Education metrics geeks would be well aware that Finland routinely comes at or near the top of international test batteries such as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) as well as in annual OECD reports.
So it’s worth noting this summary list of features of the Finnish education system which appeared in The Providence Journal, written by former UCLA researcher and 28-year high school English teacher Walter Gardner.
Who said the following are incompatible with a world-beating education system?:
- Education seen as an end in itself, not as a pathway to employment
- Total spending is $5000 US dollars spent per student per year
- Average class sizes of 25-30
- School starts at age 7
- National curriculum
- Teachers design their own lesson plans (compatible with the national curriculum), instead of delivering centrally-planned scripted lessons
- Before the equivalent of year 10, there is standardised national testing of only a 10% representative sample of each age group to check basic skills
- No published school league tables or rankings
- No ‘gifted and talented’ classes
- Strong teacher union
- Teacher pay is no more than that of neighbouring countries
Gardner also notes that demographic changes such as a near-doubling of Finland’s immigrant population since 2002 (6% to 11%) has not damaged its standing. This proportion is projected to increase to 23% in the next two decades.
Then there is that other first-rated country, Singapore, which claims first in maths in the TIMSS scores (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).
Linda Darling-Hammond, Professor of Education at Stanford, writes in Time (Feb. 25) that the Singapore approach includes:
- A curriculum that promotes critical thinking and inquiry
- Taxpayer-funded teacher-mentor positions, where outstanding teachers receive 100 hours per year professional development and up to 20 hours per week to visit and assist junior teachers to better develop their craft.
- Fully-paid government-provided 3-4 teacher training course offered to the top third of each graduating school year.
Naturally, no two national situations are apples-to-apples comparable, and we don’t know what is causative. Perhaps the most we can claim from the above list is ‘well, that’s what works in Finland and Singapore.’
But before you drink the snake-oil offered by the edu-critics, surely it’s worth taking a look at what the world leaders are doing?
With regards to “talented and gifted” classes, it’s not just about improving average test scores.
For instance, how much of the extra stuff learned in one of those classes is actually assessed by the standard tests?
Furthermore, isn’t it possible that the test scores of the children involved in such programs improve, but removing them from regular classes reduces the scores of others (by not getting the benefit of learning with these pupils). If this conjecture (which I have no particular evidence for) is true, is it fair to be using the bright kids as assistant teachers, at the cost of their own academic performance?
A Finnish mate of mine told me that teaching in Finland requires a Masters-level qualification. He said that in the general community teachers are respected and people want to be teachers. While teachers are respected in Australia, few school-leavers have teaching as a first choice profession.
Another friend who has a masters in Art History and teaches at a Melbourne private school said that he found that in his experience, the proportion of teachers with a Masters or other higher degree was much higher in the private sector than in public schools.
Ultimately I think that the best way to improve educational outcomes is to significanly increase teachers’ pay. A talented teacher should be able to earn $100K as a classroom teacher, and not have to go into administration to get a decent pay cheque. This would get more talented people into the classroom, and generate more esteem for teachers in the community.
Other features of the Finnish system I don’t see as necessarily the right way to go. I support a voucher-based funding model with more discretion for principals. To make that work, you would need league tables and standardised tests, and more liberal entrance rules (relax zoning restrictions, but perhaps have more selective entry). Give bigger vouchers to kids who would be expected to struggle more (NESB, low SES) and let the money flow to where it is most needed and does the best job.
I’ve heard too much ignorant teacher bashing to say this is the prevailing attitude.
Among the justifications I’ve encountered for gifted and talented classes was that, without being stretched academically, those students tended to underachieve out of boredom. Vertical curriculum seems better than cohort programs for this sort of extension, however.
Division of labour in the classroom raises an interesting set of questions, Robert. Some of these issues are paralleled in debates over the (increasingly rare) practice of family grouping in prior-to-school settings. There are interesting arguments on both (all?) sides of this one.
The qualification thing is an interesting one, Required. I know of at least one school where the one teacher with a Masters was also totally incompetent, and was later removed from the teaching of senior classes after a succession of complaints.
Mercurius says:
I have strong doubts as to whether replicating US levels of diversity would improve the Finnish education system. They have gotten to where they are right now by not going down that track.
Finland’s educational and industrial excellence occurs because it is so…Finnish. An unusual sociological environment and biological endowment both play a role in Finnish intellectual success.
I had to repress a rueful grin at Mercurius’ obligatory genuflection towards diversity. The recent “near-doubling of Finland’s immigrant population” comes off the lowest immigrant base in Europe. Mostly due to its extraordinary history Finland is the most homogenous, least multicultural of Europe, indeed of Scandanavia. In any case, Finnish educational success long preceded the recent influx of immigrants, who are unlikely to be of student age.
Also, going by in the CIA factbook (2007), the ethnic breakdown of the immigrants coming into Finland must be Swedes, plus some Baltic Russians. Not exactly rainbow coalition stuff. As Steve Sailer points out:
It is a not-so closely guarded secret amongst old teachers that good students make good schools, rather than vice-versa. Most Finns, like the other Nobel-prize winning nations the Germans and Swiss, are gifted by nature and lifted by nurture. Possibly because of their overwhelmingly Lutheran workaholic religious profession.
As in Japan, with less international diversity comes more national equity. The a href=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html”>WSJ reports on the link b/w national community and social equality:
Finns, like all other Scandanvians, score well on IQ tests, national average 105-107. You can put at least part of this down to their natural ability. Dumb Finns would not be able to reproduce properly in Finland because the language is so difficult they would never get around to asking a girl out on a date.
I personally think AUS can benefit from some diversity, such as an influx of high-IQ North East Asian students. They tend to be fairly conformist, easier for teachers to manage and unwavering swots. Providing some healthy competition for native ocker slackers.
The take-home lesson from Finland is “unity is strength”. Finns are ardent nationlists and maintain strict border control so that their social system focuses on making the best of native talent, of which they have an abundance eg Linux and Nokia. SO I do not think we can learn much from Finnish existence or experience. Apart from the usual lesson of choose your parents and birthplace wisely and dont fix things which aint broke.
Really? I’m wondering if that doubling of immigration is over a small population base. Because the OECD also provides this…
http://www.oecd.org/document/1/0,2340,en_2649_201185_36701777_1_1_1_1,00.html
And Finland isn’t even mentioned in it. Firstly, it turns out that Finland’s population is just over 5.3 million – tiny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland
Ang guess what?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Finland
So, obviously the immigrant population growth rate you cite is indeed over a very small base. Sorry to rain on your parade that way, but one has to ask the more obvious questions.
With respect to “Education [in Finland being] seen as an end in itself, not as a pathway to employment”, says who? Parent? Children? Curriculum planners?
Klaus K: as somebody who suffered through the Kirner era in Victoria’s government schools, I can certainly provide anecdotal evidence for the boredom theory.
Jack (5)
Suomi on mah tava maa.
Lol, Robert. And the boredom justification is an interesting one in itself: it’s not just ‘gifted’ kids who will tell you that they find school boring. ‘Boredom’ could mean a lot of different things really.
One problem I see is that the ‘gifted and talented’ discourse is somewhere between middle-class mythifying and something with actual pedagogical merit. At some schools I have experience of, the (mostly upper middle-class) parents seem to devote an enormous amount of time and energy into the whole discourse of ‘giftedness’, agonising over whether their children would get into this or that special program and so on. As someone who jumped through some of those hoops when I was younger, I’m a little sceptical about it.
Klaus,
I agree that Masters (or other higher qualification) is not a perfect guide to ability, but it may be a useful filtering mechanism – if you have the patience and ability to get through an extra two years of uni, you will probably be a better teacher than somebody who didnt, on average.
Does anyone else find it strange that someone called Strocchi thinks it was a bad thing that Australia has admitted large numbers of non Anglo migrants?
Klaus K
I was the beneficiary of a good education at a local religious school, but what motivated me to do my best was neither the school nor my parents. It was my girlfriend who, somewhat out of character with the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) findings mentioned above, was a Latino migrant kid who was very motivated herself around education. She was a great peer influence on me.
In my final high school exams I surprised everyone in my family (myself included) by getting near the top of my graduating year and easily got into the university course of my choice. I owe my old girlfriend everything.
Yes! Teacher salaries are hopelessly low. It’s one of the greatest distortions in our labour market and it’s having a horrible effect on the supply of competent and talented individuals to teach our children.
Also, what Shaun said. I think one of the best things Kruddy could do as part of this “education revolution” – rather than the rather gimmicky computer hardware giveaway – would be to try to counter the anti-intellectual and anti-education bias in Australia, especially as it pertains to notions of maleness (not on this forum, of course, except perhaps for a few individuals); and to raise societal standards of respect for teachers- take a leaf out of the book of Asian countries which don’t trash the profession as students and teachers do here.
What’s your point, Eliot Ramsey? Does it have anything to do with the discussion at hand?
I’ve no problem with dumping suitcases full of money into the bank accounts of Australia’s teachers, on the model of the Finnish democratic socialism that Jack really ought to be praising, but I’m not sure emulation of some Asian countries’ education cultures is any way to go.
Asian cultures might emphasise respect for teachers as a part of hierarchy but many of them have no respect for learning, especially at the lower levels of education. There’s not intellectualism in any education culture that regards exam cheating as a normal part of schooling (I’m looking at you, China). A “revolutionary” approach to education would make students feel less like they are being prepared for work through drills of uniform, presenteeism, time management to other people’s schedules, and subordination to arbitrary petty authority, than given the opportunity to learn.
On “gifted” classes: I’ve always had the feeling that OC streams and selective schools self-justify with the attitude that smarter, deserving children deserve more support than the slow, undeserving ones, which is inherently inegalitarian and unjust. Stupid babies need the most attention!
“On “giftedâ€? classes: I’ve always had the feeling that OC streams and selective schools self-justify with the attitude that smarter, deserving children deserve more support than the slow, undeserving ones, which is inherently inegalitarian and unjust. Stupid babies need the most attention!”
Except that selective schools aren’t necessarily being given extra resources per student than comprehensive schools (I don’t know about OCs). Anybody have info on this? My understanding was that selective schools were underfunded pretty much at the level of everyone else.
I’m puzzled as to why (cough) certain people start obsessing about “ethnic homogeneity” in the context of education…
Klaus K says;
Well, clearly Gardner’s observation about the “near-doubling of Finland’s immigrant population since 2002 (6% to 11%)” is inconsequential in terms of Finland’s educational policy experience given that Finland has hardly any migrant population, and that in fact according to the OECD’s own reports on migrant education in countries with sizeable migrant populations, student homeland ethnicity makes a considerable difference in terms of educational outcomes unless addressed by specific policy interventions.
I mean, you couldn’t follow that?
Also, speaking from personal experience it is clear to me that not having the same ethnicity as the host society need not be a problem subject to the right sorts of motivating cultural and other factors.
Not sure how to state it more simply.
Which is what you get when you enforce a single-employer, lowest-common-denominator wage system.
Somehow I don’t think lefties would enjoy the solution. Hint: it’s not paying the worst teachers the same as the best teachers. Further hint: it’s not obfuscating teacher performance so that the worst and best are indistinguishable. Yet further hint: it’s not shielding teachers from competition.
Craig: and how are you going to distinguish the good teachers from the bad?
The trouble with emphases on test scores, for instance, that it tends to encourage teachers to teach only what is easily testable.
I think what threw me was you framing it as a response to my comment. I’m pretty sure I’m following you though: your anecdotal evidence – based on how successfully your migrant girlfriend motivated you – doesn’t bear out the findings of the report in relation to countries with large migrant populations.
Like reading, writing, and arithmetic? Good.
What would be valuable that couldn’t also be tested?
I don’t think that salaries for teachers starting out are bad at all. IIRC a freshly graduated 23 year old teacher is on about $46k. I really think that in the real world that’s a perfectly acceptable wage. Even generous. Lots more than I started on.
The problem is that that 23 year old will be crushed to know that she can spend twenty years becoming a fantastic teacher and still be worth only, what, $70k? Her only choices are becoming a Principal (and there can only be so many of them) or switching to the private sector, where wages are typically $10 – $20k higher. Which is a huge loss for kids that aren’t privileged.
Wot Liam said (15).
And the other obvious problem with paying teachers according to test scores is that the teachers of the so called brighter students would be paid more than those of the academically challenged. Hardly fair.
I said lefties wouldn’t like the solution.
I think it’s more likely that the best teachers would end up where parents are most likely to pay for their excellence. As in every other industry in the country. It happens now anyway. BTW, it’s not a given that the brightest students also have the wealthiest parents. Maybe their work ethic is better, but I doubt their ability is.
As long as minimum standards are observed at the other end, verified by independent, standardised testing, and there are graduates willing to pay their dues on the road to excellence, it’s no worse than what we’ve got. Not that anyone knows what we’ve got without standardised testing.
As it is you aren’t getting too many talented graduates because they know there’s a massive career road-block after ten years. What you’ve got is a recipe for people who want to hide in a job-for-life system that will never recognise mediocrity, let alone punish it. Further, it never rewards excellence either, thus encouraging more mediocrity.
That’s not to denigrate the good teachers working in the government system. Quite the opposite – I’d like to see them freed from the current career bleakness, and rewarded appropriately. But as long as people are hung up on “fairness”, or rather just one aspect of it to the neglect of others, that will never happen.
The same rules apply for police, firefighters, nurses and soldiers, CraigMc, yet nobody argues they should compete against their coworkers and be paid according to the crime rates, fire rates, or mortality rates.
The State Governments *could* bump teacher salaries to a competitive level tomorrow, or at the next Budget. They’ll probably end up going for tax cuts instead.
adrian: people like Andrew Leigh argue that there are ways of taking such things into account when you do the calculations.
There’s that word again.
BTW, you’ll note that none of the professions you list consider their salaries to be competitive.
Quite, the nurses especially. Then we agree: let’s make the base level salaries for public servants at all levels of experience comparable with private sector wages.
State Treasurers? We’ve finished the bloggers’ caucus and have achieved consensus. The Education Revolution starts tomorrow.
Mostly due to its extraordinary history Finland is the most homogenous, least multicultural of Europe, indeed of Scandanavia. (sic)
Er… ahem… bollocks. Finland has two official languages – Finnish and Swedish – which is more than most European countries. Then there’s the Saami in the north (or Laplanders) which have their own language. I remember that the Romani were a visible minority (or at least around the train station when I was there in ‘97). That’s not counting the Ethiopians which were admitted as refugees ten years before – I met one or two, and they seem to be fitting in fine.
And Jack – you have heard of Iceland – haven’t you? “Most homogenous, least multicultural of Europe, indeed of Scandinavia?” That would be the place.
17 Mark Mar 5th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Well you should be “puzzled” by a certain Mercurius, who kicked off the “obsessing” about Finland’s ethnic status in the “educational context” in the first place. By drawing attention to the relationship between Finland’s level of ethnic diversity and its educational performance.
The superior intellectual performance of small, homogenous nations (Singapore, HongKong, Denmark, Finland) in educational and intellectual performance should at least raise questions to those interested in the conditions for progress. Also, does the phrase “blackboard jungle” strike a distant chord?
More generally, your constructivist blank slate philosophy rules out naturally innate, as opposed to culturally acquired, factors conditioning levels and rates of intellectual development. This is unscientific and increasingly untenable.
So your “puzzlement” is not (ahem) puzzling to me.
Hong Kong is ethnically homogenous? Hong Kong is a nation?
Then put them all in the private sector.
Generally smart kids tend to make good schools. Which is why principals crawl over broken glass to get the naturally gifted ones at the earliest possible age.
Some sort of triage applies when dealing with different intellectual streams. My discussion with teachers and psychometricians indicate the following:
Students with IQs of 115+ they tend to become self-taught and dont need much help to learn.
Students with IQs from 100-115 will benefit from improved access to educational resources. They just have to be led to water.
Children with IQs from 85-100 can be lifted up to reasonable levels of intellectual performance providing they are subject to a strict regime of discipline.
Children with IQs below 85 will be a challenge. They need more or less permanent corporate institutionalization to become useful members of society.
Obviously sportsmen and entertainers who make it are exceptions to this rule, until they become ex-sportsmen and ex-entertainers.
The most important lesson to draw from this as far as educational metrics is concerned is to figure out how different curricula and institutional arrangements “add value” to the educational process.
Progress is not measured by where you are, but by how far you have come.
33 Liam Mar 5th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
The CIA Fact book reports Hong Kong as ethnic Chinese 94.9%. Homogenous enough?
But you are right, it is a small special administrative region, not a nation.
Score one point for Liam.
Oh, I missed this of yours Jack, from above, and ignoring the highly questionable quasi-Nazi link:
Finland, where all the children are above average.
If you count “Chinese” as a category, something that makes about as much historical sense as “European” as an ethnic category. The PRC count Tibetans as “Chinese”. Whatever works, right?
Anyway,
For the former, the answer is high levels of public spending on education. For the latter, the answer is low levels of public spending on education.
I’m not sure emulation of some Asian countries’ education cultures is any way to go.
No, Liam, I didn’t mean the adoption of the Singaporean or Chinese systems of education, holus-bolus. Did I say that? What I said was, we need to look at the countries where teachers are held in esteem – unlike Australia, where obstreperous parents think nothing of ignorantly slagging them off and sometimes even physically assault them, and where the teacher is supposed to guarantee little Johnny’s success without much input from child or parents.
We also do need to raise salaries across the board, without introducing bureaucratic “performance indicators” which will simply add more paperwork to teachers who are already drowning in it, and cause teachers to hoard their good methods or materials instead of sharing their skills, as others have pointed out. I work in IT, and IT workers such as programmers and testers command high salaries straight off the bat, without having their performance vetted. Why would anyone be a teacher these days?
I’m with Helen. KPIs aren’t necessarily a bad measure of performance but it takes a good manager (principal) to implement properly. Also the introduction of competition may allow the political players to gain the ascendancy which would be a disaster for a school.
I’d like to know how you reward teachers who give children a life time love of learning? That skill is one of the valuable yet it can never be measured.
37 Garrison Sarcastikeillor Mar 5th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
I pointed to the link to draw attention to globally adjusted calculations of IQ, based on Lynn’s Wealth of Nations. Lynn, you will recall, was the first academic to draw attention to the, some what misnamed, “Flynn effect”. About the last thing a quasi-Nazi would put their name to, what ever that is.
I have no knowledge in the politics of this German psychometrician. Nor do I much care, since this would be ad hominum.
I do know about the communist sympathies and Marxist theories of still-practising or revered Left wing social constructivists, such as Rose and Gould. They tend to brag about them, for some reason.
FOr your sake, we should stick to empirical measurement, and put aside the “point and splutter” method of social inquiry.
Garrison Sarcastikeillor says:
The average IQ figure of 100, which you implicitly rely on for your side-splittingly funny little riposte, is drawn from West European and American studies. Obviously these have to be renormalised to take into account global measurements.
Finland is obviously well above the global average, on these figures. Which was the point of my referring to that link in the first place.
I think that if you look into it you’ll find that obtsteperous parents are at least the same problem in Confucian societies as they are in Australia, if not more.
Their kids lives depend on their performance at school in a way that no Australian child’s does.
I agree with you. Teachers are grossly underpaid for what we need them to do. The question is how can we do it and get the outcomes we will be paying for.
One thing to note about the Singapore system is that its very much a pressure cooker environment. They have exams starting from year 1, and many of the children have extra tutoring after school. One of the reasons my parents immigrated to Australia was they felt that the education system put too much pressure on very young children (though i think they ended up thinking the Australian one was a bit too slack).
Sometimes stretching sideways rather than up can be better (more interesting for the students) but thats obviously more work for the teachers. Not doing anything can be very bad – smart but seriously bored students can cause a *lot* of trouble. Extension like classes can can also be really useful socially to bring gifted students together, especially when they come from different schools.
In a healthy environment its not just about competition, but with sufficient critical mass students help each other do better.
I’ve worked as a programmer for over a decade and except for a short stint at a dot-com, have always had bonus systems and pay rises based on performance (sometimes informal, sometimes very formal).
Liam: “For the latter, the answer is low levels of public spending on education.”
Not so fast there, buster. I wouldn’t jump to such across-the-board conclusions if I was you.
btw, can I please be you? I’d pretty much rather be anyone besides me right now.
By paying them yourself.
Last year the Economist ran an article on how McKinsey looked at PISA and the countries that keep coming top (Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea) and makes these policy recommendations:
- get the best teachers
- get the best out of teachers
- step in when pupils start to lag behind.
“raise societal standards of respect for teachers”
This seems to be quite important, and ties into the first point (and McKinsey’s research suggests salaries are not the big factor claimed by some). I quote from http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9989914
“Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them)…The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.”
On the second point:
“Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston, which has one of America’s most improved public-school systems, schedules are arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes together for common planning. This helps spread good ideas around. As one educator remarked, “when a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy.â€?”
And on point three:
“Finland has more special-education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else — as many as one teacher in seven in some schools. In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay behind — often for hours — after school to help students.”
One of the main reasons (statistically speaking) why Finland has very high average score is that they have the lowest proportion in the OECD of children who perform very poorly, i.e. they have successfully truncated the bottom tail of the school skill distribution, perhaps for the reasons just outlined by fatfingers.
You can look at distributions in some of the links at:
http://www.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_39718850_1_1_1_1,00.html#tables_figures_dbase
In most countries, children from immigrant backgrounds tend to perform worse on average than children of native-born, although there are complexities in defining who is native born and who is not (for example, in Germany children of Turkish guestworkers are likely to be counted as immigrants even if they were born in Germany, while children who were born in Romania, and whose ancestors have lived there (outside Germany) for the past 400 years can be counted as Germans if that is what they are ” ethnically”.
The “immigrant penalty” is least in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is probably due to selective immigration, whereas in Europe a higher proportion of immigrants tend to be refugees (whose children tend to do worse everywhere)
The other interesting point is why some countries do very poorly on average in PISA – notably Germany and Austria. It is because thy don’t truncate the bottom of the distribution. The explanation appears to be selective schooling – they stream children into separate schools for future academics/professionals, skilled workers of the future or unskilled future workers by around the age of 11. Unsurprisingly or surprisingly depending on your perspective the kids who are streamed as non-performers at the age of 11 don’t do very well.
So the most important negative lesson is don’t stream at the school level while the most important positive lesson is help the disadvantaged.
I found my joke pretty side-splittingly funny, Jack, yes.
Volkmar Weiss has played with his figures, and Lynn is not exactly the most reputable source either. When you have some “empirical measurement” let me know, and we’ll talk about it. From your link:
Why? He’s adjusting it up *from* Lynn’s already questionable numbers to suit his own eugenicist assumptions. Seriously now Jack, anyone who publishes stuff like this on their site is *not your friend*.
…
Los Angeles, fair enough. I suppose it was a cheap shot.
StrongKlaus K says:
Indeed. Finland seems to be like an advertorial for One Nation it’s so white-bread.
Also, I couldn’t help but notice that Finland is in per capita terms really, really rich. In fact, it’s the eleventh richest country in the world. It rakes in an impressive $37,957US per person per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita
Australia, according to the same IMF source gets $34,943. And is much more ethnically complex than Finland. So, you’d sorta hope that Finland – a kind of small, rich, white ghetto not unlike, say, Mosman – could provide a decent education for its lilly-white, clone-like children, wouldn’t you?
In fact, I’m now wondering why 28-year high school English teacher Walter Gardner has bothered to make the comparison with Finland – Land of Snow – at all.
Especially the point about Finland’s “increase” in immigration (from one “Negro seen in Seinäjokiâ€? to “Two Negroes seen in Seinäjoki” in just ten years)?
Is this just the compulsory genuflection toward exotic ethnicity required of all 28 year old school teachers? Or did he just not bother to check the facts?
Anyway, the reason I mentioned my personal experience was to show that ethnicity need not be a brake on educational aspiration. Even in relatively poor communities.
“Is this just the compulsory genuflection toward exotic ethnicity required of all 28 year old school teachers? Or did he just not bother to check the facts?”
You do realise 28-year means ‘has been a teacher for 28 years’ in this case, right? Not that said researcher was 28 years old.
You still haven’t explained why you would be addressing me. It was Jack Strocchi and a bunch of other people talking about ethnicity and migration. I was talking about ‘gifted and talented’ classes.
Once again Peter W. has interrupted a blogging bulldust session with facts. Anybody would think that commenters here actually cared about outcomes for kids rather than just enjoying a chance to parade their prejudices
The trouble with school policy is that everyone has been to school so everyone thinks they’re an expert, when in fact they are mostly just reflecting their own idiosyncratic experience.
Klaus K says:
Good grief, no! Really? That in itself says something about the quality of teaching in Australia, doesn’t it?
Pity we don’t have some more ‘gifted and talented’ teachers, hey? Maybe we wouldn’t need ‘gifted and talented’ classes.
Well, despite Eliot Ramsey’s reading comprehension troubles with the age of Gardner, at least he understood that it was Gardner, not I, who raised the issue of ethnicity in the original article. That point seemed to have escaped Strocchi’s reading comprehension, since he saw fit to lambast me for it.
If you read Gardner’s original article, I think you’d concede that mine was a pretty straightforward no-frills summary/retelling. I haven’t been able to do any ‘obligatory genuflecting towards diversity’ because I got off a long-haul flight only three days ago and my legs still won’t bend properly.
It’s depressing that this thread has turned into a eugenicist discussion of IQ. Isn’t “IQ” a flawed and discredited concept these days, anyway?
One country may never be able to exactly replicate the success of another because they will never be identical in resources, culture, history, housing, climate and the list goes on. The lesson I take from Finland is that they take education seriously and treat it as a top priority. There is a lot of talk in Australia about taking education seriously but as long as we reduce public education to a dwindling safety net for the hopeless while forcing families further into debt to purchase private education (sometimes of dubious quality), we don’t really treat it as a top priority in our overall nation building scheme of things.
Helen, yes it is. I’m sorry that I keep getting drawn into endless reruns of Educating Strocchi.
By the way:
We are of one mind. In fact, whenever the subject of corporal punishment in schools comes up, it always occurs to me that it’s the wrong generation potentially being subjected to discipline. Give an obnoxious daddy or mummy a public six of the best at parent-teacher night, and we’d soon see some changes in behaviour.
“The trouble with school policy is that everyone has been to school so everyone thinks they’re an expert, when in fact they are mostly just reflecting their own idiosyncratic experience.”
Exactly. And reflecting their own prejudices. Everybody’s an expert when it comes to education, even though in most cases most have really no idea what makes a good teacher, and what work that teacher has to do to consistently inspire a class full of teenagers.
And, as dd says, using education as a political football to make dumbassed culture wars points.
Helen says:
God knows I haven’t met anyone with an IQ for years. I attribute that to the education system and the fact that I work in the public health sector. Also, I’m not sure there’s any evidence that the blonde, downy flecked Fins take education any more seriously, nor prioritise it any more than say Australians, Belgians or Canadians.
They seem from the evidence provided merely to have more money to splash around and fewer cultural variations to contend with than most. Oh, and the whole country is about the size of Melbourne.
“God knows I haven’t met anyone with an IQ for years.”
No doubt that includes yourself.
Maybe I should start pontificating about workers in ‘the health sector’ the way you pontificate about teachers. But I probably know as much about the health sector as you do about the education system so I’ll restrain myself.
Don’t waste your energy on the junior Strocchibot, adrian! It’s nice to see Jack has a disciple, though.
Yes, I know it’s a waste of time Kim, but maybe he’s a Greensleaves accolyte?
adrian says:
Well, I don’t know if you’re from New South Wales, but the health sector is a very topical public issue right now and pretty well everyone’s got an opinion on it.
