This time, Kim knew, she needed to speak up. She should have told Susanne that she adored her but she needed a host family with enough mental and physical space for her. She hadn’t wanted to offend anyone, so she’d been silent for too long.
There was a word in Finnish, sisu [pronounced SEE-su]. It meant strength in the face of great odds, but more than that, a sort of inner fire. Kim first learned about sisu when she was researching Finland from Oklahoma. “It is a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity,” Time magazine wrote in a story about Finland in 1940, “of the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win.”
It may have been the one word that encapsulated the Finnish way more than any other. Sisu was what it took to coax potatoes out of the soil of the Arctic Circle; sisu had helped Finland pull itself back from the brink of irrelevance to become an education superpower. Sisu helped explain how a country smaller than Montana had invented Nokia, Marimekko, and the Linux operating system, not to mention the video game Angry Birds. Sisu was Finland’s version of drive, a quiet force that never quit. English has no word for sisu, though the closest synonym might be grit.
That day, arriving at the station near Pietarsaari, Kim felt as if she understood what sisu was. She didn’t know how long the feeling would last, but she hoped she would remember it. As she heaved her suitcase off the train and made her way outside with the rest of the passengers, she felt almost as if she belonged.
virtual reality
I met Kim and both of her host families for dinner in Pietarsaari one night that spring. By then, the snow had finally melted. We gathered at a big, white clapboard restaurant on the sea. Kim had stayed in close touch with Susanne despite having moved out. She wrote a regular column for Susanne’s newspaper, and Susanne was working on a Finnish magazine story about Kim.
We ate cod and cloudberries, and Kim sat in the middle, wearing a red jacket and telling stories about her first days in Finland. She seemed more sure of herself than she had just a few months before. That’s when she told me she was working on a plan for her return to America.
“I’m applying to virtual high school,” she said.
Kim had decided she couldn’t go back to Sallisaw High School. She didn’t want to be the person she was before, and she was afraid she couldn’t change if everything else stayed the same.
“I worry that the indifference will start to affect me again. That I’ll just slip back into the views of all my peers.”
“What view is that?”
“That ‘it just doesn’t matter; that school sucks, so why should we be here?’ I feel like removing myself from that situation.”
She’d researched boarding schools on the Internet, just like she’d once researched Finland. That was the fantasy. Then she’d come across a link for something called Oklahoma Virtual High School. She’d discovered it was a real high school, albeit one that existed online. And it was free, unlike boarding school. She and her mother were going to talk about it some more, but Kim seemed confident she’d found a way to get through her last years of American high school.
Afterward, we emerged into the blue twilight. It was ten o’clock and still light out, the time of year when the Nordic countries paid their debts from the winter. Kim let me take a few pictures of her in front of the sea, then she got on her bike and rode home, like a real Finn.
stress test
Two days later, I accompanied Kim to school. I went to classes with her, and she introduced me to her principal and her teachers. It happened to be the week that the seniors got the results of the big matriculation exam they’d taken earlier that year—the one that determined where they would likely go to college. Kim’s Finnish teacher, Tiina Stara, was worried about her students. “They are feeling a lot of pressure. It’s not like in Japan or Korea, but still.”
The test had been around for more than 160 years and was deeply embedded in the system. The countries with the best education outcomes all had these tests at the end of high school. It was one of the most obvious differences between them and the United States—which had a surplus of tests, few of which had meaningful effects on kids’ lives.
Matriculation exams like Finland’s helped inject drive into education systems—creating a bright finish line for kids and schools to work toward. Teenagers from countries with these kinds of tests performed over sixteen points higher on PISA than those in countries without them.
Still, Stara worried that this test stressed out her students and drove too much of her lesson planning. “I sometimes want so badly to do something fun with them,” she said, clenching her fist in her lap. “I think it’s very important that they enjoy studying.” In addition to the matriculation exam, Finnish kids still took regular classroom tests and final exams every six weeks at the end of each mini-semester. In surveys, Finnish kids cited the high number of tests as one reason that they didn’t like school. Tests were controversial all over the world, another universal truth.
Stara hastened to add that she would not do away with the matriculation test if she could. “It’s a very good exam,” she said, nodding her head.
Then she described what rigor looked like: Finland’s exam stretched out over three grueling weeks and lasted about fifty hours. Teachers followed students to the bathroom to make sure they didn’t cheat. The Finnish section took two days. On the first day, students read several texts and wrote short essays analyzing each one, over the course of six hours. On the second day, students chose one topic out of fourteen options and wrote a single, very long essay, over the course of another six hours. One recent topic was, “Why is it difficult to achieve peace in the Middle East?” Another was, “I blog, therefore I am.”
To do well, students had to be able to structure a long-form essay, communicate complex ideas, and, of course, use proper spelling and grammar. Stara felt a heavy responsibility to help her students do well on this test.
