Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?
February 22, 2022 11:11 PM Subscribe
Eleven years ago Smithsonian Magazine published an in-depth examination[1] of the Finnish education system (and what the U.S. can learn from the Finns). Here's a quote: "Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Student health care is free... Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry."
A few months earlier the Boston Globe published an op-ed[2,3,4] about the Finnish education system, touching on many of the same topics (although with fewer specific examples).
A few months earlier the Boston Globe published an op-ed[2,3,4] about the Finnish education system, touching on many of the same topics (although with fewer specific examples).
Well, I was going to post a joke about depressed Finns or something, but it seems like they've snagged the title of happiest country on Earth as well. Damn Finns, investing in their youth and community and social programs and being happy and shit!
posted by Harald74 at 1:28 AM on February 23, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by Harald74 at 1:28 AM on February 23, 2022 [13 favorites]
This is a big topic with a lot of moving parts, but for me cutting to the chase is this: Finland and virtually ALL developed nations fund their schools federally, spreading the money more or less equally to each school. U.S. schools get about half their funding from the federal government and the other half from local taxes. If a school is in a poor area, that means less tax revenue, that means less money for the schools, and that means worse outcomes for students, period.
U.S. public schools are an example of income inequality, but it's income inequality by choice. It doesn't have to be that way, but Republicans of course won't change that dynamic and Democrats by and large have shown they don't give two shits about education reform as well.
We could change schools. Ask teachers, they've been screaming the same things for decades now: smaller classes; get rid of high-stakes testing and allow teachers to handle most of the assessment; proper textbooks and facilities; pay teachers a goddamn living wage. The solutions are there. The political courage is not.
posted by zardoz at 2:26 AM on February 23, 2022 [80 favorites]
U.S. public schools are an example of income inequality, but it's income inequality by choice. It doesn't have to be that way, but Republicans of course won't change that dynamic and Democrats by and large have shown they don't give two shits about education reform as well.
We could change schools. Ask teachers, they've been screaming the same things for decades now: smaller classes; get rid of high-stakes testing and allow teachers to handle most of the assessment; proper textbooks and facilities; pay teachers a goddamn living wage. The solutions are there. The political courage is not.
posted by zardoz at 2:26 AM on February 23, 2022 [80 favorites]
Finland has a child poverty rate of 4%, compared to a US child poverty rate of 20%.
The Finnish education system sounds fantastic. It does. But it's really striking to me that the problems of American education are not problems you can fix just by changing the education system. You could copy everything about the Finnish education system and still fail, if you had students who were coming to school not ready to learn because of the stresses of poverty. (Free food and health care is a good start.)
posted by Jeanne at 2:38 AM on February 23, 2022 [40 favorites]
The Finnish education system sounds fantastic. It does. But it's really striking to me that the problems of American education are not problems you can fix just by changing the education system. You could copy everything about the Finnish education system and still fail, if you had students who were coming to school not ready to learn because of the stresses of poverty. (Free food and health care is a good start.)
posted by Jeanne at 2:38 AM on February 23, 2022 [40 favorites]
The entire population of Finland the country, is only a bit more than the city I live in. And a fraction of most countries. How well can these solutions scale?
posted by Zumbador at 3:04 AM on February 23, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Zumbador at 3:04 AM on February 23, 2022 [5 favorites]
This is a big topic with a lot of moving parts, but for me cutting to the chase is this: Finland and virtually ALL developed nations fund their schools federally, spreading the money more or less equally to each school. U.S. schools get about half their funding from the federal government and the other half from local taxes. If a school is in a poor area, that means less tax revenue, that means less money for the schools, and that means worse outcomes for students, period.
Many countries do fund their schools nationally without that necessarily leading to equality. The UK (it's devolved but this is true x4), The Netherlands, France all have national funding either directly or using dispersal through centrally funded local government institutions. Two of those countries have very unequal selective secondary education (the UK nations have only a small number of selective secondary schools remaining) and all three have very unequal educational outcomes.
The entire population of Finland the country, is only a bit more than the city I live in. And a fraction of most countries. How well can these solutions scale?
Perfectly well I imagine.
The degree to which solutions scale is related to how tightly coupled they have to be to work. So making a single school ten times bigger does not work trivially, because the way a school operates internally is tightly coupled: the head of the school knows all their staff, department heads are able to sit in on the occasional lessons, etc. that doesn't scale easily. You can make a school bigger but it requires very careful thinking about process because there's scale variant behaviour.
An educational system as a whole is loosely coupled - almost all the interaction is intra-school with some local coordination on capacity planning and national coordination for funding and standard setting. Medical care is very similar, making individual departments or hospitals bigger requires some thought about scaling logic but "numbering up" by adding tightly coupled units of schools or hospitals does not lead to a coordination problem the way scaling the units up.
Think of it like McDonalds scaling vs Apple scaling. Increasing the size of the team making the IPhone requires a lot of thought about interface management and productivity. Adding a McDonalds is entirely modular.
posted by atrazine at 3:20 AM on February 23, 2022 [39 favorites]
Many countries do fund their schools nationally without that necessarily leading to equality. The UK (it's devolved but this is true x4), The Netherlands, France all have national funding either directly or using dispersal through centrally funded local government institutions. Two of those countries have very unequal selective secondary education (the UK nations have only a small number of selective secondary schools remaining) and all three have very unequal educational outcomes.
The entire population of Finland the country, is only a bit more than the city I live in. And a fraction of most countries. How well can these solutions scale?
Perfectly well I imagine.
The degree to which solutions scale is related to how tightly coupled they have to be to work. So making a single school ten times bigger does not work trivially, because the way a school operates internally is tightly coupled: the head of the school knows all their staff, department heads are able to sit in on the occasional lessons, etc. that doesn't scale easily. You can make a school bigger but it requires very careful thinking about process because there's scale variant behaviour.
An educational system as a whole is loosely coupled - almost all the interaction is intra-school with some local coordination on capacity planning and national coordination for funding and standard setting. Medical care is very similar, making individual departments or hospitals bigger requires some thought about scaling logic but "numbering up" by adding tightly coupled units of schools or hospitals does not lead to a coordination problem the way scaling the units up.
