Counterpoint: Delving more deeply into ‘bold initiative’ No. 1 …

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Jon Olson’s top recommendation to the Minnesota Legislature this year (“10 bold initiatives for Minnesota,” Opinion Exchange, Feb. 13) is to “adopt the Finnish education system.” Probably this is because a decade ago, PISA, the international assessment of student achievement, was showing Finland’s students top in the world.

What could be more obvious: Let’s just do what Finland does! Unfortunately, most of what appears online is praise for the results. Legislators might want to know a bit more about what specifically that would involve.

I went with the American delegation to Finland in 2012. Here’s what the 40 of us heard.

Basically, we saw a remarkable program of aid to parents and young children, parental leave and child care, on top of which is a fairly conventional school system. Classrooms, desks, maps on the wall. Not much different from what you see in a “good” American school.

What is truly different about Finland, and not explained to outsiders (probably because for the Finns it is their “given”) is the organization and operation of the system.

Public education in Finland is a municipal responsibility. There are no separate, elected, boards of education. Education is a department of city government. Helsinki handles public education, as it handles public works, public parks, public libraries, public welfare and other public services.

The state (the national government, comparable to Minnesota) makes a block grant to the cities. There is no state appropriation specifically for education. Revenue is apportioned among education and other public services at the city level.

Some schools are owned and run by the city. There are “specialty schools” not unlike our chartered schools — as in the southwest, where parents want their children to learn Swedish, or for Catholics (Finland having a state church, Lutheran).

“Finland wants their children to be independent learners; to explore things,” Linda Darling-Hammond, the head of our delegation, said in the opening briefing.

Children begin school at age 7. The school day is shorter than ours. Youth sports are not school-based. When we visited there were two years of secondary education; after that, two years of “upper secondary” — choice-based, with admission competitive. “We have to make our points,” I remember one student telling us. The schools still do vocational education.

Because in a city the education department is small, most decisions are made in the schools. Standards are set in the schools, the standard pretty much the teacher’s judgment of the individual student’s potential. When someone asks, “How well are they learning?” the response is: “Ask their teacher.”

Teaching is a prestigious occupation. Salaries are not particularly high, but turnover is minimal. Finland, almost exactly Minnesota’s size, has eight schools for teacher education. Each runs a “lab school.” About 10% of the applicants are admitted. All teachers have master’s degrees.

A single teachers union bargains at the state (national) level with representatives from the municipalities (a process similar to the bargaining here between a building trade and the association of general contractors). There is a single, uniform, salary contract. There had been one strike in the 30 years before our visit.

We were looking at a system then only 40 years old: Finland had the opportunity to build its system new, in the 1970s, after it escaped from Russian control. We have no such opportunity in Minnesota.

The idea of dropping what we have and adopting a system as radically different as Finland’s is an impossibility — as Olson surely knows. A discussion about these differences, though, would not be amiss.

Ted Kolderie is a longtime public-policy analyst in Minnesota. His most recent previous commentary — “Why is Minnesota short on teachers?” — was published in September.