Amanda Ripley has investigated the education mystery: why do some kids learn so much while others so little? From country to country? From school to school within America? The Smartest Kids in the World is really two books. One is an analysis of data, “education [is] suddenly awash in data.” The other presents the stories of three American exchange students who go abroad for a high school year in one of the world’s best school systems: Finland, South Korea, and Poland. (Poland? You may ask, but read on.)
While I appreciate that “narratives without statistics are blind, [and] statistics without narratives are empty,” personally I could have done with less detail on the three exchange students. I was anxious to learn how America can improve education and less interested in how a student raised money for her trip. For me, the book could be a third shorter, but at only 165 pages in the body, that’s not a significant problem.
Ripley uses an international testing system called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) to compare schools. She explains its genesis and how it works to assess students’ ability to solve problems (not just memorize) in math, reading, and science. She makes a good case that PISA tests students’ “preparedness for life”, not just “for more schooling.” To reinforce her point, Ripley interviews the CEO of Bama Companies (they make apple pies for McDonalds among other products). Bama opened a new factory in Poland because they “had trouble finding enough maintenance techs in Oklahoma… even filling their lowest-skilled line jobs, because even those workers had to be able to think and communicate… [they] couldn’t trust a high school diploma [in America]; graduates from different high schools… knew wildly different things.”
The tales of the exchange students are interesting, and if I had a choice I’d choose Finland for a combination of good education and independence for students. In Korea, the government actually sends out police squads to enforce curfews on the tutoring companies that students attend after their regular school day, to make sure students leave for home by ten pm. (It’s not clear to me why the government cares, but they seem to.)
I will dwell on the solution to the mystery of America’s lackluster education system.
Our “kids are being misled… fed a soft diet of pabulum by middling professionals… Only later, after high school [in the work force], would they discover they’d been tricked.” While many factors contribute, it’s not poverty, immigrants, diversity, or lack of funds that lead to poor results. It is lack of rigor – “a serious intellectual culture in schools, one that kids can sense is real and true.”
Rigor requires high standards for teachers and students. In America, anyone who turns up for their college classes can get a teaching degree. In Finland, only students in the top third of their high school class are eligible to attend a teachers’ college, and the courses are difficult with much more student-teaching. Ripley states that America produces many more teachers than we have jobs for, so higher standards would not lead to shortages.
Finland has national standards (they’ve had a high school graduation test for decades – and it is not “multiple choice.”) But within those testing requirements, teachers have autonomy. Parental involvement is important, but what matters is parents readings to their young children and even showing their kids they read for pleasure, not running bake sales or attending sporting events.
“In every [country], that agreement [to get serious about education] had been born out of crisis: economic imperatives that had focused the national mind in a way that good intentions never would.” Everyone needs to see the serious consequences school has for each person’s life. The Federal government can try to inject rigor with One Child Left Behind or Race to the Top, the states can adopt Common Core, but everyone at every level must participate. In the past, Americans could succeed in life without a rigorous education, but in today’s global economy, kids need more.
Ripley notes a sad bipartisan effort to prevent rigor in our schools, from liberals worried about self-esteem to conservatives worried about local control. “We have the schools we want.” But we can want better.
Poland offers an optimistic example. They turned their education system around in the course of a few years, the time for one class to go through high school. Individual schools in America have done it, too. Parents, taxpayers, and legislators should read Ripley’s book.
I fint it interesting that the U.S. is once again being compared to Finland. That country (and Korea and Poland for that matter) enjoys a level of cultural and political homogeneity which makes policy decisions, from education to health care, a slam dunk. This country is the least homologous society on the planet and has been for most of its history. That’s a blueprint for discord and we have certainly followed it. But what has all its supposed educational superiority gained for Finland? World reknowned research universities? An avalanche of patents or breakthrough technologies? Nope. And no wonder, when the teaching profession, apparently by government fiat, bleeds off the best and brightest. I’m not inclined to put much stock in any theories that rely on comparing the U. S. to any other country. It will always be apples to oranges, simply because no other country that exists or has existed compares to this one. Warts and all.
You raise important issues. Ripley does address diversity and its effect:
She feels in America “diversity” is often used to mean “race” and she discusses how black children’s poorer performance is explained first by economics (lower income with less-educated parents), but also by inferior schools. She emphasizes how low expectations hurt students. She says “there was a fatalism to the [diversity] story line…[it] underwrote low aspirations.” She reports on experiments where kids were randomly labeled as high achievers, and found teachers evaluated them as smarter than their classmates and spent more time with them.
In Finland, the top third of high school students are not required to go into teaching – if I implied that I erred. I don’t recall Ripley saying what percentage of that top third goes into teaching… that would be interesting to know. Ripley also reports that diversity is increasing in Finland (and throughout Europe), so there are school districts with high diversity in Finland to evaluate.
If we don’t compare America to other countries in terms of education, we will still be compared in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy, economic growth, poverty rates and other real-world measures. I am open to learning from others, though grabbing any single idea as a quick fix will fail – education doesn’t fit in a sound bite. Ripley discusses high-performing schools in America, so maybe looking at how they adapt good practices can guide other schools.