The Smartest Kids in the World (29 page)

But no one said anything. Maybe all the parents were stunned, as I was. Then the tour guide parent added one more thing:

“Oh, and I wish the football program was stronger.”

Suddenly, the parents perked up.

“Really, what do you mean? Is there not a football team? What age does it start?”

I wandered out into the parking lot, mystified. Perhaps this explained why our most affluent kids scored eighteenth in math compared to affluent kids worldwide: Even wealthy American parents didn’t care about math as much as football.

That was a big difference between America and Finland, Korea, and Poland. In the world’s education superpowers, parents agreed that a rigorous education was critical to their kids’ life chances.

Wherever you live, if you can find a community or school where parents and educators share this baseline belief, then you have found
something more valuable to more children than the best football program on earth.

As you search for a world-class school, ask parents at each place to talk about the school’s weaknesses. Listen carefully. If parents say they are very involved in the school, ask them
how.
American parents tend to be more involved in school than parents in the education superpowers, but not, generally speaking, in ways that lead to learning.

Raising money, going to soccer games, and serving on teacher-appreciation committees are wonderful things to do. They do not, however, tend to impact the quality of your child’s education, as documented throughout this book.

Around the world, parents have dramatic influence on how their children learn. But Parent Teacher Association meetings are not where that learning happens. The research shows that parents who are most active in their children’s schools do not tend to raise smarter children. The real impact happens mostly at home.

Parents who view themselves as educational coaches tend to read to their children every day when they are small; when their children get older, they talk with them about their days and about the news around the world. They let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work. They teach them good habits and give them autonomy. They are teachers, too, in other words, and they believe in rigor. They want their children to fail while they are still children. They know that those lessons—about hard work, persistence, integrity, and consequences—will serve a child for decades to come.

For different cultural and historical reasons, most parents in the world’s smartest countries seem to understand the importance of academic resilience—the same way American parents understand why coaches bench their sons and daughters when they’ve missed practice. World-class principals keep parents focused on what matters, even if it means five hundred dollars in lost bake-sale revenue per semester.

Old-school can be good school. Eric’s high school in Busan, South Korea, had austere classrooms with bare-bones computer labs. Out front, kids played soccer on a dirt field. From certain angles, the place looked like an American school from the 1950s. Most of Kim’s classrooms in Finland looked the same way: rows of desks in front of a simple chalkboard or an old-fashioned white board, the kind that was not connected to anything but the wall.

Tom’s school in Poland didn’t even have a cafeteria, let alone a state-of-the-art theater, like his public school back home in Pennsylvania. In his American school,
every
classroom had an interactive white board, the kind that had become ubiquitous in so many American schools. (In fact, when I visited Tom’s American high school in 2012, these boards were already being swapped for next-generation replacements.) None of the classrooms in his Polish school had interactive white boards.

Little data exists to compare investments in technology across countries, unfortunately. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans waste an extraordinary amount of tax money on high-tech toys for teachers and students, most of which have no proven learning value whatsoever. As in all other industries, computers are most helpful when they save time or money, by helping to sort out what kids know and who needs help. Conversely, giving kids expensive, individual wireless clickers so that they can vote in class would be unthinkable in most countries worldwide. (In most of the world, kids just raise their hands and that works out fine.)

“In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms,” Andreas Schleicher, the OECD international education guru, told me. “I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets.”

In the survey conducted for this book, seven out of ten international and American exchange students agreed that U.S. schools had
more technology. Not one American student surveyed said there was significantly less technology in U.S. schools.

The smartest countries prioritize teacher pay and equity (channeling more resources to the neediest students). When looking for a world-class education, remember that people always matter more than props.

When you meet a principal, ask the questions you might ask a potential employer. Get a sense of the school’s priorities and the culture. Don’t be afraid to be as assertive as you might be when buying a car or taking a job.

When searching for a school, the leader matters more than any other factor. Yes, the teachers are critically important, too, but you can’t pick your child’s teacher in our system. So, you have to rely on the principal to do that for you.

Finland, Korea, and all the education superpowers select their teachers relatively efficiently, by requiring students accepted to teacher colleges to be in the top third of their graduating high school classes. This selectivity is not enough by itself, but it ensures a level of prestige and education that makes other world-beating policies possible.

Since most countries do
not
take this logical step, the principal is even more important. That leader acts as the filter instead of the education college or the teacher certification system, which is not robust in most places. Nothing matters more than the decisions the principal makes about whom to hire, how to train, and whom to let go.
“Great vision without great people is irrelevant,” as Jim Collins wrote in his classic book,
Good to Great
.

Find out if the principal can choose which candidates to interview and hire. That kind of common-sense autonomy is rare in many schools. Then ask if the principal actually watches the job applicant
teach.
That, too, is almost unheard of in many countries including the United States—even though it is an obvious way to see whether a person has the extraordinary leadership abilities required to be a great teacher, one of the most demanding and complex jobs in the modern age. Even if candidates pretend to teach—to an adult audience—as part of the hiring process, that is far better than nothing.