It was hard to think of a test like this in the United States. The SAT and ACT served a similar purpose, but neither was as comprehensive or as embedded in schools themselves. Many states had some kind of graduation test, but kids didn’t need much sisu to pass them. The New York State Regents exam was considered one of the most challenging. Yet the English portion lasted only a quarter as long as the Finnish portion of Finland’s test. It included just one essay and two short responses, each of which only had to be one paragraph long.
The English test used to be six hours, but the New York Board of Regents voted to cut it in half in 2009, citing the logistical challenges of administering a long test, particularly with other distractions, like snow days, a rationale that would have amused the Finns. Altogether, the Regents exam required one-third the time of Finland’s test.
In Finland, school was hard, and tests affected students’ lives. Snow was not a good excuse. That might explain why only 20 percent of Finnish teenagers said they looked forward to math lessons, compared to 40 percent of Americans. They had to work hard, and expectations were high. About half of Finnish kids said they got good grades in math, compared to almost three-quarters of Americans. (In fact, American fifteen-year-olds were more likely than kids in thirty-seven other countries to say they got good math grades.) The problem with rigorous education was that it was hard. Ideally, it was fun, too, but it couldn’t always be, not even in Finland.
There was much to be said for American teachers, who, in many schools, worked hard to entertain and engage their students with interactive classrooms. In my survey of 202 exchange students, I was struck by how many of them brought up their affection for their U.S. teachers. One German exchange student surveyed described the difference this way:
“The teachers in the U.S. are way more friendly. They are like your friends. . . . In Germany, we know nothing about our teachers. They are just teachers. We would never talk to them about personal problems.”
This bond between teachers and students mattered, and U.S. teachers deserved credit f
or connecting with their students. But learning to do higher-order thinking, reading, and math mattered, too. Finland seemed to have found a way to create manageable pressure, something compassionate teachers worried about, but not something that forced millions of kids to study for fifteen to eighteen hours per day. The Finns had gone long on teaching quality, autonomy, and equity, which meant they could ease up a bit on drive. In Finland, kids could have a life and an education, too.
black people in finland
The more time I spent in Finland, the more I appreciated the rare balance it had struck. Finland had achieved rigor without ruin. It was impossible not to notice something else, too: During my time in Pietarsaari, I saw exactly one black person. In Kim’s classes, everyone looked basically the same. Nationwide, only 3 percent of Finland’s students had immigrant parents (compared to 20 percent of teenagers in the United States).
In fact, Finland, Korea and Poland were all homogeneous places with few immigrants or racial minorities. Japan and Shanghai, China, two other education superpowers, were similarly bland. Maybe homogeneity was a prerequisite for rigor at scale. Did sameness beget harmony, which somehow boosted learning? If so, was Finland irrelevant to a big, jangling place like the United States?
Diversity was one of those words that got hijacked so often it had lost most of its meaning. Part of the problem was that there were thousands of ways to be diverse. In the United States, conversations about diversity were usually about race. The United States closely tracked the race of students because of its history of institutionalized racism; other countries did not, which made comparisons difficult.
But within the United States, African-American students did poorly on PISA, heartbreakingly so. On average, they scored eighty-four points below white students in reading in 2009. It was as if the white kids had been going to school two extra years, even though they were the same age. The gap between white and African-American students showed itself in dozens of other ways, too, from graduation rates to SAT scores. Generally speaking, up to half the gap could be explained by economics; black students were more likely to come from lower-income families with less-educated parents.
The other half was more complicated: Black parents tended to have fewer books and read less to their children, partly because they tended to be less educated. Then, when black children walked out of their homes and went to school each day, the disparities compounded. African-American kids were more likely to encounter inferior teaching and lower expectations in school, and they were disproportionately tracked into the lowest groups for reading and math lessons.
Each school day, African-American kids got the message in many schools around the country. It was subtle, but it was consistent: Your time is not precious, and your odds are not good. Those kinds of signals took up residence in kids’ brains, echoing in the background whenever they contemplated what was possible. In one long-term study of Australian teenagers, researchers found that teenagers’ aspirations at age fifteen could predict their futures. Kids who had high expectations for themselves, who planned to finish school and go to college, were significantly more likely to graduate high school. In fact, their parents’ socioeconomic status didn’t seem to affect their graduation odds, statistically speaking, as long as they held these aspirations.
Still, despite all the insidious disadvantages they faced, African-American kids were not responsible for the lackluster U.S. performance overall. For one thing, five of every six American kids were not black. For another, white kids didn’t do so great in math, either. On average, white American teens performed worse than all students in a dozen other countries, including all kids in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, which had higher ratios of immigrant kids. On a percentage basis, New York State had fewer white kids performing at high levels in math than Poland and Estonia had among kids overall.
Nothing was simple. Diversity could raise or lower test scores, and it did. One in five U.S. students came from an immigrant background, the sixth highest ratio in the developed world. But U.S. immigrants were, well, diverse: Hispanic students scored higher than blacks on PISA, for example, and lower than whites, but Asian-Americans did better than everyone.
