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Key insights from
The Smartest Kids in the World—and How
They Got That Way
By
Amanda Ripley
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What you’ll learn
TIMES reporter Amanda Ripley was in the habit of
sidestepping stories on education—until she saw a graph showing the United
States’ educational standing compared to other nations. The United States
was consistently average. By contrast, three countries—Finland, Poland, and
South Korea—had come out of nowhere, and are now topping the charts. What
were they doing that the United States was not? Has the United States
failed to understand what does and does not make for a quality education? The
Smartest Kids in the World is the story of what these countries teach
us about educating effectively. Ripley’s conclusions will surprise some.
Read on for key insights from The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That
Way.
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1. The typical
explanations for unevenly distributed success—like culture, race, and
economics— are unconvincing.
There was a grand mystery surrounding education: Why were
some students learning a lot, and other students not so much? Politics,
race, economics, and culture have all been invoked as explanations. But the
data is in, and it shows that the divide between the learned and the
not-so-learned does not fall neatly along any of the typical sociological
divides.
One might suspect that money and social privilege explain
the discrepancy, but here, too, the data does not back the thesis. Consider
the results of PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), an exam
that grade school students from most of the world’s countries now take.
Even though the United States is a well-off nation and is second in the
world in per capita educational spending, its students’ scores are
consistently average by international standards. American students from
well-to-do families and access to the best preparatory schools do not score
significantly better than similarly privileged students from other
countries. In fact, they did worse than twenty-seven different countries in
math. In 2009, the United States ranked twenty-sixth in math, seventeenth
in science, and twelfth in reading.
Long story short—the world has changed. The United States is
no longer the golden standard for education, and money is clearly not the
main determinant of success.
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2. One of the best
way to understand other educational systems is to interview exchange
students.
The United States has been thoroughly mediocre in education.
By contrast, Poland, South Korea, and Finland were consistently topping the
international charts. But which system is worth emulating? The three
countries have three radically different ways of going about it.
This led to an in-depth study of the three countries’
educational systems. There were already heaps of data, but the best way to
figure out what was actually happening in the classrooms was to involve
students. Student exchange programs made this a real possibility. And so,
three American high schoolers—a boy from Pennsylvania in Poland, an
Oklahoma girl in Finland, a Minnesotan boy in South Korea—became invaluable
members of the research team.
These high schoolers provided an in-depth glimpse of what
student life was like—a glimpse that an adult could not easily get.
The results are not discouraging, but ultimately cause for
optimism. We’ve wasted time and devoted resources to things that don’t
matter, but the good news is that change is attainable. The examples of
Finland, Korea, and Poland offer clarity for how this could be done. It
begins with a firmer grasp of the why behind education.
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3. PISA is not a
perfect test, but it is an innovative way of evaluating students’ critical
thinking skills.
The Finnish educators were just as surprised as the rest of
the world by the results of the first PISA test. They had come out of
nowhere to become the smartest people in the world. And that change
happened extremely quickly—within a generation!
When PISA came out in the early 2000s, it was met with
skepticism and criticism. While even its creator, Andreas Schleicher, would
admit that the test is not perfect, it is still the best out there for
determining capacity for critical thinking and creative problem solving in
reading, math, and science. For example, in the math section, students are
asked questions that require not just plugging in numbers to formulas, but
opinions about a problem or data presentation, with blank spaces to explain
reasoning.
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4. South Korea’s
pressure cooker model yields results, but at the cost of sleep-deprivation,
stress, and no social life.
During the day, Korean students attend classes like students
from any other country. But there’s another piece to the Korean educational
experience that sets it apart: hagwons. These hagwons—more literally, “cram
schools”—are private, for-profit tutoring businesses that provide
supplemental education for students after the school day. They are popular
means of boosting scores, getting remedial help, or learning material not
covered in school curricula.
