One Helsinki restaurant I didn’t sample:

The concept of an “outback bar and grill” in this context suggests to be that somebody went to an Outback Steakhouse in the USA and didn’t quite understand the concept. I’m no Texan, but I’m pretty sure there’s no outback there.

Achievement gaps in the US education system are an important cause of economic inequality, which is especially unfortunate when you consider that economic inequality is also a leading cause of achievement gaps in the US education system. Chad Alderman writes about the latest TIMSS results:

Despite this progress, the biggest difference in the scores of US students is not between countries, but rather remains within our own. In fourth grade math, the effect size of US students attending high-income versus low-income schools is 1.4 times as large as the difference between US students and the highest performing country. In science, the effect size by income is three times what it is between the US and the leading nation. Income gaps continue to persist at levels higher than all others, and that should be the real story out of these results.

In Finland, by contrast, they’ve happily gotten themselves onto the good equilibrium. Relatively low levels of background inequality and poverty make it relatively easy to deliver fairly egalitarian educational outcomes. Add to that a determination to target in-need students with a degree of extra resources, and this becomes even more the case. And those relatively egalitarian educational outcomes help maintain a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income. Lather, rinse, and repeat. The United States, by contrast, is becoming more-and-more of a class-bound society in which parental SES dominates other factors in determining economic opportunities, helping to reinscribe patterns of inequality over and over again.

I think the American education policy debate is probably going to start focusing more and more on how we train and credential teachers. And yesterday, I learned about how this is done in Finland. For background, the Finnish equivalent of high-school (“upper secondary school”) teachers students who are 17, 18, and 19. So obtaining a Bachelor’s degree from a Finnish university typically only takes three years. A master’s degree takes five. To qualify as a “kindergarten teacher” you need a bachelor’s degree, but that doesn’t actually mean you teach kindergartens. Rather, you’re qualified to staff certain positions in Finland’s municipally administered daycare centers.

Primary and secondary school teachers, by contrast, need master’s degrees. But within this group, there are two different kinds of degrees. There are “class teachers” for younger kids and “subject teachers” who are mostly for older kids. A class teacher has a class of children, all of whom are basically the same age, and teachers diverse subjects. A subject teacher teaches one subject to kids of different ages. To become a class teacher, you apply to a university’s Department of the Practical Science of Education and spend five years doing a mix of classes on education theory and pedagogy (in general terms like what we do in US education schools) and “practice teaching” on actual students in actual schools. To become a subject teacher, by contrast, you first need to get into the regular department in that subject and do coursework there, and then on top of that apply to the Education Department for admission to a brief course of pedagogical instruction.

One important difference between how this works and how equivalent systems work in the United States is that the education programs are highly competitive. Only 10-20 percent of applicants are accepted, and the applicants typically come from the top half of upper secondary schools which themselves only basically the top half of Finnish primary school graduates (the rest go to vocational schools). Along the same lines, it’s generally quite common for Finns to foot-drag there way through university, since the price is actually negative (free tuition, plus a stipend, plus subsidized loans) but we’re told that teachers usually do the five year course in five years because the job market for graduates of teacher programs are strong.

It’s a bit hard to say what accounts for the strong level of interest in a teaching career in Finland. Finnish teacher compensation seems about average for the US (which is to say considerably more generous than some states, considerably less generous than others). The relative salary is higher because other professionals such as lawyers and doctors earn less in Finland than do their US equivalents. And the subjective quality of the job experience seems better in Finland since the kids have many fewer discipline issues.

But at the same time, there seems to be a somewhat circular phenomenon at work. Teaching is held in high regard not just in the abstract, but in practice as a profession a lot of people want to get into. Consequently, the teaching programs are quite selective. And the selectivity itself makes teaching prestigious since everyone knows teachers are graduates of selective programs. Which helps make going into teaching seem appealing to a lot of people. And so on and so forth in an interesting way. It seems to me that it’s easy to see how it’s socially beneficial to increase the number of talented people who want to be teachers; by contrast, it’s difficult for me to see what kind of social benefits from from increasing the number of talented people who want to be lawyers. Finland and the United States seem to be on different spots on the teacher/lawyer curve, and I don’t think it’s difficult to say which is the better spot.

Barack Obama’s team is thought to be torn between two camps on education policy thinking, one led by Linda Darling-Hammond that’s more friendly to teacher’s unions, and another of self-described reformers who are less so. One difference, as explained by Thomas Toch, has to do with testing and Finland specifically comes up:

Darling-Hammond points approvingly to a “growing emphasis” in high-performing countries on “project-based, inquiry-oriented learning” that has led “to an increasing prominence for school-based tasks, which include research projects, science investigations, development of products and reports or presentations about these efforts”–so-called performance tests. The bulk of the article (written with co-author Laura McClosky) describes approvingly locally administered peformance assessment in countries ranging from Finland to Australia, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the UK. [...]