Think of it like McDonalds scaling vs Apple scaling. Increasing the size of the team making the IPhone requires a lot of thought about interface management and productivity. Adding a McDonalds is entirely modular.
posted by atrazine at 3:20 AM on February 23, 2022 [39 favorites]
The entire population of Finland the country, is only a bit more than the city I live in. And a fraction of most countries. How well can these solutions scale?
Not to mention - and I know discussions of demography and ethnicity can get ugly fast - the current population of Finland is very homogenous - according to Wikipedia 92% of the population is ethnically Finnish, speaking the Finnish language, and so comparisons to a substantially multicultural country of 335 million (or even other Western countries with more substantial minority populations) can miss the mark. Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
posted by fortitude25 at 3:23 AM on February 23, 2022 [7 favorites]
Not to mention - and I know discussions of demography and ethnicity can get ugly fast - the current population of Finland is very homogenous - according to Wikipedia 92% of the population is ethnically Finnish, speaking the Finnish language, and so comparisons to a substantially multicultural country of 335 million (or even other Western countries with more substantial minority populations) can miss the mark. Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
posted by fortitude25 at 3:23 AM on February 23, 2022 [7 favorites]
Damn Finns, investing in their youth and community and social programs and being happy and shit!
So, can we have a thread without fetishizing Nordic countries? What I’ve seen of Finland is very nice, I have friends there who are quite happy, but it’s a country full of people, with all the benefits and problems. Sorry, Harald74, you were pretty mild, but I’ve seen Iceland threads go to weird places. No Maniac Pixie dream Countries, please!
Additionally, although comparison is inevitable and necessary, can we all work to keep this thread focused on Finland, not the USA?
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:48 AM on February 23, 2022 [16 favorites]
So, can we have a thread without fetishizing Nordic countries? What I’ve seen of Finland is very nice, I have friends there who are quite happy, but it’s a country full of people, with all the benefits and problems. Sorry, Harald74, you were pretty mild, but I’ve seen Iceland threads go to weird places. No Maniac Pixie dream Countries, please!
Additionally, although comparison is inevitable and necessary, can we all work to keep this thread focused on Finland, not the USA?
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:48 AM on February 23, 2022 [16 favorites]
all three have very unequal educational outcomes
I have to ask, honestly, how much those unequal outcomes in France, the UK, and the Netherlands have to do with race and class? Coming from an American background, with property tax funded schools and the massive, untenable disparity that creates (combined with all sorts of traditional feeder ideas like education being a path to success, but ignoring that success in education has a lot to do with how well prepared for education one is, and the inherent wealth based disparities on early childhood education in America), I am entirely used to the idea that wealth and race are the key factors in disparate outcomes, if not the primary reasons. Not knowing a lot about the Netherlands situation, I have heard a lot about racial and wealth based divisions in France and the UK, and that, along with the experience I've had in the US school system, seems like it might be more than a little important in finding out why these schools produce such different results.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:32 AM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
I have to ask, honestly, how much those unequal outcomes in France, the UK, and the Netherlands have to do with race and class? Coming from an American background, with property tax funded schools and the massive, untenable disparity that creates (combined with all sorts of traditional feeder ideas like education being a path to success, but ignoring that success in education has a lot to do with how well prepared for education one is, and the inherent wealth based disparities on early childhood education in America), I am entirely used to the idea that wealth and race are the key factors in disparate outcomes, if not the primary reasons. Not knowing a lot about the Netherlands situation, I have heard a lot about racial and wealth based divisions in France and the UK, and that, along with the experience I've had in the US school system, seems like it might be more than a little important in finding out why these schools produce such different results.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:32 AM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
The Smartest Kids In The World by Amanda Ripley is a really interesting book about this; she compares school systems in other countries to the US; it's interesting because she basically collaborates with several kids who've studied both in the US and abroad. Includes a chapter on Finland.
posted by BlueNorther at 4:55 AM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by BlueNorther at 4:55 AM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
What strikes me about this is that Finns want kids to learn a *lot*, but without making them miserable-- American kids in well-funded schools still don't receive something that good.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:07 AM on February 23, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:07 AM on February 23, 2022 [12 favorites]
Two of those countries [Netherlands and Germany] have very unequal selective secondary education (the UK nations have only a small number of selective secondary schools remaining) and all three have very unequal educational outcomes.
There is a perception in the UK that selective education is 'better'. There is no evidence that it is true. In England, schools that take the top X% of pupils score better in academic achievement tests than schools that take 100-top X% or then schools that take 100% of pupils. But education authorities that still operate a selective system (Buckinghamshire and Kent) score about the same overall as similar authorities that operate a comprehensive system overall (eg Hertfordshire, East Sussex). Selective education is all well and good until your child is in the secondary modern, hauptschule or VMBO-BBL, which yes is linked to class and also to race (or more pertinently, immigrant background).
The features of Finnish education that I think help it do well are the late start to formal schooling, the non-selective approach, the ancillary services, the even funding and the relatively homogenous population. I think it would be a good idea to replicate all of those except the homogenous population and see whether it helps at all.
posted by plonkee at 5:11 AM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
There is a perception in the UK that selective education is 'better'. There is no evidence that it is true. In England, schools that take the top X% of pupils score better in academic achievement tests than schools that take 100-top X% or then schools that take 100% of pupils. But education authorities that still operate a selective system (Buckinghamshire and Kent) score about the same overall as similar authorities that operate a comprehensive system overall (eg Hertfordshire, East Sussex). Selective education is all well and good until your child is in the secondary modern, hauptschule or VMBO-BBL, which yes is linked to class and also to race (or more pertinently, immigrant background).
The features of Finnish education that I think help it do well are the late start to formal schooling, the non-selective approach, the ancillary services, the even funding and the relatively homogenous population. I think it would be a good idea to replicate all of those except the homogenous population and see whether it helps at all.
posted by plonkee at 5:11 AM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
I have to ask, honestly, how much those unequal outcomes in France, the UK, and the Netherlands have to do with race and class?
I don't know about the Netherlands, but Wikipedia summarises the position in Germany albeit a little out of date. My personal view is that selective systems are a good way for systemic racism to manifest itself, even though that's not the deliberate purpose of the system or the people involved.
In England, the position is that schools in London outperform the rest of the country, including for ethnic minority groups and the poorest areas. London is also the most diverse area of the country. Wealthy suburbs and small towns also tend to do well, and tend to be mostly white. The most 'left behind' areas for education are generally seaside resorts which are predominantly white, and smaller towns in northern and midlands areas, which tend to have self-segregating Asian (usually Pakistani and/or Bangladeshi) and white communities. These are all economically deprived areas and are mainly working class and precariat (in both a British and American sense).
