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Finland's high-achieving public school system is now part of the conversation about U.S. education reform these days. What, it is often asked, can we learn from Finland? (Plenty, actually, though U.S. reformers consistently ignore the lessons .) The query has been asked and answered so often that it seems like a good time to ask what the United States can't learn from Finland. So I asked Pasi Sahlberg, author of " Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? " to tackle the subject, which he does, below.

Faced with the relentless campaign against teachers and public education, educators have sought a different narrative, one free of the stigmatization by test scores and punishment favored by the corporate reformers. They have found it in Finland. Even the corporate reformers admire Finland, apparently not recognizing that Finland disproves every part of their agenda. It is not unusual for Americans to hold up another nation as a model for school reform. In the mid-nineteenth century, American education leaders hailed the Prussian system for its professionalism and structure. In the 1960s, Americans flocked to England to marvel at its progressive schools. In the 1980s, envious Americans attributed the Japanese economic success to its school system. Now the most favored nation is Finland, and for four good reasons.

With the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, the education reform debate in the U.S. is moving into a second round of Finnish envy-the first being the corporate reformers' distorted claims about international comparisons and the new being calls to examine the full and complex picture of why Finland has achieved both social and education reform that has pushed them to the forefront of education quality. This second round, however, appears to be exposing a nonpartisan failure among all concerned with public education moreso than the needed turn away from corporate education agendas and toward democratic ideals seeking social justice and human agency. Education Week recently reprinted Erin Richards' piece (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) addressing Finland's education system, titled, "Better Teachers, Common Curriculum Are Hallmarks of Finnish Schools." While such coverage should signal the shift needed in discourse about international comparisons and what the U.S. should gain from Finland's social and educational commitments, the headline alone shows that we persist in seeing not what the evidence shows, but what we already assume about schools and reform.

Forget Santa Claus and saunas, the biggest export from Finland these days is its educational system. During a two-day conference this week at Stanford University, Finnish educators discussed how they improved so dramatically and what the United States can learn from the Nordic country. Finnish education reform can be summed up in ten points, according to Pasi Sahlberg, a director at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and author of Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? The first nine are instructive, but it's number ten that sums it up neatly and harshly.

As recently as 25 years ago, Finnish students were below the international average in mathematics and science. There also were large learning differences between schools, with urban or affluent students typically outperforming their rural or low-income peers. Today, as the most recent PISA study proves, Finland is one of the few nations that have accomplished both a high quality of learning and equity in learning at the same time. The best school systems are the most equitable - students do well regardless of their socio-economic background. Finally, Finland should interest US educators because Finns have employed very distinct ideas and policies in reforming education, many the exact opposite of what's being tried in the United States.

As the poor get poorer, and college tuitions keep rising, the media declare that no one without a B.A. qualifies for a living wage. Something's rotten in this proposition. It isn't that way in Finland, for example. Finland didn't do it overnight, but they built their education system around critical democratic habits: competence and trust. They didn't trade off one for the other. Looking for a trust-proof solution is the fragile error. David Remnick says it well in the March 12th New Yorker: Democracy, he writes: "At best, it's an ambition, a state of becoming," and "the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history." Every time we try an end-run around it we at best distract ourselves from useful next steps, and more often undermine our own aspirations.

Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg and Chancellor Stephen Spahn of the Dwight School in Manhattan have big dreams for education. Sahlberg, the celebrated global reformer and author of newly released (and already in reprint) Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, spent the day at Spahn's school in Manhattan. Sahlberg discussed with faculty and students not just how and why Finland built their phenomenal, world-class education systems, but even more importantly, what needs to be done to maintain its educational excellence as this century progresses.

Have you noticed there's a lot of hullabaloo about Finland's education system lately? I've been paying attention to what the Finns have been doing for a couple years now,  but it is only recently that I've thought to pay attention to Finland's neighbour Norway. Norway and Finland have some similarities. They are neighbouring countries that each take up about 350 000 square kilometres with populations around 5 million and about 10 percent foreign born. A notable difference, however, is that Norway has a significantly higher Gross Domestic Product.

