Ping to the Swedish Ping List.
Posted on 06/06/2008 6:10:00 PM PDT by Lorianne
THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds' reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it’s my turn.
And since I'm coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.
Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden’s Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.
In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Yet another case against American public education.
If sweden had the same lower 20% pupils our schools have, they would be below the bottom.
This article totally missed the point identified in a previous article posted here on FR about Finnish schools.
I’ll look for the link when I have time, but IIRC, that article quite persuasively found that it was the fact that Finnish students did a LOT of independent reading on a wide variety of subjects that led to the hallowed view of their education.
Basically, the picture of Finnish schools painted in the previous article was that of American-style homeschooling done in a public school setting.
There was very little emphasis placed on the quality of the teachers, as this author did. Huh.
Ping to the Swedish Ping List.
You just don't get it!
We need to do it FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!1!11!11!!!1!!1!
ping
Also, Finnish children do not start school until age 7.
I’ve also heard Finland is still fairly ethnically homogenous. Not a big immigrant problem. Is that true, I wonder...
FINLAND'S schools may lead the world, but its universities are nothing special. This bothers the Finnish government.... Finland is hardly the only country worried about the global reputation of its universities.... Most countries have decided that the way to break into the top ranks is to boost a few chosen universities rather than fund all equally. They look to America, which dominates the top of both rankings. Its elite private institutions have enormous endowments and attract top names; small liberal-arts colleges provide a more intimate education; many state universities offer an excellent education at a keen price; and its community colleges give no-frills tuition to locals and often serve as a springboard for future progression.
So, I ask Mr Katainen, does the Finnish government hope to see an elite emerge? The answer is a flat no. That would not be the Finnish way: equality is one of the country's fundamental values.
I’ve been having the same sinking feeling.
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