RSS
Finland always aces the PISA test and does pretty well on the TIMSS, so there is much interest in their schooling techniques. Thus, more Mandatory Finnish Content from the comments section at Education Realist:
Lagertha writes:
May 19th, 2014 at 10:09 pm
… American reformers have been smitten with the Finnish school system for a couple of years now, but they have not really fully understood that it is NOT what they think it is, nor will it magically cure what ails American schools. And, being that I am Finnish (duo citizen w/ USA); have a mother who taught English & German in Finland; have HKI U professor cousins whose kids are in Finnish schools; I feel that I can burst the Common Core bubble by telling all of you some truths about the Finnish system that those annoying American reformers chose to ignore as they now try to push CC to the American public. …
Well, these are some of the things that CC fans have ignored as to how the Finns use their education core standards which are supposed to be adapted by US public schools:
1. PISA is taken in 9th grade, around the time students (students start school at 7) are 15 turning 16. At the end of 9th grade, surprise, Finnish students are entitled to receive a HS diploma, and many graduate, move on with their lives. 80 % continue to business schools, Votech community college-like places, nursing schools, industrial schools, trade schools. All free of tuition. Teaching, however, requires the rigorous Bac HS for 3 more years, and then you pray that you are accepted to a 6-year university program after that.
2. ONLY 20% of Finnish students move on to the intensive baccalaureate 3-year program for which they have to take a test- that would be the equivalent of scoring 1300 out of 1600 SAT. One simply will not get ACCEPTED to the national universities without being in this percentile. University of Helsinki and Aalto only accept the top 10%. Most students in that very small group (17-19 year olds) are confident enough to continue for the baccalaureate diploma, since they have passed ALL the tests that will ALLOW them to enter the Bac program in the first place.
In the Helsinki area there are roughly 10 HS. For each one, a student must take an exam to see if they get into their favorite one…normally, one picks 3…and of course, their district HS, if they are not accepted to the any of the other, favored ones. Currently, the most popular one is completely taught in English, and only the top 3% get in there. Of course, it is the STEM HS (similar to Stuyvesant) in Tapiola, a suburb of Hk. Many American ex-pats’ kids go there…and Asians/other foreigners whose parents are working in the tech sector in Finland.
3. Starting in 7th grade, there IS tracking, at least in the Finnish metropolitan areas. Finns believe strongly in letting their best minds move quicker faster…children are considered a national resource, so the country believes in supporting the top students/most academically gifted from falling off the rails because of boredom/crappy parents/crappy home life. Even the best hockey players go to their “own HS” in Lahti since Finland knows that they will become future multi-million dollar NHL players and come home to Finland as the top 1% taxpayers. Finnish people are loathe to leave Finland….at least forever.
4. Not only do Finnish kids have to read books in Finnish, but Swedish is also required…and English, starting in 2nd grade. Most of the immigrant/refugee kids can be exempt from Swedish, but they must learn Finnish or they will not succeed in the country. If their English is good (better than Finnish), there are “English only” High Schools where they can springboard to universities in UK or USA…which is fairly common. I know several non-ethnic Finns, immigrant students that are at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc.
5. Curriculum is not dumbed-down, nor is it unrealistically hard for students who just can’t master the content. Skilled teachers do a fair amount of differentiation, and parents have no say as to who gets to be in the “higher track,” or not, since every child has to hit certain bench marks. There is far less parental involvement and no sports. Teachers are free to teach, no annoying parents meddling, and, this is accepted as status quo.
Some work is done together as a group in the classroom, some is harder for the more capable students…and no one argues that this is not fair. There is plenty of pull-out programs for the students who are struggling with content, particularly the newer immigrants. Also, every week the same content is taught (with different levels of rigor) in every Finnish school but the teachers are completely entitled to deliver the content in a method of their choosing. This is why the quality of teachers is so high and why their education is long and laborious – why they are respected.
6. Special needs kids have separate schools – the Finns have not figured a way to realistically, in their opinion, integrate SN children. In some cases, a high-functioning student who is autistic is integrated, and possibly attending a top HS & later, university.
7. Finnish students more or less, must know what kind of student they are/what they are interested in/what are they good at by 15-16. All males upon turning 18 must serve in the army or navy, where they get another chance to do some soul-searching. It is not imperative or socially more acceptable to go and get that university education as opposed to wanting to be a plumber. Career choices are numerous, and, it is not considered negative to end your secondary HS education after 9th grade. I have many friends who are ship’s captains, nurses, small business owners, marina managers, equine managers, bakers, potters, fire fighters, nuclear power plant technicians, professional snowboarders who were loathe to enter that rigorous 3 year HS Bac education, even if they could have, academically.