The more specifics you hear in response to this question, the better. Most teachers operate without meaningful feedback, in isolation. That is indefensible today. Professional development, which is jargon for training in the education world, should be customized to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual teacher. It should not feature hundreds of teachers sitting through a lecture in an auditorium.

No country has figured this out. But some countries do it better than others. In Finland, teachers are more likely to watch each other teach—in training and throughout their careers. Many countries give teachers more time to collaborate and plan together; the United States ranks poorly in this respect. American teachers work relatively short school years, but they have little time to share ideas and get feedback in most schools. Ask principals how they help teachers collaborate and what kind of leadership roles they give to their top teachers.

Strong leaders can clearly explain their vision. If you hear a long, vague answer, full of many disparate parts, you may have found yourself in a school without a mission—which is to say, an average school. In the United States, most principals will mention test-score data as one measure of success, which is fair but insufficient. They might also mention graduation rates or parental satisfaction surveys.

Fine. But how do they measure the intangible outcomes that matter
just as much? How do they know if they are training students to do higher-order thinking and solve problems they have never seen before? Most standardized tests do not capture those skills. How do they judge if they are teaching kids the secrets behind the world’s greatest success stories, skills like persistence, self-control, and integrity?

Do they ask their students what needs to be improved? Do those opinions change the way the school works in fundamental ways—every semester? World-class educators have a vision for where they are going, tools to determine if they have lost their way, and a culture of perpetual change in order to do better.

At the Success Academy charter schools in New York City, students spend an hour and a half reading and discussing books each day. Then they spend another hour and a half writing. Kids start learning science every day in kindergarten. That’s what rigor looks like. In most New York City public schools, kids don’t learn science daily until middle school.

That’s not all. Success Academy students also take music, art, and dance; they learn to play chess. They almost never skip recess, even in bad weather—a policy they share with Finland. They call their strategy
“joyful rigor.”

Does this work? All fourth graders at Success Academy schools are proficient in science, according to New York City’s test, and 95 percent perform at advanced levels. Success Academy Harlem I, where the mostly low-income students are randomly admitted by lottery, performs at the same level as gifted-and-talented schools across New York City.

Teachers at these schools are expected to be intellectually fascinating and hyper-prepared; they are trained to overestimate what kids can do, rather than worrying about kids’ self-esteem. At these schools, kindergarten teachers are forbidden from speaking to children in a singsong voice. It’s hard to respect children when you are talking down to them.

“It’s
an insult to the scholars’ intelligence,” writes founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz and her co-author Arin Lavinia in their 2012 book,
Mission Impossible.
“What the teacher is saying should be so interesting that the kids are sitting on the edge of their seat, hanging on every word. It’s intellectual spark that holds and keeps their attention, not baby talk.”

Parental involvement means something different at Success Academies; parents are not asked to bake cookies or sell gift wrap. Instead, they are asked to read to their kids six nights a week. They are expected to help speed the learning at home to get their students ready for college, just as Korean parents do. Parents have the cell phone numbers of their kids’ teachers and principal.

In 2011, Success Academy opened a new school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a far richer neighborhood than its previous locations. Unlike most schools in America, including the best public charter schools, these new schools were actually
diverse,
in the literal sense. Moskowitz wanted a true mix of white, Asian, African-American, and Hispanic students at a range of income levels, and she got it. That is how kids learn best—together, with a mix of expectations, advantages, and complications—according to the hard-earned lessons of countries around the world.

There are stories like this all over the country: Success Academy charter schools in New York City, the closest thing to Finland in the United States; William Taylor, a public-school teacher who has almost Korean expectations for his low-income students in Washington, D.C.; and Deborah Gist in Rhode Island, a leader who has dared to raise the bar for what teachers must know, just like reformers in Finland and Korea.

These world-class educators exist, but they are fighting against the grain of culture and institutions. That fight drains them of energy and time. If they ever win, it will be because parents and students rose up around them, convinced that our children cannot only handle a rigorous education but that they crave it as never before.

No country has figured out how to help all children reach their full learning potential. Like health care systems, education systems are dazzlingly complex and always in need of change. To improve, countries can learn from each other; the trick is figuring out which of our differences matter most.

Tests can measure skills, and surveys within a country can measure attitudes. It is hard, however, to compare survey results across different countries, since the surveyed populations live in unique cultural contexts.

However, people who have lived and studied in multiple countries can transcend some cultural barriers and identify meaningful distinctions. Their voices, in combination with quantitative research, can help us chip away at this mystery.

Each year, tens of thousands of enterprising teenagers from
around the globe leave home to live and learn on exchange programs. During the 2011–2012 academic year,
1,376 Americans went abroad and another 27,688 international students came to the United States. Immersed in new cultures, families, and schools, these young students could compare education systems in ways no adult researcher ever could.

In May 2012, Amanda Ripley and New America Foundation researcher Marie Lawrence collaborated with AFS Intercultural Programs, one of the world’s oldest and most respected exchange organizations, to try to learn from this corps of young travelers. AFS (formerly the American Field Service) is a nonprofit that facilitates exchanges in more than fifty countries.