There is lots of discussion about why London has improved so markedly, including additional funding, additional support and the idea that it attracts a higher calibre of young teachers.
posted by plonkee at 5:20 AM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't know about the Netherlands, but Wikipedia summarises the position in Germany albeit a little out of date. My personal view is that selective systems are a good way for systemic racism to manifest itself, even though that's not the deliberate purpose of the system or the people involved.
In England, the position is that schools in London outperform the rest of the country, including for ethnic minority groups and the poorest areas. London is also the most diverse area of the country. Wealthy suburbs and small towns also tend to do well, and tend to be mostly white. The most 'left behind' areas for education are generally seaside resorts which are predominantly white, and smaller towns in northern and midlands areas, which tend to have self-segregating Asian (usually Pakistani and/or Bangladeshi) and white communities. These are all economically deprived areas and are mainly working class and precariat (in both a British and American sense).
There is lots of discussion about why London has improved so markedly, including additional funding, additional support and the idea that it attracts a higher calibre of young teachers.
posted by plonkee at 5:20 AM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
Also in England, school populations that are more deprived get more funding. Extra money ("pupil premium") specifically follows the student for several years if for example they have had a period of needing free school meals. Schools have to account for how that is spent in a way that will benefit those pupils.
posted by plonkee at 5:22 AM on February 23, 2022
posted by plonkee at 5:22 AM on February 23, 2022
Not to mention - and I know discussions of demography and ethnicity can get ugly fast - the current population of Finland is very homogenous - according to Wikipedia 92% of the population is ethnically Finnish, speaking the Finnish language, and so comparisons to a substantially multicultural country of 335 million (or even other Western countries with more substantial minority populations) can miss the mark.
The first paragraph of the article is about how they handled the case of a Kosovan Albanian boy, so it's not the case that no Finnish school has to deal with language challenges.
There are two ways of looking at that.
First, is there something in the Finnish approach that would not work well in a place that was linguistically diverse? (note that historically, Finland was arguably de jure more linguistically diverse than the US but de facto both countries require fluency in one dominant language for education and employment). Well, the Finnish approach is to train, treat, and pay teachers as essentially regulated professionals rather than mere employees. Think of how a lawyer operates in the US or UK in terms of autonomous practice and authority and you get a lot closer to what it's like. Finnish teacher training only admits about 10% of applicants which is intermediate between the acceptance rates of Harvard and Stanford law schools. When I compare this to the people I know who went into teaching in England... well the best ones match that description but there are more than a few people who just needed something to do.
Second, let's forget about "multicultural", and talk about economic inequality. Would the approach work in a society that is as unequal as the US is? Almost definitely not.
What they do not focus on so heavily is curricula, materials, testing, all the non-teacher paraphernalia which makes up a school system. Since teaching is essentially an intensive 1:1 or 1:few activity, it should be no surprise that this approach works.
Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
Why wouldn't I? I think it is an essential moral principle that everyone who lives in a place is treated equally and that all cultural groups are treated respectfully but I think there is something very strange about effectively insisting that there's something wrong with a place because it doesn't match your idea of how a society should be arranged. By the way, 8% of the the Finnish population is foreign born which is pretty high for a country that isn't a settler-colonialist state.
I have to ask, honestly, how much those unequal outcomes in France, the UK, and the Netherlands have to do with race and class?
Basically all of them, of course. I'm just pushing back a bit against the American "one weird trick" narrative that if you guys just fixed the funding model then you would have it cracked.
Admission to the selective secondary tiers of the French and Dutch systems tracks parental socioeconomic status pretty closely and that continues in the post-secondary world as well. France manages to send almost exclusively the parents of the wealthy and well positioned through its elite post-secondary system and that is despite all of these being free and centrally funded. Ditto the Dutch system where the highest tier of secondary education and the universities it leads to are free to absolutely everyone and yet dominated by elites.
The UK is a bit different (I was educated in Scotland and now live in England, so know little about Welsh or Northern Irish schools) in that while there are only a few remnants of selective secondary education left, and funding is centrally allocated, schools still display the kind of differential outcomes that you see in the US because of intake differences and because parents buy houses near "good" schools which drives up the price, causing the intake demographics to shift to wealthier, which makes the school "good" and drives the price up more. England and Scotland both have much more extensive private schooling systems than is typical for Europe.
There is a perception in the UK that selective education is 'better'. There is no evidence that it is true. In England, schools that take the top X% of pupils score better in academic achievement tests than schools that take 100-top X% or then schools that take 100% of pupils. But education authorities that still operate a selective system (Buckinghamshire and Kent) score about the same overall as similar authorities that operate a comprehensive system overall (eg Hertfordshire, East Sussex). Selective education is all well and good until your child is in the secondary modern, hauptschule or VMBO-BBL, which yes is linked to class and also to race (or more pertinently, immigrant background).
The features of Finnish education that I think help it do well are the late start to formal schooling, the non-selective approach, the ancillary services, the even funding and the relatively homogenous population. I think it would be a good idea to replicate all of those except the homogenous population and see whether it helps at all.
Basically, yeah. Although is is right to say that Hertfordshire is comprehensive given the number of selective grammars in the London-adjacent parts of the county?
The reason why it is popular for politicians to talk about bringing selection back but that they never really do it is that while it's theoretical you get to imagine that your little Einstein will go into the higher tier but once you introduce it for real not everyone does...
It's probably because I'm a materialist but I would be willing to bet quite a lot that economic and not ethnic homogeneity is important. I went to a series of schools that were simultaneously as "diverse" as any school that makes it into a touching Channel 4 documentary and also economically very homogenous and I don't think that the spread of passports had any impact on the running of the school.
posted by atrazine at 5:22 AM on February 23, 2022 [15 favorites]
The first paragraph of the article is about how they handled the case of a Kosovan Albanian boy, so it's not the case that no Finnish school has to deal with language challenges.
There are two ways of looking at that.
