The Smartest Kids in the World Page 12

  Adults didn’t have to be stern or aloof to help kids learn. In fact, just asking children about their school days and showing genuine interest in what they were learning could have the same effect on PISA scores as hours of private tutoring. Asking serious questions about a child’s book had more value than congratulating the child for finishing it, in other words.

  Around the world, people who studied parenting usually divided the various styles into four basic categories: Authoritarian parents were strict disciplinarians, the “because I said so” parents. Permissive parents tended to be indulgent and averse to conflict. They acted more like friends than parents. In some studies, permissive parents tended to be wealthier and more educated than other parents. Neglectful parents were just how they sounded: emotionally distant and often absent. They were also more likely to live in poverty.

  Then there was the fourth option: Authoritative. The word was like a mash up of authoritarian and permissive. These parents inhabited the sweet spot between the two: they were warm, responsive, and close to their kids, but, as their children got older, they gave them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices. Throughout their kids’ upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear, bright limits, rules they did not negotiate.

  “We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect.

  When researcher Jelani Mandara at Northwestern University studied 4,754 U.S. teenagers and their parents, he found that kids with authoritative parents had higher academic achievement levels, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer problems with aggression, disobedience, and other antisocial behaviors. Other studies have found similar benefits. Authoritative parents trained their kids to be resilient, and it seemed to work.

  It is perilous to make sweeping generalizations about people based on their ethnic heritage, but the research does suggest patterns. In the United States, European-American parents are more likely to exhibit authoritative styles than Hispanic or African-American parents, who trend toward authoritarian styles of parenting. (Although all ethnicities include all four kinds of parents.) However, the Asian-American parenting style may be the most consistently authoritative.

  For example, studies have shown that Chinese-American parents are more hands-on with their children when they are young, training them in the ways of reading, writing, and math, but then they give their kids significantly more autonomy as they get older (a model that sounds eeirly similar to the stereotype of the Finnish parent). “In high school, Asian immigrant parents really have a more hands-off approach,” says Ruth Chao, who has studied parenting styles for over two decades. “They’re not doing direct instruction. They’re not managing the child’s schoolwork anymore. They feel that if they are still having to do that, then there’s really a problem.”

  After studying the data, Schleicher took his own advice. At his home in Paris, he and his wife were raising three children. They attended public school in a country that, like the United States, did not have strong PISA scores. Before he saw the research, he had always assumed that the ideal parent would spend several hours helping his children do their homework or complete other school projects. But there was a problem: He frequently didn’t have several hours free to look over their shoulders. As a result, he did very little.

  The data showed that he had more choices than he thought. From then on, even on his most hectic days, Schleicher at least asked his kids how school had gone, what they had learned, and what they had liked most. He talked to them about news and social issues of the day. He still didn’t manage to read to his youngest daughter more often, but he at least knew what to feel guilty about—and what not to. Like every parent, he wanted his children to grow up to be thoughtful, curious, and smart. It was a relief to have strategies to influence their learning—regardless of what became of the French school system.

  the anxiety olympics

  On the eve of the big test, Eric’s classmates performed elaborate rituals. The younger students cleaned the classrooms for the seniors. They purged the walls of posters and even covered the flag so that test takers would be able to focus on the college entrance exam without any distractions.

  At the supermarket, Eric saw special displays of fancy good-luck candies for parents to buy their test-taking children, amulets to protect them through this ordeal. On the street, parents filed into temples and churches to offer one last prayer.

  The whole country obsessed over the test. Korea Electric Power Corp. sent out crew members to check the power lines serving each of the one thousand test locations. The morning of the test, the stock market opened an hour late to keep the roads free for the more than six hundred thousand students headed to the test. Taxis gave students free rides.

  That day, Eric took the bus to school as he normally did. But nothing was normal. As he got closer, he heard cheering. Some of his classmates had lined up outside the entrance to hand out tea to the test-takers and wave signs reading, “Hit the Jackpot!” The seniors trudged past them, heads down, like boxers entering a ring for a fight that would last nine hours. Police officers patrolled the school perimeter to discourage cars from honking their horns and distracting the students. Eric ran into a boy he knew, who explained that there was no school for younger students that day. Then he and Eric left to go play video games.

  Later that morning, Eric went to Busan’s Shinsegae Centum City, the largest department store in the world, to do some shopping. During the English language listening portion of the test, when airplanes were grounded to reduce unnecessary noise, Eric was in a movie theater.

