The Smartest Kids in the World (20 page)

But he couldn’t find it.

Gettysburg High School was palatial. It sprawled out across 124 acres, a red brick and glass campus set back behind a manicured lawn. The $40 million facility, built in 1998, included an engineering lab, a greenhouse, three basketball courts, and a sleek 1,600 seat auditorium.
The school spent almost twice as much per student as Kim’s school spent in Oklahoma, even after adjusting for cost of living and differences in students’ needs. Whatever the school needed, it wasn’t money.

Blanchard worried the problem might be the teachers; that would be hard to fix. Yet he was surprised to discover many talented, experienced teachers. He also met hundreds of hard-working, creative kids, including Tom. One in five Gettysburg children came from families living in poverty, a relatively manageable level, and most of Tom’s classmates lived in middle- or upper-income homes.

In time, Blanchard realized the problem was more insidious. The challenge was not a lack of potential but a failure of imagination. Some parents—including the ones who worked as professors at nearby Gettysburg College—assumed their children would go to college. But most parents just wanted their kids to get through high school, and that was about it, Blanchard realized. Many of these parents worked in agriculture and had never needed more education than that. Their goals were modest to a fault.

In certain other countries, that twentieth century mindset had been disrupted—often by economic crises. Families in Finland, Korea, and Poland had started to assume that their kids would go to college or get technical training after high school, and most of them did.

Yet in Gettysburg and many schools around the world, the status quo had calcified. And it wasn’t just the parents and students who
settled for less; that same mindset pervaded many of the classrooms. In his conversations with teachers in the hallways, Blanchard noticed a certain resignation. Why should they stand up in front of kids and talk about politics, literature, or advanced math if all their students wanted was to get through high school?

Blanchard started to think of the problem like Plato’s Cave. People assumed the familiar shadows they’d seen on the wall in front of them were real, even if they were just reflections of their own imaginations. He needed to make them turn around and discover that the world was different. Things had changed, and they could dream bigger.

First, Blanchard tried to boost the rhetoric. He started talking about Gettysburg becoming the best. He announced a plan to double the size of the AP program. He told the orchestra teacher he wanted to have the strongest music program in the county. “I want to be great at everything, so nobody can say this is the football high school.”

Then he tried to lift the academic expectations, just slightly. When he heard about the applied classes, he started asking questions. Neither of his previous schools had needed applied courses. Why should Gettysburg? He started referring to them as “bonehead” classes, and he proposed doing away with them.

“Kids meet the expectations you set for them,” he told his staff.

Some teachers and guidance counselors objected. “The students won’t pass,” they warned him. “They won’t graduate.”

Blanchard told them it was their job to teach all the kids, not just the ambitious ones. So Tom’s sophomore year, the school offered no bonehead courses. Just like that, Gettysburg deleted its lowest track.

Interestingly, nothing happened.
No one dropped out because “bonehead English” went away. Soon, teachers stopped talking about it, and it was as if
the applied track had never existed.

Gettysburg and other local school districts also got together to build a new technical school, so that kids who wanted vocational training could spend half their days in the program for diesel mechanics
or pre-nursing, earning community college credit. They couldn’t do it until they were sixteen, though, just like in Poland. Until then, they had to keep taking English, science, and math.

Diesel mechanics needed to know geometry and the basics of physics in order to diagnose and repair modern heavy machinery. They had to be able to read blueprints and technical manuals. They had to understand percentages and ratios in order to measure the gasses found in exhaust.
All jobs had gotten more complex, including blue-collar jobs.

Besides these important changes, though, much remained the same at Gettysburg. There were still multiple tracks, and kids got sorted onto them early on. The AP program had grown but not doubled. Most of the teachers remained the same. And, while many were strong, some were not, a veteran Gettysburg teacher told me. “Parents complain about them, and kids complain, too, and yet they are still here.”

Overall, the state of Pennsylvania got a D+ for its management of teachers from the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2011 and 2012; it got a flat-out F for its practices regarding the removal of ineffective teachers.

Sports remained the core culture of Gettysburg High School. At each football game, no less than four local reporters showed up. Both local newspapers devoted entire sections to high-school sports. Many games were broadcast on the radio. Student athletes had grueling schedules that left little time or energy for studying. They had to lift weights all summer, but they didn’t have to do much math. Blanchard had worked hard to increase the drive and equity quotient at his school, but the rest of the equation remained mostly the same.

In 2011, four out of ten Gettysburg high school juniors still weren’t doing math at grade level, according to
the state’s own test, which wasn’t very hard.
When Tom’s classmates took the SAT, they scored a bit better than the national mean in reading and a little worse in math. Their AP scores were high, but only a third of the students took AP classes. It was almost as if Gettysburg were two different
schools, with one set of ideals for the top students and another for the rest. The metamorphosis had stalled.

Tom liked Principal Blanchard, though he didn’t know him well, and he was reluctant to say anything critical about his hometown. But as we walked through Wrocław talking about the differences, he described the problem with Gettysburg this way: “The school is not that concerned with sending people off to do big things.” It was one reason he’d wanted to spend his senior year somewhere else. He’d wanted to do big things.

We got to number thirteen just before first period, arriving with a throng of other students. The building was made of deep red and black bricks, with bars covering the windows. Like the rest of the city, number thirteen was a contrast of old and new; half of it was rebuilt after World War II, while the other half dated back to the 1800s. A scowling guard allowed us to pass through the foyer into the main lobby.