Finland believes that students develop an innate sense of themselves and what kind of career they want from their K-9 years. And, proof of that is that everyone seems happy in that cold, northern country, and, the population is increasing every 10 years. And, yes, there are plenty of millionaires and well to do with their yachts and water-front homes. It is not some kind of socialist, snowy wasteland. They do pay more taxes than Americans, but they don’t have to worry about tuition for any type of post secondary school education; they have universal healthcare and the fastest internet in the world, great infrastructure. Beckham had all his knee surgeries there.
I know this is really wordy, but I felt like stating all this since American reformers ignore the plain truth that not every student is the same/has the same motivation/same level of acuity/same interests. And, this is NO ONE’S fault. It is a shame that all I ever hear from Common Core supporters (particularly by Ivy League graduated journalists and reformers) is that every student in America can supposedly do the level of work that a student bound to a Caltech/MIT/Stanford does. That everyone is special/everyone is equally creative/artistic/intelligent is not true and should be obvious to people. If this was the case, one would think that reformers would question the very validity of a Noble Laureate: did they “game” their research? Did they receive sneaky, expensive test prep to get into their initial undergraduate university? Were they from a perceived affluent family, so were thus, privileged over others? Are they really intellectually superior in their field? Is there work somehow fraudulent?
Expecting all students to excel like all top % students world-wide, can not be willed somehow. And, I do think the point that a previous commenter made (if CC fails, it proves that current American teachers are crappy) about the nefarious intentions of the reformers is a valid one.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I like sports fine, but I do think that most schools and colleges might be far better if they dropped sports. (Not gym, but competitive-with-other-schools type sports.) Let the people who want it badly organize their own sports activities via clubs and such.
PISA is taken in 9th grade, around the time students (students start school at 7) are 15 turning 16. At the end of 9th grade, surprise, Finnish students are entitled to receive a HS diploma, and many graduate, move on with their lives. 80 % continue to business schools, Votech community college-like places, nursing schools, industrial schools, trade schools. All free of tuition. Teaching, however, requires the rigorous Bac HS for 3 more years, and then you pray that you are accepted to a 6-year university program after that.
2. ONLY 20% of Finnish students move on to the intensive baccalaureate 3-year program for which they have to take a test- that would be the equivalent of scoring 1300 out of 1600 SAT.
Firstly, I have never before heard anyone call the diploma at the end of the 9th grade a high school diploma. Secondly, nowadays more than 50 percent of students move on the (supposedly) intensive high school (baccalaureate) program. Lagertha’s figures are out-of-date by several decades. Thirdly, there is no test for entering high school in Finland, and while some schools are selective, many will accept even bad students. There is a comprehensive national examination at the end of high school.
University of Helsinki and Aalto only accept the top 10%.
That’s not true. The percentage that are accepted varies widely across programs. Considering that only those who have graduated from HS (<50 percent of each cohort) can, generally, apply to universities proper, the selection can be pretty tough, sure.
Lagertha is correct about the fact that the American idea of everybody being college material has no currency in Finland. However, the nine years of compulsory schooling are very egalitarian, e.g., most schools never group students by ability.
Of course this will never do for obvious reasons. Look at the flack elite NYC public schools are catching for not having enough Blacks. The new mayor wants the admittance tests scrapped in favor of more “holistic” approaches.
One of my books–a rather abstruse mathematical one–was translated into Finnish. I really don’t understand why, as every educated Finn I have ever met spoke perfect English.
Pah! The first educated Finn I met spoke Finnish, Swedish, English, German, and Russian. He was doing his PhD in physics.
I should add that I cannot imagine how an “untracked” system can work. I dare say I’d have left school early if I’d been asked to learn at a rate determined by the dimmest of my age-group. Hell, even in primary school we had a degree of “tracking” though it was at the crude level of bottom half/top half.
Mr. Sailer,
Either this person hasn’t been following Finnish education for the last 30+ years, or she has confused Finland with some southern German state.
“1. — 80 % continue to business schools, Votech community college-like places, nursing schools, industrial schools, trade schools. —
2. ONLY 20% of Finnish students move on to the intensive baccalaureate 3-year program for which they have to take a test- that would be the equivalent of scoring 1300 out of 1600 SAT.”