  By then, Eric had made a decision. He was going to drop out of Korean high school. He couldn’t wait out the rest of the year this way. It felt like he spent every day in a huge cage, watching other kids run on a hamster wheel. The wheel never stopped; it thrummed day and night. And he was tired of sitting quietly in the wheel’s shadow, waiting for his life in Korea to begin.

  He needed to talk to kids if he was going to learn Korean and stay sane. He knew it was the right thing to do, but he was unsure how to do it. He hoped that leaving high school didn’t mean he would have to leave Korea.

  That evening, as Eric meandered through the city on his way back to the apartment, trucks delivered late-edition newspapers with the exam questions and answers for families to pore over at dinner. The entire spectacle felt melodramatic to Eric, like some kind of Hunger Games of the mind. Why did the whole country have to take the test on the same day? Kids in Minnesota took the SAT multiple times a year without any disruption to normal life.

  Still, a child growing up in Korea could not help but get the message: Education was a national treasure. Getting a good one mattered more than stock-market trades or airplane departures. And everyone, from parents to teachers to police officers, had a role to play.

  the mystery equation

  Listening to the stories of Kim and Eric, I started to notice one fundamental theme. In Korea and Finland, despite all their differences, everyone—kids, parents, and teachers—saw getting an education as a serious quest, more important than sports or self-esteem. This consensus about the importance of a rigorous education led to all kinds of natural consequences: not just a more sophisticated and focused curriculum but more serious teacher-training colleges, more challenging tests, even more rigorous conversations at home around the dining room table. Everything was more demanding, through and through.

  In these countries, people thought learning was so important that only the most educated, high-achieving citizens could be allowed to do the teaching. These governments spent tax money training and retaining teacher talent, rather than buying iPads for first graders or mandating small class sizes. It wasn’t that publi
c respect for teachers led to learning, as some American educators claimed after visiting Finland; it was that public respect for learning led to great teaching. Of course people respected teachers; their jobs were complex and demanding, and they had to work hard to get there.

  One thing led to another. Highly educated teachers also chose material that was more rigorous, and they had the fluency to teach it. Because they were serious people doing hard jobs and everyone knew it, they got a lot of autonomy to do their work. That autonomy was another symptom of rigor. Teachers and principals had enough leeway to do their jobs like true professionals. They were accountable for results, but autonomous in their methods.

  Kids had more freedom, too. This freedom was important, and it wasn’t a gift. By definition, rigorous work required failure; you simply could not do it without failing. That meant that teenagers had the freedom to fail when they were still young enough to learn how to recover. When they didn’t work hard, they got worse grades. The consequences were clear and reliable. They didn’t take a lot of standardized tests, but they had to take a very serious one at the end of high school, which had real implications for their futures.

  As Kim had noticed, teenagers were expected to manage their own time, and they usually did. Interestingly, this was another difference that exchange students noticed. Six out of ten of those surveyed said that U.S. parents gave children less freedom than parents abroad. (Only one in ten said that U.S. parents allowed more freedom.) One Finnish student who had spent a year in the United States explained this difference this way:

  “In the U.S., everything was very controlled and supervised. You couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a pass. You had to turn all your homework in, but yet you didn’t really have to think with your own brain or make any decisions of your own.”

  I’d been looking around the world for clues as to what other countries were doing right, but the important distinctions were not about spending or local control or curriculum; none of that mattered very much. Policies mostly worked in the margins. The fundamental difference was a psychological one.

  The education superpowers believed in rigor. People in these countries agreed on the purpose of school: School existed to help students master complex academic material. Other things mattered, too, but nothing mattered as much.

  That clarity of purpose meant everyone took school more seriously, especially kids. The most important difference I’d seen so far was the drive of students and their families. It was viral, and it mattered more than I’d expected. Eric and his friend Jenny had reminded me what I’d forgotten in adulthood: Kids feed off each other. This feedback loop started in kindergarten and just grew more powerful each year, for better and for worse. Schools and parents could amp up student drive through smarter, more meaningful testing that came with real consequences for teenagers’ lives; through generous grants of autonomy, the kind that involved some risk and some reward; and through higher quality, more challenging work, directed by the best educated teachers in the world. But those policies were born out of a pervasive belief in rigor. Without it, those things just didn’t happen.

  The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition.

  Sports were central to American students’ lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans.

  Without a doubt, sports brought many benefits, including lessons in leadership and persistence, not to mention exercise. In most U.S. high schools, however, only a minority of students actually played sports. So they weren’t getting the exercise, and the U.S. obesity rates reflected as much. And those valuable life lessons, the ones about leadership and persistence, could be taught through rigorous academic work, too, in ways that were more applicable to the real world. In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids, while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone.

