The Smartest Kids in the World (19 page)

The timing, however, was exceptional: Poland had a new government full of so-called reformers. They couldn’t easily call themselves reformers and then obstruct reform. More important,
there were a lot of distractions. The government was reforming health care and pensions at the same time. The dizzying pace of change gave Handke cover.

On September 1, 1999, four thousand new junior high schools opened their doors across Poland. The metamorphosis had begun. Handke wisely started the day by praying for the best. In the ancient Polish city of Gniezno, he attended a special Mass at the Gothic cathedral. Then he went to the city’s new junior high school, a three-story, concrete-and-glass structure known as number three, for an inauguration of Poland’s new educational era. He vowed that the new system would be “more creative and safe,
not hammering redundant information into the head.” Designed for the present world instead of the past, the new system would teach children how to think.

In reality, it was a chaotic day. Many teachers and principals were not ready. Buses failed to show up in many rural towns where students lived far from the new schools. Parents, teachers, and principals complained bitterly about the changes. The orange books were a nice idea, but they had not convinced the public and teachers that the changes were wise. At the end of the school year,
60 percent of Poles surveyed said they did not think the reforms guaranteed equal access to an education. No one, including Handke, knew whether the gamble would pay off.

While Handke the chemist was disrupting the equilibrium in Poland, Schleicher the physicist was trying to persuade countries to participate
in the first-ever PISA test. Many countries had signed on, but Poland was not among them.

Poland had little experience with international exams, and many felt that the money could be better spent elsewhere. However, a few officials, like Jerzy Wiśniewski, an adviser in the education ministry and a former high-school math teacher, lobbied for Poland to join the experiment. To them, PISA represented modernity—a rational, sophisticated tool for the first world.

“The only other developed country still opposed is Turkey,” Wiśniewski pointed out. “We don’t want to be left behind.”

The peer pressure worked and, in 2000, Polish fifteen-year-olds took the PISA. No one realized it then, but the timing was perfect. PISA captured, entirely by coincidence, a snapshot of Poland before and after the reforms.

The Polish kids who took the first PISA in 2000 had grown up under the old system. Half had already been tracked to vocational schools, half to academic schools. They were the control group, so to speak.

No one in Poland had expected to lead the world, but the results were disheartening all the same. Polish fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-first in reading and twentieth in math, below the United States and below average for the developed world. Once again, Poland had found itself on the outside looking in. If the vocational students were evaluated separately, the inequities were startling.
Over two-thirds scored in the rock-bottom lowest literacy level.

Three years later, in 2003, a new group of Polish fifteen-year-olds took PISA. They had spent their elementary years in the old system but were by then attending the new gymnasia schools. Unlike their predecessors, they had not yet been tracked. They were the experimental group.

The results were shocking—
again
. Poland, the punch line for so many jokes around the world, ranked
thirteenth in reading and eighteenth in math, just above the United States in both subjects. In the space of three years, Poland had caught up with the developed world.

How could this be? Typically, it takes many years for reforms to have any impact, and most never do. But the results held. By 2009, Poland was outperforming the United States in math and science,
despite spending less than half as much money per student. In reading and math,
Poland’s poorest kids outscored the poorest kids in the United States. That was a remarkable feat, given that they were worse off, socioeconomically, than the poorest American kids.

The results suggested a radical possibility for the rest of the world: perhaps poor kids
could
learn more than they were learning. Perhaps all was not lost. Most impressively,
85 percent of Polish students graduated from high school that year, compared to 76 percent in the United States.

Over the same time period, the United States had undergone its own education reforms, including more testing and public flogging of failing schools under No Child Left Behind. But all the while,
PISA scores for American kids remained largely unchanged. The United states had cranked up the pressure on schools but done little else to inject rigor into the system, delay the tracking of students, or grant autonomy to the best teachers.

When Wiśniewski looked closely at the data, he saw that much of Poland’s improvement had come from the students who would eventually end up in vocational schools. Their scores had jumped, lifting the entire country. Poland’s schools had gotten more consistent, too.
The variation in scores from one Polish school to the next had dropped more than in any other developed country. Childhood had become one notch fairer in Poland, almost overnight. And this improvement had
not
come at the expense of Poland’s most advanced kids, who also raised their scores.
Over one-third of Polish teens scored in the top two levels of literacy, higher than average for the developed world.

What had made the difference in Poland? Of all the changes, one reform had mattered most, according to research done by Wiśniewski and his colleagues:
the delay in tracking. Kids who would have otherwise been transferred to vocational schools scored about 100 points higher
than their counterparts in 2000, those who had already been tracked at that point. The expectations had gone up, and these kids had met them.

The four thousand newly inclusive schools had, it appeared, jump-started the education system in ways no one had expected. The principals who had volunteered to run the new schools tended to be the more ambitious school leaders, and they were allowed to handpick the teachers who came with them. Quite by accident, the new system self-selected for talent, and the new schools had built-in prestige. To the rest of the education establishment, the new schools sent a message that these reforms were real, not just another political spasm that could be ignored.

Handke was delighted, seeing the PISA scores as vindication for his reforms. “Our youth have begun to think.”

But the data also revealed a troubling flip side: Expectations could fall as quickly as they rose. In 2006 and 2009, Poland gave the PISA test to a sample of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, to see what happened once they went off to vocational schools. Incredibly, the gains disappeared: The achievement gap from the first PISA returned, one year later. By age sixteen, vocational students were performing dramatically worse than academic students.
The reforms had postponed the gap, not eliminated it.

