The PISA results published yesterday, which measure schoolchildren’s academic performance, showed that the performance level of Finnish, and many other European, schoolchildren had declined since the previous assessment. The reasons for this have been discussed in the pages of one Finnish media outlet after another, and at least the obvious impact of social media on children’s ability to concentrate has not been downplayed.
However, one factor that has quite evidently contributed to the decline in our schoolchildren’s performance has received remarkably little attention. Namely, the indirect effect of poorly performing immigrant children and young people on other pupils.
Of course, it is impossible to say anything with certainty about this without proper research, but even common sense suggests that the disruption these pupils are known to cause, and the special attention they require from teachers—which comes at the expense of the time available for teaching other schoolchildren—would seem to be plausible candidates for explaining, for example, the [surprising decline] in the learning outcomes of children from socioeconomically advantaged families.
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I was particularly surprised when Professor Mari-Pauliina Vainikainen, who commented on the issue on television —and was wearing a rather striking floral decoration on her head—explicitly denied that immigration has an impact on learning outcomes (at around the 15-minute mark in this recording). She justified this by saying that the gap in academic performance between immigrant young people and native Finnish young people had narrowed since the previous assessment.
Her reasoning is, of course, factually correct in itself, but her conclusion seemed odd given that the impact of immigration is known to have significantly worsened the conditions for maintaining order and concentration in school classrooms. Even more peculiar was the realization that I could not easily find a Finnish source to link to documenting this phenomenon, which is familiar to the parents of children in all kinds of ethnically diverse classrooms.
In any case, it is clear that if pupils from the majority population have to study in a more disruptive environment than in previous years, this will affect their learning. The same applies if, because of the additional attention required by immigrant children, they receive less time and instruction from their teachers than they did in the past.
It would therefore be good if researchers and funding could also be found for studying these factors. Above all, we should develop a pedagogical solution that would eliminate these problems from Finnish school classrooms.
Previous thoughts on the same topic:
Finnish Families Flee Immigrant-Dominated Areas Over School Safety Concerns
Finnish Immigration Policy Limits Freedom of Expression
Attitudes Toward Immigrants Are a Problem in Schools
