The Smartest Kids in the World (41 page)

Many states had some kind of graduation test:
Center on Education Policy,
State High School Exit Exams.
As of 2012, twenty-five states had exit exams, a policy affecting seven out of ten U.S. public-school students.

But kids didn’t need much
sisu
to pass them:
Ibid. In most states that had exit exams, the tests were not designed to measure students’ readiness for careers or college, and colleges did not consider the results in admissions decisions. Students who failed the exam could retake it four to six times in their final year of high school in most states. Twenty-two states allowed students to circumvent the test by taking another kind of exam altogether, doing a project, creating a portfolio of their work, or requesting a waiver.

Opposition to the exams was fierce in many states. Critics often included teachers’ unions and advocates for students with special needs.

New York State Regents exam:
Winerip, “Despite Focus on Data, Standards for Diploma May Still Lack Rigor.”

One-third the time of Finland’s test:
To graduate, New York students had to take five Regents exams, each of which lasted three hours, for a total of fifteen hours of testing (compared to fifty hours total in Finland).

Only 20 percent of Finnish teenagers said they looked forward to math lessons:
OECD,
Learning for Tomorrow’s World,
Figure 3.2.

About half of Finnish kids said they got good grades in math:
Ibid, Figure 3.6.

Only 3 percent of Finland’s students had immigrant parents:
OECD,
Education at a Glance 2011,
Table A5.2.

Eighty-four points below white students:
Fleischman et al.,
Highlights From PISA 2009,
14.

As if the white kids had been going to school two extra years:
OECD,
Let’s Read Them a Story!,
31. In general, thirty-nine score points in PISA is considered the equivalent of one year of formal schooling.

The other half was more complicated:
Magnuson and Waldfogel, eds.
Steady Gains and Stalled Progress.

Teenagers’ aspirations at age fifteen could predict their futures:
Homel et al., “School Completion.”

White American teens performed worse than all students in a dozen other countries:
Peterson et al.,
Globally Challenged.

New York State had fewer white kids:
Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessmann,
U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective,
17.

Asian-Americans did better than everyone:
Fleischman et al.,
Highlights From PISA 2009,
14.

Gap between PISA reading scores for native and immigrant students:
OECD,
Education at a Glance 2011, Table A5.2.

Poor American students had become more concentrated:
Rothwell,
Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High Scoring Schools.

Most white kids had majority white classmates:
Aud, Fox, and KewalRamani,
Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups.

More likely to attend majority black or Hispanic schools:
Orfield and Lee,
Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies.

In Singapore, the opposite happened:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
159-176.

The number of foreigners had increased over 600 percent:
OECD,
International Migration Outlook 2012,
Table A.1.

Teachers changed their behaviors in a hundred small ways:
Tauber,
Classroom Management.

Special education:
The research on special education around the world leaves much to be desired. Different places define special needs in different ways—sometimes within the same country. It is therefore extremely difficult to make meaningful comparisons.

Special ed students do participate in PISA in most developed countries—but in 2003 they represented only 1.4 percent of the total sample worldwide. And here again, different definitions made comparisons almost impossible. (For more on PISA data and special education, see OECD,
Students with Disabilities.
)

We do know that most countries seem to be moving away from segregating special needs kids in separate schools and toward the Finland model, which is to say, including special needs students in traditional classrooms and training teachers to differentiate instruction accordingly.

In fact, while Finland probably leads the world in this area, it’s fair to say that the United States is ahead of many top-performing countries in Asia. Of all special ed students in the United States, about 95 percent receive services in regular schools, according to
Department of Education statistics.

In the pressure cooker of South Korea, on the other hand, special needs children and their families are often ignored or denigrated. They have little chance of winning the Iron Child competition, so they reside in the margins. “People often view students with disabilities as stubborn, irresponsible, unsocialised and incapable,” according to Hyunsoo Kwon, in a 2005 article from the
International Journal of Disability, Development & Education
. Kim Song-ah, a high school student writing in the
Korea Times,
noted that although special ed students attended regular classes for part of the day, “[N]obody, classmates and teachers alike, cares about their presence . . . Frankly, we are rather indifferent to them.” According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, fewer than 1 percent of Korean students received special education services in 2007. Over a third of them attended separate schools.

Ironically, the more children a country categorizes as special needs, proportionally speaking, the more equitable the system seems to be. But once so labeled, kids must still remain in mixed classrooms for as long as possible with highly trained teachers who can meet their needs. This pattern supports a theme that recurs throughout the international research: Keeping children of different abilities and backgrounds
together
in the same classroom tends to lift the performance of everyone, everywhere in the world.

Finland had one of the highest proportions of special education kids in the world:
Kivirauma and Ruoho, “Excellence Through Special Education?”

One in four Finnish kids:
Official Statistics of Finland,
Special Education.

One in eight American students received special education:
U.S. Department of Education,
Digest of Education Statistics, 2010: Table 45.

“Our parents on this side don’t have the know-how”:
Ripley, “What Makes a Great Teacher?”

“Undoubtedly we all want to live in a multicultural and tolerant atmosphere”:
Lyytinen, “Helsinki Parents at Pains to Avoid Schools with High Proportion of Immigrants.”

