El autor sostiene que el exíto del sistema educacional de Finlandia se
debe al enfasis de las políticas educativas en la equidad e igualdad de
oportunidades.
Gregory
-------------------
The Atlantic
By Anu Partanen
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values
equality more than excellence.
finnish-kids.jpg
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.
* * *
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.
The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight
School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a
private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a
year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for
profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented
on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.
Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to
education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of
two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and
physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a
variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent
years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other
international organizations.
Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred
visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want
to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly
an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.
From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with
certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if
you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have
no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How
do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you
provide school choice?
The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about
everything America's school reformers are trying to do.
For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is
what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at
the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of
American high school.
Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess
children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but
these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher.
Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by
testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.
As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs.
"There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an
audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability
is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and
administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of
responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession,
and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional
schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's
responsibility to notice and deal with it.
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out
that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes
a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not
compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it
comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude
might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in
Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between
teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is
engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence
after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight
don't exist in Finland.
"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can
choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a
marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents
can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the
options are all the same."
Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message
emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.
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.
* * *
Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish
Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems
of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans
point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous
population than the United States.
Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should
give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a
relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of
Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7
percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents
in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country
didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in
certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than
others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of
variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same
period.
Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers
College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's
education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country:
Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse
overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that
is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the
PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more
important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's
size or ethnic makeup.
Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an
American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the
state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research
organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010
with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born
residents than Finland.
What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have
an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to
reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because
they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on
manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest
in a knowledge-based economy.
With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of
educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from
President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by
doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that
game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but
all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the
best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are
children being left behind.
Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't
meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."
"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American
science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the
1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit
to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few
years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was
that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless
of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and
many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps
even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking
about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible
to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on
cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of
the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is
precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More
equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive
abroad.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
-------------------
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
debe al enfasis de las políticas educativas en la equidad e igualdad de
oportunidades.
Gregory
-------------------
The Atlantic
By Anu Partanen
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values
equality more than excellence.
finnish-kids.jpg
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.
* * *
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.
The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight
School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a
private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a
year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for
profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented
on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.
Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to
education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of
two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and
physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a
variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent
years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other
international organizations.
Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred
visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want
to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly
an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.
From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with
certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if
you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have
no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How
do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you
provide school choice?
The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about
everything America's school reformers are trying to do.
For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is
what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at
the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of
American high school.
Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess
children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves.
All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but
these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher.
Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by
testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.
As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs.
"There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an
audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability
is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and
administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of
responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession,
and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional
schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's
responsibility to notice and deal with it.
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out
that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes
a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not
compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it
comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude
might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in
Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between
teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is
engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence
after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight
don't exist in Finland.
"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can
choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a
marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents
can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the
options are all the same."
Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message
emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.
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.
* * *
Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish
Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems
of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans
point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous
population than the United States.
Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should
give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a
relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of
Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7
percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents
in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country
didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in
certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than
others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of
variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same
period.
Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers
College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's
education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country:
Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse
overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that
is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the
PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more
important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's
size or ethnic makeup.
Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an
American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the
state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research
organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010
with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born
residents than Finland.
What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have
an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to
reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because
they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on
manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest
in a knowledge-based economy.
With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of
educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from
President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by
doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that
game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but
all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the
best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are
children being left behind.
Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't
meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."
"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American
science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the
1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit
to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few
years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was
that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless
of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and
many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps
even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking
about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible
to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on
cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of
the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is
precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More
equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive
abroad.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
-------------------
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
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