Amanda Ripley. Photo: Brooke Bready.
Investigative journalist Amanda Ripley has written about education issues for many years. Her latest project, The Smartest Kids in the World (S & S, 2013), a New York Times bestseller, examines the world’s top performing educational systems through extensive research plus narrative accounts of the year-long trips abroad by three American exchange students. Over the past few decades, Finland, Korea, and Poland have managed to transform their schools into the highest achieving in the world. We recently caught up with the author to hear more about her research process, what inspiring takeaways she garnered from the experience, her reaction to the book’s positive reception and wide appeal, and her upcoming projects. First and foremost, how do these countries perform so well—and what can the US do to replicate that kind of success?
Quite a lot in fact, Ripley tells School Library Journal. “The most important lesson from these other countries is that change is possible,” she says. “Countries can and do improve their education results all the time—and just because we haven’t done it at scale in a long time doesn’t mean that we can’t.”
However, “It requires a consensus among regular people that all kids really do need to learn to think for themselves in math and reading and science. They need to learn to make arguments and communicate ideas,” Ripley says. “They need these skills the way they need survival skills. These things are essential to their wellbeing in a way that they weren’t 20 years ago or even 15 years ago.”
The Common Core is a step in the right direction, Ripley tells SLJ, but what’s equally important is a country-wide commitment to kids’ school success as their key to lifelong happiness. What Finland, Korea, and Poland have in common, she notes, is that policy makers, administrators, educators, parents, and, especially, the students themselves have reached a consensus that education matters.
This is reflected in how teachers are selected and trained for the profession in these countries, as well as the commitment that students make to their own schoolwork and the significant amount of support that families provide towards their children’s scholastic endeavors.
Another surprising finding? According to Ripley, access to technology and its use in the classroom, or lack thereof, has had little impact on students’ test scores in these high-performing countries. Rather, the greatest investment that an educational system can make is in its teachers—and equity of access to the best teachers is a challenge that needs to be addressed in the US.
Yet despite these issues, she has high hopes for our potential. Above all, Ripley’s book is meant to be a hopeful one for the US, she explains. Here’s what else she had to tell us, in her own words.
What do you think of the positive reaction the book has been getting, and all the attention from the mainstream press? Does that surprise you?
Yeah! Way more people want to talk about rigor in Finland and international comparisons of education outcomes than I really could have imagined. [laughs] I’ve been amazed at how eager people seem to be to talk about [it], so it’s been fun to share some of these stories that I’ve been working on in isolation for three years. I worked very hard to make the book accessible and readable, and to use the stories of kids in order to do that, but I’ve been surprised by how many drive-time radio DJs want to talk about policy and data, which is exciting. The economic turbulence that we’ve been through as a country over the past six years has given us a sense of urgency around improving our education.
Why did you set out to write this book, and what was your methodology?
There is something to be learned from the small number of countries that seem to be doing what very few countries can do. A lot of my time was taken up with figuring out which countries to visit and which metrics to use to judge education systems, which is pretty complicated. I used multiple measures: high school and college graduation rates, the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), and the PISA (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment) for 2009. I ended up prioritizing the PISA because it is really the only one that’s done towards the end of kids’ compulsory schooling, so you get the cumulative effect as much as possible. It’s given to half a million 15-year-olds in 70 countries every three years, including the US, and it’s designed to really try to get at the kinds of higher order thinking skills that we know are really valuable in the modern economy.
Were you surprised at how the US ranked in these tests?
The US was pretty average. The more time I spent with the results, it became clear to me that the real challenge was in math and science. We do significantly better in reading in almost every age level than we do in math and science. So that to me is actually pretty hopeful. No need to get hyperbolic about the international comparisons and say that we’re the worst and we’re terrible. We’re not. We could do better—and, given the money we spend, we should do better.
But the fact that we do better in reading gives me a lot of hope that we could potentially do better in math and science as well. Math is particularly important because it’s a great predictor of future earnings but also it’s a language of logic and discipline. Even if you don’t use advanced math in your job it’s becoming very important to have a strong mastery of that language regardless.
What do you think is behind America’s strength in reading?
We’ve really made reading a priority and a science. We’ve enlisted parents in helping teach kids to read and we jump on it earlier when kids are not learning. As a country we tend to value reading more than math and science, just to generalize wildly. Our teachers and our principals have come to a consensus on how to teach reading. We need to do better with lower income and minority kids, but we’ve gotten serious about it in a way that we still need to do with math and science. With parents, there’s a level of rigor around reading that we’re not seeing around math. But I think it’s improving with the Common Core. At least there’s clarity now about what the goals are, and there’s more time to go deeper and get that kind of fluency that you need. So hopefully this will improve.
