just because they can.

> Immediate implication: teachers are actually paid well over there. The job is actually desirable and respected.

The job is respected, but not as desirable or well paid as you might think. I can actually recall many teachers joking that if you can't do anything well, become a teacher. And in a way that's true: if you can't pick a profession you can continue your studies for practically free of charge.

Although teachers do not have hard time finding a job, the pay is pretty bad and only becomes worse if you decide to teach younger students. Although, teachers here get paid according to their best paying speciality, so it may depend on who you ask. For example, a former PE teacher said this to me: "Do not become a teacher if you plan to become rich". But since the respect between student and teacher here cuts both ways, it gives the sentence a bit more depth than you might think at first.

> Immediate implication: teachers are actually paid well over there.

Apparently not:

"The average salary for primary education teachers with 15 years experience in Finland is about $37,500, compared to $45,225 in the United States."

http://www.cato.org/blog/no-teachers-finland-are-not-paid-do...

That's very interesting. In the US, if we only accepted 20% of people who wanted to be teachers, we'd have a very bad shortage of teachers.

The real questions is, why do so many people want to be teachers in Finland?

the 2.5 month summer vacation, prestige and relatively good salary. the Cato quoted PPP corrected salaries might mislead if they fail to account for stuff you get for the high taxes (healthcare, education, retirement homes etc).

Cost of living is a much better way to compare salaries. They actually mentioned that:

"Moreover, the cost of living in Finland is about 30% higher."

Their cost-of-living link just leads to OECD stats that are used as basis of computing PPP.

So the cato article makes 2 mistakes: applying the PPP normalization twice (once by using "PPP normalized income" and a second time in adding the ~30% from the "cost of living"), in addition to ignoring what you get in exchange for the taxes that lower your purchasing power.

Easily?

I presume he means he has the mathematical aptitude to teach high-school math, which (at least in my area) maxes out at trig in most schools and Calc 1 in the bigger ones.

To teach as an adjunct, that's about all you need to teach. If you want to be good at it, some genuine compassion for your students will help there. If you want to be awesome at it, you'll typically need the above plus some training in the proper ways to educate, motivate, etc.

Source: married to a college math teacher.

More easily than a teacher who, like we kids always suspected, actually needs the answer key?

Small tidbit of info: In Finland students don't pay for studying. Instead, the government pays money to the students for studying. I've heard this is not the case in US.

Let's throw a cold splash of reality onto the treasured fairy tale about Finland's "stellar schools." What do the data say? One place to look is at the standardized assessment tests designed to (among other things) make international comparisons. The National Center for Education Statistics relies largely on three: the Program for International Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). For brevity, let's pick math using PIRLS, which is also nice because it breaks out some U.S. states separately. Cherry-picking the data, consider these scores for 8th-grade math students in 2011.

Finland: 514

U.S. White, not Hispanic: 530

Massachusetts: 561

Massachusetts Black, not Hispanic: 516

Massachusetts Hispanic: 507

"Stellar" Finland's 8th graders are bested in math by America's white 8th graders overall, by Massachusetts 8th graders overall by a wide margin, and by Massachusetts black 8th graders, and Massachusetts's Hispanic 8th graders come close. Why choose Massachusetts? Partly, because I'm cherry-picking one of our best-performing states. But I think that's defensible because it also closely matches Finland demographically. The U.S. has 300+ million people, Finland only 5+ million; Massachusetts has 6+ million, and it approaches Finland in terms of racial homogeneity.

Now, before anyone gets excited, I am NOT making a racial argument, saying that white kids are somehow "better." However, it is an unfortunate, incontrovertible fact that in the U.S., white and Asian kids outperform Black and Hispanic kids currently. We can argue about why that might be and long for the day when it's no longer true, but while we've made great strides and hope to make more in the future, we're not there yet. Given that, comparing tiny Finland with its greater ethnic and socioeconomic homogeneity to enormous and diverse America (with, by the way, 400+ years of institutionalized racism) is intellectually dishonest.

I am also not claiming these few data points to be definitive. There are other tests (PISA and PIRLS), other subjects (language and science), other grades, a patchwork of yearly coverage, and other measures. Certainly, on some Finland does come out on top. On others, the U.S. does.

I am also not criticizing Finland or saying we have nothing to learn from them. No doubt, they have some wonderful teachers, delightful kids, and some important lessons for the rest of the world. But we also have some wonderful teachers, delightful kids, and given our unique challenges we're actually doing quite well (though we can and will do better).

What I am claiming is that there is a myth about Finland's educational prowess that gets told and retold, that is much too simplistic, that evaporates when confronted with actual data, that probably serves the interests of certain "educational reformers", and that is not a helpful part of an informed, rational debate about education policy in the U.S.

Do you have source on this, since I cannot recall any standardized assesments which would have been done nation wide in Finland on 8th grade.

Unfortunately, the best I can do is provide a link to the TIMSS Data Explorer (click the link for "TIMSS IDE"):

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/

After agreeing to the terms, you can choose:

1. Subject matter (I chose math)

2. Grade (I chose 8th)

3. Jurisdiction (U.S., Finland, Massachusetts, etc.)

4. Variable (ethnicity, income, etc.)

5. Years (not every year has data for every variable)

Not every combination of year, jurisdiction, and variable has data (e.g., Finland doesn't seem to disaggregate by race).

When I built the report for Finland, it included a caveat about issues that "interfere with proper trend analysis", presumably by year, so I avoided that.

