Amanda Ripley's Blog, page 3

Teaching Revealed

If you have time to read only one chapter of one book this fall, consider the first pages of Building A Better Teacher, a new book by journalist Elizabeth Green. It opens with you—the reader—temporarily cast as the protagonist. You’re a teacher walking into a 5th grade classroom. It sounds contrived, I know, and yet it works.

“Your job, according to the state where you happen to live and the school district that pays your salary,” Green writes, “is to make sure that, sixty minutes from now, the students have grasped the concept of ‘rate.’”

What do you do?

In this way, we walk through the hundreds of micro-decisions a teacher must make in a single hour. Do you call on Richard, a new African-American student who says he hates math but has his hand raised anyway? If he’s wrong, will he shut down for the rest of class?

You call on Richard. His answer makes no sense to you. Do you correct him yourself right away? Or do you call on the white girl next to him who has the right answer more often? You decide to ask the rest of the class if anyone can explain what Richard was thinking. No one responds. You feel the dread creep in. But then Richard speaks up. “Can I change my mind?”

In just a few pages, Green rips open the “black box” of the classroom and reveals, as few education writers manage to do, the intellectual chess match that is teaching. Richard’s new answer is not right—but it’s closer. You want to know why he is doing what he’s doing. There’s a reason, and it matters. He’s not the only one who is confused. Your mind is racing, trying to decode his logic. Other hands go up. You ask Richard why he changed his mind. He explains himself, haltingly, and you start to realize that Richard is thinking mathematically, even though his answer is wrong.

This is why teaching is hard. Not because kids try your patience (though there is that); not because it doesn’t pay enough (though that’s true, too). It’s hard because it is hard–and we’ve been treating it like it’s easy. The dynamics of teaching 25 or 30 kids to think for themselves is far more complex than anything your average American physician faces on a daily basis, as Green notes.

Appreciating that complexity is critical to changing the way American taxpayers, teachers, parents and kids look at teaching and learning. That’s why this book could not be better timed. Outside of the classroom, the U.S. education debate has become insufferable. It has little to do with the cerebral contest facing teachers every day. Technocratic reformers cling to mantras about “choice” and “accountability” like junkies unable to loosen their grip on the data pipe. Meanwhile, cranky union leaders and ideologues reflexively demonize tests, standards and “corporate reformers” without regard for facts–and insist everyone should simply leave teachers alone and fight poverty instead (as if education could ever be disentangled from any serious fight against poverty).

Both sides are long on angst and short on vision. “The cold truth,” Green writes, “is that accountability and autonomy, the two dominant philosophies for teacher improvement, have left us with no real plan.” Instead, most teachers are left to “make it up” every minute of every day in the classroom.

It’s time for the conversation to evolve. The next frontier is to help teachers develop their craft in a scientific, replicable way. At a time when higher-order skills have become more valuable in the U.S. than any other country—and when the absence of skills comes with a bigger financial penalty than almost anywhere else—America’s 3 million teachers should not be left to reinvent the science of teaching each morning.

There is another way. Green tells the stories of the small but captivating group of revolutionaries who have spent their lives trying to help teachers in a systematic way—training them to provoke discussion, to build suspense, to predict the mistakes children make when they learn geometry and to allow kids to struggle productively down in those rabbit holes. These veteran teachers and trainers have done the work. They’ve written a common curriculum for teacher education, video-taped sample lessons and designed tests to assess teachers’ strengths and weaknesses in order to customize training. None of this is mystical.

Now the rest of us need to listen. Education deans, professors, principals, school boards and teachers should embrace their work and bring it to life outside of a few isolated schools. Policy makers need to take all that energy they’ve spent debating value-added data and dedicate themselves to finding time for teachers to watch each other teach and hone their craft in a serious way. U.S. teachers have far less time to do this than most teachers around the world—a major but fixable problem. If we really think teaching is hard and education is important, it’s time to stop beefing over old feuds and start getting tactical.

This book review originally appeared here on the Emerson Collective website.