First, is there something in the Finnish approach that would not work well in a place that was linguistically diverse? (note that historically, Finland was arguably de jure more linguistically diverse than the US but de facto both countries require fluency in one dominant language for education and employment). Well, the Finnish approach is to train, treat, and pay teachers as essentially regulated professionals rather than mere employees. Think of how a lawyer operates in the US or UK in terms of autonomous practice and authority and you get a lot closer to what it's like. Finnish teacher training only admits about 10% of applicants which is intermediate between the acceptance rates of Harvard and Stanford law schools. When I compare this to the people I know who went into teaching in England... well the best ones match that description but there are more than a few people who just needed something to do.
Second, let's forget about "multicultural", and talk about economic inequality. Would the approach work in a society that is as unequal as the US is? Almost definitely not.
What they do not focus on so heavily is curricula, materials, testing, all the non-teacher paraphernalia which makes up a school system. Since teaching is essentially an intensive 1:1 or 1:few activity, it should be no surprise that this approach works.
Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
Why wouldn't I? I think it is an essential moral principle that everyone who lives in a place is treated equally and that all cultural groups are treated respectfully but I think there is something very strange about effectively insisting that there's something wrong with a place because it doesn't match your idea of how a society should be arranged. By the way, 8% of the the Finnish population is foreign born which is pretty high for a country that isn't a settler-colonialist state.
I have to ask, honestly, how much those unequal outcomes in France, the UK, and the Netherlands have to do with race and class?
Basically all of them, of course. I'm just pushing back a bit against the American "one weird trick" narrative that if you guys just fixed the funding model then you would have it cracked.
Admission to the selective secondary tiers of the French and Dutch systems tracks parental socioeconomic status pretty closely and that continues in the post-secondary world as well. France manages to send almost exclusively the parents of the wealthy and well positioned through its elite post-secondary system and that is despite all of these being free and centrally funded. Ditto the Dutch system where the highest tier of secondary education and the universities it leads to are free to absolutely everyone and yet dominated by elites.
The UK is a bit different (I was educated in Scotland and now live in England, so know little about Welsh or Northern Irish schools) in that while there are only a few remnants of selective secondary education left, and funding is centrally allocated, schools still display the kind of differential outcomes that you see in the US because of intake differences and because parents buy houses near "good" schools which drives up the price, causing the intake demographics to shift to wealthier, which makes the school "good" and drives the price up more. England and Scotland both have much more extensive private schooling systems than is typical for Europe.
There is a perception in the UK that selective education is 'better'. There is no evidence that it is true. In England, schools that take the top X% of pupils score better in academic achievement tests than schools that take 100-top X% or then schools that take 100% of pupils. But education authorities that still operate a selective system (Buckinghamshire and Kent) score about the same overall as similar authorities that operate a comprehensive system overall (eg Hertfordshire, East Sussex). Selective education is all well and good until your child is in the secondary modern, hauptschule or VMBO-BBL, which yes is linked to class and also to race (or more pertinently, immigrant background).
The features of Finnish education that I think help it do well are the late start to formal schooling, the non-selective approach, the ancillary services, the even funding and the relatively homogenous population. I think it would be a good idea to replicate all of those except the homogenous population and see whether it helps at all.
Basically, yeah. Although is is right to say that Hertfordshire is comprehensive given the number of selective grammars in the London-adjacent parts of the county?
The reason why it is popular for politicians to talk about bringing selection back but that they never really do it is that while it's theoretical you get to imagine that your little Einstein will go into the higher tier but once you introduce it for real not everyone does...
It's probably because I'm a materialist but I would be willing to bet quite a lot that economic and not ethnic homogeneity is important. I went to a series of schools that were simultaneously as "diverse" as any school that makes it into a touching Channel 4 documentary and also economically very homogenous and I don't think that the spread of passports had any impact on the running of the school.
posted by atrazine at 5:22 AM on February 23, 2022 [15 favorites]
Not to mention - and I know discussions of demography and ethnicity can get ugly fast - the current population of Finland is very homogenous - according to Wikipedia 92% of the population is ethnically Finnish, speaking the Finnish language, and so comparisons to a substantially multicultural country of 335 million (or even other Western countries with more substantial minority populations) can miss the mark. Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
Someone says this every time, but 80% of the US population over 5 speaks only English at home, and English or Spanish gets you to 92% of the population over 5. (ACS data) There are other languages with significant numbers of speakers, but they're not going to be as uniformly distributed across the country. Those percentages are actually quite similar to Finland, with Finnish being 86% of the population and Swedish another 5%. It's true, language isn't ethnicity, but it's going to be the biggest hurdle in a school system (barring high levels of sectarian tensions that don't exist in the US).
posted by hoyland at 5:28 AM on February 23, 2022 [18 favorites]
Someone says this every time, but 80% of the US population over 5 speaks only English at home, and English or Spanish gets you to 92% of the population over 5. (ACS data) There are other languages with significant numbers of speakers, but they're not going to be as uniformly distributed across the country. Those percentages are actually quite similar to Finland, with Finnish being 86% of the population and Swedish another 5%. It's true, language isn't ethnicity, but it's going to be the biggest hurdle in a school system (barring high levels of sectarian tensions that don't exist in the US).
posted by hoyland at 5:28 AM on February 23, 2022 [18 favorites]
The reason why it is popular for politicians to talk about bringing selection back but that they never really do it is that while it's theoretical you get to imagine that your little Einstein will go into the higher tier but once you introduce it for real not everyone does...
It's never a secondary modern in every town, is it?
Going back to Finland, most of the defining features of Finnish education are the opposite of what many middle-class parents/grandparents in the UK are perceived to think of common sense (especially potential Tory voters). Particularly starting school later, staying comprehensive throughout, treating teachers as real professionals, and making up for gaps in pupils home lives beyond a narrow definition of education.
posted by plonkee at 7:22 AM on February 23, 2022 [7 favorites]
It's never a secondary modern in every town, is it?
Going back to Finland, most of the defining features of Finnish education are the opposite of what many middle-class parents/grandparents in the UK are perceived to think of common sense (especially potential Tory voters). Particularly starting school later, staying comprehensive throughout, treating teachers as real professionals, and making up for gaps in pupils home lives beyond a narrow definition of education.
posted by plonkee at 7:22 AM on February 23, 2022 [7 favorites]
Reading the article, there are a lot of details about the pedagogy and curriculum that folks who haven’t been studying education will probably skim over or miss. But suffice to say that the school system described makes use of a whole slate of tools and techniques that we know from education research also work to reduce inequality and improve student learning outcomes (as compared with other instructional techniques used under the same general student circumstances) in other places, such as the US. In particular, if you’re inclined to argue that linguistic or cultural homogeneity has anything to do with Finland’s academic success, I’d recommend reading the article, which focuses on a particular school, that is every bit as successful as the rest of Finnish schools according to the article, whose student population is about half immigrant. The article also includes such details as funding comparisons with the US, affect of socioeconomic background, health care available to students and similar social supports outside of academics, immigration dynamics, etc. It’s really quite comprehensively written, and one could learn a lot from a close reading.