Finland also doesn't have any homework for its students. There's a very nice Infographic which offers an in-depth look about Finland's educational system.

http://www.onlineclasses.org/resources/no-homework-in-finlan...

Edit - It seems they have "less HW" and not "no HW".

Finland does have homework and it is a part of getting your grades (ie. don't do homework, you'll fail). I wonder what their source is.

Thank you for your correction. It seems they have "less homework" and not "no homework".

That is utter bullshit. Finnish schools have homework - and sometimes a lot of it.

Maybe also because other professions in the private sector don't pay so much better, compared to US.

Probably fairer to instead say "Maybe because teachers aren't paid so much worse than other professions in the private sector". This emphasizes that high private sector salaries are not the problem, rather low teacher salaries are.

A bit like that but it might mislead. US teachers have higher salary than Finnish teachers. Salary level in general in the US is much higher than in Finland. But for teachers, the difference is smaller.

In general, with high progressive taxation, income is much more equal between sectors. The job market is just different. Things like shorter hours and longer vacations also become larger perks.

The society also is just not as money centered, for example status is derived more from other things. Finns are also quite jealous and shy, meaning people don't tend to exhibit it if they are wealthy. Some people from other cultures might feel it as a sort of repressive "keep your head down" attitude. It is anathema to try to raise yourself above others in any way. In total it makes things like luxury cars or flashy villas much less desirable here - they would be boorish. So what is your motivation for a higher pay? You won't use it for status or luxury. Education for your children is free anyway. Most people use it for apartments in slightly better locations.

what evidence is there that teachers are underpaid in the US when you look at total compensation?

Have you ever talked with a young teacher? Ask them how they're doing on paying back those student loans.

Is that evidence?

My edit that didn't go through for some reason:

We're not talking about total compensation, we're talking about salary.

Have you ever talked with a young teacher? Ask them how they're doing on paying back those student loans. Several people I went to highschool^ with are currently working as teachers (several more are still looking for teaching jobs. The surplus of people looking to get into education certainly doesn't help...). While I had my student loans paid off quite some time ago, they are still floundering. Although they love 'their kids', more than one has confided in me that they don't know what the hell they were thinking.

Salary, specifically how it will enable them to pay back their loans, is the sort of thing that young people in university consider when they are decided whether they want to go into industry or education. Total compensation doesn't really enter the equation at that stage.

When the best and the brightest can get starting offers with a salary two or three times as high as starting teacher salaries, that is going to take a toll in the grand scheme of things. You'll still have a few very bright chaps (such as my highschool friends) who swallow the bullet and go into education anyway, but you cannot expect that to be typical.

^ We still talk a few times a year, and they are all closer with each other than any of them are with me. Incidentally, nobody I know from my (rather over-priced) private university has gone into education...

End previous comment.

The point that you should get here is that total compensation does not pay student loans. Salary is the relevant number when you are trying to convince students straight out of school with student loans to come work for you. Starting teacher salary is undeniably remarkably low.

Or to answer your question directly and succinctly: My comment is not evidence of low total compensation, nor was it meant to be taken as such.

They don't pay as much as in the US, but the overall quality of life is arguably better (less debt, shorter working hours, long holidays, free healthcare, etc.)

Teachers are particularly well payed and very respected. In order to become a teacher you need a Master's degree, and only about 1 out of 10 applicants succeeds in getting a position. So, all in all, I think your argument is not very strong.

> In order to become a teacher you need a Master's degree

This is not true in at least some (I suspect 'many') US states. Pennsylvania for instance requires a minimum of a Bachelor's degree: http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/pa_...

A Masters degree provides a much-needed salary bump though; a new teacher in Philadelphia with only a Bachelor's can expect to earn a whooping $45k/yr. If you are living in Philadelphia (or worse, paying for a car and insurance to commute into Philadelphia...) and just got done paying for four/five years of school, 45k/yr is not exactly pleasant. That isn't how we treat members of society that we respect.

I guess my post was not clear enough. I as referring to Finland, not the US.

Could the secret to Finland's excellent schools be...Finland's excellent students?

Having spent the better part of my life in various Finnish schools, I would say "no". It's nothing like in many Asian countries where students are either strongly motivated or strongly pushed by their parents to do well in school.

But perhaps it's this relative lack of individual ambition that allows the system as a whole to perform well? I.e. the Finnish school system delivers a high mean with fewer of the excellent outliers. (Personally I think that's a reasonable goal for an educational system because measuring students doesn't work all that well, so it would be dangerous to optimize for exceptional performance on a broken metric.)

Good point. Mean performance, that is used to compare countries, may rise while variance shrinks resulting in fewer if any extremely high and low performers. Reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould's book "Full House".

I'm confused. If you're saying that Finns do well in school even though nobody forces them to, then they would seem to fit the definition of excellent students to a tee.

It's worth noting that the students in the article have already expressed some level of interest towards school. Unless they wouldn't be in 'lukio'.

The other part consists of students who are normally thought to be worse in school. In contrary to their lukio peers, they do not have matriculation examination and therefore do not contribute to the statistics shown on the article.

I would say the common factor in all nations w exceptional academic achievement is the reverence for educators. The excellence of the students will always follow in such cultures.

Not reverence for educators, reverence for education.

What works for a tiny Scandinavian country that's ethnically homogenous, has a strong culture and is geographically isolated, might just work for ANYONE.

Or, not.

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