Finland Bound

I'm leaving tomorrow for a week-long junket fact-finding mission to Finland along with some other think tank people and journalists who will be learning why the Finns are beating the world on PISA and other measures of education success. We'll be in Helsinki, so if you have any suggestions about places to go and people to see--education-related or otherwise--send me an email, kcarey at educationsector.org. And if you actually live in Helsinki, we're staying in the Sokos Hotel Vaakuna Helsinki--drinks are on me. 

One of the nice things about vacationing in visiting Finland in an official capacity is that you get invited to the Finnish embassy here in DC for a pre-trip orientation / dinner / sauna bath. The embassy is just as you'd expect, all blond wood, glass, steel, and elegant Nordic design. The dinner included meatballs and I know just enough about Finnish history not to ask if they were Swedish. Afterwards, we retired to the embassy's extensive subterranean sauna facility--the only "diplomatic sauna" in Washington, FYI--where our host, a cheerful broadcast journalist, regaled us with stories of his youth spent in a special army ranger outfit based near the Arctic Circle whose mission was to travel via cross-country skis to positions on the Eastern border and repel attacking Soviet helicopters with shoulder-fired missiles. Why this hasn't replaced the comparatively-much-less-exciting biathlon as an official Winter Olympics sport is a mystery. 

Earlier in the evening, he suggested that I should ask Finnish education officials why, if the Finns rank so high on PISA, the University of Helsinki is only the 68th best university in the world. But while I hope to learn about many things next week--early childhood education, recruiting high-quality teachers, and the Bologna process, among others--that one I already know. 

In primary and secondary education, success is defined in terms of how much students learn. We can--and do-contest the hows and whys of it, but no one really debates the principle. In higher education, by contrast, success is defined in ways that have little or nothing to do with student learning. The world rankings he cited--which place 17 American universities among the top 20--are based entirely on research measures like publications, citations and prizes. A university could literally not enroll undergraduates and it wouldn't affect their position a bit. 

OECD is now in the process of piloting a higher education version of PISA. Countries that lack world-renowned research institutions may find their standing improved when the focus shifts to student learning. But Americans won't know if our unchallenged reputation for having the world's best higher education system is deserved, because we have--sadly--chosen not to participate. I guess when one measure says you're the best, there's no reason to support any others.