[Benjo]

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless.

I don't see how this author can fail to make any mention of the vastly different demographics in Finland as compared to the US. Certainly the US system has problems, but acting like the solutions are so easy doesn't help anyone.

Finland has one of the most even wealth distributions in the world. The education problem in the US, as far as I can tell, is mostly in the lower class. So the larger the middle class, the smaller the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distributi...

Am I missing something?

[chrismealy]

Finland's schools were terrible forty years ago.

[cadr]

Just wondering, has the wealth distribution changed in that time?

[jlmendezbonini]

A bit, not that much according to these numbers: Finland:

  Mid-2000s  2000   Mid-1990s  1990  Mid-1980s  Mid-1970s
  0.269      0.261  0.228      n/a   0.207      0.235

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

For a more comprehensive data set see: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/data-access/key-figures/inequal...

If you happen to have access to an even more comprehensive data set, please share. I'm mainly interest on the Gini coefficient overtime and its relation with GDP or GDP per capita to answer questions like: Did Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Norway, etc developed maintaining a low income equality?, Which country has significantly lowered its income equality over the last 50 or so years? Are they highly developed now?, Has there been highly unequal countries that were able to successfully reduce and become developed?

[lautis]

More comprehensive data about income distribution in Finland over time:

http://www.stat.fi/til/tjt/2009/tjt_2009_2011-05-20_tau_002_...

Statistics Finland provide data about income distribution, but not much about wealth.

[lautis]

Wealth distribution did become more even from 60s to mid 80s, but after that the trend has reversed.

[nosse]

It has gone worse, the rich are richer, and the poor are poorer.

[shaggyfrog]

I just happen to have watched the documentary mentioned in the article (Waiting For Superman) a couple of nights ago. It found that children from the middle class are just as effected. The issue boils down to the pervasiveness of bad teachers in the system, and an inability to get rid of those teachers and reward/promote good teachers.

[lbarrow]

Waiting For Superman is right-wing propaganda. Here's a really good NYRB article that explains exactly how distorted that movie is. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch...

Also, Finnish schools are entirely unionized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_finland Ctrl-F "union"

[shaggyfrog]

I don't want to get into the "right-wing" side of things, as that's overly political. Let's focus on the assertions of the documentary instead.

One of them suggested that tenure is very easy to get. In the article you posted, "tenure" appears exactly twice, neither time doing anything to dispel that notion. Furthermore, the byzantine and kafkaesque "due process" to eliminate bad teachers has been in the news quite a bit the last few years; I had heard of the NYC Rubber Room long before I saw Waiting For Superman.

Perhaps instead of downvoting my comment and appealing to a political agenda -- I have none, and ironically, most of my family are teachers -- it would be more instructive to discuss the actual issues at hand.

[yardie]

W4S is an extremely insidious hitpiece on teachers and unions and was universally criticized by most teachers. Like any documentary with an agenda it extrapolates a few datapoints and says, "look, here is your problem, just get rid of items 1, 2, 3 and everything will work".

The kafkaesque dismissal process you allude to is the same in most union jobs. 1: written warning, 2: written warning with training, 3: teacher review board. That's it. The administrator knows this and the teachers know this so I don't see how it is kafkaesque in the slightest. The only way to shortcut that is if the teacher did something illegal like sleep with the students or possess child porn.

I also read the piece on the Rubber Room and the reason why the teachers were there was because the administrators were too lazy to actually start the dismissal process. From the same NYT article I read that some teachers should have been fired but hadn't and others shouldn't be there at all but butted heads with the administrators. They were put there because there was a procedure in place but no one wanted to follow it.

You work at a large enough company you'll get an employee manual on ways you can be fired and the procedure in place to do so. That is what wasn't happening in the Rubber Room case.

[2arrs2ells]

Ravitch is just as radical in her views as Waiting for Superman is on the other side. Both sides vastly oversimplify things and refuse to accept reasonable compromises on ideological grounds.

My personal views are closer to "Waiting for Superman" than Ravitch's, but I (like many ed-reformers) am a lefty. Views on education issues don't split cleanly along party lines.

My take on Ravitch's NYBooks piece is here (the tl;dr version is that her criticisms of the charter school movement as "an attack on public education" are way overblown): http://tumblr.2arrs2ells.com/post/1586044918/myth-of-charter...

[dirtyaura]

I'm quite sure that it's not because it's easier to get rid off of bad teachers in Finland. My mother is an elementary school teacher here in Finland, and if I recall correctly, I've never heard that somebody was sacked because of bad teaching. Sometimes teachers take long sick-leaves due to psychological stress, when they have problems with their class, but that's an another topic of it's own.

Maybe it's more controlled in Finland who can end up as a full-time teacher. Teaching is still pretty popular career choice (esp. for women) and not everybody who wants to be a teacher gets into university to study for a degree. What is the situation in US, is it popular choice anymore?

[shaggyfrog]

Finland, according to the article, hires the top 10% of graduates, who also require master's degree in education. So they're starting off with a highly skilled base of top candidates. On this side of the pond, there are decades of poor teachers ensconced in the system.

"You can't have good schools without good teachers"

[scarmig]

W4S has a pretty big agenda, though, and it's main point comes off as "it's the unions' fault!"

They fail to mention unionization rates in Finnish schools, though.

[eru]

Even if you had unionization rates, American unions probably work different than Finnish unions.

[aik]

> "The issue boils down to the pervasiveness of bad teachers in the system, and an inability to get rid of those teachers and reward/promote good teachers."

As others have mentioned, that is seen as a solution (and one that the US is acting on), however MANY disagree heavily that that is the core issue, as do I. I hope no one is offended by this comparison, but I believe it can be compared to the issue with the massive amount of people in prison in US problem -- can there really be that many bad people, or is the issue something else? I'm 100% convinced it's something else, specifically that (in a lot of cases) the system itself causes the behaviors by motivating/incentivizing it.

[bugsy]

I agree with you that "bad teachers" is not the core or only issue. A more serious issue, as an example, is that good teachers are actively driven away by petty bureaucrats. Those that remain are severely constrained in the good they can do. With the advent of endemic standardized testing tied into bonuses and tenure, classes have devolved into regurgitate the answer mode. That issue, of really excellent teaching being punished or prohibited, is only one of many many problems in the system. Easy fixes don't work because there is not just one thing that is the problem. There are many things and the things vary somewhat state by state and district by district within a state.

[Duff]

A key difference is scale. Finland's population is 5 million people -- right between the cities of New York and Los Angeles.

So you're looking at 200-300 school districts in Finland and 12,000-15,000 in the US. Standards for everything from bussing to curriculum vary dramatically by state or even by district.

I'd attribute the variation in quality to scale, too much money and poor governance in the US.