But it’s clear that Darling-Hammond is ambivalent about using performance testing to hold educators accountable for student achievment. She notes that the countries she has studied “do not use their examination systems to rank or punish schools or to deny diplomas to students.” Finland, she writes, “has no external standardized tests to rank students or schools.” Instead, she writes approvingly, the testing systems in Finland and other countries are closely linked to efforts to develop teachers’ ability to teach higher-level skills to their students; they are part of the countries’ human capital strategies.

What Finland does, testing-wise, is that the national government draws up lots of tests. Tests of different kinds of subject matter that are appropriate for children of different ages. But it doesn’t require any nationwide assessment testing. Instead, what’s done on a national basis is that there’s a matriculation exam after ninth grade and there’s also non-publicized testing done on a statistical sample basis so that the government can keep track of what’s happening.

So what are all the tests for? Well, the local governments who actually run schools can — and typically do — order tests administered from time to time in order to check up on what’s happening. So while there isn’t a formal system of test-based accountability, in practice something similar is happening. For example, there was a test in Helsinki of Finnish language ability among I think sixth graders last year. The results weren’t publicized, but they were shared with the principals of Helsinki schools. We visited a school that got poor results on this test, and so the principal and his staff responded by drawing up an action plan to turn things around.

This is simultaneously very different from No Child Left Behind’s accountability system and on another level quite similar. The basic idea that the best way to tell how a school is doing is to administer tests, and then when a school does poorly on tests you know things need to be changed, is held in common. What’s very different are the details of implementation. Finland’s system is much less of a “system” — it’s less formal and less systematic. The Finnish government takes for granted that municipalities will want rigorous assessments of their schools’ performances. The US congress assumes that school districts don’t want such assessments and need to be forced to do them. The Finnish government also takes for granted that the staff and administration of a low-performing school will be alarmed by bad test results and start taking action to change things. The US congress assumes that the staff and administration of a low-performing school won’t act unless they’re made to act.

I don’t think one can seriously dispute that the Finnish system is “better” — it’s more cooperative, more responsive, etc. But at the same time, the underlying belief behind NCLB — that low-performing US schools won’t change unless they’re forced to change — strikes me as a factually accurate claim about conditions in the United States. What we do strikes me as a direction in which the Finnish system might evolve if it starts to break down over time, whereas what Finland does strikes me as a direction in which we might evolve after we see substantial structural reform in the minority of school districts that are truly dysfunctional. After all, it’s not as if the United States has had our current testing and accountability system since time immemorial and we’re clinging to it out of reflexive habit. On the contrary, it was put into place out of a sense that many schools and school districts had been persistently unresponsive to data about performance problems.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is getting ready to foreswear the smear against white people that we eat cucumber. And yet just yesterday here in Finland where the white people are twice as white as back home (Nordic ancestry + subarctic winter = pale), I was in fact served a sandwich of cucumbers and cheese on a croissant.

Obviously, you don’t build a Finnish level of educational performance without the foundation provided by the egalitarian Nordic social/political/economic model. And you don’t build a Nordic welfare state without some taxes. But there are things besides tax rates that make it possible to afford to Finland’s relatively generous social provision. One such thing — lower defense expenditures. But another is lower health care expenditures:

If you can’t read that chart, click over here. It shows that the Finnish system is so much cheaper on a systemic basis than the American system, that public expenditures on health care actually comprise a slightly smaller share of Finnish GDP than they do of American GDP. This even though Finland’s public expenditures on health care are done in a far more egalitarian manner and cover far more comprehensive service.

And of course when private expenditures are factored it, Finland spends dramatically less on health care. And yet, we get little-to-nothing in terms of better health outcomes in exchange for our additional health care spending. The total gap — including both public and private expenditures — frees up almost 8 percent of Finnish GDP for productive investment in education, infrastructure, etc. in a way that allows reasonable robust growth to coexist with relatively high taxes and levels of social provision.

There would be nothing wrong with America spending a huge amount on health care if there were some evidence that it was making us an unusually healthy people, but there isn’t.

Another place we visited yesterday was one of Helsinki’s 10 — nine public, one private — 24 hour day care centers. Of course it’s not really “day” care if it’s provided at night. But the basic philosophy here is that some people have to work at night — shift workers at hospitals, people working in public services doing transportation or police work, people working at the airport, etc. — and some of those people have kids, too. The exact details of how the center works were a bit complicated and not terribly interesting, but it’s a great example of Finnish public policy’s strong commitment to meeting family policy needs.

Early childhood policy in Finland in a nutshell:

Mothers are entitled to five weeks maternity leave. After that, there’s a parental leave period of ten additional months that can be taken by either mother or father or divided between the two. After that, children have an “unconditional right to day care.” That can be provided either at municipal-run institutions or else at private ones. There are fees day care charged on a sliding scale according to income that max out at 233 euros per month. That’s far less than the cost of care, which, clearly, is heavily subsidized. A family that prefers to have a parent stay home and take care of the children can do so and receives a home care subsidy. Thus, the system is neutral between traditional and working-mother models. About 30 percent of Helsinki children are in the home care / allowance system.

