The Smartest Kids in the World (25 page)

The United States Revisited: If states were countries, which countries would they be?
(
Map derived from analysis of math performance across states and countries in Peterson et al.,
Globally Challenged.)

It was snowing when Tom got the email. He was staying at a youth hostel in Poland. He read the words over and over. “We hope you will celebrate your admission to Vassar College in grand style.”

Vassar was his first choice, the same school his grandmother and his brother had attended. He imagined himself studying great literature there, just as he’d pictured himself learning Chopin in Poland. He wanted to study English, and Vassar offered a freshman seminar on Virginia Woolf, his favorite author. In Poland, that spring, he reread
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse
. He couldn’t wait to get to college.

In the summer of 2011, the American field agents headed home. It was a strange time in their lives, an ellipse before adulthood. Kim, Eric, and Tom had much to look forward to, assuming they went to college and graduated. When they returned to America, the cash prize for a college education was bigger in the United States than almost anywhere in the world. It might take a while, but if they got
a degree, the odds were good that they would eventually get a decent job. That summer, the unemployment rate for college graduates was a temperate 4 percent. The world was big and alight for Americans with college degrees and the ability to adapt to change.

If they didn’t go to college, they would earn half as much money. They would encounter an unemployment rate that was twice as high. They might still find a way into a decent job, though it was unlikely. When they went home at night, they would keep paying the price: Americans who did not graduate from college were more likely to get divorced and raise children on their own. They even died younger than college graduates.

If they walked out on high school altogether, they would enter a world of perpetual struggle, with low wages, vanishing benefits, and 14 percent unemployment. It was an unlikely fate for Kim, Eric, and Tom, but a foregone conclusion for about a quarter of their peers. By the time Kim turned twenty, there would be some
six million more Americans without high-school diplomas than there would be jobs for them.

Depending on what happened next, in other words, Kim, Eric, and Tom could essentially be living in different countries than kids they’d sat next to in kindergarten. So much remained unknown about their futures, but it was becoming harder to change one’s destiny in America. The tracks that had begun sorting kids in elementary school ran on and on into adulthood. Without dramatic changes in the way the country operated, the paths would not intersect.

As Tom left Poland, another American was arriving. Paula Marshall came from Oklahoma, not far from where Kim lived. She didn’t come to study or sightsee, however; she came to open a factory.

Marshall ran the Bama Companies, an Oklahoma institution. Her grandmother had started selling homemade pies to local restaurants
in the 1920s. Then, Paula’s father had pitched a brilliant idea to McDonald’s: Portable pies customers could eat in their cars. It was a profoundly American success story: a young man who turned deep-fried apples into gold.

Decades later, Paula had taken over, opening new factories in Oklahoma and China. The company had grown exponentially, supplying breadsticks to Pizza Hut and biscuits to McDonald’s. Most of its one thousand employees still worked in Oklahoma.

But now, she’d come to Poland to open her next plant. There were lots of reasons, one of which was that modern factory jobs required skilled workers who knew how to think critically. The locals had assured her that she wouldn’t have trouble filling jobs in Poland. “We hear that educated people are plentiful,” she said.

When I met Marshall for coffee, she spoke in very practical terms about the challenge of filling jobs in the United States. Take maintenance jobs, she said. Those jobs paid twenty-five to thirty dollars per hour, but they required more skill than the title implied. Today, maintenance techs had to be able to understand technical blueprints; communicate in writing what had happened on their shifts; test possible solutions to complex, dynamic problems; and, of course, troubleshoot and repair major mechanical systems.

The Bama Companies had trouble finding enough maintenance techs in Oklahoma. Some years, they even had trouble filling their lowest-skilled line jobs, because even those workers had to be able to think and communicate. Marshall was willing to pay for employees’ technical training, but she’d discovered that many people came to her unable to read or do basic math. She found that she couldn’t trust a high-school diploma; graduates from different high schools within the same Oklahoma school district knew wildly different things. (The military had found the same thing, interestingly. A quarter of Oklahoma high-school graduates who tried to enlist could not pass the military’s own academic aptitude test.)

To backstop the diploma, Bama’s human-resources people
learned to have applicants fill out documents in front of them, so that they could see if the person really understood the questions. Then they asked candidates to respond to hypothetical scenarios to see if they could articulate their thoughts and solve problems. Finally, they administered a drug test, a background check, and a physical test and, by the time that was over, not many people were left.

In 2012, Marshall started hiring two-hundred people for a dough-making facility in Poland. She sounded optimistic. “Poland seems to me what it might have been like here in the 1800s,” she said. “You get the same feeling in Shanghai. People are busy.”

After her year in Finland, Kim went back to Oklahoma full of complicated emotions. This time, she reminded herself, she would be different, even if everything else stayed the same. On her first day back in American high school, she wore fuzzy dog-shaped slippers. She drank a cup of the coffee she’d brought back to Oklahoma from Finland. Then she settled into an easy chair with her cat George to start online biology.

Kim loved the idea of Oklahoma Virtual High School. This way, she thought, she could recreate the autonomy she’d had in Finland. She could decide when to wake up and when to do geometry. And she could eat lunch with real forks and knives from her kitchen, just as she had in the school cafeteria in Finland.

The freedom would help motivate her, she hoped. She couldn’t control things like teaching quality or equity, but she might be able to conjure autonomy and drive. And, if so, she’d be halfway to Finland, theoretically speaking.

