The Smartest Kids in the World
Page 22
“In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms,” Andreas Schleicher, the OECD international education guru, told me. “I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets.”
In the survey conducted for this book, seven out of ten international and American exchange students agreed that U.S. schools had more technology. Not one American student surveyed said there was significantly less technology in U.S. schools.
The smartest countries prioritize teacher pay and equity (channeling more resources to the neediest students). When looking for a world-class education, remember that people always matter more than props.
ask the principal the hard questions
When you meet a principal, ask the questions you might ask a potential employer. Get a sense of the school’s priorities and the culture. Don’t be afraid to be as assertive as you might be when buying a car or taking a job.
When searching for a school, the leader matters more than any other factor. Yes, the teachers are critically important, too, but you can’t pick your child’s teacher in our system. So, you have to rely on the principal to do that for you.
How do you choose your teachers?
Finland, Korea, and all the education superpowers select their teachers relatively efficiently, by requiring students accepted to teacher colleges to be in the top third of their graduating high school classes. This selectivity is not enough by itself, but it ensures a level of prestige and education that makes other world-beating policies possible.
Since most countries do not take this logical step, the principal is even more important. That leader acts as the filter instead of the education college or the teacher certification system, which is not robust in most places. Nothing matters more than the decisions the principal makes about whom to hire, how to train, and whom to let go. “Great vision without great people is irrelevant,” as Jim Collins wrote in his classic book, Good to Great.
Find out if the principal can choose which candidates to interview and hire. That kind of common-sense autonomy is rare in many schools. Then ask if the principal actually watches the job applicant teach. That, too, is almost unheard of in many countries including the United States—even though it is an obvious way to see whether a person has the extraordinary leadership abilities required to be a great teacher, one of the most demanding and complex jobs in the modern age. Even if candidates pretend to teach—to an adult audience—as part of the hiring process, that is far better than nothing.
How do you make your teachers better?
The more specifics you hear in response to this question, the better. Most teachers operate without meaningful feedback, in isolation. That is indefensible today. Professional development, which is jargon for training in the education world, should be customized to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual teacher. It should not feature hundreds of teachers sitting through a lecture in an auditorium.
No country has figured this out. But some countries do it better than others. In Finland, teachers are more likely to watch each other teach—in training and throughout their careers. Many countries give teachers more time to collaborate and plan together; the United States ranks poorly in this respect. American teachers work relatively short school years, but they have little time to share ideas and get feedback in most schools. Ask principals how they help teachers collaborate and what kind of leadership roles they give to their top teachers.
How do you measure your success?
Strong leaders can clearly explain their vision. If you hear a long, vague answer, full of many disparate parts, you may have found yourself in a school without a mission—which is to say, an average school. In the United States, most principals will mention test-score data as one measure of success, which is fair but insufficient. They might also mention graduation rates or parental satisfaction surveys.
Fine. But how do they measure the intangible outcomes that matter just as much? How do they know if they are training students to do higher-order thinking and solve problems they have never seen before? Most standardized tests do not capture those skills. How do they judge if they are teaching kids the secrets behind the world’s greatest success stories, skills like persistence, self-control, and integrity?
Do they ask their students what needs to be improved? Do those opinions change the way the school works in fundamental ways—every semester? World-class educators have a vision for where they are going, tools to determine if they have lost their way, and a culture of perpetual change in order to do better.
How do you make sure the work is rigorous enough? How do you keep raising the bar to find out what kids can do?
At the Success Academy charter schools in New York City, students spend an hour and a half reading and discussing books each day. Then they spend another hour and a half writing. Kids start learning science every day in kindergarten. That’s what rigor looks like. In most New York City public schools, kids don’t learn science daily until middle school.
That’s not all. Success Academy students also take music, art, and dance; they learn to play chess. They almost never skip recess, even in bad weather—a policy they share with Finland. They call their strategy “joyful rigor.”
