Amanda Ripley's Blog, page 4
March 14, 2014
How Do You Say SAT in Finnish?
We’ve heard a lot over the past week about how the new SAT compares to the old SAT and rightfully so. But the world is a big place, and the SAT is not the only test to evolve over time. All of the world’s new education superpowers, from Japan to Poland, have their own long-established, oft-debated university entrance exams. And many of these tests matter more to students’ destinies than the SAT does in America, where kinder, gentler college admissions officers consider many things beyond test scores.
So how does the new SAT compare to the university entrance exam in a place like South Korea, a test-crazed culture if ever there was one? Or Finland—a country that boasts a high school graduation rate of 96 percent (compared to 77 percent in the United States) and, like Korea, scores at the top of the world on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, test (administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)?
In at least three ways, the new SAT looks a bit worldlier than it did before—which is good news... [Read more here.]
So how does the new SAT compare to the university entrance exam in a place like South Korea, a test-crazed culture if ever there was one? Or Finland—a country that boasts a high school graduation rate of 96 percent (compared to 77 percent in the United States) and, like Korea, scores at the top of the world on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, test (administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)?
In at least three ways, the new SAT looks a bit worldlier than it did before—which is good news... [Read more here.]
March 1, 2014
What Kids Could Tell Us (If Only We Would Ask)
Over the course of one week this past December, U.S. newspapers ran more than 400 education stories—earnest dispatches on class sizes, teaching and online learning. From the Fresno Bee to the New York Times, every story included the opinion of at least one adult, including school board members, teachers and parents. But only about 2 in every 10 of these stories included the voice of an actual student (often as a garnish at the end of the piece, with a quote that echoed what the adults had already said).
It’s odd, isn’t it? Given all our angst about education, you’d think we would be more interested in the opinions of the people who know it best. But in the media and in school boards and city halls, most students are silent partners in the education debate. Less than half of American high-school students believe they have a voice in decision-making at their schools, according to a survey of 58,000 students conducted by the Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations.
“Many journalists and policymakers don’t see much value in speaking with young people. In their minds, students are not experts,” says Nikhil Goyal, the 18-year-old author of the forthcoming book, Reclaiming Our Freedom to Learn. “The cost of this omission is that awful decisions and policies are put into effect.”
What could kids tell us if we asked? When asked intelligent questions, students are more reliable at identifying effective teachers than trained adult observers, according to a study of 3,000 classrooms in seven cities. Why? Because kids (unlike principals) don’t just parachute into the classroom for 30 minutes every couple of months; they come every day, and there are more of them. So their opinions, taken together, tend to be more meaningful and fair.
Worldwide, according to OECD data released late last year, education systems that routinely seek written feedback from students tend to be fairer countries where poverty is less damning. (The U.S. ranks in middle of the pack on this metric, with less than 60% of teenagers attending schools that routinely solicit their feedback. In countries like New Zealand, the Netherlands and Estonia, over 80% of students attend such schools.)
In my own reporting, I’ve found that students are usually less ideological and more honest than adults; they care less about policy flashpoints and more about the things that affect them every day–from teachers to parents to other students. They talk about the whole tapestry of their lives, not just the policy silos that captivate adults. They make my stories more interesting and more accurate. (And getting permission from their parents to interview them is not hard, since so many schools now collect media releases from parents as a matter of course.)
Adults spend a lot of energy trying to get students’ attention in school. We bribe kids and punish them and invest in all manner of high-tech devices and professional development to try to entice them into caring. But maybe the answer is simpler. Maybe we could make school more engaging by asking kids how it could be more engaging.
If we did listen to students, if we let them shape the debate, what would happen? The best story that came out that random December week offers one glimpse. For that piece, The Chicago Tribune obtained and analyzed the results of an unprecedented statewide survey that had not been released in full by education officials. This survey included the voices of 740,000 students, a remarkable treasure trove.
