The Place Where Ranking Schools Proves They're Actually Equal
Why one journalist wanted to grade Finland’s schools
In Finland you’re not supposed to wonder—let alone ask out loud—if one school is better than another. That’s because all Finnish schools are designed to be equal.
We Finns are very proud of our equal education system. In fact, education is the one positive thing Finland is known for all around the world. Our results in global assessments of 15-year-olds have won us international attention a small nation rarely receives.
The strong ideology of equality doesn’t always make life easy for us Finnish education reporters. We feel, for example, we should rank the nation’s high schools even though the government doesn’t want us to.
All Finnish schools are designed to be equal.
In 2011, my boss asked me to help her create a more ambitious high-school ranking than anything Finland had ever seen. I had just been promoted from an education reporter to the editor of domestic news at the Finnish News Agency, which is like the Associated Press of Finland except on a smaller scale. (Since there are only 5 million Finns, all things Finnish are small scale.)
My boss, the editor in chief of news at the agency, is also a former education reporter. She had been dreaming of the new high-school ranking for a long time. The project sounded very interesting, but also very challenging.
In Finland, ranking schools is unthinkable to educators and education officials. Especially when it comes to elementary and middle schools, Finnish education officials have a clear stand: It’s always best for any child to go to the neighborhood school closest to their home.
The idea behind this policy is that if we started believing some schools were better than others, those schools would attract the best teachers and the most advantaged students. The rest of the schools would see their reputations decline and have a hard time keeping, and recruiting, good teachers. That, in turn, could harm the quality of many schools.
That’s why education officials in Finland believe that ranking schools would do more harm than good.
As a Finn, I feel very strongly that everyone should get equal opportunities in life. I believe one good way to try to accomplish that is to have equally good schools available for everyone, and to avoid letting some schools get a better reputation than others.
As a journalist, however, I’m not at all happy with the idea of officials telling me not to seek information. I find it essential that any question can be asked.
So when my boss asked for my help, I said yes.
Comparing high schools was not unheard of in Finland at the time we began our project. Some of the biggest newspapers published, twice a year, a simple ranking Ranking Finland's Schools Proves That They're All Equal - The Atlantic: