The country’s achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework Finland’s
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo,
a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal,
decided to try something extreme— Finnish standards.
One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy,
had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts.
The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame.
So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around.
This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
“I took Besart on that year as my private student,”
Finland’s Schools
Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet.
When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack,
slowly reading one, then another,
then devouring them by the dozens.
the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could,
in fact, learn.
Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher.
Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
Schools Successful
This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success,
a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators.
Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers,
but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku
—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education.
Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else.
They seem to relish the challenges.
Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.
The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity,
more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh,
Estonia and Ethiopia,
among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling.
“We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan.
Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000,
when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues,
revealed Finnish youth to the best young readers in the world.
Finland’s Schools
Three years later, they led in math. 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science.
In the 2009 PISA scores released last year,
the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.
“I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”
In the United States,
which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade,
government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools.
In recent years,
a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers,
data-driven curriculum and charter schools,
which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama,
too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers,
a philosophy that would not fly in Finland.
“I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,”
said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings,
Are Finland’s Schools Successful
no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.
Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators,
not business people, military leaders or career politicians.
Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.
The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town.
The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world,
according to the most recent survey the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
“Equality is the most important word in Finnish education.
All political parties on the right and left agree on this,”
said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.