The Smartest Kids in the World (39 page)

Finland, it turns out, had its own No Child Left Behind moment:
Simola and Rinne, “PISA Under Examination,” and Landers, “Finland’s Educational System a Model for Dallas.”

Central authorities approved textbooks:
Aho, Pitkänen, and Sahlberg,
Policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary Education in Finland Since 1968.

Opponents argued that the new system was elitist:
Jauhiainen, Kivirauma, and Rinne, “Status and Prestige through Faith in Education,” 266-267.

Some university leaders objected, too:
OECD,
Stronger Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
117-135:

“University leaders initially resisted the idea that teaching was anything more than a semiprofession and feared that advocates for other semiprofessions like nursing and social work would now clamor to give their training programs university status. Their real worry was that the admission of teacher education candidates would lead to a dilution of academic standards and a consequent loss of status. Over time, however, as the new university-based teacher education programs were designed and built, these fears were not borne out.”

This liberation worked only because of all the changes that had come before:
To be fair, other writers, some of them Finnish, have disparaged the country’s top-down, centralization phase as a total mistake. Instead, they cite the later phase—in which schools and teachers received more autonomy—as the key cause of Finland’s success. And they recommend that other countries jump to that phase immediately.

However, veteran teachers and reformers in Finland told me that Finland needed to go through both phases, in that order. The centralizing, top-down phase, which included the creation of more rigorous teacher-training programs, made the subsequent period of decentralization possible in the 1980s and 1990s. Without raising all levels to a respectable baseline, there could never be trust.

Irmeli Halinen, a former teacher and reformer, and a member of the Finnish Education Evaluation Council, put it this way in our 2011 interview: “It’s so difficult to speculate, but I think it would have been very difficult to be more collaborative in the first phase. People have to learn to work together. The national authorities have to learn to trust teachers, and the teachers have to learn to trust the national authorities. And that’s a slow process—to learn to trust. I don’t think we were ready for that in the beginning of the 1970s.

“It will disenfranchise too many students”:
Jordan, “A Higher Standard.”

“I have the utmost confidence”:
Ibid.

The percentage of minority students studying to be teachers:
In 2012, with the higher standards in place, minorities represented 9.24 percent of students admitted to Rhode Island College’s education school—a rate slightly higher than the previous four-year average of 8.8 percent. That rate could change,
of course, but it was an early, hopeful sign that raising standards did not necessarily lead to a whiter teaching corps. Figures for 2008 to 2012 provided in December 2012 via email by Alexander Sidorkin, Dean of Rhode Island College’s Feinstein School of Education and Human Development.

Only two out of ten American teachers:
August, Kihn, and Miller,
Closing the Talent Gap.
In the class of 1999, about 23 percent of new U.S. teachers had SAT or ACT scores that were in the top third of the distribution for all college graduates. Only 14 percent of teachers in high-poverty schools had top-third scores.

Higher academic standards to play football:
National Council on Teacher Quality, “It’s Easier to Get into an Education School Than to Become a College Football Player.”

A grade-point average of just 2.5 or higher:
Details about Northeastern State University’s current and past requirements come from a review of current policies, a list of the admissions requirements for the Teacher Education program from 1990 as well as email correspondence with former education dean Kay Grant, who joined the NSU faculty in 1985.

The national average for the ACT back then was 20.6:
U.S. Department of Education,
Table 135.

Less than half of American high-school math teachers majored in math:
Schmidt and McKnight,
Inequality for All.

“A large majority of elementary education majors are afraid of math”:
Johnson,
Oklahoma Teacher Education Programs Under the Microscope.

Most of the material was at a tenth or eleventh grade level:
Education Trust, “Not Good Enough.”

Knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand and Oman:
Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education,
Breaking the Cycle.
One line from the executive summary bears repeating: “U.S. future teachers are getting weak training mathematically, and are just not prepared to teach the demanding mathematics curriculum we need, especially for middle schools, if we hope to compete internationally.”

An average of twelve to fifteen weeks of student teaching:
Wang et al.,
Preparing Teachers Around the World,
21-23. For a more thorough account of student teaching within the United States, see Greenberg, Pomerance, and Walsh,
Student Teaching in the United States.

The world’s highest paid teachers lived in Spain:
Relative to other workers with college degrees, teachers in Spain earned more in 2010 than teachers in all other developed countries surveyed, including Germany, Finland,
France, Korea, Poland, and the United States. OECD.
Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession,
13.

About four hundred Finnish kids travel to the United States:
Poehlman,
2011-2012 International Youth Exchange Statistics.

Elina came to America:
I first read about Elina in a newspaper story (see Gamerman, “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?”). To learn more, I tracked Elina down and interviewed her in 2010, and again in 2012.

Over half of American high schoolers echoed Elina’s impression:
Boser and Rosenthal,
Do Schools Challenge Our Students?

