The Center on International Education Benchmarking

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According to The Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB), Finland, Japan, and Canada are some of the world’s top performing countries. However, the education system of the United States continues to lag behind that of these three countries and many others. In order to compete more with these countries, one must look more in depth into these education systems and compare the many different factors that are contributing to the success of these countries such as their educational structure, curriculum and assessment, teacher quality, and accountability.
The Center on International Education Benchmarking states that the success of Finland’s schools is said to come from the highly-qualified teachers and the high value the Finns place on the teaching field. Finland has created very in depth policies on the recruitment, selection, training, and supervision process of the teaching profession. However, this would not be enough in itself without the national curriculum they have put into place. This national curriculum does not give teachers’ methods on how to teach, but instead provides guidelines that outline how teachers should focus on developing their students skills and creativity (Hancock).
Finland also tends to focus less on standardized tests for accountability, but more on monitoring students’ progress in comprehensive schools than that of the U.S. The monitoring assessments are offered to these schools for sixth and ninth grade. These assessments are optional to teachers, but most decide to take the test out of curiosity. These results are not publicized, but are used to drive instruction in the classroom. The actual exam that all students strive to do good on is the Matriculation Exam which is taken at the end of u...

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