The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  The questions varied slightly from country to country. Students from Mexico, for example, would not have been asked to measure the diameter of Lake Erie. Details like that didn’t matter very much, because PISA was not just a test of facts. It was a test of the ability to do something useful with facts.

  Finally, I announced my score to my chaperone, since there was no one else to tell. I had gotten just one wrong (a science question). “Good job!” she said generously. We both knew I had twenty-two more years of life experience than normal PISA takers, including four years of college.

  After I left the building, my sense of relief faded. My score, I realized, did not bode well for teenagers in my own country. This test was not easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. On one question that I’d gotten right, only 18 percent of American fifteen-year-olds were with me. There were other questions like that, which many or most of the Finns and the Koreans were getting right, just as I was, but most young Americans were getting wrong.

  PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate; in other words, the basic skills I needed to do my job and take care of my family in a world choked with information and subject to sudden economic change. What did it mean for a country if most of its teenagers did not do well on this test? Not all of our kids had to be engineers or lawyers, but didn’t all of them need to know how to think?

  I still didn’t believe PISA measured everything, but I was now convinced that it measured critical thinking. The American Association of University Professors had called critical thinking “the hallmark of American education—an education designed to create thinking citizens for a free society.” If critical thinking was the hallmark, why didn’t it show itself by age fifteen?

  It was hard to escape the conclusion that American kids and taxpayers had been squandering a lot of time and money. In 2009, U.S. teenagers ranked twenty-sixth on the PISA math test, seventeenth in science, and twelfth in reading. We ranked second in the world in just one thing, spending per pupil. (The only country that spent more was Luxembourg, a place with fewer people than Nashville, Tennessee.)

  The implications of that waste were painful to think about. Economists had found an almost one-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation’s long-term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic growth, of course, but the ability of a workforce to learn, think, and adapt was the ultimate stimulus package. If the United States had Finland’s PISA scores, GDP would be increasing at the rate of one to two trillion dollars per year.

  For students, PISA scores were a better predictor of who would go to college than report cards. Kids who scored poorly on the PISA reading test were far more likely to drop out of high school. PISA wasn’t measuring memorization; it was measuring aspiration.

  I left the test with an unsettled feeling. The exam and the one thousand pages of analysis that came with the PISA results sketched out a kind of treasure map of the world. This map could help me sort out which countries were teaching all of their children to think, and which were not.

  Most successful or improving countries seemed to fit into three basic categories: 1) the utopia model of Finland, a system built on trust in which kids achieved higher-order thinking without excessive competition or parental meddling; 2) the pressure-cooker model of South Korea, where kids studied so compulsively that the government had to institute a study curfew; and 3) the metamorphosis model of Poland, a country on the ascent, with about as much child poverty as the United States, but recent and dramatic gains in what kids knew.

  Still, PISA could not tell me how those countries got so smart, or what life was like for kids in those countries, day in and day out, compared to life in America. Children’s life chances depended on something beyond what any test could measure. Were Korean girls and boys driven to learn, or just succeed? There was a difference. Did Finnish teenagers have as much character as they had math skills? I had the data, and I needed the life.

  I set out to visit Finland, Korea, and Poland to see what the rest of the world could learn from the kids who lived there. I studied other places, too, places with sky-high scores like Shanghai, China, and Singapore. But I decided to focus most of all on developed democracies, countries where changes could not be made by fiat. I wanted to go where parents, kids, and teachers had to tolerate the vagaries of politics and the dull plod of compromise, and succeeded anyway. That was a magical thing that had to be seen to be believed.

  chapter 2

  leaving

  The Quest: To raise money to go to Finland, Kim held a bake sale outside a supermarket in her hometown of Sallisaw, Oklahoma.

  If the town of Sallisaw, Oklahoma, was famous for anything, it was for something the locals did not often discuss. In the 1939 book, The Grapes of Wrath, a fictional family called the Joads fled the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. When they drove off in search of better life, it was Sallisaw they were running from.

  “The ancient overloaded Hudson creaked and grunted to the highway at Sallisaw and turned west,” John Steinbeck wrote, “and the sun was blinding.”

  In early 2008, when Kim was twelve, Sallisaw was on the brink of the second worst depression in U.S. history. It wasn’t obvious, not right away anyway. Highway I-40 ran alongside the town, connecting Oklahoma to Arkansas. A chain of economy motels had opened up to cater to the truckers who came and went. In an empty field less than a mile from Kim’s house, Walmart had built a Superstore.

  Just down the road, a big Indian-owned casino drew a decent crowd at lunch hour. Older men in cowboy hats worked slot machines in the cool darkness. Retirees came for the three-dollar-and-fifty-cent lunch special. On the bathroom wall, a red plastic sharps container installed for diabetic gamblers held dozens of used insulin needles.

  Despite this modest commerce, Sallisaw was still a rural town, home to just under nine thousand people. The bank that Pretty Boy Floyd had robbed during the Depression was now a vacant lot. The train station, where his body had arrived in a pine box after he was shot dead, housed a small public library.

