The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  Meanwhile, Korean politicians vowed anew to treat the country’s education fever, as it was called. Under Lee’s tenure, the ministry had hired and trained 500 admissions officers to help the country’s universities select applicants the way U.S. universities did, which is to say, based on something other than just test scores.

  Almost overnight, however, new hagwons cropped up to help students navigate the new alternative admissions scheme. Hundreds of students were accused of lying about their hometowns to get preferential spots reserved for underprivileged rural families. One parent fabricated a divorce to take advantage of a preference for single-parent children. The fever raged on.

  The country’s leaders worried that unless the rigid hierarchy started to nurture more innovation, economic growth would stall and fertility rates would continue to decline as families felt the pressure of paying for all that tutoring.

  To retroactively improve public schools, so that parents would feel less need for hagwons, Lee tried to improve teaching. Korea already had highly educated elementary school teachers, relative to the United States and most countries. Korean elementary teachers came from just a dozen universities that admitted the top 5 percent of applicants, and they were well trained. Middle school teachers-in-training in Korea performed at the top of the world on a mathematics test administered in six countries, trouncing future teachers in the United States.

  Korea’s high-school teachers were not as impressive, however. During a shortage of teachers decades earlier, the government had made a fateful mistake, allowing too many colleges to train secondary teachers. Those 350 colleges had lower standards than the elementary training programs. Like the more than 1,000 teacher-training colleges in the United States, the Korean programs churned out far more teachers-to-be than the country needed. Teacher preparation was a lucrative industry for colleges, but the lower standards made the profession less prestigious and less effective. Because, as one Korean policymaker famously said, “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”

  To elevate the profession, Lee rolled out a new teacher evaluation scheme to give teachers useful feedback and hold them accountable for results. Under the new system, teachers were evaluated in part by their own students and their parents, who filled out online surveys, as well as other teachers, an approach meant to approximate the 360-degree review used in many businesses. (Unlike the model used by many U.S. districts, Korea’s teacher evaluation scheme did not include student test-score growth; officials I talked to seemed to want to use this data, but they didn’t know how to assign accountability, since so many students had multiple teachers, including outside tutors, instructing them in the same subjects.)

  Under Korea’s new rules, low-scoring teachers were supposed to be retrained. But, as in U.S. districts where reformers have tried imposing similar strategies, teachers and their unions fought back, calling the evaluations degrading and unfair. Pretty policies on paper turned toxic in practice. As a form of protest, some Korean teachers gave all their peers the highest possible reviews. In 2011, less than 1 percent of Korea’s teachers were actually sent for retraining, and some simply refused to go.

  After his first year in office, one of Lee’s biggest accomplishments was that spending on hagwons had declined. The figures went down just 3.5 percent, but he considered it a major victory nonetheless.

  Listening to Lee, I realized that the rest of the world could learn as much from what worked in Korea as from what didn’t work. First, countries could change. That was hopeful. Korea had raised its expectations for what kids could do despite epidemic poverty and illiteracy. Korea did not wait to fix poverty before radically improving its education system, including its teacher colleges. This faith in education and people had catapulted Korea into the developed world.

  Second, rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn’t take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work—not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder, and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil.

  As Eric had noticed on his first day, Korean schools existed for one and only one purpose: so that children could master complex academic material. It was an obvious difference. U.S. schools, by contrast, were about many things, only one of which was learning. This lack of focus made it easy to lose sight of what mattered most.

  For example, U.S. schools spend a relatively large sum of money on sports and technology, instead of, say, teachers’ salaries. When I surveyed 202 exchange students from fifteen countries, they overwhelmingly agreed that they saw more technology in U.S. schools. Even students from high-performing countries said they saw more technology in their U.S. classrooms than back home. Seven out of ten American teenagers who had been abroad agreed. Americans had tricked-out classrooms with interactive white boards, high-tech projectors, and towers of iPads. However, there was little evidence that these purchases had paid off for anyone other than the technology vendors themselves.

  Third, and this was Lee’s most immediate problem: In places with extreme levels of student drive, winning the competition could become the goal in and of itself. Families and kids could lose sight of the purpose of learning and fixate obsessively on rankings and scores. In some high-income American neighborhoods, kids experienced a version of this compulsion, working day and night to get into an Ivy League college and prove themselves perfect on paper, perhaps only later wondering why. This obsession remained relatively mild in the United States, as shown by the persistently low math performance of even the wealthiest U.S. kids and the fact that only 15 percent of teenagers took afterschool lessons in the United States (a rate below average for the developed world). However, a small number of kids (many of them Asian-American) lived their own Westernized version of the Iron Child competition.

  Finally, it was clear that the real innovation in Korea was not happening in the government or the public schools. It was happening in Korea’s shadow education system—the multimillion-dollar afterschool tutoring complex that Lee was trying to undermine. I realized that, if I wanted to see what a truly free-market education system looked like, I would have to stay up late.

