The rise and fall of Finlandmania, part 2: Why did scores plummet?

Editor’s note: This was originally published on the author’s Substack. education daily.

In Part 1, which you should probably read before proceeding, we learned that a string of excellent results in international evaluations in the early 2000s made Finland the envy of the world. Enthralled visitors soaked up Finnish wisdom.

Then things got weird. Here, we trace the decline of the world’s most famous school system and unpack the explanations and lessons.

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At the same time as Finland gained supremacy, its performance declined. The first whispers were heard after her PISA implementation in 2012, when it emerged that Finland had dropped out of the top 10 countries in mathematics for the first time. That voice became even louder after the 2015 trial, when the trial showed a decline in all three of her subjects.

Then the pandemic happened. Students around the world suffered unprecedented setbacks as they missed important in-school instruction and dealt with disrupted study habits. By the time PISA was conducted in 2022, with results just released in late 2023, the alarming decline in Finnish student performance had become undeniable.

The table below ranks countries by change in scale scores since the PISA reading and math tests were first administered (2000 for reading and 2003 for math).[i]

In our reading, only Iceland has surpassed Finland’s 56-point decline over nearly 20 years. As a counter-example, Poland has improved by 10 points over the same period and is now performing on par with Finland, even though it was significantly behind Finland in her first PISA administration.

But what really hit home was the math. Finland’s average scale score fell by an incredible 79 points between 2003 and 2022, putting it miles ahead of other less developed countries.

As of 2022, Finland is no longer ranked first in mathematics among PISA participants. It was the 20th. And in the reading, Finland was still in a respectable 14th place, but I noticed that they were trailing…wait for it…US.

you read that correctly. For 20 years, the poster child for what not to do has somehow overtaken the country that touts itself as doing everything right (in reading).

In mathematics, Finland still outperforms the United States, but the gap between the two countries has narrowed by 75%. This is especially shocking given the United States’ poor performance in this area over the past decade.

You’re probably wondering how the Finns took the news. Answer: It’s difficult.

by helsinki times, the Ministry of Education and Culture described the latest results as “very worrying”. The education minister said results “continue to trend downward” and have “significantly worsened”. Officials were particularly concerned that the proportion of students with substandard math skills had grown over time from seven to 25.

The days of junkets and embassy seminars seem long gone, according to the frank and humble assessment of Finnish officials as a whole.[ii] In Behind the Music, it’s when the band breaks up and everyone goes bankrupt to pay for the divorce.

Why did Finland collapse?

There are several common explanations for the unprecedented change in Finland’s PISA performance.

Explanation 1: Finland’s initial success was a fluke. Perhaps the vagaries of international assessment introduced undetected bias in the Finnish student sample in the early 2000s, leading to overly positive results. After all, only a small percentage of students in a country take PISA. Finland’s blockbuster rankings were conducted when this test was new. Maybe there was a bug that needed to be resolved. Finland is not to blame, but what if the noise in the scores originally worked to its own advantage? We can imagine that even if the rankings changed, the performance of Finnish students would not have changed significantly.

How strong is this explanation? Not very convincing. First of all, Finland was not a one-hit wonder. They performed very well in PISA across multiple years, across multiple subjects including math, science and reading.Over the past 20 years, no evidence has emerged that there is anything strange about these results, much less. all One of them. Finnish officials also said that the poor PISA results confirmed the results of country assessments and studies that were “well known” by 2016, and that PISA was “not big news.” Ta. Therefore, the trend line appears to be tracking.

However, PISA is not the only international assessment. In Finland, the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Learning (TIMMS) for 4th and 8th graders are generally not as good as his PISA results. Back in 2013, Brookings’ Tom Lovelace questioned Finland based on its sub-elite TIMMS scores. Therefore, it is safe to say that there were some warning signs that Finland’s performance may have been overestimated.

Explanation 2: Finland’s initial success was real, but it was followed by a period of notable decline. It captured images accurately in our tests. For a relatively short period of time, Finnish students who entered primary school in the 1990s were among the best in the world. However, their colleagues who followed them just a few years later were not as successful. If Finland’s education system was once uniquely elegant in its design and implementation, it probably no longer was by the time the pilgrims arrived en masse. Rather, visitors took classes in a school that recreated its early heyday.

