And the overwhelming number of solutions have tended to be politically correct. What did university professors and politicians think the right solutions should be like?
The result has been a lot of motivated thinking. We have "significant increases" in learning as measured by ... test scores. Or by "engagement" (without test scores). We've thrown money at problems. We've tracked kids, and then find that detracking is better on "measures of learning", many of which don't involve academics. We've detracked kids, and found that things didn't improve much. So we focus on closing the achievement gap by having nice rubrics and well-defined goals so that the test and standards and lessons are aligned, except that by making everything explicit we fail to teach high-achieving kids how to use their brains. So we have pre-AP classes for them.
My district has pre-AP 8th grade English. They won't get to AP English until 12th grade. Yeah, there's pre-AP 11th grade English. By the time kids have been in pre-AP 8th, 9th, and 10th grade English it's hard seeing how level 11th-grade English and 11th-grade pre-AP English are really the same class. While we're detracked we're quite tracked.
The Finnish solution is presented as simple. It has to be. Because the first criterion is whether it it suits what people want to say. If you think X is the reason, you find a reason for Finland's educational system to support your cause. Money. Touchy-feeling. Class size. Teacher qualifications. Parental involvement. GINI coefficient. Cultural imperatives. Alignment of standards with teaching. Empowering teachers. Views of education. Use of technology. Differentiating instruction. Having high standards. Having no high-stakes testing ... well, okay, not having much. Distinct graduation pathways. Student behavior. Social safety net. Alignment of Finland's standards and testing with the international tests used to rank Finland. Selection of students for inclusion in the comparison samples.
In the PDF linked to, some of these are *the* solution. The rest are ignored as contenders. Why? Because they fail to meet the requirements for being contenders--they aren't already believed to be important by the person making up the slide presentation.
Which is the largest problem with education.
The crass term for this is "cherry-picking your data."
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