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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.

Milgram quotes at length from "a published letter signed by 207 Finnish university, polytechnic (applied sciences) and technical university mathematics teachers warning about the totally unsatisfactory and, indeed, worsening performance of Finnish students when they get to the universities."

Finland's success has more to do with PISA's shortcomings, he argues, than with Finnish students' mathematical prowess:  "PISA does not measure the kind of reasoning that is crucial to our economic well-being, and it is very, very important that we all understand this distinction."

Now, Milgram is hardly sanguine about U.S. students' performance in mathematics, citing their uninspiring showing in the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), which he considers the better assessment.  Yet he notes that Finland's performance on TIMSS was not substantially better when it last participated in 1999. Milgram cautions U.S. educators against taking curricular cues from the Finns.

You can read Milgram's entire comment here.

Any thoughts?