Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2010

Abstract

The essay is four parts. Part 2 sets out the theoretical frame of the argument. It explains briefly why social solidarity increasingly depends on the provision of capacitating or enabling circumstances; why those services must increasingly be adapted to individual needs to be effective; and what is organizationally problematic (from the point of view of current theories of organization) about the success of countries such as Finland, Denmark and the US in delivering these services. It sketches two paths — a Nordic way, building on traditional professions, and a roundabout, US way, re-building broken bureaucracies originally intended as substitutes for professionalism — to a new type of institution — neither traditional profession nor conventional bureaucracy, but with elements of each — that addresses the apparent problem. These paths have complementary strengths and weaknesses so that each can benefit by learning from the experience and innovations of the other as it proceeds its own way towards their convergence.

Part 3 reviews the transformation of the Finnish school system from the 1970s on, focusing on the origins and especially the functioning of key elements of special education: early childhood testing, co-development of test instruments by teachers and other actors, and monitoring of the provision of services in each school by the SWG, and the decentralization of school governance. We present here some quasi-experimental evidence that, as the PISA results suggest, special education raises the achievement levels of students with recurrent learning difficulties—and thus the overall performance of the Finnish school system. To buttress the conclusion that the “treatment” that explains the favorable school outcome is indeed individualized pedagogy — the classroom practices build around the collaboration of special education and classroom teachers — we look at the failures of school reform in Denmark: a country strikingly like Finland in its approach to education, except that (relying almost exclusively on the bottom-up initiatives of teachers themselves) it has proven incapable of transforming the teaching profession and therefore incapable of providing crucial services to weaker students.

By way of conclusion we return, in Part 4, to weaknesses in the natural or Nordic development path—and specifically to problems in Finnish special education revealed by current attempts at reform. We consider the Danes’ travails in reforming their public schools and ask whether current plans to extend special education and further integrate it with regular classroom teaching may encounter “Danish” problems by excessive reliance on professional collegiality and informal exchanges among professional groups as mechanisms for pooling information about and evaluating current performance. If so, techniques developed in the US and elsewhere for the diagnostic monitoring of the process by which services are customized might prove useful.

Disciplines

Comparative and Foreign Law | Education Law | Law

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