Tuition-Free College in New York State

[Jack Sawyer]

Yeah it's recently pumped loads of money into the system and completely change the way they are going about things. It's had good results for a fairly short amount of time. You'll see this type of pattern happen every 5-10 years and as soon as testing criteria starts to change they tend to start performing worse again and the countries that change their approach for the new testing criteria tend to do better etc.

Where did you get this information? Also, shouldn't any system be constantly refined and improved?

What Finland does is incredibly bad for innovation and change so they will suffer from these issues more than most other countries I would hypothesise (and what do I know?).

A good opinion to have. Time will tell if you are right.

International testing scores are also mostly complete nonsense. Places like China do brilliantly in them usually because the people that take them see them as an honour to be doing them so put more effort in and they literally stop bad places and schools taking them so the results are incredibly artificial.

One of the great points made in the video I linked above is that the students in Finland never "study for the test", unlike in other places.

And indeed, I found this article on the Chinese PISA thing, but I found no such thing indicating that the Finns are up to the same shenanigans. One of the main things about Finnish education, is that all schools are the same. There are no "better" schools, nor no "worse" schools, and this is a crucial feature of the system. This is not the case in China as you can see with this quote from the article:

If we dig deeper into the sampling, we come across another potential problem with the PISA testing: that the sampling done on mainland China (Beijing, Jiangsu, Guangdong and Shanghai) and other cities was not taken from a wide variety of schools. Rather, the very best schools were chosen and the very best students were cherry-picked from those schools.

[wufwugy]

And indeed, I found this article on the Chinese PISA thing, but I found no such thing indicating that the Finns are up to the same shenanigans. One of the main things about Finnish education, is that all schools are the same. There are no "better" schools, nor no "worse" schools, and this is a crucial feature of the system. This is not the case in China as you can see with this quote from the article:

Does anybody know the causal direction of the feature? It can be that the feature exists because the Finnish are a certain way, or it can be that the Finnish are a certain way because feature exists.

[Jack Sawyer]

Does anybody know the causal direction of the feature? It can be that the feature exists because the Finnish are a certain way, or it can be that the Finnish are a certain way because feature exists.

This article offers some insight:

https://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/806378...ools-education

Some people argue that Finland's schools aren't actually better — they're just serving a much smaller, much more homogenous population. Finland is tiny — the entire country has just 5.4 million people, fewer than New York City. About 5 percent of its residents are immigrants, much lower than the United States.

Schools in the US where most children aren't poor are actually better than low-poverty school systems in Finland. But high-poverty schools in the US struggle in part because of a toxic legacy of segregation, unequal funding, and unequal opportunity. "For a lot of kids who don't score well on these tests, you go back six generations and you have people in bondage," Jack Schneider, a historian of education, told Vox in October.

Finland, which essentially reinvented its school system from scratch in the second half of the 20th century, has none of that baggage. In some ways, the United States has two school systems — well-funded, high-performing suburban schools serving the middle class, and struggling urban school systems where students are overwhelmingly poor and from disadvantaged backgrounds. While Finland has a few schools educating low-income immigrants with an excellent track record of success, those schools are fewer and farther between than they are in the US.

[wufwugy]

This article offers some insight:

https://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/806378...ools-education

The US certainly does have two school systems (roughly speaking), though I would caution about the claims made as for why that is. The mainstream view today may say things like "legacy of segregation", but top tier thinkers like Thomas Sowell would point out that these failing communities did very well in spite of segregation and that it was after segregation ended that different nefarious policies were instituted that caused the issues we have today.

[Savy]

As for the constantly improving and changing part of your argument yeah they probably should but it's very hard to do. Places that do well tend to have a more long term educational policy and stick to it because funnily enough a plan tends to be better than flip flopping every few years like we do in the UK.

It's also quite hard to take academia which suggest changes and apply it to schools across the board. A lot of schools in the UK are pushing for "mastery" in maths which is based on foreign imports like singapore and shanghai approaches but then they half ass them, don't look at the important parts that make it work and funnily enough it won't do anything special.

[Savy]

Where did you get this information? Also, shouldn't any system be constantly refined and improved?



A good opinion to have. Time will tell if you are right.



One of the great points made in the video I linked above is that the students in Finland never "study for the test", unlike in other places.

And indeed, I found this article on the Chinese PISA thing, but I found no such thing indicating that the Finns are up to the same shenanigans. One of the main things about Finnish education, is that all schools are the same. There are no "better" schools, nor no "worse" schools, and this is a crucial feature of the system. This is not the case in China as you can see with this quote from the article:

I've spent the last year learning about education, talking to people involved in shaping education, particularly in maths in this country so they tend to be pretty aware of what's going on in the world scale.

Not studying for the test is nonsense, what you may be talking about is not teaching to a test which is also pretty much nonsense too. No matter how great your assessment processes you will have tests at the end of it which are important to teach to otherwise you won't get the results as high as you want them to be. Practice answering a certain types of phrasing of questions etc is all very important and I'm yet to see a large scale system implemented that is successful and viable economically which doesn't do tests.

Not having better or worse schools is complete shit too unless Finnland has absolutely zero social differences across the country. The idea that one school works for everyone is a lie. This can be seen pretty well with the UK academy system where lots of high flying schools have taken over poorly performing schools implemented there policies etc and made the schools much worse because funnily schools that work great for privileged high performing kids don't necessarily know how to deal with schools which have to deal with other problems such as foreign languages, high levels of deprivation, cultures who don't value education (or worse are actively against it), kids not going to school.

All schools should be up to bullshitting international tests if they aren't they aren't doing their job properly and when countries make changes these are the type of things they want to bullshit as it's an easy way of showing success.

[Jack Sawyer]

I've spent the last year learning about education, talking to people involved in shaping education, particularly in maths in this country so they tend to be pretty aware of what's going on in the world scale.

Not studying for the test is nonsense, what you may be talking about is not teaching to a test which is also pretty much nonsense too. No matter how great your assessment processes you will have tests at the end of it which are important to teach to otherwise you won't get the results as high as you want them to be. Practice answering a certain types of phrasing of questions etc is all very important and I'm yet to see a large scale system implemented that is successful and viable economically which doesn't do tests.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...55/?c=y&page=2

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...rdg1ITOT35x.99
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[Savy]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...55/?c=y&page=2

There are no standardised tests apart from one...

so yeah what I said. It may well be better, I've definitely argued it's better than most in other threads but it's hardly an ideal to look at trying to replicate. It just doesn't work like that unfortunately.

[Jack Sawyer]

Not having better or worse schools is complete shit too unless Finnland has absolutely zero social differences across the country. The idea that one school works for everyone is a lie. This can be seen pretty well with the UK academy system where lots of high flying schools have taken over poorly performing schools implemented there policies etc and made the schools much worse because funnily schools that work great for privileged high performing kids don't necessarily know how to deal with schools which have to deal with other problems such as foreign languages, high levels of deprivation, cultures who don't value education (or worse are actively against it), kids not going to school.

All schools should be up to bullshitting international tests if they aren't they aren't doing their job properly and when countries make changes these are the type of things they want to bullshit as it's an easy way of showing success.

Hmmm

Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...55/?c=y&page=2


You are calling them liars/bullshitters?

Why lie though? Isn't it the easiest thing in the world to prove?