The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  After the first test, the teacher announced the scores in front of the class, so everyone could hear. As a new exchange student, Tom had been exempt from the test himself. But listening to the grade announcements, he felt intensely uncomfortable. Like Eric in Korea, he couldn’t imagine such a public reckoning in his American classroom.

  Nor could he imagine everyone doing so poorly: In Poland, the lowest grade was always one, and the highest was five. After each test, he waited to see if anyone would get a five; no one ever did. No one seemed surprised or shattered, either. They shouldered their book bags and moved on to the next class. He tried to imagine no one ever getting an A in Gettysburg. Would they give up, or would they try harder?

  Kids in Poland were used to failing, it seemed. The logic made sense. If the work was hard, routine failure was the only way to learn. “Success,” as Winston Churchill once said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

  Tom had failed in math, too, back in eighth grade in Pennsylvania. But he hadn’t experienced that failure as normal or acceptable. He’d experienced it as a private trauma. Failure in American schools was demoralizing and to be avoided at all costs. American kids could not handle routine failure, or so adults thought.

  Like many young people, the lesson Tom had learned from his failure was that he wasn’t good at math, and that he should stay away from it whenever possible. He didn’t know, back in high school, how central math was to philosophy and music, two subjects he loved. He didn’t know that math could be cosmically beautiful, and it was something he could master with hard work, time, and persistence, just the way he’d mastered Chekhov.

  the country of minnesota

  Of the three American students I followed, Eric was the only one who did not loathe math. Coincidence or not, Eric’s home state of Minnesota was one of only two states that came close to achieving world-class math performance. Roughly speaking, Minnesota ranked below just a dozen other countries (including Canada, Korea, and Finland) in math proficiency; only Massachusetts did better in the United States.

  When Eric arrived in Korea, he had a solid math background. There were lots of reasons for this: One might have been that his timing was good. Had he been born earlier, things might have turned out differently.

  In 1995, Minnesota fourth graders placed below average for the United States on an international math test. Despite being a mostly white, mostly middle-class state, Minnesota was not doing well in math. When Eric started kindergarten two years later, however, the state had smarter and more focused math standards. When he was eleven, Minnesota updated those standards again, with an eye toward international benchmarks. By the time he went to high school, his peers were scoring well above average for the United States and much of the world. In 2007, Minnesota elementary students rocked a major international math test, performing at about the same level as kids in Japan.

  What was Minnesota doing that other states were not? The answer was not mystical. Minnesota had started with a relatively strong education system. Then they’d made a few pragmatic changes, the kind of common sense repairs you would make if you believed math was really, truly important—and that all kids were capable of learning it.

  First, Minnesota officials agreed on a single set of clear, targeted standards. That one change was radical. With that, the state overcame the most glaring problem with America’s fragmented system. Until then, Minnesota teachers—like teachers nationwide—had been buffeted by clashing guidance about what to teach. Many American teachers had to contend with both state and local district standards, which frequently conflicted with one another. Then, each spring, teachers had to prepare kids for standardized tests, which often had no connection to the various standards or curriculum. Caught in a web of criss-crossing mandates, they had to choose which to ignore and obey.

  The purpose of American education was muddled in all kinds of ways. The farther away I got, the more obvious that truth became. There was no better metaphor for this mission confusion than the American textbook.

  American teachers taught with textbooks that were written to appease thousands of districts and many states all at once, as education researcher William Schmidt has documented in detail. That meant that American textbooks tended to be far too long—covering (and repeating) way too many topics in too little depth. Internationally, the average eighth grade math textbook was 225 pages long; in the United States, eighth grade math texts averaged 800 pages. That was about 300 pages longer than all thirteen volumes of Euclid’s Elements.

  America’s tradition of local control was a nightmare for teachers. They were left to pick and choose between clashing standards as best they could, repeating subjects again and again under the direction of repetitive, sprawling textbooks. Some of the kids who came to them each fall had covered prime numbers; some had not. It was hard to predict.

  The end result was that American students ended up learning about, say, fractions every single year, from first to eighth grade, while their peers in smarter countries covered fractions in grades three through six. In a majority of states, American kids learned decimals for six years, until they were nearly catatonic with boredom, while kids in the world’s education superpowers covered decimals for three years and moved on. That meant that all the time American kids spent going over—and over—fractions and decimals could not be spent learning other things.

  It also meant that different algebra classes within the same school or district covered wildly different material, depending on a given teacher’s sampling of the textbook. Geometry textbooks were particularly arbitrary; two American geometry books typically had next to nothing in common with each other. This partly explained the roller coaster of data coming out of schools around the country, the big and unexplained differences in what kids knew.

