gramarye said:
I also sympathize with the Finnish skepticism about standardized testing, and I don't say this as sour grapes--I was a gifted test-taker, to the point of getting a lot of scholarship money off of it. The statistics that I'd really like to see with respect to Finland, though, are their family-deterioration statistics (divorce, single motherhood, etc.). It's a pretty open secret that if we took the test scores of only the American students from stable nuclear families, we'd be scoring a lot higher.
A couple thoughts - from what I can find, the divorce rate in Finland is higher than in the US (tho the stats are a little old for my liking - it's probably hedging to equal rates at this point); but the rate of single parenthood is considerably higher in the US, than in Finland. (Best data I've found is here.) The statistic from that article that is more telling to me is the percentage of single-parent households where that parent works full time - it is about the same considerable different *less* in Finland. There are a lot of reasons for that - likely the biggest one being social safety nets. I know a lot of y'all are going to hate hearing that.
That all children in Finland are educated to the same standard, regardless of their economic standing cannot be overlooked - it's basically the thing that makes our system fail.
The other thing to keep in mind, in regards to those single parent households (and this is down the rabbit hole a little) - you have to start looking at where people live, what their socioeconmic status is (in the US, single parent households are majority poor & low income). You get involved, deeply, in income inequality, since about 80% of those single U.S. households are women, women that statistically earn less, AND are penalized in the workplace for having children (childcare issues, sick days, etc). In this country, that means not only less education in regards to years, but less in regards to quality.
That doesn't even begin to cover the differences in race - which adds a whole 'nother dimension onto the problem here. The rabbit hole goes deeper, and the War on Drugs gets involved. With that came the near systematic jailing of young black men.
The equality here isn't equal.