If you thought you knew everything about the remarkable transformation of Finland's schools from mediocre to one of the top performing school systems in the world, think again.  Native Finn Pasi Sahlberg (educator, researcher, advisor on global education reform,  and Director General of CIMO in Helsinki, Finland),  who has lived and closely studied this remarkable reformation, tells the full story in his newly released book, Finnish Lessons  - What can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?  Sahlberg shows how the Finnish ways of improving schools differ from the global educational reform movement and from the North American educational policies and reform strategies.  It's a wake-up call for all countries around the world who aspire to achieve excellence.

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: "Who here wants to be a teacher?" Out of a class of 15, two hands went up - one a little reluctantly. "In my country, that would be 25 percent of people," Dr. Sahlberg said. "And," he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, "it would be more like this."

Ever since the Finland-Alberta partnership was launched in Edmonton last March at an international symposium titled Informed Transformation from the Inside Out: International Perspectives on the Fourth Way in Action, the partnership has been guided by the view that school development emanates from the inside out. In short, the partnership is based on the hypothesis that the real work of reform and the locus of influence for positively achieving educational development are the school, not the system.

The general Finnish educational method is a Dewey-esque learning-then-doing approach, theory then practice model. Teachers are highly professional and professionalized. You need a Master's degree to teach at a higher level than kindergarten. There is great respect for teacher judgment as well as respect and decent wages for teachers as the best people to determine what metrics best account for learning success. They work with principals at coming up with the best ways to determine how to measure success, engage kids and communities, and how to both keep national norms and address local conditions. In immigrant communities, kids are taught all subjects in their first language (including Finnish instruction).

"Indeed, Mr. Obama cites [South Korea President] Mr. Lee's views on education in virtually every speech he gives these days, including one in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, holding up the hard-working Asian country as an example of what the United States needs to do." from The New York Times

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, and national expert on why schools in Finland are so successful, visited Anchorage and Bethel area schools last month, ate the lunches and sat in on classes. Some things impressed him, and others illustrated problems that schools face across the U.S., he said.

Diane Ravitch reviews Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg and A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education for All by Wendy Kopp with Steven Farr 

Finland has one of the world's best performing education systems. Thanks to years of steady progress in education reform, its secondary school students regularly achieve high scores in PISA tests. The gap between the highest and lowest performers within schools is small, and there is little variation among schools or among pupils of differing family backgrounds.

Public education guarantees every child good basic education and equal opportunities to further learning. Public education also equalizes the differences that income inequalities and other socioeconomic characteristics create to different learners. In brief, public education is basic human right and basic service to all children and their families. One of the key factors behind Finland's good and equitable educational performance in international studies is the strong role of public education. Public schools have an important role in building democratic nation up here in the north.

A new report by the Schott Foundation documents policies and practices of the New York City Department of Education that create and reinforce unequal opportunities to learn ("A Rotting Apple"). It maintains that what is taking place in the nation's largest school district amounts to no less than education redlining because the census tract in which students live determines the quality of education they receive. It's a provocative argument. But there's another side of the story that needs to be told. In an ideal world, there would be equal opportunities to learn by all students regardless of the location of their residence. The only country that has come close to that educational Eden is Finland. That's because differences in income are modest. The U.S. is the antithesis. The yawning gap between family incomes explains why.

I recently wrote two review articles for the New York Review of Books about the teaching profession. The first was a review of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, about the exceptional school system of Finland, which owes much to the high professionalism of its teachers. The second of the two articles was a review of Wendy Kopp's A Chance to Make History, and it focused on her organization, Teach for America. I expressed my admiration for the young people who agree to teach for two years, with only five weeks of training. But I worried that TFA was now seen -- and promoting itself -- as the answer to the serious problems of American education. Even by naming her book A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp reinforced the idea that TFA was the very mechanism that American society could rely upon to lift up the children of poverty and close the achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups. Wendy Kopp responded to my review of her book with a blog called "In Defense of Optimism.

Since it implemented huge education reforms 40 years ago, Finland's school system has consistently come at the top for the international rankings for education systems. So how do they do it? It's simple - by going against the evaluation-driven, centralized model that much of the Western world uses.