Foundation and Earth
Matt Yglesias writes:
Obviously, you don’t build a Finnish level of educational performance without the foundation provided by the egalitarian Nordic social/political/economic model. And you don’t build a Nordic welfare state without some taxes.
Not surprisingly, I don’t think this is obvious at all. What happens when you break down the results by historical disadvantage? As Matt noted, the children of immigrants to Finland tend to have a harder time in Finnish schools.
The early education system is, in principle, a huge opportunity in terms of hopes of building a successful system of integration and assimilation. Kids come in to Finnish early education at very young ages — sometimes just one or two years old — at a time when their linguistic capabilities are developing rapidly and at a point where foreign language acquisition is relatively easy. Thus, this is a great opportunity to teach Finnish to foreign-born children or to the children of foreign-born (most often Russian or Somali) parents. One interesting element to this is that Finnish center-based early childhood services are universally available but by no means mandatory. Many children are taken care of at home or by relatives. And since unemployment is higher among immigrant communities and immigrants also tend to come from families with more traditional gender/family ideas the objective need for child care services in the immigrant community isn’t necessarily enormous.
Similarly, educational outcomes among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. — a good proxy for the population that has not been subject to serious and sustained discrimination — are strikingly similar to what you find in Finland. Yet there is a great deal of wage dispersion among non-Hispanic whites.
This isn’t a flawless comparison, to be sure. One could just as easily point to Singapore, a highly diverse state that is in the same weight class population-wise as Finland and that achieves stellar educational outcomes.
I feel a little silly getting into this. Matt is making a lot of great points on Finland. The point I most strongly endorse is that schools are only part of a larger, complicated picture that affects educational outcomes, something I drone on about in the aforelinked post. I just think it’s not obvious that Nordic social democracy is the essential foundation to Finnish levels of educational performance, given that there are other populations that get to roughly the same destination in very different ways. (One could just as easily say that Nordic family structure, i.e., the far higher number of intact families, is the essential foundation. But I won’t! I’m trying not to be polemical.)
I fear that some people will draw glib conclusions from Finland’s performance, e.g., mandatory schooling starts later on in Finland in the U.S. — so we should forget about universal kindergarten! I mean, that’s ridiculous.
Will Wilkinson notes this very smart article on teacher performance. It’s worth a look.
Right. Please forgive the self-linking….
(Or delete if you can’t!)
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/08/vouchers.html
[revised by the editors to make the link linkier]
— Freddie · Dec 10, 06:37 PM · #
“Nordic family structure”?
— matt · Dec 10, 07:39 PM · #
“Nordic family structure” = two-thirds of Swedish kids live with both biological parents at 15 vs. half in the United States. Similar numbers obtain elsewhere in western and northern Europe.
— Reihan · Dec 10, 08:43 PM · #
Freddie:
That was a terrific post, thanks for linking to it.
The centrality of selection bias, that can not be corrected for by using regression or similar techniques, in evaluating almost any government program is hard to over-state. This is one of the reasons that random control trials using lotteries for vouchers are so critical. They are the only way to properly adjust for this.
As a greneral statement, the results are about what Steve Sailer asserts from experience in your blog comments: the gains from moving a student (at least one who is in the self-selected group of applicants to the lottery) is positive, but small. Advocates of school deregulation (like me) need to be serious about this evidence if they are to be taken seriously in this debate.
— Jim Manzi · Dec 10, 11:26 PM · #
Freddy, Jim is right, that was a really good post.
Jim, the small gains from moving to public to private school would disappear if private schools were actually open to all. The advantages of private schools are, as Freddy points out, that the disruptive and difficult to educate students are in public school.
When I was getting my teaching certificate I was taught that the ideal mix of low income and middle class students was about 1/4 to 3/4. In that environment there is enough resources (reading tutors, psychologists, social workers, aids, mentors, etc…) to meet the needs of the low income students. They also get the benefit of the peer pressure exerted by their middle class classemates who culturally usually have more fucntional attitudes towards, and expectations of, education. The 1/4 to 3/4 mix also reduces the classroom disrutption which large populations of lower income students usually brings. Disruption of class time is one of the biggest cause of educational failure. THe teacher spends all his time on the management of four or five or whatever kids and the non-disruptive just sit there. It’s very hard to teach or learn in those conditions. Most teachers get burned out. That’s why most everyone wants to teach in the suburbs or at private schools.
In Madison, the city governemnt ha been talking about mitigating what it calls pockets of poverty. One reason is that if low income students were more spread out throught he city, then educational outcomes would improve. It sounds like a good idea, but has proven impossible to do anything about so far.
I think that instead of vouchers, charter schools with standards and financial support from the government is probably the best hope to improve the outcomes for low income kids. Charter schools instigated by the community to serve the communities kids would feel more owned by the community and could be designed to meet their particular kids needs. You have to get the whole community involved or it deosn’t work. The attitudes of the parents is one of the main reasons middle class kids do better in school that low income kids. Middle class parents believe in school, becasue they have seen that it works, and that belief is forced down on to the kid.
But there have to be standards, oversite, and assistance. It is very difficult to create a school. Some people think that any smart person, good manager, or whatever can step off the street and do it, but the results of the past decade or so show that that is very much not the case.
— cw · Dec 11, 07:02 PM · #
It certainly makes a ton of sense to me to talk about the advantage of vouchers if you are in general opposed to a system of government run schools, rather than a “private school for all” system where tax dollars are distributed to everyone with a child in order to pay for their education in a private school. But I really don’t think vouchers make sense piecemeal. I also think we should all be more honest about what we want in the long run from education in America. Abolishing public school as we know it, I think, is a principled stance. My frustration occasionally comes from the fact that people who want that are coy about it because of political pressure. And, you know, it’s tough to argue with a Trojan horse.
And thanks, guys.
— Freddie · Dec 11, 09:07 PM · #
<i>That was a terrific post, thanks for linking to it.</i>
No, it was a stupid and uninformed post, full of breezy factual claims (like how many private schools admit special ed kids) that Freddie just pulls out of thin air.
— SB · Dec 18, 09:29 PM · #