So what did the kids say? Almost half of Illinois students said they were never or seldom asked hard questions in their main academic classes. Forty percent said they were rarely or never given challenging test questions. Less than half of the junior high and high school students surveyed felt “very safe” in their school hallways and bathrooms or walking to and from school. The messages were bright and clear, if only someone would listen.
This blog post originally appeared on EmersonCollective.com.
It’s odd, isn’t it? Given all our angst about education, you’d think we would be more interested in the opinions of the people who know it best. But in the media and in school boards and city halls, most students are silent partners in the education debate. Less than half of American high-school students believe they have a voice in decision-making at their schools, according to a survey of 58,000 students conducted by the Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations.
“Many journalists and policymakers don’t see much value in speaking with young people. In their minds, students are not experts,” says Nikhil Goyal, the 18-year-old author of the forthcoming book, Reclaiming Our Freedom to Learn. “The cost of this omission is that awful decisions and policies are put into effect.”
What could kids tell us if we asked? When asked intelligent questions, students are more reliable at identifying effective teachers than trained adult observers, according to a study of 3,000 classrooms in seven cities. Why? Because kids (unlike principals) don’t just parachute into the classroom for 30 minutes every couple of months; they come every day, and there are more of them. So their opinions, taken together, tend to be more meaningful and fair.
Worldwide, according to OECD data released late last year, education systems that routinely seek written feedback from students tend to be fairer countries where poverty is less damning. (The U.S. ranks in middle of the pack on this metric, with less than 60% of teenagers attending schools that routinely solicit their feedback. In countries like New Zealand, the Netherlands and Estonia, over 80% of students attend such schools.)
In my own reporting, I’ve found that students are usually less ideological and more honest than adults; they care less about policy flashpoints and more about the things that affect them every day–from teachers to parents to other students. They talk about the whole tapestry of their lives, not just the policy silos that captivate adults. They make my stories more interesting and more accurate. (And getting permission from their parents to interview them is not hard, since so many schools now collect media releases from parents as a matter of course.)
Adults spend a lot of energy trying to get students’ attention in school. We bribe kids and punish them and invest in all manner of high-tech devices and professional development to try to entice them into caring. But maybe the answer is simpler. Maybe we could make school more engaging by asking kids how it could be more engaging.
If we did listen to students, if we let them shape the debate, what would happen? The best story that came out that random December week offers one glimpse. For that piece, The Chicago Tribune obtained and analyzed the results of an unprecedented statewide survey that had not been released in full by education officials. This survey included the voices of 740,000 students, a remarkable treasure trove.
So what did the kids say? Almost half of Illinois students said they were never or seldom asked hard questions in their main academic classes. Forty percent said they were rarely or never given challenging test questions. Less than half of the junior high and high school students surveyed felt “very safe” in their school hallways and bathrooms or walking to and from school. The messages were bright and clear, if only someone would listen.
This blog post originally appeared on EmersonCollective.com.
February 17, 2014
The Girl from Finland
When Elina came to America from Finland at age 16, all she knew about American high schools she’d learned from movies. She thought every street would look like Rodeo Drive, and every Friday would be like prom night.
She ended up in Colon, MI, just outside Kalamazoo, where she was assigned a host family through her exchange program. The town itself was not radically different from many towns in Finland: almost everyone was white, and in the winter, the locals played ice hockey on frozen lakes. But at her public high school in America, Elina quickly noticed one big difference.
On her first Algebra II test, she got 105%. Until then, she had not known such a score was mathematically possible.
Click here to read the rest of Elina's story at NBC's Education Nation.
She ended up in Colon, MI, just outside Kalamazoo, where she was assigned a host family through her exchange program. The town itself was not radically different from many towns in Finland: almost everyone was white, and in the winter, the locals played ice hockey on frozen lakes. But at her public high school in America, Elina quickly noticed one big difference.
On her first Algebra II test, she got 105%. Until then, she had not known such a score was mathematically possible.
Click here to read the rest of Elina's story at NBC's Education Nation.
