It's hard to say whether the Finnish system is really that good.

You have a few confounding factors:

* a middle-class society with no language problems

* less pressure on the students regarding exam scores.

Things that Finland seems to do well (from your article):

* "What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach."

Really, education gets screwed up terribly by all the pressure.

But can you imagine the uproar if teachers stopped teaching the tests?

* "The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines."

When is the last time you heard of a US schools training their teachers? I know teacher-training happens, but it's really half-assed.

And like I said, DI isn't necessarily the best method possible. But there hasn't been any decent research since.

It's like we've found that washing hands saves lives in hospitals, but nobody has bothered to break anything else down statistically, or research why washing hands is good (hint - germs), or even wash hands!

Why do you say no language problems? They have different problems - educating in two languages, Finnish for home use (a unique language no-one else uses) and English to be competitive in the wider world. The article even makes mention of the issues of English.

I think the confounding factor is not "a middle-class society" rather than "a democratic socialist society", where everyone is given the chance to perform instead of being damned by the location of their birth within their country. None of this 'born in poor location, local schools don't have funding' crap.

If the US could get rid of it's endemic Just World fallacy, half of it's problems would be solved...

To add on to the language problem - all Finns have to learn Swedish as well as English. I came from a strictly Swedish speaking part of Finland, and had to learn Finnish and English from the very start.

And the primary thing that the Finnish society does well: - Everyone respects the teaching profession. - Teachers, who most often are at the top of their class and have a Masters, are given much autonomy and trust.