Does this work? All fourth graders at Success Academy schools are proficient in science, according to New York City’s test, and 95 percent perform at advanced levels. Success Academy Harlem I, where the mostly low-income students are randomly admitted by lottery, performs at the same level as gifted-and-talented schools across New York City.
Teachers at these schools are expected to be intellectually fascinating and hyper-prepared; they are trained to overestimate what kids can do, rather than worrying about kids’ self-esteem. At these schools, kindergarten teachers are forbidden from speaking to children in a singsong voice. It’s hard to respect children when you are talking down to them.
“It’s an insult to the scholars’ intelligence,” writes founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz and her co-author Arin Lavinia in their 2012 book, Mission Impossible. “What the teacher is saying should be so interesting that the kids are sitting on the edge of their seat, hanging on every word. It’s intellectual spark that holds and keeps their attention, not baby talk.”
Parental involvement means something different at Success Academies; parents are not asked to bake cookies or sell gift wrap. Instead, they are asked to read to their kids six nights a week. They are expected to help speed the learning at home to get their students ready for college, just as Korean parents do. Parents have the cell phone numbers of their kids’ teachers and principal.
In 2011, Success Academy opened a new school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a far richer neighborhood than its previous locations. Unlike most schools in America, including the best public charter schools, these new schools were actually diverse, in the literal sense. Moskowitz wanted a true mix of white, Asian, African-American, and Hispanic students at a range of income levels, and she got it. That is how kids learn best—together, with a mix of expectations, advantages, and complications—according to the hard-earned lessons of countries around the world.
There are stories like this all over the country: Success Academy charter schools in New York City, the closest thing to Finland in the United States; William Taylor, a public-school teacher who has almost Korean expectations for his low-income students in Washington, D.C.; and Deborah Gist in Rhode Island, a leader who has dared to raise the bar for what teachers must know, just like reformers in Finland and Korea.
These world-class educators exist, but they are fighting against the grain of culture and institutions. That fight drains them of energy and time. If they ever win, it will be because parents and students rose up around them, convinced that our children cannot only handle a rigorous education but that they crave it as never before.
appendix II
AFS student experience survey
/> introduction
No country has figured out how to help all children reach their full learning potential. Like health care systems, education systems are dazzlingly complex and always in need of change. To improve, countries can learn from each other; the trick is figuring out which of our differences matter most.
Tests can measure skills, and surveys within a country can measure attitudes. It is hard, however, to compare survey results across different countries, since the surveyed populations live in unique cultural contexts.
However, people who have lived and studied in multiple countries can transcend some cultural barriers and identify meaningful distinctions. Their voices, in combination with quantitative research, can help us chip away at this mystery.
Each year, tens of thousands of enterprising teenagers from around the globe leave home to live and learn on exchange programs. During the 2011–2012 academic year, 1,376 Americans went abroad and another 27,688 international students came to the United States. Immersed in new cultures, families, and schools, these young students could compare education systems in ways no adult researcher ever could.
survey design
In May 2012, Amanda Ripley and New America Foundation researcher Marie Lawrence collaborated with AFS Intercultural Programs, one of the world’s oldest and most respected exchange organizations, to try to learn from this corps of young travelers. AFS (formerly the American Field Service) is a nonprofit that facilitates exchanges in more than fifty countries.
We conducted an online survey of all AFS exchange students who were sent abroad from the United States or sent to the United States from other countries during the 2009-2010 academic year. (We chose that year in part because all the students would be over eighteen and able to participate without parental permission.)
The primary goal of the survey was to understand whether differences observed by the exchange students featured in this book were also noticed by a larger number of students. We also wanted to discover whether students’ opinions had changed since a previous survey was conducted in 2001 and 2002, before a decade of reforms to the U.S. education system. Last, we were curious to investigate, to the extent possible, whether differences in student experiences might be associated with differences in PISA performance.
Students have been shown to be highly reliable observers of their teachers and classroom environments. The Measures of Effective Teaching Project, an effort by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to understand good teaching, has found that student ratings are consistent across different groups of students taught by the same teacher and strongly related to gains in academic achievement. It only makes sense to ask students what they know.
