Yes, the university level education is pretty much free in Finland. They also have 22% sales tax, 75% gasoline tax, 50% tax on cars, extremely high income tax (goes very easily over 30% and can go up to 60%) etc. Also the salaries paid after getting a good education are very bad. There is pretty much only Nokia that is doing R&D, which means that it does not much make sense to get a PhD. In fact I saw that most people were making a complete U-turn after getting their PhD - they usually ended up being elementary school teachers (very expensive ones as measured by the money invested in their education by the tax payers). In general you will end up doing much better moneywise if you stay away from the university and just start working directly.
I was actually involved in teacher training in Finland (and since that time have moved to US because they actually pay me here for doing my job and the government does not steal everything I make). In my opinion the main problems with the US school (or at least in California) system are: 1) lack of well defined curriculum; 2) lack of proper teacher training; 3) excessive testing of students; 4) attempting to teach too much and too sophisticated material to young students; 5) trying to just get students to memorize things rather than teaching them to solve problems; 6) powerful teacher unions and the incompetent school district administrators will block any attempt to change things towards the better; 7) parent involvement and language problems.
Point 1) leads to a very inconsistent overall teaching process. This will hit especially hard the students who have lazy or inexperienced teachers. These teachers have hard time in preparing the core curriculum and communicating to the students and parents what will be taught and what will be required from the students. I suppose that we would call these the "bad teachers". In Finland it is not necessarily such a disaster for the students if you have a bad teacher since the curriculum was designed in such a way that even an "idiot" can teach it. All the textbooks are prepared so that they are compatible with the national curriculum. In addition to coherent teaching plan, one needs to consider also simple practical issues. For example, students can concentrate on a given subject for about 45 mins after which they will need a break. This break is also important for teachers so that they can prepare for the next class (photocopies etc.). This is how it works in Finland but in California, for example, things are completely upside down. Even at the university level studenst can at most concentrate for two hours on the subject being taught. At high school level one should make mathematics courses, which include calculus and integration, mandatory. Most students tend to skip these courses since "it willl ruin their GPA". The outcome is that their math skills as completely inadequate when they enter college.
Regarding 2) the teacher training programs at least in California are a joke (as compared to Finland). In Finland students are actually chosen to the teacher training programs based on their abilities to communicate and teach (usually a group of teachers will be judging them before they get accepted). This weeds out people how would not be able to teach no metter what one does - it makes no sense to try to turn them into teachers. In addition to the subject training (masters level in the main subject and bachelors in the 2nd subject; grades 6 and above), they will have pedagogical training with directed classroom teaching, courses which emphasize classroom demonstrations and doing experiments with students. In the directed classroom teaching they will be dealing with real students (they are the teacher in charge) and an expert who is giving them feedback how things are going. You can also fail this part in which case you will not become a teacher. Here the state of California (= all the highly paid half politicians - half bureaucrats who run the system) has its own vision what teachers need to know and do in the classroom rather than relying on the universities to provide the proper level of training. This is especially reflected by the State requirements for teachers, which are completely inadequate. They will need to increase the requirements especially for science teaching and recognize the importance of university level teacher training programs. But then, unfortunately, most universities in California have absolutely no interest in teacher training and their programs do not work well at all. They tend to consider teacher training as waste of time as they want to concentrate on the science teaching at higher level and research. This leads to an interesting situation where the K-12 and the universities in the US are pretty much complete mirror images of each other (i.e. the universities are very good and K-12 very bad). Finally, it seems that they have made the same mistake as they made recently in Finland. They let the basic elementary school teachers (with training for grades 6) teach science and mathematics. They have absolutely no training for this and it will lead into things being taught incorrectly + both the teacher and the students will end up hating the subject with a passion. For example, I recently had to explain to an elementary school teacher that light travels along straight lines (rather than "squiggly lines" has she was teaching the students) and that light does not have temperature etc. By the way this was a 3rd grade teacher. You can imagine the confusion that this will generate among the students (the textbook was saying things correctly) and furthermore later on it will be very difficult to teach the students the correct material once they learned things incorrectly.
In California (including the universities) students are being tested excessively (point 3). It makes absolutely no sense to have 7 tests / week. This will only lead to short-term memorization, which does not help anyone. Half of the time is spent on tests rather than concentrating on teaching in the classroom. Since there are so many tests, teachers are overwhelmed with them and they give only multiple choice tests (WHICH ARE BAD!). The teachers will need to see and judge the reasoing by the students rather than just looking at the answers. This will give the important feedback to teachers and will teach the students to write down their reasoning properly. Since students end up memorizing the material, one has to teach the material again at the next grade. This results in massive waste of school time. Since a lot of time is wasted at school, students will get huge amounts of homework. And, eventually, they will start hating the whole process as they don't have time to do anything else. Furthermore, in some California school districts the tests may actually contain material that was not taught at all! For example, to earn an A, "you must consistently know more than you were taught" and C would correspond to understanding everything that was taught. This is a very unreasonable thing to do and leads to students being very frustrated! Think how this will work, for example, in mathematics. People who set up this system were extremely incompetent and had no idea about teaching.
Attempting to teach too high-level material to kids just lead them to not properly understanding the material (point 4). They will need to have additional tools (math, for example) in order to digest the advanced maerial properly. This again leads to students just memorizing the material without really learing it. [I am mainly focusing on science teaching since I am involved in that field]. This is again related to the lack of well thought out curriculum. Teach the basics first and then proceed to advanced material in well defined order.
Point 5). Especially in mathematics teaching in California, the very old fashioned memorization of multiplication tables (which is enforced by timed tests!) and following mechanical procedures are just a waste of time. For example in Finland multilpication tables are not so heavily stressed anymore because most people end up using calculators or can quickly calculate it. This will make the whole topic extremely boring and the students will learn to hate mathematics (which is a very beautiful subject!). This will then go on with memorizing geometrical shapes etc. Concentrate on understanding the topics and learning to solve problems rather than mechanical memorizing. In natural sciences the same thing happens again. Teachers should get the students to participate in experiments and to discover things by themselves - all this properly supported by theory. By the way, in California most schools have very good equipment for doing experiments but nothing is being done. Experiments are extremely important in learning natural sciences.
There are many teachers who should not be teaching at all or are just extremely lazy (point 6). It is possible to evaluate them - not necessarily statewide - but within the school (differences in the student backgrounds do not affect this). The teachers should be required to keep up their teaching skills and their knowledge up to date (especially during summer times when they are not teaching). As for everyone, they need to have the feeling that if they are not doing things properly, they can be fired. Of course the teacher unions will block anything that tries to address these problems. On the other hand if you try to fix, for example, the excessive testing problem or the lack of coherent curriculum etc., the administrators block this since they don't understand in the first place what the problem is and they don't want to do extra work. Also someone might find out that they had royally screwed up previously.
Of course the parents play extremely important role behind every successful student. If they don't participate in the homework & teach them the basic things such as the English language, the student will be screwed completely. The language problem is especially serious with Hispanic students. If they don't understand English, they will fail for sure. Furthermore, for the other students this means that their education will suffer also because the class cannot proceed at a normal pace.
All this adds up to a very toxic mixture for student success. I can say at this point that I will make sure that my daughter will be attending private school (we need school vouchers!). The public school system should be rebuilt completely. For example, in my opinion, the LAUSD is the worlds most expensive failing school system.
