The Smartest Kids in the World (23 page)

Compared to the rest of Finland, the Tiistilä kids performed above average. That was impressive: Better than average in Finland meant better than average just about anywhere.

Tiistilä students were diverse
and
good at math. The school was inspiring. It was also different from most U.S. schools in almost every way. First, it was
truly
economically and ethnically diverse. The school’s three hundred children came from poor families, who lived in tiny, crowded apartments, and from rich families, who lived by the sea. Second, the Finnish government gave the school extra money for its immigrant students, to help pay for intensive language instruction.

The other difference was that Tiistilä had highly educated teachers. Vuorinen did not get into education college on his first try. Or his second. His test scores weren’t high enough.

Finally, after spending years gaining experience as a substitute teacher, Vuorinen was accepted on his third try. He didn’t find his university experience nearly as helpful as substitute teaching, but he didn’t
begrudge the process, either. When I asked him if he had any advice for the United States, he said: “You should start to select your teachers more carefully and motivate them more. One motivation is money. Respect is another. Punishing is never a good way to deal with schools.” Autonomy mattered as much to Vuorinen as cash.

Vuorinen had worked at ten schools in fifteen years, but he liked Tiistilä the best. His reason was the same reason happy teachers cited everywhere:

“I like the principal. She knows what to do,” he said. “I feel like I am trusted. And every time I need help, I can trust she will help me.”

The principal, Mirja Pirinen, had worked at the school for fifteen years, going back to when it was much less diverse. She gave me a tour that ended at the playground, where a group of Muslim girls in pink headscarves jumped rope in the sunshine.

In her eight years as principal, Pirinen hadn’t dismissed any of Tiistilä’s permanent, full-time teachers. As in the United States, Finnish teachers almost never lost their jobs due to their performance. They were protected by a strong union contract. However, it was easier to manage inflexible workforces if employees arrived at work well-educated, rigorously trained, and decently paid from day one.

To me, Tiistilä seemed like a model school. Pirinen was smart and organized. She was the only principal I met on any continent who could actually tell me how much money her government spent per student. (In most schools, this was a mysterious figure that required many phone calls to uncover.) By all indications, Pirinen had successfully led Tiistilä through a major transition, adapting to a surge in families who couldn’t speak a word of Finnish.

But not everyone in the neighborhood had such confidence in the school.

“Some parents in this area say that they would never want their children in this school,” Pirinen told me matter of factly. The parents who did enroll their kids sometimes had to defend their decision to their neighbors.

Why? The parents were worried about the immigrant children. They’d been worried when there were 6 percent immigrants, and they were more worried now that there were 30 percent. Pirinen had to work hard to convince them that the school was good, despite its diversity.

There were virtually no private schools in Finland, nor any vouchers or charter schools. However, school choice took many forms, I was discovering. The kids who lived near the Tiistilä school could apply to attend special international, science, music, or foreign language schools, which were public schools that took only the higher performers (a practice that sometimes favored upper-income or savvier parents).

Finland’s teenagers could also choose to go to job-training high schools, and about half of them did. The Finnish government had recently lavished vocational schools with funding and performance bonuses, so regular academic high schools like Kim’s had to work even harder to keep their students.

Normally, Finnish schools did not publicize test results, but Pirinen had posted her school’s scores on the web site to help reassure parents. With more diversity, test data had become more valuable, not just to track the school’s effectiveness, but to assuage parental anxieties.

In every country, parents tried to get their children into the best schools. That was another universal truth, and who could blame them? The problem was defining
best
. Lacking good information, parents tended to judge schools based on hearsay, or the skin-color, ethnicity, or income level of the students and their families.

If everyone agreed that all schools met certain baseline standards, as in Finland, then the competition was mostly friendly. However, as more immigrants arrived, parents became less trusting. Even in Finland, with its long history of equity, there were reports of parents moving to other parts of Helsinki to avoid schools with just 10 percent immigrant children.

“Undoubtedly, we all want to live in a multicultural and tolerant atmosphere,” one Finnish mother told the newspaper
Helsingin Sanomat
in 2011, explaining one reason why her child attended school
outside of her neighborhood. “But the fact is that if there are many children who do not speak Finnish, the teacher’s time is spent on them.” The mother did not know any children at the local school, but she had heard stories.

I wondered what would happen in a true free market in which parents had real insight into the rigor of a school and the quality of its teachers, not just the aesthetics of the building or the ethnicity of the students. Some U.S. education reformers and politicians were convinced that more competition would lead to just this kind of scenario, pushing schools to get better results, or shut down.

At the time,
11 percent of children in the United States were enrolled in private schools—
less than average for the developed world. According to PISA data,
private schools did not add much value; private-school students did better on PISA than public-school students, but not better than would have been expected if they’d been in public school, given their socioeconomic status. Charter schools (a more autonomous type of public school available in some U.S. cities) accounted for another 5 percent of students. But here, too, the benefits varied widely depending on the charter school.

