The Smartest Kids in the World (27 page)

As Kim, Eric, and Tom finished their first school year back in America, no one could say there was a consensus around rigor. In a culture plagued by distractions, from digital white boards to self-esteem building to high school football, that clarity of purpose was hard to find. But not impossible.

William Taylor taught math in a traditional public school in Washington, D.C. He had grown up in D.C, and he’d always loved math. As a brand-new teacher, he’d happened to land in a school with a principal who understood the importance of rigor. She was not perfect, but she taught him important things; she taught him, for example, never to send misbehaving students into the hallway as a form of punishment. Find another way to get them to behave.

School was not a good-behavior factory; it was a learning factory. That was her vision, and it was clear. If kids were in the hallway, they were not learning.

She also taught him never to let a child leave school without a backpack. Where was their work? School was about learning; work mattered. These little boys and girls lived in a neighborhood where one of every five adults was unemployed; every student at that school was African-American, and most were poor or close to it. These children had to do a lot of learning if they were going to make it. Their backpacks were like lifejackets, and they would surely drown without them.

After a couple of years, Taylor became an exceptionally strong math teacher. Year after year, his students’ knowledge advanced more than one grade level in his class. When they left, they were at or above grade level. They had also learned about hard work, which was just as important.

Will Taylor believed in rigor and embedded it in his classroom. He wasn’t a hero; he just believed that kids were smarter and tougher than other people assumed, and he acted accordingly. He was also good at his job, and he had a boss who made him better. Under D.C.’s complex teacher evaluation scheme, Taylor was even paid according to his value, a rarity in schools worldwide. He had been rated highly effective three times in a row, an unusual and mighty feat. Thanks to controversial bonus schemes put into place under former Chancellor
Michelle Rhee, Taylor was earning six figures. He had just bought his first house.

In 2011, Taylor transferred to a new public school in an equally troubled corner of D.C. He was excited to be there. The principal was warm and supportive, the teachers were enthusiastic, and the parents seemed relatively involved. It took him a while to discover the airless void where the rigor should have been.

Taylor did what he’d always done: He taught his students all kinds of games, hand gestures, and systems to help them learn without wasting time. He used tricks to make sure he was calling on all of them, and he grouped the kids together strategically, so that they could help each other when he could not.

In the first few weeks, he had to spend more time than usual getting his students to take his class seriously and control their behavior. But once he got their respect, he didn’t have to ask for it again.

Then, one day, a little girl who rarely spoke walked up to him and said something important.

“My mother wants to know why you gave me an F.”

Taylor looked down at her over his tiny wire-frame glasses, unblinking.

“I didn’t give you an F,” he said. “You earned an F.”

“Well, I try,” she said quietly.

“I don’t grade you on effort. I grade you on results.”

Taylor did not change the girl’s grade. He did not believe in setting kids up for failure. He believed in telling kids the truth.

He asked around and found out that some of his colleagues were basing 60 percent of students’ grades on effort alone.
Sixty percent.
Who was going to tell these kids that effort didn’t count on the SAT? Math counted, and there
was
a right answer.

Soon, he started hearing other complaints from parents. He was sending kids home with books, and they didn’t like it. The books were too heavy, and the homework was too hard. He asked the other teachers why they didn’t send books home, too. They told him the
kids wouldn’t take care of the books. Taylor raised his eyebrows. How could they learn without books?

He started noticing other things. When he walked the halls, he routinely saw students standing outside classroom doors doing nothing. Usually they were boys, young African-American boys who reminded him of himself. He asked them what they were doing, and they told him they’d been ejected for misbehaving.

One afternoon, watching the students shuffle, slink, and run out the front doors of the school into the world, Taylor noticed something that made his heart sink. Most were not wearing backpacks at all.

The little girl got an F on her report card that semester. But after that, it was as if she woke up. She started to do the homework. She made fewer excuses. She formed a study group with some of the other kids and came into the classroom at lunchtime to work. The next semester, she got a D. By the end of the year, she had a C in math.

When Taylor told her the grade, she started crying. “I cannot believe I did this,” she said. And he could tell her, in total honesty, “You did.”

There are teachers like Taylor all over America. There are even whole schools built around the ideals of rigorous learning and telling children the truth. These are countercultural places, though, with leaders who spend a lot of time convincing parents that their children are tougher than they think.

At BASIS public charter schools in Arizona and Washington, D.C., teachers train students for academic conquests the way most American high schools train football players for Friday night games. On the day of Advanced Placement exams, each student files into the classroom to the
Rocky
theme song, “Eye of the Tiger.”

In 2012, teenagers at two
Arizona BASIS schools took
a special new version of the PISA test designed to compare schools to international benchmarks. Until then, PISA had only shown nationwide or statewide results, not individual school outcomes.

The results were breathtaking. The average BASIS student not only outperformed the typical U.S. student (by nearly three years in reading and science and
four years
in math) but outscored the average student in Finland, Korea, and Poland, as well. These kids even did better than the average student from Shanghai, China, the region that had ranked number one in the world on PISA in 2009.

Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world.

On the same test, however, students from another U.S. high school in a western state performed worse than teenagers in twenty-three countries in math. The PISA organizers did not release the name of this school, but it had no obvious excuses. The school was mostly white and middle class; only 6 percent of its students were living anywhere near the poverty line. Its home state had just awarded it an A letter grade. And yet fewer than one in ten students performed at a high level of critical thinking in math, compared to six in ten students at BASIS. Teenagers at that school scored below teenagers in Finland, Korea, and Poland, not to mention the Slovak Republic and Estonia.

