Picking Winners and Losers

Is anybody had enough yet of all the fawning over Finland's education system? Yesterday, for example, Pasi Salsberg, a big education cheese in Finland, was on CBC's Sunday edition with Michael Enright, claiming that Finland is at the top of international rankings and suggesting that other countries follow Finland's example. Mr. Salsberg has his own website and he's pretty hunky. You can see why he has rock star appeal.

There's just one problem with this picture. The trouble is - Finland didn't do all that well in the recent TIMMS, being skunked (like everybody else) by Asian tigers Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. It's true that Finland did well in the grade 4 reading assessment, being neck and neck with the leaders - Hong Kong, Florida, Russia, and Singapore (Japan and Korea did not participate). However, there are a couple of non-educational reasons that may have contributed to the reading proficiency of Finnish children.

For one thing, Finnish spelling is very regular - with every sound almost always being represented by its own letter. It's as if Finns need to read only sentences like the following: A BIG CATAMARAN MUST NOT BUMP ITS MAST. Secondly, most Finnish children watch a lot of Swedish TV, a language they can't understand. Although the programs for very young children are dubbed into Finnish, most programs for older children are sub-titled in Finnish - meaning that children have to be good readers if they are to enjoy their TV shows. Thus Finnish kids get a lot of extra reading practice.

In contrast, English spelling is highly irregular, and most English-speaking children need very skillful teaching if they are to become fluent readers. Try teaching kids to read the following sentence, with its seven different pronunciations of ‘ough’: I THOUGHT I HICCOUGHED, THOUGH,  AS I WENT THROUGH A TOUGH TROUGH in the BOUGH. Then there’s the sound /oo/ (as in “moon”), which can be represented in at least 12 different ways: for example, stew, soon, glue, judo, soup, do, lose, tune, shoe, fruit, neutral, and through. And of course the letter ‘y’, which can be a vowel or a consonant and represent several different sounds: for example, yes, key, happy, boy, gym, sky, type, day, and they.

The bottom line is that what happens in Canadian Grade 1 classes really matters. But what happens in Finnish Grade 1 classes is far less critical. The success of Finnish kids on reading tests may not have all that much to do with Finnish schools.

All of which begs the question: why is so much fuss being made about the Finnish education system? Why are Canadian educators not interested in what the Asian tigers are doing? The answer has got to be that Canadian educators like what is happening Finland but don't like what is happening in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Canadian educators like to point to Finland, which pays its teachers a lot and which doesn't have many private schools. Canadian educators don't like to point to the Asian tigers, which use direct instruction and drill and large classes and sequential curricula.

If Canadian educators were truly interested in high student achievement, they would stop making pilgrimages to Finland and start packing their bags for the countries that are producing far superior results - Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

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