Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children

itsame@lemm.ee to World News@lemmy.world – 1046 points –
Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children
inews.co.uk

Finland ranked seventh in the world in OECD's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education

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Why would you think that given the fact that this is more or less what the countries with the best education standards in the world do?

We have and had services that have no private option and they're invariably horrible

Why don't they work - bear in mind that we're addressing funding issues, and getting the decision makers more staked into the outcomes.

Dunno, I live in Brazil, I'm used to things not working. Getting from here to what they have in Finland is unlikely

For better or worse, I get the impression that an increase in social spending isn't something you'll need to worry about under the Bolsonaro government.

The problem with this solution in Brazil isn't the solution itself - it's the fact that you have an austerity-focused right-wing government that wants such investment to fail so that they can kill it.

Oh, Bolsonaro is gone, now we have Lula, moving from the extreme right to the extreme left. He wouldn't kill public education, just intensify the communist propaganda that already happens there

My mistake. This policy is socdem stuff though, so leaning in the general direction of communism, and it's been shown to improve educational outcomes better and more equitably than just about any solution out there while massively improving social mobility, and by extension, the concept of meritocracy.

If a government has no interest in rolling this out properly or ability to do so for whatever reason, of course it'll fail - but that's not so much a failure of the policy - it's a failure of the government. If they're unwilling or unable to roll out good policy, I think it's worth asking why.

Government doing everything works better when the government has enough money for it, our taxes, with an already high tax burden, makes about 100 usd for person/month IIRC. There is no policy that will work around that

Yeah - I mean solving for broader governmental failure in a country I didn't understand well is probably a little beyond the scope of this conversation - that's a far broader issue that negatively impacts this solution, but really isn't a reflection on its efficacy. Seems like there's little changing that situation without broader structural change.

Whatever the situation though, I hope it improves.

The trade-offs probably aren't the same for developed and 3rd world countries. I want the free public schools to be as good as they can and have the private ones too

While this is almost certainly true, as I said, I'm concerned having a paid "out" of the public system not only divests the wealthy's interests from having a strong public system - it pushes them in the opposite direction, as they've now got to help pay for a public system that they see no benefit from, which will produce kids that will be competing with theirs for jobs, etc.

Considering the disproportionate political power that comes with wealth, I think this is inviting failure.