Notice, for example, the class sizes, teacher preparation (and who funds teacher education), teacher workloads and working conditions, emphasis on learning how to learn and avoidance of competition and standardized testing, collaboration between teaching staff, comparison with older pedagogical techniques used in Finland prior to their push for educational reform, development of curriculum standards over different stages of their multi-decade education reform project and how that has impacted student learning outcomes, school day timing and structure, and homework policy. Since my background is in math, I also recognized the description of the base-10 blocks and other manipulative used by the students coming in from their play break, or the outdoor math lesson described in the caption to one of the pictures, as relating to some specific curriculum and pedagogy (for more background that is accessible to parents and students as well as education professionals, I highly recommend the book “Mathematical Mindsets” by Dr. Jo Boaler).
posted by eviemath at 7:27 AM on February 23, 2022 [35 favorites]
Notice, for example, the class sizes, teacher preparation (and who funds teacher education), teacher workloads and working conditions, emphasis on learning how to learn and avoidance of competition and standardized testing, collaboration between teaching staff, comparison with older pedagogical techniques used in Finland prior to their push for educational reform, development of curriculum standards over different stages of their multi-decade education reform project and how that has impacted student learning outcomes, school day timing and structure, and homework policy. Since my background is in math, I also recognized the description of the base-10 blocks and other manipulative used by the students coming in from their play break, or the outdoor math lesson described in the caption to one of the pictures, as relating to some specific curriculum and pedagogy (for more background that is accessible to parents and students as well as education professionals, I highly recommend the book “Mathematical Mindsets” by Dr. Jo Boaler).
posted by eviemath at 7:27 AM on February 23, 2022 [35 favorites]
I am always amazed at how discussions about America in comparison to other countries always seems to ignore Canada, a culturally and economically very similar neighboring country with different policies and very different and mostly better outcomes.
posted by srboisvert at 8:40 AM on February 23, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 8:40 AM on February 23, 2022 [22 favorites]
Well, I was going to post a joke about depressed Finns or something, but it seems like they've snagged the title of happiest country on Earth as well
But how are they dealing with the news? They may have moved on from denial and anger and through bargaining by now.
On a more serious note, the whole idea that a diverse population makes support for socially democratic policies difficult is not even borne out by US history; Eugene Debs and Bernie Sanders both had wide support during times when the US had/has historically high percentages of immigrant population. The facts even in broad strokes just don't actually track with that idea.
And to respond to what tamarisk said, I'd totally believe that most of it isn't the education system but the whole package of social support. I remember from one of the previous discussions here on education, and maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can provide actual citations and confirmation/denial, that at most something like 20% of student test performance could be attributed to teaching/quality of instruction, and that went down significantly once class sizes exceeded 20 or so students.
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:45 AM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
But how are they dealing with the news? They may have moved on from denial and anger and through bargaining by now.
On a more serious note, the whole idea that a diverse population makes support for socially democratic policies difficult is not even borne out by US history; Eugene Debs and Bernie Sanders both had wide support during times when the US had/has historically high percentages of immigrant population. The facts even in broad strokes just don't actually track with that idea.
And to respond to what tamarisk said, I'd totally believe that most of it isn't the education system but the whole package of social support. I remember from one of the previous discussions here on education, and maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject can provide actual citations and confirmation/denial, that at most something like 20% of student test performance could be attributed to teaching/quality of instruction, and that went down significantly once class sizes exceeded 20 or so students.
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:45 AM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
Why wouldn't I?
How is this allowed on this website? Like can someone confirm for me if people who are not white are allowed on Metafilter? Or would people prefer it if only white people participated?
posted by chernoffhoeffding at 9:48 AM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
Why wouldn't I?
How is this allowed on this website? Like can someone confirm for me if people who are not white are allowed on Metafilter? Or would people prefer it if only white people participated?
posted by chernoffhoeffding at 9:48 AM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
>>> Would you like to live in a country where the schools are extremely progressive but 9 out of every 10 people belong to your ethnic group and speak your (fairly uncommon) language?
>>Why wouldn't I?
>How is this allowed on this website? Like can someone confirm for me if people who are not white are allowed on Metafilter? Or would people prefer it if only white people participated?
Uhh, so, hi, I wasn't involved in the thread before now, but... I was born and still live in Finland. I like living here, and that's not due to ethnic homogeneity. Are you perhaps reading the "Why wouldn't I?" fairly uncharitably here? I see a thousand potential reasons to "like to live" in Finland that have nothing to do with its ethnic makeup. My interpretation of that response in its full context is "Why wouldn't I like to live in Finland (or a similar country), because there's a lot to like there, even if it's ethnically homogeneous." Which is to say, you might actively consider the homogeneity a downside just like you might consider our shit climate and long, dark winters a downside, but neither of those things would necessarily be dealbreakers in the big picture.
I'm pretty sure that this is the spirit in which the response was intended. Atrazine can jump in and clarify if I'm mistaken, of course.
If I were to read yours and the original comment uncharitably, my read would be "well, I must be a bad person for having been born here and not actively trying to move to a less ethnically homogeneous place". It isn't my read, though, because that would be absurd.
posted by jklaiho at 11:29 AM on February 23, 2022 [11 favorites]
>>Why wouldn't I?
>How is this allowed on this website? Like can someone confirm for me if people who are not white are allowed on Metafilter? Or would people prefer it if only white people participated?
Uhh, so, hi, I wasn't involved in the thread before now, but... I was born and still live in Finland. I like living here, and that's not due to ethnic homogeneity. Are you perhaps reading the "Why wouldn't I?" fairly uncharitably here? I see a thousand potential reasons to "like to live" in Finland that have nothing to do with its ethnic makeup. My interpretation of that response in its full context is "Why wouldn't I like to live in Finland (or a similar country), because there's a lot to like there, even if it's ethnically homogeneous." Which is to say, you might actively consider the homogeneity a downside just like you might consider our shit climate and long, dark winters a downside, but neither of those things would necessarily be dealbreakers in the big picture.
