Educational research is often used in a selective manner in policy-making and education reform designs. For example, some employ PISA data to shame and blame public education systems but not in educational change architecture to overcome the designated problems. In the United States and England some education reformers use PISA rankings to make their point that their public school systems are falling behind the others and at the same time they offer solutions that go against the evidence available in these same studies. Canada, Korea and Finland show that tough competition and strong accountability are not necessary as the key drivers of educational reforms. In other words, evidence from successful countries and how they have reformed their education systems is ignored, or used selectively.

But it is not only the decision-makers who often fail to use existing change knowledge for better policies. Reporters who should cover both ups and downs in education systems more often than not build their stories on opinions and anecdotal evidence rather than researched knowledge. In the United States the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) Policy Memo (http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/researchers-as-resources) offers a list of experts who can speak to the overall knowledge base — to the weight of scholarly thought and research evidence in a given education policy area. Excellent idea that many countries should replicate. This is recommendation to Finland, where the current international fame of its education system is poorly reported by Finnish media. Actually, if a Finnish taxpayer wants to understand that Finnish school system is internationally advanced and to know why it is so, this Finn needs to find out what the international reporters have written or how foreign pundits analyze the success of Finnish schools. Only bad news about education seem to be good enough for the Finnish media. According to some seasoned Finnish politicians this criticism applies to other issues as well, among them economic and foreign policies.

The world of politics is different. It shows little imagination and even less understanding of educational change knowledge to adopt outdated corporate world operating models as the main means in education reforms. Still around the world tougher competition between schools, stronger accountability for teachers, and more standardized testing of students are common drivers of promised turnaround of traditional education systems. I was in an event recently to hear the Nobel economist Paul Krugman explaining how many of today’s popular market-based ideas in public school systems, like standardized performance or pay per measurable merits, are not used in modern businesses anymore to improve productivity as they are in education. Still, the main ideology of current global educational reform movement is borrowed from outdated business models and is not supported by contemporary change knowledge that scores of researchers have generated during the last two decades. Anybody who is lost in that corporate jargon in leading the change should take a look at how some of the best experts think about educational change (www.aera.net/Educational_Change_SIG_Lead_the_Change.htm).

I think we need to rethink a couple of things. First, we don’t necessarily need new schools like charter schools to develop innovative educational changes in our school systems. First and foremost we need less standardization and testing in our schools. What we need more is flexibility, educational leadership, and trust in schools and teachers. Charter schools and other forms of alternative governance may have their place as educational choice but not as a solution to the system-wide problem. Research evidence of the impact of Swedish Free schools tells the same: Some schools may do better but the systems becomes more inequitable.

Then, we should make better use of educational research and all those pedagogical innovations that have been developed during the last century or so. I think the real problem is that in education we tend to develop innovation after innovation without really solving the problem of implementation. We know enough about powerful teaching, purposeful assessment, effective schools, and insightful leadership to make our public school systems work better. Much of this knowledge has been produced, ironically, by American researchers and innovators starting from John Dewey in early 20^th century. It is professional knowledge with moral purpose that will eventually make our school better.

In FINNISH LESSONS: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? I conclude that rather than introducing sequential educational revolutions, Finnish education policy has been built upon periodic change and systemic leadership led by commonly accepted values and shared social vision that resonate closely with contemporary ideas of sustainable educational change. Importantly, the main features for developing a equitable, high-performing education system are similar to those underlying the social and economic transformation of Finland into a welfare state and a competitive knowledge society. It is, therefore, difficult to identify particular reforms or innovations per se that served as driving forces in raising the level and quality of Finnish education.

It is necessary to identify broader policies – and especially how different public sector policies are interconnected with the education system. It is also essential to emphasize that although Finland has been called ‘a model pupil’ in listening to the policy advice from the international organizations, especially the OECD and the European Union, the Finnish education system has remained quite uninfected to viruses of what is often called the global education reform movement or GERM. And the reason for that is clear: professional strength and moral health of Finnish schools.

GERM has emerged since the 1980s and has increasingly become adopted as a educational reform orthodoxy within many education systems throughout the world, including in the U.S., England, Australia and some transition countries. Tellingly, GERM is often promoted through the interests of international development agencies and private enterprises through their interventions in national education reforms and policy formulation.

Since the 1980s, at least five globally common features of education policies and reform principles have been employed to try to improve the quality of education and fix the apparent problems in public education systems.

