Wonderful article. I'm an American teacher in a mainly homogenous school district. While scaling up some of these success stories may be difficult in large, diverse countries, it needn't be in small pockets of those same countries. America generally doesn't like diversity, so most of our schools are racially homogenous (like mine) and thus could use many of the ideas from places like Estonia. It should be noted, perhaps, that for those who say countries like America can't use these ideas from smaller nations because of our size and diversity, many of the progressive reforms that have benefited places like Finland, for example, were American ones. We just abandoned them, for some reason, in pursuit of testing volume like the Asian societies. And yet we still can't catch them. We are very conflicted here.