Finland (Part 2)

Last week, I posted an article about the demographic causes of Finland’s preeminence on the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA) exams. My purpose in that post was to show that a simple comparison between countries is impossible—but this is not to say that we can learn nothing from international comparisons. We can learn a lot, but only through careful and detailed examination of the data. I’ve spent much of the past two weeks sifting through that data, and I’ve come up with some interesting leads.