The Warring States of NPF - What Americans miss when looking at Finland education

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What Americans miss when looking at Finland education

Quote:

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.

I find this pretty interesting and as I read the article it begins to make some sense why they have such success.

Quote:

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.

Student loans have ballooned since the 1990s. It's beyond ridiculous how it's occurred. The education that you get has been severely limited as well. So I would have loved to pay attention to what he was saying at this point. But I'm not allowed to go to Sweden. The fact remains that the US education system has more administrators than teachers. It's quite literally a bubble. So if you can show me that a system works without privately owned schools, I'd be damned interested in finding out more info about it.

Quote:

Finland has no standardized tests.

Notice all of the testing the US has. People are held back in states if they don't score high enough. It's gotten so bad that I'm sure these people basically learn how to be better test takers who have no faith in education.

Quote:

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.

The Darwinism that occurs in the US can't be denied. It's like we teach people to be sharks when that's not necessarily the ideal we want in most jobs nowadays.

Quote:

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.

So the question we should be asking... Can this work in the US? Should we have a different set of goals for education now that we have more tools to teach with?

Well this is a system that any country can use. And my high school used a similar system for It's special ed courses and that worked out fine. So yeah this could work here in the US, granted it will take time for this to be in every state.

It will work if you can detach the leading cause for all of our problems: the profit cycle.

Putting students into debt is profitable for the loan agencies. Private schools are profitable for the administration of the same. Abolishing these practices for an idiotic pretense like "having a competitive and learned population" is anathema to the powers that be.

American Public School is not designed to enrich the knowledge and creativity of students. It is designed to crush those traits into dust and train them for a life of shuffling meaningless papers around and not daring to try and usurp the positions of upper management.

Quote:

Originally Posted by shiney (Post 1177280)

plus for many public schools not charging tuition and bringing on students can actually be profitable in the long run. My University has a "special case" scholarship that nearly everyone in the school could apply for. They take in students from households with below average income and basically give them a free ride for only the students federal grant.
because they are a state collage they get even more funding for students they bring on and they get a tax deduction for helping out special cases. meaning that the cost to teach everyone goes down with the more "free" students on the campus. The best part is that the wording is so vague in the contract that almost 80% of the student body can apply for this with no hassle all you have to do is declare yourself a independent in your tax returns. So for the last few years I have been going to collage for free (minus book costs and gas) while also paying for the massive Eco-friendly engineering building.

OR

Raise taxes (especially on the rich) and use this money to fund a public FREE education system.

I only live next door to Finland, so it's practically my duty to patriotically suggest their little societal advances here are not quite as good as it sounds and they probably copied some stuff from us anyway. But I can only admit you guys are doing much better than us and we should learn from your example.

I don't know, I always figured we kind of just followed your model.

e: or like a nordic model of a welfare state anyways

From what I understand, the thing the U.S. misses about Finland is pretty much everything about their educational system, since they continually ignore anything and everything they did to actually achieve such high student achievement.

I mean, the U.S. not grasping the basic necessity of funding schools to help them succeed is just the tip of the iceberg of the rampant idiocy inherent in how our educational system is being run. Education is not run to be as successful as possible, but to be as successful as possible and as cheap as possible at the same time. These two goals continually ram into each other, sending the metaphorical train off its tracks.

I'm looking at figures from 2009 here:
elementary & middle school: 6915�/student
upper secondary: 6285�/student
vocational school: 10604�/student
higher professional education: 7877�/student
university: 8130�/student

Of course the university part has changed, since universities are no longer public institutions since 2010.