Finland is an education “miracle story,” according to one set of
international tests, but nothing special on others, reports Ed
Week’s Curriculum Matters. “If Finland were a state taking the
8th grade NAEP, it would probably score in the middle of the
pack,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution. The most striking contrast is in mathematics, where
the performance of Finnish 8th graders was not statistically
different from the U.S. average on the 2011 TIMSS, or Trends in
Mathematics and Science Study, released last month. Finland,
which last participated in TIMSS in 1999, actually trailed four
U.S. states that took part as “benchmarking education systems”
on TIMSS this time: Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina,
and Indiana. . . . “Finland’s exaggerated reputation is based on
its performance on PISA, an assessment that matches up well with
its way of teaching math,” said Loveless, which he described as
“applying math to solve ‘real world’ problems.” He added, “In
contrast, TIMSS t