11 percent of children in the United States were enrolled in private schools:
U.S. Department of Education,
Digest of Education Statistics, 2010: Table 3.

Less than average for the developed countries:
OECD,
Education at a Glance 2011
, Table C1.4.

Private schools did not add much value:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education
, 47.

Three-quarters of kids attended high schools that competed for students:
Ibid, 45-46.

chapter 9: the $4 million teacher

Andrew Kim earned $4 million in 2010:
Author interview with Andrew Kim in Seoul on June 7, 2011. I was unable to independently confirm Kim’s salary, but the amount was within the range of what Korea’s most successful hagwon instructors are known to earn.

Three of every four Korean kids participated in the private market:
Statistics Korea,
The 2010 Survey of Private Education Expenditure.

In 2011, their parents spent over $18 billion:
Lee, “Private Education Costs Fall for 2nd Year.”

Investments from places like Goldman Sachs:
Yoon, “Foreign Investors Eye Education Market.”

Something U.S. teachers were rarely asked to do before being hired:
National Council on Teacher Quality,
Teacher Quality Roadmap,
12. In this survey of Los Angeles teachers, only 13 percent of recent hires had been asked to teach a sample lesson as part of their interviews.

U.S. schools dismissed about 2 percent of teachers annually:
U.S. Department of Education,
Table 8.

Most Korean teenagers preferred their hagwon instructors:
Kim and Su-ryon, “Students Rely on Hagwon More Than Public Schools.”

Private tutoring did seem to lead to higher test scores:
Choi, Calero, and Escardíbul,
Hell to Touch the Sky.

PISA data for the entire world suggested that the quality of afterschool lessons mattered more:
OECD,
Quality Time for Students,
14. Students from high-performing countries spent less time, on average, taking afterschool lessons and studying on their own.

Eight out of ten Korean parents said they felt financial pressure:
Kang, “67 Percent of Private Cram Schools Overcharge Parents.”

Convinced that the more
they paid, the more their children learned:
Na, “Cram Schools Turning to NEAT to Boost Revenue.”

Some 900 Korean students had their SAT scores canceled:
Arenson, “South Korea.”

Charging double and sometimes quintuple the allowable rates:
Kang, “67 Percent of Private Cram Schools Overcharge Parents.”

Nine out of ten Supreme Court and high court justices:
Chae, Hong, and Lee, “Anatomy of the Rank Structure of Korean Universities.”

Korea’s suicide rate for fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds:
OECD, “Child well-being Module—CO4.1.”

Korea’s overall suicide rate was one of the highest in the world:
OECD, “Suicides,” 2010.

On patrol with the study police:
Author interview with Cha Byoung-chul on June 8, 2011, and Ripley, “Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone.”

Ratting out various hagwons:
Na, “Bounty Hunters.”

chapter 10: coming home

Six million more Americans without high-school diplomas:
Manyika et al.,
An Economy that Works,
2.

Marshall ran the Bama Companies, an Oklahoma institution:
I cannot do justice to Paula Marshall’s fascinating story in this book. To learn more about how she went from being a teen mother to the CEO of Bama, check out her book,
Sweet as Pie, Tough as Nails
.

Online education had grown 400 percent:
Eger, “
www.school.com
.”

Jerry McPeak introduced a bill to repeal the mandate:
Oklahoma House Bill 2755, titled the “Freedom to Succeed Act.”

“We’re going to brutalize and bully those children”:
Greene, “Graduation Testing Bill Advances.”

“If we keep rolling these limits back, students are not going to take this seriously”:
Rolland and Pemberton, “Raising Bar for Final Tests Leaves Some Feeling Worry.”

Fewer than 5 percent of Oklahoma’s 39,000 high school seniors:
Estimate per Oklahoma State Department of Education officials as of September 2012.

6 percent of seniors who did not pass Finland’s far more rigorous graduation exam:
In English, more information about Finland’s matriculation exam can be found at
http://www.ylioppilastutkinto.fi/en/index.html
. The
Finnish version of the site included the failure rate for 2010, the most recent data available as of August 2012. Translation by Tiina Stara.

“There are some kids that just can’t test well”:
Archer, “Owasso Board Joins High-Stakes Testing Protest.”

The United States was ranked number seven:
World Economic Forum,
The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013.

Finland ranked second in the 2012 World Happiness Report:
Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs, eds,
World Happiness Report.

“If you want the American Dream”:
Miliband, “On Social Mobility.”

“The Common Core State Standards are federalization of education”:
Rolland, “National Group’s Plan to Be Used.”

William Taylor taught math:
Ripley, “What Makes a Great Teacher?” and author interviews between 2009 and 2012.

At BASIS public charter schools:
Author interview with Olga and Michael Block, cofounders of the BASIS charter schools, in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 2013.

A special new version of the PISA test:
America Achieves,
Middle Class or Middle of the Pack?

appendix I: how to spot a world-class education

Average class size:
Rotherham, “When It Comes to Class Size, Smaller isn’t Always Better.”

An epic Gates Foundation research study:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Learning About Teaching.

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant”:
Collins,
Good to Great.