 And now on to our keynote, Pasi Sahlberg. Wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me here. You know, Washington DC is my former home. I used to live and work here for five years, but I'm fine now. Yeah, it's wonderful. My home was just a few blocks away from here. Very nice. Now I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I see that there are some people from Springfield. Wonderful. Okay. Now, is there anybody here who has been in Finland? Because that's where I come from. One person, two, three, four, five. Okay, good. How many of you would like to visit Finland? Everybody, okay? So it's true what people say that there are two types of people in the world. They're Finns and wannabe Finns. Okay. You know, I've been doing this for a long time, you know, traveling around the world and people ask me to talk about Finland. And one thing I realized is that actually there are many other places that look like Finland when it comes to education. So this morning I tried to speak to you not only about what we have done in Finland, but what many other countries actually, most of those countries that are now used as a benchmark or examples in education, we are doing very similar things. And that's a kind of hopeful because if you ever meet anybody who says that I've heard enough about Finland, you can say that it's not only Finland. Many of these high-performing successful school systems are doing exactly the same thing. So I speak a little bit about that and then I leave a lot of time for you to ask you questions or comments or whatever concerns you may have. And I certainly like to leave you with the kind of a piece of hope in your work. I think you are doing extremely important work in your communities, working with teachers and children and schools there. And I'm happy to talk about those my experiences as well. I've been everywhere in the United States in almost all the States and seen a lot. And more I see things, more I kind of think that there will be a change and things will get somehow better. My grandfather was American. He came here 100 years ago, 1914 in the spring. And it was before Finland became independent. And if we hadn't become independent from Russia, he probably would have remained American and I would be one of you here. Would it be wonderful American guys talking about Finnish? But he went back to Finland in 1920s when we decided to let Russia go and be by themselves and become independent. And he never came back. He met a Finnish woman and the rest is history. Okay, let me start by, first of all, if you want to, if you're a social media type of person, you can sign in to follow me in Twitter because I'm gonna tweet this later today, this presentation if you want to look at some of these things. The easiest thing is to join there. I also tweet a lot about education here in the United States and in Finland and around the world. So try to share interesting stuff with people in my community. But let's, I wanna take you back 15 years from now to be a 2000 deliberately, okay? So let's assume for a moment that you're meeting now but 15 years ago, okay? And we are here and the world is as it was 15 years ago. And I am your distant, wealthy, very wealthy uncle that you've never seen. But I'm here standing before you and say that I have enough money to take you anywhere you like in the world, any country, any place you want. If you are able to justify why do you think that that place where you're gonna spend a week is about to help you to understand how good education looks like, how to run a system or district or school in a way that you want to do, okay? Now think about this is year 2000 and you know what we knew in the year 2000 and you have this wealthy uncle here with a lot of money and I want to know now where would you go, okay? And rather than asking you to speak out now, I'll give you one minute to turn to the person next to you and just say the place, say the country or the city or the place where would you go for a week to look for inspiration and good ideas for education, doing education better, okay? And then why, the important thing is why would I go to place X? One minute, only one minute for this. Okay, thank you so much. Now is there anybody in the room who would like to who would like to share the destination and the reason why you want to go there with everybody else here? Anybody? So we selected Singapore. And why Singapore? Singapore math, okay. Good, on voyage. Next one, Singapore. Is anybody else who wanted to go to Singapore? So you can go alone, first class. I selected Japan because of their lesson study and the way the teachers are very working very collaboratively in peer review and so on. Okay, Japan because of their lesson study. Anybody else here who wants to join Japan? Okay, you have to think about now all the time that this is year 2015 years ago, okay? Good, wonderful, very good. Anybody else? Well, I said Massachusetts in the United States because I thought we were doing pretty good. So you are from Massachusetts? Okay, okay. You see that this is like a school classroom where all the good pupils are sitting in a front row so I'm gonna go back here and if there are any naughty boys here. One more, sir. What did you hear? If you don't know where to call yourself, what did you hear? What the other folks are saying? It sounds like except for the folks from Massachusetts we need to go somewhere else to find good education. Japan, Singapore? Sure, why not? Okay, anybody else? Okay, of course there's a kind of a trick behind it. Some people may wonder why did I put year 2000? Why not 1990 or something like this? I put this year 2000 here because this was the first year when the OECD, everybody knows the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that runs the PISA study, Program for International Student Assessment. The OECD for the first time that year collected the data from all of its member countries including United States. And before that year we didn't really have an idea how the countries are performing. There's a lot of speculation of where the good education systems are but we didn't really have a data to say that this is what we know about the countries and that's exactly why the PISA was launched in the first place in the year 2000. So when the data was collected it took a while to analyze it and the results were released in December 2001 and the closer we got to December 2001 more kind of a speculation to stay aware that who will be those countries in this new measurement, this global measurement that will be on the top of the world, okay? And there were several candidates like Australia, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Germany, France, England, okay? Nobody ever mentioned Finland. You know, I was working in Finland that time and I remember that the only concern we had among educators in my country was that if we are doing better than Sweden, anything goes. You know, Sweden is our western neighbor. But otherwise we said that we probably will be somewhere there in the middle or below the average, kind of a middle country in this measurement and when the results came public in December it looked something like this and this was a huge shock to the education world, not so much here in the United States because America didn't really pay so much attention to what the rest of the world was doing in education that time, 15 years ago. But the rest of the world was really shocked about seeing this thing and what made Finns particularly happy was that Sweden was their number nine. But you know, the interesting thing in my country was that nobody was able to explain this. Not me, not my colleagues, not people in the ministry but you know, how do you explain this? When everybody were expecting that we will be like Norway or France or United States there and all of a sudden Finland was there on the top. So if you know anything about the kind of a character of Finns, how we are, you probably understand why we did what we did because we decided to do nothing. Most people thought that it must be so that the OECD made a mistake in measuring. So they were using kind of a wrong way of measuring this and three years later when the next cycle of PISA will come the Finland will be somewhere there where the other Scandinavian countries are and it would be very embarrassing, would it be? If we had been making a huge noise about Finland and we are the best in the world, come and see what we do and then three years later the OECD comes and says sorry Finns, we made a mistake. You are actually worse than Sweden. But you know, that started to make some people to think about what's going on in the world because those countries that were often thought to be doing very well like Germany or Switzerland or United States, Norway, Sweden, they were not really up there. So what happened three years later was something like this, okay? And still in Finland, although we were in a top category there, we still didn't believe that this is real. You know, it's amazing that the Finns were kind of arguing that it cannot be that we are that good. So let's wait another three years to maybe the OECD made the same mistake twice and see, you know, what's happening. But this already that the pattern becomes visible that some of those countries seem to be there on the top and the others are not doing that well. So this is the 2006 PISA cycle that was focusing on science, education. And so now we are talking about December 2007, early 2008. And it's this thing, these three cycles of this new measurement that really changed a lot how people think about global education. So if this question was asked in 2008, where would you go to find good ideas? And this is a time when the United States already started to look at the, you know, how things are going in other countries. The destinations for these places would be very different. Like in year 2000, nobody would go to Finland. People didn't really know that Finland exists in year 2000 because there was nothing really in our education system that people knew. But this, that's where the importance of this PISA study comes from. It's not the important where the countries are, but how this pattern is becoming, getting its shape. So there's the same countries seem to be there, Finland and Canada and Japan and Korea and so on. That clearly there's something has changed in the world of education that raises these new questions. So from the research point of view, from my work point of view, there are two interesting questions there that we have been looking at ever since this third study. The first one is, of course, that what makes some education system successful? This is kind of a normal question that people have been repeating over and over again, whether they go to Japan or Finland or Singapore or Canada. The same question is that what did you do? What makes your system, education system do so well? These are some of those things that you find, not only in Finland, but you find the same similar story in all or most of these countries that you find in the top of these league tables. And if you look at these, there's a collaboration that is one of the topics and themes of this convening here that we, those countries believe that by helping schools and teachers and principals to collaborate, not to compete against one another, things seem to be getting better, okay? The creativity and kind of individual approach to teaching and learning is a common theme in all of these well-performing education systems. Trust-based responsibility is one. You hear a lot of people speaking about trust, trusting teachers and schools and principals in all of those countries. Particularly, this is a theme that you hear in Finland. If you spend a week in Finland, you cannot leave the country without hearing this trust every day. People, if you ask anything about what you do, you always hear people, teachers and principals and educators saying that we feel that we are trusted in our work, that we can do what we think is the best for the kids and the communities because people feel that way. The professional responsibility is another one. There's a very strong sense of responsibility, not so much about accountability, it's more about helping people to take the responsibility and feel that way. Teacher professionalism and leader professionalism is one common theme in all of the high-performing systems certainly in Finland. That we would never allow, let me put it this way, no high-performing education system would never allow anybody to teach without a proper education. Unlike in this country and many others where you can teach without being a really professional teacher. We would never allow this in Finland or in Singapore or in Japan or in Canada. So that's a common thing. And then the focus on equity. And equity here, I know that equity has different meanings, but equity here means that we try to kind of beat the odds that come with the fact that kids come from different backgrounds and different families and in all countries around the world. If the child comes from a more disadvantaged background, broken home, low socioeconomic status and so on, their performance and learning in school tend to be lower than those who come from, that's everywhere, okay? But the interesting thing is that that link between the family background and educational performance is very different in different countries. So some countries are doing much better in trying to kind of weaken that link. And in some countries it's actually enforced by the, because of the school system. So that's a kind of an interesting thing. So this is kind of a first important question that came from PISA. And that's why I have a kind of a divided mind when it comes to the OECD PISA question. That I think that without the OECD PISA, we wouldn't know this. I wouldn't be here talking about these things because we would talk much more about speculating things, okay? But then the other one is equally important. But why some education systems are not getting any better, okay? Now those education systems that were thought to be high performing, regardless of their billions and billions of dollars of investing money in reforms and improvement, things simply don't seem to get any better. So the good question is that what's going on in those places is that there's something that we can identify, kind of a similar things that they are doing. And this is the list of, there are many others, but this is a kind of an interesting list of things that you see that it's almost like a opposite type of thing. These countries believe that competition is the key, that we can elevate the quality of education by insisting that schools and teachers and principals have to compete more, just like in a free marketplace, okay? Standardization, have clearer standards for everybody and then hold everybody accountable using standardized testing. Very common things happening around the world. Deep professionalization of teaching and leadership. So let's open schools and principalships to anybody regardless of your professional training and then the privatization. People seem to be thinking increasingly around the world that by opening public education to private providers through charter schools or private schools or whatever they are, that things somehow will, that the private, kind of a private sector will somehow do these things better than public, okay? Sounds familiar to you? It's not only America here, there are many other places. There are so many places around the world that I have started to call this a global educational reform movement, germ, okay? Because it's really, these ideas are really behaving like a virus, you know, they're spreading around the world because of the development institutions and politicians and large corporations like Pearson and others that are kind of insisting these types of ideas to some extent in different parts of the world and that's why I'm calling it a germ. Now, the interesting question is that why this germ, why these policy priorities that you see here, why they are so easily spread around the world? There has to be a reason why countries kind of adapt these ideas in their policies and I have an answer for you that you may not like but I'll show it anyway. First of all, I think that the, we have to think about this yellow and red not as either or, you know, don't think about this that this is bad and the other one is good. I think we have to think about these policy items there or reform items as a kind of a complimentary things, okay? Like in Finland, if you look at Finland, we have of course competition there but it's a kind of a friendly competition rather than kind of a fierce competition between people. I'll give you an example of unhealthy competition. There were two guys who went hiking in Canada. So they're hiking there together and they enter the area where there's a big sign saying that you are entering a zone where grizzly bears live. As soon as the other guy saw this sign he put his backpack off, took his hiking boots off and put the running shoes on and these other guys say that, what are you doing? You can never run faster than a grizzly bear and these other guys say that I know that but I'm gonna run faster than you. So that's how we see the unhealthy competition often in education. Don't you think so? That we kind of a collaborate when everything is nice but when the serious business begins then we put our running shoes off and we don't care about the others. But what I'm saying here is that, you know, you can see these two different types of things in balance in some ways in all of those high-performing systems. But the question is the priorities, you know, which one of these ideas you think should be leading a priority in education policies and the germ-infected education