  Personally, Lee thought Finland was a far better model than his own country. After all, Finland spent less per pupil on education, and just one in ten kids took afterschool lessons. In Korea, seven in ten took extracurricular lessons. Both countries scored at the top of the world on PISA, but, however you looked at it, Finnish children got a far better deal. There was more than one way to become a superpower, Lee warned; take care to choose the high road.

  claustrophobic in korea

  After visiting the minister in Seoul, I took a high-speed train to Busan, the booming beachfront city on the southern coast of Korea. Eric offered to give me a tour. He showed up at the lobby of my hotel in his white-rimmed sunglasses and a messenger bag, eager to please.

  “Do you feel like Korean food or are you already sick of it? Have you had Korean pizza? It’s crazy! Or we could do sushi.”

  Eric loved Korea. As we walked through the clamor of the shopping stalls, he pointed out socks with Barack Obama’s face on them and made me try his favorite yogurt drink. We made a special stop at a gift store so he could show me the infamous napping pillows—demonstrating how they slipped over the wrist for effortless comfort.

  “I adapt really well to places,” he told me. He had diligently worked on his Korean and could now navigate gracefully through restaurants and casual conversations. He ordered sweet-potato pizza for both of us. By this time, he’d spent a night at a Buddhist temple high in the mountains; he’d learned Taekwondo; on one harrowing evening at a fish market, he’d even forced himself to eat a live baby octopus, wrapped around his chopstick.

  Eric appreciated the weirdness of Korea and the warmth of Koreans. Really, the only problem was school. He had tried to keep his mind open, but he dreaded those days at Namsan, sit
ting for six hours with students too stressed—or exhausted—to talk for more than five minutes between classes, then taking the bus home alone.

  It wasn’t that Eric couldn’t be alone. In fact, he had a lot of experience with isolation. He’d spent years as a closeted gay teenager in America. He knew about loneliness.

  But he had discovered that the pressure to conform extended well beyond sexuality in Korea. Teenagers were in all kinds of closets, sometimes literally, locked into small, airless spaces, studying for the test. “The students I’ve talked to despise the system,” he said, shaking his head. “They absolutely loathe it.”

  Eric admired one part of the Korean system—the high expectations that everyone had for what kids could do. He was curious about the hagwons, where his classmates said they learned so much. However, he was learning that the top of the world could be a lonely place, and the important question was not just which kids lived there, but what they had gone through to get there.

  chapter 4

  a math problem

  From Pennsylvania to Poland: Tom outside his high school in Wrocław.

  Five thousand miles away, Tom’s teacher asked him a question.

  It was his first day of school in Poland. He’d sat quietly in the back, trying to make himself small and unremarkable. But now she stared back at him, waiting. So he repeated the one sentence he knew by heart:

  Nie mówię po polsku. I don’t speak Polish.

  Then he smiled, the clueless exchange student. This tactic had worked well for him so far.

  Tom would turn eighteen in two weeks. He had a perpetual five o’clock shadow and dark eyes, the face of a young man hovering precariously atop a boy’s body. When he smiled, flashing the dimples he’d inherited from his mother, he looked at least three years younger. American teachers had accepted Tom’s excuses, generally speaking.

  Yet this teacher spoke back to him, repeating the question in English.

  “Could you please solve the problem?” She held out a piece of chalk and motioned for Tom to come to the front of the room. It was math class, and she’d written a polynomial problem on the board.

  Tom got up, heart surging, and walked slowly to the board. The other twenty-two Polish students watched the American, wondering what would happen.

  The story of Poland, a symphony of suffering and redemption, will come later in this book. But, for now, suffice to say that Tom found himself in a brooding country with a complicated past, which was precisely why he’d wanted to live there.

  In America, Tom had lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War. Some fifty-one thousand men were wounded or killed on the hills of Tom’s hometown. Thousands of tourists stalked the empty, silent battlefields each year, looking for relics or ghosts or a lingering sensation of some kind.

  However, since the 1800s, Gettysburg had become much less interesting, in Tom’s opinion. It was a rural village two hours and a world away from Washington, D.C. As a little boy, Tom had no interest in Union or Confederate toy soldiers, the kind sold by the sackful in the town souvenir shops. He played with World War II soldiers instead.

  As a teenager, Tom played the cello, listened to Sonic Youth, and watched Woody Allen movies. He occupied himself in the margins of the high school culture, which revolved around sports and the Future Farmers of America. In August, the Gettysburg Warriors football team held an all-you-can-eat pig roast to kick off the season. The local coffee house closed before the sun had set.

  Early on, Tom had learned that the world outside of his home could be a complicated place. His father was a family law attorney, facilitating divorces and waging custody battles. His mother was the town’s chief public defender. She worked out of a windowless basement office, representing Gettysburg’s least popular residents, including a young man facing the death penalty for killing a wildlife conservation officer.

