The Smartest Kids in the World (28 page)

My longtime agent, Esmond Harmsworth, wisely insisted that I find characters before I did anything else. Thank you, Esmond, for saving me from years of suffering, and for supporting this idea from beginning to end. The very talented and wise Dan Baum rescued me from a writing quagmire, reminding me that stories matter most of all.

To make a living as a long-form writer today requires a crowd of sponsors. Without the support of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellowship, Laurene Powell Jobs, Stacey Rubin, and the Emerson Collective, and all the advice and encouragement of Steve Coll, Andrés Martinez, Faith Smith, and Caroline Esser at the New America Foundation, this book would never have gotten off the ground. Special thanks are due
to Marie Lawrence, a smart and meticulous researcher at New America, who made the AFS survey happen and contributed reams of valuable analysis on child poverty and the primacy of high-school sports in America. Thank you as well to Rebecca Shafer, a former teacher and New America staffer, who helped make sense of the research into special education around the world.

The seeds of many of these stories came from magazine articles, the kind that take a long time to write, a lot of effort to edit, and significant real estate when they get published. Thank you many times over to Michael Duffy, Nancy Gibbs, and Rick Stengel at
Time
magazine, and to James Gibney, Scott Stossel, Corby Kummer, and James Bennet at
The Atlantic
for helping me tell the stories of kids, teachers, and parents around the world, before and after this book came out.

The data gurus at the OECD, including Andreas Schleicher, do vitally important work that is not easy to understand. I thank them for helping me all along the way. At times of great confusion, I also got valuable guidance from the good people at the Education Trust, AIR, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Embassies and Ministries of Education of Finland, Poland, and South Korea.

School leaders in Seoul and Busan, Korea; Wrocław and Warsaw, Poland; Helsinki, Espoo, and Pietarsaari, Finland, as well as in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Sallisaw, Oklahoma, graciously allowed me to see their schools up close. Many teachers in many countries, including Binh Thai from New York City, Lynn Hommeyer and Will Taylor from Washington, D.C., and Sung Soon Oh from Busan, Korea, spent precious time explaining their worlds to me, complicating the picture in critical ways.

For translation and research in Poland, I relied heavily on the intrepid and insightful Mateusz Kornacki. In Korea, Stephen Kim, an outstanding translator and agile reporter, led me through schools, hagwons, and government offices in two cities at all hours. I also received translation and research assistance from Justine Jablonska and Theresa Buchstätter in Washington, D.C., Jenni Santaholma in Helsinki,
Finland, and Sarah Zarrow in Warsaw, Poland. For fact checking a fact-dense book, I thank the indomitable Rachael Brown for her conscientious and smart work.

For the second time, Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice, a woman who can do damn near anything, helped me brainstorm, research, and refine this book. Thank you, Kaitlyn, for telling me straight up what was boring and what was not.

No one finishes a book, as far as I can tell, without friends, colleagues, and family who listen to them talk about it ad nauseam. Romesh Ratnesar, Lesley Chilcott, Michael Schaffer, Dave Ripley, Ben Ripley, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Gordon, Lisa Green, Rachel Dolin, Steven Farr, Karen Marsh, Lennlee Keep, and Courtney Rubin each helped me figure out what this book was about and why it mattered. Kate Walsh at the National Council on Teacher Quality provided generous and helpful guidance on the preparation of American teachers. Timothy Daly from TNTP helped me translate what I’d seen for U.S. consumption. My dear friend Catherine Brown spent many years and jogging miles brainstorming, commiserating, and guiding me toward the finish line. Thank you, Catarina.

John, my husband and best friend, helped imagine this book, and he made it better at every stage along the way. He has listened to more rants about education dysfunction than any human should have to endure. And he did me the enormous twenty-first century favor of telling me I could work for myself, and showing me how it was done (with grace, grit, and a habit of literally knocking on wood). My son, Max, drew cover-jacket mock-ups, rejected many titles, researched countries on his globe, and understood what I was trying to do better than most people well over the age of six.

My mom, Louise Ripley, died while I was writing this book. Many years ago, she taught elementary school in Iowa—a job she loved. She believed that education was a serious pursuit, never to be left to chance. She believed it fiercely. This book is dedicated to her spirit—one part empathy, two parts fight.

Like most reporters, I’d rather not give advice; I prefer to just relate other people’s stories and let you form your own conclusions. That is better for everyone.

And yet. Everywhere I go, parents ask me for specific action items that they can actually use in real life. They ask me at the supermarket, they ask me at the playground. It’s as if they live in the real world, where prose is not all that matters.

In most countries, most parents have some choice as to where to send their children to school. It is a very hard choice, however, and useful information is shamefully hard to find. So, here is my best attempt to deliver what the people want.

Every child is different. An outstanding school for one child would be hell on earth for another. Still, when it comes to finding a school that is both rigorous and alive, full of spirit and learning, there are a few reliable questions to ask. Here is my cheat sheet to finding a world-class school based on what I have seen from visiting schools on four continents, listening to kids, teachers, and parents and studying
the research of other, smarter people than myself. It is incomplete, but it is a start.

If you are trying to understand a school, you can ignore most of the information you are given. Open houses? Pretty much useless. Spending per student? Beyond a certain baseline level, money does not translate into quality in education anywhere. The smartest countries in the world spend less per pupil than the United States.

Average class size? Not as important as most people think, except in the earliest years of schooling. In fact, the highest-performing countries typically have larger classes than the United States. The research shows that the quality of the teaching matters more than the size of the class.

Test data? More helpful, but very hard to decipher in most places. How good is the test? How much value is the school adding beyond what kids are already learning at home? More and more U.S. school districts have this kind of information, but do not make it public.