A Short List of Things that Do Not Explain Our Educational Mediocrity…

Everywhere I go, people bring me theories about why one country's students seem smarter than another. Many of these theories make intuitive sense. Some make no sense at all. The good news is that the research helps us rule out a bunch of things based on what we do know about educational outcomes around the world:

 

A Short List of Things that Do NOT Explain Education Outcomes:

 

1. School Lunches

I hear this a lot, mostly because many people have heard that Finland--an educational utopia--gives free lunches to all students. While I think it's a good idea to provide free lunch to all students,  and I agree Finnish school lunches are quite delicious, free lunch does not seem to be a common theme among top performing countries. For example, Canada, which has significant child poverty but very strong education outcomes, is rather stingy when it comes to lunch. Nine out of 10 students bring their own lunches in Canada, according to this 2008 report (which is fascinating, though a bit dated). In Poland, which also has better education outcomes than the U.S., the high school where I spent the most time did not even have a cafeteria, let alone free meals.

But in Italy, which has very unimpressive education results, "children sit down at round tables with tablecloths and proper crockery and cutlery to enhance the whole meal experience." Menus typically include three courses. In Rome, students eat locally sourced, organic food cooked on-site. I almost can't believe this is true. Clearly, I need to go sample school lunch in Italy for myself.

 

2. Class Sizes

Around the world, class sizes are not predictive of education results. In the U.S., small class sizes seem to be better for very young students, but as usual, it depends on the teacher. 

 

3. Time in School

Despite popular belief, most U.S. schools require at least as much instructional time as schools in other countries. The quality of that time matters more than the quanitity. I have seen a lot of time wasted in schools all over the world....

 

4. School Choice

Around the world, there is no relationship between the amount of school choice and competition and students' performance on a test of critical thinking in math, reading and science. In fact, school choice seems to be related to greater levels of segregation in some countries. 

 

5. Parental Involvement

The kind of involvement matters more than the quantity (see the theme here?). In a 2009 study of parenting in 13 countries and regions, parents who volunteered in school extracurricular activities had children who performed worse in reading, on average, than parents who did not volunteer—even after controlling for children’s backgrounds. What kind of parental involvement does matter? The kind that requires more thinking than baking. Adults who read on their own for pleasure, who read to their kids almost everyday when they were little and who talked to their kids a lot as they got older tended to raise students who were better critical thinkers by age 15.

Smartest Kids 2.0

It’s been one very full year since the hardcover publication of The Smartest Kids. Since then, I’ve been privileged to speak to thousands of people in dozens of cities. I’ve learned which stories and facts resonated most, from Tennessee to Idaho to California. I’ve heard stories and discovered new research that sometimes confirmed—and other times challenged—what I thought I knew. I’ve met teachers, kids, researchers and brave leaders who are committed to learning all that we can from the smartest countries in the world—and hell bent on doing even better.

The paperback edition reflects all of those conversations. It also includes new data from international test results that came after the book’s publication—which showed that Poland has rocketed to new heights, even beyond what I’d expected. I’ve added new material on the Common Core State Standards and early childhood education around the world, given the current, roiling debate over both issues in the U.S.

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that the American students I followed for the book are all doing well in college. Since he left South Korea, Eric has been studying philosophy and mathematics at DePaul University in Chicago, loving the energy of the city and scheming to figure out a way back to Asia. Tom, the Pennsylvania student who went to Poland, is entering his senior year at Vassar after spending a semester abroad (again)—this time in Heidelberg, Germany. And in just two weeks, Kim, the Oklahoma teenager who went to Finland (and the youngest of the three students), will move to my town of Washington, DC, to study at American University. (I am insanely excited about this but trying to play it cool and let Kim experience college without my hovering presence.)

Eric, Tom and Kim have all gamely participated in media interviews with me for the book, sometimes on camera, sometimes on the radio, occasionally in packed auditoriums--showing a worldliness and poise I still struggle to achieve. Once an NBC reporter asked Kim, without warning, "What does it mean to be 'smart?'" I held my breath. Kim paused for one beat and then replied, "I think being smart means learning from other people."

Amen to that.

Please let me know what you think of the paperback if you get time to check it out. I can be reached via email at Amanda@amandaripley.com or on Twitter @amandaripley. Thank you for reading and for sharing your thoughts and stories, as always.

Do U.S. Principals Overestimate Poverty?

