The Smartest Kids in the World (10 page)

From Pennsylvania to Poland: Tom outside his high school in Wroc
ł
aw.

Five thousand miles away, Tom’s teacher asked him a question.

It was his first day of school in Poland. He’d sat quietly in the back, trying to make himself small and unremarkable. But now she stared back at him, waiting. So he repeated the one sentence he knew by heart:

Nie mówię
po polsku.
I don’t speak Polish.

Then he smiled, the clueless exchange student. This tactic had worked well for him so far.

Tom would turn eighteen in two weeks. He had a perpetual five o’clock shadow and dark eyes, the face of a young man hovering precariously atop a boy’s body. When he smiled, flashing the dimples he’d inherited from his mother, he looked at least three years younger. American teachers had accepted Tom’s excuses, generally speaking.

Yet this teacher spoke back to him, repeating the question in English.

“Could you please solve the problem?” She held out a piece of
chalk and motioned for Tom to come to the front of the room. It was math class, and she’d written a polynomial problem on the board.

Tom got up, heart surging, and walked slowly to the board. The other twenty-two Polish students watched the American, wondering what would happen.

The story of Poland, a symphony of suffering and redemption, will come later in this book. But, for now, suffice to say that Tom found himself in a brooding country with a complicated past, which was precisely why he’d wanted to live there.

In America, Tom had lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War. Some fifty-one thousand men were wounded or killed on the hills of Tom’s hometown. Thousands of tourists stalked the empty, silent battlefields each year, looking for relics or ghosts or a lingering sensation of some kind.

However, since the 1800s, Gettysburg had become much less interesting, in Tom’s opinion. It was a rural village two hours and a world away from Washington, D.C. As a little boy, Tom had no interest in Union or Confederate toy soldiers, the kind sold by the sackful in the town souvenir shops. He played with World War II soldiers instead.

As a teenager, Tom played the cello, listened to Sonic Youth, and watched Woody Allen movies. He occupied himself in the margins of the high school culture, which revolved around sports and the Future Farmers of America. In August, the Gettysburg Warriors football team held an all-you-can-eat pig roast to kick off the season. The local coffee house closed before the sun had set.

Early on, Tom had learned that the world outside of his home could be a complicated place. His father was a family law attorney, facilitating divorces and waging custody battles. His mother was the town’s chief public defender. She worked out of a windowless basement office, representing Gettysburg’s least popular residents, including a young man facing the death penalty for killing a wildlife conservation officer.

To escape the strain of their jobs, Tom’s parents read. They read the
way other families fished or watched television, together but apart. On Friday nights, they took Tom and his two brothers to Barnes & Noble, where they would wander off in their separate directions to choose their own adventures; on rainy Saturdays, they might all be found reading, sometimes in different rooms. The only noise was the sound of the rain.

Tom’s two older brothers read leisurely, but Tom read hungrily, as if in search of a metaphor that he could never quite find. In the summer, his mom would see him in the backyard reading for hours on end. One winter, he read nothing but Anton Chekhov. He read
The Pianist
—twice.

For his senior year of high school, Tom had decided to exchange Gettysburg for one of his old-world novels. He’d wanted to go to Eastern Europe because he’d thought it would be romantic to live somewhere where people knew the names Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. He hadn’t traveled much, but he believed in the promise of a faraway place, one that could sustain the kind of romance he’d read about and conjured in his head. He’d imagined himself learning to play Chopin in the homeland of Chopin.

And there he was, in Poland at last. Everything was more or less going according to his plan. The thing is: When Tom walked to the front of that classroom in Poland that day, he was carrying an American burden no one could see. Despite his Yo La Tengo T-shirt and his winter of Chekhov, Tom was in at least one way a prototypical American teenager.

Tom was not good at math.

He’d started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn’t understood one lesson, and then another and another. He was too embarrassed to ask for help. He hadn’t wanted to admit that he wasn’t as smart as other kids. Then he’d gotten a zero on a pre-algebra quiz in eighth grade. In other classes, a bad grade could be overcome. But, in math, each lesson built on what happened before. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to catch up. It felt like he was getting dumber, and it was humiliating. The next year, he got an F in math.

Math eluded American teenagers more than any other subject. When people talked about the United States’ mediocre international scores, they were not really talking about reading. American teenagers scored twelfth in reading on PISA, which was a respectable performance, above average for the developed world. There was still far too big a gap between privileged kids and low-income kids, but the overall average was decent.

In math, the average score placed the United States twenty-sixth in the world, below Finland (third), Korea (second), and Poland (nineteenth). American teenagers did poorly in science, too, but their math results were, statistically speaking, the most ominous.

Math had a way of predicting kids’ futures. Teenagers who mastered higher-level math classes were far more likely to graduate from college, even when putting aside other factors like race and income. They also earned more money after college.

Why did math matter so much? Some reasons were practical: More and more jobs required familiarity with probability, statistics, and geometry. The other reason was that math was not just math.

Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking. There is a right answer; there are rules that must be followed. More than any other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the language of logic helps to embed higher-order habits in kids’ minds: the ability to reason, for example, to detect patterns and to make informed guesses. Those kinds of skills had rising value in a world in which information was cheap and messy.

America’s math handicap afflicted even its most privileged kids, who were
more
privileged than the most advantaged kids in most other countries, including Poland. Our richest kids attended some of the most well-funded, high-tech schools in the world. Yet these kids, including the ones who went to private school, still ranked
eighteenth in math compared to the richest kids in other countries. They scored lower than affluent kids in Slovenia and Hungary and tied with the most privileged kids in Portugal.