To begin the survey, AFS-USA sent an email invitation to 242 U.S. students who had studied abroad in thirty-three countries, and AFS-International sent the invitation to 1,104 students who had traveled to the United States from nineteen different countries.
The survey included thirteen questions. (The full text appears at the end of this appendix.) Most questions evolved from dozens of conversations the author has had with other exchange students over the course of several years. Two questions, regarding the overall difficulty of school abroad and the importance of sports, were reconstructed from the Brookings Institute surveys of international and U.S. students in 2001 and 2002. The survey also included two opportunities for open-ended responses to capture observations that might not otherwise have been drawn out by the close-ended survey questions. For privacy reasons, none of the questions collected identifying information about participants.
To analyze the responses, we divided them into two groups based on home country (United States versus international students) and, among international students, by high-achieving country (HAC) and lower-achieving country (LAC). Each sending country was categorized based on its average PISA math score rankings. We chose math because math performance is more easily comparable across countries and because math skills tend to better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other subjects.
Countries with PISA math scores significantly above average for developed nations were classified as high-achieving countries; those with math scores not significantly different than average or significantly below average were classified as lower-achieving countries. Of the sending countries participating in this project, the high-achieving countries were Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. The lower-achieving countries were Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Honduras, India, Italy, Latvia, Philippines, and Russia.
limitations of the data
Of the 1,346 students invited, a total of 202 completed the survey (see Table 1), a response rate of 15 percent. There were various possible reasons why more students did not participate, including the fact that many had changed email addresses since AFS had last heard from them. Still, the response rate was high enough to form broad conclusions about students’ perceptions, with some caveats.
Of U.S. respondents, a significant number (19 percent) had studied in Italy. Of international respondents, a large group (37 percent) had come to the United States from Germany. Those ratios mirrored the distribution of AFS students generally, but the results should be considered with those biases in mind.
Germany, for example, was counted among the high-achieving countries because German teenagers scored above average in math on PISA. That meant that 54 percent of our international high-achieving sample came from Germany. However, Germany is not in the same league as Finland or Korea—two countries that perform at the very top of the world in math, reading, and science on the PISA test.
Moreover, international exchange students in general are not necessarily representative of their peers back home, of course. Some exchange students (though not all) come from higher-income families and from higher-achieving schools. They may also possess higher levels of motivation and adventurousness than those who did not participate in an exchange program. In their host countries, these students are not treated in the same way as their classmates; that distinction, combined with the obvious language barriers, may limit their abilities to assess other countries’ education systems and cultures.
Despite these caveats, the observations by these 202 students show intriguing patterns. They agreed more often than they disagreed. We are grateful to the students and to AFS for helping us collect wisdom from the one stakeholder group rarely consulted in education debates around the world—the students themselves.
Table 1. Response Rates from U.S. and International Students
U.S. Students
International Students
Host /Home Country
N
n
%
N
n
%
Argentina
16
0
0.0%
Austria
9
1
11.1%
Belgium
12
1
8.3%
Brazil
4
2
50.0%
47
4
8.5%
Chile
3
0
0.0%
China
5
0
0.0%
Columbia
19
2
10.5%
Costa Rica
3
0
0.0%
5
0
0.0%
Czech Republic
2
0
0.0%
Denmark
4
0
0.0%
51
6
11.8%
Dominican Republic
2
0
0.0%
Ecuador
6
1
16.7%
Egypt
3<
br />
0
0.0%
Finland
4
2
50.0%
38
10
26.3%
France
29
3
10.3%
62
14
22.6%
Germany
16
3
18.8%
334
61
18.3%
Honduras
4
0
0.0%
Hong Kong
2
1
50.0%
22
3
13.6%
Hungary
1
0
0.0%
Iceland
1
0
0.0%
11
4
36.4%
India
1
1
100.0%
15
0
0.0%
Italy
33
7
21.2%
234
30
12.8%
Japan
136
6
4.4%
Latvia
5
1
20.0%