The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  A few years later, however, Oklahoma’s lawmakers delayed the test. It was a matter of compassion, or so they said. The lawmakers were worried too many students would fail. How would that look? Those kids would have attended four years of high school without getting a diploma. That didn’t feel right. The parents wouldn’t like it, either. So, the test was set aside, and the kids were left to fail a little later, in the real world, if they didn’t know enough math to take college classes for credit, or couldn’t get a job that paid above minimum wage.

  After that, the governor of Oklahoma tried a kinder, gentler strategy. He signed an executive order requiring kids to pass a series of literacy tests, starting in eighth grade. That meant they had four years to retake the tests if they failed. However, just before the new mandate could take effect, Oklahoma’s legislature scrapped this requirement, too. Lawmakers said they were worried about lawsuits from angry parents.

  The state’s history read like a slow-motion tug of war between hopes and fears, as if no one could agree what Oklahoma’s children were capable of doing—a lack of faith that surely trickled down to the students. “Kids have a really good detector about what adults take seriously and what counts,” as a 1997 teachers’ union report noted, “If they see that it doesn’t count, then they’re not going to do the hard work.”

  In 2005, Oklahoma tried yet again, passing a law to require students to show a mastery of English, algebra, geometry, biology, and U.S. history in order to receive a diploma. The state had seven years to phase in the requirement, gently and humanely. Kids who failed could retake the test up to three times in one year, or they could take alternate tests, like the SAT. They could even opt to do special projects demonstrating their competence in any subject that they’d failed.

  In 2011, as the graduation test was finally about to take effect, local newspapers warned that thousands of kids might not graduate. An Oklahoma School Boards Association official predicted that the results would be “devastating.” One superintendent told the Tulsa World that the graduating class of seniors might be known as the “lost generation.” A Republican legislator introduced a bill to delay the test for two more years.

  When I first visited Kim’s hometown, the young new superintendent of Sallisaw gave me a tour of the brick, one-story high school, past the orange and yellow lockers lining the cinderblock hallways. The last high school had been built by WPA workers during the Depression. This one, opened in 1987, looked like many American high schools: institutional but tidy, with blocks of color and light. The basketball court was the school’s jewel. The school’s black-diamond mascot, gleaming on the hardwood floor, dated back to the 1920s, when coal mining was a major local industry.

  Scott Farmer had just been appointed the town’s first new superintendent in twenty years. He had short brown hair and a boyish face. The state of Oklahoma had 530 superintendents like him, each with their own fiefdom. There were about as many superintendents in Oklahoma as there were members of Congress for the entire country. This tradition of hyperlocal control, hard-wired for inefficiency, hinted at one reason that the United States spent so much more than other countries on education.

  Farmer made about $100,000 per year, which made him one of the top earners in Sallisaw. He had an assistant superintendent, too, along with eight director-level managers and a school board. It was quite an operation for a district that included just four schools. But it was hardly unusual. Compared to the rest of the state, in fact, Sallisaw was one of the more efficient school districts in Oklahoma.

  When I asked Farmer to describe Sallisaw High School’s biggest challenge, he talked mostly about parental involvement, lamenting the low turnout for parent-teacher conferences. “I’m just not convinced that parents quit caring,” Farmer said, shaking his head, “but that’s something we need to work on—reminding them of the importance of lifelong learning.”

  I’d heard this argument often in U.S. schools, not just in Oklahoma. It seemed to be common knowledge that parents were AWOL in our schools. Even other parents thought so. In a survey about the best ways to improve education, most American adults cited more involved parents.

  Reality was more complicated, however. Whatever U.S. parents were doing wrong, they were in fact showing up at their children’s schools more often than they had in twenty years. In 2007, nine out of ten parents said they’d attended at least one parent-teacher conference or school meeting that school year. Some were coming to school for disciplinary meetings—uncomfortable encounters with assistant principals and stone-faced kids. But whether they came for positive reasons or negative, American parents were not as hands-off as most of us seemed to think.

  So, what explained the disconnect? It might have depended on how you defined involved. When I talked to Ernie Martens, Sallisaw High School’s principal for the past decade, he had no complaints about parental involvement. Sure, parent-teacher conferences weren’t as well attended as they were in the younger grades, but that was okay, he said. High-school students didn’t need that kind of handholding. Instead, about three-quarters of the Sallisaw parents got involved in some other way, usually with the football booster club, the basketball booster club, or the Future Farmers of America chapter. Only about one in four of his parents were what he would consider uninvolved.

  In fact, Principal Martens said his biggest problem was not parental involvement at all. His biggest problem was expectations; they were, he said, too high.

  Politicians and so-called reformers expected too much from his students. “We have a lot of our kids who come from dysfunctional homes,” he said. “We’re the only normal thing they have in their life.” It was all well and good to talk about high expectations in political speeches, but he lived in the real world, in a part of the country where some parents read to their children, and some never did. In his world, some mothers thought breakfast was a bag of potato chips, and some fathers hid methamphetamines in the backyard barbecue.