What characteristics do the top-performing countries share?
As an adult, it’s easy to forget how much you are influenced by other kids when you’re in high school—other kids are more powerful in many ways that your teacher or your parents at that point. By following American teenagers to these countries, I was forced to be reminded how much that matters. What they were struck by, all of them—three very different kids in three very different countries—was how much kids seem to care about school in the foreign countries where they were living. That they seem to buy into the premise of school in a way that [American] kids do not, even in their honors classes back in the US. And that was really fascinating, because if you can get that level of buy-in [here], then everybody else’s job becomes easier.
We spent a lot of time trying to understand why, because the kids themselves in these countries are not that different. They’re not all intellectual heavyweights. They play video games, they’re on Facebook, they do a lot of the same things our kids do. They text in class when they’re not supposed to, and they have teachers they hate. It’s a huge relief actually to see that the kids are similar all around the world.
The difference is that they seem to be connecting the dots between what they were doing in school and how interesting their lives and work would be. One reason kids take school more seriously is that it is more serious, in every way. Kids pick up on signals. They can tell when they are being given busy work and when they’re being given work that makes them think. They can tell when their teachers are highly educated and well-trained and respected—and when they’re not.
How is teacher training and evaluation different in these countries?
It’s very front-loaded. In all the top-performing counties you have to have to be very well educated to study education in college. There is some variance within the systems, but in general, only the top students get accepted into the teacher training colleges in these countries.
In Finland, they don’t allow you even to consider thinking about studying to become a teacher unless you’re performing at the very top of the country in high school yourself. So getting into teacher training college in Finland is as hard as getting into MIT in the US. Try to imagine what that means. Imagine for a second all the cascading implications of that—and I don’t think the most obvious one is the most impactful. The obvious implication is that the teachers themselves have the benefit of strong education, so it’s easier to teach the material when you yourself have learned it well.
[But] once I spent time in these countries, I felt that it’s even more powerful than that. What happens is that you don’t try to get rid of the worst teachers once they’re in the classroom and reward the best ones. You do it before they even start training to become a teacher. And that transmits a message to everyone else: to politicians, to tax payers, to parents, and, most importantly, to kids about how serious you are about the importance of education and how hard teaching really is. We do a lot of lip service around this, a lot of rhetoric, but we don’t take a lot of action.
Once upon a time, Finland didn’t either, which is the reassuring thing. Finland used to have a whole bunch of education schools of wildly varying qualities of selectivity, just like we do, and they educated more teachers than they needed, just like we do. And then they shut those schools down in the late 1960s and reopened them in the most elite universities, and eventually by doing that they were able to unwind some of their accountability measures that they had put in place to try to reform schools. So it’s this cool thing that can happen if you’re able to have more trust in your teachers from the beginning.
In the 1980s, Finland really started giving teachers a lot more autonomy and getting rid of some of the more draconian accountability measures that they had in place, like national inspections, teachers had to keep diaries of what they did hour by hour, and a very scripted curriculum that they had to follow. But they couldn’t have done away with those things unless they had also dramatically elevated the profession first. Today they have some standardized testing, but it’s pretty nominal. There is a lot of testing but they are tests created by the teachers at the classroom level.
Do you think we could duplicate this type of rigorous approach here?
I think we could! We regulate education colleges heavily already, just totally wrapped up in red tape. But the regulations don’t typically go to the selectivity and rigor of the training. So there’s some movement to improve on that, but it’s very early days. Typically universities are very resistant to limiting the number of education majors they can have in this way, because they make money off of these students and it hasn’t been a very respected part of most of their colleges. So it’s hard to change that.
I think more and more people are becoming focused on the importance of teacher training, and there’s some progress on that. The pushback I’ve gotten, the criticism has been mostly people defending the US and saying that our kids actually do better than I suggested, and debating some of the test data and that kind of thing. But in theory, union leaders and reformers agree that education colleges should be more selective and more rigorous.
What do you think about the Common Core?
I’m excited about the Common Core. Obviously there’s a lot of political debate about the Common Core, but I think it’s healthy. It does seem like an obvious prerequisite to really getting serious about education. All the education superpower countries [have] agreed on a list of more challenging targets for what their kids should know, and that’s all this is, and it’s only in math and reading. But the math in particular does seem to be more aligned with math goals in high performing countries like Finland and Japan, so that’s exciting. It gives teachers a chance to really go deeper into these skills.
What about science education?
Science is on the way. I think the debate has already started about evolution and climate change. Unfortunately, we are getting left behind in science. If kids are not understanding climate change and evolution, it is harder and harder for them to work in scientific jobs that are really exciting and important fields. These debates about science are not nearly as toxic in the top performing countries.
What other big differences did you discover between schools in the US and abroad ?