  Like Kim, most everyone in Sallisaw looked white, but people’s identity shifted depending on which form they were filling out. Half the kids had their Indian cards, identifying them as certified blood descendants of Native Americans. Even if you were only 1/512 Indian, you could get the card, and it came with certain benefits, like free school supplies or access to a Cherokee food pantry. About a quarter of the kids in the Sallisaw school district were officially classified as poor, so the Indian benefits were as much about sustenance as heritage.

  The schools in Sallisaw were considered just fine—not the best, nor the worst. A lot depended on where you were standing when you were doing the considering, however. On the state test, Kim and most of her classmates did all right, but that test was notoriously easy. On a more serious test used nationwide, just one in four Oklahoma eighth graders performed competently in math. (Sallisaw kids likely fared about the same, though not enough kids took the test at a local level to know for sure.)

  The farther away you got, the worse things looked. If states were countries, Oklahoma would have ranked about eighty-first in the world in math, or around the same level as Croatia and Turkey.

  Kim had lived in Sallisaw all her life. Each winter, she and her grandfather participated in the Christmas rodeo, steering antique tractors through the old downtown. She liked the slow rumble of the Model H tractor, the jangle of the marching bands behind her, and the way children shrieked when she threw candy into their outstretched hands.

  Still, like many twelve-year-olds, Kim felt like maybe she belonged somewhere else. She’d tried to succeed in Sallisaw in all the ways that mattered. Since she wasn’t very good at traditional sports, she’d started doing cheerleading in kindergarten. She’d posed straight-backed and smiling for pictures in her daffodil-yellow uniform. But, by third grade, she still could not do a cartwheel, so she quit.

  After that, she’d started dreaming about playing in the school marching b
and. That felt right: a path into the football stadium, the center of the town’s culture, without the forced smiles and front handsprings. She’d taken up the flute and practiced each day until her jaw ached. After two years, though, the notes still came out breathy and thin, and the band leader had assigned her to the fourth chair.

  What came more naturally to Kim was a curiosity about the world. She took her schoolwork seriously and felt connected to injustice in faraway places. In second grade, she’d watched a TV news segment about scientists using rats to detect bombs. It was the year after 9/11, and the country had just gotten its first Secretary of Homeland Security. The reporter explained that scientists were inserting electrodes in rats’ heads to make them go left or right or wherever humans dared not go, turning them into remote-controlled bomb detectors.

  Kim felt a prick of conscience. She had no particular affection for rats and understood that a rat’s life was less valuable than that of a human. But it seemed wrong to infiltrate the brain of any creature. It was creepy, possibly even immoral. She thought about her pet turtles and imagined if the government took over their brains, too. Where would it stop? Surely there was a better way to make animals go left or right. Maybe offer them a treat?

  Then Kim did something unusual for a child, or for an adult, for that matter. She took action to rectify a faraway problem that had little to do with her. That afternoon, she sat by the vending machine at her elementary school and wrote a letter to President George W. Bush detailing her concerns about the rat experiments. She’d made sure to be polite and respectful, looping her letters in careful penmanship in her spiral notebook.

  When two of her friends walked by, Kim told them the story of the rats. She asked if they wanted to sign the letter. Maybe they could start a petition, get the whole school to sign.

  After staring at her for a beat, the girls squealed.

  “Ewwwww! Gross, Kim! Who cares about rats?!”

  Their laughter echoed down the fluorescent-lit hallway. Then they made up a little song about Kim and her crusade. It was more of a jingle really; not very lyrically inspired. “Save the rats! Save the rats!” But it caught on anyway.

  Kim felt a space open up between her and her friends. She wouldn’t have minded if they’d thought the robo-rats were a good idea; what had upset her was that they didn’t seem to care at all. Why didn’t they care? At times like this, it felt like her friends were speaking another language, one she could imitate but never really understand.

  She stopped talking about the rats, and she pretended she didn’t hear the save-the-rats jingle when she walked down the hallway. Still, she sent the letter to the White House.

  an invitation

  One day, in seventh grade, Kim’s English teacher asked to speak with her in the hallway.

  “You’ve been invited to go to Oklahoma City and take the SAT,” her teacher told her. “It’s an honor.”

  Kim was confused; she was only twelve. She stared back at the teacher, her dark brown eyes awaiting more information. The teacher explained that Kim’s standardized test scores had qualified her and other students for something called the Duke University 7th Grade Talent Search. The scores wouldn’t count, but it might be an interesting experience.

  In the car on the way home from school, Kim handed her mom the pamphlet. “I want to go to Oklahoma City and take the SAT,” she announced. Looking over the top of her small wire-frame glasses, her mom stared at the information and then at her daughter. Oklahoma City was a three-hour drive from Sallisaw. But Kim hadn’t sounded this emphatic about anything in a while.

  Kim’s mom, Charlotte, was a teacher at the local elementary school. She was a petite woman with short, curly hair, an unabashed Oklahoma drawl, and a quick laugh. She doted on Kim, driving her to and from school each day so she didn’t have to take the bus. At their small ranch house, she lined the walls with pictures of Kim visiting the Oklahoma State Senate and Kim in her cheerleader uniform.