Wiśniewski was mystified. How could the improvements vanish so fast? “It might be motivation,” he said. “It needs more research. But the peer effects are somehow very influential.” Something happened to kids once they got into the vocational schools with all the other vocational students and teachers. They seemed to lose their abilities, or maybe their drive, almost overnight.

Intuitively, tracking made sense. A classroom should function more efficiently if all the kids were at the same level. In reality, though, second tracks almost always came with second-rate expectations.

Statistically speaking,
tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger the tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: Once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down.

In Pennsylvania, Tom was tracked starting in third grade. A teacher recommended him for testing, and he did well. So, at the age of eight, he was placed in the gifted and talented program in Gettysburg. At first, this distinction had little practical effect. Once a week, he and the other designated kids went to a special class where they got to sample Latin and learn long division early. As he got older, he was gradually eased onto a more explicit track. By age fifteen, his core classes were all considered advanced in some way. He took English, social studies, and science classes on what was called the
accelerated
track, with other higher-achieving students. He only saw the nonaccelerated kids his age in gym, art, or the other nonessential classes.

It was hard to know what effect this sorting had, but it was safe to say that kids who were told they were gifted at age eight probably tended to see themselves that way, and kids who were not probably did not. The word
gifted
alone implied an innate talent that no amount of hard work could change. In a sense, it was the opposite of Confucianism, which holds that the only path to true understanding comes from long, careful study.

When Tom was a freshman, Gettysburg High School had three main tracks. The most rigorous was the accelerated route, which became the Advanced Placement track in junior and senior year. The second level was for all the regular kids. Then there was yet
another
track, euphemistically called the
applied
track. This was for the 10 to 15 percent of Tom’s classmates who, for whatever reason, just aimed low. Instead of English, these kids took something called, “English in the Workplace.” Everyone had his or her track, regardless of where it was headed.

When most people thought of tracking, they thought of places like Germany or Austria, where students were siphoned off to separate
schools depending on their aspirations. Tracking took different forms in places like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Norway, and Sweden. But that didn’t mean it was less powerful.

Tracking in elementary school was
a uniquely American policy. The sorting began at a very young age, and it came in the form of magnet schools, honors classes, Advanced Placement courses, or International Baccalaureate programs. In fact, the United States was one of the few countries where schools not only divided younger children by ability, but actually taught different
content
to the more advanced track. In other countries, including Germany and Singapore, all kids were meant to learn the same challenging core content; the most advanced kids just went deeper into the material.

Meanwhile, the enduring segregation of U.S. schools by race and income created another
de facto
tracking system, in which minority and low-income kids were far more likely to attend inferior schools with fewer Advanced Placement classes and less experienced teachers.

By the early twenty-first century, many countries were slowly, haltingly, delaying tracking. When they did so, all kids tended to do better. In most Polish schools, tracking occurred at age sixteen. At Tom’s school in Wrocław, the sorting had already happened; only a third to half of the students who applied were accepted. Tom only saw the vocational kids when he came to gym class. They left as his class arrived.

Finland tracked kids, too. As in Poland, the division happened later, at age sixteen, the consequence of forty years of reforms, each round of which had delayed tracking a little longer. Until students reached age sixteen, though, Finnish schools followed a strict ethic of equity. Teachers could not, as a rule, hold kids back or promote them when they weren’t ready. That left only one option: All kids had to learn. To make this possible, Finland’s education system funneled money toward kids who needed help. As soon as young kids showed signs of slipping, teachers descended upon them like a pit crew before they fell further behind.
About a third of kids got special help during
their first nine years of school.
Only 2 percent repeated a grade in Finnish primary school (compared to 11 percent in the United States, which was above average for the developed world).

Once it happened, tracking was less of a stigma in Finland. The government gave vocational high schools extra money, and in many towns, they were as prestigious as the academic programs. In fact, the more remote or disadvantaged the school, the more money it got. This balance was just as important as delaying tracking; once students got channeled into a vocational track, it had to lead somewhere. Not all kids had to go to college, but they all had to learn useful skills.

In Finland and all the top countries, spending on education was tied to need, which was only logical. The worse off the students, the more money their school got. In Pennsylvania, Tom’s home state, the opposite was true.
The poorest school districts spent 20 percent
less
per student, around $9,000 compared to around $11,000 in the richest school districts.

That backward math was
one of the most obvious differences between the United States and other countries.
In almost every other developed country, the schools with the poorest students had
more
teachers per student; the opposite was true in only four countries: the United States, Israel, Slovenia, and Turkey, where the poorest schools had fewer teachers per student.

It was a striking difference, and it related to rigor. In countries where people agreed that school was serious, it had to be serious for everyone. If rigor was a prerequisite for success in life, then it had to be applied evenly. Equity—a core value of fairness, backed up by money and institutionalized by delayed tracking—was a telltale sign of rigor.

After his first year at Gettysburg High School, Tom got a new principal. His name was Mark Blanchard, and he was on a mission. The high school’s
test scores were lower than they should have been, and he came in looking for the reason. He’d worked at two other higher-performing public schools in Pennsylvania, so
he figured he could fix Gettysburg once he identified the problem.