The Smartest Kids in the World (4 page)

The questions varied slightly from country to country. Students from Mexico, for example, would not have been asked to measure the diameter of Lake Erie. Details like that didn’t matter very much, because PISA was not just a test of facts. It was a test of the ability to do something useful with facts.

Finally, I announced my score to my chaperone, since there was no one else to tell. I had gotten just one wrong (a science question).
“Good job!” she said generously. We both knew I had twenty-two more years of life experience than normal PISA takers, including four years of college.

After I left the building, my sense of relief faded. My score, I realized, did not bode well for teenagers in my own country. This test was not easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. On one question that I’d gotten right, only 18 percent of American fifteen-year-olds were with me. There were other questions like that, which many or most of the Finns and the Koreans were getting right, just as I was, but most young Americans were getting wrong.

PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate; in other words, the basic skills I needed to do my job and take care of my family in a world choked with information and subject to sudden economic change. What did it mean for a country if most of its teenagers did not do well on this test? Not all of our kids had to be engineers or lawyers, but didn’t all of them need to know how to
think
?

I still didn’t believe PISA measured everything, but I was now convinced that it measured critical thinking. The American Association of University Professors had called critical thinking
“the hallmark of American education—an education designed to create thinking citizens for a free society.” If critical thinking was the hallmark, why didn’t it show itself by age fifteen?

It was hard to escape the conclusion that American kids and taxpayers had been squandering a lot of time and money. In 2009,
U.S. teenagers ranked twenty-sixth on the PISA math test, seventeenth in science, and twelfth in reading. We ranked
second in the world in just one thing, spending per pupil. (The only country that spent more was Luxembourg, a place with fewer people than Nashville, Tennessee.)

The implications of that waste were painful to think about. Economists had found an almost
one-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation’s long-term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic growth, of course, but the ability of a workforce to learn, think, and adapt was the ultimate stimulus package. If the United States had Finland’s PISA scores, GDP would be increasing at the rate of
one to two trillion dollars per year.

For students, PISA scores were
a better predictor of who would go to college than report cards. Kids who scored poorly on the PISA reading test were far more likely to drop out of high school. PISA wasn’t measuring memorization; it was measuring aspiration.

I left the test with an unsettled feeling. The exam and the one thousand pages of analysis that came with the PISA results sketched out a kind of treasure map of the world. This map could help me sort out which countries were teaching all of their children to think, and which were not.

Most successful or improving countries seemed to fit into three basic categories: 1) the utopia model of Finland, a system built on trust in which kids achieved higher-order thinking without excessive competition or parental meddling; 2) the pressure-cooker model of South Korea, where kids studied so compulsively that the government had to institute a study curfew; and 3) the metamorphosis model of Poland, a country on the ascent, with about as much child poverty as the United States, but recent and dramatic gains in what kids knew.

Still, PISA could not tell me how those countries got so smart, or what life was like for kids in those countries, day in and day out, compared to life in America. Children’s life chances depended on
something beyond what any test could measure. Were Korean girls and boys driven to
learn
, or just succeed? There was a difference. Did Finnish teenagers have as much character as they had math skills? I had the data, and I needed the life.

I set out to visit Finland, Korea, and Poland to see what the rest of the world could learn from the kids who lived there. I studied other places, too, places with sky-high scores like Shanghai, China, and Singapore. But I decided to focus most of all on developed democracies, countries where changes could not be made by fiat. I wanted to go where parents, kids, and teachers had to tolerate the vagaries of politics and the dull plod of compromise, and succeeded anyway. That was a magical thing that had to be seen to be believed.

The Quest: To raise money to go to Finland, Kim held a bake sale outside a supermarket in her hometown of Sallisaw, Oklahoma.

If the town of Sallisaw, Oklahoma, was famous for anything, it was for something the locals did not often discuss. In the 1939 book,
The Grapes of Wrath,
a fictional family called the Joads fled the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. When they drove off in search of better life, it was Sallisaw they were running from.

“The ancient overloaded Hudson creaked and grunted to the highway at Sallisaw and turned west,” John Steinbeck wrote, “and the sun was blinding.”

In early 2008, when Kim was twelve, Sallisaw was on the brink of the second worst depression in U.S. history. It wasn’t obvious, not right away anyway. Highway I-40 ran alongside the town, connecting Oklahoma to Arkansas. A chain of economy motels had opened up to cater to the truckers who came and went. In an empty field less than a mile from Kim’s house, Walmart had built a Superstore.

Just down the road, a big Indian-owned casino drew a decent crowd at lunch hour. Older men in cowboy hats worked slot
machines in the cool darkness. Retirees came for the three-dollar-and-fifty-cent lunch special. On the bathroom wall, a red plastic sharps container installed for diabetic gamblers held dozens of used insulin needles.

Despite this modest commerce, Sallisaw was still a rural town, home to just under nine thousand people. The bank that
Pretty Boy Floyd had robbed during the Depression was now a vacant lot. The train station, where his body had arrived in a pine box after he was shot dead, housed a small public library.

Like Kim, most everyone in Sallisaw looked white, but people’s identity shifted depending on which form they were filling out. Half the kids had their Indian cards, identifying them as certified blood descendants of Native Americans. Even if you were only 1/512 Indian, you could get the card, and it came with certain benefits, like free school supplies or access to a Cherokee food pantry. About a quarter of the kids in the Sallisaw school district were
officially classified as poor, so the Indian benefits were as much about sustenance as heritage.

