How Did Finland’s Schools Get So Good?

In this Education Gadfly article, Kathleen Porter-Magee notes that Finland, which has some of the highest student achievement worldwide, is “the unlikely poster child for the anti-reform movement.” That’s because Finland’s schools give teachers plenty of autonomy and have very little top-down regulation, accountability, and standardized testing. “Given its success on international assessments,” she says, “it must follow that U.S. schools would do better if we copied the Finland model.” 

Wrong, says Porter-Magee, citing a 2010 McKinsey study of 20 successful school systems around the world. Its key finding was that the reform strategy varied depending on the initial status of schools:

• Low-achieving schools needed “tightly controlled teaching and learning processes from the center because minimizing variation across classrooms and schools is the core driver of performance improvement at this level.”

• Good schools seeking to become great required “only loose guidelines on teaching and learning processes because peer-led creativity and innovation inside schools becomes the core driver for raising performance at this level.” 

Finland, many of whose schools were decidedly sub-par 25 years ago, started off with the first strategy. “[T]he autonomy and decentralization we see in Finland today came after more than two decades of tightly controlled, centrally driven education reform that systematically adjusted curriculum, pedagogy, teacher preparation, and accountability,” says Porter-Magee. These included:

• A mandatory national curriculum that held all students to the same rigorous standards; the standards were developed with teacher input (there was lots of push-back);
• Major improvements in teacher professional development and certification requirements, including a requirement that all new teachers have a master’s degree and become content experts in their field;
• A central inspectorate to evaluate teaching and learning in every school.

“It was only after this top-down systemic reform moved Finland from poor to good that its education leaders shifted to a more flexible approach,” says Porter-Magee. “Yes, Finnish educators now enjoy broad autonomy over curriculum and instruction, and schools are largely self-governed. But this happened only after decades of reform aimed at raising standards for both students and teachers and ensuring that teachers had the capacity to thrive under a more decentralized system… Ultimately, Finland’s success is built atop a series of hard choices, rigorously implemented.” 

“Real Lessons from Finland” by Kathleen Porter-Magee in The Education Gadfly, Jan. 3, 2013 (Vol. 13, #1), http://bit.ly/10opjO0 

From the Marshall Memo #467