First is standardization of education. Outcomes-based education reform became popular in the 1980s, followed by standards-based education policies in the 1990s, initially within Anglo-Saxon countries. These reforms, quite correctly, shifted the focus of attention to educational outcomes, i.e. student learning and school performance. Consequently, a widely accepted – and generally unquestioned – belief among policy-makers and education reformers is that setting clear and sufficiently high performance standards for schools, teachers, and students will necessarily improve the quality of expected outcomes. Enforcement of external testing and evaluation systems to assess how well these standards have been attained emerged originally from standards-oriented education policies. Since the late 1980s centrally prescribed curricula, with detailed and often ambitious performance targets, frequent testing of students and teachers, and test-based accountability have characterized a homogenization of education policies worldwide, promising standardized solutions at increasingly lower cost for those desiring to improve school quality and effectiveness.

A second common feature of GERM is focus on core subjects in school, in other words, on literacy and numeracy, and in same case science. Basic student knowledge and skills in reading, writing and mathematics are elevated as prime targets and indices of education reforms. As a consequence of accepting international student assessment surveys, such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, as criteria of good educational performance, reading, mathematical and scientific literacy have now become the main determinants of perceived success or failure of pupils, teachers, schools, and entire education systems. This is happening on the expense of social studies, arts, music and physical education that re diminishing in many school curricula.

The third characteristic that is easily identifiable in global education reforms is the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals. This minimizes experimentation, reduces use of alternative pedagogical approaches, and limits risk-taking in schools and classrooms. Research on education systems that have adopted policies emphasizing achievement of predetermined standards and prioritized core subjects, suggests that teaching and learning are narrower and teachers focus on ‘guaranteed content’ to best prepare their students for tests. The higher the test-result stakes, the lower the degree of freedom in experimentation and risk-taking in classroom learning.

The fourth globally observable trend in educational reform is use of corporate management models as a main driver of improvement. This process where educational policies and ideas are lent and borrowed from business world is often motivated by national hegemony and economic profit, rather than by moral goals of human development. Faith in educational change through innovations brought and sold from outside the system undermines two important elements of successful educational change: First, it often limits the role of national policy development and enhancement of an education system’s own capabilities to maintain renewal, and perhaps more important. Second, it paralyzes teachers’ and schools’ attempts to learn from the past and also to learn from each other.

The fifth global trend is adoption of test-based accountability policies for schools. In doing so school performance – especially raising student achievement – is closely tied to processes of accrediting, promoting, inspecting, and, ultimately, rewarding or punishing schools and teachers. Success or failure of schools and teachers is often determined by standardized tests and external teacher evaluations that devote attention to limited aspects of schooling, such as student achievement in mathematical and reading literacy, exit examination results, or intended teacher classroom behavior.

None of these elements of GERM have been adopted in Finland in the ways that they have within education policies of many other nations, for instance, in the United States and England. This, of course, does not imply that education standards, focus on basic knowledge and skills, or accountability should be avoided in seeking better educational performance. Nor does it suggest that these ideas were completely absent in education development in Finland. But, perhaps, it does imply that a good education system can be created using alternative approaches and policies orthogonal to those commonly found and promoted in global education policy markets. This is why I wrote Finnish Lessons.

By contrast, typical features of teaching and learning in Finland are:

• high confidence in teachers and principals as high professionals;
• encouraging teachers and students to try new ideas and approaches, in other words, to put curiosity, imagination and creativity at the heart of learning; and
• purpose of teaching and learning is to pursue happiness of learning and cultivating development of whole child.

The best way to avoid infections of GERM is to prepare teachers and leaders well. In Finland all teachers and principals must have masters degree in education or in the field of their subject. This ensures that they are good in what they do in classrooms or staffrooms, and also understand how teaching and learning in their schools can be improved. School principals are also experts of educational change and can therefore protect their schools and school system from harmful germs.

These lessons from Finland help you to kill 99.9% of GERMs.

When people are asked what they associate with Finland, most still say: “Nokia.” According to Finnish diplomats next comes “Education.” In the end of 2011 Nokia still is the leading mobile communication company, with about one third share of all mobile phones sold in the world. The global reputation of Finnish education, in turn, draws primarily from peruskoulu, a 9-year comprehensive school model launched in 1972 that has become the bedrock of all other forms of education in Finland and one of th top-performing school systems in the world.