One of the more baffling findings in the OECD’s latest survey of teachers and principals suggests that our school leaders are overestimating poverty in their own schools. As the OECD's own Andreas Schleicher explains in a recent blog post, about two-thirds of our principals say more than 30% of their students come from disadvantaged homes. But an OECD survey of actual U.S. students, which includes fairly detailed questions about parent education, technology in the home and other reliable indicators of socioeconomic status, estimates the number of disadvantaged students at 13% (slightly better than average for the developed world).

Are our principals seeing poverty where it does not exist? That would be fairly terrifying, since child poverty is bad enough as it is – and exaggerating it can tempt adults to lower their expectations for kids and settle for mediocrity sooner than they should.  

I suspect that the real explanation is not that sinister (though the effects could be just as toxic). U.S. principals may be using a different definition of poverty than principals in other countries. That OECD survey defined “disadvantaged” for the principals this way: “‘Socioeconomically disadvantaged homes’ refers to homes lacking the basic necessities or advantages of life, such as adequate housing, nutrition or medical care.” 

That is probably not how U.S. principals answered the question, however.

That’s because our principals routinely equate poverty rates with the rates of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. Every U.S. principal I’ve interviewed has this number memorized. But in fact, the lunch number is definitely not the same as a poverty rate, and educators in other countries don’t think of poverty this way.

Kids who qualify for lunch subsidies in the U.S. come from families who earn up to 185% of the federal poverty line. So in 2013, a child in a family of four qualified if the family’s annual income was no more than $42,643. In some U.S. towns, $42,643 would not be enough for a family of four to live on. But in others, it would be. The criteria is the same in the 48 contiguous states, which is sort of nuts given the variance in cost-of-living between, say, New York City and Norman, OK. In any case, the lunch cut-off is explicitly not the same as the poverty line.

The free-lunch number is useful, of course. It does give us a rough approximation of poverty, even if it is higher than what other people in other countries might consider “poor.” But researchers agree that the number is seriously flawed as a measure of child poverty.

Most sophisticated analyses of poverty now include multiple measures such as parental education, employment status, single parenthood, medical conditions—not just income. After all, we know that neglect and deprivation have many causes, not only (and not always) low incomes.

To make matters worse, researchers have found that the current free-lunch rates suffer from troubling inaccuracies. (A 2007 federal report found that about 15% of students who had been granted lunch subsidies were actually not qualified; another 8% who were refused the benefit were in fact eligible.) More and more schools are now automatically qualifying all their students, making the free-lunch figure even less reliable.

That’s why the U.S. Department of Education is currently trying to come up with a better estimate of poverty to replace the free-lunch figure. That's a wise idea. A more accurate figure could be lower in some schools and higher in others; no one really knows for sure what we’d find if we used a more serious measure of socio-economic status. But at least we'd be closer to the truth than we are now.

In the meantime, it does appear that U.S. principals are overestimating poverty compared to principals in other countries. Does it matter? It depends on the principal. No matter how you measure it, child poverty is high in the U.S. compared to other developed countries, so the problems are real and present in many U.S. schools. But hyper-awareness of poverty can make a mediocre principal worse—by providing a compelling explanation for education failures that conveniently shifts much of the blame to the home and society at large. And when combined with the reductionist, blame-poverty narratives propagated in many U.S. education colleges, books and blogs, this mindset can excuse all manner of in-school failures.

One of the things I noticed while interviewing principals and teachers in other countries is that they were not nearly as conscious of poverty stats as their American peers. In every country I visited (including Poland and South Korea, which have higher poverty rates than, say, Finland), I asked principals roughly what percentage of their kids would be considered disadvantaged. None of them could tell me off the top of their heads.

In a strong system, that obliviousness can be an asset. One Finnish teacher who had a significant number of refugee students in his class explained it to me this way: “I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much. I don’t want to have too much empathy for them because I have to teach. If I thought about all of this too much, I would give better marks to them for worse work. I’d think, ‘Oh, you poor kid. Oh, well, what can I do?’ That would make my job too easy.”

Testing America’s Patience

test

Are American Teachers Underpaid?