Overall, the gap between PISA reading scores for native and immigrant students in the United States was 22 points—better than Germany or France, where the gap was 60 points, but not as impressive as Canada, where the gap was zero. Much depended on the education and income of the immigrant parents, which had a lot to do with the history and immigration policies of a given country.
The rest depended on what countries did with the children they had. In the United States, the practice of funding schools based on local property taxes motivated families to move into the most affluent neighborhoods they could afford, in effect buying their way into good schools. The system encouraged segregation.
Since black, Hispanic, and immigrant kids tended to come from less affluent families, they usually ended up in underresourced schools with more kids like them. Between 1998 and 2010, poor American students had become more concentrated in schools with other poor students.
The biggest problem with this kind of diversity is that it wasn’t actually diverse. Most white kids had majority white classmates. Black and Hispanic students, meanwhile, were more likely to attend majority black or Hispanic schools in 2005 than they were in 1980.
Populating schools with mostly low-income, Hispanic, or African-American students usually meant compounding low scores, unstable home lives, and low expectations. Kids fed off each other, a dynamic that could work for good and for ill. In Poland, kids lost their edge as soon as they were tracked into vocational schools; likewise, there seemed to be a tipping point for expectations in the United States. On average, schools with mostly low-income kids systematically lacked the symptoms of rigor. They had inconsistent teaching quality, little autonomy for teachers or teenagers, low levels of academic drive, and less equity. By warehousing disadvantaged kids in the same schools, the United States took hard problems and made them harder.
In Singapore, the opposite happened. There, the population was also diverse, about 77 percent Chinese, 14 percent Malay, 8 percent Indian, and 1.5 percent other. People spoke Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil and followed five different faiths (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, and Hinduism). Yet Singaporeans scored at the top of the world on PISA, right beside Finland and Korea. There was virtually no gap in scores between immigrant and native-born students.
Of course, Singapore was essentially another planet compared to most countries. It was ruled by an authoritarian regime with an unusually high-performing bureaucracy. The government controlled most of the rigor variables, from the caliber of teacher recruits to the mix of ethnicities in housing developments. Singapore did not have the kind of extreme segregation that existed in the United States, because policy makers had forbidden it.
In most freewheeling democracies, governments did not have that kind of power. Left to their own devices, parents tended to self-segregate. If the class distinctions were less obvious, and the quality of the schools more consistent, this tendency was manageable.
Watching the kids sitting in Kim’s classes, some animated, some aloof, but all of them white, I wondered what would happen if Finland’s population suddenly changed. Would the Finns still have a shared belief in rigor if students came in all different colors? Or would everything come undone?
“i want to think about them as all the same.”
Finland was a homogeneous place, but getting less so. The number of foreigners had increased over 600 percent since 1990, and most of the newcomers had ended up in Helsinki.
To find out how diversity changed the culture of rigor, I went to the Tiistilä school, just outside Helsinki, where a third of the kids were immigrants, many of them refugees. The school enrolled children aged six to thirteen. It was surrounded by concrete block apartment buildings that looked more communist than Nordic.
In a second-floor classroom, Heikki Vuorinen stood be
fore his sixth graders. Four were African; two wore headscarves. An Albanian boy from Kosovo sat near a Chinese boy. There was a smattering of white kids born in Finland. Vuorinen gave the class an assignment and stepped out to talk to me.
Wearing a purple T-shirt, jeans, and small, rectangular glasses, Vuorinen proudly reported that he had kids from nine different countries that year, including China, Somalia, Russia, and Kosovo. Most had single parents. Beyond that, he was reluctant to speculate.
“I don’t want to think about their backgrounds too much,” he said, running his hand through his thinning blonde hair. Then he smiled. “There are twenty-three pearls in my classroom. I don’t want to scratch them.”
When pressed, he told me about one of his students in particular. She had six brothers and sisters; her father was a janitor and her mother took care of other people’s children. Money was very tight. But she was, he said, the top student in his class.
Vuorinen was visibly uncomfortable labeling his students. “I don’t want to have too much empathy for them,” he explained, “because I have to teach. If I thought about all of this too much, I would give better marks to them for worse work. I’d think, ‘Oh, you poor kid. Oh, well, what can I do?’ That would make my job too easy.”
He seemed acutely aware of the effect that expectations could have on his teaching. Empathy for kids’ home lives could strip the rigor from his classroom. “I want to think about them as all the same.”
I’d never heard a U.S. teacher talk that way. To the contrary, state and federal laws required that teachers and principals think about their kids as different; they had to monitor their students’ race and income and report that data to the government. Schools were judged by the test scores of kids in each category. Most principals knew their ratios of low-income and minority kids by heart, like baseball players knew batting averages. There were important reasons for all this labeling; the U.S. government was trying to highlight injustice in order to fix it. Still, I wondered how much that raised consciousness had suppressed expectations along the way.
The Smartest Kids in the World Page 16