These hagwons are an intimate part of the South Korean
educational experience, and they are more intentional about connecting and
staying connected with families than the schools are. They court parents
and students by touting the graduation and college admissions rates of
students who have studied with them. Once parents sign on, the hagwon sends
frequent updates, including texts about daily attendance and several phone
calls each month to update parents on their child’s progress. If the
parents don’t get involved, this is considered the fault of the hagwon—not
the parents. What would happen if there were this level of coordination
between parents and teachers in the United States? In 2011 alone, Korean
parents spent over $18 billion on hagwons or cram schools—that’s more money
than the United States government ever spent on the war on drugs.
The word “tutoring” does not begin to describe the
gargantuan operation that one hagwon teacher, Andrew Kim, leads in Seoul.
Kim has thirty employees helping him keep things running at his business.
In addition to hosting English lessons online which students can join for a
fee of $3.50 per session, he has a publishing house where his 200 workbooks
and textbooks are edited and printed. Success—and arguably, celebrity—of
this caliber is uncommon, but the hagwon structure is about as pure a
meritocracy as they come. Teachers build up a reputation through respect
for students and competently conveying information; and the more successful
their students are on exams, the more esteemed the teachers and desirable
their classes. It’s worked out for Kim, who makes about $4 million dollars
a year.
According to both Kim and Korea’s Education Minister,
Finland’s education is superior to Korea’s. A school system that was
average but supplemented by hours in hagwons meant a life consumed by
education, a pressure-cooker education that left Korean students exhausted.
No one spoke highly of the Korean system—even those on top, like Kim, who
benefitted from it. At points, the government has tried to limit or even
ban hagwons, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere. Students anxious for
enrollment in top universities continue to go to hagwons for that edge over
the veritable army of competitive peers.
The America student studying in Korea did not end up
finishing his school year in a Korean high school. He was so fed up with
the pace, the classmates who barely had the emotional energy to sustain a
five-minute conversation, the obsession with test scores, the sleep
deprivation, that he was willing to wrap up his year abroad at a vocational
college where he would be learning business Chinese. His professor at the
vocational college was shocked that the American had endured half a year in
the Korean system.
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5. After years of
overly bureaucratic education, Finland’s new model is almost utopian.
The Finnish teacher-training program is no joke. Admission
into a Finnish teacher-training college is about as impressive as getting
into medical school in the United States. One Finnish teachers union
advertised that their teachers were among the most educated in the nation.
The same could hardly be said for Elementary Ed majors here in the United
States, where the programs are not rigorous, the applicants are
below-average in SAT and ACT scores, and the training they receive is
usually impractical and inefficient.
For a while, Finland had its own version of No Child Left
Behind and a uniform, compulsory curriculum approved by the centralized
government. There were standards that teachers had to meet, and regular
classroom inspections from the government employers. Then, in the 1980s and
90s, Finland overhauled their educational system, particularly the ways
they prepared teachers. They shut down subpar institutions and established
high quality, rigorous training centers affiliated with top universities.
More talented, dedicated teachers emerged from these programs, which
removed the need for stifling regulation. In fact, the stifling regulation
needed to be removed so the teachers could actually teach.
The few attempts to raise requirement levels for teacher training
programs in the United States have met with serious resistance and
criticism of elitism. But why? In the United States, teacher supply exceeds
teacher demand by almost two and a half to one. In other words, there are
two to three teachers vying for every teaching position available.
Figures were even more lopsided in Rhode Island, where such
reforms were seriously attempted. The state’s teacher-training colleges
graduated 1,000 teachers when only 200 positions were available.
All ten of the Finnish teachers at the school where the
American exchange student enrolled graduated in the top third of their high
school class. In America, only one in five teachers graduated with a
similar class ranking.
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6. The
metamorphosis model of education has brought Poland out of the pit in just
20 years.
The US exchange student who studied in Poland entered a
nation undergoing an educational metamorphosis, a process that Finland and
South Korea went through decades earlier. Poland was a poor, beleaguered
country for most of the twentieth century: blitzkrieged by the Nazis and
then under the Soviet Union’s thumb for more than half a century. When the
USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the future looked bright for Poland, and
for most of the ‘90s their economy and infrastructure was improving
dramatically. The growth was unsustainable, and there were growing fears
that collapse and inflation were coming, which would usher in a return to
Soviet-esque conditions.
