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Comment on Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?

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Wow, if those numbers are true then it sure falls into the "uncomfortable truths" category:

'''

* Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.

* White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).

* Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.

* African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete.

'''

scuze me, I couldn't figure out how to italicise something when it contained asterisky bullet points.

Interesting. Though America also probably spends much more on their Foo-Americans than they spend in Foo-istan, so you'd expect a higher showing.

If truth is uncomfortable, it's just grinding against some lies you're more comfortable with.

But there's no "wow" about it. If America has the pedigree amongst whites, asians, africans, and hispanics, it was simply due to the horrible trials associated with distant migration. Simple Darwinian stuff really.

The article specifically mentions how immigrants are helped in Finland.

Yes, but there aren't enough of them to affect the statistics. Here's the ethnic breakdown of Finland as of 2006:

  Finn 93.4%
  Swede 5.6%
  Russian 0.5%
  Estonian 0.3%
  Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%
  Sami 0.1% (2006)
Finns and Swedes make up 99% of the population. The first group that historically has trouble in school, the Roma, makes up a whopping 0.1% of the population. If schools can work anywhere, it's Finland.

Thank you.

It's much harder to specifically help immigrants if they make up 80% of the class, like in the schools in inner Berlin.

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