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TOP OF THE CLASS
Jun 26th 2008 

How to learn the right lessons from other countries' schools

THE children at Kulosaari primary school, in a suburb of Helsinki, seem
unfazed by the stream of foreign visitors wandering through their
classrooms. The head teacher and her staff find it commonplace too--and
no wonder. The world is beating a path to Finland to find out what made
this unostentatious Nordic country top of international education
league tables. Finland's education ministry has three full-time staff
handling school visits by foreign politicians, officials and
journalists. The schools in the shop window rotate each year;
currently, Kulosaari is on call, along with around 15 others. Pirkko
Kotilainen, one of the three officials, says her busiest period was
during Finland's European Union presidency, when she had to arrange
school visits for 300 foreign journalists in just six months of 2006.

Finland's status as an education-tourism hot spot is a result of the
hot fashion in education policy: to look abroad for lessons in
schooling. Some destinations appeal to niche markets: Sweden's
"voucher" system draws school choice aficionados; New Zealand's skinny
education bureaucracy appeals to decentralisers. Policymakers who
regard the stick as mightier than the carrot admire the hard-hitting
schools inspectorate and high-stakes mandatory tests in England (other
bits of Britain have different systems).

But visitors to Finland--and to a lesser extent to South Korea, Hong
Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Canada--are drawn by these countries' high
scores in a ranking organised by the Paris-based Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a rich-country
think-tank. Its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
tests 15-year-olds from dozens of countries (most recently 56) in
literacy, mathematics and science. Finland habitually comes top; the
others jockey for places as runners-up (see chart).

Such a quest is understandable but misguided, says Alan Smithers, an
expert in cross-border education comparisons at Britain's University of
Buckingham. Importing elements of a successful education system--the
balance between central and local government, the age of transfer to
secondary school, the wearing of school uniforms and so on--is unlikely
to improve performance. "You shouldn't try to copy the top performers
in PISA," he says, "because position in those league tables depends on
lots of other things besides what happens in schools."

Bearing out Mr Smithers's caution is an analysis of Finland's most
recent PISA results, from 2006, by Jarkko Hautamaki and his colleagues
at Helsinki University. They highlight only one big policy element that
could easily be replicated elsewhere: early and energetic intervention
for struggling pupils. Many of the other ingredients for success that
they identify--orthography, geography and history--have nothing to do
with how schools are run, or what happens in classrooms.

In Finnish, exceptionally, each letter makes a single logical sound and
there are no irregular words. That makes learning to read easy. An
economy until recently dependent on peasant farming in harsh latitudes
has shaped a stoic national character and an appetite for
self-improvement. Centuries of foreign rule (first Swedes, then
Russians) further entrenched education as the centrepiece of national
identity. So hard work and good behaviour are the norm; teaching tempts
the best graduates (nearly nine out of ten would-be teachers are turned
down).

Few countries would want to copy Finland's austere climate or sombre
history even if they could (though spelling reform in English might
merit consideration). More instructive, perhaps, is looking not at how
Finland's schools are run, but how decisions about education are made.
As in other European countries, Finland merged specialist academic and
vocational schools into comprehensive ones in the 1970s. The first
point Mr Hautamaki highlights is broad consensus, cautiously but
irrevocably reached. "They simply kept going until they reached
agreement," he says. "It took two years."

Comprehensive schools were introduced in 1972 in the sparsely populated
north, and then over the next four years in the rest of the country.
Matti Meri, a teacher-trainer at Helsinki University, was a teacher at
the time. "Grammar-school teachers were quite afraid of the reforms,"
he recalls. "They used to teach only one-third of the students. But the
comprehensive schools used almost the same curriculum as the grammar
schools had--and we discovered that the two-thirds were mostly able to
cope with it." By the time comprehensives reached the more populous
south, teachers were eager to join in what was clearly a roaring
success.

"What you are planning might be the right thing to do, but if teachers
aren't on board it will be very hard to make anything happen," says Sam
Freedman, the director of education for Policy Exchange, a London-based
think-tank. He points to Canada, where Alberta and Ontario both
introduced major reforms in the 1990s. Alberta's provincial government
won general support for its ideas, and the reforms are now
uncontentious. In Ontario, by contrast, politicians' rhetoric was
confrontational and the teachers' unions bitterly opposed. The current
government is having to work hard to mend fences.

Finland's education reforms may have taken ten years from conception to
full implementation, but they have proved durable: little has needed
changing in the 30 years since. Mr Smithers draws a gloomy contrast
with the permanent revolution that reigns in England's schools.
"Politicians here seem to think that a day without an education
announcement is a day wasted," he says. New policies should build on
previous ones, agrees Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education
research. "In some countries, though, a new government's greatest
ambition is to undo everything its predecessors did."

Mr Schleicher acknowledges that the hopeful, or simply naive, sometimes
rifle through the PISA studies for shiny new education initiatives to
pilfer. But, he says, international comparisons teach a crucial lesson:
what is possible. "In 1995, at the first meeting of OECD ministers I
attended, every country boasted of its own success and its own
brilliant reforms. Now international comparisons make it clear who is
failing. There is no place to hide."



See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11622383&CFID=21781489&CFTOKEN=39964909