Poland’s Minster of Education in the late 90s made an
unorthodox series of educational reforms. After traveling the country and
drawing from his several years abroad in the United States, he compiled a
200-page bright orange handbook in order to get Poland through the
transitional phase.
The reforms involved making the system more rigorous,
introducing accountability in the form of standardized tests, raising
expectations of what students were capable of achieving, and preserving the
teachers’ autonomy to select texts and design curriculum. Accountability
going hand-in-hand with greater freedom for teachers are hallmarks of the
Polish system, a theme also present in the Finnish system.
The reform was controversial and met with strong
disapproval, as reforms often do. In 2000, Poland, eager to become a
respected member of the developed world, had its fifteen-year-olds take
PISA. The results? Poland was at the bottom of the stack among developed
countries. When the world’s students took PISA again three years later,
Poland’s rankings jumped significantly in all three subjects. They’d been
the butt of jokes, but not anymore—far less so after 2012, when Polish
teens kept pace with high-performing countries like Finland and Canada. The
first round of students had grown up under the Communist regime. Poland and
the rest of the world were able to observe the extent to which the
educational reforms were helping. By 2012, students had started in school
under the new educational system, and their high school graduation rates
were seven percent higher than the United States’.
Poland’s case shows us that quality education is possible
even in a poor country with a haunting legacy of oppression and
bloodshed. What is more, it can happen quickly. Looking back on the period
of reform, Poland’s Minister of Education says its teachers were the
lynchpin that made a world of difference, and they are key to continued
success for Poland. It’s safe to extrapolate this to the rest of the world,
considering the theme of good teachers has emerged not just in Poland, but
in Finland and South Korea as well. Top performing nations prize good
teachers.
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7. To identify a
world-class education, observe the students in a classroom—not the teachers
or open house brochures.
In most countries, parents have some level of choice about
where to send their children for school. After conducting thorough research
on four continents and extensive conversations with teachers, students, and
their families, several indicators have emerged to help identify schools
offering world-class educations—or that are merely pretending to do so.
The first thing to do is to observe the students in the
classroom—not the teacher. The amount of money spent per student and on
open houses with aesthetically pleasing brochures don’t amount to much.
South Korea, Finland, and Poland all spend far less than the United States
and, clearly, obtain better results. Class size is also not that
significant a factor either. Keep an eye on students –not the bulletins or
lesson plans. See if the students are engaged and challenged. Don’t let the
presence of order and neatness lull you into the belief that a quality
education is necessarily being delivered. Sometimes clutter and noise are
signs of rigor. If you walk into a classroom, see how many students seem to
be mentally checked out—One? Two? Nine?
Another clue is student opinion. Talk with the students. Ask
them questions that their teachers couldn’t answer. Don’t think of them as
too young or too cynical to have valid opinions. If you ask intelligent
questions that convey genuine interest and curiosity, they will likely open
up.
Are you learning a good
amount of material each day?
Does this course keep
you busy or is there a lot of time wasted?
What are you studying
right now? Why?
In the case of that last question, most students can readily
state what they are learning, but get hung up on the why. Students
don’t often ask why—they need to be reminded, and, frankly, the teachers
do, too. Perhaps the true reason for education gets muddled by all the
self-esteem training, high school football, and high-tech props.
An aside on technology: Don’t be fooled by the presence of
state-of-the-art technology. It tends to have very little impact on student
success. In fact, the best educational systems in the world are
surprisingly spartan when it comes to technology.
Listen to how the parents of students at a school talk. What
do they value? Exactly how important is their child’s education? Is reading
or basketball a close second to arithmetic? Is basketball even second? Some
parents in America seem to rank sports above academics. This confusion is
not present in South Korea, Finland, Poland, or other countries with top
notch educational systems.
It’s also advisable to grill the principal. Ask hard
questions about things like teacher selection, actions taken to push
teachers and students to improve, metrics for judging success at the
school.
This is not a set-in-stone formula, but observing students
and asking the right questions in conversations with students, parents, and
principals will give you a good idea as to what kind of education a school
is providing.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The
Smartest Kids in the World here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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