Both Nokia and the Finnish public school system have roots dating back to the 1860s. The story of Nokia begins in 1865. Fredrik Idestam, mining engineer and founder of Nokia Company, brought a new paper manufacturing process from Germany to Finland and built a wood pulp mill on the banks of the Tammerkoski River near the city of Tampere. Idestam is often referred to as the father of Finland’s paper industry.

The Finnish school system evolved at the same time. Pastor Uno Cygnaeus, a student of my grandfather’s grandfather’s father, Professor Carl Reinhold Sahlberg, and a travel companion of his son Reinhold Ferdinand to Sitka (Alaska) in the 1840s, was sent to Germany and Switzerland by the Finnish Senate in the 1850s to find out how public education in Finland should be organized in Finland. Cygnaeus recommended that the first teacher preparation seminar, based on what he saw in Switzerland, should be established in Jyväskylä, Finland. He also advised that the Finnish Folk School, as it was called, should be based on practical learning and the development of manual skills for all students, boys and girls. The first Finnish public school meant for all children was established also in Jyväskylä in 1866 following the model of German education. The pedagogy of Cygnaeus significantly shaped the future of public education and he has come to be known as the father of Finnish public school.

Nokia grew quickly and expanded its business from forestry to rubber works, cables and electronics. When European telecommunications markets were deregulated in the 1970s and 1980s and mobile networks became global, Nokia quickly took the leading role with some iconic innovations: The first international mobile phone network was built in 1981 and the first new technology GSM (global system for mobile communications) phone call was made by Nokia in 1991. Nokia soon became the world leader of the mobile telephone industry by the end of that decade. This transformation of Nokia happened in a relatively short period of time and is often cited as an example of dramatic organizational transformation.

Education in Finland has gone through a similar transformation, as is described in my book Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?. The transformation of the education system in Finland that kicked off from the introduction of the new peruskoulu was fundamental and rapid. It led to the immediate expansion of upper-secondary education and created pathways to higher education for two thirds of the age cohorts by the end of the 1990s. Building on the ideas of upgrading teacher education to the master’s degree level in universities, abolishing streaming and ability grouping, and investing early on in special education and student counseling positively affected the quality of education in peruskoulu and beyond. As a consequence, by the end of the 1990s, Finnish peruskoulu became the world leader in reading, science, and math. This shift from an elitist and socially divided system of education into the most equitable public education system in the world happened in such a short time that it has been frequently cited as an example of dramatic organizational transformation.

Smart phone sales became the weak component of Nokia in 2010. Nokia continued to make mobile phones that were smarter but they were also more complicated for users. These new products were not able to compete in North America with the iPhone and other hand-held media devices that could do more than traditional phones. Analysis of what went wrong at Nokia reveals some telling aspects of leadership that may resonate with education sector management later on. Some observers argued that 10 years ago Nokia had reached a state of complacency with its domination of the world’s mobile phone market. There were those who believed that Nokia had lost much of its creative capacity to come up with new ideas when set goals had been realized.

This is a also potential risk for the Finnish education system as it moves on as a celebrated model of public education in the world. The fourth PISA study in 2009 conveyed the first signs of possible turn of the course of the Finnish comprehensive school, although the overall performance is still excellent. Certain complacency and inability to build joint and inspiring vision of the future in Finnish education will serve as factors that inevitably lead the system into trouble.

Foreign visitors often ask where all the pedagogical ideas and innovations come from in Finnish education. The response is surprising: The source of many pedagogical innovations and research evidence for change are imported from elsewhere. Education in Finland depends on a truly open-source platform also because domestic educational change-knowledge generation is modest in international comparison. In 2009 Nokia spent 8.5 billion U.S. dollars on its own research and development work, with every third staff member employed as a researcher. Finland’s educational research and development hasn’t got necessary resource to keep up educational renewal. Therefore international partnerships are more important to the Finns than ever before.

Global benchmarking of education systems has radically changed the geography of educational change in the world. Ten years ago, the epicenter of high educational performance and innovation was the Anglo-Saxon part of the world: United Kingdom, Australia, United States, New Zealand and Canada. Many of these countries then believed that their education system is among the best in world. Now several Asian countries and Finland are in the limelight. It is not a great surprise then that most OECD countries today state in their education strategies the aim to be among the top five education nations in the future. This standardized global race for excellence and its consequences to practice is the most pressing issue of educational change today as I see the situation.

