Finland boasts “low poverty, high achievement, and virtually no
standardized tests,” writes writes Kathleen Porter-Magee on
Education Gadfly. Should reformers abandon standards and
accountability in favor of “few top-down regulations, broad
teacher autonomy, and virtually no centralized accountability?”
Finland’s real lessons aren’t that simple, she writes. Moving a
system from fair to good performance calls for different
strategies than moving from good to great, concludes a November
2010 McKinsey study, How the world’s most improved school
systems keep getting better. . . . systems moving from poor to
fair rely far more heavily on policies that “tightly control
teaching and learning processes from the center because
minimizing variation across classrooms and schools is the core
driver of performance improvement at this level.” Systems
seeking to progress from good to great, by contrast, “provide
only loose guidelines on teaching and learning processes because
peer-led creativity and innovation inside school