I'm pretty sure that this is the spirit in which the response was intended. Atrazine can jump in and clarify if I'm mistaken, of course.
If I were to read yours and the original comment uncharitably, my read would be "well, I must be a bad person for having been born here and not actively trying to move to a less ethnically homogeneous place". It isn't my read, though, because that would be absurd.
posted by jklaiho at 11:29 AM on February 23, 2022 [11 favorites]
I'm a brown person, and I did have a WTF response to Atrazine's choice of words and tone in that part of the comment. Note that they erase "ethnicity" from their response, and use terms like "foreign-born" and "cultural" instead, which then allows for their statements about desired equality and diversity to apply to people who are simply non-Finnish but still high SES and white.
Perhaps if you are used to people harassing and harming you for being different from the majority (particularly for being non-white) your whole life, comments about how ethnic diversity is "your idea of how a society should be arranged" hit different.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 12:06 PM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
Perhaps if you are used to people harassing and harming you for being different from the majority (particularly for being non-white) your whole life, comments about how ethnic diversity is "your idea of how a society should be arranged" hit different.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 12:06 PM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
This ethnic homogeneity discourse only even makes sense to have if you’re identifying ethnic diversity as a cause of educational disparities. Which of course people do even without getting into the explicitly racist stuff - e.g. they will take the extremely pessimistic tack that it’s a fact of life that people in general are too racist to support universal programs in an ethnically diverse environment. But if you’re going to propose that this is a tradeoff, it doesn’t seem fair to do it without actually arguing the point. Just asking if people would trade less diversity for more/better social programs like there’s a natural assumption of a tradeoff is weird and offloads taking a position on anything hard to everybody else.
posted by atoxyl at 12:10 PM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 12:10 PM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
Just asking if people would trade less diversity for more/better social programs like there’s a natural assumption of a tradeoff is weird and offloads taking a position on anything hard to everybody else.
I have heard this argument - that the US cannot have good social programs because it's "too diverse" - so many times, and it always perplexes me. For one, how is diversity being defined? If you are talking about immigrant populations, both Canada and Australia have much higher percentages of people born outside of the country than the US. If you're talking about language - well, only 56% of Canadians speak English as their "mother tongue", 21% speak French, and those are just our official languages. As noted, Finland has a significant immigrant population and a Swedish speaking minority.
But really, what people mean is that the US can't have good social services because of the racial diversity. And this is true - not because non-white people are somehow harder to provide services for - but because white Americans have consistently voted against social and public services when they might also be benefit or be used by non-white people, particularly Black people.
This isn't the whole story - there are also shared trends across the English speaking world that push for more testing, underfunding of schools, etc. But I also grew up in a majority-nonwhite Canadian neighbourhood with a free swimming pool and terrific parks. (We also had many families on welfare, including my own, who weren't starving, but that was 40 years ago and Mike Harris destroyed all that.)
posted by jb at 1:04 PM on February 23, 2022 [13 favorites]
I have heard this argument - that the US cannot have good social programs because it's "too diverse" - so many times, and it always perplexes me. For one, how is diversity being defined? If you are talking about immigrant populations, both Canada and Australia have much higher percentages of people born outside of the country than the US. If you're talking about language - well, only 56% of Canadians speak English as their "mother tongue", 21% speak French, and those are just our official languages. As noted, Finland has a significant immigrant population and a Swedish speaking minority.
But really, what people mean is that the US can't have good social services because of the racial diversity. And this is true - not because non-white people are somehow harder to provide services for - but because white Americans have consistently voted against social and public services when they might also be benefit or be used by non-white people, particularly Black people.
This isn't the whole story - there are also shared trends across the English speaking world that push for more testing, underfunding of schools, etc. But I also grew up in a majority-nonwhite Canadian neighbourhood with a free swimming pool and terrific parks. (We also had many families on welfare, including my own, who weren't starving, but that was 40 years ago and Mike Harris destroyed all that.)
posted by jb at 1:04 PM on February 23, 2022 [13 favorites]
How is this allowed on this website? Like can someone confirm for me if people who are not white are allowed on Metafilter? Or would people prefer it if only white people participated?
As it happens, I live in a country where most people don't speak my (fairly uncommon) language and depending on how broadly or narrowly you define my ethnic group, the amount of time I have lived in places where 9/10 people belonged to the same ethnic group as me ranges from rarely to never.
Places can be ethnically homogeneous because of some deliberate attempt to keep out people marked as "other" and this is very bad, those places are not good places to be and a stated desire to move there is inherently suspicious even if one claims to want to live there for some other reason.
Some places are "ethnically homogeneous" only by imposing a definition of what that means that may not match local understanding of what the important societal fracture planes are - i.e. I spent the best part of a year living on the boundaries of two neighbourhoods in Chennai which many Americans would think of as equally "ethnically homogeneous" but actually one was a very mixed neighborhood with many Muslims and one was essentially 100% Tamil Brahmin. Finland is actually not really homogenous at all given the long standing Swedish speaking minority and the Sami but again, an American would look at it and say, "well those are all white people". (and actually Finland has a pretty substantial population of people from the middle east)
Finally, some places are ethnically homogeneous just because their history ended up that way without any kind of active attempt to keep certain people (or kick certain people out).
I think North Americans and more generally people from settler-colonialist states, assume that all places which are less ethnically diverse than their particular city are so for that first reason, a sort of active ethnic purity motive and this leads to remarks of a very strange tone which imply that if one wanted to live in one of those places, well we know what kind of person you are, eh?
And yes, I am suspicious of any attempt to identify ethnic diversity as a reason why a given group of people might be difficult to educate. Class disparities which align on ethnic/racial lines, yes, but I guess I do not see why an ethnically and racially mixed group of children which is what I grew up in would be harder to educate than a homogenous one.
posted by atrazine at 1:21 PM on February 23, 2022 [12 favorites]
As it happens, I live in a country where most people don't speak my (fairly uncommon) language and depending on how broadly or narrowly you define my ethnic group, the amount of time I have lived in places where 9/10 people belonged to the same ethnic group as me ranges from rarely to never.
