The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley

     A few months ago I read a book review  on the book “The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way” by Amanda Ripley, and I walked away feeling a bit irritated and defensive because of my background in education. When I read a book that spend a good deal of time criticizing teachers, it irritates me because I often feel like an accurate opinion can only be formed after spending some real time in the school with students. So after being irritated for a few minutes, I decided that the best thing to do was read the book for myself. The book examines the the education systems in three countries who outperform the United States on international academic testing. Those countries are South Korea, Finland, and Poland. Analyzing test scores and firsthand accounts from American students studying abroad in those countries, as well as teachers, administrators, and policy-makers, the author looks at the systems in place and the cultural norms in each society in an attempt to account for the lackluster performance of students in the United States.

     Before I get into the details of what the author found, I have to confess that I ended up loving this book. I found the different information that was related to be fascinating and the book was well researched to the extent possible. Obviously the information in the book does not paint the entire picture, there are many exceptions to the rules, and using too many generalities to describe a problem can be a problem in and of itself. However, as I read this book I found myself relating to many of her topics and nodding my head in agreement both from the perspective of a student and teacher in the United States. And oddly enough I vaguely remember taking the PISA exam, the primary test the author is looking at when comparing the intelligence of students worldwide. It was first given while I was a senior in highschool, and it wasn’t administered at very many schools in the United States but I’m pretty sure that my school participated.

     Here are just a few of the points that the author makes that I found to be interesting:

• School in Finland, South Korea, and Poland is about one thing, the mastering of complex academic material. In the United States, the purpose of the education system is “muddled.”
• In the United States, “schools were about many things, only one of which was learning. This lack of focus made it easy to lose sight of what mattered most. . . no one could say there was a consensus around rigor. In a culture plagued by distractions, from digital whiteboards to self-esteem building to high school football, that clarity of purpose was hard to find.”
• The strong emphasis placed upon athletics in the education system in the United States, detracts from the education happening in schools. Outside of the United States, sports are run independently of school.  
• “Without a doubt, sports brought many benefits, including lessons in leadership and persistence, not to mention exercise. In most US high schools, however, only a minority of students actually played sports. So they weren't getting the exercise, and the US obesity rates reflected as much. And those valuable life lessons, the ones about leadership and persistence, could be taught through rigorous academic work, too, in ways that were more applicable to the real world. Draining focus and resource from academics for everyone. The lesson wasn't that sports couldn't coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education. . . Sports, for all the value they offer, also siphon money and attention from classroom learning. It is their relative importance--not their absolute existence--that is worrisome.”
• An education system based upon rigor is necessary for learning. In South Korea the education system is intense. Students spend the majority of their time in school because the end of school exam has real consequences for the rest of their life. Career and future jobs are all based upon well a student does on the test. In the United States we are so worried about building self-esteem, that we don’t allow our students to fail at a young age and learn from those failures. So often we do everything we can to just get students through the system and give them second and third chances, which is not realistic in real life. Said Winston Churchill “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Failure is often delayed until later in life when the stakes are higher. Praise is often used to boost self-esteem. While self-esteem is important, “it comes from hard work and authentic accomplishment, not flattery.”  
• Parent involvement worldwide is very different. In South Korea parents view themselves as coaches and education is one of their jobs. “American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.”  The type of parental involvement that had the most positive impact happened inside the home. Parents who read for pleasure, and also read to their children daily, had students who  “performed much better in reading, all around the world, by the tie they were fifteen.It sounded like a public-service cliche: read to your kids. Could it be that simple? . . . Done well, it meant teaching them about the world--sharing stories about faraway places, about smoking volcanoes and little boys who were sent to bed without dinner. It meant asking them questions about the book, questions that encouraged them to think for themselves. It meant sending a signal to kids about the importance of not just reading but of learning about all kinds of new things. As kids got older, the parental involvement that seemed to matter most was different but related. All over the world, parents who discussed movies, books, and current affairs with their kids had teenagers who performed better in reading. Here again, parents who engaged their kids in conversation about things larger than themselves were essentially teaching their kids to become thinking adults.”
• Cultural attitudes in the United States about math, are detrimental. “Math was something you were either good at, or you weren’t, and they weren’t. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren't good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed… American adults didn't like math or think it was critical to kids' life chances. . .  But based on the standards of modernity, all decent jobs required some math and science fluency. Contractors needed to be able to factor inflation into cost estimates. X-ray technicians used geometry. In real life, math was not optional, and it hadn't been for some time.”
• Math curriculum in the United States needs to be reformed. Because the standards and textbooks are inconsistent, students end up with gaps in their math education. Because math builds upon concepts, students start to struggle. Often too much time is spent learning a topic which leaves not enough time to move on.
• “In a majority of states, American kids learned decimals for six years, until they were nearly catatonic with boredom, while kids in the world's education superpowers covered decimals for three years and moved on. That meant that all the time American kids spent going over--and over -- fractions and decimals could not be spent learning other things.”  
• “internationally the average eighth grade math textbook was 225 pages long; in the United states, eighth grade math texts averaged 800 pages.”
• Teacher training and the lack of rigor in the United States. In Finland candidates for teacher preparation programs must be in the top third of their high school graduating class, they must compete for limited spots in training programs (only twenty percent of candidates are admitted), and getting into a teacher training program in Finland “was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States.”  In the United States, “just one out of every twenty education schools was located at a highly selective institution in the United States. Far More than that had no admission standards at all. In other words, to educate our children, we invited anyone--no matter how poorly educated they were--to give it a try.” When efforts were made in the United States to move in the direction of Finland, critics immediately blocked those attempts, calling them “elitist . . . [arguing] that a teacher who struggled in school was actually a better teacher, because that teacher could relate to students who were failing.” When it comes to the amount of training received in their education programs, teachers in the US received far less than teachers in Finland.  In Finland student teaching lasts for about a year. In the United States it averages twelve to fifteen weeks. “For some American teachers, the lack of serious training didn't matter; they made up for what they didn't know by learning on the job. Some got lucky and had a strong principal or mentor. For other teachers, though, this education gap did matter. As more of their students aspired to attend college, and the economy increasingly rewarded higher-level thinking, more teachers were being asked to teach material they'd never really learned themselves.”