Private daycare facilities are eligible for the same level of public subsidy as municipally run ones. This isn’t really a profitable line of work and so there aren’t many providers — just five percent of Helsinki children are enrolled in a private center.

That leaves the other 65 percent of Helsinki kids in the municipal centers. Centers have two kinds of staff members — “kindergarden teachers” who have bachelor’s degrees and “practical nurses” who have less education. For every four children under the age of three you need one staff member. For every seven children between the ages of 3-6 you need one staff member. And for every two practical nurses you need one kindergarden teacher. So a section of 21 older kids would be taught by one kindergarden teacher assisted by two practical nurses.

I’m going to do a bunch of posts about Finland over the course of this trip that won’t necessarily be conclusion-driven. The basic spirit is that (a) it’ll be content, (b) it’ll be a useful exercise for me to just try to summarize things I’m learning, (c) someone might find it interesting, and (d) there’ll be time to reach meaningful conclusions later.

Yesterday’s visits in Finland were focused on their early education system. One important new challenge to that system, as to many dimensions of European social policy, relates to dealing with immigrants. Finland’s immigrant population is still relatively small, but in the city of Helsinki it’s pretty big, and immigrants are disproportionately fecund so it’s a big deal for the education system especially in the city.

The early education system is, in principle, a huge opportunity in terms of hopes of building a successful system of integration and assimilation. Kids come in to Finnish early education at very young ages — sometimes just one or two years old — at a time when their linguistic capabilities are developing rapidly and at a point where foreign language acquisition is relatively easy. Thus, this is a great opportunity to teach Finnish to foreign-born children or to the children of foreign-born (most often Russian or Somali) parents. One interesting element to this is that Finnish center-based early childhood services are universally available but by no means mandatory. Many children are taken care of at home or by relatives. And since unemployment is higher among immigrant communities and immigrants also tend to come from families with more traditional gender/family ideas the objective need for child care services in the immigrant community isn’t necessarily enormous.

In the United States, many if not most local governments would take a look at the reduced budgetary costs associated with immigrant families choosing to keep their kids at home and conclude that it’s all good. But the Finns regret the missed opportunity to ensure that immigrant kids learn Finnish and are able to hit the ground running once “real” school starts at age seven. So they make special efforts to try to do outreach and encourage immigrant families to send their kids to early childhood education centers even if they’re unemployed and capable of taking care of them at home. It’s an interesting peek at the difference between social services that are grudgingly provided (as is typical in the US) and a mentality that looks upon them more positively as things that are being offered because it would be good for them to be used.

A related aspect of this is, of course, that it’s easier for immigrant children to learn Finnish if their playmates in school are predominantly Finnish. And this is a point where educators observed that the success of their mission winds up depending on policies made by totally different branches of government. In particular, for the schools to be integrated enough to do language education with maximal success, you need housing policy to put an adequate mix of units of different types and affordability levels in different neighborhoods. The Helsinki authorities reportedly do accomplish this to some extent, with public housing scattered somewhat around the city rather than in a concentrated ghetto. But there seem to be some real limits to the scope of this policy — one school we visited was a bit over 50 percent immigrant, which makes their task difficult.

On a related note, a teacher at that school observed that since that school — with a relatively high number of immigrants, a high number of low-income families (both native and foreign born) and a high number of kids from single-parent families — had a relatively more challenging task than other preschools in Helsinki, it really ought to get more funding on a per capita basis. That seems correct to me — the flat distribution of funds they have in Finland isn’t really appropriate. On the other hand, it’s about a million times more appropriate than the American system which generally allocates the least funding to the communities most in need.

Kids — I’m off today for a week-long trip to Helsinki, Finland where I and some other DC-based policy thinkers and writers are going to be guests of the Finnish government to learn about their education system. Finland is a world leader in PISA scores and other measures of educational success, so as the United States tries to reverse the current disturbing trend toward declining educational attainment, it seems that perhaps we have something to learn not only from how Finnish schools function, but from the larger social and economic policy context in which children learn.

In general, I think the United States has a lot to learn from the social models prevailing in northern Europeans countries such as Finland. Finland’s per capita GDP is roughly the same as America’s, but Finland’s gini coefficient is far lower, suggesting that typical Finns enjoy higher material living standards than do Americans. Add to that longer life expectancy, lower crime rates, and lots of modernist design and architecture and it seems like a nice place. On the other hand, they have worse weather. I once spent an extremely long layover in Helsinki Airport where I was surprisingly well treated by Finnair rather than given the usual “we’ve stranded you here and it’s all our fault but we refuse to apologize or take responsibility” schtick one usually gets form airlines, so I’ve long felt a deep appreciation for the Finnish way and I’m very eager to see some non-airport portions of the country (the view from the terminal looked nice).

At any rate, you know the drill — blogging will continue, but on a reduced and somewhat sporadic schedule. Of course you should expect some commentary on Helsinki’s public transportation (metro, tram, and commuter rail — a veritable trainapolooza) system.