Recently, I wrote a piece for Slate about the power of paying teachers in prestige--not just cash--and the ways that teacher colleges can make that happen. The most common response I got was the show-me-the-money argument: We cannot hope to make teaching more prestigious without paying teachers more. In Finland, I was told, teachers earn more than teachers in America--so of course the profession can be more selective.

Good news! This is simply not true. In fact, US teachers earn above average for the developed world at every grade and experience level. They earn even more than teachers in Finland!

Do they earn as much as they should? No, they do not (more on that below). This is a serious, intellectual job that demands serious pay. But if we keep exaggerating how bad our teachers have it, no one will want to become a teacher--and policy makers will continue to dismiss salary increases as an unimaginably expensive reform.

On the other hand, if we ground the conversation in facts, we might discover that the situation is not as overwhelmingly hopeless as we thought.

First things first: What does the evidence show about how well US teachers are paid? There are different ways to compare salaries. One way is the straightfoward way: compare teacher salaries across countries. To do this, you take a country's average teacher salary at different grade and experience levels, convert the figure into equivalent US dollars using Purchasing Power Parities to adjust for cost-of-living differences, and see how things stack up.

When you do this, as the OECD does, then you find out a startling truth: US teachers make more than teachers in Finland at every grade and experience level.

The pay gap is most glaring for elementary teachers. Here is the average salary (in equivalent USD converted using PPPs) for new elementary-school teachers in 15 countries:

1. Luxembourg $64,043

2. Germany $47,488

3. Switzerland $47,330

4. Denmark $43,461

5. United States $37,595

6. Netherlands $36,626

7. Spain $35,881

8.  Canada $35,534

9. Australia $34,610

10. Ireland $33,484

11. Norway $33,350

12. Belgium (Fl.) $32,095

12. Belgium (Fr.) $31,515

13. Austria $31,501

14. Portugal $30,946

15. Finland $30,587

The full list is here. If you rank order the data, you'll find that US teachers rank 5th in the world for starting-pay at the elementary level. They rank 7th after 15 years of experience. And 11th at the maximum allowed under their pay scales. The pattern persists in the older grades. In lower secondary school, US teachers rank 7th in the world based on average starting salary; 10th after 15 years of experience; and 9th at the maximum pay allowed. Salaries are similar for upper secondary. By contrast, Finnish teachers rank 15th for their starting salaries at the elementary level. They still rank 15th after 15 years on the job. Then they rank 21st at the maximum allowable salary. (In lower secondary, Finnish teachers rank 12th initially, 17th after 15 years and 20th at the pay ceiling. Upper secondary salaries rank similarly.)

Another way to compare salaries is to look at earnings in relative terms. How much are teachers earning relative to other professionals within the same country? From a recruiting perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Young people decide to become teachers (or not) based in part on their other options within their own countries.

By this metric, almost no countries come out looking good. All around the world, teachers tend to earn less than other professionals with college degrees. The problem is rooted in gender and history. But the gap between teachers and other professionals varies quite a bit.

By this measure, US teachers fare worse--mostly because other US professionals earn far more than their peers abroad (i.e. lawyers, doctors, bankers). US teachers earn about 2/3 of what their full-time, college-educated peers earn in other professions. (By comparison, Finnish elementary teachers earn 89% of what their professional peers earn.)

So in absolute terms, US teachers earn more cash than Finnish teachers. But relative to other professions within our country, US teachers earn less.

What's to be done about this? One solution would be to pay teachers more in the US; an even better solution might be to pay lawers, doctors and bankers less... Regardless, it is only sensible to look at total compensation--beyond just salary. After all, compensation is also about social capital--whether it is "cool" to tell people you are a teacher. In this sense, Finnish teachers earn far more of than their US peers. (Which leads back to the value of highly selective education colleges in building that prestige.)

Compensation also includes benefits, of course. And in that regard, US teachers earn fewer benefits in absolute terms compared to teachers in more generous social-welfare states; but they earn more relative to their professional peers within the US. Teachers have (on average) relatively good pension, health care and job-security benefits compared to college-educated professionals across America.