Instead, the best way to gauge the quality of a school is to spend time—even just twenty minutes—visiting classrooms while school is in session.

When you get there, though, it’s important to know where to look. Parents tend to spend a lot of time staring at the bulletin boards in classrooms. Here is a better idea: Watch the students instead.

Watch for signs that
all
the kids are paying attention, interested in what they are doing, and working hard. Don’t check for signs of order; sometimes learning happens in noisy places where the kids are working in groups without much input from the teacher. Some of the worst classrooms are quiet, tidy places that look, to adults, reassuringly calm.

Remember that rigorous learning actually looks rigorous. If the kids are whizzing through a worksheet, that’s not learning. That’s filling
out a form. Kids should be uncomfortable sometimes; that’s okay. They should not be frustrated or despairing; instead, they should be getting help when they need it, often from each other. They should not spend long, empty stretches of time getting in line for lunch, sitting down for circle time, or handing out papers. There should be a sense of urgency that you can feel.

Resist the urge to focus on the teacher. In the best classrooms in the world, the teacher might be quiet. Or charismatic or even a tiny bit crazy (as most of us remember from our own school days). What you think of the teacher during a short visit is not as important as what the kids think after watching her all year.

I did this in every nation I visited. How interested were the students in my arrival? Engaged kids didn’t take much notice; they had more important things to do. Bored kids looked back and smiled, offered a shy wave, and handed me a tissue if I sneezed. Their time was being wasted, and they were desperate for a distraction.

I saw bored kids in every country. Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent. In American classrooms, I watched a girl draw a beautiful rose tattoo on her arm with a ballpoint pen; she did it slowly, meticulously, as though she were serving a life sentence. I saw a young boy dance silently in his bright white high-tops under his desk. His upper body never moved.

In Finland, I saw a teenage boy take unusual interest in the cord of the window blinds next to him, as if it were a ripcord that might parachute him into another place. In Korea, I saw rows of students sleeping—flat-out REM sleeping—with their heads upon the desks. Some had pillows. Korea was where boredom went to sleep, and got up later to study all night.

Boredom varied wildly from one classroom to the next, usually within the same school. In the best schools, though, boredom was the exception rather than the norm. You could walk into five classrooms
and see just one or two students who had drifted away, mentally or physically, rather than eight or ten. That’s how you know that you are in a place of learning.

People, including reporters, rarely ask students for their insight. Everyone focuses on the teacher, the principal, the building, or the bulletin boards. Young kids are thought to be too small to understand; older kids are presumed to be too jaded. Neither is true, in my experience. As long as you ask intelligent questions, students are the most candid and helpful sources in any school.

Don’t ask, “Do you like this teacher?” or “Do you like your school?” What if a tall, smiling stranger came to your office and asked, “Do you like your boss?” You’d wonder if he was a consultant brought in to fire you. Kids have the same reaction. And in any case, liking a teacher is not the same as learning from a teacher. Instead, ask questions that are specific, respectful, and meaningful.

The first thing I usually ask is straightforward:
What are you doing right now? Why?

You’d be amazed how many kids can answer the first question but not the second. The second question is imperative, however. To buy into school, kids need to be reminded of the purpose all day, everyday.

In 2011,
an epic Gates Foundation research study found that kids’ answers to specific questions were surprisingly predictive of student test-score growth and more reliable over time than classroom observations by trained observers. Tens of thousands of students of all ages were asked to agree or disagree with thirty-six different items on that particular survey (the Tripod Survey designed by Ronald Ferguson at Harvard). When you are visiting a school, you obviously cannot conduct a scientifically valid survey like this. But the questions that most correlated with student learning in that study
might help shape questions that would be worth asking anyway. For example:

1. In this class, do you learn a lot every day?

2. Do students in this class usually behave the way your teacher wants them to?

3. Does this class stay busy and not waste time?

Those are the kinds of questions that students—and only students—can answer.

Some schools have started using variations of this same survey to help teachers improve, a smart and relatively cheap idea. If a principal or teacher uses this kind of classroom-level survey
and
spends significant time studying the results and learning to do better, that is a promising sign.

And here’s one more question to ask students, this one supplied by Dwan Jordon, former principal of John P. Sousa Middle School in Washington, D.C.:
If you don’t understand something, what do you do?

In rigorous classrooms, kids know the answer.

In 2011, I took a tour of a Washington, D.C., private school that was hard to get into and cost about $30,000 a year. I really couldn’t afford the school, but I’d already visited many public schools and charter schools, and I wanted to know what my child might be missing.

Sunlight streamed through the skylights. As I walked down the hall, the sound of kids learning in different languages filtered out into the hallway. There were muffins in the principal’s office. It felt like a learning spa—a parent’s dream.

But strange things happened on this visit. When the head of the school talked, nothing she said made sense to me. There was a lot of jargon about the curriculum and vague promises of wondrous field
trips and holistic projects. All the visiting parents nodded; I got the sense that no one wanted to say anything off key that might hurt a child’s admission chances.

Then a parent with three children at this school took us for a tour. We saw gleaming floors, bright, colorful walls, beautiful, framed art projects, and other seductive tokens. Finally, one visiting father asked a good question:

“Every school has its weaknesses. What is this school’s weakness?”

I lifted my head, straining to hear what our tour guide would say.

“You know, I’d have to say the math program is weak.”

I was speechless. Imagine visiting a tony private hospital that only admitted healthy patients who could afford its services, and finding out the surgery practice was weak. What did it mean if the math program was weak at a school that made small children take I.Q. tests before they were even accepted? That particular parent wrote a check each year for about $90,000 to this school to cover the tuition for her three children. Wouldn’t she demand decent math classes in exchange?