The Smartest Kids in the World

by Amanda Ripley

  In 2012, Marshall started hiring two-hundred people for a dough-making facility in Poland. She sounded optimistic. “Poland seems to me what it might have been like here in the 1800s,” she said. “You get the same feeling in Shanghai. People are busy.”

  day one

  After her year in Finland, Kim went back to Oklahoma full of complicated emotions. This time, she reminded herself, she would be different, even if everything else stayed the same. On her first day back in American high school, she wore fuzzy dog-shaped slippers. She drank a cup of the coffee she’d brought back to Oklahoma from Finland. Then she settled into an easy chair with her cat George to start online biology.

  Kim loved the idea of Oklahoma Virtual High School. This way, she thought, she could recreate the autonomy she’d had in Finland. She could decide when to wake up and when to do geometry. And she could eat lunch with real forks and knives from her kitchen, just as she had in the school cafeteria in Finland.

  The freedom would help motivate her, she hoped. She couldn’t control things like teaching quality or equity, but she might be able to conjure autonomy and drive. And, if so, she’d be halfway to Finland, theoretically speaking.

  That first day at virtual school, Kim logged in and checked her progress on a dashboard. So far, the bar graphs were all green, which meant she was on track. She had 149 days left to fall behind. She watched twenty minutes of video lectures on the basics of geometry. Teachers were available five days a week, twenty-four hours a day. She could communicate with them over email, phone, or instant message. It was a new day, and not a terrible one.

  For eight hours, she had zero live, face-to-face interactions. At three-thirty or so, her mom got home from her teaching job. At midnight, Kim was still awake, reading about colleges in Ireland, her latest dream. It didn’t seem nearly as inconceivable as Finland once had. At one in the morning, she studied Mesopotamia for her World History class.

  “I really, really like it,” she told me on the second day, shortly after writing a report on carrier pigeons. “I don’t miss people at all.”

  “Aren’t you worried you’ll be isolated?” I asked.

  “People always say that,” she said. “But what people forget is that I was very isolated in my American high school anyway.”

  This way, I began to understand, Kim was lonely on her own terms. The only downside she’d noticed so far was that she tended to personify the cat and dog. “You talk to them a lot,” she admitted. “Everything they do becomes adorable.”

  She mitigated against insanity by joining a writer’s club that met at a coffee shop in the next town. And she signed up for Irish dance lessons one evening a week. Her mom faithfully drove her there and back, grateful to have her daughter back and unsure how long she would stay. In this way, Kim still saw people on a regular basis. She missed Finland, but for now, for her, virtual reality was better than bricks and mortar.

  Kim’s school was run by Advanced Academics, a for-profit company headquartered in Oklahoma City that offered online courses in thirty states. That company was itself owned by DeVry, a publicly traded corporation that posted $2 billion in revenue in 2011. For Kim, virtual school was free, just like public school; most of the state money that would have normally gone to Sallisaw High School went to Advanced Academics instead.

  In three years, the number of Oklahoma public-school students participating in some form of online education had grown 400 percent. No one, though, knew whether the virtual schools were any better or worse than regular schools. It felt a little like the early days of the Korean hagwon industry. Without the cultural obsession with results, however, the analogy broke down. Was a free market really free if no one knew the quality of the product, or even agreed as to what the product should be?

  That school year brought another milestone for Kim’s state: After decades of debate, Oklahoma had finally decided to require an end-of-school test, just like Finland, Poland, and Korea. For the first time, high-school seniors had to pass four out of seven tests in math, English, biology, or history to get a diploma. The Oklahoman newspaper supported the move, which had been planned for seven long years: “It’s not too much to expect Oklahoma students to have a working knowledge of basic math, science and English content.”

  The tests were not hard. Nine out of ten Oklahoma high school seniors were expected to pass. Those who failed could retake any of the tests at least three times per year, take an alternate test, or complete a project instead. Special education students did not have to score as high as other students.

  Nevertheless, Oklahoma lawmakers fought over the exam all year long. Some deemed even this baby step toward a more rigorous education system too harsh. Democratic legislator and teacher Jerry McPeak introduced a bill to repeal the mandate, likening the test to child abuse: “We’re going to brutalize and bully those children because they don’t have the intellectual capacity of another child?”

  Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses.

  In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.

  This time, Oklahoma state superintendent Janet Barresi held fast. “If we keep rolling these limits back, students are not going to take this seriously,” she said. “I’m more concerned with a student’s ability to get a job than about their ability to walk across the stage with their buddies.”

  That spring, fewer than 5 percent of Oklahoma’s 39,000 high school seniors failed to meet the new graduation requirements, far fewer than many superintendents had predicted. Oklahoma’s kids had been wildly underestimated. (Interestingly, the failure rate resembled the roughly 6 percent of seniors who did not pass Finland’s far more rigorous graduation exam.)