systems are much more relying on these and Finland and others, Canada and other countries are doing the other way around. Okay, so, you know, if you know anything about Ying and Yang thing my theory here is that why this germ thing has been so easily, you know, finding a place in national education policies and reforms is that it is much of a kind of a masculine way of thinking about these things and everybody in this room should know that throughout the world about women has only about 20% of the voice, political voice in the world when the decisions of policies and reforms are made and so it's mostly dominated by a masculine male power. Okay, so that's why I'm often saying that if you wanna change anything here in the United States the first thing you should try to change is to give women more power in politics. And, you know, I come from the country I come from the country where we have almost 45% of our members of the parliament that is our legislative party in the country 45% of the members of the parliament are women. And many of them are teachers. So we have a lot of different voices, different opinions and that's a kind of a necessary thing in here and also in Canada, many other places to have more people in decision making when it comes to health, families, mothers, children, education, young people, whatever it is. We're gonna get much better policies for those people including our schools if we have more equality over there. Okay, now how about technology? Technology was not one of those things. Do you think that technology will be the kind of a saving grace for our public education? No? Is there anything good coming with that? You know, it's interesting when I travel around here I've seen schools now here in America where they don't use technology at all. And those schools are gonna be more and more around the world in Finland and many other countries where parents and people have just had enough about young people who are with their gadgets and iPads and phones all night long. And what they're asking the schools to do is not to teach them math and science and these things but give them a little bit of kind of a human relation time. Okay, leave your iPhones and technology away and let's be like people together. That's, it's a very possible future by the way in general. But I'm gonna show you a little thing what may happen if we are not careful with technology. Okay, so we have to be careful what to hope. I love technology. I think it's gonna help us in many ways but we should be very careful with these things. Anybody from Los Angeles here, you know what you can help, crazy things can go if you just put your faith in iPads and all the money there and then nothing really happens. And that's, you know, Finland has been, we have been experiencing the same way that we have put hundreds of millions in technology and all the smart boards and you name it. But teachers are still not finding a good reason to use those things because they think that it's more important to, you know, have a kind of a direct human conversation with people. Finnish teachers are very reluctant to change the way they have thought to kids to this new kind of a digitalized technological thing. I think they're much more conscious consumers of technology than many politicians and authorities think. Now, my main thing here, I'm gonna speak a little bit about equity for you and this is gonna be my main lesson for you if you wanna take anything out of this thing that what we can learn from others, what we know about what works, this is it. Okay, so remember equity to me means that we see how the kids from different backgrounds, how well they're doing the school system, right? And now because of the OECD piece of the OECD data, we have a, for the first time in our history, we have a means, a kind of a way to compare countries in terms of how equitable or inequitable they are, right? That we didn't, 15 years ago, we had no idea. 15 years ago in this meeting, many people would have said that, oh, well, equity is kind of a socialist idea. I would rather go for excellence. Okay, excellence meaning that I try to, you know, educate some people to the full potential and then somehow cope with those who can't. But equity says something different. Equity says that we try to provide a kind of a conditions for everybody to learn and, you know, help those people who find it more difficult to learn so that they can do what they can. Okay, and that's a very different thing. Most people would have said 15 years ago that you can have one, but you cannot have both. So it's a kind of a political decision. Which one do you think is more important? But now, if you look carefully, for the first time, we can say that this was a wrong way to think because we can have both if we are smart. It doesn't happen by itself. We have to know what we do in education policy and we have to do it right and good things will happen. Now, I'm gonna show you a little bit data about this, this comes from the OECD database and what I'm doing here simply is to, I'm gonna show you countries here. So you're gonna see different education systems including the United States, although there is no such thing as American education system, right? You have 50 states and 15,000 districts and 100,000 schools and they can do often their own things. So there's not really American education system but this is what the OECD is doing. Now, next time when you see the media ranking America number 27, you can always raise the question that what does it mean? There's not really America as such in education. You cannot compare America. Otherwise, we should compare America to Europe, the United States of Europe, right? It's about the same thing but you never see that. You never see in international rankings United States of Europe or European Union there, you see the different countries, Finland and Germany and others, okay? So equity of education system enhances when you move from left to right, okay? So if your country moves this way, it means that it comes more equitable, okay? And if you go from here to top, it means that the excellence and the quality of learning outcomes is getting better. So what I've simply done here is to combine all the math and reading and science data together and then estimate the strength or weakness of equity there in a way. Do you understand this graph? It's a kind of elementary school stuff, statistics. Okay, so this is the average of these two variables. So if you're somewhere here, it means that you are about the international average in equity and excellence or quality, all right? Okay, so if your country is, if you are, sorry, if you are here in the red zone, it means that you are in the freezing side of both equity and quality. It's a bad place to be. So nobody would like to be there. This is where you have more quality but less equity. Here you have less quality, sorry, there's the high quality and low equity. Here you have more equity but less quality and this green area is where everybody would like to go now. And our policy makers especially here are only now beginning to understand how these things are interrelated. Now remember that there's a world of difference between correlation and causation. So what I'm talking about here is not causation, it's about correlation. How things correlate, how equity and quality or excellence here, how do they correlate? If you don't have a correlation, it's very unlikely that there will be any causation, causal relationship in the store. If you have strong correlation, it's likely that there is something that is linking these things also in a causal way. Now let me take this away and ask you where do you think the United States of America would be? Just tell your neighbor, your guess, where would you put the US flag here in this map? Okay, let me ask you this. How many of you think, raise your hand if you think that America will be somewhere in the red zone? Raise your hand. Okay, so this is a red zone here. Raise your hand if you think that America will be here, this brown, okay? Good, anybody who thinks that America will be in the green zone? No, okay. Now, this is where the United States is, according to the OECD. Raise your hand if you're surprised. Raise your hand if you don't believe. Okay, but you know, this is what the data says. This is what the OECD data says. OECD data doesn't say that America is horrible, that your public school system is breaking or disaster. It doesn't say this. That's what your media says. Or this is what your private foundations say, okay? The data says that you are doing, actually you are doing exactly the same way as the United States of Europe. You know, if I combine all the 28 European Union nations as you do here with your states, we would be identical. And nobody in Europe say that our education system is broken. Most people say that we need to improve and develop and do some things, particularly with equity, but there's nobody who would say that European, any of the European systems would be completely rotten. Okay, so don't buy these things when people say that you are doing well. So show this data, okay? This is what the OECD is saying. Yeah, thank you. Okay, this is Australia and this is UK. Now, some people conclude that if you only speak one language, English, you are doomed to be around the average. Until you see the next candidate here, which is Canada. Wow, you say wow? Look at Canada, Canada is the highest performing English and French speaking education system in the world. You know, Canada is doing so well that I often say that Canada is in heaven. So any Canadians in the room? Good, okay. You agree with me? Is there anybody who has been in Canada? Everybody should go to Canada. Go to Ontario or Alberta, any of these states, and you will see pretty much same things that you would see in Finland. If you don't like Finland, if you think it's too far or too cold, go to Alberta. It's too cold too. But the education, you know, the five things that you hear in Alberta first, if you ask, so tell me why Alberta is doing that well. Exactly the same as in Finland. They talk about those things. Teachers, leadership, collaboration, respect, trust, those things. If you close your eyes, you could be in Finland actually. Ice hockey is a little bit worse there than in Finland, but otherwise. Okay, so here are the others, you know, if you look at this, and this is interesting stuff that we only now know since the last about five years. Take the Sweden here, you know, this is Sweden, Italy and Norway and Iceland, if you forget those for a moment, you'll see that there seems to be a kind of a quite clear correlation between equity and quality. Somehow it's, this shows that equity and quality within the system of education are connected. Whether there's a causal connection or not, we don't know that, that we can always speculate. This is a good bet for education policies to support equity. Now, the correlation is so clear here among all of these countries that it's almost like these countries are on this kind of a stairway, on the stairway to heaven, you remember the song? It goes something like this, the music coming from somewhere there. So those countries are climbing up there, now in the United States is somewhere here, so if you want to go to heaven, it means that you have to work on two things aggressively. One is equity, probably put the equity as a kind of a primary concern here, and then remember that you have to improve and enhance quality somehow. But the current way of thinking here in America, that is mostly putting the resources on quality side, standards and assessments and all these things, technology just will not get you there. That's what the international evidence is. I have no reason to believe that America would be able to be one of the, or close to the high performing countries with the current way of thinking about education. It just doesn't happen, okay? So where's Finland here? No, it's not. You know, I'm gonna show you where Finland was 40 years ago when I went to school. This is where Finland was, and this was exactly why we wanted to transform and turn around our school system. And already 40 years ago, we realized that equality and equity are probably the best ways to improve things there. We had a very unequal and unequitable or inequitable system of education. 40 years ago, and we started to work systematically to enhance equality of opportunity. That we, by the way, learned from Americans. America inspired us to do this. And you're thinking in the 1960s and 70s about equality of opportunity. You guys, you somehow lost the way somewhere there. But the Finns, you spoke about, Rudy said that we have the sisu, and sisu means that you keep on working in all the way until the job is done. And that's exactly what the Finns did. We didn't give up. They said that this is a good way to make the school system good for everybody. So now, if you look at this Finnish flag, I'm gonna show you what has been the Finnish way and why Finland is so much discussed and so interesting place. It's not because of the high PISA scores, but exactly because of this journey. Look at this. Working with equity year after year, policy after policy, government after government so that things will get better. It was somewhere here when the PISA came, the first PISA 2000, that actually confirmed our policies and reforms that we were in a right way. Okay? And we just have been doing those things ever, ever since. Now, there's one country, this one here, that is almost there in heaven. Do you know which country this is? I'm talking about this very close, the closest country to heaven, the Netherlands. Anybody from the Netherlands? Has anybody been in Amsterdam? It's a wonderful place for many reasons. Okay, but you know, the Netherlands, the Dutch are so close to heaven that I'm often saying, when I work with the Dutch, I say that you're so close to heaven, you're almost like knocking on heaven's door. Remember that song? And now we can sing a little bit. How about that? NEA, sing with me. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. Everybody, louder. Raise your hand. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. Take your mobile phones. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. One more time, everybody. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. Thank you so much, beautiful. I love you people. Okay, but please, you know, take this with you, that if you believe in data, if you wanna have evidence, global, new global international evidence is showing that the policy level, probably the best way to think about this is that, just like the OECD is saying, that the highest performing education systems are those that combine quality and excellence, the equity. That's the way we should be thinking about education from now on. So let me close by giving you some ideas what is the kind of a framework for Finland and then we can have a conversation about this, because we have been doing some of these things in a very detailed and systematic way. I'm just gonna speak a little bit about three things. The first one is that, as I said earlier, that we have had a very strong and consistent focus on equity since the 1970s, okay? And equity meaning that we have been trying to make sure that everybody has what they need in the system. And for example, kind of a foundation of the Finnish way of thinking about equity is that we have to fund our schools in a fair way, which is not the case always here in America, right? That your schools are getting resources based on how much wealth there happens to be in their community, okay? We do it in another way. If you go to Helsinki, for example, that is our biggest district. They have the policy called positive discrimination school funding, meaning that they discriminate the schools in terms of how much resources they get based on what type of community or kids they have in a school. Meaning that if you have more immigrants, single parent family kids, or lower socioeconomic class children, these schools are given more resources so that they can have smaller classes, more stuff, more resources to do whatever they need to do to make help everybody be successful. It's a absolutely critical thing here in America to change. If you continue funding your schools, you are continuing funding inequality in the system. And it's only gonna take things, it's gonna make the work of teachers much more complicated than if you had a system of funding that would work in favor of teachers and schools when they're trying to help kids. Early childhood education, we have a universal right for every child. Listen to this. Every child in Finland has a right to high quality pedagogical early childhood education. It's not the mother's right or parents' right, it's a right of the child, okay? So everybody can, by law, can have early childhood services if they want to, if they decide to do that. Everybody goes to preschool, 100% of kids, and about 75% of three to five year olds are in early childhood education of some sort. We have a one year, fully paid parental leave. Do you wanna hear it again? One year, fully paid, for mother often, or father like me. One year, you can stay away from your job, stay home, take care of the child for one year. It's wonderful, yeah? Preventive special education, this is kind of a cornerstone of Finnish, excuse me, Finnish story, to have the system that is trying to prevent the problems and difficulties not to repair. As it is often here in America and many other countries, special education is trying to kind of a repair and cope with these problems that already have emerged. In Finland, we don't think like this. We think that it's better to prevent and intervene early on and then try to avoid these things. A very different thing, and it's funded properly throughout the country. School health and well-being is a very strong focus if you walk into any primary school in Finland right now and you ask the teacher that, what are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to accomplish here? Why do you do these things? What's your primary aim here? Most of them would say that I want my kids to be happy and healthy. And then when they're happy and healthy, they will learn math and reading and those things. Nobody in Finland would say that my main aim here is to have all the kids to perform in a great level. We don't have this great level thinking at all because the great level for each and every child is a different bar. So that's how Finnish teachers are educated to teach. We are all different. So it creates a very different environment. And then the whole child approach. We have, as you've seen here in my presentation, music is absolutely critical part of Finnish education. As is arts, trauma, physical education, everything. So we think that there has to be a balance between what you do with your cognitive brain and what you do with your other part of the body. So very important things for equities. It's not for educating excellence or quality. These are all equity-related things that we think we need to do. So this is our equity program, actually, that we have been doing for 40 years. Then the second one is the teacher professionalism. And this is something that gets me often very angry here in America when I hear people saying that Finland is doing so great because we recruit our teachers from the top 10% of anything. It's completely rubbish. We are not doing that. We are looking for young people who feel that the teaching profession is their passion. And every year we recruit in our teacher training programs in our research universities that our only place is to train teachers, those who have relatively low academic scores in high school. Why we do that? Because they may be people in the sports that they have been coaching kids or they may be community workers or artists. And I've been sitting in these panels when we recruit these people to teacher training programs that are fully paid by the government. Our university system is free for everybody. If somebody tells me that my scores in math and reading and those other things are not very good but I know how to make young people work because I've been a football coach or I have had an orchestra or anything. I'm a theater director. So I know how to make people do things that they wouldn't do otherwise. Then I say that tell me more about that, what do you do? And often these people say that I know exactly, they can convince me that they have an idea how to make things work. And I'm gonna say that you're gonna be a great teacher regardless of your grades in math. Those things you can easily learn if you need to but how to work with people, how to have this passion in your heart is very difficult to learn. So that's why these are some of those things that we only provide the best possible programs for all our teachers. There's eight research universities in Finland where the teachers are trained and nowhere else. There's no other way to become a teacher. We don't have teach for Finland. You know what I'm talking about? Just like we don't have the heel for Finland either to train medical doctors in a five week summer program and send them to the rural clinics to take care of the most difficult patients. We don't do that, okay? So we have the best programs. We find right people, unlike in many other countries where those people come to teacher training when they cannot find anything else to do, okay? And they come to teacher training saying that this is not really my job I'm just gonna do this for a couple of years and then go and do something real, okay? We don't think like this. We invest a lot in social capital meaning that we invest in collaboration and cooperation between teachers when they are in a workplace. Much of the professional development of Finland is actually investment in social capital not in human capital only. So the teachers have resources and time to learn how to work together, share, network, help one another, it's a very different thing. And then we have a very strong professional association. One teacher union, the trade union of education in Finland where all the teachers, most of the 95% of teachers and almost all the school principals and superintendents belong to. It's a very important, powerful professional association working for many of these things that you see here before and also of course protecting teachers' professional rights. So this best and the pridest idea here in America is just nonsense. I don't believe at all that the best and the pridest thinking would be any better it was with the John F. Kennedy's cabinet in the 1960s. Remember the horrible foreign policies that follow the idea when he said that I wanna find the best and the pridest young people to advise me what to do in the world and the world got really bad because of that advice. Now we have the same type of thing in education that people are recruiting best and the pridest young people who have no idea about education or teaching and learning to do these things. So it's about the best and the rightest, the right people in the system. And finally, you know, this is my favorite topic that we have forgot one thing ladies and gents that the kids have designed to play. This is how they exist. This is the form of their kind of existence. It's not something we do if there's no other thing to do. But more serious thing is that you have had studies here in America and we have had the similar things in Finland. Just about a month ago our health organization, National Health Institute, came up with a study that says that if you sit, if you're adult or child, it doesn't matter. If you sit about eight hours a day or more, the negative health consequences equal to being a smoker. Hear this. If you sit eight hours or more a day, it means that your health will suffer just like you were a regular smoker. Now, would you like to have your eight-year-old a smoker? I think we try to do everything to keep these kids away from all of these things. But we still, here in America and many other countries, you go to Southeast Asia, Shanghai, Singapore, eight hours a day sitting is an easy thing. Most people do that. Many people do much more than that. They sit eight hours a day in school and they go home and they play games and watch TV and do those things and continue sitting. Sitting is new smoking, okay? And this is what we need to keep in mind. The schools have to be designed in a way and curricula has to be designed in a way that kids will not do that anymore, at least when they are in a school, okay? The other one, these may be somehow interrelated, but America is kind of a strange place because you have this extreme thing called ADHD. Huge prevalence throughout the United States. Actually, the national data shows that the closer you get to Washington, D.C., the higher the rate of incidence of ADHD there is. Seriously, go to Hawaii and they hardly have ADHD at all. You know, I often say that if you look at these figures, it's close to 50 billion dollars a year just to take care of this thing that is partly fabricated by the big pharma here and partly exists. We do also have ADHD in Finland but we have a different name for that. We call it a childhood. You know what I'm saying? When you're 18 or 19, you normally leave the childhood behind and you become an adult. So leave you ADHD behind and you live like no. Sometimes people are 25 and they still have that, that's still childish. No, seriously, we have a much less rate of ADHD as do most other countries in the world than America. So I think the question for you is first, is this all real? And if it's real, you need to do something. You need to do something not only at homes but you need to do something in your schools not to let kids sit down when they need to move like me. You know, I have to move to think that many of the kids are designed in the same way. If you ask them to sit too long, they go crazy. Okay, I walk around and then we say that, okay, they have ADHD. Give them a blue pill and everything's fine. I never tried a blue pill. Okay, so this is, is there something behind that? You know, this is how the typical school day, fourth grade, or first grade school, but in this case, fourth grade school day looks like, okay? And we are not doing this because we want to prevent the ADHD or anything because, but we do this because it's a basic human right of a child to have 15 minutes of every hour that we give them education to do what they want to do, okay? They go out, they put their boots on, they go out and play and do whatever they want to do. Every 60 minutes has to include 15 minutes for kids. This is the right that we issue for, it's an every child in Finland. Tell me, what rights do your children have here? Nothing like this, okay? So if we have more women in power, in politics, I'm sure that women would think like this, that kids need to have rights, right? Just like we do. But we men, we often think that, no, they need iPads. Okay, so this is how Finland is working to make sure that there's a good balance between the different things. And this is my last one. How many of you know? Taylor Malley. Okay, if you haven't seen this, this is just two minutes. I'm gonna close here and I'm gonna thank you so much for this and then have a conversation. But this is, I know Taylor and he's a teacher, he's a poet, lives in New York City. Wonderful guy. And listen to this, because this guy, this little piece, two minute piece, has a very powerful message for you and all of us. Someone who decided that his best option in life was to become a teacher. Ha ha ha ha. Uh uh uh. He reminds the other dinner guests that you know it's true what they say about teachers. Those who can do and those who can't teach. Ha ha ha ha. Uh uh uh. I decided to bite my tongue instead of his. And resist the urge to remind the other dinner guests that it's also true what they say about lawyers because we're eating after all and this is supposed to be polite conversation. I mean, you're a teacher, Taylor. Come on, be honest. What do you mean? And I wish he hadn't done that. Ask me to be honest. Because you see, I have this little policy about honesty and ass kicking, which is if you ask for it, then I have to let you have it. Ha ha ha. I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C plus feel like a congressional medal of honor and I can make an A minus feel like a slap in the face. How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best. You want to know what I make? I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups. No, you cannot ask me a question, so put your hand down. Why won't I let you go to the bathroom? Because you're bored and you don't really have to go, do you? I make parents tremble in fear when I call home at around dinner time. Hi, this is Mr. Molly. I hope I'm holding a bad time. I just wanted to talk to you about something that your son said today. He said, leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don't you? And it was the noblest act of courage that I have ever seen. I make parents see their children for who they are and who they can be. You want to know what I make? I make kids wonder. I make them question. I make them criticize. I make them apologize and leave it. I make them rat, rat, rat. And then I make them read. I make them spell. Definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful over and over and over again until they will never misspell either one of those words again. I make them show all their work in math class and then hide it on their final draft in English. I make them realize that if you've got this, then you follow this. And if somebody are trying to judge you based on what you make, you give them this. Here, let me break it down for you. So you know what I say is true. Let me break it down for you. So you know what I say is true. Teachers make a backhand difference. Now, what about you? Okay, thank you so much, people. Thank you. You know, I often say here that in America, I mean, that one thing that you guys, you don't understand. And it's the thing that, you know, the things that have made Finland, Canada, Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, many of those places create in education. Those are the ideas made here in the United States. They are not Finnish innovations or Singaporean innovations or Canadian stuff. People in Finland, the teachers read American textbooks, research. They teach using American teaching methods. Schools are led based on American leadership ideas. Most things are from here. One thing I don't understand here in America, why you do not do those things in a large scale, kind of a system-wide scale, so that they would be part of your policy reforms and education on thinking that has made all these high-performing systems bloom. You know, I met last spring one of the presidential candidates by accident in Upper State, New York. His name is George Pataki. Okay? And I was having a lunch with him without knowing who he was. We spoke in the same conference. And so George asked me that, so what do you think about American education? And I said, my grandmother told me that if there's something you don't understand, don't talk about it. So I said to George that, you know, there's so many things that I really don't understand here in America. So I would rather not answer your question. And he said, so what do you don't understand? And I said, exactly this. I said, I don't understand why you don't do things that have made everybody else great here in your schools. Why don't your teachers teach just like all the others do? And he just didn't understand what I was saying. So he said to me, give me an example. So I said, you know, I teach at Harvard and my good friend and colleague is called Howard Cardner. How many of you know Howard Cardner? Almost everybody, okay? But I said that, you know, in Finland we allowed Howard's work 30 years ago so much that we designed the whole system in that way. That's why we have the whole child approach there. And special education, many of these other things. Everybody reads Howard's work. Everybody knows what the multiple intelligences way. So he took the menu card and wrote this thing down. What is this guy's name? He said, I said, Howard Cardner. And what is this theory called? He said, I said, the theory of multiple intelligences. He wanted to have another one. I said, other great American idea is a thing called cooperative learning. How many of you know cooperative learning? Everybody do. How much it's used in the schools around America? Not much. As it should be. Go to Finland, you see everybody doing this. Every classroom, every school all the time has something from this thing. George took the menu card, wrote the thing. I said, what is this theory called? I said, no, it's kind of a cooperative learning and assigning whole class in the smaller groups and then assign, you know, learning according to those units there, okay? And where is it done? He said, I said, go to the University of Minnesota Stanford or Johns Hopkins, different places here where this has been done during the last 40 years. Then he said, Pasi, you know, I'm a practical guy, give me a third example. And I look at George, this is a real story. I look at him there and say, George, you know, I give you two for free, but third one costs you a lot of money. And then he said to me that, you know, I'm gonna announce my running for the president today. And if I'm gonna make it all the way to White House, you're gonna be my advisor. I said, you bet. So please vote for George Patak. I need a job. Okay, anybody, any questions or comments? No, I was not serious. Of course you can vote for a woman, that's my only thing. It's very basic. Could you just move your presentation back to slides? I'm right here in front. Sorry, where are you? I'm just right here. Okay, okay. Yeah, could you just go back to slides where you had the breakdown of a school day? This one. Yeah, and then, so I have a question because I thought maybe I'd misread it. Mathematics, is it just not shown here because it's infused in other courses? No, this is just an example. This is one. Just an example. Okay, thank you. You know, in Finland, the next day will be something different. So the kids in the primary, fourth grade, they have probably, they study probably about 12 different subjects. So this is just how the structure, this is just examples for you. But you know, one thing that we have different here is that here in America, I think most fourth grade teachers teach a fourth grade all the time. I think it's not a good idea. I think the better idea would be to have a kind of a looping system like we do in Finland where the fourth grade teacher who is teaching this class now would be teaching the fifth grade next year, the same kids, and then the sixth grade. And there are many advantages with this. One is that you learn to know the kids much better. And you know, we do it that in Finland also because we don't have any standardized testing to tell you how the kids are doing. That's what the teachers have to do. And because we have also this system of assessing students based on, not based on the kind of a statistical grade level performance, but teachers have to assess the students based on each and every individual's potential. So it's almost like a medical doctor. You don't examine your patients by looking at the kind of a grade level performance and say, this is what everybody seems to do. If I'm a doctor, I wanna see exactly who you are, what you do, what are your living conditions, and your past health record and many other things. And then I say that I think the best thing for you would be to do something like this. Of course, I know that the blood pressure and many other things that there is a kind of a benchmark. And this is exactly how Finnish teachers work, that they have to learn to know each and every pupil so that they can put the expectations and the children put their expectations in a right way. Yes. Tim Cross from Colorado. I'm wondering how much you think culture plays in the basis of this. And what I mean is, in the United States, of course, we have Dems and Republicans, and that's pretty much it. So yin and yang, there is a competition element that I think exists in the United States. I'm right and you're wrong. There's never gray areas. And I wonder if maybe Finland really doesn't have a culture like that, given the response you expressed that happened when the studies came out in 2000. You kind of sit and wait. United States would be draping itself in a flag and running around talking about how great it was. And sitting culturally, folks sit a lot. I mean, I'm just wondering if there is a cultural factor here that even if we started theoretically approaching education in the ways that mimic Finland, would we still have a cultural problem where people just are not predisposed to doing that? Those things. Yeah, it's a great question. I said what I said in the beginning. Remember, I said that this is not only a story about Finland. Because if this was only Finland, then I could say that you're right. Maybe many of these things that we do, you cannot do. Actually, my book, Finnish Lessons 2.0, should have a sticker in the back of the book saying that don't try this at home. Because many of those things are, they are dangerous to do because they may not work as it is. But you know, the beautiful thing is that this is not only Finland. If you don't like, if you think that Finland is too different culturally, go to Canada. You know, they watch CNN and Fox News and all these things there. But they still have a pretty much kind of a similar approach to education. And there's a lot of inequality. They're not as much as here in the United States. There's a lot of child poverty in Canada. About 15% of the, 14% of the kids come from poor homes. So there must be something that you can do. And I would actually say that try to avoid these things. I hear it every day. People saying that America is not like Finland. We're gonna do these things. You can do this, you're socialists, you can do that. Okay? That's what they say about Canadians. Many of here say that Canadians are socialists. That's why they can do this. I don't care how you call that. You know, if it's good for kids, a good for teachers, we should do that regardless of what it is. So that's why I'm saying that, you know, now we are probably living the time when you can say that, you know, don't mimic or try to imitate Finland or anybody else. Just look at the trends. Look at the evidence what we know across the world, what the different systems are doing. And some of those kind of a key policies and ideas are very different to what they are here in a kind of a mainstream education policy and reform thinking. And that's why I would say that, yes, there are cultural differences there between Finland and the United States or many of the states here, but that still should not give us a kind of a reason to walk away from the fact that equity and excellence and quality seem to be walking hand in hand. If this is true, then we need to do something about it. We need to ask here, that are we really doing everything we can to keep the education system equitable or not? But some of these things, I think the key word here is that don't try to imitate anybody. Don't try to copy anybody. Learn why countries are doing things in a different way than here and see what you can, how you can revise and restructure some of your policies and ways of doing education here. And I have, for example, this recess time. It's a simple thing. One thing that I would do, if I was a king of America here, which I'm thankful or not, this would be one of the first things I would do. I would issue a law, a federal law that would give every child a right to have free time during the school day so that they can do their own things. That would change everything. That would change many things in what happens in the schools. Okay, I have one quick question about mother tongue. Is that a time where there's just focus on oral language and interaction? Mother tongue here includes also literature. So this would be reading and writing and it's like your literature thing. So that's what it is. And remember that we have two mother tongues in Finland, actually three, that's Finnish and Swedish. So everybody in Finland needs to learn two domestic or mother tongues, two domestic languages plus two foreign languages. So we have people who leave the Finnish school system speak four languages. Somebody told me that the person who speaks two languages is called bilingual and person who speak one language is called American. So do something about that. If I was a king of America, the second thing I would do, I would issue a federal law that every child must have right to learn another language, regardless of what it is. It can be Spanish or Chinese, whatever it is, but every American in the future should speak at least two languages. It's good for your brain and it's good for your business. Can you talk for, my name is Joan Sobel and can you talk for a minute about teacher recruitment? I was listening to what you were saying about finding the teachers that have the passion and I kind of wondered, do you find them? Do they find you? Do a lot of people come to you right out of school? Do they come from other careers? How do you match make with each other? Yeah, you know, the basic teacher education, teacher degree in Finland is a master's degree. Like I was a math and science teacher, so I did my master's degree first in math and science. Took about five years and then I went to teacher education for one year. Okay, but the primary school teachers, the primary school is a kind of a foundation. It's like a cornerstone of the Finnish school system. Primary school teachers have their master's degrees in education, so the major is education and it's a very competitive degree. It's very difficult to get in there. We have like a University of Helsinki has 20 times more applicants that we can take in every year. Nationally we have 10 applicants for each place in primary school teacher education programs. So you need to be pretty good to get through. But you know, the mistake that America makes, many people commentators in the media and conferences like this, that they don't understand. They think that when Finland has this privilege to select one out of 10 applicants that we do that based on the SAT or the high school leaving scores. And this is completely wrong. We are not doing that. I have a data that shows that one quarter of the current freshmen in my university, the University of Helsinki, teacher education program, one out of four students come from the bottom half of the academic merits. And those are the ones that have been doing coaching or music or something like this that indicates that their passion is real and that they really love to become teachers and that they have this drive to do that for life. So that's why it's a kind of a natural selection in Finland because it's so much, it's a respected and valued degree. If you have a primary school teacher degree in Finland, you are very strong in labor markets anywhere. And I was leading one of the national agencies for many years in Finland. Whenever I had a primary school teacher applying for a job there, I always wanted to have those people in an interview just to see who they are. Normally they were fantastic people because they had to show so many times what they can do, who they are, that there's a kind of a guarantee that they are great people. So if you're primary school principal in Finland who is hiring teachers, you are in a very good position because you know that you don't need to worry about whether the decrease and qualifications and merits that they come with in their diplomas are real. You can be sure that they are well qualified and trained people because of this drive. So you can focus more on this kind of a motivation and commitment side of whether somebody is committed to work in a school like yours. Like I have some friends who are leading primary schools and they say that they only hire people who are like a real team players that you have to prove and show evidence that you are a team player, that you have been doing something with other people. And principals are not looking at your records of academic knowledge what you have. They wanna see how you have been performing and doing things together with other people. And that's what decides