Number thirteen was a bilingual German school, considered one of the better high schools in the city. It had hardwood floors, high ceilings, and wooden desks, but it was not in the same league as the facility in Gettysburg. There was no cafeteria, for example. Kids brought sandwiches from home or bought food from a small snack counter inside the school.

There were no high-tech white boards or laptops, either. Back at Gettysburg, half the classrooms had laptops for all students, and the other half used one of five computer labs as needed. As we made our way downstairs, I asked Tom what kinds of things he did with those laptops. “We played Flash games,” he said smiling, “or tried to find a way to get on Facebook.”

Polish kids wasted time on Facebook, too, of course. They procrastinated by playing World of Warcraft, just like kids back home.
However, they also spent a lot of time studying for their graduation exam, far more than most of Tom’s classmates had spent studying for the SAT. When Polish kids took that graduation test, they got dressed up in their nicest clothes—the way high-school football players did on game day in America.

And one other thing: There were no sports at Tom’s school in Poland. Sports simply did not figure into the school day; why would they? Plenty of kids played pick-up soccer or basketball games on their own after school, but there was no confusion about what school was for—or what mattered to kids’ life chances. Unlike Principal Blanchard back in Pennsylvania, Tom’s Polish principal did not have to spend any time worrying about whether her new math teacher could also coach baseball.

When the bell rang at the end of class, I followed Tom outside for one of several daily smoke breaks. We stood beside the school, along with dozens of other students, as a streetcar churned by, shaking the ground around us. He’d picked up the habit soon after he’d arrived. Back in Gettysburg, he would have been suspended for smoking outside school.

Like many American exchange students, Tom relished the freedom he had in his time abroad. After school, he liked to go to one of the twelve islands located on the Odra River that ran through the city. There, with throngs of other Polish teenagers, he and his friends drank beer and smoked. He felt more like an adult who could decide what to do, even if it was bad for him.

That autonomy was not always fun, however. If teenagers were capable of taking care of themselves after school, they were also expected to face facts during school. They were not protected from hard truths. In one class, Tom remembered, the teacher announced the exam scores aloud. He was stunned when he heard the results: Twenty-two out of twenty-six kids had failed, an unimaginable ratio in most U.S. high schools. School didn’t necessarily seem better in Poland, in Tom’s opinion, but it did seem less forgiving.

Later that day, I asked Tom to introduce me to his principal, Urszula Spałka. He took me to her office, where we sat down underneath a large eagle, the national symbol of Poland, hanging on the pale violet wall. Spałka wore a low-cut black blouse and a brown suit with chunky jewelry. She had started out as a math teacher, but she had been the principal at number thirteen for almost 20 years.

Like the United States, Poland ran its schools on the local level. The country was divided into 2,500 municipalities. On average,
Spałka and other principals had about $4,681 to spend on each student each year,
compared to $11,000 per student in Gettysburg.

Spałka gave succinct answers to my questions, betraying little emotion. When I asked her about the reforms, the ones that had made the country a role model for the rest of the world, her expression soured.

“We’re not too excited about the reforms,” she said drily. “Schools don’t like radical changes. And these were radical changes.”

Despite Poland’s higher PISA scores, many Poles still thought it had been a mistake to keep all kids together during the volatile teenage years. Or they were focused on other problems: Many thought the graduation exam had gotten too easy, and the country’s teachers were feuding with the government over a move to increase their hours.

Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country—every one—still had work to do.

In the summer of 2000, after seeing through the first phase of reforms, Handke had resigned. He’d failed to secure funds needed to pay for a promised pay raise for teachers, and besides that, he was tired. He went back to chemistry, and soon afterwards, his party was defeated in a landslide.

Poland was more rigorous than it had been; it had a higher level of drive, some measure of autonomy and a dose of equity. But, like
Gettysburg High School,
it hadn’t changed enough. It still had too many teacher-training colleges of wildly varying quality. The teachers who managed to find jobs still did not get paid enough. Until it doubled down on rigor and fixed its teaching quality, Poland could never be Finland.

Poland had made a breakthrough nevertheless. It had proven that even troubled countries could do better for their children in just a few years. Rigor could be cultivated. It didn’t have to appear organically. In fact, there was no evidence that it ever had, in any country. Expectations could be raised. Bold leaders who didn’t know better could help to raise an entire generation of smarter kids.

Before they’d gotten tracked, Polish kids had finished that survey, the one attached to the PISA test, coming in first in the world for conscientiousness. It seemed as if, somewhere along the way, they’d bought into the idea that they should take school seriously. Maybe because they were expected to do so.

When I talked to Handke in 2012, he was convalescing from a heart condition, which he blamed, semiseriously, on the three years he’d spent trying to reform his country’s education system. Looking back, he wished he and his colleagues had done a better job selling the reforms. They had focused more on the policy than public relations, when they should have done the reverse. That was another common mistake, lamented too late in every time zone. Politics, history, and fear mattered more than policy, always and everywhere. Still, he consoled himself with the knowledge that controversy was inevitable.

“Every reform hurts. People want peace. When you’re used to something, it’s better when nothing is happening.”

I asked him what he would do if he could go back and push for one last change before he died. He did not hesitate.

“The teachers. Everything is based on the teachers. We need good teachers—well-prepared, well-chosen. I wouldn’t change anything else.”