  In Minnesota, a coherent, clear set of standards, which focused on a few important topics each year, rather than dozens, had helped repair this damage. At the same time, elementary students across the state started spending sixty minutes per day on math, up from thirty minutes in 1995. Something else had happened, too. The new standards not only covered fewer topics in more depth; they featured more challenging material. Eric may have been bored at times, but he was nowhere near as bored as he would have been in most other places in the United States. His state had intentionally modeled its math education after the best practices used in the world’s education superpowers, and succeeded.

  The year that Eric was in Korea, the rest of the United States was considering doing what Minnesota had done. In defiance of a long history of incoherent standards and irrational localism, forty-five states agreed to adopt new, more rigorous standards as to what kids should know in math and reading. Known as the Common Core, they were modeled after standards in the education superpowers. Kids would no longer have to dabble in fractions for eight years; they would dispense with the subject in five years, starting a couple years later than before but going into more depth.

  Even still, critics attacked the Common Core Standards as a violation of local authority; others pointed out that if teachers didn’t have the math skills or training to bring the standards to life, they would just be words on a piece of paper. Ironically, Minnesota officials declined to adopt the standards, choosing to continue with the ones the state already had in place. Texas, Virginia, and a handful of other states did the same. It remained to be seen if America would take this one obvious step toward world-class schools or reverse course yet again.

  Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something was very different about how math was taught in Korea. Something that not even Minnesota had figured out.

  The class was ostensibly a geometry class. Since he’d already taken geometry and graduated from high school, Eric understood most of it. He noticed, however, that the students were learning geometry in a totally different way from how he had learned it.

  The teacher wove trigo
nometry and calculus into the lesson, following the thread of the lesson across disciplines, as though geometry were just one solar system in a larger universe of math. Together, the different disciplines could solve problems in the real world, where mathematics was not boxed into neat categories. Geometry was the study of shapes, after all, and calculus was the study of change. To figure out how shapes behaved when they changed—perhaps to design a video game—you needed both.

  Eric felt himself waking up. He had not known geometry could be so interesting. Although he’d always done well in math in Minnesota, he had sometimes found it boring. In third grade, his teacher had told his mother he was having problems doing double-digit addition and had done terribly on a test. His mother was surprised; Eric had been doing double-digit addition at home for years. When she’d asked to see the test, she’d noticed that Eric had left many of the problems blank. Then she’d held the paper at arm’s length, and she could see that the problems he had answered formed a shape. It was the letter E. Eric had been so bored in math that he’d started carving his initial into the test.

  In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom’s class in Poland, calculators weren’t allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.

  Eric was impressed to see the equivalent of sophomores understanding the references to calculus. These kids, who were not in any kind of advanced class, were doing math well above the level of the typical sophomore back home. If Minnesota had found kids could rise to high expectations in math, Korea had proven that the ceiling was higher still.

  The rest of the country, for the most part, continued to underestimate what kids could do, and the kids themselves knew it. When Kim, Eric, and Tom were growing up, four out of every ten American fourth graders said their math work was too easy. By eighth grade, seven out of ten kids went to schools that did not even offer algebra courses with the kind of content that was standard in most other countries. It was only logical that American kids were behind their peers in the smart-kid countries; they were essentially taking remedial math, whether they needed it or not.

  Compared to countries around the world, the typical eighth grade math class in the United States featured sixth or seventh grade content; by the same measuring stick, the highest-performing countries taught eighth graders ninth grade math.

  Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math?

  In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren’t, and they weren’t. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren’t good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed.

  The truth was that American adults didn’t like math or think it was critical to kids’ life chances. In 2009, most American parents surveyed said it was more important to finish high school with strong reading and writing skills than with strong math and science skills. It was almost as though math was optional, like drawing. Half of those parents said that the science and math their children were learning in school was just fine, and they were right, based on a standard from a different era.

  But based on the standards of modernity, all decent jobs required some math and science fluency. Contractors needed to be able to factor inflation into cost estimates. X-ray technicians used geometry. In real life, math was not optional, and it hadn’t been for some time.

  It was widely accepted that young children could learn foreign languages with ease. At ages two and three, their brains absorb and integrate a second or third language at a pace that ten-year-olds could not begin to match. Why hadn’t we realized that they could do the same thing with the language of math?

  Early childhood programs in America pushed reading, arts and crafts, and behavior—important skills. Yet playing with numbers was still considered taboo, a subject best left to the later years, despite America’s obvious and enduring math handicap.

  For too long, what American kids learned had been a matter of chance. The problem with chance was that math was a hierarchy. If kids like Tom and Kim missed one rung on the scaffolding, they would strain and slip and probably never get a foothold on the next rung. A child’s first algebra course had lasting impact, influencing whether the student would take calculus in high school or give up on math altogether.

  part II

  winter

  chapter 5

  an american in utopia

  From Oklahoma to Finland: Kim in Pietarsaari.

