What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

WHAT MAKES FINNISH KIDS SO SMART?
Wall Street Journal -- February 29, 2007
by Ellen Gamerman

Helsinki, Finland -- High-school students here rarely get more than a 
half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor 
societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the 
gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over 
college and kids don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the 
smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old 
students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among 
the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, 
standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also 
waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap 
and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science 
and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most 
productive workers.

The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests 
sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 
a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. 
In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland's students 
placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according 
to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland's 
combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, 
who directs the OECD's test, known as the Programme for International 
Student Assessment, or PISA. The U.S. placed in the middle of the pack 
in math and science; its reading scores were tossed because of a glitch. 
About 400,000 students around the world answered multiple-choice 
questions and essays on the test that measured critical thinking and the 
application of knowledge. A typical subject: Discuss the artistic value 
of graffiti.

The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more 
than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, 
including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they 
find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible 
children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers 
create lessons to fit their students. "We don't have oil or other 
riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have," says Hannele 
Frantsi, a school principal.

Visitors and teacher trainees can peek at how it's done from a viewing 
balcony perched over a classroom at the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, a 
city in central Finland. What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics 
approach. The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, 
marching bands or prom.

Trailing 15-year-old Fanny Salo at Norssi gives a glimpse of the 
no-frills curriculum. Fanny is a bubbly ninth-grader who loves "Gossip 
Girl" books, the TV show "Desperate Housewives" and digging through the 
clothing racks at H&M stores with her friends.

Fanny earns straight A's, and with no gifted classes she sometimes 
doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up. She often 
helps lagging classmates. "It's fun to have time to relax a little in 
the middle of class," Fanny says. Finnish educators believe they get 
better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than 
by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that 
bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress.

At lunch, Fanny and her friends leave campus to buy salmiakki, a salty 
licorice. They return for physics, where class starts when everyone 
quiets down. Teachers and students address each other by first names. 
About the only classroom rules are no cellphones, no iPods and no hats.

Fanny's more rebellious classmates dye their blond hair black or sport 
pink dreadlocks. Others wear tank tops and stilettos to look tough in 
the chilly climate. Tanning lotions are popular in one clique. Teens 
sift by style, including "fruittari," or preppies; "hoppari," or 
hip-hop, or the confounding "fruittari-hoppari," which fuses both. Ask 
an obvious question and you may hear "KVG," short for "Check it on 
Google, you idiot." Heavy-metal fans listen to Nightwish, a Finnish 
band, and teens socialize online at irc-galleria.net.

The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 
teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while 
instructors evaluate from the sidelines. Teachers must hold master's 
degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people 
may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. 
teachers, but they generally have more freedom.

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students 
to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car 
factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. 
Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international 
student test in 2000.

One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading. Parents 
of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture 
book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus 
travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.

Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most 
popular English-language books are translated here long after they are 
first published. Many children struggled to read the last Harry Potter 
book in English because they feared they would hear about the ending 
before it arrived in Finnish. Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles 
instead of dubbing. One college student says she became a fast reader as 
a child because she was hooked on the 1990s show "Beverly Hills, 90210."

In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian 
educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the 
National Education Association and the American Association of School 
Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, 
and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith 
Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching 
he saw. "You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?" says Mr. 
Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of 
school technology officers that organized the trip.

Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. 
She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict 
rules didn't translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. 
Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. 
They would reply: " 'Nah. So what'd you do last night?'" she recalls. 
History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she 
says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects 
were largely "glue this to the poster for an hour," she says. Her 
Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to 
repeat the year when she returned.

Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern 
Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they 
find classes too easy. He says he is trying to make his schools more 
rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.

Despite the apparent simplicity of Finnish education, it would be tough 
to replicate in the U.S. With a largely homogeneous population, teachers 
have few students who don't speak Finnish. In the U.S., about 8% of 
students are learning English, according to the Education Department. 
There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. 
Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based 
on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. 
(All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school 
dropout rate of about 4% -- or 10% at vocational schools -- compared 
with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education 
departments.

Another difference is financial. Each school year, the U.S. spends an 
average of $8,700 per student, while the Finns spend $7,500. Finland's 
high-tax government provides roughly equal per-pupil funding, unlike the 
disparities between Beverly Hills public schools, for example, and 
schools in poorer districts. The gap between Finland's best- and 
worst-performing schools was the smallest of any country in the PISA 
testing. The U.S. ranks about average.

Finnish students have little angstata -- or teen angst -- about getting 
into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is 
free. There is competition for college based on academic specialties -- 
medical school, for instance. But even the best universities don't have 
the elite status of a Harvard.

Taking away the competition of getting into the "right schools" allows 
Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood. While many U.S. 
parents worry about enrolling their toddlers in academically oriented 
preschools, the Finns don't begin school until age 7, a year later than 
most U.S. first-graders.

Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. 
parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and 
arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their 
own. At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some 
first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in 
near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all 
schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no 
Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks 
during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up 
their own skates or put on their own skis.

The Finns enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, but 
they, too, worry about falling behind in the shifting global economy. 
They rely on electronics and telecommunications companies, such as 
Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, along with forest-products and mining 
industries for jobs. Some educators say Finland needs to fast-track its 
brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at 
producing more go-getters. Parents also are getting pushier about 
special attention for their children, says Tapio Erma, principal of the 
suburban Olari School. "We are more and more aware of American-style 
parents," he says.

Mr. Erma's school is a showcase campus. Last summer, at a conference in 
Peru, he spoke about adopting Finnish teaching methods. During a recent 
afternoon in one of his school's advanced math courses, a high-school 
boy fell asleep at his desk. The teacher didn't disturb him, instead 
calling on others. While napping in class isn't condoned, Mr. Erma says, 
"We just have to accept the fact that they're kids and they're learning 
how to live."


	
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