  In Sallisaw, nearly one in four students failed to graduate high school within four years. Martens and Farmer had different narratives about why that was, but they were both looking in the same direction. Neither saw education itself as the primary problem or the main solution. Both pointed to external forces: negligent parents, social ills, or out-of-touch government expectations. That, too, was a common refrain among educators all over the United States. Whatever the problem, it was, it seemed, largely outside their control.

  And they were right, of course. A long list of grim factors lay beyond their reach, from how much kids slept to how much television they watched. The stress that kids endured in many families taxed their bodies and minds, doing damage that no school could undo.

  The only problem with this narrative was that it was habit forming. Once you start locating the source of your problems outside your own jurisdiction, it is hard to stop, even when the narrative is wrong.

  For example: Sallisaw had plenty of good students, too. Other than the destitute and the dropouts, Sallisaw High School had its success stories, like every town. About half the kids who graduated from Sallisaw enrolled in public colleges and universities in Oklahoma. Others went to out-of-state colleges or looked for jobs.

  What happened to these success stories after they left? Their colleges tested their basic skills and found them wanting. More than half these students were promptly placed into remedial classes at Oklahoma public colleges. That meant that some of Sallisaw’s best students were paying good money for college, often in the form of student loans, but they weren’t getting college credit.

  These young men and women had been told their whole lives to get a high-school diploma and go to college; that was the dream. But when they got there, they were stalled in limbo, redoing algebra or English as if they’d never left high school. It wasn’t hard to understand why, as their debt mounted, many quit college altogether. One out of two Oklahoma university students failed to graduate within six years.

  I asked Principal Martens about all the Sall
isaw alumni who were retaking math or English. “That really doesn’t bother me,” he said, “because at least they are trying.”  The main goal was to go to college. Whether his graduates succeeded there was out of his control, or so it seemed.

  The fact that those kids had spent four years in his school preparing to get to college—and that he’d given them a diploma that was supposed to mean they were ready—did not seem relevant.

  “rich people do that. we don’t do that.”

  It was July Fourth weekend, the year after she took the SATs, and Kim and her mom were visiting Kim’s older half-sisters in Texas. It was too hot to do anything ambitious, so they stayed close to the air conditioning, playing Scrabble and petting the dogs. When her mom went outside to smoke a cigarette, Kim told her sister Kate she wanted to leave Sallisaw.

  “I’d like to live somewhere where people are curious.”

  Kate listened and nodded. She was a woman of action. She worked a retail job, but on her days off, she liked to jump out of planes and explore caves. In her opinion, if Kim wanted to go away, she should think big.

  “Why don’t you become an exchange student?”

  “You mean like go to another country?” In her head, Kim imagined a kid with floppy hair and leather flip-flops, backpacking around Europe.

  “Why not?”

  Kim laughed. “Rich people do that. We don’t do that.”

  It wasn’t until Kim went home to Sallisaw that she thought about the idea again. If Kate thought she could go to another country, maybe it wasn’t a totally absurd idea. She Googled “exchange programs” and spent an hour clicking on random countries, imagining herself in each one.

  She learned that one or two thousand American high school students went abroad each year. She found AFS, one of the largest exchange programs, by reading the blog of an American girl posted in Sweden. Kim liked the story of AFS. It had started out as the American Field Service, an ambulance convoy set up by American volunteers to help ferry wounded soldiers to safety during the World Wars. After liberating concentration camps at the end of World War II, the ambulance drivers were tired of carnage. They decided to reinvent the group, dedicating it to building trust between countries through cultural exchanges.

  The more Kim read, the less ridiculous the whole idea sounded. She decided to bring the idea up to her mother. But, this time, she tried a new strategy.

  “I am applying to go on an exchange program,” she said one evening, keeping her voice level and free from doubt. “I want to live in Egypt for a year.”

  Charlotte looked up from her tea. “Wow, how exciting,” she said, trying to act like this was not a completely insane notion. Kim had never left the country, and neither had she.

  The obvious response was no, just like it was when Kim had asked to go to Shakespeare summer camp at Duke. But, this time, she tried a new approach.

  Charlotte and Kim’s dad had gotten divorced not long before. It was a long time coming, and Kim said she was relieved by the split. Still, Charlotte was trying to handle her daughter with care. So, if Kim wanted to rebel by vowing to go far away, she would not stop her; she would just wear her out.

  “Egypt sounds a little unsafe,” Charlotte said in her most reasonable voice. “Why don’t you pick another country and write me up a little report on why you want to go there?”

  “Okay, fine,” Kim answered, with a tight smile. Then she got up and walked toward the extra bedroom, the one with the computer in it.

  Charlotte felt a sliver of anxiety. What had she just done? “And, Kim,” she called out after her, “nowhere with sand!”

  At the computer, Kim contemplated her remaining options. She didn’t want to go to France or Italy. She wanted to be original, so she started reading about places she knew nothing about, obscure countries with languages she’d never heard and food she’d never eaten.

