Amanda Ripley

I'm very glad I read this book. I've always been interested in education issues, probably since I went through much of my school career as part of the "guinea pig" year for a new curriculum. At first I felt negatively towards the author when she said in the introduction that she had always avoided covering education in her career as a journalist, because it didn't seem exciting enough. But I'm glad I persevered.

In examining why US educational outcomes are so bad, Ripley looks at a few of the show more countries that are excelling in education: Finland, Korea, and Poland. And in order to get a deeper understanding than would be possible for a complete outsider, she focuses specifically on the experiences of three American exchange students, one in each of these countries. There's plenty of discussion about policy too, but the students' story definitely made the book more interesting.

The Korean system, while effective in its way, isn't seen as ideal because of the extreme stress it imposes on everyone. So much in Korea is based on test scores, so there's an enormous after-school education market, and curfews were recently imposed to forbid attending one of these tutoring places after midnight. Students studied so much after school that they would fall asleep in their regular school classes, sometimes bringing along a pillow. The whole thing is pretty messed up, but the students do learn a lot.

Finland is seen as a much better model, because students manage to learn a lot without overdoing it. The key here is largely in teacher quality and prestige: as part of significant education reforms, Finland moved teacher training programs into the top universities (comparable to MIT etc.), so that only the best students can become teachers. The teacher training is long and rigorous, with plenty of practice teaching, so that teachers come out thoroughly prepared to teach. They're paid a decent salary, and given a lot of respect and freedom. Basically, teaching is seen as a high-level job, and it attracts the best candidates, and the whole thing is a virtuous circle.

One interesting point is that in order to enact these reforms, Finland did at some point impose the sort of painful accountability measures that are found in the US today. But while the United States has focused just on punishing teachers who do badly, it hasn't taken the extra steps of producing better-trained teachers who were themselves more academically successful and making the job appealing enough (in pay, prestige, etc.) that those teachers will stick around. In Finland, it actually turned out that all the accountability measures were no longer needed once the teacher selection and training process had been thoroughly revised, but they did play an important role initially.

Ripley also points out that the idea of choosing better-qualified teachers wouldn't necessarily fly in the United States. There's an idea that anyone should be able to become a teacher—that they deserve the opportunity—and a fear of elitism if teacher training programs admitted only students in the top third of their class.

Meanwhile, for Poland, the most striking and shocking idea was just how detrimental streaming is to the students placed into the lower stream. At one point, the Polish government decided to delay streaming by just one year, keeping the academic and vocational students together until they were 16. This meant building thousands of new schools to accommodate the extra students for that extra year, but the consequences were dramatic and average test scores for 15-year-olds shot up. Even more importantly, though, they plummeted the following year for students who were placed in the vocational stream, showing that a lot of the difference was just about expectations. Students in vocational streams just weren't expected to do very well academically, and so they didn't.

This was a particularly significant point to me because I've always been very much in favour of streaming—I was in gifted classes starting in Grade 3, and I definitely noticed the difference in unstreamed high school courses like Civics, where the learning was done at a much lower level. It's tricky to offer extra opportunities to students who are doing well without offering fewer opportunities to the others, but I wonder whether there could be a regular stream and an advanced stream but no below-average stream. I also find it confusing in general that "vocational" often ends up being just less—I feel like there should be plenty of hands-on type stuff that certain types of people excel at, and that I couldn't do at all, but that's just *different*, not a watered-down version of the academic curriculum. Anyway, much to ponder there.

This whole book was very thought-provoking, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in education. I may also look for Ripley's other book, The Unthinkable, on a completely different topic. show less

I read this book because I'm going to be facilitating a conversation about it at work, and I found it far more interesting than I imagined. Ripley offers a variety of case studies: an attorney-turned-mediator, a gang member, a Colombian guerilla fighter, a rabbi and his congregation...and a lot more. Through excellent storytelling, Ripley weaves together these stories to both explain "high conflict" and offers great counsel for how to move out of it, and perhaps even avoid it. But the point show more that resonated the most for me is her discussion of "good conflict"--something that sometimes gets lost in a lot of conversations about peace and mediation. Curiosity is key. But we have to make the space to allow for curiosity. Also a key point about the conflict-industrial complex: "To keep conflict healthy in an adversarial world, the encounters can't end... But keeping the conversation going in a huge challenge in a country where people increasingly live, date, and marry in their own political tribes. As in any segregated society, encounters won't happen naturally." (273). I would have liked more about managing the sustainability of this process.

So, it takes work. The book offers many resources about how to do that work, but Ripley's main focus is how to identify high conflict in the first place. There are some major tips for preventing it as well: investigating the "understory", reducing binaries, marginalizing "firestarters", buying time and making space, and "complicating the narrative." It is this last one that I think is seldom talked about as part of reducing binaries. There is value in complexity, it turns out--sometimes we call it nuance--but actively seeking out the complexity can help us foster good conflict, instead of high conflict.

Ripley's writing is accessibly human, but backed up with research and journalistic insight. She seems to practice the humility necessary for good conflict, even in the way she approaches this topic. She shares the stories of people with care and consideration for multiple truths and lived experiences. This is an EXCELLENT book for a group read of folks who work together, but really most people could benefit from considering a thoughtful approach to conflict (rather than conflict avoidance, or firestarting, as polar extremes). show less

Normal conflict is healthy and helps us solve problems. But high conflict, the kind that makes us outraged and determined to destroy the idiots who disagree, serves only to perpetuate itself. It seduces us, draws other people in, escalates, and spreads like wildfire.

