The Smartest Kids in the World (22 page)

Diversity
was one of those words that got hijacked so often it had lost most of its meaning. Part of the problem was that there were thousands of ways to be diverse. In the United States, conversations about diversity were usually about race. The United States closely tracked the race of students because of its history of institutionalized racism; other countries did not, which made comparisons difficult.

But within the United States, African-American students did poorly on PISA, heartbreakingly so. On average, they scored
eighty-four points below white students in reading in 2009. It was
as if the white kids had been going to school two extra years, even though they were the same age. The gap between white and African-American students showed itself in dozens of other ways, too, from graduation rates to SAT scores. Generally speaking, up to half the gap could
be explained by economics; black students were more likely to come from lower-income families with less-educated parents.

The other half was more complicated: Black parents tended to have fewer books and read less to their children, partly because they tended to be less educated. Then, when black children walked out of their homes and went to school each day, the disparities compounded. African-American kids were more likely to encounter inferior teaching and lower expectations in school, and they were disproportionately tracked into the lowest groups for reading and math lessons.

Each school day, African-American kids got the message in many schools around the country. It was subtle, but it was consistent: Your time is not precious, and your odds are not good. Those kinds of signals took up residence in kids’ brains, echoing in the background whenever they contemplated what was possible. In one long-term study of Australian teenagers, researchers found that
teenagers’ aspirations at age fifteen could predict their futures. Kids who had high expectations for themselves, who planned to finish school and go to college, were significantly more likely to graduate high school. In fact, their parents’ socioeconomic status didn’t seem to affect their graduation odds, statistically speaking, as long as they held these aspirations.

Still, despite all the insidious disadvantages they faced, African-American kids were not responsible for the lackluster U.S. performance overall. For one thing, five of every six American kids were
not
black. For another, white kids didn’t do so great in math, either. On average,
white American teens performed worse than
all
students in a dozen other countries, including
all
kids in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, which had higher ratios of immigrant kids. On a percentage basis,
New York State had fewer
white
kids performing at high levels in math than Poland and Estonia had among kids overall.

Nothing was simple. Diversity could raise
or
lower test scores, and it did. One in five U.S. students came from an immigrant background, the sixth highest ratio in the developed world. But U.S. immigrants were, well, diverse: Hispanic students scored higher than blacks
on PISA, for example, and lower than whites, but
Asian-Americans did better than everyone.

Overall, the
gap between PISA reading scores for native and immigrant students in the United States was 22 points—better than Germany or France, where the gap was 60 points, but not as impressive as Canada, where the gap was zero. Much depended on the education and income of the immigrant parents, which had a lot to do with the history and immigration policies of a given country.

The rest depended on what countries
did
with the children they had. In the United States, the practice of funding schools based on local property taxes motivated families to move into the most affluent neighborhoods they could afford, in effect buying their way into good schools. The system encouraged segregation.

Since black, Hispanic, and immigrant kids tended to come from less affluent families, they usually ended up in underresourced schools with more kids like them. Between 1998 and 2010,
poor American students had become more concentrated in schools with other poor students.

The biggest problem with this kind of diversity is that it wasn’t actually
diverse
.
Most white kids had majority white classmates. Black and Hispanic students, meanwhile, were
more likely to attend majority black or Hispanic schools in 2005 than they were in 1980.

Populating schools with mostly low-income, Hispanic, or African-American students usually meant compounding low scores, unstable home lives, and low expectations. Kids fed off each other, a dynamic that could work for good and for ill. In Poland, kids lost their edge as soon as they were tracked into vocational schools; likewise, there seemed to be a tipping point for expectations in the United States. On average, schools with mostly low-income kids systematically lacked the symptoms of rigor. They had inconsistent teaching quality, little autonomy for teachers or teenagers, low levels of academic drive, and less equity. By warehousing disadvantaged kids in the same schools, the United States took hard problems and made them harder.

In Singapore, the opposite happened. There, the population was
also diverse, about 77 percent Chinese, 14 percent Malay, 8 percent Indian, and 1.5 percent other. People spoke Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil and followed five different faiths (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, and Hinduism). Yet Singaporeans scored at the top of the world on PISA, right beside Finland and Korea. There was virtually no gap in scores between immigrant and native-born students.

Of course, Singapore was essentially another planet compared to most countries. It was ruled by an authoritarian regime with an unusually high-performing bureaucracy. The government controlled most of the rigor variables, from the caliber of teacher recruits to the mix of ethnicities in housing developments. Singapore did not have the kind of extreme segregation that existed in the United States, because policy makers had forbidden it.

In most freewheeling democracies, governments did not have that kind of power. Left to their own devices, parents tended to self-segregate. If the class distinctions were less obvious, and the quality of the schools more consistent, this tendency was manageable.

Watching the kids sitting in Kim’s classes, some animated, some aloof, but all of them white, I wondered what would happen if Finland’s population suddenly changed. Would the Finns still have a shared belief in rigor if students came in all different colors? Or would everything come undone?

Finland was a homogeneous place, but getting less so.
The number of foreigners had increased over 600 percent since 1990, and most of the newcomers had ended up in Helsinki.

To find out how diversity changed the culture of rigor, I went to the Tiistilä school, just outside Helsinki, where a third of the kids were immigrants, many of them refugees. The school enrolled children aged six to thirteen. It was surrounded by concrete block apartment buildings that looked more communist than Nordic.

