The end of the semester is often filled with dread, as both students and parents wait for grades.
Why didn’t I start that term paper earlier? Study harder for those final exams? Hit the library more and the video games less? Given the intense competition for college admission and jobs, along with the barrage of bad news about how American students are falling behind in the global economy, is it any wonder that anxiety hangs in the air?
To find out more about what makes for vibrant schools, we turned to journalist Amanda Ripley, whose book “The Smartest Kids in the World — And How They Got That Way” has clinched a spot on numerous “most notable” nonfiction lists for 2013. Ripley followed three American students (or “field agents”) who attended schools in South Korea and Finland — long known for academic excellence — along with Poland, a country that has made remarkable gains in the last decade. We talked to the author about why, after years of seemingly ineffective reforms, success is still elusive in too many American classrooms. Here are edited excerpts from our interview:
Q: Should we be worried about the state of education in the U.S.?
A: I think we should be worried about specific things … not everything. We’re performing about average for the developed world, but we also spend more per pupil than all but four countries. And our biggest weaknesses are in math and science … and that’s at every socioeconomic level. To see that Poland, with 16 percent child poverty, can rocket from below average to above average in the course of a decade, it’s very exciting … because it proves it is possible.
Q: What you are proposing in many instances is a dramatic shift in priorities, thinking and funding. Is improvement in American education possible in our lifetime?
A: It’s possible for a single state or group of states to show dramatic progress in five to 10 years because we’ve seen countries that are bigger and have more poverty than some of our states radically improve. … We’re not going to get the entire U.S. performing at the top of the world any time soon because we have some very dysfunctional states, some very poor states. … But in many of our states, we are spending enough money and have enough ingredients in place to do what other countries have done.
Q: Why is educational change so difficult?
A: In every country, government officials complain about unions, teachers complain about testing and parents complain about schools. But in the U.S., it’s a particularly complex system that involves a lot of people at a lot of different levels — at the district, state and federal level. The management of education is so diffuse … which, overall, makes it much less efficient than in other countries.
Q: How do other nations view the importance of a student’s self-esteem?
A: We care more about self-esteem than other countries. … It’s one reason why in the U.S., students say they routinely get high grades in math but then those same kids score below average on tests of their actual math skills compared to their peers in other countries. Adults in Japan, Korea and Finland don’t spend a lot of energy praising kids for routine accomplishments. … The kids I followed all remarked on this difference.
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To generalize wildly and recklessly, American parents act more like cheerleaders and Korean parents act more like coaches. … Korean parents work with children to get better and push them to work harder … sometimes too hard. All the adults, including the teachers, expect more from kids. In Poland, the grades go from 1 to 5 (with 5 being the top score). Tom, the American student I followed from Pennsylvania to Poland, kept waiting for someone to get a 5. None of his classmates seemed surprised or shattered by this, which he couldn’t imagine happening back home.
Q: Is the U.S. hampered by not being a homogenous society like Finland, Japan or South Korea, where change is easier to affect?
A: Our problem is not diversity, it’s just the opposite. Most American kids attend very segregated schools — both racially and by income. Between 1998 and 2010, poor American students became more concentrated in schools with other poor students. Black and Hispanic students, meanwhile, were more likely to attend majority black or Hispanic schools in 2005 than they were in 1980. By warehousing disadvantaged kids in the same schools, the U.S. makes hard problems harder.
Q: There seems to be no political will or money available to increase teachers’ salaries. How can we attract more intelligent students to go into the profession?
A: It’s not just a question of money. Finland used to allow anyone to become a teacher. Then, in the late ’60s, they shut down their teacher training colleges and reopened them in the eight most selective universities in the country. Students had to be in the top 20 percent of their graduating high school classes to get admitted to these universities. Setting a very high bar seems to give a huge boost of prestige to the profession. People respect it more … and if you can boost the prestige, it’s cheaper than boosting salary. Meanwhile, Finnish kids know that this is a serious job taken seriously by the country … which has implications for how seriously they take school.
Q: These are big ideas and questions for society. How about shrinking your findings and applying it to the typical American family. If you are a parent with a school-age child, what one thing should you do to ensure more achievement?
A: I am glad you asked. I just read a story in your newspaper (“What do students, teachers really say?” Dec. 10) that rendered our global challenges intensely local. About half of Illinois students say they are rarely or never asked a challenging question in their core academic classes, according to the article. The results of this survey are public on a school-by-school basis, I believe. If I lived in your state, I’d be all over those results.
Kids can tell us things that adults cannot. If a majority of kids at a school say they are not being challenged, parents should find out what the principal is doing about it. They should be irate. We know we are systematically underestimating what our kids can do in the U.S. — especially in math and science. Given the kind of turbulence our kids will face in the economy, we can’t afford to keep wasting their time this way.