In my own survey of 202 foreign-exchange students:
Details from this survey are contained in the appendix. Some of the results were mirrored in surveys conducted by the Brown Center on Education Policy a decade earlier. That study included a larger sample size, so the results may be more robust. In all, Loveless surveyed 368 foreign-exchange students and 328 Americans studying abroad. A majority of both groups agreed that their U.S. classes were easier. See Loveless,
How Well Are American Students Learning? With Special Sections on High School Culture and Urban School Achievement,
and Loveless,
How Well Are American Students Learning? With Sections on Arithmetic, High School Culture, and Charter Schools.

chapter 6: drive

Thirteen countries and regions:
Borgonovi and Montt, “Parental Involvement in Selected PISA Countries and Economies.” The thirteen countries and regions that participated in the parents’ survey were Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, Macao (China), New Zealand, Panama, Portugal and Qatar. Since the United States and other countries chose not to participate in this survey, we don’t know for sure if the dynamics would be comparable in those places. But it was interesting to see that clear patterns emerged even among these very different, far-flung thirteen locales.

For a less academic, more reader-friendly report on the same survey, see OECD,
Let’s Read Them a Story!

Parents who volunteered in their kids’ extracurricular activities had children who performed worse:
Borgonovi and Montt, “Parental Involvement in Selected PISA Countries and Economies,” Table 3.1b. Specifically, parents
were asked if they had volunteered in extracurricular activities, such as a book club, school play, sports, or field trip over the last academic year.

Fifteen-year-olds whose parents talked about complicated social issues:
Ibid., 18.

Research from within the United States echoed these findings:
Henderson and Mapp,
A New Wave of Evidence,
and Dervarics and O’Brien,
Back to School.

Parent Teacher Association parenting:
For more about the dangers of praise and the self-esteem parenting movement (and specific ideas about what parents can do differently), see Bronson and Merryman,
Nurture Shock,
and Seligman et al.,
The Optimistic Child.

For more on the differences between Asian and Caucasian parenting in the United States, see Chao, “Chinese and European American Mothers’ Beliefs about the Role of Parenting in Children’s School Success.”

See also Parmar, “Teacher or Playmate,” a 2008 study of highly educated Asian and European-American parents with children enrolled in the same preschools. The study revealed that while Asian and European parents spent about the same amount of time with their children—and allowed their children to watch about the same amount of television—the parents did different things with their kids. The Asian parents spent over three hours a week engaged in preacademic activities with their young children—learning letters and numbers, playing alphabet and number games, and visiting the library. The European parents spent just twenty minutes per week engaging in these activities.

Parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse:
Borgonovi and Montt, “Parental Involvement in Selected PISA Countries and Economies,” Table 3.1b. Parents in thirteen countries and regions were asked if they had participated over the past academic year in local school government, such as a parent council or school management committee. Less than one-third of parents said they had done so in every case. Parents who had participated tended to have children who scored significantly lower in reading than parents who had not.

Coach parents:
For an intriguing analysis of the parent as trainer, see Chao, “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style.”

Actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers:
Carol Huntsinger and her colleagues have conducted fascinating research on the parenting styles and learning outcomes of Chinese-American kids. See Huntsinger and Jose, “Parental Involvement in Children’s Schooling.”

Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian:
One obvious question is whether Finnish parents more closely resemble Korean or American parents. It is
hard to get comparative data on this, and many Finns anecdotally report that play is the primary goal of elementary education in their country.
Play
can mean many things, however; some forms of play seem to lead to enormous learning and growth, and other forms do not. There is some evidence that totally unstructured free play is not as central to early childhood education in Finland as it is in the United States (Hakkarainen, “Learning and Development in Play”).

My sense is that Finns are not as regimented nor as competitive as Korean parents, generally speaking, and that they have a more holistic approach to education at home and at school. That said, both cultures value self-reliance, humility, and direct communication in ways that might make many American parents uncomfortable. I suspect that the subtle cues that Korean and Finnish parents send to children about their capabilities, and how they can do better, may be similar and worth studying in more detail.

European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too:
Huntsinger et al., “Mathematics, Vocabulary, and Reading Development in Chinese American and European American Children over the Primary School Years,” 758.

Scored twenty-five points higher on PISA:
OECD,
PISA in Focus No. 10.

If parents simply read for pleasure:
OECD,
Let’s Read Them a Story!,
Chapter 5.

85 percent of American parents surveyed:
Dweck, “Caution—Praise Can Be Dangerous.”

Same effect on PISA scores as hours of private tutoring:
Andreas Schleicher made this assertion in Friedman, “How about Better Parents?”

“Warmth and strictness”:
Lemov,
Teach like a Champion.

Researcher Jelani Mandara:
Mandara, “An Empirically Derived Parenting Typology.”

“In high school, Asian immigrant parents really have a more hands-off approach”:
Author interview with Ruth Chao on September 7, 2011.

Everything was more demanding, through and through:
This difference comes through in the data but also in person. When I visited Finland and Korea, it was obvious that both places had their problems. But going there was like watching a professional soccer game when you’d been playing junior varsity all your life. It was the same game, but everything seemed more fluid, less random. Pervasive rigor had raised these systems to another level.

The education superpowers believed in rigor:
The OECD report,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education
, describes this difference on page 231:

“Many nations declare that they are committed to children and that education is important. The test comes when these commitments are weighed against others . . . .When it comes down to it, which matters more, a community’s standing in the sports leagues or its standing in the student academic achievement league tables? Are parents more likely to encourage their children to study longer and harder or to want them to spend more time with their friends or playing sports?”