  Lately, she’d become worried about her daughter’s attitude. When she wasn’t alone, reading in her room, Kim spent a lot of time complaining about school and Sallisaw. Charlotte had several theories about this behavior. For one thing, she and her husband had been fighting too much. It was an old, worn fissure in the family, but as Kim had gotten older, she’d started to take sides, defending her mom against her dad and pleading with her to get divorced.

  Another theory was middle school. In sixth grade, Kim had come home with her first C. She’d said she was afraid to ask for help because her teacher got angry when kids didn’t understand. Charlotte eventually complained to the principal, but nothing happened. She made Kim ask for the teacher’s help anyway, and Kim went into school early for a series of strained tutoring sessions. By the end of the year, she’d decided that she was terrible at math and vowed to avoid it whenever possible.

  As a mother, Charlotte figured Kim was going through a phase. She was nearly a teenager after all; she was entitled to slam doors and play Avril Lavigne at excessive volume. But, as a teacher, she also knew that middle school was a kind of limbo for children, the years when American kids began to slip behind—and when it became obvious that some of them would eventually drop out altogether.

  This Kim, the one who wanted to drive three hours to take the SAT, reminded her of the old Kim, the one with plans. As she drove home, Charlotte silently added up the cost of going to Oklahoma City. They would probably need to spend the night in a hotel to get to the test on time, not to mention gas and food. As they pulled into the driveway, she made up her mind: “Okay, let’s go see how you do.”

  A few weeks later, at a mostly empty Oklahoma City high school, Kim sat down with a small group of kids to take the SAT. She answered the essay question as best she could, twisting her long brown hair round and round her index finger. She’d always liked to write, and people had told her she was good at it.

  When she got to the math section, though, the problems had letters in them where there should have been numbers. Maybe it was a misprint? She looked around; no one else seemed confused, so she focused on the word problems and guessed on the rest. By the end, she’d twirled her hair into a nest of knots. She had a grinding headache, like her brain had been slowly cooked over a low flame. She took four aspirin and slept the whole ride home.

  One month later, Kim’s teacher handed her an envelope with her SAT scores. When her mom picked her up from school, the two of them sat in the car and stared at the paper, trying to decipher what the numbers meant.

  “Oh, look here: It says you’ve done better than 40 percent of college-bound Oklahoma high-school seniors in critical reading!” her mom said.

  “What?” said Kim, grabbing the paper. “That can’t be right.”

  Kim read and reread the words. How could she have done better than any college-bound high school seniors, let alone 40 percent? What had those kids been doing for the past five years?

  “Wow, I am very disappointed in my state right now.”

  “Oh, Kim,” her mom said, rolling her eyes and putting the car into drive.

  But as they drove home, Kim had a second reaction. This was the first time she had ever won anything. It wasn’t a cheerleading trophy, but still. She looked down at the scores again. Then she turned to look out the window so her mom wouldn’t see her smile.

  Later that spring, Kim and her parents drove to Tulsa for a recognition dinner for the top-scoring SAT takers. Kim wore the yellow flowered sundress she’d gotten for the band recital. The Sequoyah County Times ran a short article, along with a picture of Kim and her silver medal. Usually, the newspaper ran stories about Sallisaw basketball and football players, the local celebrities; it felt strange to see her name in the same font.

  Back at home, Kim put the medal in her desk drawer. It made her nervous to have it out in the open. What if it was the last thing she won? Better to forget about the whole episode until she took the SAT for real in high school.

  But a few weeks later, a brochure arrived from
Duke’s summer camp for the gifted and talented. Her SAT scores had gotten their attention; the story was not over after all. She was invited to learn Shakespeare and study psychology in Durham, North Carolina.

  Reading the pamphlet, Kim felt disoriented, as if she’d stumbled upon a new planet. The program was billed as “intense and demanding,” equivalent to one year of high school in just three weeks. How was that possible? The camp looked like an unusual place: the kind of place where it was acceptable to care about things like Shakespeare and psychology.

  She ran to tell her mom; her mind buzzed with the idea of meeting people her own age who wanted to have serious conversations. “This is my chance to be normal. We can discuss things—real things!”

  Kim had never been good at small talk; it felt awkward and fake. Maybe this camp was a place where she could be herself, where she could go left or right at will, and let her questions come tumbling out into the open.

  But the program cost money and, besides, Charlotte was in no hurry to let her youngest child leave home for the summer. She said no.

  “at least they are trying.”

  Oklahoma, like the rest of America, had been trying to fix its schools for a long time. Between 1969 and 2007, the state had more than doubled the amount of money it spent per student in constant dollars. Over the years, Oklahoma had hired thousands of new teachers’ aides, granted badly needed raises to teachers, and lowered the student-to-teacher ratio. By 2011, over half the state budget went to education, but most of Oklahoma’s kids still could not demonstrate competency in math.

  To motivate kids and schools to do better, state lawmakers decided to create an incentive. In the late 1980s, they passed a law requiring students to take a test to graduate from high school. This kind of end-of-school test was standard in the countries that performed at the top of the world on the PISA test. It gave kids and teachers a clear mission, and it made a diploma mean something.