It’s more like 50-50 these days. There is NO testing for admission to the upper secondary schools, selection is based purely on grades; even the handful of specialized schools select mostly by other means than testing. There IS a series of tests after the upper sec. school, the German-style matriculation exam. All subjects are now optional for the exam, with the exception of mother tongue. Some subjects (math, physics) double as admission exams to university programs. You can BS your way through now; nothing like SAT.
“3. Starting in 7th grade, there IS tracking, at least in the Finnish metropolitan areas. Finns believe strongly in letting their best minds move quicker faster…”
There is no tracking worth mentioning outside the metropolitan areas. It’s not much better in the cities. That everyone gets the same curriculum is the defining characteristic of Finnish school system, and the one policy point that is forever outside debate. There are some optional courses and grouping by skill level, but that just means the skilled students solve more problems, and more challenging problems, concerning the same topics. For an example, students will work on pairs of linear equations for the same number of lessons, there are no groups of 3 equations or more. Moving on is a big no-no.
The social democratic party has pretty much wilted away in the 2000’s, but the ministry of education, the union, and other bodies in the field are still staffed with old democrat ladies. They are either openly hostile to the idea of tracking and differentiation, or emphasize the downward aspect of tracking, the education of special-needs children. (‘The smart kids can always take care of themselves.”) This emphasis, along with low immigration levels (immigration hurts schools most in the form of lowered standards and bad policies, see Sweden), is the reason for Finnish PISA successes. In TIMMS, Finland does much worse, because it actually is a test of math skills on all levels rather than a noisy reading/IQ test that saturates at 120.
“5. Curriculum is not dumbed-down, nor is it unrealistically hard for students who just can’t master the content. Skilled teachers do a fair amount of differentiation—”
This curriculum is also pretty much all there is. Most teachers aren’t skilled in doing differentiation, and it hasn’t received much emphasis in their education. I’ve read it is getting better.
“There is plenty of pull-out programs for the students who are struggling with content, particularly the newer immigrants.”
‘Inclusive education’ was all the rage in the early 2000’s, both as a edu-fad and a way of cutting municipal expenses. This meant a lot of ‘remedial’ education (pull-out groups) was slashed. Again, it is getting better. (There are still some officials who have some ability to learn from experience.) But there are no ‘push-forward’ groups for students who, for an example, are some of the few students fluent in the language of instruction.
“7. Finnish students more or less, must know what kind of student they are/what they are interested in/what are they good at by 15-16.”
This is true for students who go to vocational schools. Many choose upper secondary school (“HS Bac”, Finnish analogue of German Gymnasium) because they don’t know what they want to do when they grow up.
” 8. Finland has NO private schools; so the children of the top 2 % income homes go to the same public schools…this is a big difference with regard to US schools. Warren Buffet once implied that because of the existence of “private schools” – probably
would include parochial schools – Americans do not “blow into the embers together,””
There are a handful of religious and Steinerpedagogik private schools, but they must finance themselves with the standard allotments from the municipality and state. Also, it is practically impossible to get a permit for a new private school, because the officials are scared of competent rivals.
In the Helsinki metropolitan area, kids are designated to ‘nearby schools’, comprehensive schools that are closest to their homes. Since the immigration to metropolitan area has exploded in the last decade, this system has resulted in the flight of middle class families from near the troubled sub-urbs. If you’re stuck in the immigrant-rich suburbs, your best bet is to get your kid to a “musical” or sports-oriented class elsewhere. Or to have some connections. Being good at math won’t suffice.
Busing has been very limited this far, I think the officials don’t want immigration and schools to develop into a hot topic. That much for “blowing in the same ember”. And, of course, the revealed preferences of the upper classes don’t show up in the debate on immigration and racism. It’s the same old game of chicken. SUVs versus mopeds.
There are some lessons to be learned from Finnish schools, but PISA is a poor measure (and it’s mostly lack of immigrants + easy written form of language anyway.)
I think Germany has the solutions that are more relevant for most countries: early differentiation of kids into reading and vocational types, apprenticeships… And by the most important measure of education, economy, Germany is doing very well.
I thought the impressive Finnish scores resulted from Finland having fewer immigrants to drag down their scores. You want Finnish scores aim for Finnish demographics.
Not only that, they dance Bhangra, man.
Why Finland and not Sweden?
Is it due to genography? Sweden is safely situated and hasn’t been invaded for a long time. Even during WWII, it had little to worry about. It made a lot of money and it made even lot more money during the Cold War. So, Swedes seem to get carried away with leftist utopian dreams.
