The Big Picture

One of the benefits of spending a whole week doing nothing but learn about a single foreign education system is that it forces you to consider the totality of things in a way that's actually very difficult in one's home environment. For example, I spend very little energy wondering how America's schools could be improved if we implemented a financing system whereby the federal government provides 80 percent of school resources, rather than the 10 percent it actually provides, because the odds of such a policy coming to exist in my lifetime are very low. That's just not how we roll in the United States. But of course the basic finance structure does matter, a lot, and--crucially--affects how much other things matter. Every piece of the system is contingent on other pieces and the overall design. 

This also underscores the absurdity of education policy arguments that go something like this: Country A is kicking our tail on some agreed-upon measure of achievement. Country A has Policy X, which is very different than our policy. Therefore, implementation of Policy X here in America will improve achievement. People say stuff like this all the time, and their arguments are generally given a lot of weight.

But they shouldn't be, at least not if they're presented in such in simplistic way. Take, for example, the issue of school time. There's a growing movement in America to invest a lot of resources in expanding the school day and otherwise increasing the amount of time students are educated. Inevitably, these discussions come around to the fact that countries like Korea and Japan have much longer school years than do we, provide all kinds of after-school tutoring, and generally do much than we do on international tests, particularly in math. Malcolm Gladwell made a version of this argument in his recent book and the school time people trot it out at every opportunity. It's one of those little nuggets of conventional education policy wisdom that everyone knows.

Yet two days ago I sat in a conference room at the Finnish National Board of Education and listened to an education official explain that Finland, which also kicks our tail in math, spends less time on math instruction, both in school and out of school, than does Japan, Korea, other Scandinavian countries, and the OECD average. And Finland has the highest math scores in the world. She didn't present this fact as a puzzle; she offered it as evidence of why Finland does so well. "Learning is efficient in Finland," she said, and this was her proof.

Does this mean that the school time movement is a fraud? Of course not. Long school days and years may indeed be good for Japan, given the nature of Japan, the Japanese, and the rest of the Japanese education system. It may be a good idea in the United States, or some parts of it, given who we are and all the other things we do. Or it may not; there's no way to know without understanding all of the parts and how they fit together. More on those parts and the big picture later this week and next.