Then there’s public transport – but I’m not a train driver, so I won’t express an opinion on that. It wouldn’t be democratic.
According to this Australian Education Union summary, education expenditure under the previuos Federal government represented 7.6 per cent of its budget for 2005/2006
http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:j1kM0HJK844J:www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/2006Budget.pdf+Education+expenditure+as+percentage+of+Australian+budget&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=au
And according to the NSW Budget of 19 June 2007, education expenditure “closely follows Health at more than 23 per cent of the State Budget.” Which makes sense as it’s largely a State responsibility in Australia.
According to the Finnish Minsitry of Education, education expenditure in Finland “is average OECD level” and that in 2003 educational expenditure in Finland amounted to 6.1% of the GDP, which is “close to the OECD average”.
http://www.minedu.fi/OPM/Tiedotteet/2006/9/OECDx_Suomalaisen_koulutuksen_tehokkuus_maailman_kxrkex.html?lang=en
According to the following Earth Trends site, education expenditure in Australia as a percentage of GDP is 4.8 per cent.
http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.php?step=countries&cID%5B%5D=9&allcountries=checkbox&theme=10&variable_ID=643&action=select_years
But this site puts Australian expenditure on education as a percenatge of GDP at 4.0 per cent and the OECD average as 4.5 per cent
http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/indicators/resources/total_investment_in_education
That is, more than Ireland or less than the USA.
Hasn’t mentioned luvvies yet, adrian.
No, but it’s only a matter of time.
Notwithstanding the discussion that has occured before, I read a paper on Finland’s educational success (by a Finn) that attributed it to a number of things – including quality of teaching and remedial support, like fatfingers says – but also relates it to the value placed on reading by parents. In other words cultural, not genetic factors. In fact, maybe the best thing we can do to improve our quote literacy unquote performance is to help parents develop a love of reading in their kids – in all cultural groups, from the age of zero.
I’m not sure about the idea that Singapore encourages critical thinking. I know a bit about the place and my experience is that conformity in students is greatly prized. It’s an extremely repressive society where people tend to be punished for stepping out of line.
Kevin, I think you’re onto something with identifying reading as a factor.
About three years ago I read a study done by and an English university and HM Inspectorate, where they looked at the early years (about age 5-6) in England, Denmark and Finland. Denmark was chosen because kids didn’t perform as well as the English in later standard tests (I thought age 13, but it could have been 15) and the Finns performed better.
Of particular interest is that the Scandinavian kids, Germans too I think, don’t tackle formal learning until they are 7.
The main thing I remember about the Danes is that they don’t staff their prep schooling with trained teachers. They have two adults for every class of 25, but both are trained in a generic 3-year diploma type courses for ‘helping services’ at that level (I’m a bit vague about that).
In Finland they had two adults for each group, one a teacher, who had great respect in the community and professional standing in the school. The groups were limited to 13, from memory, so the staffing was double that in England. The space provided also seemed about twice as large, with better resources and more flexibility for creative and informal-type activities. (My wife who works in this area likes a group of about 20. She would say 13 is too small to provide enough variety of experience in the group.)
That being said two things stood out like beacons. One is that the Finnish experience was very rich in terms of literature and exposure to reading. Particular mention was made of the excellence of the public library system and the cultural value placed on books.
The second was the passionate egalitarianism, whereby no special provision was made at that level for smart kids. It was felt important that they all had the same activities. The English, of course, were critical of this, it being an obvious waste of human development potential – or something.
What they didn’t see, and what happens in our schools too, is that children are sorted and classified from the outset in terms of their aptitude for academic learning. So very powerfully all are getting to know their place in the pecking order. In fact some are being taught to cope with their mediocrity and some with failure, often just because developmentally they are a bit later in coming to the party.
Some learn very fast that school learning is really not for them. Some outwardly comply but quietly die inside. A few can resort to outright rebellion.
Brian said;
Well, per capita expenditure on education certainly doesn’t guarantee a result. It helps too to be small and culturally homogenous, judging by the result.
If you look at this New Zealand report on their per capita level of expenditure of education, it’s impressively high by OECD standards, ranking up with the UK and the USA. Ireland’s by contrast, is low.
http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/indicators/resources/total_investment_in_education
However, if you look at this breakdown of PISA results for both 2003 and 2006, with outcomes separated out by Mathematics, Reading literacy, Science, and Problem solving, the results for New Zealand are fairly patchy and uneven. Australia outperforms New Zealand in Literacy in 2003, for example.
And Britain and the USA don’t even rank in the top ten in any catgory.
An evaluation of the 2003 results showed that the countries which spent more on education did not necessarily do better than those which spent less.
Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands spent less but did relatively well, whereas the United States spent much more but was below the OECD average.
New Zealand performs fairly well, but then Ireland gets a mention too in the 2006 results, yet oddly Britain and the USA, both investing above the OECD average don’t appear in the top 10 in any category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment
What seems apparent from the results is that small, wealthy, culturally homogenous nations like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea do best by far.
Probably not the sort of message that would be welcomed by teachers unions and the like.
So what do these results tell us, Eliot Ramsey, about what we should do in Australia? Select a cultural group we like and then send everyone else to another country? Shrink Australia? Give everyone a million dollars (that might work!!).
How do we use what PISA and TIMSS etc tell us to improve the skills of our own students? I think Brian and fatfingers had it right in part – invest in early childhood; get really good teachers, and intervene as soon as problems arise.
Implications? Better diagnosis (not just population testing), more of, and more skilled remediation teachers, and find a way to attract really good people into teaching (at the very least, better wages, but more importantly, better conditions).
What they tell us, if we are parents, is to teach our children to read from an early age. Rejoice with them in the complexity and beauty of your language, whether it be Finnish or English or any other language.
And that’s not hard work if you believe in your children and love them,regardless of the competition they may face when they enter public school education.
Don’t leave it up to school teachers to do this for you. That leaves them to make up for your abdication of responsibility as a parent.
You’re a hippie home-schooler, GregM.
Kevin Brady asks;
It probably tells us that comparing countries like the USA, Australia and the UK to tiny, culturally homogenous outposts like Funland and Lichtenstein is meaningless for purposes of developing national policy. But handy for buttressing the selective propaganda claims of special interest lobbies like the Teachers Union.
Yes Eliot Ramsey, it’s teh evil teacher unions who are so poweful that their members are the highest paid professionals in Australia, unlike doctors whose weak and powerless union fails to gain adequate wage increases for its members.
Poor Eliot Ramsey clearly knows nothing about education. but it suits his peurile idelogical prejudices to blame teh evil union for all the perceived ills of education.
# 47 Liam Mar 6th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Liam laughs to himself at his own jokes. Ahh well, to each his own.
Liam says:
Lynn is the most reputable source in this area because he is basicly the only source for international IQ comparisons. Lynn is also one of the first people to notice the so-called Flynn effect, which should clear him of straw-men genetic determinist accusations.
Post-modern liberal arts professional malpractice and the ideological antics of their sub-competent camp followers (no names, no pack drill) has caused psychometry to be vastly under-researched. This means ignoring the gold mines of data on special nature and its relation to social structure.
The vacum gets filled with ignorant moralisers and Liam’s version of the moulding, stale liberal ideology that launched a million cliches.
Liam says:
Weiss has not played with any figures in this case, whatever his geneological assumptions. The PISA-adjusted IQ scores are an alternative way to measure IQ which avoids the cultural bias criticism. Since it is mainly maths-based it is more suitable for global comparisons.
And indeed, as London School psychometry predicts, North East European Finns come in near North East Asians since both have similar high intelligence in the logical sciences. Here is a link to more detailed “empirical measurement”. It is the rotten racist OECD, so be careful of ideological contamination.
But wait, there’s more. Finland has more Mensa members by ratio of population than any other country. A visit to an international nerd convention, hosted by Linux, reinforces this impression. That is what a high IQ meritocracy looks like, as anyone who has had anything to do with programming firms will know.
Liam says:
As I said above, I neither know or care of what people like Weiss do in their spare time. I leave ad hominum attacks to intellectual slum dwellers, such as yourself.
Nor am I am not interested in making new friends, I have more than enough to catch up with all over the world. I am interested in the facts, just the facts, ma’am.
Seriously Liam, try for once to critique without relying on baseless assertion and ad hominum attacks. You might learn something and slightly diminish the void of ignorance in which you currently spin.
Now once you have absorbed all this information, “let me know” and then we will continue with filling in the glaring gaps in your education (and back-filling the nonsense).
Q. Whats the difference between educating Liam and playing a drum machine.
A. With the drum machine you only have to key the information in once.
FFS it’s ad hominem Jack. And you do it fine, if I may say so from my intellectual gutter.
Teh “populus” do “ad hominum”, Liam. We’re in the Strocchiverse, remember.
All problems to do with education everywhere are reducible to ethnic homogeneity if it’s Jack-certified ethnicity.
“I neither know or care of what people like Weiss do in their spare time. I leave ad hominum attacks to intellectual slum dwellers, such as yourself.”
Yes, it’s Möbius Strip Jack Naked time again. Why do we need to wind him up when he does it all himself?
Incidentally Jack, I notice your mate Volker Weisse scored Italian IQ ratings at the bottom end of the European races.