Finland has very few immigrants compared to its neighbouring countries. (Many immigrants are from places like Somalia with low literacy.)
Please note that the size of organisatorical problems increase more than linearly with the number of involved people. I seriously doubt it would work to copy Scandinavian solutions to countries like the US, with more than 50 times the population...
I don't think anyone has suggested copying Scandinavian solutions to the US.
Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries.
What the article says is you can't use the differences in immigration to blanket-deny all other findings. The US and Finland have their socio-economic issues but the Finnish school system has been able to diminish their effect on education outcomes.
The effect of immigrants on average scores is (% of immigrants) x (size of individual effect). Finland has minimized (% of immigrants), not (size of individual effect).
The only lesson the US can really draw from this is that if we reduced the number of immigrants we have, our average scores would go up. So what? Raising averages due to composition changes is pointless.
> The only lesson the US can really draw from this is that if we reduced the number of immigrants we have, our average scores would go up. So what? Raising averages due to composition changes is pointless.
Nowadays, Finland has much of the same rate of immigration than US. Historically it has not been so. But today, around 20000 people move into Finland every year. Whereas the US gets a bit more than one million new inhabitants. Finland has 1/60th of the population of US. The performance is still better, though there is the same ratio of first-generation immigrants.
And I'd guess a lot less people relocating around the world know Finnish than the dominant teaching language in the US...
Yes, but the quality of the immigrant is different. Immigrants to the US are primarily south and central American peasants with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak English. Canada has much better control over who it lets in.
Please note that the size of organisatorical problems increase more than linearly with the number of involved people. I seriously doubt it would work to copy Scandinavian solutions to countries like the US, with more than 50 times the population...