When it comes to education, Finland is not as perfect as we think it is
Girls score higher than boys on reading tests at every grade and every age in pretty much every country. This has been the case for a very long time.
But the largest gender gap in reading ability in the world can be found in Finland, a country whose education system has been celebrated ad nauseum since it rose to first place in a key international test of skills among 15 and 16-year-olds, the OECD’s Program of International Student Achievement (PISA), in 2000.
The latest rankings reveal some not-so-sunny findings for Finland. In reading assessments, their girls outperformed their boys by 62 points, the largest gap of any country and twice that of the US. Girls scored 556 and boys 494, according to an analysis by Tom Loveless at the Brookings Institution Brown Center on Education Policy.
Loveless writes:
To put this gap in perspective, consider that Finland’s renowned superiority on PISA tests is completely dependent on Finnish girls. Finland’s boys’ score of 494 is about the same as the international average of 496, and not much above the OECD average for males (478) … Finnish superiority in reading only exists among females.
If there were a country that people would bet on to close the gender gap in reading, it would probably be Finland. Almost everything about the country’s education system has been put on a pedestal: kids start school at seven years old and are permitted ample time to play; they are barely tested and not deluged with homework; teachers are well paid, well-trained, and rigorously selected. The system is so amazing that thousands of educators flock to Finland every year to study the country’s supposed secret sauce.
But boys in Finland (who scored an average of 494 in the latest PISA test) perform roughly the same in reading as boys in the US (482) or the When it comes to education, Finland is not as perfect as we think it is - Quartz: