In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?<\/i>, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation\u2019s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland\u2019s story is important, he writes, because \u201cit gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Detractors say that Finland performs well academically because it is ethnically homogeneous, but Sahlberg responds that \u201cthe same holds true for Japan, Shanghai or Korea,\u201d\u009d which are admired by corporate reformers for their emphasis on testing. To detractors who say that Finland, with its population of 5.5 million people, is too small to serve as a model, Sahlberg responds that \u201cabout 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n