The Smartest Kids in the World
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Authors: Amanda Ripley
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chapter 5 an american in utopia
chapter 9 the $4 million teacher
appendix I how to spot a world-class education
appendix II AFS student experience survey
for louise s. ripley
germany
Thomas Neville Postlethwaite.
British scientist. Pioneered the study of what children know around the world. Mentor to Andreas Schleicher.
Andreas Schleicher.
German scientist at the OECD who helped create the PISA test, designed to measure twenty-first century skills in fifteen-year-olds around the world.
united states
Scott Bethel.
Football coach and teacher of Kim’s Algebra I class in Sallisaw, Oklahoma.
Mark Blanchard.
Principal of Tom’s high school in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Charlotte.
Kim’s mother and an elementary school teacher in Sallisaw, Oklahoma.
Scott Farmer.
Superintendent of Kim’s school district in Sallisaw, Oklahoma.
Deborah Gist.
Education Commissioner in Rhode Island.
Elina.
Finnish exchange student who left Helsinki at sixteen to spend a year in Colon, Michigan.
Ernie Martens.
Principal of Kim’s high school in Sallisaw, Oklahoma.
William Taylor.
Public-school math teacher in Washington, D.C.
south korea
Cha Byoung-chul.
Head of a study-curfew enforcement squad at Gangnam district office of education in Seoul, South Korea.
Lee Chae-yun.
Owner of a chain of five tutoring academies in Seoul, South Korea.
Eric.
American exchange student who left Minnetonka, Minnesota, at age 18 to spend the 2010-11 school year in Busan, South Korea.
Jenny.
Korean student who had lived in the United States and became friends with Eric in Busan, Korea.
Lee Ju-ho.
South Korea’s Minister of Education, Science and Technology. An economist with a PhD from Cornell University.
Andrew Kim.
English teacher who made his fortune at Megastudy, one of Korea’s biggest private tutoring academies.
poland
Mirosław Handke.
A chemist who served as Poland’s Minister of Education from 1997 to 2000, during a period of intense reform.
Urszula Spałka.
Principal of Tom’s high school in Wrocław, Poland.
Tom.
American exchange student who left Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, at age seventeen to spend the 2010-11 school year in Wrocław, Poland.
Paula Marshall.
CEO of the Bama Companies in Oklahoma, China, and Poland.
finland
Kim.
American exchange student who left Sallisaw, Oklahoma, at age fifteen to spend the 2010–11 school year in Pietarsaari, Finland.
Tiina Stara.
Teacher of Kim’s Finnish class in Pietarsaari, Finland.
Susanne.
Kim’s host mother for the first six months of her stay in Pietarsaari, Finland.
Heikki Vuorinen.
Teacher at the Tiistilä School, where a third of the students are immigrants. Located in Espoo, Finland, just outside Helsinki.
the mystery
Heat Map: In a handful of countries scattered across the world, virtually all kids are learning to think critically in math, reading, and science.
For most of my career at
Time
and other magazines, I worked hard to avoid education stories. If my editors asked me to write about schools or tests, I countered with an idea about terrorism, plane crashes, or a pandemic flu. That usually worked.
I didn’t say so out loud, but education stories seemed, well, kind of soft. The articles tended to be headlined in chalkboard font and festooned with pencil doodles. They were brimming with good intentions but not much evidence. The people quoted were mostly adults; the kids just turned up in the photos, smiling and silent.
Then, an editor asked me to write about a controversial new leader of Washington, D.C.’s public schools. I didn’t know much about Michelle Rhee, except that she wore stiletto heels and tended to say
“crap” a lot in interviews. So, I figured it would be a good story, even if it meant slipping into the fog of education.
But something unexpected happened in the fog. I spent months talking to kids, parents, and teachers, as well as people who have been
creatively researching education in new ways. Pretty soon I realized that Rhee was interesting, but she was not the biggest mystery in the room.
The real mystery was this: Why were some kids learning so much—and others so very little?
Education was suddenly awash in data; we knew more than ever about what was happening—or failing to happen—from one neighborhood or classroom to the next. And it didn’t add up. Everywhere I went I saw nonsensical ups and downs in what kids knew: in rich neighborhoods and poor, white neighborhoods and black, public schools and private. The national data revealed the same peaks and valleys, like a sprawling, nauseating roller coaster. The dips and turns could be explained in part by the usual narratives of money, race, or ethnicity. But not entirely. Something else was going on, too.
Over the next few years, as I wrote more stories about education, I kept stumbling over this mystery. At
Kimball Elementary School in Washington, D.C., I saw fifth graders literally begging their teacher to let them solve a long division problem on the chalkboard. If they got the answer right, they would pump their fists and whisper-shout, “Yes!” This was a neighborhood where someone got murdered just about every week, a place with 18 percent unemployment.
In other places, I saw kids bored out of their young minds, kids who looked up when a stranger like me walked into the room, watching to see if I would, please God, create some sort of distraction to save them from another hour of nothingness.
For a while, I told myself that this was the variation you’d expect from one neighborhood to the next, from one principal or teacher to another. Some kids got lucky, I supposed, but most of the differences that mattered had to do with money and privilege.
Then one day I saw this chart, and it blew my mind.
Dance of the Nations: Over a half century, different countries gave eighteen different tests to their children. Economists Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek projected kids’ performance onto a common measuring stick. The results suggest that education levels can—and do—change dramatically over time, for better and worse.
The United States might have remained basically flat over time, but that was the exception, it turned out. Look at Finland! It had rocketed from the bottom of the world to the top, without pausing for breath. And what was going on in Norway, right next door, which seemed to be slip sliding into the abyss, despite having virtually no child poverty? And there was Canada, careening up from mediocrity to the heights of Japan. If education was a function of culture, could culture change that dramatically—that fast?
Worldwide, children’s skills rose and fell in mysterious and hopeful ways, sometimes over short periods of time. The mystery I’d
noticed in Washington, D.C., got far more interesting when viewed from outer space. The vast majority of countries did
not
manage to educate all their kids to high levels, not even all of their better-off kids. Compared to most countries, the United States was typical, not much better nor much worse. But, in a small number of countries, really just a handful of eclectic nations, something incredible was happening. Virtually
all
kids were learning critical thinking skills in math, science, and reading. They weren’t just memorizing facts; they were learning to solve problems and adapt. That is to say, they were training to survive in the modern economy.
How to explain it?
American kids were better off, on average, than the typical child in Japan, New Zealand, or South Korea, yet they knew far less math than those children. Our most privileged teenagers had highly educated parents and attended the richest schools in the world, yet they ranked
eighteenth in math compared to their privileged peers around the world, scoring well below affluent kids in New Zealand, Belgium, France, and Korea, among other places. The typical child in
Beverly Hills performed below average, compared to all kids in Canada (not some other distant land, Canada!). A great education by the standards of suburban America looked, from afar, exceedingly average.
At first, I told myself to resist the hype. Did it really matter if we ranked number one in the world in education outcomes? Or even number ten? Our elementary students did fine on international tests, thank you very much, especially in reading. The problems arose in math and science, and they became most obvious when our kids grew into teenagers. That’s when American students scored twenty-sixth on a test of critical thinking in math, below average for the developed world. But, so what? Our teenagers had performed at or below average on international tests for as long as anyone had been counting. It had not mattered much to our economy so far; why should it matter in the future?