I did survey hundreds of exchange students as well as the three that I followed closely, and nine out of ten international students said that their US classes were easier, and seven out of ten American kids agreed, a clear majority of both groups in grades 9–12.
[Also]: a majority of the exchange students that I surveyed said that they saw more technology in their US classrooms than abroad. The three kids I followed really noticed that many American schools have invested pretty heavily in laptops and smart boards, and there’s very little evidence that those investments have paid off. Their schools abroad did not have as many shiny objects in the classroom—[but the kids] didn’t miss the technology. Sometimes, once in a while, they have a class where the teacher really loves the technology and knows how to use it really well and does really cool stuff with it, but in general they don’t find new technology to be particularly helpful.
Kids like technology in their pockets, they’re not mesmerized by how it’s being used in most American classrooms. And many kids will tell you about how they think it’s great to have a laptop in their school because they can use Facebook and play flash games. They spend a lot of time trying to do that; there’s just a lot of waste that comes from this.
Do you think this has to do with lack of teachers’ professional development? Isn’t there a real opportunity here for school media specialists to step in and narrow this gap?
That’s a good point! I‘ve been in a lot of schools where there are smartboards just sitting in boxes for months and months, and there’s no one to hook them up and no one knows how to use them. It is, I think, an example of our emphasizing products over people.
SLJ’s 2013 Tech Survey shows that US students sometimes have to contend with issues that limit technology in the classroom, such as filtering. Do schools abroad differ?
There seems to be a lot less anxiety about this in Finland. Typically they put a lot of filters on the computers they did have, but there’s a higher level of trust in teenagers to make their own decisions. The majority of the international kids I surveyed said they felt like they had less autonomy in the United States than they had abroad, particularly from their host parents. They complained about having to get a pass to go to the bathroom or that they couldn’t leave the building. They just weren’t used to that. And I think for teenagers, having so little autonomy can really drain your motivation to go to school.
What about equitable access? Is it better abroad than in the US?
One of the metrics that we do dramatically worse on than many, many countries around the world is how poverty affects kids’ education outcome. Of the three countries I looked at, Poland is not performing yet on the level of Finland or Korea, but it has improved dramatically over the past 10 years and they have a 15 percent child poverty rate. So, yes it’s true we have more poor kids than many other developed countries and in addition, poverty seems to be a destiny in a way that it’s not in places like Canada or Poland or Korea. There’s lots of reasons for this: certainly the segregation of our schools is one reason, the lack of a social safety net is another.
But it’s also true that we are one of very few developed countries that devotes more resources to more affluent schools than to poorer schools. In most countries it’s the other way around.
Do you see a way to change this in America? Is progress being made?
There is good news. More and more states are moving towards a more equitable system, so it’s possible to do even with a property tax scheme, to distribute resources more based on need. And the federal government does this, too, giving schools a ton of money if they have a certain percentage of low-income kids. It’s enough to really make a difference to those schools.
Part of the challenge is that the more senior teachers, the more experienced, typically choose to be in the more affluent schools. So even if you’re trying to distribute money fairly, you wind up paying more for the teachers. It’s very, very expensive to have a teacher with 20 years of experience. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but the expense is pretty high compared to other countries. Some districts are paying teachers more to go to the needier schools, and that’s a promising initiative to try to balance that out.
In DC, where I have a child in school, the school loses its federal funding if they don’t have enough low-income kids, and then the upper-income parents devote themselves to raising that money. They have elaborate auctions and festivals and all manner of creative, impressive fundraising events, so they end up unintentionally reverting to an inequitable system. So it’s harder than I would have imagined to fix this problem, but not impossible. People have to agree on the value of equity through and through for it to work. You can’t just legislate it, because people will find ways around it.
What has been the best part of this project for you?
I stay in touch with the kids. In some cases they’ve been doing media interview with me, which has been totally awesome in every way. Two of them are in college now and [one] is applying this year and actually just wrote something, her first published piece about her return from Finland. It’s very cool to see them come into their own and speak for themselves. It’s been a highlight of the whole publication of this book to share them, these remarkable young Americans, with everybody else. I was very lucky to find them, but I don’t think they’re the only ones. There are a lot of American kids out there who are curious about the world and who have a lot of wisdom about how we could make our schools better.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on various magazine pieces related to education—things that didn’t quite fit in the book. I’m glad to have a chance to be one more voice in this conversation. The inspiration for this book, and the reason I still care about this subject, is that it should give us all hope. There are inspiring lessons from what these countries have done, and even though we won’t do it exactly like they do, it’s good to know it’s possible. I didn’t see anything anywhere that I didn’t think we could do as well or better, or that we aren’t already doing as well or better in specific classrooms and schools around the country.