TALKING ABOUT BUT NOT LEARNING FROM FINLAND
Finland’s education system has become an international celebrity. Their remarkable results are being trumpeted, usually in the “What can we learn from them?” context. Yet a lot of the recent discussion about what we canlearn – as far as concrete policies – has been rather shallow.
Right now, the factoid that is getting the most play is that Finnish teachers come from the “top ten percent” of those entering the labor force, whereas U.S. teachers don’t. But without knowing the reasons behind this difference, this fact is not particularly useful.
Although there has been some interesting research on these issues (se