January 30, 2014
How Poland Became an Education Superpower
In 2000, Polish 15-year-olds scored below average for the developed world (and below American teens) on an international test of critical thinking. Twelve years later, they ranked at the top of the world--up there with Finland and Canada, and well above the U.S. What happened in Poland? How did a big country with a high rate of child poverty evolve from a communist backwater into an education powerhouse?
---
In 1997, when Mirosław Handke became Poland’s minister of education, he was an outsider. A chemist with a white mustache and dramatic, black-slash eyebrows, he looked like an Eastern Bloc version of Sean Connery.
Handke was accomplished in his own world at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. He’d published more than eighty papers on the obscure properties of minerals and become the head of the university, one of Poland’s best. However, he knew next to nothing about education policy or politics. His cluelessness would serve him well, at least for a little while.
Read more here...
---
In 1997, when Mirosław Handke became Poland’s minister of education, he was an outsider. A chemist with a white mustache and dramatic, black-slash eyebrows, he looked like an Eastern Bloc version of Sean Connery.
Handke was accomplished in his own world at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. He’d published more than eighty papers on the obscure properties of minerals and become the head of the university, one of Poland’s best. However, he knew next to nothing about education policy or politics. His cluelessness would serve him well, at least for a little while.
Read more here...
December 4, 2013
The Olympics of Smarts
Christmas came early this year. The new PISA results are out. (PISA = a relatively sophisticated test of critical thinking administered to half a million 15 year-olds every three years in 65 countries.) This year is especially intriguing for the US because the focus is on math—our biggest weakness.
So I’ve been hunkered down, reading through the 3,000-some pages of analysis and data—which go far beyond what you read in the headlines—to see what we can learn.
The most obvious (and least interesting) result: Our teenagers remained below average in math for the developed world—and average in reading and science. No change over past 13 years, since PISA began. Could be better, could be worse.
The least obvious (and more interesting) results: Even our most affluent students, the ones with highly educated parents and tricked-out high schools, scored worse than their privileged peers in 27 other countries in math. (I’m not even counting Shanghai and other regions here--just countries.)
Our least-advantaged kids (the bottom quartile) also scored below their peers in 27 other countries. Even our middle class teenagers scored below their middle class peers across the developed world!
So let’s be clear: Math is a US weakness at every economic level. It’s true among adults, too. Not to mention teachers. Something is amiss. We are systematically underestimating what our kids can do in math—which is distressing, since math is a strong predictor of future earnings, college completion and all manner of metrics related to living a full and healthy life.
We did better in reading, which is good news. Because it suggests that we could do better in math, too, despite our poverty, our diversity, our size, our paranoia, our bureaucracies, our politicians and our unions. We could do better.
There is more good news. (No seriously!) Never have I seen so many complicated countries at the top of these rankings. Not just Poland (16% child poverty) but Estonia (15% child poverty), Canada (15%) and Vietnam! I haven’t yet found reliable, comparable child poverty figures for Vietnam, but from what I've seen, I'd guess it's far higher than all those countries and more than double our own rate. So Vietnam is blowing my mind. This is the first time they've taken PISA, by the way.
You know what this means, right? This means that it is possible to improve education despite poverty. It means it can be done—and other countries can show us the way.
Take Poland: This country, a land defined by tragedy, overrun by Nazis and traumatized by communists; a big, messy place with plenty of distrust for the central government; this country has lifted up an entire generation of students, moving from below average for the developed world (and below the US) in the 2000 PISA results—to above average (and way above the US) in 2012.
Polish teens are now performing at the level of Finland, a place with a much lower child poverty rate (4%). Polish teens are scoring far above Sweden and Norway. (Sweden and Norway, interestingly, have both slid on PISA, going from above average in 2000 to at or below average in 2012—despite 5% child poverty levels).
Poland underwent a series of reforms in 1999-2000 (followed by a bit more in 2009). I’ll write more about what they did soon, but for now, suffice it to say that what Poland did was similar to what other countries have done to inject rigor into their systems. This is not mystical or entirely cultural, which is the best news yet.