In a second-floor classroom, Heikki Vuorinen stood before his sixth graders. Four were African; two wore headscarves. An Albanian boy from Kosovo sat near a Chinese boy. There was a smattering of white kids born in Finland. Vuorinen gave the class an assignment and stepped out to talk to me.

Wearing a purple T-shirt, jeans, and small, rectangular glasses, Vuorinen proudly reported that he had kids from nine different countries that year, including China, Somalia, Russia, and Kosovo. Most had single parents. Beyond that, he was reluctant to speculate.

“I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much,” he said, running his hand through his thinning blonde hair. Then he smiled. “There are twenty-three pearls in my classroom. I don’t want to scratch them.”

When pressed, he told me about one of his students in particular. She had six brothers and sisters; her father was a janitor and her mother took care of other people’s children. Money was very tight. But she was, he said, the top student in his class.

Vuorinen was visibly uncomfortable labeling his students. “I don’t want to have too much empathy for them,” he explained, “because I have to teach. If I thought about all of this too much, I would give better marks to them for worse work. I’d think, ‘Oh, you poor kid. Oh, well, what can I do?’ That would make my job too easy.”

He seemed acutely aware of the effect that expectations could have on his teaching. Empathy for kids’ home lives could strip the rigor from his classroom. “I want to think about them as all the same.”

I’d never heard a U.S. teacher talk that way. To the contrary, state and federal laws
required
that teachers and principals think about their kids as different; they had to monitor their students’ race and income and report that data to the government. Schools were judged by the test scores of kids in each category. Most principals knew their ratios of low-income and minority kids by heart, like baseball players knew batting averages. There were important reasons for all this labeling; the U.S. government was trying to highlight injustice in order
to fix it. Still, I wondered how much that raised consciousness had suppressed expectations along the way.

Diane Ravitch, one of the most popular education commentators in the United States, had insisted for years that Americans should think about our students’ backgrounds
more,
not less. “Our problem is poverty, not schools,” she told a roaring crowd of thousands of teachers at a D.C. rally in 2011. Kids were
not
all the same, in other words, and their differences preceded them.

In Finland, Vuorinen said the opposite of what Ravitch was saying in America.

“Wealth doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “It’s your brain that counts. These kids know that from very young. We are all the same.”

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to think that the diversity narrative in the United States—the one that blamed our mediocrity on kids’ backgrounds and neighborhoods—was as toxic as funding inequities. There was a fatalism to the story line, which didn’t mean it was wrong. The United States
did
have too much poverty; minority students were
not
learning enough. Parents
did
matter, and so did health care and nutrition. Obviously.

But the narrative also underwrote low aspirations, shaping the way teachers looked at their students, just as Vuorinen feared. Since the 1960s, studies have shown that if researchers tested a class and told teachers that certain students would thrive academically in the coming months, teachers behaved differently toward the chosen kids. They nodded more, smiled more, and gave those kids more time to answer questions and more specific feedback.

In fact, the kids had been chosen at random. The label was fictional, but it stuck. At the end of the school year, teachers still described those students as more interesting, better adjusted, and more likely to be successful in life. As for other kids who had done well in the classroom, but were not chosen? The same teachers described them as less likely to succeed and less likable. The human brain depends on labels and patterns; if a researcher (or cultural narrative)
offers teachers a compelling pattern, they will tend to defer to it.

What did it mean, then, that respected U.S. education leaders and professors in teacher colleges were indoctrinating young teachers with the mindset that poverty trumped everything else? What did it mean if teachers were led to believe that they could only be expected to do so much, and that poverty was usually destiny?

It may be human nature to stereotype, but some countries systematically reinforced the instinct, and some countries inhibited it. It was becoming obvious to me that rigor couldn’t exist without equity. Equity was not just a matter of tracking and budgets; it was a
mindset
.

Interestingly, this mindset extended to
special education in Finland, too. Teachers considered most special ed students to have temporary learning difficulties, rather than permanent disabilities. That mindset helped explain why
Finland had one of the highest proportions of special education kids in the world; the label was temporary and not pejorative. The Finns assumed that all kids could improve. In fact, by their seventeenth birthday, about
half
of Finnish kids had received some kind of special education services at some point, usually in elementary school, so that they did not fall farther behind.

During the 2009 to 2010 school year, about
one in four Finnish kids received some kind of special education services—almost always in a normal school, for only part of the day. (By comparison, about
one in eight American students received special education services that year.)

As I watched Vuorinen talk with his students, I thought back to a Washington, D.C., public school at which I’d spent time a few years before. The school was in a poor part of the city, and many of the families were struggling. One veteran teacher I met had a warm manner and a bright, tidy classroom. She’d paid for classroom supplies with her own money.

However, when she’d talked about her fourth grade students’ backgrounds, she’d stressed their disadvantages above all else. She’d talked about her kids’ families as if they were a lost cause:
“Our parents on this side don’t have the know-how to raise their children,”
she’d said. “They’re not sure what it takes for their child to make it.”

She’d felt genuinely sorry for her students, but what good had come from her sympathy? After a year in her class, her students were farther below grade level in reading than they’d been when they’d first met her. They’d performed worse than other low-income kids who’d started the year at the same level in the very same city. Yet she’d seemed oddly sanguine about those results. The diversity narrative explained everything, even when it didn’t.

At Vuorinen’s school, all fifth graders had been tested in math two years earlier. It was one way that the Finnish government made sure that schools were working. Unlike in the United States, the accountability tests were precision targeted; the government tested only a sample of students. It usually took just one hour.