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Making international comparisons about education systems was all the rage in 2011. Rhetoric suggested that America’s education system is performing so poorly that we as a nation have lost our competitive edge, and that the world’s emerging economies are out-educating us, which will result in the further decline of our nation.

I’m not sure if that rhetoric will stop in 2012, but it is time we move beyond it. How can we do that?

First off, in talking about our education system, we need to acknowledge that, as Dan Domenech (executive director of the American Association of School Administrators and chair of the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors) points out, it is actually the best that it has ever been. Graduation rates, college attendance rates and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are at their highest levels ever. Domenech also points out that when educators and education leaders travel internationally, they find that “overseas colleagues refer to our school system as the gold standard” and “parents in every corner of the world want to send their children to American schools.”

While it is important to remember that some public schools in America are not performing nearly as well as they should, it is equally important to remember that some are doing a phenomenal job, and that many in the international community still look to us as a leader in the education field.

Second, we need to be honest about what an incomplete or misleading picture educational data (be it performance, staffing, funding or any other subcategory of educational data) can paint. For example, federal officials have claimed that students in other countries – emerging economies like China and India as well as established high-performing nations like Korea and Japan – spend more time in class than American students. If you look at the number of days students spend in school, that may be true. But a recent review by the National School Board Association’s Center for Public Education shows that actually students in the U.S. receive around the same number of instructional hours as do many of their Asian counterpoints. [It also points out that U.S. students receive more instructional hours than a number of European nations, including high-flying Finland, and that there does not seem to be a relation to time in class and student performance.] The general point: We must move beyond simply citing figures in making international comparisons. 

And third, in addition to observing the educational practices in high-performing countries, we need to actually implement the policies we admire so much.

As we all know, Finland is widely touted as a model for educational excellence. Yet as a recent article in The Atlantic points out, the educational policies that politicians in the U.S. have been favoring for the past decade-plus are nothing like what exists in Finland. What do I mean? Here is the U.S. we seem to have become dependent on standardized tests. But in Finland, there are no standardized tests (aside from a matriculation exam at the end of what is roughly the equivalent of American high school).

We talk a great deal about accountability. But there is no word for “accountability” in Finnish, according to Pasi Sahlberg director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility – “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

We allow individuals with little training into our schools to teach our children. In Finland, one must have a master’s degree to enter the teaching profession. Teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the nation. Teachers have prestige, decent pay and a lot of responsibility.

And we spend a great deal of time debating issues of school choice – charter schools, private school vouchers, inter- and intradistrict choice. But in Finland, there are no private schools. The small number of independent schools are all publicly financed, and none can charge tuition. School choice is not a priority. As the article puts it, “the main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.”

As Sahlberg is quoted, “In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.”

That is the heart of the lesson from Finland. But as the article’s title - What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success - points out, it is something we often ignore here in America.

The goal of the Finnish education program is not excellence, but equity. The idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn. Accomplishing equity ultimately led to excellence.

Critics often charge that what works in a nation like Finland won’t work here in the U.S. Finland is small, homogeneous nation – very unlike ours. And to be sure, we shouldn’t simply import what worked in Finland. We must adapt it to our context. Still, Finland’s size and diversity are comparable to that of some U.S. states. And we must only look to Norway, as Samuel Abrams (a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College) has done, to realize that being a small, relatively homogeneous nation does not guarantee excellent educational performance. Norway has mediocre performance on international assessments. The lesson there?

“Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.”

We need to force the conversation around international comparisons beyond political sound bites, publicly acknowledging the strengths of our own system and revisiting often-cited data to get a more accurate picture of the state of education around the world.

And we must be willing to apply what we learn to our own context. One possible starting place: Finland's revelation that “The problem facing education…isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population, but the economic inequality of society. … More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.”

Food for thought as we ponder strategies for improving education in 2012.