More About Finland

If you want to learn more about Finland's educational system, check out this list of resources from Larry Ferlazzo. He provides links to a number of news stories and interviews that give more details on how Finland educates its youth.

Finland's Education System

Justin Snider of the Hechinger Report interviews Pasi Sahlberg, who works for the Ministry of Education in Finland. Sahlberg gives his thoughts on the reform movement in the United States. He is mostly critical of the Bill Gates/Race to the Top/Merit Pay "reforms" that are taking over the U.S.

The best answer is this one:

The Hechinger Report: What are your thoughts on the use of value-added data to measure teacher performance, which is quite popular in the U.S. at the moment?

Sahlberg: It’s very difficult to use this data to say anything about the effectiveness of teachers. If you tried to do this in my country, Finnish teachers would probably go on strike and wouldn’t return until this crazy idea went away. Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning. You know, one big difference in thinking about education and the whole discourse is that in the U.S. it’s based on a belief in competition. In my country, we are in education because we believe in cooperation and sharing. Cooperation is a core starting point for growth.

Monty Neill on the value of experienced teachers

In this blog post, hosted by Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, Monty Neill explains why there are problems with the claim that experienced teachers are not much better than inexperienced ones.

Test scores can't prove whether teacher experience matters