64 International The EconomistDecember 7th 2019
2 antee their veracity). Less well-studied
countries including Jordan, Poland and
Turkey have also seen improvements. And
yet for every Jordan, there is a Finland.
Part of the reason for the lack of overall
progress is that schools have less influence
over results than is commonly assumed.
Culture and other social factors, such as
adult literacy, matter more, meaning that
even well-informed policymakers can only
make so much difference. As John Jerrim of
University College London notes, “You are
always going to have East Asian countries
coming top.” And, as the data suggest,
above a certain level (around $50,000 per
pupil, cumulatively between the ages of six
and 15) there is not much of a relationship
between expenditure and pisa scores.
The importance of culture can be seen
in Estonia and Finland, both of which have
long histories of high levels of literacy, of-
ten promoted by the local Protestant
church. “There is this kind of general un-
derstanding” says Ms Reps, “that we don’t
have, I don’t know, a golden diamond, but
that education is the thing.” Finland
created a series of children’s books featur-
ing the Moomins—pale, rounded creatures
that are beloved by youngsters around the
world. Libraries are scattered throughout
the country, including a spectacular, slop-
ing one next to the train station in the cen-
tre of Helsinki, called Oodi, which was
built to celebrate the country’s centenary at
a cost of €98m. These kinds of things are
difficult for other countries to replicate.
Other factors are also beyond the con-
trol of education ministers. Immigration
plays an important role, with recent arriv-
als scoring below locals in most countries.
Finland has seen a small uptick in the
number of migrant pupils taking pisaover
the past decade. More than four-fifths do
not speak Finnish at home, helping to ex-
plain the big gap in performance betweenthem and local students. Estonia has seen a
similar increase in the number of immi-
grant pupils, but new arrivals are much less
likely to be poor than they are in its Nordic
neighbour.Finishing lessons
Finland’s decline may make the wonks
who rushed to copy its schools seem silly.
But looking deeper there are still lessons to
learn from Finland’s example. Despite the
country having a reputation for cuddly
teaching, it used to take a slightly more
hardline approach. In 1996, four years be-
fore the first batch of pisaresults, a group
of British researchers visited the country.
They found “whole classes following line
by line what is written in the textbook, at a
pace determined by the teacher...We have
moved from school to school and seen al-
most identical lessons—you could have
swapped the teachers over and children
would not have noticed the difference.” As
Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, an economist, has
noted, most of the children who scored so
highly in the first round of tests would have
experienced this sort of schooling.By the time the results came out, many
Finnish schools had started to move in a
very different direction, confounding tour-
ing policymakers. A forthcoming study by
Aino Saarinen and colleagues at the Uni-
versities of Helsinki and Oulu analyses
pisadata from 2012 and 2015, finding that
children in schools which gave pupils
more freedom to direct their own learning
had lower scores in maths and science.
Those from poor and migrant families suf-
fered the most. Eschewing the possibility
of a happy midpoint between reading from
a textbook and leaving children to their
own devices, schools have continued to ex-
periment in the years since. A wave of new
institutions are being built without class-
rooms. A new curriculum, which began to
be introduced in 2016, encourages lessons
without defined subjects.
Despite this, there remain many simi-
larities in the organisation of the Estonian
and Finnish education systems. There are
very few fee-paying schools, for instance,
and both seek to minimise exams and seg-
regation by ability. Belying the slightly
staid office in which he sits, replete with
portraits of the country’s leaders and a
large Estonian flag, Rando Kuustik, the
head of the Jakob Westholm School in the
centre of Tallinn, says that his first priority
is his pupils’ happiness, and his second is
to “help them manage better in the world
than when they entered.”
But although Mr Kuustik’s teachers are
beginning to tweak their style of instruc-
tion by, for instance, making more use of
group work, “we are still a very traditional
school,” he explains. Before pupils work in
groups, the teacher makes sure they have a
thorough understanding of what they are
working on. Rules are clear, and teachers
lead lessons from the front of the class. Ac-
ademics report a similar picture across the
country. Tim Oates of Cambridge Assess-
ment, a testing company, lauds the coun-
try’s rigorous, coherent curriculum.
Much of this can be learnt from. But any
country hoping to import the Estonian
model in its entirety is likely to be disap-
pointed. The country has seen fast eco-
nomic growth over the past three decades,
which is associated with better results.
And migration out of the country, com-
bined with a lower birth rate, means the
school population has fallen by 29% since
2000, leaving an unusual education sys-
tem. Andreas Schleicher, head of education
at the oecd,notes there is a “healthy degree
of competition” between schools to attract
the remaining pupils. In rural primary
schools, it is not uncommon to have class-
es as small as two or three pupils, says Ms
Reps, meaning they receive something
akin to private tuition. One school even
managed to stay open for two years with-
out any children—something other coun-
tries will probably choose not to copy. 7Could do better
PISA test score, average of maths, reading and scienceSource: OECD *Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and ZhejiangOverall rise181512092006550500450400350300SingaporeChina*Macau
Estonia
PolandTu r ke y2018
OECD
averageQatar
North
MacedoniaJordanOverall fall181512092006550500450400350300Hong Kong
FinlandNew ZealandCosta RicaIndonesiaDominican
RepublicGreece