Competition existed almost everywhere, even if it was sometimes hard to see. Across the developed world,
three-quarters of kids attended high schools that competed for students one way or another. But in the United States and most other countries, the competition was modest and distorted by a lack of information. As far as I could tell, there was really only one place in the world with a true free market for education, where supply and demand determined prices, and customers had closer-to-perfect information. That place was not the United States. Nor was it likely to ever be found in any public-school system on the planet.

Now that I appreciated the importance of rigor, I wanted to see if it could be jumpstarted by competition. To find out, I had to go into the shadows of South Korea’s hagwons, a laboratory for the best and worst of everything, all at once.

Celebrity Teacher: Andrew Kim teaches at a Megastudy hagwon in the Daechi-dong neighborhood of Seoul.

When Andrew Kim taught English, he spoke quietly into a tiny hands-free microphone that protruded from under his right ear. He wrote on an old-fashioned chalkboard. He didn’t seem to be doing anything remarkable, but in his class, unlike so many Korean classes, the students did not sleep.

Andrew Kim earned $4 million in 2010. He was known in Korea as a
rock-star teacher
, a combination of words that I’d never heard before. He’d been teaching for over twenty years, all of them in Korea’s private afterschool tutoring hagwons. That meant that he was paid according to the demand for his skills, unlike most teachers worldwide. And he was in high demand.

I interviewed Kim in his office in a luxury high-rise building in Seoul in June 2011. One of his employees greeted me at the door and offered me bottled water. We gathered around a table, and Kim explained that he worked about sixty hours per week, although he only taught three in-person lectures. The Internet had turned his classes
into commodities. Each lecture he did went online, where kids could purchase his teaching services at the rate of $3.50 per hour. The rest of the time, he responded to students’ online requests for help, developed lesson plans, and wrote textbooks and workbooks. He’d written about two hundred books. “The harder I work, the more I make,” he said. “I like that.”

He didn’t seem overly proud of his salary, but he didn’t seem embarrassed by it either. Most of his earnings came from the 150,000 kids who watched his lectures online each year. Kim was a brand, I came to realize, with the overhead that entailed. He employed thirty people to help him manage his teaching empire. He ran a publishing company to produce his books.

To call this
tutoring
was to wildly underestimate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Kim worked for, was listed on the Korean stock exchange.
Three of every four Korean kids participated in the private market.
In 2011, their parents spent almost $18 billion on cram schools, which was more than the federal government spent fighting the drug war in the United States. The so-called tutoring business was so profitable that it attracted
investments from places like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, and A.I.G.

The involvement of multinational bankers in education was, generally speaking, ominous. Still, there was something thrilling about meeting Andrew Kim. For the first time, I was in the presence of a teacher who earned the kind of money professional athletes earned. Here was a teacher—
a teacher
—who was part of the 1 percent. Someone with his ambition and abilities might have become a banker or a lawyer in the United States, but in Korea, he’d become a teacher, and he was rich anyway.

The idea was seductive. What better way to guarantee that the best and brightest went into teaching than to make the greatest teachers millionaires? Maybe Korea offered a model for the world after all.

Still, the world of hagwons was mysterious. It was hard for an outsider to understand how this industry functioned—and boomed.
To learn how the business worked, I met with Lee Chae-yun, who owned a chain of five hagwons in Seoul called Myungin Academy. We had lunch in a traditional Korean restaurant, sitting on pillows and wielding metal chopsticks.

Lee understood the private and public worlds unusually well. She had been a teacher for almost two decades in public schools and in a university. But now, she sounded like a CEO.

“Students are the customers,” she said.

She was speaking literally. To recruit students, hagwons held open houses, sent out mass mailings, and posted their graduates’ test scores and university acceptance figures outside their entrances. In the Korean marketplace, results mattered more than anything else.

Once students enrolled, the hagwon employees did not wait for parents to get involved, then complain if they didn’t; the hagwon embedded itself in their lives. Parents got text messages when their children arrived at the hagwon; then they got another message relaying students’ progress. Two to three times a month, the teachers called home with feedback. If parents were not engaged, that was considered a failure of the hagwon, not the family. I had seen few U.S. schools go to such lengths to serve their so-called customers.

The most radical difference was that students signed up for specific teachers, not just hagwons, so the most respected teachers got the most students. Andrew Kim had about 120 students per lecture, though the typical teacher’s hagwon classes were much smaller. The Korean private market had unbundled education down to the one in-school variable that mattered most: the teacher.

It was about as close to a pure meritocracy as it could be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers were free agents. They did not need to be certified. They didn’t have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay was determined by how many students signed up for their classes, by their students’ test-score growth, and, in many hagwons, by the results of satisfaction surveys given to students and parents.

To find star teachers, hagwon directors like Lee scoured the Internet,
reading parents’ reviews and watching teachers’ lectures. Competing hagwons routinely tried to poach one another’s star teachers. But, like movie stars and first-round draft picks, the big-name teachers came with baggage.

“The really good teachers are hard to retain—and hard to manage. You need to protect their egos,” she said smiling.

Still, most hagwon teachers were not rock stars. Foreigners who came to teach English in Korea told stories of working exorbitant hours in unreasonable conditions for low pay. Most hagwon instructors earned much less than public-school teachers, and since Korean education colleges produced far too many would-be teachers, the competition for jobs was intense.