How strong is this explanation? More plausible than explanation 1. Just as his early PISA results for Finland are very convincing, the decline is also consistent across subjects and exam years. This long-term decline is due to the fact that Finland’s early successes continued in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when Finland concentrated teacher training in major universities and hired a national inspector general to maintain education. This raises the question of whether this reflects the lag effect of the way schools were organized and operated in the 1990s. School quality. They had their NCLB moment. Over time, more power was devolved to localities, nominally to trust educators, but also driven by budgetary pressures. It’s hard to know whether the high scores of the early 2000s were due to some of these discarded strategies.[iii]

Explanation 3: Finland’s performance decline was due to increased immigration and major demographic changes, not weak leadership.. Finland was previously notable for its ethnic and religious homogeneity, but global migration patterns have made it even more diverse. Recent arrivals had more serious challenges that Finland’s social safety net could not remedy.

How strong is this explanation? Pretty unlikely. Immigration has certainly increased, but in 2022 only 7% of Finnish students will be immigrants, a far cry from the 24% in the United States. Finland’s initial success was characterized by an unusually small gap between high- and low-achieving students and a transcendence of global trends in which demographics played a small role in predicting outcomes. . As time went on, Finland became closer to the pack. The gap has widened. Demographics are now more predictable. Finland’s ranking is not compressed by any particular subgroup. It’s just going down across the board.

What lessons should we learn?

1. It’s fun to remember that education was once a top domestic policy issue.. It drew the governor to major summits and garnered consistent attention above the fold and in the op-ed pages of national newspapers. This hasn’t been true for a long time. Bipartisanship had collapsed by the end of Obama’s first term. The Trump administration had a narrow agenda on school choice. It’s hard to tell whether the Biden administration has any sort of K-12 agenda. No one is doing junkets. Even if you’re not good at looking for new ideas, it’s better than staring at the wall and watching paint dry.

2. Excellence is hard to maintain.. It’s fragile. Just ask Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots. In fact, the Patriots’ NFL dominance lasted much longer than Finland’s education reign. We’ve seen some similar problems in states across the United States. Other states are complacent as their former leaders succumb to school-improving champions (hello, Mississippi!).

3. Reasonable care should be taken when making international comparisons. To state the obvious, there is little reason to believe that American schools would be better if they copied the structures and policies of the Finnish education system. By the time Finland became an object of obsession, it was in decline. We were obsessed with later works that were once great but no longer warrant imitation, like episodes of The Andy Griffith Show after it switched to color. This doesn’t mean we can’t learn from other countries. You absolutely can. But there is no excuse for the lack of common sense scrutiny that characterizes Finlandmania.

4. Hype bubbles are real and all too common. Finnish boosters, both locally and in the US, were completely sincere in their belief that they were selling the real thing.They believed that Finland had the best school system in the world and This is due to its unique characteristics. But Lucy Calkins is sincere in saying that her reading comprehension program is effective. Decades of research have shown that too little attention to phonics and a strange adherence to word guessing as a strategy hastened the change in her students. The hype surrounding her reading curriculum, and the educators who have proven her success despite rigorous evidence to the contrary, have many similarities to Finland. Calkins’ program felt right to many. She felt that Finland was also right.The educational leader’s job is to see what will happen and make the appropriate decisions feels right And we take those that have real-world evidence and can be implemented consistently in local contexts. Finland did not meet that standard. I can hear some readers saying, “Wait!” What happened to the hype bubble promoted by school reformers over the past few decades?” And you’re absolutely right. There was hype about standards, charter schools, vouchers, community schools, extended das and annual calendars, teacher evaluations, testing, technology, and more. All these merit further consideration. This brings me to my final point.

5. We need better postmortems. I don’t know where the Finnish booster went. They have disappeared. Or rather, when Finland was in crisis, they stopped writing and discussing Finland. As if nothing had happened. It’s just like it was never touted as the solution to everything that ails us. Apparently, everyone had an answer as to why Finland was a top performer, but no one seemed to have an answer as to why Finland plummeted. I would really like to hear more from people who visited Finland during its feverish years and were closely involved with the school. If so, how would it look different in hindsight? Which lessons still seem to apply and which don’t? Where did Finland go wrong?Why didn’t you ask more questions? Where? that Finnish lesson book? If we don’t unearth things like this, we’ll just repeat the same trends every few generations, make the same mistakes, and end up back where we started.

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Later this year, I’m going to medicate myself and posthumously analyze some topics that were near and dear to my heart. Maybe I was a dying super fan.