The race to the top of the global education rankings inevitably leads to governing education by statistics and numbers rather than human values such as social justice or improvement of peoples lives. It creates education strategies that typically focus on raising the bar and narrowing the achievement gaps. Then, (1) clear targets are set for student performance, (2) standardized tests measure students’ and teachers’ performance, (3) achievements are rewarded and often sanctioned, and (4) teacher and school rankings are made public. This has no doubt increased competition, standardized solutions, and market-based models to achieve these goals. At the same time, educational research and news reports show the unintended consequences of this trend: narrowing curricula, increased teaching to tests, demoralized teachers, widespread educational corruption (e.g. correction of students’ bubble sheets in Atlanta and D.C. and teacher-authorized cheating across Indonesia), and increasing stress and mental health problems among young people. All of this does serious damage to already struggling education systems.

This is an important issue related to educational change because it assumes that the talent development in our modern innovation societies is about improving academic performance and basic skills as we have done in the past. It is ironic, actually, that education reformers call for more parental choice but students’ achievements would be judged using the same academic standardized criteria without any choice for students themselves. I don’t see room for much innovation in that. Therefore I don’t think that this would increase flexibility, risk-taking and creativity in schools that are the key conditions for making schools places where each young individual could explore and discover their own talents.

As a frequent visitor to your country and an admirer of its cultural richness, I was delighted to read of your recent appointment as minister of education. In your previous job, you often voiced your concerns about the state of your country’s education system. I have also read your writings where you call into question old ways of thinking about education and are highly critical of how education policy has been put into practice in your country. In a recent interview you spoke passionately of your sense of frustration and even anger that past efforts to improve the education system for your country’s young people have achieved so little. You also expressed your concern that international cooperation has not helped find lasting solutions to the most pressing problems in education.

In my time, I have met many people in your situation. As you will soon see for yourself, institutions, interest groups, business people and individuals, among them your colleagues, students, teachers and parents, will all come to you with their suggestions about what you should do. Some will come bearing promises of political or financial support for your work, others will offer to help you fix those parts of the education system that work improperly. Then there are those who will want your support for their own political agendas.

Two considerations may help shape your response. First, it is vital to be absolutely clear about the exact nature of the problems facing your education system. In your previous job, you declared that “education is not just an important issue, it is the issue because the future of our people and our culture are at stake.” But giving education top priority does not constitute a diagnosis. Second, you may find it useful to think about the education system and its problems in the same way a doctor thinks about a patient. If someone has a serious illness, diagnosis is not always easy even for the most experienced of doctors. A correct diagnosis often begins with the realization that the patient is not suffering from one ailment but rather a complex mix of ailments. There is no need to worry about how complex these problems are, but you must avoid being influenced by the urgent nature of the problem so that your diagnosis misses the real cause of the sickness and ends up only treating the minor symptoms.

Another important question for you is to what extent will you and your team be influenced by fashionable ideas on education reform that have become common currency at international conferences and workshops. Will you be able to convince your partners, and your own citizens, that the problems of your education system cannot be solved by simple “solutions,” like turning around a poorly performing firm or fixing a window? Before giving my opinion, I would like to offer personal observations about some of the current trends in education. There are many ways to describe global education policy trends; I will highlight only a few major ones, both desired and worrying.

• Education policies in many countries, on paper at least, value learning over teaching. Many countries have redesigned school curricula and the content of teaching according to descriptions of the knowledge and skills students must acquire rather than what teachers must teach.
• Education reforms in many countries aim to improve education for all, not just for some. This principle has become more important as social and cultural diversity in many countries has increased.
• Believe it or not, schooling in many countries is becoming like a market commodity. This trend is based on the assumption that competition and information are the primary drivers of improvement. The logic is very simple; competition is the driving force behind efficiency and economic growth, therefore competition between schools and students must be the best way of improving student performance, the corporate school reformers think.
• An economic rationale and the preparation of individuals for workforce and international competition are commonly cited reasons for educational reform. Education, as you well realize, is, indeed, an important driver of a country’s economic welfare. But an interesting shift in education policy discourse has occurred over the last 30 years. Social promotion and individual well-being appear less often than before in contemporary education policy agendas. If I, or better yet, you, examine education policies in randomly selected countries, you and I would readily note a change in how the need for education reform is expressed.

So if education policy themes are common to many countries across the world, is this the result of a process of mutual learning between the nations’ education communities? I would suggest a different metaphor to explain the global transfer of education policies. But first, let me explain why I think learning is difficult for governments, and even more so, dare I say, for individual ministries as they suffer from specific problems that often prevent them from learning from others. You, and certainly your advisors have access to global education data and to some of the most brilliant researchers on education.

You frequently interact with other ministers and their education experts and researchers. But at the end of the day, you are dealing with political issues, since most of education reform is all about politics. Technical rationality and problem solving – familiar to anyone who works in public administration – rather than posing problems take up the time of most ministers and their staff. However genuine learning thrives on the exchange of ideas, innovation and opportunities for reflection. Access to superficial information and ideas through the media and the Internet often acts as a substitute for real learning.

In your statement of intentions as education minister, you suggest that the work of your predecessors with corporate school reformers, including venture philanthropists and media moguls, has not always helped your fellow citizens understand the fundamental problems facing education. Indeed, they may even have triggered new ones, as you claim. What actually happens is that ideas are borrowed from corporate world then applied to education system as though the context, people, teachers and pupils were all interchangeable.

I suggested to earlier that it could be helpful to think about the education system and its problems in the same way a doctor thinks about a patient. Although this may seem distasteful, there may be similarities between how education policies and diseases spread. Epidemiology uses three terms – the agent, the host and the environment – to describe how severe infections move from place to place. People become ill as a result of interactions between all three. Not everyone gets infected, even though they may have been in the same place as someone who actually caught the disease, because some people have more resistance to the same agent than others.

Just for the sake of interest, may I invite you to consider how the global education reform movement behaves like a germ in an epidemic. Just like diseases, education policy ideas spread quickly around the world but whether they “infect” governments or not depends on the needs for reform and the level of awareness of the education expert communities in each country. Several governments may be infected by the same germ but the severity of the infection will vary greatly.

I would like to offer you two moral imperatives you may find useful in your work and these are prevention and repair.  What I mean may become clearer if you think about these two words in the context of an epidemic. When you are worried about your child’s health in the midst of a dangerous flu epidemic, the first thing you think about is how to prevent him or her becoming infected. Only if the worst happens do you look for a cure, namely the repair. Simple enough. But I dare say that up to now, education policies in both your country and mine have concentrated much more on repairing than prevention. With health care reforms, in contrast, the idea of prevention has long been seen as a cheaper and more effective alternative to the cure. I feel sure you will agree with me on this.

What you need to know as you move the emphasis from repairing to prevention in educational reform is that prevention has two separate but interconnected strands. First, education policies must effectively prevent your schools, teachers and students from getting into serious trouble, such as students dropping out due to lack of motivation or good teachers leaving their jobs due to disrespectful working conditions. Second, you must be sceptical and question the policy ideas and information that the global education reform movement will bring to you and your staff. The best preventive strategy, in my modest opinion, is ensuring that your best technical education experts available are constantly advising you and collaborating with you – and, of course, that you carefully listen to and try to understand their suggestions.

The aim of this letter is to wish you good luck in this important mission. It is also to provide some ideas on how to be well equipped to receive, process and act upon the flood of education policy advice that will reach you through many channels. You may view policy development and education reform in your country through an epidemiologist’s eyes; an awareness of the role of agents, hosts and environments related to improving the performance of your education system. Another strategy might be to work like a medical doctor who diagnoses already-occurring illnesses and set about to cure them.

But there is another, even better, strategy – becoming a serious leader in education, someone who can show the way and install an authentic passion for getting involved in education reform in your citizens. You may wonder – how do I go about energizing public thinking on education to strengthen its “resistance to infection” by policy ideas that may be popular but are not effective? What I am suggesting, to be sure, is not easy. However, encouraging participation by your citizens can only make your education system stronger and more responsive.

I also encourage you to engage in mutual learning with your colleagues in other countries. As you have stated many times, there is no point in blindly copying policies and ideas from other education systems. The less your education policy changes resemble an epidemic and the more they are the result of mutual learning, the closer you will be to the goals you have set yourself.

With these thoughts, let me wish you good luck once more and assure you that I will be following your leadership in education with great interest.

