What does Finland do right?

[Linus Van Pelt]

The interesting thing about Finnish education is that up until the 1980's, despite a long-standing welfare state and homogeneous society, the education system didn't perform all that well on international tests and there were large socio-economic achievement gaps. So the current very high achievement levels and low socio-economic gaps didn't actually just seep in from the broader egalitarian society but were the result of some conscious curricular and administrative reforms in the 80's. And these were broadly in the opposite direction from those advocated by the currently fashionable kind of reformist of both parties in the US: there is minimal standardized testing; curriculum design is decentralized with teachers involved in designing their own courses; quantitative comparisons among schools are not published; and the teachers' union is powerful.