Finns might have ended up like the Swedes, but their geography put them right next to massive Russia. Finland had been conquered by Russia during Tsarist times, and the USSR attacked Finland during WWII, and Finns fought a bitter war and even lost some territory. And even after the peace, Finns had to be live with the knowledge that the USSR was right next door. Indeed, it’s interesting that Finland was the ONLY European nation during the Cold War that was geographically attached to the Soviet Union but was NOT communist.
So, Finn geopolitics probably made them less naive about leftist fantasies of socialist utopia. With mighty Russian bear at its feet, Finland probably maintained a sense of ‘conservative’ nationalism if only out of fear. If a nation is overly conservative, it can hold them back.
And if a nation is overly Liberal, it can foster all sorts of silly unrealistic utopian fantasies about what can be done to improve society.
But Finland seems to have been influenced by both Social-Democracy and awakened to nationalism(if only out of fear of big Russia). So, maybe Finns are politically and socially more realistic about humanity, ideas, and the world. There’s a balance that’s lacking in places like Sweden and Denmark.
Btw, since Liberals tell us that it’s so great for all those Mexicans to flood into America, are any of them saying that millions of poor Russians should flock to Finland to make the place more vibrant and diverse?
As a gross reality check, it might be useful to compare the performance of Finns with the performance of Finnish Americans.
I knew a Finnish-American once, a Minnesota man. He retired to Orange County.
“I like sports fine, but I do think that most schools and colleges might be far better if they dropped sports. (Not gym, but competitive-with-other-schools type sports.) Let the people who want it badly organize their own sports activities via clubs and such.”
I agree. When I was in high school my school hosted a Brazilian exchange student. He said in Brazil youth sports teams were organized either by municipalities or volunteer organizations (I forget which). He said schools had sports teams but they were populated mostly by the kids who weren’t good enough for the town teams and weren’t really taken seriously.
“Teaching, however, requires the rigorous Bac HS for 3 more years, and then you pray that you are accepted to a 6-year university program after that.”
I’m currently studying to become a language teacher, and I’ll have you know we are very strongly encouraged to graduate in five years’ time (or less, if in any way humanly possible). It makes for a pretty hectic schedule at times, at least for an older student such as myself, as when I began my studies at the university a good few years had passed since I last opened a textbook, let alone took an exam.
About post “HS” life and education in Finland – after getting their Baccalaureat, it is not uncommon for Finnish youngsters to have a year (or two) off to figure out what they want to do next. That time’s usually spent working or traveling (or doing your time in the army, which by the way even as a man you do not have to do immediately after you turn 18, you can basically request to have it postponed up to a certain age, I think it’s 28 or so). After that, it’s usually back to school, or else entry-level jobs.
Myself, I spent almost a decade working before the gloomy job prospects of the current economic climate convinced me I’d better go back to school instead and put my human capital to good use. The job prospects for language teachers (especially teachers of the more widely spoken languages) are better than average in a marginal language speaking country such as Finland. I studied a good handful of languages at school and got pretty great (someone other than a Finn might say excellent, but I really shouldn’t…) grades too, so I thought I’d take the chance and apply to university, and here I am.
I’m still working part-time, which is also a pretty common arrangement for university students in Finland. Even though we have no tuition fees to speak of and are eligible to receive financial aid from the government (yes, this is great, BUT), the amount students actually get is pretty meager when you consider the costs of living around here. In fact, the unemployed receive more financial aid than full-time students, which is pretty outrageous and passivizing to boot. Still, I do realize we Finns are pretty well off overall, on a global scale.
Anyway, these were just selected personal ramblings and a few more tidbits to add to the “Mandatory Finnish Content” of the week. How my husband and I laughed when we saw that phrase! We Finns are always ridiculously tickled to see our country mentioned in any international medium, especially if it’s in a positive light. Of course, some of us then tend to immediately gather together on various internet forums to gleefully denounce or explain away most positive findings (and some rare negative ones). It might seem counter-intuitive, but makes perfect sense for a (certain type of) Finn. It serves to satisfy some twisted sense of balance, I suppose.
…students start school at 7…
And it obviously doesn’t harm them. Doesn’t this fact alone indicate the uselessness of so-called early childhood education? (I’m not a Finn.)
How to reconcile:…
3. Starting in 7th grade, there IS tracking, at least in the Finnish metropolitan areas. Finns believe strongly in letting their best minds move quicker faster…
and
5. …every week the same content is taught (with different levels of rigor) in every Finnish school but the teachers are completely entitled to deliver the content in a method of their choosing.”