in the end of the day whether you're gonna get the job or not. Hi. Hi. How are you? I have any distinct honor to visit Helsinki and spend time there and seeing that this is real. I had a couple of questions and I was so glad you mentioned the maternity leave because that to me is a game changer. And I think that in the audience it's important to mention that because that foundation of early learning and the opportunity of the parents makes the world a different starting off. And I think that that helps the equity scale. The other thing that I had the opportunity to notice is the collaboration in Helsinki with the NGOs. And so my experience there was with the Finnish Federation of Settlements and that collaboration of what happens outside of the school day and the school day. And I wanted to see if you could comment on where you think that impact on the equity side of things. And then I also had the question of if the scoring included places like Romania and Hungary where do you think the European Union would fall on the equity and quality standards if adding a place like Romania or Hungary to that? And is the purpose of not adding to avoid the skewing of the results? Yeah, okay. Let me speak a little bit about the first one because that's I think close to what we have been saying. If you look at this one, this scheme, this is how basically every school looks like that the question that many people have that what are the kids doing at two o'clock when the school day is over, fourth grade? You know, most kids almost everybody will go home to put their backpacks on and they walk home. We don't have a school buses or or taxis or parents never drive their kids because we have a public transportation and it's normal in Finland that young people, if you're fourth grader, you walk home. Even it's a mile or two to go. Take your bike or you walk, that's a normal thing. But that's why we have a very, and this very short time that kids spend on homework. Sometimes it doesn't really exist there because kids try to do most of their homework at home in school so that they can do their other things. So this is a place where the NGOs and all sorts of youth associations and sports things will take over. That's where they provide their services and the Finnish schools never have a competitive sports day not even high schools. So that's something that the students, if they wanna play basketball or do any sports, they never do that in school. They do always go after school, they go home, they change their things, they eat a little bit and then they go and do their hobbies with somebody else. So that's why we have an absolutely critical role that we call the third sector, that is these NGOs and others who are helping children and families to accomplish what they think they should accomplish with their kids rather than asking kids to do a lot of homework or some other thing. So it's absolutely critical. If you ever go to Finland, make sure that you also investigate or examine a little bit what the kids are doing when they're not in the school. How their evenings look like, what do they do and what the society and others are doing to help kids to do other things. So maybe I'll leave it here, that your question of Hungary and Romania I don't exactly know what to say about that. Thank you, Pasi. I wanna kind of shift gears and I hope I'm not putting you on the spot here but taught for 32 years, now serving as the state president of the Association in Utah. My question for you is it's very frustrating for us as educators and also those of us who are in the policy arena to try and effect change in this direction. What advice would you give for teachers in the United States when we are up against the policies that are absolutely contrary to this for us to be able to have influence? Well, if I knew that I would probably be a king of America. It's a great question. I think one thing that I would put a lot of hope is still here that America is still pretty much, this includes the research universities for example where I work, that even in the field of research and education, America is very much focusing on America. So when it comes to what works in education and what should we do, in most cases people are just looking at the evidence from the different parts of the country and the ideas what people do and what they're not doing. I think one thing that I would love to do with teachers and I think we are in a unique situation now is that we have this thing called international data, international evidence. We know what works in other countries. We know exactly what the problems are. So now I think one thing that teachers should know and this may be something that you and AFD and other teacher associations around the world should be doing. I know that the education international is doing a lot of work on this to make sure that the teachers, the members also know what's happening around the world. And many times the people who are deciding things on behalf of us, that they call for evidence. How do we know that this works? So we need to probably do better work, all of us to make sure that the people understand and see the kind of a bigger picture of what's going on. For example, this equity and quality. I have a lot of expectations for that. If this continues to go as it is now, that the evidence is so strongly proposing that equity and quality go hand in hand. That you cannot have a high quality system without having a highly equitable system. This will then lead to different types of things. I've been around this beautiful country almost everywhere. And my book has been a key for me to meet the people in the congresses and senators around this country. I've been here in the Capitol Hill speaking to people. I've been at White House talking to the presidents advisors about these things and everywhere. And even in the communities with parents and others, everywhere people say that, oh, I didn't know about that. That's interesting. I have met people, this is a high level policy makers and legislators in this country who say that maybe I have to rethink some of the positions that I have now when I know more about this, what's going on in the world. It's not only my work. There are other people who are doing, Linda Dillingham has been instrumental. I think she was here last year and she's been working so hard about this that people would understand here about the teacher policies and teacher issues around the world. And I think that we need to continue to do that more and more without teachers and members. Make sure that they understand that there is a world out there outside of the United States. And many of these things actually are American ideas. This is what I repeat over and over again that what you have here in this country has been a solution for so many others. So it can be a solution for you too. But now the thing is that let's stop talking about this, putting hundreds of millions of dollars to have yet another innovation. You know, I don't understand this that people that you are investing so much money on innovations when we know what works. But let's spend this money on helping teachers and schools to implement some of these great ideas that you have had. And that's something that I would try to help people to see like this George Pataki thing. I think, you know, I don't know too much about this. He's the only that level politician that I know. But when I was looking at George, he was really shocked. You know, he just couldn't understand what I was saying. And when he understood, he was saying like, you know, I don't understand this either. Why are we not doing these things? But, you know, the interesting thing with the choice was that when I listened to his speech, he was speaking just before me in this conference. I would say like, now he's gonna tell the truth to people and say what we should do. No, he said exactly opposite. America must be great. And I know how to make that work. We need more competition and higher standards and these things. I said, George, we just had lunch. But we need another one and another one. But I think that this is really what we need to do to make sure the things will get better. Social media is a wonderful thing. And I know that here in America, social media is doing a lot of good stuff. Diane Dravitz is one of those key leaders in making sure that people know what's going on. Diane is a very dear good friend of mine. And I know very well what she's doing and why. And I think we need more Diane's and Linda's and other people who will, you know, help people to see what's really going on here. And eventually I think that things will change. Maybe the last thing I can say is that, remember what Churchill said? He said many things, but he said something that is very good for this moment. He said that you can always account on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else. Yeah. Thank you so much.