The Smartest Kids in the World (17 page)

I found myself wishing I could travel back in time. Now that I knew what these nations had become, I wanted to see how they had gotten there.
How
did they arrive at a consensus about rigor? How had Finland and Korea done what Oklahoma could not?

In the twenty-first century, Finland was the obvious inspiration, a model for someday. It had achieved a balance and humanity that had
eluded Korea. But for most of the world, including the United States, the question was what needed to happen first to make someday possible.

In the mid-1970s, a small number of economists and sociologists started noticing that academic skills were not all important. It sounded obvious, but in the rush to count and compare IQ and reading scores, this simple truth was easily forgotten. Over the next three decades,
more and more studies showed that when it came to predicting which kids grew up to be thriving adults—who succeeded in life and in their jobs—cognitive abilities only went so far.

Something else mattered just as much, and sometimes more, to kids’ life chances. This other dark matter had more to do with attitude than the ability to solve a calculus problem. In one study of U.S. eighth graders, for example, the
best predictor of academic performance was not the children’s IQ scores—but their self-discipline.

Mastery of math never made anyone get to work on time, finish a thesis, or use a condom. No, those skill sets had more to do with
motivation, empathy, self-control, and persistence. These were core habits, workhorse traits sometimes summed up by the old-fashioned word
character
.

The problem with the word character was that it sounded like something you couldn’t change. But these same researchers discovered something wonderful: Character was malleable, more malleable in fact than IQ. Character could change dramatically and relatively quickly—for better and for worse—from place to place and time to time.

So it was fair to assume that different communities and cultures did more—or less—to promote these traits in their children. In Finland, Kim identified a difference that she thought mattered a lot: a difference, as she put it, in how much kids and teacher cared about school. Eric witnessed this drive, too, albeit the extreme and sometimes dysfunctional Korean version of the trait.

Caring about school was not the most important trait in a human being, to state the obvious. But, around the globe, this particular form of drive had begun to matter more than ever before, at least economically speaking. The research was still a long way off from identifying all the traits that mattered in young people’s lives, but could drive be measured between countries? Was there any way to quantify what Kim and Eric had noticed? And could drive be cultivated in places that needed more of it?

Few people had tried to find out. Surveys tended to ask kids to describe their own motivation and attitude, which made it impossible to separate their answers from their own cultural biases. A student in Korea who said he didn’t work hard had a very different understanding of
hard
than a typical student in the United Kingdom or Italy.

In 2002,
researchers at the University of Pennsylvania had an idea. They thought they might be able to measure students’ persistence and motivation by looking not at their answers to international tests, but at how thoroughly students answered the surveys included with those tests.

After the test portion of PISA and other international exams, students typically filled out surveys about their families and other life circumstances. There were no right answers for the questions on the surveys. In fact, the professors, Erling Boe, Robert Boruch, and a young graduate student, Henry May, weren’t even interested in the answers. They wanted to track students’ diligence in filling out the forms. So, they studied the survey attached to a 1995 test taken by kids of different ages in more than forty countries (called the “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study”).

The researchers encountered several surprises very quickly. First, students around the world were surprisingly compliant. The vast majority dutifully filled out most answers, even though the survey had no impact on their lives. The lowest response rate for any country was 90 percent. There was some variation from within a given country, but the variation didn’t seem to reveal much about the students.

Between countries, though, the differences in diligence mattered—a lot. In fact, this difference turned out to be the single best predictor of how countries performed on the actual substantive portion of the test.

This simple measure—the thoroughness with which students answered the survey—was more predictive of countries’ scores than socioeconomic status or class size or any other factor that had been studied.

How could this be?
When May repeated the analysis with the 2009 PISA data, he found the same dynamic: Half the variation between countries’ scores on the PISA math test could be explained by how much of the personal questionnaire students filled out on average in a given country.

In the United States, participants answered 96 percent of the survey questions on average, which seemed very respectable. Yet the U.S. still ranked thirty-third in conscientiousness. Korea ranked fourth. Finland ranked sixth. Kids there answered 98 percent of the questions. Seems virtually the same, right? But small differences in average response rates predicted large differences in academic performance on the same test.

Kids in Finland and Korea answered more of the demographic survey than those in the United States, France, Denmark, or Brazil. The causes of this pattern remain a mystery. May wondered if PISA and other international exams were measuring not skills but
compliance
; some countries had cultures in which kids just took all tests, and authority figures, more seriously. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that those countries included Japan, Korea, and other top PISA scorers. Perhaps that’s why those kids answered the survey more thoroughly and did better on the academic questions, too. Those kids were just rule-abiding conformists. Other countries, meanwhile, valued individualism more than compliance. Perhaps those kids simply did not feel compelled to take the survey seriously. “In some nations,” May said, “there are a lot of kids who seem like they just couldn’t care less. They drag the mean down.”

Then why did U.S. students do much better on the reading portion of the test, and so poorly on the math portion? If American kids just didn’t care about tests or authority figures, generally speaking, then they would presumably do equally poorly on
all
tests. Likewise, we probably wouldn’t see countries like Poland rocket up through the rankings in very short periods of time. It was hard to imagine that Poland had cultivated a culture of conformism in the course of three to nine years.