  In Oklahoma, some students appealed their results, and their local school boards granted them diplomas, citing extenuating circumstances of one kind or another. Flexibility was built into the system. Still, school boards across Oklahoma protested the tests, passing resolutions and calling for mercy. “There are some kids that just can’t test well. And this is terribly unfair to them,” the Owasso school board president told the Tulsa World. The fact that students had many different options, including completing a project instead of taking a test, did not assuage her concerns.

  When Kim finished her first school year back in America, the United States was ranked number seven in the World Economic Forum’s list of global competitiveness. That was a very high ranking indeed, though it had fallen for four consecutive years. The country that ranked number three? A small, remote Nordic land with few resources, aside from something the locals called sisu.

  a freshman in america

  When Tom returned to Gettysburg from Poland, he put himself on a strict regimen of reading one hundred pages per day. That summer, he pushed through Michel Foucault, just to see if he could. He quit smoking. Still, he missed being able to wander the streets of a sprawling city and drink lukewarm Polish beer with his friends as the sun set over Wrocław. Back in Gettysburg, he wanted to have his friends over at midnight the first night he came home, and his parents wondered if he’d lost his mind. He wanted to linger at coffee shops; Gettysburg’s cafés closed at dusk. He asked his mother, Gettysburg’s chief public defender, to buy him beer; she said no.

  That fall, he packed up his books and his indie band t-shirts and mo
ved to Poughkeepsie, New York. When he got to Vassar, he moved into an old, red brick dormitory with a peaked roof, located right on the grassy quad. It was quintessentially collegiate in all the right ways. His roommate decorated the walls with Christmas lights and Tibetan prayer flags. Tom signed up for the Virginia Woolf seminar, just as he’d planned, and started seeing a girl who lived two doors down from him.

  When classes started, however, he had an uncomfortable sensation. Sitting in the Woolf seminar, he realized he wasn’t quite as prepared as he’d expected. Four out of ten Vassar students had attended private schools, including elite boarding schools in the Northeast. They seemed to have a fluency in analyzing literature that he didn’t possess. They made casual references to Greek mythology that Tom didn’t catch. One student described Jacob’s Room as starting in media res, as if everyone knew what that meant. They’d read Virgil, but he had not. It was unnerving.

  At the same time, eight hundred miles away, Eric was experiencing the opposite sensation.

  He’d moved to Chicago to attend DePaul University. He knew from his year in Korea that he felt most alive in the clamor of a big city, a place where he knew he could eat sushi at four in the morning—whether or not he ever chose to. He was looking forward to studying politics and philosophy. But, that fall, when he sat down in the writing course required of all freshmen, he’d discovered something surprising. He was actually overprepared.

  It was not like the Virginia Woolf seminar at Vassar. This class was taught by graduate students and designed to bring all students up to a baseline level of competence. Eric was bored. It was just like elementary school math class all over again, when he’d amused himself by answering addition problems in the shape of his initials.

  Eric had already learned how to formulate a thesis and conduct basic research in his high school back in Minnesota; he’d assumed everyone else had learned those things, too. Sitting in the DePaul class, his notebook empty, he felt himself deflate, like a freshman balloon drifting back to earth.

  In college, Eric and Tom were witnessing firsthand the same variation that defined schools across the United States and the world, the reason for this book. When the students edited each other’s work, Eric got to read his classmates’ writing. He discovered that many did not know how to structure an essay, develop an argument, or clearly communicate an idea. The writing was disjointed, and the grammar shabby. It wasn’t that these students were unwilling or unable to do better; it was that they’d never learned how.

  Eric found other, smaller classes that he liked better. He explored Chicago. And he started thinking about transferring to a different college. It had worked in Korea, so maybe it would work in America, too.

  In Tom’s case, he adapted easily; he read Virgil. He looked up in media res and discovered it was a Latin phrase that referred to starting a story in the middle of the plot. He caught up quickly, and by spring, he could toss off his own allusions to Greek mythology in his English classes. He figured out that a lot of the banter had been bullshit, but he’d needed to learn the vernacular. By the end of his freshman year, he was working on a paper with his classics professor about the Roman poet, Catullus.

  But he had a glimpse of what might have been. If his mom and dad hadn’t taken him to Barnes & Noble as a regular Friday night ritual, if he hadn’t devoured literature on his own, he might not have gotten into the habit of reading deeply every day. Without that practice, he realized, he would have certainly been overwhelmed at Vassar. It wouldn’t have mattered that he’d taken AP English at Gettysburg High School; it wouldn’t have mattered that he’d gotten good grades. He needed more rigor than his schools had to offer. Luckily for him, he had found it on his own.

  a korean in new jersey

  Like Kim, Jenny was still in high school back in America. They both had two more years until graduation. Jenny had bounced back and forth between Korea and the United States before, so she had some idea what to expect when her family moved to central New Jersey in the summer of 2011. She figured school would be much more humane than it was for her and Eric back at Namsan High School, and she was correct. Her classes were easier; her teachers and her classmates were more relaxed.