So I’ve been hunkered down, reading through the 3,000-some pages of analysis and data—which go far beyond what you read in the headlines—to see what we can learn.
The most obvious (and least interesting) result: Our teenagers remained below average in math for the developed world—and average in reading and science. No change over past 13 years, since PISA began. Could be better, could be worse.
The least obvious (and more interesting) results: Even our most affluent students, the ones with highly educated parents and tricked-out high schools, scored worse than their privileged peers in 27 other countries in math. (I’m not even counting Shanghai and other regions here--just countries.)
Our least-advantaged kids (the bottom quartile) also scored below their peers in 27 other countries. Even our middle class teenagers scored below their middle class peers across the developed world!
So let’s be clear: Math is a US weakness at every economic level. It’s true among adults, too. Not to mention teachers. Something is amiss. We are systematically underestimating what our kids can do in math—which is distressing, since math is a strong predictor of future earnings, college completion and all manner of metrics related to living a full and healthy life.
We did better in reading, which is good news. Because it suggests that we could do better in math, too, despite our poverty, our diversity, our size, our paranoia, our bureaucracies, our politicians and our unions. We could do better.
There is more good news. (No seriously!) Never have I seen so many complicated countries at the top of these rankings. Not just Poland (16% child poverty) but Estonia (15% child poverty), Canada (15%) and Vietnam! I haven’t yet found reliable, comparable child poverty figures for Vietnam, but from what I've seen, I'd guess it's far higher than all those countries and more than double our own rate. So Vietnam is blowing my mind. This is the first time they've taken PISA, by the way.
You know what this means, right? This means that it is possible to improve education despite poverty. It means it can be done—and other countries can show us the way.
Take Poland: This country, a land defined by tragedy, overrun by Nazis and traumatized by communists; a big, messy place with plenty of distrust for the central government; this country has lifted up an entire generation of students, moving from below average for the developed world (and below the US) in the 2000 PISA results—to above average (and way above the US) in 2012.
Polish teens are now performing at the level of Finland, a place with a much lower child poverty rate (4%). Polish teens are scoring far above Sweden and Norway. (Sweden and Norway, interestingly, have both slid on PISA, going from above average in 2000 to at or below average in 2012—despite 5% child poverty levels).
Poland underwent a series of reforms in 1999-2000 (followed by a bit more in 2009). I’ll write more about what they did soon, but for now, suffice it to say that what Poland did was similar to what other countries have done to inject rigor into their systems. This is not mystical or entirely cultural, which is the best news yet.
September 19, 2013
Are International Comparisons Unfair?
As I travel around the country talking to people about The Smartest Kids, I keep running into the same objection:
"Other countries only test some of their kids; we test all of our kids."
This is not true. It may have been decades ago, but not now. From Benchmarking for Success, a 2008 report by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve:
"According to Jim Hull, who examined international assessments for the National School Boards Association, 'Since the 1990s, due to better sampling techniques and a move by more countries to universal education, the results represent the performance of the whole student population, including students who attend public, private, and vocational schools, students with special needs, and students who are not native speakers of their nation’s language.'
...U.S. enrollment rates in primary and secondary education are the same as or below those in other industrialized nations. For example, among OECD member nations, the U.S. ranks only 22nd in school enrollment of 5- to 14-year-olds and 23rd in enrollment of 15- to 19-year-olds.
Moreover, on the most recent PISA assessment, OECD member nations on average tested a higher proportion of 15-year-olds than did the U.S. (97 percent versus 96 per- cent of those enrolled in schools, and 89 percent versus 86 percent of the entire 15-year-old population), which refutes the idea that the U.S. was disadvantaged by testing a broader population.
While no assessment is perfect, PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS all have tight quality-control mechanisms, including very strict and transparent guidelines for sampling students and administering assessments. All exclusions must be thoroughly documented and justified, and total exclusions must fall below established thresholds."
