From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model
By JENNY ANDERSONDEC. 12, 2011
Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the
high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan:
Who here wants to be a teacher?
Out of a class of 15, two hands went up one a little reluctantly.
In my country, that would be 25 percent of people, Dr. Sahlberg said.
And, he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, it would be
more like this.
In his country, Dr. Sahlberg said later in an interview, teachers typically
spend about four hours a day in the classroom, and are paid to spend two
hours a week on professional development. At the University of Helsinki,
where he teaches, 2,400 people competed last year for 120 slots in the (fully
subsidized) masters program for schoolteachers. Its more difficult getting
into teacher education than law or medicine, he said.
Dr. Sahlberg puts high-quality teachers at the heart of Finlands education
success story which, as it happens, has become a personal success story of
sorts, part of an American obsession with all things Finnish when it comes to
schools.
Take last week. On Monday, Dr. Sahlberg was the keynote speaker at an
education conference in Chicago. On Tuesday, he had to return to Helsinki
for an Independence Day party held by Finlands president a coveted
invitation to an event that much of the country watches on television.
On Wednesday, it was Washington, for a party for the release of his latest
book, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational
Change in Finland?, that drew staff members from the White House and
Congress.
And Thursday brought him to the Upper West Side, for a daylong visit tothe
Dwight School, a for-profit school that prides itself on internationalism,
where he talked to those seniors.
Continue reading the main story
Ever since Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million that does not start formal
education until age 7 and scorns homework and testing until well into the
teenage years, scored at the top of a well-respected international test in 2001
in math, science and reading, it has been an object of fascination among
American educators and policy makers.
Finlandophilia only picked up when the nation placed close to the top again
in 2009, while the United States ranked 15th in reading, 19th in math and
27th in science.
The Finnish Embassy in Washington hosts brunch seminars with titles like
Why Are Finnish Kids So Smart? and organizes trips to Finland for
education journalists eager to see for themselves. In Helsinki, the Education
Ministry has had 100 official delegations from 40 to 45 countries visit each
year since 2005. Schools there used to love the attention, making cakes and
doing folk dances for the foreigners, Dr. Sahlberg said, but now the crush of
observers is considered a national distraction.
Critics say that Finland is an irrelevant laboratory for the United States. It has
a tiny economy, a low poverty rate, a homogenous population 5 percent are
foreign-born and socialist underpinnings (speeding tickets are calculated
according to income).
Its school system has roughly the same number of teachers as New York
Citys but far fewer students, 600,000 compared with New Yorks 1.1 million.
Finnish students speak Finnish and Swedish and usually English. (Patrick F.
Bassett, head of the Washington-based National Association of Independent
Schools, a fan of what Finland has been doing, said one of the things he
learned on his own pilgrimage to Finland was that the average resident
checks out 17 books a year from the library.)
Photo
Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, with students at the Dwight School in
Manhattan.CreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
There are things they do right, said Mark S. Schneider, vice president of the
American Institutes for Research, but Im not sure how many lessons we get
are portable. Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the
American Enterprise Institute, said Finlandophilia was totally deified and
blown out of proportion.
But Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford,
saidFinland could be an excellent model for individual states, noting that it is
about the size of Kentucky.
The fact that we have more race, ethnicity and economic heterogeneity, and
we have this huge problem of poverty, should not mean we dont want
qualified teachers the strategies become even more important, Dr.
Darling-Hammond said. Thirty years ago, Finlands education system was a
mess. It was quite mediocre, very inequitable. It had a lot of features our
system has: very top-down testing, extensive tracking, highly variable
teachers, and they managed to reboot the whole system.
Both Dr. Darling-Hammond and Dr. Sahlberg said a turning point was a
government decision in the 1970s to require all teachers to have masters
degrees and to pay for their acquisition. The starting salary for school
teachers in Finland, 96 percent of whom are unionized, was about $29,000 in
2008, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, compared with about $36,000 in the United States.
More bear than tiger, Finland scorns almost all standardized testing before
age 16 and discourages homework, and it is seen as a violation of childrens
right to be children for them to start school any sooner than 7, Dr. Sahlberg
said during his day at Dwight. He spoke to seniors taking a Theory of
Knowledge class, then met with administrators and faculty members.
The first six years of education are not about academic success, he said. We
dont measure children at all. Its about being ready to learn and finding your
passion.
Dr. Sahlberg, 52, an Education Ministry official and a former math teacher, is
the author of 15 books. He said he wrote the latest one, which sold out its first
printing in a week, in response to the overwhelming interest in his countrys
educational system. It was not meant to claim that Finlands way was the best
way, he said, and he was quick to caution against countries trying to import
ideas la carte and then expecting results.
Dont try to apply anything, he told the Dwight teachers. It wont work
because education is a very complex system.
Besides high-quality teachers, Dr. Sahlberg pointed to Finlands Lutheran
leanings, almost religious belief in equality of opportunity, and a decision in
1957 to require subtitles on foreign television as key ingredients to the success
story.
He emphasized that Finlands success is one of basic education, from age 7
until 16, at which point 95 percent of the country goes on to vocational or
academic high schools. The primary aim of education is to serve as an
equalizing instrument for society, he said.
Dr. Sahlberg said another reason the system had succeeded was that only
dead fish follow the stream a Finnish expression.
Finland is going against the tide of the global education reform movement,
which is based on core subjects, competition, standardization, test-based
accountability, control.
Education policies here are always written to be the best or the top this or
that, he said. Were not like that. We want to be better than the Swedes.
Thats enough for us.
Correction: December 15, 2011
An article on Tuesday about a visiting Finnish educator and author who spoke to
Upper West Side students about his countrys educational system misstated the
surname of a vice president at the American Institutes for Research who was critical
of the widespread admiration for Finnish methods. He is Mark S. Schneider, not
Schneiderman.
A version of this article appears in print on December 13, 2011, on page A33 of the New
York edition with the headline: From Finland, a Story Of Educational Success In Going
Against the Tide. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
