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Finland is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

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In recent years, Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

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Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with super achievers such as
South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top.

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Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play

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The East Asian model involves long hours of exhaustive
cramming and rote memorization. Finland's approach produces greater results than theirs.

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There are no private schools in Finland. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. ere are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

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Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the US.

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Sahlberg states that Americans ask these questions frequently:

How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly?

How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers?

How do you foster competition and engage the private sector?

How do you provide school choice?

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Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher

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As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

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Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier December of 2011, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and
generated much discussion.

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For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

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While Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from a Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete."

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Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. "Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland, parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.

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Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen rst and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

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In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. is starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

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The problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. Thee chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is
painfully plain to see.

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Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign- born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

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Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result was mediocre performance in the PISA survey.

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Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effect of size and homogeneity on a nation's education.

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Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

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Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American
state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to
the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18
states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or signicantly smaller percentage of
foreign-born residents than Finland

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What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

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With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

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Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity. The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.