I wonder what percentage of Americans excuse our kids' mediocre education results because they once heard this myth? If I had to guess, I'd say it's a big number (though not as big as the percentage that explains our results based (entirely) on our kids' poverty or skin color, which is also inaccurate).
"Other countries only test some of their kids; we test all of our kids."
This is not true. It may have been decades ago, but not now. From Benchmarking for Success, a 2008 report by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve:
"According to Jim Hull, who examined international assessments for the National School Boards Association, 'Since the 1990s, due to better sampling techniques and a move by more countries to universal education, the results represent the performance of the whole student population, including students who attend public, private, and vocational schools, students with special needs, and students who are not native speakers of their nation’s language.'
...U.S. enrollment rates in primary and secondary education are the same as or below those in other industrialized nations. For example, among OECD member nations, the U.S. ranks only 22nd in school enrollment of 5- to 14-year-olds and 23rd in enrollment of 15- to 19-year-olds.
Moreover, on the most recent PISA assessment, OECD member nations on average tested a higher proportion of 15-year-olds than did the U.S. (97 percent versus 96 per- cent of those enrolled in schools, and 89 percent versus 86 percent of the entire 15-year-old population), which refutes the idea that the U.S. was disadvantaged by testing a broader population.
While no assessment is perfect, PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS all have tight quality-control mechanisms, including very strict and transparent guidelines for sampling students and administering assessments. All exclusions must be thoroughly documented and justified, and total exclusions must fall below established thresholds."
I wonder what percentage of Americans excuse our kids' mediocre education results because they once heard this myth? If I had to guess, I'd say it's a big number (though not as big as the percentage that explains our results based (entirely) on our kids' poverty or skin color, which is also inaccurate).
August 15, 2013
The 14 y.o. Who Inspired Me to Leave the Country
The 14-year-old who inspired me to leave the country was named Wilfried Hounyo. I met him while reporting in DC public schools for Time a few years ago. Wilfried's parents had recently moved him and his four brothers and sisters to the U.S. from Benin, a tiny country in West Africa, so that the children could get a better education and have a brighter future.
Wilfried was a shy boy who hunched slightly when you talked to him, as if he'd like to be swallowed up into the ground. But he smiled all the time, even when he tried not to, and he was polite and eager to please. He got straight A's at his DC middle school. His father was working as a dishwasher, and his mother braided hair at a beauty salon. They lived packed together in a small apartment in northwest DC.
One day, sitting on the family's couch talking to Wilfried and his dad, I asked Wilfried what it had been like to transition to school in America. He must have had to work very hard to get such good grades in a language he'd barely spoken when he'd arrived. He smiled, seemingly unaware of how his father must have felt to hear his answer: "No, my DC school is actually easier than my school in Africa."
Read the rest of my post on Ed Week's Global Learning Blog.
Wilfried was a shy boy who hunched slightly when you talked to him, as if he'd like to be swallowed up into the ground. But he smiled all the time, even when he tried not to, and he was polite and eager to please. He got straight A's at his DC middle school. His father was working as a dishwasher, and his mother braided hair at a beauty salon. They lived packed together in a small apartment in northwest DC.
One day, sitting on the family's couch talking to Wilfried and his dad, I asked Wilfried what it had been like to transition to school in America. He must have had to work very hard to get such good grades in a language he'd barely spoken when he'd arrived. He smiled, seemingly unaware of how his father must have felt to hear his answer: "No, my DC school is actually easier than my school in Africa."
Read the rest of my post on Ed Week's Global Learning Blog.
August 13, 2013
When Your College Roommate is One of the “Smartest Kids in the World”
People sometimes ask me if international education rankings really matter. After all, the U.S. has done just fine with a mediocre education system until now. Our economy has other engines that drive growth, despite our challenges.
And that's true. But the world is changing, make no mistake. As more jobs are automated or outsourced, more Americans are finding that they are forced to prove themselves--over and over again, throughout their career. And the competition, even for our most elite students, has upped its game.