The author identifies "accelerants" of high conflict such as:
- Binary thinking (it's us versus them)
- Our tendency to label and categorize others
- "Firestarters" who have a vested interest in sustaining the conflict
- Negative show more emotions such as humiliation and anger, which have an addictive hold on us
- The "conflict industrial complex" that includes news media, social media, and USA's winner-take-all electoral system

Here are ways to tame high conflict:
- Active listening
- Separating oneself from firestarters
- Embracing complication and nuance
- Seeking the root cause of a conflict

Ironically, the best way to win people over may be listening to them without trying to win them over.

To explore these concepts, the author interviews some interesting people such as an environmentalist who railed against genetically modified organisms even after learning that they could have some environmental benefits, a lawyer who was a legendary peacemaker but became a vicious attack dog when he entered local politics, and a former member of a Chicago street gang who is now a peace activist and "violence interrupter."

She also studies an attempt to actively apply these concepts to bring two sides of an issue together. A group of conservative Michiganders and a group of liberal New York Jews held summits in each other's cities to discuss gun control. They struggled to put side their judgment and anxieties, but ended up feeling emotionally closer and less judgmental afterward. Later, when the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting took the lives of 11 Jews, the Michiganders flew to New York and gave a speech of solidarity in front of their counterparts' congregation.

Something bothers me about that scenario. Even after all that, the minds of the Michiganders weren't changed; they were still against the regulation of assault rifles. I'd like to ask the liberals: what is the benefit of having a kumbaya moment with conservatives when they still support the policies that lead to your annihilation? But maybe I'm still stuck in the high-conflict mindset just by posing that question.

I'm trying to integrate the lessons of this book with the lessons of stoicism I gained from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Our lives are short and insignificant in the totality of human history. We will die and be forgotten. So while we are alive, why should we think that we must solve all the world's problems? Why carry all that burden and misery on our own shoulders? Instead, maybe we should humbly strive to improve things on a small scale, listening to our rivals with curiosity and helping the few we can. show less

It seems clear from this book that we could fix the American education system, and it wouldn't cost more than we're already spending (in fact, it would probably end up costing less). The central takeaway from this book is that teachers are the most crucial part of education, and that teaching should be a more selective and respected profession. Teacher training programs should be competitive to get into, and should produce skilled, experienced, motivated professionals who can then be trusted show more with a higher degree of autonomy in the classroom. Better teachers can help foster a culture of rigor, where everyone in society recognizes and agrees that learning - not just rote memorization, but real critical thinking - is important, even essential for success in life.

Quotes

"Without data, you are just another person with an opinion." -Andreas Schleicher (19)

PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate....What did it mean for a country if most of its teenagers did not do well on this test? ...Didn't all of them need to know how to think? (23)

Education acted like an anti-poverty vaccine in Korea, rendering family background less and less relevant to kids' life chances over time. (60)

"The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." (63)

...Rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn't take shortcuts....They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work - not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder... (64)

Kids in Poland were used to failing, it seemed. The logic made sense. If the work was hard, routine failure was the only way to learn. "Success," as Winston Churchill once said, "is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." (72)

To educate our children, we [the United States] invited anyone - no matter how poorly educated they were - to give it a try. The irony was revealing, a bit like recruiting flight instructors who had never successfully landed a plane, then wondering why so many planes were crashing.
In Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States. The rigor started in the beginning, where it belonged. (85)

It was interesting to note that [in Rhode Island] higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers. (91)

Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders. (106-107)

In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education....Sports were central to American students' lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers....In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids, while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone. (118-119)

Around the world, school systems that used regular standardized tests tended to be fairer places, with smaller gaps between what rich and poor kids knew....Tests helped schools to see what they were doing right and wrong, and who needed more help. That insight was a prerequisite, not a solution. (132)

The new [Polish] system would demand more accountability for results, while granting more autonomy for methods. (133)

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...the opposite was true.
That backward math was one of the most obvious differences between the U.S. and other countries....
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. (140)

Sports simply did not figure into the school day [in Poland]; why would they? Plenty of kids played pick-up soccer or basketball games on their own after school, but there was no confusion about what school was for - or what mattered to kids' life chances. (145)

[The diversity/poverty narrative] underwrote low aspirations, shaping the way teachers looked at their students. (163)

The Korean private market had unbundled education down to the one in-school variable that mattered most: the teacher. (171)

The lesson [in Korea] seemed to be that without equity - meaningful opportunities for everyone, not just the elite - the system would be gamed and distorted. (174)

...it was becoming harder to change one's destiny in America. The tracks that had begun sorting kids in elementary school ran on and on into adulthood. Without dramatic changes in the way the country operated, the paths would not intersect. (181)

One thing was clear: To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all; that school existed to help kids learn and think, to work hard, and yes, to fail. That was the core consensus that made everything else possible. (193)

Top-down policy changes...had tried to impose rigor on the U.S. system...that could lift the floor but not the ceiling. (194)

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. (215) show less