Recently, I had the fabulous opportunity to hear a keynote address by Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and scholar, who was both incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly funny.  He has a laundry list of credentials: a Master of Science from University of Turku, a PhD. from the University of Jyvaskylä, and a Teacher’s Diploma from the University of Helsinki. He served in the Ministry of Education in Finland, as the Senior Education Specialist for the World Bank in Washington, DC., and as the Lead Education Specialist for the European Training Foundation in Torino, Italy.   He even received First Class Knight of the White Rose of Finland from the President.  He is currently a visiting Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is how he became available to educators in New England.

Why is this relevant?  Because Finland is #1 in the world in all aspects of education – math, reading, science, etc. -- (although he admitted Finland doesn’t care about that; they only care that they are better than Sweden.)  Rather than proposing that other nations follow in Finland's path, his book Finnish Lessons documents how Finland achieved success without going through the difficult and controversial educational processes typical of the United States -- in other words, without implementing competitive practices such as school choice, school report cards, and test-based accountability.  

The United States is not doing education wrong, however.  Salhberg said that Finland and all the other developed countries regularly copy the educational ideas that come out of the United States and implement them in classrooms most often in very similar ways.  Salhberg cited the technological advances and concepts such project-based learning, interdisciplinary teaching, STEM, and collaborative learning.  What he reminded us of was this: the United States is significantly struggling in the other social domains that ultimately make us educationally non-competitive.  We do not fully recognize or acknowledge the tight relationship between poverty, health care, and education, for example.  According to Salhberg's research and expertise, Finland is # 1 in education because the country is also #1 in the world in other key ‘social’ factors such as the empowerment of women, health care for children, low rate of poverty, and the percentage of people reporting satisfaction with life.  In Finland, for example, both parents get paid child care leave after the birth of a baby because of the importance Finnish society places on the nuclear family.  Free, state-sponsored child care is available to working mothers.  And so on.  

Thus, underlying the success of the Finnish system is a constitutional commitment to every child’s right to great education, as well as a strong social safety net that has reduced child poverty in Finland from its peak in the 1970's – about 22%, (near the current U.S. rate) – to just 4% today.  In the United States, as is true in most countries, socioeconomic status is truly one of the keenest predictors of a child’s success in school.

 

My take-aways were these : 

1. When it comes to the best educational practices, Sahlberg said everyone in the world is copying the United States (perhaps a slight exaggeration on his part, not mine!)
2. When our educational achievement (our y axis, or the dependent variable) is plotted on a grid against the equality of key social factors in our society (our x axis, or the independent variable), we fall below those countries with whom we most want to be recognized and competitive. (See the chart above).

He labeled the "high achievement/strong equity" zone  ‘heaven,’ and used the Led Zeppelin soundtrack ‘Climbing the Stairway to Heaven’  to close his presentation.  

His book is titled Finnish Lessons: What the World Can Learn from Finland.