The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  The researchers encountered several surprises very quickly. First, students around the world were surprisingly compliant. The vast majority dutifully filled out most answers, even though the survey had no impact on their lives. The lowest response rate for any country was 90 percent. There was some variation from within a given country, but the variation didn’t seem to reveal much about the students.

  Between countries, though, the differences in diligence mattered—a lot. In fact, this difference turned out to be the single best predictor of how countries performed on the actual substantive portion of the test.

  This simple measure—the thoroughness with which students answered the survey—was more predictive of countries’ scores than socioeconomic status or class size or any other factor that had been studied.

  How could this be? When May repeated the analysis with the 2009 PISA data, he found the same dynamic: Half the variation between countries’ scores on the PISA math test could be explained by how much of the personal questionnaire students filled out on average in a given country.

  In the United States, participants answered 96 percent of the survey questions on average, which seemed very respectable. Yet the U.S. still ranked thirty-third in conscientiousness. Korea ranked fourth. Finland ranked sixth. Kids there answered 98 percent of the questions. Seems virtually the same, right? But small differences in average response rates predicted large differences in academic performance on the same test.

  Kids in Finland and Korea answered more of the demographic survey than those in the United States, France, Denmark, or Brazil. The causes of this pattern remain a mystery. May wondered if PISA and other international exams were measuring not skills but compliance; some countries had cultures in which kids just took all tests, and authority figures, more seriously. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that those countries included Japan, Korea, and other top PISA scorers. Perhaps that’s why those kids answered the survey more thoroughly and did better on the academic questions, too. Those kids were just rule-abiding conformists. Other countries, meanwhile, valued individualism more than compliance. Perhaps those kids simply did not feel compelled to take the survey seriously. “In some nations,” May said, “there are a lot of kids who seem like they just couldn’t care less. They drag the mean down.”

  Then why did U.S. students do much better on the reading portion of the test, and so poorly on the math portion? If American kids just didn’t care about tests or authority figures, generally speaking, then they would presumably do equally poorly on all tests. Likewise, we probably wouldn’t see countries like Poland rocket up through the rankings in very short periods of time. It was hard to imagine that Poland had cultivated a culture of conformism in the course of three to nine years.

  No one knows the answer for sure, but it’s possible that the diligence kids showed in answering the survey reflected their diligence in general. In other words, maybe some kids had learned to finish what they started in school: to persist even when something held no particular gratification. The opposite was also true. Some kids had not learned to persist, and persistence was not valued as much in their school or in their societies at large.

  Conscientiousness on a survey seemed like a trifling matter. In life, it was a big deal. Conscientiousness—a tendency to be responsible, hardworking, and organized—mattered at every point in the human life cycle. It even predicted how long people lived—with more accuracy than intelligence or background.

  What would a map of conscientiousness look like? Maybe it was less important to find the smart kids, and more important to find the ones who got the job done, whatever the job was. Were there certain cultures that cultivated conscientiousness the way that other cultures cultivated gymnasts or soccer players?

  The survey results provided some clues, not all of them obvious. The countries with kids who took the survey most seriously were not necessarily places with the richest kids; affluence does not necessarily lead to persistence, as we all know. In fact, the country with the highest response rate on the survey had nearly the same level of child poverty as that of the United States.

  That country was Poland.

  chapter 7

  the metamorphosis

  The Neighborhood: A child playing in Wrocław, Poland, in 2006, not far from Tom’s high school.

  The children of Breslau, dragging suitcases behind their mothers, watched the slips of paper float toward earth. They squinted up into the bright sky, where they could just make out the silhouette of a Soviet warplane. All around them, the leaflets landed softly on the ground, like snow: “Germans! Surrender! Nothing will happen to you!”

  On January 22, 1945, Breslau was an important industrial center in what was then eastern Germany. The city had been largely spared by World War II. The city’s eight hundred thousand people, along with its medieval square and its weapons factories, lay just out of reach of allied bombers. For most of Breslau’s citizens, it had been possible to believe that life might one day return to normal.

  Now, though, the Red Army was pushing west along the Oder River, closing in on the city. Intelligence reports estimated that the approaching Soviet soldiers outnumbered the German soldiers by five to one.

  By the time Nazi officials finally allowed Breslau’s women and children to leave, it was too late. Families rushed to the train stations and borders, clogging streets already filled with refugees from other German cities. Women pushed strollers full of pots and pans as men, ordered to fight to the death, climbed into church steeples with machine guns. It was three degrees, and many of the fleeing children froze to death before they made it to the next town. Nature finished what man started. Before a single bomb fell, some ninety thousand evacuees died trying to escape Breslau.

  On the night of February 13, Soviet tanks encircled the city, churning slowly through the suburbs. The distant artillery fire grew louder each day until it exploded into a street fight in the heart of the city. The Soviets blasted their way through Breslau’s historic row houses, wall by wall, occupying the city as they destroyed it.