  The lesson wasn’t that sports couldn’t coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education. In countries like Finland, sports teams existed, of course. They were run by parents or outside clubs. As teenagers got older, most of them shifted their focus from playing sports to academics or vocational skills—the opposite of the typical U.S. pattern. About 10 percent of Kim’s classmates played sports in Finland, and they did so in community centers separate from school. Many of them quit senior year so that they would have time to study for their graduation exam. When I asked Kim’s Finnish teacher if she knew any teachers who also worked as coaches, she could only think of one. “Teachers do a lot of work at school,” she said, “and that’s enough I guess.”

  Wealth had made rigor unnecessary in the United States, historically speaking. Kids didn’t need to master complex material to succeed in life—not until recently, anyway. Other things crowded in, including sports, which embedded themselves in education systems, requiring principals to hire teachers who could also coach (or vice versa). The unholy alliance between school and sports pushed student athletes to spend extreme amounts of energy and time in training before and after school.

  In isolation, there was nothing wrong with sports, of course. But they didn’t operate in isolation. Combined with less rigorous material, higher rates of child poverty and lower levels of teacher selectivity and training, the glorification of sports chipped away at the academic drive among U.S. kids. The primacy of sports sent a message that what mattered—what really led to greatness—had little to do with what happened in the classroom. That lack of drive made teachers’ jobs harder, undercutting the entire equation.

  I found myself wishing I could travel back in time. Now that I knew what these nations had become, I wanted to see how they had gotten there. How did they arrive at a consensus about rigor? How had Finland and Korea done what Oklahoma could not?

  In the twenty-first century, Finland was the obvious inspiration, a model for someday. It had achieved a balance and humanity that had eluded Korea. But for most of the world, including the United States, the question was what needed to happen first to make someday possible.

  mapping will power

  In the mid-1970s, a small number of economists and sociologists started noticing that academic skills were not all important. It sounded obvious, but in the rush to count and compare IQ and reading scores, this simple truth was easily forgotten. Over the next three decades, more and more studies showed that when it came to predicting which kids grew up to be thriving adults—who succeeded in life and in their jobs—cognitive abilities only went so far.

  Something else mattered just as much, and sometimes more, to kids’ life chances. This other dark matter had more to do with attitude than the ability to solve a calculus problem. In one study of U.S. eighth graders, for example, the best predictor of academic performance was not the children’s IQ scores—but their self-discipline.

  Mastery of math never made anyone get to work on time, finish a thesis, or use a condom. No, those skill sets had more to do with motivation, empathy, self-control, and persistence. These were core habits, workhorse traits sometimes summed up by the old-fashioned word character.

  The problem with the word character was that it sounded like something you couldn’t change. But these same researchers discovered something wonderful: Character was malleable, more malleable in fact than IQ. Character could change dramatically and relatively quickly—for better and
for worse—from place to place and time to time.

  So it was fair to assume that different communities and cultures did more—or less—to promote these traits in their children. In Finland, Kim identified a difference that she thought mattered a lot: a difference, as she put it, in how much kids and teacher cared about school. Eric witnessed this drive, too, albeit the extreme and sometimes dysfunctional Korean version of the trait.

  Caring about school was not the most important trait in a human being, to state the obvious. But, around the globe, this particular form of drive had begun to matter more than ever before, at least economically speaking. The research was still a long way off from identifying all the traits that mattered in young people’s lives, but could drive be measured between countries? Was there any way to quantify what Kim and Eric had noticed? And could drive be cultivated in places that needed more of it?

  Few people had tried to find out. Surveys tended to ask kids to describe their own motivation and attitude, which made it impossible to separate their answers from their own cultural biases. A student in Korea who said he didn’t work hard had a very different understanding of hard than a typical student in the United Kingdom or Italy.

  In 2002, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania had an idea. They thought they might be able to measure students’ persistence and motivation by looking not at their answers to international tests, but at how thoroughly students answered the surveys included with those tests.

  After the test portion of PISA and other international exams, students typically filled out surveys about their families and other life circumstances. There were no right answers for the questions on the surveys. In fact, the professors, Erling Boe, Robert Boruch, and a young graduate student, Henry May, weren’t even interested in the answers. They wanted to track students’ diligence in filling out the forms. So, they studied the survey attached to a 1995 test taken by kids of different ages in more than forty countries (called the “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study”).