The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  In Finland, the government paid tuition for Stara and all university students. In Oklahoma, Bethel’s tuition was paid, too, but his free ride came from a carefully cobbled together safety net of Pell grants, a partial athletic scholarship, and Indian grants. Most students could not manage this feat.

  During his sophomore year at Northeastern State University, Bethel had applied to the university’s education college. Here was another chance for the university to select its best and brightest to become teachers. But to be admitted, Bethel had to have a grade-point average of just 2.5 or higher (out of 4). He would have needed a higher GPA to become an optometrist at the same university today. To be a teacher, he also had to have at least a C grade in freshman English and a C in speech or a class called the fundamentals of oral communication.

  He also needed a score of 19 or higher on the ACT, a standardized test like the SAT. The national average for the ACT back then was 20.6. Let’s consider what this meant: It was acceptable to perform below average for the country on a test of what you had learned throughout your educational career if you aspired to dedicate your career to education.

  At the education college, Bethel discovered that he didn’t have to major in math to become a high-school math teacher. So he didn’t. Nationwide, less than half of American high-school math teachers majored in math. Almost a third did not even minor in math.

  The problem was even worse among students training to teach younger children. “A large majority of elementary education majors are afraid of math,” one Oklahoma math department chair said in response to a 2005 survey. “This fear will be passed on to their students.” Another estimated that about a quarter of teachers graduating from his or her college actively hated math and showed no interest in improving.

  Bethel liked math, but his primary goal was to become a coach, so he majored in physical education and minored in math. When he took the required test for high school math teachers in Oklahoma, he passed easily. Most of the material was at a tenth or eleventh grade level, and he didn’t find it difficult. However, if he had, he would have been allowed to retake the test until he passed.

  Nationwide, people studying to become math teachers in the United States did not have to actually know that much math compared to teachers in the education superpowers. The deficit was particularly alarming among middle-school math teachers. When researchers tested thousands of aspiring teachers in sixteen countries, they found that future middle-school math teachers in the United States knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand and Oman. They had nowhere near the math competence of teachers-in-training in Taiwan, Singapore, or Poland. So it was not surprising that those same teachers’ students would perform just as unimpressively later on. You could not teach what you didn’t know.

  Still, the most valuable part of any teacher preparation program may be the hands-on practice that student teachers get in a real-life classroom. There is no better way to prepare for teaching than to actually teach—and get meaningful feedback on how to improve.

  In Oklahoma, Bethel’s student teaching experience helped him learn to plan lessons and manage a classroom. But it lasted just twelve weeks, compared to the year-long residency typical in Finland. Nationwide, U.S. teacher-training colleges only require an average of twelve to fifteen weeks of student teaching, and the quality varies wildly depending on the place.

  When Bethel got his first teaching job, he quickly realized that it would have been helpful to major in math. But what was done was done. By the time he taught Kim, he was earning about $49,000 per year, which was more than the typical salary in Sallisaw but still not a lot. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Stara was earning about $67,000. The cost of living was higher in Finland, but Stara’s salary was still higher. And her salary was closer to what other college graduates earned in Finland than Bethel’s salary was in the United States.

  Interestingly, large salaries did not necessarily coincide with greatness worldwide. The world’s highest paid teachers lived in Spain, where teenagers performed worse in math, reading, and science than students in the United States. But in higher-functioning education systems, larger salaries could help schools attract better-educated teachers and retain them over time, establishing a baseline of professionalism and prestige. In all the education superpowers, teachers’ incomes were closer to the salaries of other college-educated professionals than they were in the United States. In most cases, classes were also larger than they were in the United States, making the cost of the salaries more manageable.

  As I listened to teachers like Stara and Bethel, I started to suspect that all these differences interacted, in chronological order. Because teacher colleges selected only the top applicants in Finland and other education superpowers, those schools could spend less time doing catch-up instruction and more time on rigorous, hands-on training; because teachers entered the classroom with rigorous training and a solid education, they were less likely than American teachers to quit in frustration. This model of preparation and stability made it possible to give teachers larger class sizes and pay them decently, since the turnover costs were much lower than in other countries. And, since they had all this training and support, they had the tools to help kids learn, year after year, and to finally pass a truly demanding graduation test at the end of high school.

  The subconscious effects were just as powerful. As one U.S. exchange student to Finland explained in the survey conducted for this book:

  “My Finnish school fostered a great deal of respect for the institution and faculty in the students. This can be partly explained by the academic rigors that teachers had to endure in their journeys to becoming educators. The students were well aware of how accomplished their teachers were.”

  One thing led to another. Otherwise, one thing led to much less. If the rigor didn’t start at the beginning, then the most challenging high-school graduation test in the world would not succeed. Federal mandates could only go so far. Without highly educated and well-trained teachers and principals, kids could make only limited progress each year. Realizing that they could never pass the graduation test, many would tune out and give up.