The equation is complex, in other words. But the bottom line is that teacher compensation is not as grim as most Americans think. And journalists have an obligation to tell these stories more accurately. For now, many Americans think teachers get paid less than they do, as this story by my Time colleague John Cloud explained a while back:

"In a TIME poll, 76% of respondents said many smart people don't go into teaching because it doesn't pay enough. That may be true, but most respondents in a McKinsey survey of 900 top-third college students said they believe, incorrectly, that garbage collectors are paid more than teachers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average K-12 teacher in the U.S. makes approximately $49,000. Yes, the lowest 10% earn about $32,000, but the top 10% earn roughly $78,000. A chemistry teacher at a public school in an upscale suburban county can make $150,000 a year or more..."

If we want to make teaching more prestigious, we need to do many things. One thing is to tell the truth. The narrative of the teacher-as-charity-case has outlived its usefulness.

Higher Calling

So far this month in education news, a California court has decimated rigid job protections for teachers, and Oklahoma’s governor has abolished the most rigorous learning standards that state has ever had. Back and forth we go in America’s exhausting tug-of-war over schools—local versus federal control, union versus management, us versus them.

But something else is happening, too. Something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education in ways these nasty feuds never will.

In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher. Ever so slowly, these legislators and educators are beginning to treat the preparation of teachers the way we treat the training of surgeons and pilots—rendering it dramatically more selective, practical, and rigorous. All of which could transform not only the quality of teaching in America but the way the rest of us think about school and learning... [Read the rest of my story here on Slate.]

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Paul Tough's meticulous, fascinating New York Times Magazine piece ("Who Gets to Graduate?") is, in some ways, a story about signaling. What signals do students receive--not just in college but from birth--and how do those signals shape the stories they tell themselves when they run into hard times?

UT Austin researchers have discovered that these stories matter as much as academic skills when it comes to predicting which students will graduate. Family income predicts graduation, yes. But so do stories. When students fail a class, they are more likely to persevere and seek out help if they have heard signals telling them they belong in the hard classes and they will get smarter with hard work and help. The opposite is also true, as the story details:

"When you send college students the message that they're not smart enough to be in college -- and it's hard not to get that message when you're placed in to a remedial math class as soon as you arrive on campus -- those students internalize that idea about themselves."

My only criticism of Paul's story is that it should be bigger and broader. The US education system sends kids remedial signals at every age level--not just in college. We do it through tracking kids into different streams ("gifted," "honors," IB and AP classes) from a much earlier age than many other, smarter countries. We do it through deeply embedded, often subconscious stereotypes about what kids can do--based on the color of their skin or the income of their parents.

In fact, the United States is one of the few countries where schools not only divide younger children by ability, but actually teach different content to the more advanced track. In other countries, including Germany and Singapore, all young kids are meant to learn the same challenging core content; the most advanced kids just go deeper into the material.

Around the globe, the later countries wait to track kids into different content streams based on ability or interest, the better everyone in the country seems to do. Like UT Austin, nations like Finland and Poland have learned that if they insist all kids master the same, challenging academic material and they provide the extra help and high-quality teaching to make that possible, then they get much better results than if they dumb down the curriculum for their lowest-performing kids. Of course, great teachers work to differentiate their teaching to meet kids where they are; they have groups within the classroom that are fluid and carefully chosen. Special education intervention happens in their classrooms in most cases. But they don't send half their kids out of the room for easier (or harder) classes.

Over the past half century, many developed countries have slowly, haltingly, delayed tracking. They've changed the signals, in other words. Poland's schools delayed tracking from age 15 to 16 starting in 1999, and that one change seems to have had a dramatic impact on the entire country's performance on the PISA test. Finland, too, has slowly delayed tracking over the past four decades. Today, Finnish kids get to choose vocational or academic high schools around age 16. Until then, Finnish schools follow a strict ethic of equity. Teachers cannot, as a rule, hold kids back or promote them when they aren’t ready. That leaves only one option: All kids have to learn. To make this possible, Finland’s education system funnels money toward kids who need help. As soon as young kids show signs of slipping, teachers descend upon them like a pit crew before they fall further behind. About a third of Finnish kids get special help during their first nine years of school. Only 2 percent repeat a grade in Finnish primary school (compared to 11 percent in the United States, which is above average for the developed world). It helps, of course, that Finnish teachers are among the best-educated, best-trained teachers in the world.