  Still, there were surprises.

  During the first Algebra II test that fall, the girl sitting next to her complained that she didn’t understand one of the problems. Jenny had answered it quickly, probably because she’d learned the material two years earlier. But the girl kept saying she needed help. Then something amazing happened: The teacher came over to help her! Right there in front of everyone he walked her through the solution—during the test.

  Jenny watched, speechless. She wondered what would happen when that girl took the SAT without the teacher there to help. Later, a boy in her class did the same thing and, again, the teacher came over to help. Jenny rolled her eyes. She wished her Korean friends could see this; she looked forward to telling them the story on Skype when she got home.

  Not everything was easier in American high school. That was another surprise. That spring, Jenny discovered that kids at schools across America took something called the Presidential Fitness Test in gym class. It had been around for decades, and all that time, the standards had been impressively, almost inexplicably, high.

  To meet the award benchmarks, Jenny and her classmates had to run an eight-minute mile and do forty-four sit-ups in sixty seconds. Bouncing off the floor between sit-ups was strictly prohibited; there were no short cuts in presidential fitness, unlike in algebra. The boys had to do thirteen pull-ups, and the girls had to do twenty-five push-ups. It didn’t count toward her gym grade, but a lot of the students, and the gym teacher, took it seriously, as if they were training for a real test.

  Jenny couldn’t believe it. Twenty-five push-ups was not a joke. Why were the expectations so high? And why, given these expectations, did America have such an obesity problem?

  Back in Korea, Jenny had taken a similar physical test in gym class, but the standards were lower. Instead of eight minutes to run a mile, kids were allotted nine-and-a-half minutes. And none of them cared about it anyway; they just walked around the track. They were worried about their math tests.

  The irony was not lost on Jenny, who told her friends back home about the crazy intense American gym test. “For physical things, the standards are higher here. For studying, the standards are higher in Korea!”

  Luckily, she felt confident she would pass the fitness test in New Jersey. She’d been training for it, after all, just like she used to train for math in Korea. She knew by then that meeting high expectations was mostly a matter of hard work.

  hamster wheels and stoner kids

  When I got back to the States at the end of the school year, I spent a long time trying to make sense of what I’d seen. I was amazed by how many of our problems were universal. Everywhere I’d gone, teachers had complained about tests, principals, and parents; parents, in turn, had agonized over their children’s education, relying on fear and emotion when they could not get facts. Politicians had lamented unions, and union leaders had lamented politicians.

  Kids, meanwhile, were kids, as Jenny had told Eric on the bus that day in Busan, Korea. They had teachers they liked and teachers they didn’t. They played video games, texted in class, and watched television in every country I’d visited. What was different, more than anything else, was how seriously they took their education. That dedication fluctuated like an EKG line, depending on where children lived.

  Why did they care? Kim had asked the question in Finland, distilling this quest down to one sentence. After visiting her, I started to suspect that the answer was fairly straightforward: They took school more seriously because it was more serious. And it was more serious because everyone agreed it should be.

  There was a consensus in Finland, Korea, and Poland that all children had to learn higher-order thinking in order to thrive in the world. In every case, that agreement had been born out of crisis: economic imperatives that had focused
the national mind in a way that good intentions never would. That consensus about rigor had then changed everything else.

  High school in Finland, Korea, and Poland had a purpose, just like high-school football practice in America. There was a big, important contest at the end, and the score counted. Their teachers were more serious, too: highly educated, well-trained, and carefully chosen. They had enough autonomy to do serious work; that meant they had a better chance of adapting and changing along with their students and the economy. The students had independence, too, which made school more bearable and cultivated more driven, self-sufficient high school graduates. The closer they got to adulthood, the more they got to act like adults.

  In the United States and other countries, we’d put off this reckoning, convinced that our kids would always get second and third chances until well into adulthood. We had the same attitude toward teachers: Anyone and everyone could become a teacher, as long as they showed up for class, followed the rules, and had good intentions. We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.

  That mindset had worked alright for most American kids, historically speaking. Most hadn’t needed a very rigorous education, and they hadn’t gotten it. Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.

  There were different ways to get to rigor, and not all of them were good. In Korea, the hamster wheel created as many problems as it solved. Joyless learning led mostly to good test scores, not to a resilient population. That kind of relentless studying could not be sustained, and there was evidence that Korean kids’ famous drive dropped off dramatically once they got to college.