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...that has impelled people to respond to our recent interviews with Finnish education official Reijo Laukkanen and PISA assessment authority Andreas Schleicher.  Most telephone calls and comments we've received reveal unabashed enthusiasm for Finland's support for teachers, whom Lukkanen and Schleicher credit for Finnish students' success on PISA, one of the most well-known international assessments.

Yet Stanford mathematician James Milgram takes a different tack. In a comment he sent us yesterday, he questions both Finland's preeminence in mathematics and PISA's ability even to detect such high achievement. ...

Like many others, I've been wondering what lessons educators and students can draw from the current financial crisis.  Certainly, schools should do more to teach financial literacy:  Americans could stand to know much more about credit.  Schools could perhaps also do more to instill character in students:  Financial wizards could have done much more to rein in their greed.

But the crisis offers a third--and I would argue larger--lesson, a real teachable moment:  We're all in this together.

This fact seems lost on some people who readily understand the first two lessons.  One generally thoughtful education blogger argued against big financial bailouts on the grounds that borrowers who lived well beyond their means should experience a chastening dose of failure.  Many others have rejected bailouts on the grounds that Wall Street hucksters shouldn't profit from their sins. ...

Imagine a country where no one evaluates teachers, no one evaluates schools, and individual schools' test results remain confidential.  You've just imagined Finland, which regularly bests all other developed nations in international assessments of student performance.

How can Finland pull this off without undermining quality?  According to Dr. Reijo Laukkanen, a 34-year veteran of Finland's National Board of Education, "We trust our teachers."

In a recent interview with Public School Insights, Laukkanen assured us that this trust is well deserved.  Finland draws its teachers from the top 10 percent of college graduates, and teaching regularly beats out law or medicine as a top career choice among high performers.  "We can trust that [teachers] are competent," Laukkanen told us; "They know what to do." ...

A coalition of over 100 education, youth, social services and health organizations have released "The Community Agenda for America's Public Schools," a call for more partnerships among public schools and other community or social service organizations that work to improve the lives of children.

Marty Blank of the Coalition for Community Schools made it clear that the agenda connects strong community supports with high academic achievement. "We are not in the 'either-or' category in this debate [between academic and social supports].... What we do is take the next step and we say how this can be done. We need to get past this conversation that says it's either one way or the other." (As Quoted in Education Week)

You can read more about the Community Agenda here. ...