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There is a Finland for every taste. If you want to advocate for an education reform, any education reform, just imply that they do it in Finland.

Newsweek is the latest in a long line of national news magazines to make use of this all-purpose Finland. Newsweek contributor Stefan Theil touts Finland’s success in an article advocating the use of value-added data to measure teacher effectiveness:

[W]ithout such testing and evaluation, education policy will remain vague and approximate, based on folk wisdom and political expediency rather than evidence and facts…. [M]ost of what governments around the world are calling "education investments" still fails to meet the effectiveness test.

Testing and evaluation are without a doubt essential, and we would all welcome much better performance data on which to base policy. But it is disingenuous at best to suggest that the most successful nations succeed primarily as a result of their testing and evaluation systems.

Finland offers a case in point. Some months ago, Finnish education leader Reijo Laukkanen told me: “We don't have any evaluation of teachers. The working morale and the working ethics of the teachers are very high, and we can also trust that they are competent; they know what to do.”

What Finland does do is focus on teachers and struggling students. Theil gets this right, praising Finland for “improving [teacher] selection, upgrading their training, and concentrating on how they can best help individual students keep up.” But teacher evaluation is not part of Finland’s secret sauce.

Finland’s robust social programs, which mute the impact of social and economic disadvantage, also surely help. But Theil leaves these off his list of programs that “meet the effectiveness test.”

Theil also singles out Canada for special praise. Again, it’s not clear that Canada’s experience supports his major policy prescriptions. He’s quite right to applaud Canada for focusing on low-income and immigrant students. (“Toronto has been able to erase the achievement difference between migrants and natives,” he writes.) But Theil fails to note that Canada, like Finland, puts great stock in social programs that support student achievement. Here’s what Canadian education leader Raymond Théberge told me last November:

One of the reasons that we are able to be successful in meeting the learning needs of immigrant children is that [Canada] also [has] in place, within the provinces, a number of settlement organizations which help the whole family. In other words, the school also becomes a center for English as second language instruction for parents. So they're welcomed into the community. There are [also] a number of supports provided by these settlement groups to ensure that there are provisions for housing, provisions for jobs...those kinds of things.

We cannot expect the school to solve all of society's problems, and in order to address some of the issues that we expect schools to deal with, we have to bring a whole number of partners to the table.

One might also note that immigrants to Canada are more likely than native-born Canadians to hold a college degree. Canada already has a leg up in “erasing the achievement difference between migrants and natives.”

I do not mean to minimize the importance of teacher evaluation, assessment, strong data systems and accountability. All are critical. But it would be nice if journalists who enjoy a national podium would be more careful when they use international comparisons. Theil may be right to point out in his lede that “Too many nations are wasting their school spending.” But his next line—“Here’s how to get it right”—is sheer hubris.

The science of teacher evaluation for accountability purposes is still in its infancy, and no nation has yet “got it right.” Many of the most successful nations have accountability systems far less developed than our own. Does that mean we should follow Finland’s lead and stop evaluating teachers altogether? Hardly. But as we try to improve our evaluation and accountability systems, we might also want to investigate how successful nations support teachers and students—both in and out of schools.

And let’s stop using Finland as the poster child for every reform idea that takes our fancy.

Update: Forgot to mention.... Hat tip to Alexander Russo for pointing out this article.