  The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality.

  What if the main problem was not motivation? Was it possible to hammer 3.6 million American teachers into becoming master educators if their SAT scores were below average?

  The lesson from Finland had a linear elegance: If we wanted to get serious about education, at long last, we needed to start at the beginning. Following Finland’s example, education colleges should only be allowed to admit students with SAT scores in the top third of the national distribution or lose government funding and accreditation. Since 1.6 million U.S. teachers were due to retire between 2011 and 2021, a revolution in recruitment and training could change the entire profession in a short period of time.

  Why hadn’t this been done in any state in America? Given that colleges already prepared far more teachers than schools needed, this change would not necessarily have led to a teacher shortage. Over time, it might have actually increased the popularity of the profession by making it more prestigious.

  It was a bizarre oversight. For all the time and energy that American educators had spent praising Finland, it was remarkable that they did not insist upon this most obvious first step. It was almost as if we wanted the prestige of Finland’s teachers—but didn’t really believe that our teachers needed to be highly educated and unusually ac
complished in order to merit that prestige. But why, then, did Finland?

  “why do you guys care so much?”

  After class, Kim had a free period—a full seventy minutes with nothing scheduled. This was the other big difference she’d noticed about Finland: the inexplicable stretches of luxurious freedom. She kept finding herself released into the ether, trusted to find her way through long stretches of time. She could even walk out of the school in the middle of the day and go to a coffee shop in the village until her next class began. It was hard to get used to.

  Even outside school she felt this freedom. She had learned her way to the Halpa-Halli supermarket by bike and, although it took her an embarrassingly long time to find the simplest ingredients, her host mother didn’t seem to worry if she wasn’t home on time.

  Parents in general seemed to trust their kids more. Kim routinely saw eight-year-olds walking to school alone, wearing reflective vests to keep them visible in the dark. At the high school, she rarely saw parents for any reason. Teenagers were treated more like adults. There were no regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences. None. If teachers had a problem with the student, they usually just met with the student.

  Kim wandered into the central lobby of the school and sat on one of the gray couches. Back home, she’d had five minutes free between classes, and anyone caught hanging out was in trouble. Part of her was still in Oklahoma, waiting for someone to come bust her.

  Two girls from her class sat down next to her. They said hello to Kim and started talking about how hard they’d studied for midterm exams last year, lamenting all the work they had ahead of them.

  Most of the time, the Finnish students were just as aloof as her guide books had told her they would be. But Kim was still new enough that she could ask them about Finland to make conversation. So, she collected her courage and blurted out the question that had been on her mind.

  “Why do you guys care so much?”

  The girls looked at her, confused. Kim felt her cheeks flush, but she barreled ahead.

  “I mean, what makes you work hard in school?”

  It was a hard question to answer, she realized, but she had to ask. These girls went to parties; they texted in class and doodled in their notebooks. They were normal, in other words. Yet they seemed to respect the basic premise of school, and Kim wanted to know why.

  Now, both girls looked baffled, as if Kim had just asked them why they insisted on breathing so much.

  “It’s school,” one of them said finally. “How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?”

  Kim nodded. It was a fair question. Maybe the real mystery was not why Finnish kids cared so much, but why so many of her Oklahoma classmates did not. After all, for them, too, getting a good education was the only way to go to college and get a good job. Somewhere along the way, however, many of them had stopped believing in this equation. They didn’t take education very seriously. Maybe because they were lazy, spoiled, or dysfunctional in some other way, or maybe because, in their experience, education wasn’t all that serious.

  “how is it possible you don’t know this?”

  Listening to Kim’s impressions of Finland, I wondered if she were unique. Kim came from a relatively low-performing state, and no one would say she had an overly generous attitude toward her hometown. Would other exchange students notice the same differences? What about a teenager traveling in the opposite direction? Would a Finnish girl who’d chosen to come to the United States see a mirror image of what Kim had noticed in Finland?

  Every year, about four hundred Finnish kids travel to the United States to live and study. Most of them ended up in the Midwest in public high schools. To find out what they thought of their borrowed land, I started tracking them down. It didn’t take long to notice a pattern.

  Elina came to America from Helsinki when she was sixteen, the same age as Kim. She came because she’d spent much of her life dreaming about the American high schools she saw on television and in movies: the prom, the pep rallies, and all the twinkling rituals of the American teenager.

  In America, Elina lived with a host family in Colon, Michigan, a small town named after the punctuation mark, just outside Kalamazoo. At first, Elina’s new world looked a lot like home. Colon was surrounded by lakes and trees. The population was 95 percent white and native born. On weekends, men zipped themselves into down jackets and played ice hockey on frozen lakes. The winter lasted most of the year, just like back home.

