Whenever I go to a conference I act selfish. I’m there only to improve myself as a teacher and bring new ideas back to my own classroom. It was with that attitude that I attended a session at last weekend’s Teaching and Learning Conference in Washington DC. It was about education in Finland. The presenter was a man named Pasi Sahlberg: a real, live Finn, apparently with a Finnish name.

“Finland,” I thought, “Those guys are supposed to know what they’re doing. If I can’t get some teaching ideas from a Finn, then who?”

I was completely wrong.

First of all, Pasi showed us the ubiquitous PISA rankings, showing Finnish dominance and American mediocrity. But he went on to explain the rest of the story. The US has a lot of poor children; over 50% of our kids qualify for free/reduced lunch. That’s not the case in many high-PISA countries. According to Pasi, if we compared just those American schools which have poverty levels comparable to high-PISA countries, American schools are doing just fine. Better than Finland, as a matter of fact.

There is, however, a strong school of thought among Ed-reformers that we can’t except excuses like poverty for poor academic performance, even though poverty correlates pretty closely with low test scores. That’s why we’ve ended up with charter schools, vouchers and Teach for America. But according to Pasi, Finland accepts poverty as an underlying factor in school performance, and they’ve actually decided to do something about it. Kind of like putting out the fire when your house is ablaze instead of just turning up the air conditioner. That’s why their schools dispense food and healthcare (including dental) and that’s why they give homes to their homeless. It’s also why they make a big deal about insuring high-quality preschool for every Finnish kid.

Finland, of course, is a much more manageable country than the US. It’s small, for one thing, and the population is a lot more homogeneous than ours. They don’t have nearly the proportion of language-learners as we have. And only eight Finnish universities have a teaching program. With a small population, they have a pretty clear idea of how many teachers they need to staff their schools, and they only train as many as they need; about 900 per year. Each teacher is virtually guaranteed a job upon graduation. A high-paying job. That’s why they have ten applicants for every spot in their university teaching programs. And once they graduate, Finnish teachers are in it for the long haul, unlike so many of our young teachers, job-surfing towards wherever.

Another important difference between Finland and America is their sense of accountability. In America we keep testing our kids, hoping that eventually their teachers will improve. The Finnish teachers are expected to perform, but they’re also trusted. The Finns trust that their teachers will teach their children, assess their children, act on the resulting data, and report it to their parents. They don’t feel the need to employ a third party to do their testing for them; therefore there’s no standardized testing. None at all. That’s not to say there’s no standards or no testing. There’s just no Finnish version of SBAC, PARCC or Pearson. The Finns simply believe what the Finnish teachers say about the Finnish students.

I should also mention that in Finland, they place their best teachers where they’re most needed. We do just the opposite. Some people who think I’m a good teacher recently recruited me to work at their school. I would have received $5,000 more per year to work with a population in which 95% pass their state tests and only 5% are on free/reduced lunch. (That’s an interesting pair of numbers, isn’t it?)

It took me two weeks to say no.

So Finland seems to have a much more functional and nimble education system. But what actually happens in the classrooms? After all, that was why I went to this session in the first place: to steal Finnish ideas. But as it turns out, the Finns are stealing our own pedagogical research. (“You’re not using it,” quipped Pasi, “so why shouldn’t we?”) The Finns focus on engaging, open-ended projects. They place a premium on building relationships. They reach toward higher-level thinking and interdisciplinary activities. They don’t ignore the arts. And they have a fifteen-minute recess after every 45 minutes of instruction. Even in high school. Instead of homework, kids are expected to be active and explore their own interests after school. Teachers are expected –and given time – to collaborate during school.

In other words, they actually do all the stuff we say we want to do, but don’t.

Which is why I learned nothing from the Finns.