In the world's education superpowers, kids are hearing different signals--the kinds of signals that convince them they are capable of great things if they work hard enough and get enough help. That mindset sounds remarkably similar to the strategies deployed by Chemistry Professor David Laude at UT Austin, as Tough describes:

"He did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the [high-risk] students a new sense of identity: They weren't subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars."

That identity changes everything. Everywhere.

Sports Psychology

If you were an alien tasked with understanding the educational mediocrity of planet Earth’s largest economy, this would have been the perfect week for a reconnaissance mission to America. Two headlines, taken together, hold the clues to understanding our greatest challenge of all. It’s not a lack of money or a lack of good intentions; it’s not our diversity or poverty. It’s not something you can easily quantify, and yet it’s all around us.

On Monday, we learned that our colleges and universities have been increasing spending on athletes over the past decade--at the same time that they are cutting spending on instruction. The most rapid rise in spending was in Division III, where there are no athletic scholarships or lucrative TV contracts. Between 2003 and 2010, community colleges spent less per student on instruction—while spending per athlete jumped 35%!

Our visiting alien might wonder why. Aren’t colleges primarily places of learning? Isn’t it true that Earth’s economy now requires its inhabitants to build more agile, innovative minds in order to thrive? Or was our alien misinformed? Is there some giant fantasy sports league that will provide good jobs to millions of community college graduates? These humans must be in training for something, yes?

The report’s authors speculate that colleges are pumping up sports teams in an effort to attract more students, in a myopic and not entirely irrational race to the bottom. It’s true, after all, that many American students and parents are enchanted by the idea of attending a school with a winning basketball team they can vicariously claim as their own. The hard truth of the matter is that our students and parents are struggling with the same fundamental challenge that plagues our schools.

We Americans are confused. We have yet to agree about what school is for. This confusion distinguishes us from countries like Finland, South Korea and Poland. We say education is our priority and then act differently, and our kids are paying close attention.

Sports are a symptom of this confusion—and not the only one. (Our alien might want to visit our education colleges next week. Just one out of every 20 U.S. education schools is located at a highly selective institution. Far more have no admission standards at all. While in Finland, education colleges only admit the top 5 to 20% of applicants—sending a loud, clear signal to everyone about how serious education really is.)

Our conflicting signals create a kind of mission fog, the kind that limits what we can do in all our schools—and turns toxic in our poorest neighborhoods. Over the past decade, American high schools—just like our colleges--have been cutting back. Many of our communities have been laying off teachers and cutting school days out of already short academic calendars--while never even discussing whether it makes sense to continue to spend two to three times per football player what they spend per math student.

In fact, the vast majority of school districts don’t even track how much they spend (all in) per athlete. So how could they begin to talk about something they don’t even know? This kind of trade-off does not exist in most countries around the world, where kids play sports outside of school, if they play at all. In Finland, teenagers spend less and less time at the hockey rink as they get older—as they become more focused on getting into college or getting a job.

Our alien was starting to think it might be time move on to another, less confused jurisdiction on Earth. Canada perhaps. Then something surprising happened.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post released his annual list of the most challenging high schools in America. He uses a simple ratio to compile this list: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year, divided by the number of seniors who graduated. Then he removes schools that are highly selective and attract a majority of students who are already performing way above average. It’s a blunt measure and wildly imperfect, but it remains a worthy attempt to identify schools that are challenging regular students with world-class expectations.

This year, Mathew noticed something startling about the list: 67 of the top 100 schools do not field a football team. It's just not part of their mission. Like high schools in the education superpower countries, they have focus. And this may be something of a trend: in 1998, 9 of the top 10 schools on this same list had a football team, Mathews writes. This year, only 3 do.

James Leathers, the spokesman for D.C. Catholic boys’ school St. Anselm’s Abbey, explained the school’s lack of football this way: “There is a fundamental difference between the traditional American high school, which balances various priorities, and schools like ours, which place academics over nearly all else.”

What does this mean? A small (teeny tiny) but growing group of countercultural parents, students and teachers are not confused. They know now that rigorous learning can be joyful. They understand that sports are great—and secondary; that teaching kids to think for themselves is hard. It requires the total focus of everyone involved. It demands outstanding teachers who are well-educated and well-trained, high standards and clarity. Our alien reports back: America remains a mysterious place, worthy of future study and not without hope.

