The Smartest Kids in the World (38 page)

Education acted like an antipoverty vaccine in Korea:
Kim, “Consequences of Higher Educational Expansion in Korea.”

Dropout rates:
The dropout rate for Minnetonka High School comes from the Minnesota Department of Education online Data Center, accessed in November 2012. The dropout rate for Namsan, Eric’s Korean high school, comes from my interview with the principal in June 2011.

To be fair, Namsan only admits 70 percent of the students who apply, while Minnetonka must take all students in the zoned jurisdiction. However, even with its selectivity, Namsan has a more impoverished student body, with about 17 percent qualifying for a full tuition subsidy due to their parents’ low-income levels. (This formula is complex, but in general, qualifying families must earn less than $20,000 or so.) By contrast, at Minnetonka, only 8 percent of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch under the federal guidelines (which comes out to about $29,000 or less for a family of four). While these are two totally different measures, they give us some rough indication of the relative affluence of the Minnetonka student body.

High salaries:
Teachers in Minnetonka, earned $61,000 on average according to Minnesota Department of Education statistics. According to the principal of Namsan, Eric’s school in Korea, teachers earned
about $45,000 on average. When adjusted for purchasing power parity, the Korean salary is worth about $61,000, or the same as the Minnetonka salary.

There are, of course, many ways to compare teachers’ earnings. However, suffice it to say that teachers in both of Eric’s schools could afford a similar standard of living (although the Korean teachers earned less per hour, given Namsan’s longer school day and year).

Stabbed his mother:
Rahn, “Student Kills Mother, Keeps Body at Home for 8 Months”; Lee, “18-year-old Murders Mom, Hides Body in Apartment.”

Some went so far as to accuse the mother:
Jae-yun, “Shadow of Higher Education.” The quote about “pushy” mothers comes from a 2011 unsigned editorial in the
Korea Times
.

“One of the pushy ‘tiger’ mothers”:
Korea Times,
“Education Warning.”

Hundreds of students were accused of lying:
Kim, “BAI Finds Several Big Loopholes in Admission System.”

Highly educated elementary school teachers:
Minister Lee himself confirmed this rather bluntly in an interview by Kang Shin-who in the
Korea Times
: “Our teachers are better than those in the U.S.”

The top 5 percent:
Barber and Mourshed,
How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top,
19. Interestingly, Korean elementary teachers were not always so carefully chosen. For many years, the teachers in training attended less prestigious two-year colleges. But, in the early 1980s, those education colleges became four-year universities offering more rigorous training and boosting the status of the profession. This history is almost identical to the story of Finland, which also consolidated its middling training programs into the more elite university system (albeit a decade or so earlier). Coolahan,
Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers.

This proven approach—elevating the selectivity and rigor of the teaching profession at the very beginning of teachers’ careers—has never been attempted on a large scale in the United States, despite its obvious logic.

Top of the world:
Schmidt et al.,
The Preparation Gap.

Fateful mistake:
Ibid.
The Economist, “How to be the Top.”

“
Quality of an education system”:
Barber and Mourshed,
How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top,
16.

Less than 1 percent:
In 2011, about 750 underperforming Korean teachers were sent for two months of training; another fifty were told to get six months of training. In all, 800 out of about four hundred thousand teachers received the training, which comes out to a mere .2 percent. Stephen
Kim, a
Time
magazine freelancer and a professional translator in Seoul, got these numbers from Korean education officials in September 2011.

Some simply refused to go:
Author interviews with Korean educators in Seoul who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

Down just 3.5 percent:
Author interview with Minister Lee.

Tricked-out classrooms:
There is remarkably little comparative data on technology investments around the world. It remains possible that technology holds great potential for schools, especially since it can personalize learning. So far, however, despite extravagant financial investments in technology, U.S. schools have not realized major benefits in productivity or effectiveness. And the American teenagers I followed for this book uniformly reported that they did not miss the high-tech devices they had in their U.S. classrooms.

For more detail on what other exchange students said about technology, see the results of the survey in the appendix and Ripley, “Brilliance in a Box.”

Only 15 percent of teenagers took afterschool lessons:
OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. IV),
Table IV.3.17b.

Lee thought Finland was a far better national model:
Yun, “ ‘My Dream is to Reshape Korea’s Education.’ ”

Just one in ten kids took afterschool lessons:
OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. IV),
Table IV.3.17b.

chapter 4: a math problem

Math eluded American teenagers:
OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. I).

Math had a way of predicting kids’ futures:
ACT,
Crisis at the Core,
and Hanushek et al., “Teaching Math to the Talented.”

Eighteenth in math:
U.S. Department of Education
, Table B.1.71.

American third graders:
Leinwand,
Measuring Up.
This study found that, even in Massachusetts, the highest performing state in the country, third graders were being asked less demanding math questions than kids their age in Hong Kong.

Less than half were prepared for freshman-year college math:
ACT,
The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2011.
Only 45 percent of high-school graduates who took the ACT test in 2011 met the college readiness benchmark in math. The benchmark was based on the minimum score
needed to have a 50 percent chance of earning a B or higher in a freshman-year college math class. (Keep in mind that only half of high-school graduates took the ACT to begin with, so ability levels for the entire population would presumably be significantly lower.)

“Success is going from failure to failure”:
Langworth,
Churchill by Himself,
579.