Here is a real-life example of why all of this matters: This summer, I met Elizabeth Carls at the New America Foundation, where she is working as an intern. This woman is impressive. She's getting straight As at Stanford; she is eloquent, curious and driven.
And yet, when she met her freshman year roommate, a young woman from South Korea, she realized she'd have to work much, much harder to compete on a global scale in the 21st century. Here is her story:
I teetered up the stairs to my new dorm room on my first day of freshman year at Stanford, slightly embarrassed by my three, oversized teal blue suitcases. My mother had lobbied for them by arguing that they’d be impossible to lose in the airport. In my free hand, I clutched a key to Room 209. If I was embarrassed about the suitcases, I was proud of the key. I’d worked hard for it throughout high school, and I expected that it would unlock more than just the door to my dorm room.
My roommate, I was delighted to learn, was from South Korea, and I was also about to learn that kids from South Korea are very smart.
One night that fall, I was struggling to write a research paper in Spanish—the longest assignment I’d ever attempted to research and write in a foreign language. My thesis was not working, and my brain struggled to pick through the clutter of two languages. I sighed and frustration pricked my eyes.
My roommate turned around from her own studies. “Liz, what’s wrong?”
After a pause, I voiced the thought troubling me most. How could school be this hard for me, and yet seemingly effortless for her? This was the hardest year of my scholastic life and, academically at least, she was breezing through at the top of our class.
She turned in her chair, fully facing me. “Liz,” she said, “this is the hardest you’ve ever worked, right?”
I nodded.
“As hard as you are working now, that’s how hard I worked in third grade--to get into the middle school that got me into the high school that got me into Stanford.”
Read the rest of Elizabeth's post here.
And that's true. But the world is changing, make no mistake. As more jobs are automated or outsourced, more Americans are finding that they are forced to prove themselves--over and over again, throughout their career. And the competition, even for our most elite students, has upped its game.
Here is a real-life example of why all of this matters: This summer, I met Elizabeth Carls at the New America Foundation, where she is working as an intern. This woman is impressive. She's getting straight As at Stanford; she is eloquent, curious and driven.
And yet, when she met her freshman year roommate, a young woman from South Korea, she realized she'd have to work much, much harder to compete on a global scale in the 21st century. Here is her story:
I teetered up the stairs to my new dorm room on my first day of freshman year at Stanford, slightly embarrassed by my three, oversized teal blue suitcases. My mother had lobbied for them by arguing that they’d be impossible to lose in the airport. In my free hand, I clutched a key to Room 209. If I was embarrassed about the suitcases, I was proud of the key. I’d worked hard for it throughout high school, and I expected that it would unlock more than just the door to my dorm room.
My roommate, I was delighted to learn, was from South Korea, and I was also about to learn that kids from South Korea are very smart.
One night that fall, I was struggling to write a research paper in Spanish—the longest assignment I’d ever attempted to research and write in a foreign language. My thesis was not working, and my brain struggled to pick through the clutter of two languages. I sighed and frustration pricked my eyes.
My roommate turned around from her own studies. “Liz, what’s wrong?”
After a pause, I voiced the thought troubling me most. How could school be this hard for me, and yet seemingly effortless for her? This was the hardest year of my scholastic life and, academically at least, she was breezing through at the top of our class.
She turned in her chair, fully facing me. “Liz,” she said, “this is the hardest you’ve ever worked, right?”
I nodded.
“As hard as you are working now, that’s how hard I worked in third grade--to get into the middle school that got me into the high school that got me into Stanford.”
Read the rest of Elizabeth's post here.
Why I Wrote The Smartest Kids in the World
For most of my career at Time and other magazines, I worked hard to avoid education stories. If my editors asked me to write about schools or tests, I countered with an idea about terrorism, plane crashes, or a pandemic flu. That usually worked.
I didn’t say so out loud, but education stories seemed, well, kind of soft. The articles tended to be headlined in chalkboard font and festooned with pencil doodles. They were brimming with good intentions but not much evidence. The people quoted were mostly adults; the kids just turned up in the photos, smiling and silent.