That first day at virtual school, Kim logged in and checked her progress on a dashboard. So far, the bar graphs were all green, which meant she was on track. She had 149 days left to fall behind. She watched twenty minutes of video lectures on the basics of geometry.
Teachers were available five days a week, twenty-four hours a day. She could communicate with them over email, phone, or instant message. It was a new day, and not a terrible one.

For eight hours, she had zero live, face-to-face interactions. At three-thirty or so, her mom got home from her teaching job. At midnight, Kim was still awake, reading about colleges in Ireland, her latest dream. It didn’t seem nearly as inconceivable as Finland once had. At one in the morning, she studied Mesopotamia for her World History class.

“I really, really like it,” she told me on the second day, shortly after writing a report on carrier pigeons. “I don’t miss people at all.”

“Aren’t you worried you’ll be isolated?” I asked.

“People always say that,” she said. “But what people forget is that I was very isolated in my American high school anyway.”

This way, I began to understand, Kim was lonely on her own terms. The only downside she’d noticed so far was that she tended to personify the cat and dog. “You talk to them a lot,” she admitted. “Everything they do becomes adorable.”

She mitigated against insanity by joining a writer’s club that met at a coffee shop in the next town. And she signed up for Irish dance lessons one evening a week. Her mom faithfully drove her there and back, grateful to have her daughter back and unsure how long she would stay. In this way, Kim still saw people on a regular basis. She missed Finland, but for now, for her, virtual reality was better than bricks and mortar.

Kim’s school was run by Advanced Academics, a for-profit company headquartered in Oklahoma City that offered online courses in thirty states. That company was itself owned by DeVry, a publicly traded corporation that posted $2 billion in revenue in 2011. For Kim, virtual school was free, just like public school; most of the state money that would have normally gone to Sallisaw High School went to Advanced Academics instead.

In three years, the number of Oklahoma public-school students participating in some form of
online education had grown 400 percent.
No one, though, knew whether the virtual schools were any better or worse than regular schools. It felt a little like the early days of the Korean hagwon industry. Without the cultural obsession with results, however, the analogy broke down. Was a free market really free if no one knew the quality of the product, or even agreed as to what the product should be?

That school year brought another milestone for Kim’s state: After decades of debate, Oklahoma had finally decided to require an end-of-school test, just like Finland, Poland, and Korea. For the first time, high-school seniors had to pass four out of seven tests in math, English, biology, or history to get a diploma. The
Oklahoman
newspaper supported the move, which had been planned for seven long years: “It’s not too much to expect Oklahoma students to have a working knowledge of basic math, science and English content.”

The tests were not hard. Nine out of ten Oklahoma high school seniors were expected to pass. Those who failed could retake any of the tests at least three times per year, take an alternate test, or complete a project instead. Special education students did not have to score as high as other students.

Nevertheless, Oklahoma lawmakers fought over the exam all year long. Some deemed even this baby step toward a more rigorous education system too harsh. Democratic legislator and teacher
Jerry McPeak introduced a bill to repeal the mandate, likening the test to child abuse:
“We’re going to brutalize and bully those children because they don’t have the intellectual capacity of another child?”

Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses.

In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring
mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.

This time, Oklahoma state superintendent Janet Barresi held fast.
“If we keep rolling these limits back, students are not going to take this seriously,” she said. “I’m more concerned with a student’s ability to get a job than about their ability to walk across the stage with their buddies.”

That spring,
fewer than 5 percent of Oklahoma’s 39,000 high school seniors failed to meet the new graduation requirements, far fewer than many superintendents had predicted. Oklahoma’s kids had been wildly underestimated. (Interestingly, the failure rate resembled the roughly
6 percent of seniors who did not pass Finland’s far more rigorous graduation exam.)

In Oklahoma, some students appealed their results, and their local school boards granted them diplomas, citing extenuating circumstances of one kind or another. Flexibility was built into the system. Still, school boards across Oklahoma protested the tests, passing resolutions and calling for mercy.
“There are some kids that just can’t test well. And this is terribly unfair to them,” the Owasso school board president told the
Tulsa World
. The fact that students had many different options, including completing a project instead of taking a test, did not assuage her concerns.

When Kim finished her first school year back in America,
the United States was ranked number seven in the World Economic Forum’s list of global competitiveness. That was a very high ranking indeed, though it had fallen for four consecutive years. The country that ranked number three? A small, remote Nordic land with few resources, aside from something the locals called
sisu.

When Tom returned to Gettysburg from Poland, he put himself on a strict regimen of reading one hundred pages per day. That summer, he pushed through Michel Foucault, just to see if he could. He quit smoking. Still, he missed being able to wander the streets of a sprawling city and drink lukewarm Polish beer with his friends as the sun set over Wrocław. Back in Gettysburg, he wanted to have his friends over at midnight the first night he came home, and his parents wondered if he’d lost his mind. He wanted to linger at coffee shops; Gettysburg’s cafés closed at dusk. He asked his mother, Gettysburg’s chief public defender, to buy him beer; she said no.

That fall, he packed up his books and his indie band t-shirts and moved to Poughkeepsie, New York. When he got to Vassar, he moved into an old, red brick dormitory with a peaked roof, located right on the grassy quad. It was quintessentially collegiate in all the right ways. His roommate decorated the walls with Christmas lights and Tibetan prayer flags. Tom signed up for the Virginia Woolf seminar, just as he’d planned, and started seeing a girl who lived two doors down from him.