Minnesota:
Peterson,
Globally Challenged,
8-9 and SciMathMN,
Minnesota TIMSS.

American textbooks:
Schmidt and McKnight,
Inequality for All.

Sixty minutes per day:
MSU News, “MSU Scholars Help Minnesota Become Global Leader in Math.”

A larger universe of math:
In his book
The One World Schoolhouse
, Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, writes persuasively about the problem of stove-piping in U.S. schools:

“Genetics is taught in biology while probability is taught in math, even though one is really an application of the other. Physics is a separate class from algebra and calculus despite its being a direct application of them . . . In our misplaced zeal for tidy categories and teaching modules that fit neatly into a given length of class time, we deny students the benefit—the physiological benefit—of recognizing connections.”

Fourth graders said their math work was too easy:
Boser and Rosenthal,
Do Schools Challenge our Students?

Schools that did not even offer algebra courses:
Schmidt and McKnight,
Inequality for All.

In 2009, most American parents surveyed:
Johnson, Rochkind, and Ott, “Are We Beginning to See the Light?”

chapter 5: an american in utopia

It made everyone more serious about learning:
When I visited Kim in Finland, I wondered if her impressions of her fellow students were skewed by the fact that she was at an academic high school in Pietarsaari—not a vocational one, where the less-driven students might have ended up. Kim disagreed, pointing out that she was comparing the drive of students in her AP and honors classes in the United States to the students in her Finnish academic school—and still noticing the same disparity in engagement.

In any case, the dropout rate of Finland’s vocational schools (about 8 percent) was still much lower than the dropout rate of the vast majority of U.S. high schools. Partly due to an infusion of resources from the government, Finland’s vocational schools were generally more popular than U.S. vocational schools. So, it is likely that the student level buy-in was high at the vast majority of schools in Finland, not just Kim’s school.

Teachers rarely got fired anywhere:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
238. Many U.S. education reformers insist that unions are the reason for the country’s mediocre education outcomes. After all, U.S. teachers’ unions have a history of adversarial relations with government, and over the years, specific union leaders have obstructed basic, common sense changes at the expense of millions of students.

That said, the top performing countries in the world have unions, too. These countries offer irrefutable evidence that it is possible (and preferable) to radically improve entire systems
with
teachers’ unions, rather than against them. That cooperation is much more likely to work if teaching has already evolved into a knowledge-worker profession, with high standards of entry and rigorous training (a development that has not yet happened in the United States and most countries worldwide). Consider this excerpt from the OECD report,
Strong Performers:

“[M]any of the countries with the strongest student performance also have the strongest teachers’ unions, beginning with Japan and Finland. There seems to be no relationship between the presence of unions, including and especially teachers’ unions, and student performance. But there may be a relationship between the degree to which the work of teaching has been professionalised and student performance.”

She knew the odds were still against her:
Author interviews with Tiina Stara, in-person and over email and Skype, in 2011 and 2012.

Only 20 percent of applicants were accepted:
The acceptance rate for the University of Jyväskylä in the mid-1980s comes from Ossi Päärnilä, who works in the Finnish literature department and kindly researched the historical acceptance rates at my request. Acceptance rates today vary depending on which department and university students select; but most Finnish teacher-training programs take between 5 and 20 percent of applicants.

About as selective as Georgetown or the University of California, Berkeley:
U.S. News and World Report,
“College Ranking Lists.”

Just one out of every twenty education schools:
Walsh, Glaser, and Wilcox.
What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning
.

“A
Finnish teacher has received the highest level of education in the world”:
Jauhiainen, Kivirauma, and Rinne, “Status and Prestige through Faith in Education,” 269.

Norway is not choosy about who gets to become a teacher:
OECD,
Improving Lower Secondary Schools in Norway 2011.

Norwegians have fretted:
Afdal, “Constructing Knowledge for the Teaching Profession.”

Even the most privileged among them:
U.S. Department of Education
, Table B.1.70.
Norway’s most advantaged teenagers rank twentieth in math compared to other countries’ top quartile students.

He’d decided to become a teacher mostly so he could become a football coach:
Author interviews with Scott Bethel via phone and email in 2012.

Nearly two dozen teacher-training programs:
Oklahoma Commission for Teacher Preparation,
Teacher Preparation Inventory 2012.

They were rewarded with high grades:
Koedel, “Grading Standards in Education Departments at Universities.”

It also has a 75 percent acceptance rate:
Northeastern State University,
Fact Book: Academic Year 2010-2011.
The university did not respond to requests for historical acceptance rates dating back to the time of Bethel’s admission.

The university’s typical ACT score is lower:
Northeastern State University,
Fact Book: Academic Year 2010-2011
and ACT,
2010 ACT National and State Scores.
In 2010, incoming freshmen at NSU had an average ACT score of 20.1, compared to 21 for the U.S. overall. (The average for Oklahoma in 2010 was 20.7.)

A master’s degree did not make American teachers better at their jobs:
For a summary of this research and other insights into what does (and does not) seem to make teachers stronger, see Walsh and Tracy,
Increasing the Odds.

Two and a half times the numbers of teachers it needed:
Greenberg, Pomerance, and Walsh.
Student Teaching in the United States.
About 186,000 new teachers graduate in the U.S. each year. About 77,000 actually take a teaching job.