Places can be ethnically homogeneous because of some deliberate attempt to keep out people marked as "other" and this is very bad, those places are not good places to be and a stated desire to move there is inherently suspicious even if one claims to want to live there for some other reason.
Some places are "ethnically homogeneous" only by imposing a definition of what that means that may not match local understanding of what the important societal fracture planes are - i.e. I spent the best part of a year living on the boundaries of two neighbourhoods in Chennai which many Americans would think of as equally "ethnically homogeneous" but actually one was a very mixed neighborhood with many Muslims and one was essentially 100% Tamil Brahmin. Finland is actually not really homogenous at all given the long standing Swedish speaking minority and the Sami but again, an American would look at it and say, "well those are all white people". (and actually Finland has a pretty substantial population of people from the middle east)
Finally, some places are ethnically homogeneous just because their history ended up that way without any kind of active attempt to keep certain people (or kick certain people out).
I think North Americans and more generally people from settler-colonialist states, assume that all places which are less ethnically diverse than their particular city are so for that first reason, a sort of active ethnic purity motive and this leads to remarks of a very strange tone which imply that if one wanted to live in one of those places, well we know what kind of person you are, eh?
And yes, I am suspicious of any attempt to identify ethnic diversity as a reason why a given group of people might be difficult to educate. Class disparities which align on ethnic/racial lines, yes, but I guess I do not see why an ethnically and racially mixed group of children which is what I grew up in would be harder to educate than a homogenous one.
posted by atrazine at 1:21 PM on February 23, 2022 [12 favorites]
Pillarisation is another approach to equity across diversity, yes? And it looks to me as though it’s capable of being more just than the USian approach. Very probably because the pillars were closer to equally powerful at the start, but it’s evidence that socities can design for either homogenized or sorted total diversity.
posted by clew at 1:56 PM on February 23, 2022
posted by clew at 1:56 PM on February 23, 2022
From the article. It helps the discussion to read it.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations.
posted by mygraycatbongo at 2:44 PM on February 23, 2022 [13 favorites]
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations.
posted by mygraycatbongo at 2:44 PM on February 23, 2022 [13 favorites]
But really, what people mean is that the US can't have good social services because of the racial diversity. And this is true - not because non-white people are somehow harder to provide services for - but because white Americans have consistently voted against social and public services when they might also be benefit or be used by non-white people, particularly Black people.
You don’t sound that perplexed - you basically just gave the standard argument. I don’t agree with the people who treat this as an immutable law of political dynamics. And I’ve noticed center-liberals deploying it against social democrats in bad faith or without much thought - so intent on pitting a stronger universal welfare state against nominally anti racist values that they end up implicitly laying out a case for segregation. But it is an argument people make.
posted by atoxyl at 3:24 PM on February 23, 2022
You don’t sound that perplexed - you basically just gave the standard argument. I don’t agree with the people who treat this as an immutable law of political dynamics. And I’ve noticed center-liberals deploying it against social democrats in bad faith or without much thought - so intent on pitting a stronger universal welfare state against nominally anti racist values that they end up implicitly laying out a case for segregation. But it is an argument people make.
posted by atoxyl at 3:24 PM on February 23, 2022
I find it interesting that Education in Finland and Education in South Korea both have high ratings with different approaches. I'd rather start school in Finland if I had a choice.
posted by ovvl at 6:49 PM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by ovvl at 6:49 PM on February 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
While I'm all ears if the Finns have advice about what's worked there, I don't, at this point, have that much confidence in "instructional strategies" and "pedagogical techniques" as they are bandied about in academic and ed-consulting circles.
I think the interesting part of the Finnish approach is that at the central level, they seem to have little interest in those things. That is, individual teachers as professionals are expected to understand and use these things but there is no set of central enthusiasts trying to impose these things on individual teachers. They just focus on getting the right teachers and the right number of them and then let them run their classrooms and schools.
So there is no "magic dust" to be turned into an EdTech product or set of consultant slides. You have to have really good teachers (and that probably requires paying them quite a lot more at least in some places, yes teachers are motivated by more than money but there comes a point where you pay them so poorly that it starts to bite into your talent pool) and you have to have enough of them and then you let them do their jobs.
People, Ideas, Things. In that order.
That is, in some senses, a very boring answer and nobody can make any money off of it.
posted by atrazine at 12:11 AM on February 24, 2022 [9 favorites]
I think the interesting part of the Finnish approach is that at the central level, they seem to have little interest in those things. That is, individual teachers as professionals are expected to understand and use these things but there is no set of central enthusiasts trying to impose these things on individual teachers. They just focus on getting the right teachers and the right number of them and then let them run their classrooms and schools.
So there is no "magic dust" to be turned into an EdTech product or set of consultant slides. You have to have really good teachers (and that probably requires paying them quite a lot more at least in some places, yes teachers are motivated by more than money but there comes a point where you pay them so poorly that it starts to bite into your talent pool) and you have to have enough of them and then you let them do their jobs.
People, Ideas, Things. In that order.
That is, in some senses, a very boring answer and nobody can make any money off of it.
posted by atrazine at 12:11 AM on February 24, 2022 [9 favorites]
> How is this allowed on this website? Like can someone confirm for me if people who are not white are allowed on Metafilter? Or would people prefer it if only white people participated?
I don't understand how you're getting this from the original comment. I'm no expert but imagine that there must be plenty of places where "9 out of every 10 people belong to [one] ethnic group." In this case it's about living in Finland, but it doesn't have to be: it could be about living in any not-very-diverse country where the dominant language isn't English.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:50 PM on February 24, 2022
I don't understand how you're getting this from the original comment. I'm no expert but imagine that there must be plenty of places where "9 out of every 10 people belong to [one] ethnic group." In this case it's about living in Finland, but it doesn't have to be: it could be about living in any not-very-diverse country where the dominant language isn't English.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:50 PM on February 24, 2022
The reason I asked about scaling up is because my experience as a teacher is that a lot of my frustration comes from attempts to standardise education across many schools.
For some (most!) people in management, standardisation becomes a way of justifying not trusting teachers.
It's more difficult (not impossible!) to create a curriculum that is flexible enough to allow teachers to teach the way they need to, for the students they have and the situation they are in.
It's so much easier to insist on mechanisms that are easy to track and report on eg standardised testing, or delivery of utterly dreadful quality textbooks or computer labs that end up in a locked room unused because of standardised security concerns.