The schools in Sallisaw were considered just fine—not the best, nor the worst. A lot depended on where you were standing when you were doing the considering, however.
On the state test, Kim and most of her classmates did all right,
but that test was notoriously easy.
On a more serious test used nationwide, just one in four Oklahoma eighth graders performed competently in math. (Sallisaw kids likely fared about the same, though not enough kids took the test at a local level to know for sure.)

The farther away you got, the worse things looked.
If states were countries, Oklahoma would have ranked about eighty-first in the world in math, or around the same level as Croatia and Turkey.

Kim had lived in Sallisaw all her life. Each winter, she and her grandfather participated in the Christmas rodeo, steering antique tractors through the old downtown. She liked the slow rumble of the Model H tractor, the jangle of the marching bands behind her,
and the way children shrieked when she threw candy into their outstretched hands.

Still, like many twelve-year-olds, Kim felt like maybe she belonged somewhere else. She’d tried to succeed in Sallisaw in all the ways that mattered. Since she wasn’t very good at traditional sports, she’d started doing cheerleading in kindergarten. She’d posed straight-backed and smiling for pictures in her daffodil-yellow uniform. But, by third grade, she still could not do a cartwheel, so she quit.

After that, she’d started dreaming about playing in the school marching band. That felt right: a path into the football stadium, the center of the town’s culture, without the forced smiles and front handsprings. She’d taken up the flute and practiced each day until her jaw ached. After two years, though, the notes still came out breathy and thin, and the band leader had assigned her to the fourth chair.

What came more naturally to Kim was a curiosity about the world. She took her schoolwork seriously and felt connected to injustice in faraway places. In second grade, she’d watched a TV news segment about scientists using rats to detect bombs. It was the year after 9/11, and the country had just gotten its first Secretary of Homeland Security. The reporter explained that scientists were inserting electrodes in rats’ heads to make them go left or right or wherever humans dared not go, turning them into remote-controlled bomb detectors.

Kim felt a prick of conscience. She had no particular affection for rats and understood that a rat’s life was less valuable than that of a human. But it seemed wrong to infiltrate the brain of any creature. It was creepy, possibly even immoral. She thought about her pet turtles and imagined if the government took over their brains, too. Where would it stop? Surely there was a better way to make animals go left or right. Maybe offer them a treat?

Then Kim did something unusual for a child, or for an adult, for that matter. She took action to rectify a faraway problem that had little to do with her. That afternoon, she sat by the vending machine at her elementary school and wrote a letter to President George W.
Bush detailing her concerns about the rat experiments. She’d made sure to be polite and respectful, looping her letters in careful penmanship in her spiral notebook.

When two of her friends walked by, Kim told them the story of the rats. She asked if they wanted to sign the letter. Maybe they could start a petition, get the whole school to sign.

After staring at her for a beat, the girls squealed.

“Ewwwww! Gross, Kim! Who cares about
rats?!”

Their laughter echoed down the fluorescent-lit hallway. Then they made up a little song about Kim and her crusade. It was more of a jingle really; not very lyrically inspired. “Save the rats! Save the rats!” But it caught on anyway.

Kim felt a space open up between her and her friends. She wouldn’t have minded if they’d thought the robo-rats were a good idea; what had upset her was that they didn’t seem to care at all. Why didn’t they care? At times like this, it felt like her friends were speaking another language, one she could imitate but never really understand.

She stopped talking about the rats, and she pretended she didn’t hear the save-the-rats jingle when she walked down the hallway. Still, she sent the letter to the White House.

One day, in seventh grade, Kim’s English teacher asked to speak with her in the hallway.

“You’ve been invited to go to Oklahoma City and take the SAT,” her teacher told her. “It’s an honor.”

Kim was confused; she was only twelve. She stared back at the teacher, her dark brown eyes awaiting more information. The teacher explained that Kim’s standardized test scores had qualified her and other students for something called the Duke University 7th Grade Talent Search. The scores wouldn’t count, but it might be an interesting experience.

In the car on the way home from school, Kim handed her mom the pamphlet. “I want to go to Oklahoma City and take the SAT,” she announced. Looking over the top of her small wire-frame glasses, her mom stared at the information and then at her daughter. Oklahoma City was a three-hour drive from Sallisaw. But Kim hadn’t sounded this emphatic about anything in a while.

Kim’s mom, Charlotte, was a teacher at the local elementary school. She was a petite woman with short, curly hair, an unabashed Oklahoma drawl, and a quick laugh. She doted on Kim, driving her to and from school each day so she didn’t have to take the bus. At their small ranch house, she lined the walls with pictures of Kim visiting the Oklahoma State Senate and Kim in her cheerleader uniform.

Lately, she’d become worried about her daughter’s attitude. When she wasn’t alone, reading in her room, Kim spent a lot of time complaining about school and Sallisaw. Charlotte had several theories about this behavior. For one thing, she and her husband had been fighting too much. It was an old, worn fissure in the family, but as Kim had gotten older, she’d started to take sides, defending her mom against her dad and pleading with her to get divorced.

Another theory was middle school. In sixth grade, Kim had come home with her first C. She’d said she was afraid to ask for help because her teacher got angry when kids didn’t understand. Charlotte eventually complained to the principal, but nothing happened. She made Kim ask for the teacher’s help anyway, and Kim went into school early for a series of strained tutoring sessions. By the end of the year, she’d decided that she was terrible at math and vowed to avoid it whenever possible.