PISA Under Examination: Hannu Simola's Keynote Speech

Hannu Simola gave a keynote speech entitled, "Education policy and contingency: Belief, status, and trust behind the Finnish PISA miracle."

Here are the notes from the speech:

Comparative studies in education are now more popular than ever, thanks to PISA. Novoa and Yariv-Marshal (2003) called them "soft comparisons."

Contingency as uncertainty:

• "age of contingency"
• double meaning of contingency
• "the art of playing"
• Hautamaki (2008) in reference to Finland's performance PISA 2006: "chance encounter, a lucky constellation"
• the concept of contingency -- does it explain Finland in PISA?

1. high belief in schooling
2. teaching respected
3. comprehensive school trusted

• why do these three beliefs exist?
• there is little research comparing Finnish education to other Nordic countries

Hypothesis for Finland's success in PISA -- High belief in schooling:

• "late bloomer"
• e.g. compulsory education
• e.g. expansion of schooling
• e.g. late construction of the Welfare State
• e.g. late modernization of the occupational structure
• e.g. most recently left agrarian lifestyle, even compared to Nordic countries
• the "high belief" in schooling came from these examples
• they happened at the same time -- a collective experience

Hypothesis for Finland's success in PISA -- High status of comprehensive school teachers

• teaching popular, especially in the primary years
  
• an accepted profession for upper social strata
• 10% acceptance rate to teacher training programs
• requirement of MA

Hypothesis for Finland's success in PISA -- Requirement for teachers to have an MA coincided with comprehensive school reform

• 1971 Act -- primary school teaching courses moved to universities
• MA model not proposed by the government
• 1977 -- teaching degrees now MA level
• this coincides with the comprehensive school reforms -- the MA model was accepted because of this

Hypothesis for Finland's success in PISA -- High trust in comprehensive school

• 1990s -- era of trust officially began
• prescribed teaching, curriculum, school inspectorate all abandoned
• the reforms of the 1990s -- restructuring of the steering of education
• recession 1991-1993 -- budget cuts in education/schooling strengthened the judicial position of the municipalities
• Finland's school system one of the most decentralized in Europe
• competing coalitions of the national QAE of compulsory schooling, e.g. Ministry of Education and Finnish National Board of Education
• Finnish National Board of Education: "We have no control over anything. This is our biggest weakness."

Hypothesis for Finland's success in PISA: The recession forced a move to evaluation-based goal steering

• ironically created the trust in the system
  

Contingency as freedom:

• different levels of conjunction -- changes happened all at once
• coinciding of teacher training and comprehensive school reforms
• concurrent municipal control and comprehensive school governance
• this gave freedom for the policy actors

Conclusions:

• "constructive effects of human action: consequences that may be sweeping and far reaching but rarely foreseeable or suspected." - Dahler-Larsen (2007)
• focus on how schools change reforms rather than how reforms change schools