The more you try to manage a big education system, the more admin the teachers have to to do to satisfy management's need to report to the politicians how well their policies are doing.
And the bigger the system, the more likely it is that administrative personnel grant themselves more and more power, and teachers, drowning in paperwork, and trying to meet the needs of their students, have no time or energy to ensure that they don't slip lower and lower in the hierarchy.
I live in South Africa, so diversity is definitely a thing, but the problems are mostly created by politicians needing to show how well their policies are doing.
Lack of resources (enormous problem for us!) could be dealt with at least to some extent if teachers hands were freed from having to work in the confines of a standardised nation wide system.
That's why I was asking about scale. Even the most well balanced and rational approach to education seems to revert gradually to the same problems because of the temptation to standardise across too many schools.
posted by Zumbador at 8:31 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
For some (most!) people in management, standardisation becomes a way of justifying not trusting teachers.
It's more difficult (not impossible!) to create a curriculum that is flexible enough to allow teachers to teach the way they need to, for the students they have and the situation they are in.
It's so much easier to insist on mechanisms that are easy to track and report on eg standardised testing, or delivery of utterly dreadful quality textbooks or computer labs that end up in a locked room unused because of standardised security concerns.
The more you try to manage a big education system, the more admin the teachers have to to do to satisfy management's need to report to the politicians how well their policies are doing.
And the bigger the system, the more likely it is that administrative personnel grant themselves more and more power, and teachers, drowning in paperwork, and trying to meet the needs of their students, have no time or energy to ensure that they don't slip lower and lower in the hierarchy.
I live in South Africa, so diversity is definitely a thing, but the problems are mostly created by politicians needing to show how well their policies are doing.
Lack of resources (enormous problem for us!) could be dealt with at least to some extent if teachers hands were freed from having to work in the confines of a standardised nation wide system.
That's why I was asking about scale. Even the most well balanced and rational approach to education seems to revert gradually to the same problems because of the temptation to standardise across too many schools.
posted by Zumbador at 8:31 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
fwiw re: homogeneity, a thread...
@_adasgupta: "Very important point -- the canonical cross-sectional correlation between ethnic diversity and (low) public goods provision is confounded by many forms of endogeneity. Newer papers which study historical coevolution and natural experiments show it to be potentially spurious... What is needed to credibly assess relationship between diversity and development/public goods provision is a natural experiment where diversity is quasi-randomized. This paper by @vcharnysh does just this, reaching a different conclusion than past lit..."
Diversity, Institutions, and Economic Outcomes: Post-WWII Displacement in Poland
@_adasgupta: "Very important point -- the canonical cross-sectional correlation between ethnic diversity and (low) public goods provision is confounded by many forms of endogeneity. Newer papers which study historical coevolution and natural experiments show it to be potentially spurious... What is needed to credibly assess relationship between diversity and development/public goods provision is a natural experiment where diversity is quasi-randomized. This paper by @vcharnysh does just this, reaching a different conclusion than past lit..."
Diversity, Institutions, and Economic Outcomes: Post-WWII Displacement in Poland
How does an increase in cultural diversity affect state–society interactions? Do institutional differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous communities influence economic activity? I argue that heterogeneity not only impedes informal cooperation but also increases demand for third-party enforcement provided by the state. Over time, the greater willingness of heterogeneous communities to engage with state institutions facilitates the accumulation of state capacity and, in common-interest states, promotes private economic activity. I test this argument using original data on post-WWII population transfers in Poland. I find that homogeneous migrant communities were initially more successful in providing local public goods through informal enforcement, while heterogeneous migrant communities relied on the state for the provision of public goods. Economically similar during state socialism, heterogeneous communities collected higher tax revenues and registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates following the transition to the market. These findings challenge the predominant view of diversity as harmful to economic development.posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM on February 25, 2022
The reason I asked about scaling up is because my experience as a teacher is that a lot of my frustration comes from attempts to standardise education across many schools.
You will find the answer to your question in the article, in the second half, where it describes how the Finnish educational system has changed over the decades of their educational reform project from one with a more centralized curriculum to one with more flexibility.
posted by eviemath at 3:53 AM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
You will find the answer to your question in the article, in the second half, where it describes how the Finnish educational system has changed over the decades of their educational reform project from one with a more centralized curriculum to one with more flexibility.
posted by eviemath at 3:53 AM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
If you're doing intensive teaching and trust the teachers, it scales by ... hiring more teachers. And if you have more students now, you will have more potential teachers pretty soon.
It is an interesting question why Finland apparently trusts its teachers more than most nations do! I expect they get some of that by being picky about hiring and just agreeing that teachers are expected to meet high expectations. Everyone who got a good egalitarian un-centralized education has good reason to believe it's possible. Good rankings in the international tests can't hurt. For people who don't get chumped, meeting high expectations is far more pleasant (eventually) than cheating. An actual virtuous circle.
posted by clew at 2:36 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
It is an interesting question why Finland apparently trusts its teachers more than most nations do! I expect they get some of that by being picky about hiring and just agreeing that teachers are expected to meet high expectations. Everyone who got a good egalitarian un-centralized education has good reason to believe it's possible. Good rankings in the international tests can't hurt. For people who don't get chumped, meeting high expectations is far more pleasant (eventually) than cheating. An actual virtuous circle.
posted by clew at 2:36 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
> Well, I was going to post a joke about depressed Finns or something, but it seems like they've snagged the title of happiest country on Earth as well.
My Favorite Thing About Finland. It’s probably not what you think.
posted by homunculus at 11:30 PM on March 15, 2022
My Favorite Thing About Finland. It’s probably not what you think.
So, Finland is the happiest country in the world, four years in a row. Amazing, right?* Previously
There are many things I love about Finland. The amazing social security, the rye bread and licorice, the midsummer nights when the sun comes up at 3 am, and Finnish people’s honesty. There’s lack of small talk and polite chitchat when you really want to be quiet. And the natural social distancing we’ve practiced since way before the pandemic.
I hate some things, too. The silence, the long winters, the cold weather, the way Finnish men, can’t talk about feelings* without being wasted.
But there’s one strange thing Finland taught me that I really value, that I probably couldn’t have learned in any other place in the world.
It’s nudity. Or rather, a natural relationship with being naked.
posted by homunculus at 11:30 PM on March 15, 2022
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