  Retreating Germans threw grenades through windows and set fire to entire neighborhoods as they left, determined to slow the Soviet advance by leveling their own city. The aerial bombardment reached its crescendo just after Easter. By April 30, even Hitler had given up, killing himself in his bunker in Berlin. But, in Breslau, the siege continued, grinding on, defying logic.

  Finally, on May 6, Breslau capitulated. Three quarters of the city had been razed in two-and-a-half months. A mere three days later, Europe’s long, wicked war came to an end. What was left of Breslau was plundered or burned by Soviet soldiers.

  Within months, the allies redrew the map of Europe. Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt plucked up Breslau like a chess piece. They flicked it over to Poland’s side, under the new name Wrocław (pronounced VROTZ-waf). Most of the remaining Germans were run out of town, and hundreds of thousands of traumatized Polish refugees flooded in to take their places—literally—moving into the formerly German houses, sometimes before they’d been abandoned by their owners.

  This was the city in which Tom lived. To understand it was to understand this dislocated history, warped by blank spots and confused identities. Over the centuries, the city had been called by more than fifty different names. People that lived there, as in much of Poland, never resided entirely in the present. The place had too many ghosts, too many parallel histories.

  The “pioneer” Poles, as they were called, gamely tried to reinvent their adopted city. They renamed Adolf Hitler Street after a Polish poet named Adam Mickiewicz; Herman Göring Stadium became Olympic Stadium. But they were living in a haunted place. Everywhere, in the vandalized statues and the faded outlines left by stripped-away swastikas, they saw reminders of their Nazi persecutors.

  The newcomers had precious little time to reflect on those ironies. Soon after the end of World War II, Poland fell under communist rule for forty years. Tens of thousands of Poles, including hundre
ds of priests and political activists, were imprisoned. Secret police infiltrated every neighborhood. In Wrocław, street names changed once again. One brand of oppression replaced another.

  the polish miracle

  The defenders of America’s mediocre education system, the ones who blamed poverty and dysfunction for our problems, talked as if America had a monopoly on trouble. Perhaps they had never been to Poland.

  It is difficult to summarize the tumult that occurred in Poland in the space of a half century. After the fall of communism in 1989, hyperinflation took hold; grocery store shelves were empty, and mothers could not find milk for their children. The country seemed on the verge of chaos, if not civil war. Yet Poland tumbled through yet another transformation, throwing open its institutions to emerge as a free-market democracy. The citizens of Wrocław renamed their streets for a third time. A small Jewish community even returned to the city.

  By 2010, when Tom arrived from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Poland had joined the European Union. The country still struggled with deprivation, crime, and pathology of all kinds, however. While Tom was there, the local soccer teams started playing in empty stadiums, silent but for the sounds of their feet kicking the ball. There’d been so much violence among the fans that they’d been banned from their own teams’ games.

  Nearly one in six Polish children lived in poverty, a rate approaching that of the United States, where one in five kids are poor. It is hard to compare relative levels of sadness, but the data suggested that poor children in Poland led jagged lives. In a United Nations comparison of children’s material well-being, Poland ranked dead last in the developed world.

  Like the United States, Poland was a big country where people distrusted the centralized government. Yet something remarkable had happened in Poland. It had managed to do what other countries could not. From 2000 to 2006, the average reading score of Polish fifteen-year-olds shot up twenty-nine points on the PISA exam. It was as if Polish kids had somehow packed almost three-quarters of a school year of extra learning into their brains. In less than a decade, they had gone from below average for the developed world to above. Over the same period, U.S. scores had remained flat.

  Tom was living in the transition that Finland and Korea had finished decades earlier. To see this change up close was the next best thing to time travel. Poland still had not joined the top tier of education superpowers. But, unlike the United States, it had dramatically improved its results in just a few years—despite crime, poverty, and a thousand good reasons for why it should fail. It was an unfinished narrative, but one that had turned, quite unexpectedly, in the direction of hope.

  from pennsylvania to poland

  I met Tom in the center of Wrocław at a grand old hotel where Adolf Hitler, Pablo Picasso, and Marlene Dietrich had all stayed. He wore jeans and a rumpled, button-down shirt, untucked, with the sleeves pushed up above his elbows. He was eighteen, a senior in high school. Since he’d arrived from Gettysburg, his Polish host mothers had been trying, without success, to fatten his skinny frame.

  We walked through the old city, and it looked exactly the way Tom had described it to me months before: an eclectic collage of baroque cathedrals, cobblestone streets, and large, brutalist Soviet-style apartments. In the medieval square, known as the Rynek, tourists drank Piast beer at outdoor cafés underneath a sixteenth century clock that tracked the phases of the moon. Babcias, Polish grandmothers, shuffled by, scarves tied under their chins, packages tucked under their arms. The Rynek had been rebuilt and restored many times. This version was slightly too resplendent, the paint a shade more vibrant than it should have been, but still magnificent in its scale and sweep.