        As I mentioned before, the explanations that the author gives about the gap between the United States and these higher performing countries may not be fully explained, but many of her arguments have merit. The emphasis upon sports is real, and schools end up with many “coach” type teachers. Teachers who are there primarily because they love their sport, and not so much because they love to teach or are even good it at. That’s not to say that you can’t be a good coach and a good teacher, I have met plenty who are good at both. But especially in history teaching there is a stigma associated with coaching and teaching. We’ve all heard of the history teacher who played movie after movie for their students so that they could prep for their big game. IT’S REAL! One of the questions that was always asked when I interviewed for teaching positions was “What can you coach?” The first high school that I worked in had a history department of ten teachers. Only three of us could not coach anything, and when it came time to divide the staff when a new high school was built, coaching was the primary consideration. Never mind how good you were at your actual job. We had one teacher in our department who was always outside his classroom (a portable) bouncing a ball against the wall when he should have been inside teaching. I kept running into him during my prep period and it always made me roll my eyes. When the school was split, he stayed!

    Math has always been a topic of concern for me, especially as my daughter is about to enter school next year. At her registration appointment the Principal asked if I had any particular concerns, and of course my concern is that she learns her math and learns it well. Not understanding math can become a huge limitation in life. In my interactions with math teachers, I have met a lot of bad math teachers and only a handful of good math teachers. The author discusses possibilities as to why that is, one example is that secondary math teachers don’t necessarily have to major in math to teach it. I thought that the comparison of textbooks was fascinating because anytime I didn’t understand something in math I was told to read the textbook, and then read it again. As an eighth-grade student in math, 800 pages can be daunting. I love that the author tried to emphasize why math ultimately mattered:  “Why did math matter so much? . . . more and more jobs required familiarity with probability, statistics, and geometry. The other reason is that math was not just math. Math is a language of logic. . . Mastering the language of logic helps to embed higher-order habits in kids' minds: the ability to reason, for example, to detect patterns and to make informed guesses. Those kinds of skills had rising value in a world in which information was cheap and easy.”

   When it comes to teacher skill, I didn’t love how many generalizations the author used about the number of poor teachers out there. She briefly points out that there are some exceptions to the poorly trained teachers, but spends the majority of time focusing upon the lack of rigor in the programs, the low and non-existent admission standards, etc. I have met several fabulous, highly-intelligent, and amazing teachers. People who would have easily been in the top third of their graduating class, who attended respectable teacher training schools. While the schools they attended were not necessarily Ivy League schools, the programs were rigorous and these teachers work hard. These teachers are conscientious, constantly looking for professional development opportunities, and effectively teaching their students to think critically. So the bottom line is that in the education system you will bump into teachers that are unprepared and doing a poor job, but there are also some really great teachers out there so I don’t think the argument about teacher skill level paints a complete picture of what needs to change for education to improve. Of course if admissions standards were raised for teacher training programs, these excellent teachers that I am referring to would make the cut and would not be excluded from the profession, which essentially proves the author correct in the first place. And weeding out the bad teachers before they get to the point where they are teaching would obviously be a great thing too. Perhaps this filtering would allow for more focus upon professional development opportunities that push teachers above and beyond the mediocre seminars they are sometimes forced to sit through just to make sure those that are behind reach the appropriate level.