What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

By Anu Partanen
The Atlantic
January 3, 2012

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/#.TwOaKjAH9aI.mailto

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because
it values equality more than excellence.

Sergey Ivanov/Flickr 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.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it
was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the
mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting
attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek
ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national
education system has been receiving particular praise,
because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in
some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one
study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different
countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked
at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey
since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South
Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009
Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China,
taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very
top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the
United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long
hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization --
Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish
schools assign less homework and engage children in more
creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of
foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit
schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and
constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the
Finnish miracle.

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.

To read more, go to
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/#.TwOaKjAH9aI.mailto

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