Fascinating piece in The Atlantic about Finland's remade education system and possible lessons it offers us. It also inadvertantly conflates an important broader message that a segment of our society is going out of its' way to not understand.
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...uccess/250564/
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.