  Early on, however, Elina discovered one important difference about America. Back home, she’d been a good student. In Colon, she was exceptional. She took Algebra II, the most advanced math class offered at Colon High. On her first test, she got 105 percent. Until then, Elina had thought it was mathematically impossible to get 105 percent on anything.

  She thought she might have more trouble in U.S. history class, since she was not, after all, American. Luckily, her teacher gave the class a study guide that contained all the questions—and answers—to the exam. On test day, Elina coasted through the questions because, well, she’d seen them in advance.

  When the teacher handed the tests back, Elina was unsurprised to see she’d gotten an A. She was amazed, however, to see that some of the other students had gotten Cs. One of them looked at her and laughed at the absurdity.

  “How is it possible you know this stuff ?”

  “How is it possible you don’t know this stuff ?” Elina answered.

  I talked to Elina after she had left the United States and gone to college in Finland. She was planning to work in foreign affairs one day. Now that some time had gone by, I wondered if she had a theory about what she’d seen in her American school. Were the students too coddled? Or the opposite—too troubled? Too diverse? Maybe they were demoralized by all the standardized testing?

  Elina didn’t think so. In her experience, American kids didn’t study much because, well, they didn’t have to. “Not much is demanded of U.S. students,” she said. In Finland, her exams were usually essay tests, requiring her to write three or four pages in response. “You really have to study. You have to prove that you know it,” Elina told me about Finnish high school. In the United States, her tests were typically multiple choice.

  “It was like elementary school in Finland,” she said. In that history class, she remembers, the class spent an inordinate amount of time making posters. “We did so many posters. I remember telling my friends, ‘Are you kidding me? Another poster?’ ” It was like arts and crafts, only more boring. The teacher gave all the students the information for the poster, and the kids just had to cut and glue their way to a finished product. Everybody’s poster featured the same subject.

  The expectations were lower in America, Elina concluded, and the consequences were, too. She took a journalism class in Colon that was taught by an outstanding teacher. Everyone loved this teacher, including Elina. More important, perhaps, they respected her, and knew they were learning in her class. However, when the teacher told everyone they had to write ten articles by the end of the semester, only Elina actually did all ten stories. The teacher was irritated, but the other students still passed the class.

  Elina and Kim’s observations were anecdotal to the extreme. How much could we make of a few kids’ memories? But it was remarkable how many kids from all different lands agreed on this point. In a large, national survey, over half of American high schoolers echoed Elina’s impression, reporting that their history work was often or always too easy. Less than half said they felt like they were always or almost always learning in math class.

  In my own survey of 202 foreign-exchange students, an overwhelming majority said their U.S. classes were easier than their classes abroad. (Of the international students who came to America, nine out of ten said classes were easier in the United States; of the American teenagers who went abroad, seven out of ten agreed.) School in America was many things, but it was not, generally speaking, hard.

  During her year in Amer
ica, Elina saw a Broadway show and visited the Washington Monument. She ran track and worked on the yearbook. She was surprised by how involved parents were in the school, much more so than parents back home. However, in the classrooms at Colon High—a school not overwhelmed by poverty, immigration, gangs, or any of the blights so often blamed for our educational mediocrity—she did not learn much in the traditional sense.

  life after school

  When Kim’s school day in Finland ended at three forty-five, it was already dark. Her classmates all headed off in different directions. A few boys in a garage band went off to practice; some of the girls went shopping. No one Kim knew went to afterschool tutoring academies. Finnish kids had more free time than American kids, and not just because they did less homework. They were also less likely to play sports or hold down jobs.

  As Kim walked through town on the way to the library, she felt hopeful. She spent a lot of time alone with her thoughts. But, she had discovered, to her relief, that life in Finland was different. The distinctions were subtle: the freedom, the freshly cooked food in the cafeteria, the civility. It was hard to describe the cumulative effect of these differences, but it felt, on days like today, as if she’d been paroled for good behavior.

  The town felt cleaner and nicer than Sallisaw, like it was built for people instead of cars. As she walked along the brick pedestrian way, she passed boys with Justin Bieber hair, girls with tattoos, and billboards covered with H&M bikini ads. People dressed slightly better than they did back home, but not radically different. There were not nearly as many tall, blonde women as she had expected.

  The neighborhood surrounding her school was filled with eighteenth and nineteenth century wooden houses, built after Russians sacked the village and drove out most of the townspeople in the 1700s. Kim had been keeping a mental list of the ordeals Pietarsaari had endured, from famine to communism; it had been fired on by the British Navy and bombed by the allies during World War II. The mystical land of smart children and Nokia, the one she had read about in America, was a relatively recent development.