Pasi Sahlberg

School improvement activist, Helsinki

Surprisingly, educational change in Finland has been studied more by foreigners than by the Finns themselves. Analysis by Andy Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley, Linda Darling-Hammond, Sam Abrams, Diane Ravitch, Tony Wagner and several international journalists have helped us to understand the nature of whole system reform in Finland. These scholars emphasize the importance of making the entire system work well, not just it’s ‘output part’, e.g. early childhood development, well-being of children in school, and professionalism within education craft. Journalists often point out to the parts of the system that seem to work well. Rather than simply listing the obvious elements of educational success in Finland – good teachers, inspiring curricula, and sustainable leadership – I would look for these major lessons beyond those factors of change. Let me mention three of them here.

I think the first lesson that Finland offers to other educational reformers is that whole-system reform can be successful only if it is inspiring to all involved and thereby energizes people to work together for intended improvement. I often use the thinking of Martin Luther King as an example of an inspiring dream that moves people. Dr. King’s dream was not that his country would have a 5-percent annual economic growth rate. That wouldn’t have inspired many people. Similarly, making a country number one in PISA rankings doesn’t excite too many educators. The Finnish Dream since the 1970s has been to provide a good public school for every child in the country. This goal inspired many and was a source of energy that was needed to push through necessary political and educational changes. It was powerful enough to bring different people and political groups to join forces for fulfillment of this dream. The Finnish Dream looks like the dream of John F. Kennedy in 1961: to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It was challenging, required hard work and political consensus, but in the end rewarded the entire nation through its outcomes.

Second, some observers have concluded that the secret of Finnish educational success is its well-trained teachers. Yes, it is true that teachers and leaders have higher academic education in Finland than in many other countries. But that alone is not the way to whole-system change. What is significant in the Finnish approach is that it has focused on improving the professional knowledge and skills of teachers and leaders as a collective group, not only as individuals, which is the common practice in many current reform programs elsewhere. Finnish teachers learn to work together with other teachers. Finnish education system development has systematically focused on improving schools as social organizations. This includes leadership development that is, according to external reviewers, aimed at enhancing shared and distributed models of leadership. In brief, Finnish educational change is driven by building social capital within the system in concert with individual professional growth.

Third, I think the Finnish example – together with lessons from Canada, Singapore, Japan and Korea – of successful transformation of an education system shows other countries what could be the wrong drivers in educational change that Michael Fullan has recently written about. In my book Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland? I talk about the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) that has been much less successful than what Finland and the other successful reformers mentioned above have been able to accomplish with almost the opposite solutions. The best-performing educational systems all have built their change strategies on systemic approaches that rely on collective professional and institutional (or social capital) development, enhanced conditions for teaching and learning for all, and more equal educational opportunities within their education systems. Countries that have been infected by GERM drive their education reforms by piecemeal changes, stronger accountability for teachers, faith in individual capacity building, and the power of technology over humans as keys to turning around unsatisfactory school systems. Michael Fullan has argued that “there is no way that … nationwide goals will be met with the strategies being used” in the ongoing education reform in the U.S or Australia. “Finnish Lessons” suggests that these are not the right drivers for whole-system reforms. They have never been used in Finland or in any other successful education system as the main strategy of change.

We should not ask whether Finnish educational model would work in the United States or anywhere else. The question should be: What can we learn from the Finnish experience as high performer and successful reformer? The main lesson from Finland is that there is another way to transform current education systems than that based on standardization, testing, accountability and competition. Finland also shows that we don’t need to rely on corporate school reform models to achieve our goals. Finnish lesson is that good policies and overall well-being of people, including poverty reduction, are the corner stones of sustainable educational success.

Many are fascinated by the fact that Finland has been able to transform its educational system from something elitist, unknown, and inefficient into a paragon of good learning, equity and efficiency. Foreign visitors have been particularly surprised to find out that Finland doesn’t employ any corporate-style education reforms or allow private money to pay for education of its children. Many wonder how teaching has become the number one profession among young Finns—above medicine and law—and how primary teacher education in Finnish universities is one of the most competitive choices of study. Some still ask: Can Finland be a model for educational change in other countries?

There are those who doubt that Finland has much relevance to other educational systems. The most commonly presented argument is that since Finland is so exceptional, it hardly provides anything meaningful to the United States, England, Australia, France, or other much larger and different nations. Two points are often emphasized when the relevance of Finland as a model for educational change is considered.

First, Finland is culturally and ethnically rather homogeneous and thus too far apart from United States, for example. Fair enough. But the same holds for Japan, Shanghai or Korea that are also used as inspirations for education reforms. The proportion of foreign-born citizens in Finland is barely 5% in 2011 and the number of non-Finnish speaking citizens about 10%. The largest minorities are Russian, Estonian, and Somali. The diversification of Finnish society since the mid-1990s has been the fastest in Europe. Ethnic diversity concentrates in urban districts; by 2020 the capital area is expected to have about one-fifth of its students with immigrant background.

Second, Finland is considered to be smallish, and therefore not a good model for whole-system reform for large nations in North America or elsewhere. Population in Finland is today 5.5 million. It is about the population of Minnesota in the United States or Victoria in Australia, and just slightly more than the size of Alberta in Canada or Nord-Pas de Calais in France. Indeed, about 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland. These include the states of Maryland, Colorado, Oregon, and Connecticut. The states of Washington, Indiana, and Massachusetts are also smallish and close to Finland in size. In Australia, only New South Wales has a slightly larger population than Finland; all other Australian states are smaller. In Canada, only Ontario is significantly larger in population (and land area) than Finland; all other provinces are similar in size. All these jurisdictions have freedom to set their own educational policies and conduct reforms as they think best. Therefore experiences from an educational system of the size of Finland should be particularly interesting and relevant to them.

Finally, one point of view is that academic achievement tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), focus on areas too narrow to capture the whole spectrum of school education, and thus ignore social skills, moral development, creativity or digital literacy as important outcomes of public education for all. This skeptical group argues that chosen measurement methodologies in current international tests favor Finland because they match better with the culture of teaching in Finland. These include both Finnish and foreign scientists and experts. Recently, Harvard professor Howard Gardner told his audience in Finland that it is wise to treat these student assessment studies with caution. He contended that results in the studies like these always depend on the subjects of study, i.e. selected methodologies and overall point of views.

We all are different and can learn from one another. An important lesson from Finland is that its educational success is a result of deliberate and continuous learning from other education systems, their practitioners, policy-makers and researchers. Most of the innovations in Finnish classrooms are initially from the United States, England, Germany or Canada. If Finland had used the excuse that these countries are irrelevant as sources for its educational improvement because they are too different, I wouldn’t be writing this blog now. Yes, Finland is different but there are many interesting lessons to other countries in the way Finland provides good public education for every child.

“The Finnish Way” of educational change is unique in many ways. Some observers in the United States confess that their current education reform policies are not only different from the Finnish ones but they are orthogonal to them. During the last decade, American schools have been steered by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and more recently by the Race to the Top (RTTT) program that both adopt similar logic of educational change. These include externally mandated teaching standards with intensified testing of students, stronger accountability for schools (in NCLB) and for teachers (in RTTT), increasing choice for parents and thereby tightening competition between schools. In these ‘reforms’ technology is often seen as an optimal (and most efficient) instructional solution to educational improvement. These drivers of whole-system improvement in the United States and in other parts of the world present a piecemeal reform strategy that is steered from the top to the bottom and therefore often remains foreign to the practitioners in schools.

Many educators and leaders in the United States are looking at the Finnish Way of education reform because it has proved to work over the years with fundamentally different policies to what educational reformers believe to be the key to better schools. It is interesting that many of the high-performing education systems in the world today rely on similar drivers of change to those employed in Finland. Singapore, Korea, Shanghai, China and Canada’s province of Alberta all assume that only by better engaging teachers in educational reforms, investing in social capital development within the teaching profession, enhancing equity and equality of educational opportunity, and improving school leadership will student learning improve. All these jurisdictions place creativity and innovation at the heart of what they call ‘improvement’.

The Finnish education system has progressed steadily since the 1980s because we prepare teachers to improve their students’ learning as well as their own work in collaboration with their colleagues. We see teachers as knowledge workers, not technicians who implement instructions or standards mandated by someone else. The Finnish Way is unique also because it has been able to accomplish educational excellence and equity simultaneously. Indeed, it is interesting that none of the best education systems today has designed their education policies according to the drivers that dominate the United States education reform movement today.

The popularity of international student assessments, especially the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), allows us to compare national education systems in ways that were not possible before. These comparisons are made by looking at the national averages of 15-year-old students’ standardized test scores in reading, mathematics and science. Many countries are increasingly obsessed by such rankings.

These league tables let policy makers benchmark their school system not only across countries but also within them. Administrators and principals in the UK, for instance, can assess the strengths of their schools by comparing England to Wales, or Scotland to Northern Ireland. As the stakes – both political and economic – get higher, the temptation to create policies and employ practices that help to boost the test scores is growing. As a consequence, teachers teach to tests and schools turn away children who are not effective learners to guarantee greater success in forthcoming student assessments.

The comparative analysis of education policies in participating countries has received less attention. For example, one may ask whether the evidence from PISA supports the assumption that educational reforms based on competition, choice and testing have improved student learning in education systems that adopted these policies in the 1990s. If it doesn’t, this should lead us to question the validity of these principles as a basis for reform strategies.

English education policies rely on more choice, tougher competition, intensified standardised testing and stronger school accountability. These are the key elements of the policies that were dominant in the United States, New Zealand, Japan and parts of Canada and Australia a decade or so ago. Available PISA data reveals the impact of these education policies on students’ learning between 2000 and 2009. The overall learning trend in all these countries is consistently declining.

Many governments are taking note of the 2009 PISA results, but they are rather selective in reporting of the education systems that are doing well in PISA. Finland has been one of the few consistently high performing systems in PISA’s 10-year history. Significantly, Finland has not employed any of the market-based educational reform ideas in the ways that they have been incorporated into the education policies of many other nations, including the United States and England.

A typical feature of teaching and learning in Finland is high confidence in teachers and principals as respected professionals. Another involves encouraging teachers and students to try new ideas and approaches rather than teaching them to master fixed attainment targets. This makes school a creative and inspiring place for students and teachers. These policies are a result of three decades of systematic, mostly intentional development that has created a culture of diversity, trust and respect within Finnish society in general, and within its education system in particular. The result is a cocktail of good ideas from other countries and smart practices from the tradition of teaching and learning in Finland.

The Finnish education system has evolved from being barely mediocre in international standards in the 1980s to a celebrated model two decades later. Although Finland is not included in the latest McKinsey report in the sample of “sustained improvers”, it is noted as the only one to have “excellent” education system. What distinguishes Finland from other nations is that this high level of educational performance has occurred alongside a system-wide equity in education.

The secret of education in Finland is that it brings together government policy, professional involvement and public engagement around an inspiring social and educational vision of equity, prosperity and creativity in a world of greater inclusiveness, security and humanity. This is also known as the Fourth Way of change as Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley have eloquently described in their recent book with that same name.

Although Finland is different from other countries, there is a lot they can learn from each other. Prime Minister David Cameron hinted recently that Europe should learn from its Northern Alliance referring to the Nordic countries. Experience from Finland shows that through high quality teachers committed to and capable of creating deep and broad teaching and learning it is possible to have powerful, responsible and inspiring schools in an increasingly self-regulating profession. In Finland teachers design and pursue high quality learning and shared goals. They improve their schools continuously through professional teamwork and networks without being disturbed by standardized teaching, frequent testing or competition over resources and higher rankings.

The roots of our current education system date back to the 1960s when it became clear that the country needed better-educated citizens if it wanted to catch up to its western neighbors in prosperity. The twin imperative for education reform was thus both social and economic. The welfare state ideal required that people have equal opportunities and access to basic services, such as education, health and employment. Economic imperative shifted the focus from industrial skills to knowledge-based skills already seen as a condition for sustained economic progress in Finland.

It is necessary to note that Finland never intended to be a world leader in education. That wouldn’t have been an inspiring and engaging vision the country needed to reform its inequitable and traditional educational system to drive necessary economic and social changes. The goal was to secure equal educational opportunities for all Finnish children until the end of compulsory schooling at the age of 16, to expand access to secondary and higher education after compulsory school, and to introduce new curricula that aim at development of the whole child and overall well-being of each individual. The key drivers of that whole-system change were equity and equality of educational opportunities, not raising standards or closing (academic) achievement gaps.

To implement this reform in the 1970s, the Finnish educators realized that only a highly educated teaching force would be able to cope with all the challenges that the new school would bring. The key decision was to make teaching a high-status profession by mandating that all teachers earn master’s degrees and do so in substantial programs integrating content, theory, and practice. Primary school teacher education thereby became part of academic education, and students were expected to master scientific knowledge and research methodology as in any other field of higher education. Soon teachers began to gain respect.  And the popularity of teaching, especially in primary schools, quickly increased. Two decades into this reform, teaching had become the most favored profession among Finnish high school graduates. If teaching had not become such a desired career among Finnish youth, the history of Finnish education would be written very differently.