Then, an editor asked me to write about a controversial new leader of Washington, D.C.’s public schools. I didn’t know much about Michelle Rhee, except that she wore stiletto heels and tended to say “crap” a lot in interviews. So, I figured it would be a good story, even if it meant slipping into the fog of education. But something unexpected happened in the fog. I spent months talking to kids, parents, and teachers, as well as people who have been creatively researching education in new ways. Pretty soon I realized that Rhee was interesting, but she was not the biggest mystery in the room. The real mystery was this: Why were some kids learning so much—and others so very little?
American kids were better off, on average, than the typical child in Japan, New Zealand, or South Korea, yet they knew far less math than those children. Our most privileged teenagers had highly educated parents and attended the richest schools in the world, yet they ranked eighteenth in math compared to their privileged peers around the world, scoring well below affluent kids in New Zealand, Belgium, France, and Korea, among other places. The typical child in Beverly Hills performed below average, compared to all kids in Canada (not some other distant land, Canada!). A great education by the standards of suburban America looked, from afar, exceedingly average...
Read the rest of this excerpt here at the New America Foundation's In the Tank.
I didn’t say so out loud, but education stories seemed, well, kind of soft. The articles tended to be headlined in chalkboard font and festooned with pencil doodles. They were brimming with good intentions but not much evidence. The people quoted were mostly adults; the kids just turned up in the photos, smiling and silent.
Then, an editor asked me to write about a controversial new leader of Washington, D.C.’s public schools. I didn’t know much about Michelle Rhee, except that she wore stiletto heels and tended to say “crap” a lot in interviews. So, I figured it would be a good story, even if it meant slipping into the fog of education. But something unexpected happened in the fog. I spent months talking to kids, parents, and teachers, as well as people who have been creatively researching education in new ways. Pretty soon I realized that Rhee was interesting, but she was not the biggest mystery in the room. The real mystery was this: Why were some kids learning so much—and others so very little?
American kids were better off, on average, than the typical child in Japan, New Zealand, or South Korea, yet they knew far less math than those children. Our most privileged teenagers had highly educated parents and attended the richest schools in the world, yet they ranked eighteenth in math compared to their privileged peers around the world, scoring well below affluent kids in New Zealand, Belgium, France, and Korea, among other places. The typical child in Beverly Hills performed below average, compared to all kids in Canada (not some other distant land, Canada!). A great education by the standards of suburban America looked, from afar, exceedingly average...
Read the rest of this excerpt here at the New America Foundation's In the Tank.
August 3, 2013
The $4 Million Teacher
Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world...
My new book is excerpted in today's Wall Street Journal. This story is from a chapter on South Korea, a place where the best teachers can become millionaires.
I met Mr. Kim while I was traveling around the world visiting the new education superpowers—places like Finland and Korea that have dramatically improved their education systems and now consistently outperform the U.S. These countries are very different places, of course, but one thing they all have in common is that they’ve evolved to treat education as if it were deadly serious, as if the future of the civilization depended upon it (which, in their cases, it did). That decision changed everything else.
American schools will never make teachers millionaires, it's fair to say. But there are still surprising lessons to be learned from Korea's booming educational bazaar, lessons about how to motivate teachers, how to captivate parents and students and how to adapt to a changing world.
My new book is excerpted in today's Wall Street Journal. This story is from a chapter on South Korea, a place where the best teachers can become millionaires.
I met Mr. Kim while I was traveling around the world visiting the new education superpowers—places like Finland and Korea that have dramatically improved their education systems and now consistently outperform the U.S. These countries are very different places, of course, but one thing they all have in common is that they’ve evolved to treat education as if it were deadly serious, as if the future of the civilization depended upon it (which, in their cases, it did). That decision changed everything else.
American schools will never make teachers millionaires, it's fair to say. But there are still surprising lessons to be learned from Korea's booming educational bazaar, lessons about how to motivate teachers, how to captivate parents and students and how to adapt to a changing world.