The parents at that school may never know about these results, but the students will find out, one way or another. If not as freshmen in college, when they are placed in remedial math or struggle to follow a basic physics lecture, then in the workforce, when they misinterpret a graph at the bank where they work or miscalculate a drug dosage at a hospital nursing station. This revelation—that they lack tools that have become essential in the modern economy—will in all likelihood arrive privately, a kind of sinking shame that they cannot entirely explain. They may experience it as a personal failing, though I hope they don’t.

I hope they experience it as an outrage instead. Maybe, unlike generations before them, these young Americans will decide that their own children, like children in Finland, deserve to be taught by the best-educated, best-trained professionals in the world. They might realize that if Korean kids can learn to fail and try again before leaving high school, so can their kids. Perhaps they will conclude that Poland is not the only place where change is possible.

History shows us that great leaders matter, and so does luck. Politics are critical, as is power. All major shifts, though, also require a feeling that spreads among people like a whispered oath, kitchen table by kitchen table, until enough of them agree that something must be done.

The stories of Finland, Korea, and Poland are complicated and unfinished. But they reveal what is possible. All children must learn rigorous higher-order thinking to thrive in the modern world. The only way to do that is by creating a serious intellectual culture in schools, one that kids can sense is real and true. As more and more data spills out of schools and countries, and as students themselves find ways to tell the world how much more they could do, these counternarratives will, I hope, become too loud to bear.

Writing this book was a blatant escape attempt. In the early twenty-first century, the debates about education in the United States had become, in my opinion, so nasty, provincial, and redundant that they no longer led anywhere worth going. I wanted to wander off, as far away as I could, and see if the conversation changed.

The data gave me the perfect excuse: A small number of countries had taught almost all of their children higher-order thinking. How had that happened? What was stopping it from happening elsewhere? I didn’t care deeply about charter schools, vouchers, tenure, or other policy hang-ups. The grown-ups were looking inward, sniping at one another in hotel ballrooms and city halls, while billions of children were learning to reason and solve problems—
or not
—all around the world. So, I thought, I’ll just slip out the back door and go investigate this other mystery for a while.

It took about six months before I realized I was nuts. Writing about one foreign country is hard; writing about three is borderline fraudulent. A stranger who parachutes into a faraway country ends up, as the Koreans would say, “licking the outside of a watermelon,” unable to get beneath the surface into what matters.

I needed a lot of help: about as many people, in front and behind the scenes, as a Broadway musical. Only I didn’t have a Broadway budget. And even though I had little to offer them, people did remarkable things. I think they did it because they thought the mystery mattered. Or maybe it was pity. They could see that I would never be able to navigate the labyrinth of data and other countries’ bureaucracies without
them. In the end, more than a hundred people around the world—researchers, teachers, translators, fixers, politicians, business people, diplomats, students, and parents—helped me find my way.

From beginning to end, I relied most of all on Kim, Eric, Tom, and Jenny, the young people who took me inside their schools and homes on three continents and patiently explained what they knew—again and again. Without them, I never would have glimpsed the ordinary lives of kids and families, the scenes that make it possible to understand why policy works or, more often, misses the mark totally. They answered thousands of tedious and sometimes foolish questions, by Skype, phone, email, Facebook, text message, and in person. They sat patiently outside of Buddhist temples, in high-school hallways, and in hotel lobbies while I recorded them talking about their experiences (in video snippets now archived on
www.AmandaRipley.com
). They let me talk to their families, their teachers, and their friends. I am sure I embarrassed them in ways I will never realize. I kept waiting for them to roll their eyes and storm off, but they never did.

I visited Kim, Tom, Eric, and Jenny in person in Finland, Poland, and Korea. I also visited Kim and Tom’s hometowns in the United States. Whenever I was not able to witness a scene in person, I used interviews, newspaper clips, and other historical documents to help me reconstruct it as accurately as I could. I owe a particular debt to Kim and Tom for their richly detailed, thoughtfully written blogs, which filled in any holes left over from our conversations. (Kim’s blog is cited in the bibliography under Kim; Tom’s blog is not cited because the url includes his last name.)

One lesson from this experience was that reporting about young people has become alarmingly easy; many teenagers (though not all) leave a long, meandering trail of digital footprints that they may one day come to regret. I, for one, am very glad that the VHS tape my friend made of me pretending to be a newscaster when I was twelve is not on YouTube.

For this reason, I decided not to include the last names of the
teenagers featured in this book. They exhibited levels of self-awareness and modesty that I don’t see in most of the adults that I interview. But, just in case, I wanted to give them a chance to change their minds, to reinvent themselves and tell their own stories one day.

The parents of these young informants took a risk in letting them talk to me. I am so grateful for their trust. In some cases, they spent hours talking to me about their children and their own theories about parenting and education in America and abroad. My sincere thanks, as well, to everyone at AFS, Youth for Understanding, the Rotary Clubs, and CSIET, who graciously connected me to exchange students all over the world.

Arranging for young people to live and study thousands of miles from home is a complicated, risky business; the people who do it well are dedicated to the simple idea that the world is a big and wondrous place, and the sooner we teach our children about it, the better off we all will be.

For believing that it was possible to write a not-boring book about education and never giving up on that radical idea, I want to thank my longtime editor and friend, Priscilla Painton, along with Jonathan Karp, and the rest of his team at Simon & Schuster. Thank you for making it possible to go on far-flung quests and share the treasures with the rest of the world.