Quality and Equality in Education
posted by Frank Pasquale
A regular reader of the blog alerted me to this story on the Finnish education system, which has been studied around the world for its extraordinary accomplishments:
[B]y 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.
Certainly cultural factors play an important role here. But Finland’s experience should also challenge any easy assumptions that pursuing equality in educational opportunity leads to a decline in the quality of education for top students:
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.
Note that the same “lessening of the stakes” pervades much of the rest of the economy in Finland. America may need to reconsider whether its own inequalities in educational opportunity are not simply a burden on the disadvantaged, but also militate against our economic position as a whole.
March 4, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Posted in: Education
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Responses (1)
Daniel Goldberg - March 5, 2008 at 1:21 am
To say nothing of the significance of such educational disparities and health outcomes (the effect is robust).
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