Our poorest kids did even worse, relatively speaking, coming in twenty-seventh compared to the poorest kids in other developed countries, far below the most disadvantaged kids in Estonia, Finland, Korea, Canada, and Poland, among many other nations.

Why weren’t our kids learning this universal language of logic?

As I traveled around the world on this quest, I kept encountering this puzzle. Again and again, the data revealed a startling math deficiency in the United States. Like a lack of nutrition, it started when children were small and took a cumulative toll. Studies had shown that
American third graders were being asked easier math questions that required simpler responses than children the same age in places like Hong Kong. By the time our kids graduated from high school,
less than half were prepared for freshman-year college math. If our international performance was the mystery, then math held the most important clues.

That morning, in Wrocław, Poland, Tom picked up the chalk. All his old feelings of incompetence came swirling back. He started writing. He knew he could do this; the problem wasn’t that hard, and he was older than most of the kids in the class.

Just then, the chalk snapped in half. He let the piece fall and continued writing. But something was wrong; he must have missed a step. Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working, and he knew it. He kept writing anyway. Behind him, one of the Polish students giggled. His hands felt damp with sweat. Finally, the teacher spoke.

“Does anyone else want to try?”

Tom shuffled back to his seat. She didn’t call on him again.

As the semester went on, Tom noticed differences between his math class in Poland and his math class in Pennsylvania. Back in America, Tom and all his classmates had used calculators. In his Polish math class, calculators were not allowed. Tom could tell the kids were doing a lot of the math in their minds. They had learned tricks that had become automatic, so their brains were freed up to do the harder work. It was the difference between being fluent in a language and not.

After the first test, the teacher announced the scores in front of
the class, so everyone could hear. As a new exchange student, Tom had been exempt from the test himself. But listening to the grade announcements, he felt intensely uncomfortable. Like Eric in Korea, he couldn’t imagine such a public reckoning in his American classroom.

Nor could he imagine everyone doing so poorly: In Poland, the lowest grade was always one, and the highest was five. After each test, he waited to see if anyone would get a five; no one ever did. No one seemed surprised or shattered, either. They shouldered their book bags and moved on to the next class. He tried to imagine no one ever getting an A in Gettysburg. Would they give up, or would they try harder?

Kids in Poland were used to failing, it seemed. The logic made sense. If the work was hard, routine failure was the only way to learn. “Success,” as Winston Churchill once said,
“is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Tom had failed in math, too, back in eighth grade in Pennsylvania. But he hadn’t experienced that failure as normal or acceptable. He’d experienced it as a private trauma. Failure in American schools was demoralizing and to be avoided at all costs. American kids could not handle routine failure, or so adults thought.

Like many young people, the lesson Tom had learned from his failure was that he wasn’t good at math, and that he should stay away from it whenever possible. He didn’t know, back in high school, how central math was to philosophy and music, two subjects he loved. He didn’t know that math could be cosmically beautiful, and it was something he could master with hard work, time, and persistence, just the way he’d mastered Chekhov.

Of the three American students I followed, Eric was the only one who did not loathe math. Coincidence or not, Eric’s home state of Minnesota was one of only two states that came close to achieving
world-class math performance. Roughly speaking, Minnesota ranked below just a dozen other countries (including Canada, Korea, and Finland) in math proficiency; only Massachusetts did better in the United States.

When Eric arrived in Korea, he had a solid math background. There were lots of reasons for this: One might have been that his timing was good. Had he been born earlier, things might have turned out differently.

In 1995, Minnesota fourth graders placed below average for the United States on an international math test. Despite being a mostly white, mostly middle-class state, Minnesota was not doing well in math. When Eric started kindergarten two years later, however, the state had smarter and more focused math standards. When he was eleven, Minnesota updated those standards again, with an eye toward international benchmarks. By the time he went to high school, his peers were scoring well above average for the United States and much of the world. In 2007, Minnesota elementary students rocked a major international math test, performing at about the same level as kids in Japan.

What was Minnesota doing that other states were not? The answer was not mystical. Minnesota had started with a relatively strong education system. Then they’d made a few pragmatic changes, the kind of common sense repairs you would make if you believed math was really, truly important—
and
that all kids were capable of learning it.

First, Minnesota officials agreed on a single set of clear, targeted standards. That one change was radical. With that, the state overcame the most glaring problem with America’s fragmented system. Until then, Minnesota teachers—like teachers nationwide—had been buffeted by clashing guidance about what to teach. Many American teachers had to contend with both state
and
local district standards, which frequently conflicted with one another. Then, each spring, teachers had to prepare kids for standardized tests, which often had no connection to the various standards or curriculum. Caught in a web of criss-crossing mandates, they had to choose which to ignore and obey.

The purpose of American education was muddled in all kinds of ways. The farther away I got, the more obvious that truth became. There was no better metaphor for this mission confusion than the American textbook.

American teachers taught with textbooks that were written to appease thousands of districts and many states all at once, as education researcher William Schmidt has documented in detail. That meant that
American textbooks tended to be far too long—covering (and repeating) way too many topics in too little depth. Internationally, the average eighth grade math textbook was 225 pages long; in the United States, eighth grade math texts averaged 800 pages. That was about 300 pages longer than all thirteen volumes of Euclid’s
Elements.

America’s tradition of local control was a nightmare for teachers. They were left to pick and choose between clashing standards as best they could, repeating subjects again and again under the direction of repetitive, sprawling textbooks. Some of the kids who came to them each fall had covered prime numbers; some had not. It was hard to predict.