  By late November, Kim’s commute to school had become a dark and frigid odyssey. On this particular morning, it was five degrees and windy. The sun would not rise until nine, well into Kim’s first class. As she walked, her footsteps crackling in the icy silence, she wondered how Pietarsaari had ever become inhabited. Perched on the west coast of Finland, the town was three hundred miles from Helsinki. How could anyone have endured this winter and thought it was a good idea to stay for another? Pietarsaari had around twenty thousand residents by then, but aside from the occasional car, she saw no other humans for most of her journey.

  Up ahead, she could make out the lights of the Pietarsaari Lukio, her high school. From the outside, it looked even more depressing than her school back home, a fact that still surprised her three months into her stay. Both schools were low-slung, brick structures, but this one was built out of off-white bricks that had turned gray and dreary with age. A large clock outside the school had stopped working some time ago. This was not the way Finnish schools had looked in her imagination.

  She walked inside as groups of laughing boys and pretty girls passed by, ignoring her. The entryway of the school was small and institutional. There were trophies on display, like at Sallisaw High School, but they seemed like an afterthought, dusty and dull. The newest one was ten years old. Had no teams won a single trophy in a decade? She walked on, trying not to bump into anyone.

  She sat down in her Finnish class, smiling shyly at the girls next to her. Kim’s Finnish teacher seemed even more animated than usual, saying something in Finnish that Kim did not understand. Then the teacher began passing out copies of a heavy book to all the students. Kim recognized the cover. It was Seven Brothers, a Finnish classic published in 1870.

  Even Kim knew about Seven Brothers. When it was written, the Finns were the underclass in their own country. They’d endured five centuries of Swedish, then Russian, domination. Then came Seven Brothers, the first major book written in Finnish. The tale of seven rowdy, uncouth, and often delinquent young men who eventually taught themselves to read became a metaphor for Finland, a country that did not even declare its independence until 1917.

  Kim felt a knot in her stomach. She knew she could not read Seven Brothers. It was written in old Finnish, and she still couldn’t understand new Finnish. What would she do? She inhaled and tried to rearrange her face to look mildly curious, like she’d been expecting this all along.

  Then the teacher appeared at her side. Kim’s teacher, Tiina Stara, was slim and attractive with layered brown hair and a quick smile. She leaned down toward Kim. In her hands, she had a different book. This book was much wider and thinner, with a glossy, shiny cover.

  “This is for you,” she said quietly in English.

  Kim looked at the cover. Instead of seven brothers, it had a cartoon image of seven dogs, all dressed in old-fashioned costume, howling in unison. She translated the title in her head: Seven Dog Brothers. Kim laughed. It was a children’s book.

  “It’s in Finnish, but simple Finnish,” Stara explained. She looked nervous, as if afraid she might hurt Kim’s feelings. “I hope you don’t think this is childish. It’s just that I would love for you to be able to experience this story, because it is very important for us in Finland. And the plot is the same, so you c
an follow along with our conversation.”

  Kim took the book, her eyes full of gratitude. “Kiitos,” she said. Thank you.

  During her three months in Finland, Kim had collected a small catalogue of differences between school here and in Oklahoma. The most obvious were the things that were missing. There were no high-tech, interactive white boards in her classroom. There was no police officer in the hallway. Over time, though, she had begun to notice more important distinctions—the kind that a visiting adult would not see.

  Take the stoner kid, as Kim had nicknamed him in her head. He’d walked into class that day looking hung over, with glassy eyes, as usual. He had short blonde hair, icy blue eyes, and a nose that was always a shade redder than the rest of his skin. He didn’t talk much in class, but when he was with his friends, smoking cigarettes outside, he was louder.

  Kim had seen plenty of kids like him in Sallisaw. Somehow, she hadn’t expected to see stoner kids in Finland. But there he was. Every country had its stoner kids, as it turned out. That was lesson one. There was only one major difference, as far as she could tell, and this was lesson two. The Finnish stoner kid was a model student. He showed up to class, and he was attentive. He took notes. When Stara assigned essays, which was often, he wrote them, just like everybody else.

  In Oklahoma, the stoner kids didn’t do much schoolwork, in Kim’s experience. They didn’t care. Here, all kids complained about school, too, and they had teachers they liked and disliked. Yet most of them seemed to have bought into the idea of education on some level.

  Sometimes Kim found herself staring at this kid and his friends. They didn’t fit into any of the boxes she had used to organize the world. It was hard to explain, but there just seemed to be something in the air here. Whatever it was, it made everyone more serious about learning, even the kids who had not bought into other adult dictates.