No one knows the answer for sure, but it’s possible that the diligence kids showed in answering the survey reflected their diligence in general. In other words, maybe some kids had learned to finish what they started in school: to persist even when something held no particular gratification. The opposite was also true. Some kids had not learned to persist, and persistence was not valued as much in their school or in their societies at large.

Conscientiousness on a survey seemed like a trifling matter. In life, it was a big deal. Conscientiousness—a tendency to be responsible, hardworking, and organized—mattered at every point in the human life cycle.
It even predicted how long people lived—with more accuracy than intelligence or background.

What would a map of conscientiousness look like? Maybe it was less important to find the smart kids, and more important to find the ones who got the job done, whatever the job was. Were there certain cultures that cultivated conscientiousness the way that other cultures cultivated gymnasts or soccer players?

The survey results provided some clues, not all of them obvious. The countries with kids who took the survey most seriously were not necessarily places with the richest kids; affluence does not necessarily lead to persistence, as we all know. In fact, the country with the highest response rate on the survey had nearly the same level of child poverty as that of the United States.

That country was Poland.

The Neighborhood: A child playing in Wroc
ł
aw, Poland, in 2006, not far from Tom’s high school.

The children of Breslau, dragging suitcases behind their mothers, watched the slips of paper float toward earth. They squinted up into the bright sky, where they could just make out the silhouette of a Soviet warplane. All around them, the leaflets landed softly on the ground, like snow: “Germans! Surrender! Nothing will happen to you!”

On January 22, 1945, Breslau was an important industrial center in what was then eastern Germany. The city had been largely spared by World War II. The city’s eight hundred thousand people, along with its medieval square and its weapons factories, lay just out of reach of allied bombers. For most of Breslau’s citizens, it had been possible to believe that life might one day return to normal.

Now, though, the Red Army was pushing west along the Oder River, closing in on the city. Intelligence reports estimated that the approaching Soviet soldiers outnumbered the German soldiers by five to one.

By the time Nazi officials finally allowed Breslau’s women and
children to leave, it was too late. Families rushed to the train stations and borders, clogging streets already filled with refugees from other German cities. Women pushed strollers full of pots and pans as men, ordered to fight to the death, climbed into church steeples with machine guns. It was three degrees, and many of the fleeing children froze to death before they made it to the next town. Nature finished what man started. Before a single bomb fell, some ninety thousand evacuees died trying to escape Breslau.

On the night of February 13, Soviet tanks encircled the city, churning slowly through the suburbs. The distant artillery fire grew louder each day until it exploded into a street fight in the heart of the city. The Soviets blasted their way through Breslau’s historic row houses, wall by wall, occupying the city as they destroyed it.

Retreating Germans threw grenades through windows and set fire to entire neighborhoods as they left, determined to slow the Soviet advance by leveling their own city. The aerial bombardment reached its crescendo just after Easter. By April 30, even Hitler had given up, killing himself in his bunker in Berlin. But, in Breslau, the siege continued, grinding on, defying logic.

Finally, on May 6, Breslau capitulated. Three quarters of the city had been razed in two-and-a-half months. A mere three days later, Europe’s long, wicked war came to an end. What was left of Breslau was plundered or burned by Soviet soldiers.

Within months, the allies redrew the map of Europe. Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt plucked up Breslau like a chess piece. They flicked it over to Poland’s side, under the new name Wrocław (pronounced VROTZ-waf). Most of the remaining Germans were run out of town, and hundreds of thousands of traumatized Polish refugees flooded in to take their places—literally—moving into the formerly German houses,
sometimes before they’d been abandoned by their owners.

This was the city in which Tom lived. To understand it was to understand this dislocated history, warped by blank spots and confused
identities. Over the centuries, the city had been called by more than fifty different names. People that lived there, as in much of Poland, never resided entirely in the present. The place had too many ghosts, too many parallel histories.

The “pioneer” Poles, as they were called, gamely tried to reinvent their adopted city.
They renamed Adolf Hitler Street after a Polish poet named Adam Mickiewicz; Herman Göring Stadium became Olympic Stadium. But they were living in a haunted place. Everywhere, in the vandalized statues and the faded outlines left by stripped-away swastikas, they saw reminders of their Nazi persecutors.

The newcomers had precious little time to reflect on those ironies. Soon after the end of World War II, Poland fell under communist rule for forty years. Tens of thousands of Poles, including hundreds of priests and political activists, were imprisoned. Secret police infiltrated every neighborhood. In Wrocław, street names changed once again. One brand of oppression replaced another.

The defenders of America’s mediocre education system, the ones who blamed poverty and dysfunction for our problems, talked as if America had a monopoly on trouble. Perhaps they had never been to Poland.

It is difficult to summarize the tumult that occurred in Poland in the space of a half century. After the fall of communism in 1989,
hyperinflation took hold; grocery store shelves were empty, and mothers could not find milk for their children. The country seemed on the verge of chaos, if not civil war. Yet Poland tumbled through yet another transformation, throwing open its institutions to emerge as a free-market democracy. The citizens of Wrocław renamed their streets for a third time. A small Jewish community even returned to the city.