The Quick and the Ed

Labor markets, by contrast, are highly regulated, with roughly 70 percent of workers belonging to trade unions, including teachers.

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It's important to understand what Finland's PISA test score distribution looks like beyond the world-beating average. Performance in the top 10 percent of Finnish schools is almost exactly the same as the average among the top 10 percent of all OECD schools. Performance in the bottom 10 percent of Finnish schools, by contrast, is better than the median score for the OECD. In Finland, the Lake Wobegon effect is essentially real—it appears to have few if any low-performing schools. And this is perfectly congruent with the aims of its larger social and economic policies--few people get very rich, but no one is truly poor.

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Once they hit the classroom, teachers' salaries are fairly modest, roughly equal those in America. Tenure isn't as automatic as in the states, but all teachers are unionized and enjoy substantial job security. While base salaries are determined by a uniform national schedule, teachers can get paid more to teach in the frozen north or on small islands in the eastern archipelago. Locally-funded performance pay is also an option—in the Helsinki upper secondary school we visited, the municipal government sent the entire faculty on a vacation to Rome as reward for meeting pre-defined (and partially test-based) performance goals. The national student / teacher ratio is slightly below the OECD average, but classes can sometimes be quite large. Teachers are said to enjoy a great deal of autonomy in the classroom—as long as they stick to the national curriculum. "Teachers are told what to teach," one Board of Education official told us, "but not how."

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