  We stopped for coffee at Literatka, which represented, as much as anything, the reason Tom had left Pennsylvania. It was a small, cloistered café with smoke purling through the air. A few people sat alone, hunched over books or laptops. No one looked up when we entered.

  Tom guided me through the café with the pride other teenagers reserve for showing off their new car. The walls were lined with bookshelves, stacked up to the ceiling. Small volumes about chemistry leaned up against faded tomes about philosophy. When Tom had imagined Eastern Europe back in the States, this was the scene he had pictured. Exactly.

  It had been six months since his Polish math teacher had called him up to the chalkboard to solve a problem—and he’d failed. Since that day, his math teacher had not called on him again. He had, however, managed to learn Chopin (“Prelude in E Minor”) on the piano, just as he’d imagined he would. His Polish had gotten quite good, too. And even though he didn’t hear many references to Nabokov, he’d once overheard two old men arguing about philosophy at one of Literatka’s small, marble-topped tables. Tom had stared at them from behind his MacBook, delighted. “Nie rozumiesz filozofii!”(You don’t understand philosophy!) one man had yelled as he rose to leave. It was perfect.

  the bermuda triangle kids

  We left Literatka and walked toward Tom’s school, LO XIII, known as number thirteen. The ambiance changed abruptly as we walked. The high school was located beside a dodgy neighborhood known as Trójkạt Bermudzki, or the Bermuda Triangle. It had earned the nickname years ago, when outsiders who’d wandered into the neighborhood seemed to vanish, never to be heard from again. The crime rate had come down since then, but it remained a complicated place. Just a few weeks before, a friend of Tom’s had been mugged at knifepoint there, in broad daylight, as he’d walked home from the school.

  The streets in the Triangle were lined with tall, ornate row houses that had survived World War II but were now dilapidated tenements. Blackened statues stared down from the battered facades. The entryways stank of urine, and graffiti was scrawled across the pink, faded frescoes on the walls. Finland felt very far away.

  As we walked, a child ran past us, on his way to a small playground tucked behind a stretch of row houses. Until 2007, the spot had been a dirt field, and the children of the Triangle had played there then, too, lacking other options. When an excavator had arrived one day to turn the field into a parking lot, the children had protested, refusing to surrender their square patch of dirt. They’d made signs out of wooden planks: “We demand a playground!” “Excavator Go Away!” The leader among them, a sixteen-year-old named Krystek who would likely go far in life, had called the newspapers. The developers had backed down, agreeing to build a few parking spaces and a modest playground.

  The Triangle kids did not have easy lives. Some had fathers in prison; others had mothers who drank too much vodka. On some days, kids came to school tired and hungry. To an outsider, it didn’t look all that different from an American ghetto.

  Yet something had changed for the Triangle kids rather dramatically in the past decade, something that was hard to see on the street. These kids spent their days in an education system that had reimagined what was possible. The changes had not been in the margins, where most reforms happened everywhere else on the planet; they had broken through to the core, fundamentally altering the structure and substance of an education in Poland, giving these kids better odds than they would have encountered in many school districts within the United States, a much richer country. These kids still lived in the Triangle, but they were less likely, statistically speaking, to be lost forever.

  the alchemist

  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.

  By then, Poland’s thirty-eight million citizens had undergone years of economic shock therapy, designed to catapult the country into t
he West after the fall of communism. So far, deregulation and privatization had worked, making Poland one of the fastest growing economies in the world; unemployment had been steadily falling, along with inflation.

  Now the country was on the precipice yet again; without urgent social reforms, the health care, pension, and education systems could suck the life out of the Polish economy, sending inflation soaring again and jeopardizing Poland’s trajectory from a Communist backwater to a European power.

  Most damning of all, Polish adults did not have the skills to compete in the modern world. Only half of rural adults had finished primary school. The Poles would be relegated to doing the low-skilled, low-wage jobs that other Europeans did not want.

  Faced with this existential crisis, Handke studied the education systems of other countries, including the United States, where he had lived for two years. He traveled around Poland meeting with teachers, researchers, and politicians. In the spring of 1998, he and his boss, the new prime minister, Jerzy Buzek (another chemistry professor), announced a series of reforms the likes of which they might never have contemplated if they’d had more experience with the political sensitivities of education.

  “We have to move the entire system—push it out of its equilibrium so that it will achieve a new equilibrium,” Handke said. He was still teaching chemistry, this time to thirty-eight million people.

  To get to the new equilibrium, the country would enter what scientists called a transition phase. This phase would, as Handke put it, “give students a chance.” It had four main parts, laid out in a 225-page orange book that was distributed to schools all over the country. First, the reforms would inject rigor into the system. A new core curriculum would replace the old, dumbed-down mandates that had forced teachers to cover too many topics too briefly. The new program would lay out fundamental goals, but leave the details to the schools. At the same time, the government would require a quarter of teachers to go back to school to improve their own education.