The Most Creative Kids in the World?

Wherever I go, from Santiago to Seoul, I am always comforted to hear one consistently positive thing said about Americans: we may not be the wisest or the thinnest people on the planet, but we can think outside of the box! The world will give us that.

Usually, this assertion is accompanied by a passing reference to Steve Jobs or Google, and no one argues the point. In fact, each year, officials in places like South Korea and Singapore leave their higher performing education systems to come study how we Americans cultivate creativity in our schools and universities. Never mind that the actual Steve Jobs loathed school for much of his childhood. There must be something we are doing right here!

Today we got a bit more data to put this assumption to the test--through a new, fairly sophisticated test of creative problem-solving administered in 40 countries in by the OECD. This computerized test, a subset of the organization’s larger international exam (known as the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA), attempts to measure how well 15-year-olds can creatively solve realistic, 21st century problems with no obvious, standard solutions.

Try out a few of the questions here and see for yourself. Personally, I’m not sure this test even begins to measure the important and more operatic aspects of creativity (from optimism to risk-taking), but it is still intriguing. Relative to the vast majority of tests, these questions do seem better designed to assess our abilities to identify patterns, to tolerate doubt and to use intuition and initiative to sort out a workable solution.

One sample question features a new air conditioner system—one that comes with no instructions. It’s like an IKEA Rorschach test, one that’s all too real for most adults. The unit features three unlabeled controls, as well as a digital display of the current temperature and humidity. The student’s job is to figure out how to work it—interacting with the sliding control knobs on the screen to try to suss out what does what.  

Admittedly, these are probably not the skills that lead to Hollywood stardom (though I look forward to that PISA test…), but they are the kinds of skills that good jobs now demand: the ability to quickly process lots of ambiguous information in order to make a judgment call and act; the skills to adapt when things don’t go the way you expect.

The results, it turns out, are not entirely demoralizing for the U.S., which is a nice change from other international tests. U.S. teenagers actually do slightly better in problem solving than they do in math, for example, and even a bit higher than other kids from other countries with similarly mediocre math, reading and science skills.

So we are creative! Right? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, these results do suggest that our teenagers are more creative than they are learned, which is worth something in an era when knowledge is cheap and thinking is priceless.

Then again, we are not as creative as everyone seems to think—and certainly not exceptionally creative relative to the rest of the world. The Asian education powerhouses trounced us on this test, just as they do in math. Canada, Australia and Finland also scored well above the U.S.

We rank somewhere between 12 and 21 on the list, around the same level as Italy and Germany. South Korea ranks at the top of the world, up there with Singapore, even though Korean students, parents, teachers and politicians all universally told me that their system stifled creativity—by focusing too much on rote learning and test scores.

So what to make of it all? For me, the takeaway from these results is that creativity—just like grit—does not occupy a separate sphere from academics. In the best of all worlds, these things interact, and that’s where great innovation happens. After all, all over the world, teenagers who did well on this test also tended to do well on the main PISA test of critical thinking in math, reading and science. They are comfortable identifying connections, building mental models and remaining flexible when things change.

There is no short cut, in other words. Creativity requires a foundation, one that includes self-discipline, deep learning and the ability to reason—all of which are taught to great effect in rigorous classrooms.

It may be that Korean students are doing less rote learning than they think—or it may be that they are doing a lot of all kinds of learning. Whatever they are doing, Korea’s system is leaving students—even large numbers of poor students—with remarkably strong higher-order skills, in a wide range of disciplines. (Poland, by contrast, does very well on the main PISA subject tests but worse than the U.S. on this new problem-solving exam, suggesting that the Poles need to work harder to help students transfer academic skills to unfamiliar, real-life problems.)

For the U.S., our so-so results are neither depressing nor affirming. They suggest that we “do not make the most of student potential in core subjects,” as the OECD analysis puts it, rather politely. If we did make the most of our student potential, imagine what we could do! We could do math and movies, and maybe the next Steve Jobs wouldn’t dread elementary school as much as the first one did.