  To escape the strain of their jobs, Tom’s parents read. They read the way other families fished or watched television, together but apart. On Friday nights, they took Tom and his two brothers to Barnes & Noble, where they would wander off in their separate directions to choose their own adventures; on rainy Saturdays, they might all be found reading, sometimes in different rooms. The only noise was the sound of the rain.

  Tom’s two older brothers read leisurely, but Tom read hungrily, as if in search of a metaphor that he could never quite find. In the summer, his mom would see him in the backyard reading for hours on end. One winter, he read nothing but Anton Chekhov. He read The Pianist—twice.

  For his senior year of high school, Tom had decided to exchange Gettysburg for one of his old-world novels. He’d wanted to go to Eastern Europe because he’d thought it would be romantic to live somewhere where people knew the names Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. He hadn’t traveled much, but he believed in the promise of a faraway place, one that could sustain the kind of romance he’d read about and conjured in his head. He’d imagined himself learning to play Chopin in the homeland of Chopin.

  And there he was, in Poland at last. Everything was more or less going according to his plan. The thing is: When Tom walked to the front of that classroom in Poland that day, he was carrying an American burden no one could see. Despite his Yo La Tengo T-shirt and his winter of Chekhov, Tom was in at least one way a prototypical American teenager.

  Tom was not good at math.

  He’d started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn’t understood one lesson, and then another and another. He was too embarrassed to ask for help. He hadn’t wanted to admit that he wasn’t as smart as other kids. Then he’d gotten a zero on a pre-algebra quiz in eighth grade. In other classes, a bad grade could be overcome. But, in math, each lesson built on what happened before. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to catch up. It felt like he was getting dumber, and it was humiliating. The next year, he got an F in math.

  Math eluded American teenagers more than any other subject. When people talked about the United States’ mediocre international scores, they were not really talking about reading. American teenagers scored twelfth in reading on PISA, which was a respectable performance, above average for the developed world. There was still far too big a gap between privileged kids and low-income kids, but the overall average was decent.

  In math, the average score placed the United States twenty-sixth in the world, below Finland (third), Korea (second), and Poland (nineteenth). American teenagers did poorly in science, too, but their math results were, statistically speaking, the most ominous.

  Math had a way of predicting kids’ futures. Teenagers who mastered higher-level math classes were far more likely to graduate from college, even when putting aside other factors like race and income. They also earned more money after college.

  Why did math matter so much? Some reasons were practical: More and more jobs required familiarity with probability, statistics, and geometry. The other reason was that math was not just math.

  Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking. There is a right answer; there are rules that must be followed. More than any other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the language of logic helps to embed higher-order habits in kids’ minds: the ability to reason, for example, to detect patterns and to make informed guesses. Those kinds of skills had rising value in a world in which information was cheap and messy.

  America’s math handicap afflicted even its most privileged kids, who were more privileged than the most advantaged kids in most other countries, including Poland. Our richest kids attended some of the most well-funded, high-tech schools in the world. Yet these kids, including the ones who went to private school, still ranked eighteenth in math compared to the richest kids in other countries. They scored lower than affluent kids in Slovenia and Hungary and tied with the most privileged kids in Portugal.

  Our poorest kids did even worse, relatively speaking, coming in twenty-seve
nth compared to the poorest kids in other developed countries, far below the most disadvantaged kids in Estonia, Finland, Korea, Canada, and Poland, among many other nations.

  Why weren’t our kids learning this universal language of logic?

  As I traveled around the world on this quest, I kept encountering this puzzle. Again and again, the data revealed a startling math deficiency in the United States. Like a lack of nutrition, it started when children were small and took a cumulative toll. Studies had shown that American third graders were being asked easier math questions that required simpler responses than children the same age in places like Hong Kong. By the time our kids graduated from high school, less than half were prepared for freshman-year college math. If our international performance was the mystery, then math held the most important clues.

  That morning, in Wrocław, Poland, Tom picked up the chalk. All his old feelings of incompetence came swirling back. He started writing. He knew he could do this; the problem wasn’t that hard, and he was older than most of the kids in the class.

  Just then, the chalk snapped in half. He let the piece fall and continued writing. But something was wrong; he must have missed a step. Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working, and he knew it. He kept writing anyway. Behind him, one of the Polish students giggled. His hands felt damp with sweat. Finally, the teacher spoke.

  “Does anyone else want to try?”

  Tom shuffled back to his seat. She didn’t call on him again.

  As the semester went on, Tom noticed differences between his math class in Poland and his math class in Pennsylvania. Back in America, Tom and all his classmates had used calculators. In his Polish math class, calculators were not allowed. Tom could tell the kids were doing a lot of the math in their minds. They had learned tricks that had become automatic, so their brains were freed up to do the harder work. It was the difference between being fluent in a language and not.