  One day, she read about Finland—a snow-castle country with white nights and strong coffee. She read that the Finns liked heavy metal music and had a dry sense of humor. Every year, the country hosted something called the Air Guitar World Championship. That sounded promising—a place that didn’t take itself too seriously.

  Then she read that Finland had the smartest kids in the world. Could that be right? Teenagers in Finland did less homework than Americans, but scored at the top of the world on international tests, which was weird, since Finland had been until fairly recently a largely illiterate farming and logging nation.

  Nothing about it made much sense. Sure, Finland was a small country full of white people, but not even the smallest, whitest states in America could compete with Finland’s education results. Not even tiny New Hampshire, which was 96 percent white and had the highest median income in the nation and one of the lowest child poverty rates. Why hadn’t New Hampshire done what Finland had done? Apparently, every kid in Finland got a decent education, regardless of how much money their parents made. It sounded like upside-down world in every way.

  Kim had found her destination. If Finland was the smartest country in the world, that’s where she wanted to go. She wrote up a report for her mom, as agreed. She emphasized the education angle; her mom was a teacher after all, so she would find this argument hard to refute. She added blurbs about the population (a little over 5 million), the religion (mostly Lutheran), and the food (fish, dark rye bread, and lots of berries with mystical names like arctic brambles and lingonberries).

  One fall morning, she handed the Finland report to her mom. Charlotte took it and promised to read it. Then they left for Sallisaw High School, where Kim was now a freshman. Her mom dropped her off by the flagpole and watched as Kim walked slowly into the orange brick building.

  Like many places in the United States, Oklahoma’s curriculum was not rigorous by international standards. The state’s science standards ranked among the least challenging in the nation, especially at the high school level. The word evolution did not appear anywhere in the thirty-one-page document, for example. Kim was taking biology that year. She spent the class period that day copying terms and definitions into her notebook. She wasn’t sure why; maybe copying information from one piece of paper to another would help her memorize the information, maybe not. Whatever the case, the time passed slowly.

  Kim’s favorite class was English, which Oklahoma and most states took more seriously. She was reading Tuesdays with Morrie, and she loved it. The best days were the days her teacher pushed the desks into a circle and everyone talked about the book.

  Her most dreaded subject, by far, was math. After the misery of sixth grade, she had decided that math was not for her; she just wanted to get through the requirements that she needed to graduate.

  When Kim walked into Algebra I that day, her teacher was talking to the football players in her class. They had a lot to talk about since he was also a football coach and a former star football player at the same school. He was a nice guy, but, like most everyone in Sallisaw, he seemed to care more about football than Kim did.

  She stared out the window at the American flag waving in the breeze. She wondered if her Finnish teachers would be different. She had read that being a teacher in Finland was prestigious, like being a doctor here. That was hard to imagine. She wished her mom was treated like a doctor at the elementary school where she taught.

  She knew Finland didn’t have American football; would they be obsessed with ice hockey instead? Would they spend so much class time on ESPN.com?

  That afternoon, when her mom picked her up, Kim slid into the Hyundai Sonata’s passenger seat and tried to refrain from asking if she had read the Finland report yet.

  “How was your day?” Charlotte asked.

  “I feel bored out of my skull,” Kim answered, looking straight ahead.

  Charlotte let that go. She had read the report, and she had an ultimatum for Kim.

  “If you get all the papers filled out, and you raise all the money, then you can go to Finland.”

  Kim turned toward her mom. “It costs
ten thousand dollars.”

  “I know.”

  beef jerky dreams

  Kim posted the pictures of her flute on eBay and set the price at eighty-five dollars. It was after midnight in early October 2009, and her mom had long since gone to sleep. Kim had done this once before with her old dresses from middle school; she’d gotten no bids at all. A humiliating defeat. This time, she tried not to get her hopes up. She stared at the screen for a while, unblinking, then made herself go to sleep.

  Two days later, Kim logged into eBay. Her eyes widened. Offers had come in from around the world, including a top bid from the United Arab Emirates for $100. Her flute was wanted. She yelped and jumped up out of her chair, breaking into a little dance on the carpet. Her flute would travel farther than she ever had. She started looking for a box. Honestly, she couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

  That fall, Kim spent all of her free time raising money for Finland. The rational part of her brain thought she would never get to $10,000, but the rest of her was desperate enough to try. She bought a case of beef jerky online and sold it door to door. Total profit: $400. Not bad.

  She baked Rice Krispies Treats all night long and sold them at a table outside of Marvin’s grocery store. Profit: $100. At that rate, she’d have to hold a bake sale every three days to get to Finland.

  She tried the Internet, which everyone knew was the best place to find easy money in twenty-first century America. She created a blog, asking strangers to sponsor her quest: “I understand our economy’s down right now, but I’ll gladly accept even the smallest amount of money,” she wrote. “I hope you’ll part with just a few dollars for some girl with a crazy dream.” To show people where Sallisaw was, she included a map of the I-40 corridor.