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

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

I noticed this book has mixed reviews here. People seem to love it or hate it. Well, I'm a teacher in my ninth year, and I loved it!

Ripley, a journalist, basically did case studies about three countries who have either out performed other countries on an international standardized test or have experienced tremendous gains in their results. She wanted to know what accounted for their testing success. What she found was sometimes alarming, such as the case of Korea's "pressure-cooker" system of education. In other places, like Finland, she found some sweeping changes that had surprised everyone with their lasting positive results.

Yes, there are parts of this study that are ego-deflating to say the least, and Ripley doesn't have all the show more answers, but then again, that's not what she claims. There is, however, a great take-away here for teachers and school administrators willing to put aside their egos for a moment. Yet, this book would most benefit people involved in education policy at the state and federal level (if only they could put politics aside for a moment). Why our policy makers have overlooked some of the basics that are working - the same basics outlined in this book - is beyond me, but I wish I could make this book required reading for anyone remotely involved in any Department of Education. As an added bonus, the book is also an entertaining and easy read, so I'm pretty sure they could handle it. show less

Read it if you care about education. Ripley is an investigative journalist and an excellent writer; she draws you into the whirlpool of how to improve education through analysis of test scores that compare student performance on an international level and the experiences of three American teens abroad. As a teacher for more than 30 years, I must say I am a bit surprised that anyone would take offense at Ripley's information that teachers in the highest scoring countries are from systems with FAR more competitive and challenging teacher training programs. It is crucial to the quality of education. Compared to this, her comments about pay are insignificant (and frankly minimal). Of course, you cannot be a great teacher if smart is the show more only thing you bring to the table (sense of humor, liking children help) but it is the place you must begin. Her comments about parents and school are right on. Sit down and talk to your kids. Meaningfully. I suspect much of the discontent about the book is because Ripley's makes no bones about the disproportionate role of sports in US schools. She is right. show less

This was fascinating, and not only because it mentioned International Baccalaureate programs. Ripley compares USian schools to those of other nations through the lens of foreign exchange students' experiences. I wanted to read it more or less as an adjunct to The Importance of Being Little to give a fuller picture of education from preschool to college, highlighting some of the places that do it exceptionally well.

The US does well by some students, those with the greatest advantages to start with. There are tremendous inequities by income and race, and only the second is being addressed. Charter schools, many of which are for-profit, show no improvements over public schools on average, despite the tremendous gains they're supposed to show more enjoy by being freed from bureaucracy and particularly the horrors of tenured teachers who cannot be fired without cause. And why bother, when it isn't an issue that elected officials send their own children to private schools or to public schools in areas so wealthy they are defacto private schools?

Korea also has a lot of crap schools, but it doesn't matter, because every parent who can afford it is hiring private tutoring companies to make up the difference, which isn't all that different from our own system.

Finland and Poland however have some lessons to teach us. They are awesome, and they achieved awesome rather quickly. I won't give away all their secrets, but a rigorous education and commensurate pay for teachers isn't a bad idea.

Highly recommended to people with a specific interest in education. I can't begin to imagine how it would appeal to readers who aren't keen on the topic.

Library copy show less

The educational systems of Korea, Poland, and Finland, compared to those in the US, both in general and through the experiences of three American exchange students (and one student who moves back and forth from Korea to the US with her family). Ripley argues that high expectations and rigor are the key to success, but that the US has imposed the expectations at exactly the wrong point (tests that punish teachers but have little relevance to the students themselves). Instead, successful countries—primarily Finland is the example here—make teaching a highly rigorous and respected profession by requiring a lot of training for teachers, both academic and hands-on, and only selecting teachers from the top third of their own classes. show more Finland has produced great results even in schools with large percentages of immigrants who don’t speak Finnish at home, which means that homogeneity isn’t the simple explanation for why we can’t get the same job done. American parents value sports and easy academics over the hard work of learning, especially in math; they’d prefer good grades to good outcomes. The prescriptions are simple but not easy: read to kids and talk to them about current events; have a few tests that actually matter to kids rather than a lot of tests that don’t; train teachers well and have them continue professional development throughout their careers, but also pay them well and give them autonomy; deemphasize sports as part of the school experience; teach kids to work through initial failure—success regularly comes from repeated hard work, not from innate talent. show less

This is the best book I have read on education in a long time. It changed my thinking on the topic, and I hope it will change lots of other peoples' thinking about it. To that end, I have already sent it to two sets of parents of young children (these parents are the ones who can benefit most from this book) and plan to send it to more.

What's so special about it? The book isn't long, it isn't weightily academic, and it relies in part on anecdotes about four specific kids, hardly a statistically significant sample. The first thing that's special is that it starts with a question -- why, when we spend more per pupil than almost any other country, are our outcomes disappointing -- rather than with an answer. The second is that it bases its show more answers on how students perform in a wide range of countries, not just in the U.S. Finally, the statistics are amplified by the stories of four kids -- three U.S. exchange students abroad, and one Korean kid here. This added a lot to the book, for me at least.

As it turns out, students perform very differently in different countries, and performance within countries can change dramatically over time. And those differences are not determined by the factors I for one would expect. Yes, richer countries tend to do somewhat better than poorer countries, but some rich countries have mediocre results (Norway) while some poorer countries (Poland) have shown dramatic improvement. Yes, big income differentials and ethnic differences do tend to pull down performance, but some countries with big income differentials (Singapore) perform very well. Higher spending per pupil does not seem to correlate well with educational outcomes, nor does technology seem to add much.

What does matter is teachers -- where teaching is a highly selective, respected, and well paid profession, children do better. What also matters is expectations -- children who are expected to work hard and do well tend to outperform children who can easily get a do-over. And parental involvement is very important, but not the parental involvement that comes from proctoring the class trip, or coaching the volleyball team. Children whose parents read to the children, and who read for their own enjoyment, tend to outperform children whose parents aren't into books. Ms. Ripley has other specific advice for parents, including a checklist on what to look for if you are evaluating a school.

This is a particularly important book for parents, but it also matters for concerned citizens, taxpayers, and businesspeople. And, let's hope, politicians. show less