High salaries: Teachers in Minnetonka, earned $61,000 on average according to Minnesota Department of Education statistics. According to the principal of Namsan, Eric’s school in Korea, teachers earned about $45,000 on average. When adjusted for purchasing power parity, the Korean salary is worth about $61,000, or the same as the Minnetonka salary.
There are, of course, many ways to compare teachers’ earnings. However, suffice it to say that teachers in both of Eric’s schools could afford a similar standard of living (although the Korean teachers earned less per hour, given Namsan’s longer school day and year).
Stabbed his mother: Rahn, “Student Kills Mother, Keeps Body at Home for 8 Months”; Lee, “18-year-old Murders Mom, Hides Body in Apartment.”
Some went so far as to accuse the mother: Jae-yun, “Shadow of Higher Education.” The quote about “pushy” mothers comes from a 2011 unsigned editorial in the Korea Times.
“One of the pushy ‘tiger’ mothers”: Korea Times, “Education Warning.”
Hundreds of students were accused of lying: Kim, “BAI Finds Several Big Loopholes in Admission System.”
Highly educated elementary school teachers: Minister Lee himself confirmed this rather bluntly in an interview by Kang Shin-who in the Korea Times: “Our teachers are better than those in the U.S.”
The top 5 percent: Barber and Mourshed, How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, 19. Interestingly, Korean elementary teachers were not always so carefully chosen. For many years, the teachers in training attended less prestigious two-year colleges. But, in the early 1980s, those education colleges became four-year universities offering more rigorous training and boosting the status of the profession. This history is almost identical to the story of Finland, which also consolidated its middling training programs into the more elite university system (albeit a decade or so earlier). Coolahan, Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers.
This proven approach—elevating the selectivity and rigor of the teaching profession at the very beginning of teachers’ careers—has never been attempted on a large scale in the United States, despite its obvious logic.
Top of the world: Schmidt et al., The Preparation Gap.
Fateful mistake: Ibid. The Economist, “How to be the Top.”
“Quality of an education system”: Barber and Mourshed, How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, 16.
Less than 1 percent: In 2011, about 750 underperforming Korean teachers were sent for two months of training; another fifty were told to get six months of training. In all, 800 out of about four hundred thousand teachers received the training, which comes out to a mere .2 percent. Stephen Kim, a Time magazine freelancer and a professional translator in Seoul, got these numbers from Korean education officials in September 2011.
Some simply refused to go: Author interviews with Korean educators in Seoul who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
Down just 3.5 percent: Author interview with Minister Lee.
Tricked-out classrooms: There is remarkably little comparative data on technology investments around the world. It remains possible that technology holds great potential for schools, especially since it can personalize learning. So far, however, despite extravagant financial investments in technology, U.S. schools have not realized major benefits in productivity or effectiveness. And the American teenagers I followed for this book uniformly reported that they did not miss the high-tech devices they had in their U.S. classrooms.
For more detail on what other exchange students said about technology, see the results of the survey in the appendix and Ripley, “Brilliance in a Box.”
Only 15 percent of teenagers took afterschool lessons: OECD, PISA 2009 Results (Vol. IV), Table IV.3.17b.
Lee thought Finland was a far better national model: Yun, “ ‘My Dream is to Reshape Korea’s Education.’ ”
Just one in ten kids took afterschool lessons: OECD, PISA 2009 Results (Vol. IV), Table IV.3.17b.
chapter 4: a math problem
Math eluded American teenagers: OECD, PISA 2009 Results (Vol. I).
Math had a way of predicting kids’ futures: ACT, Crisis at the Core, and Hanushek et al., “Teaching Math to the Talented.”
Eighteenth in math: U.S. Department of Education, Table B.1.71.
American third graders: Leinwand, Measuring Up. This study found that, even in Massachusetts, the highest performing state in the country, third graders were being asked less demanding math questions than kids their age in Hong Kong.
Less than half were prepared for freshman-year college math: ACT, The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2011. Only 45 percent of high-school graduates who took the ACT test in 2011 met the college readiness benchmark in math. The benchmark was based on the minimum score needed to have a 50 percent chance of earning a B or higher in a freshman-year college math class. (Keep in mind that only half of high-school graduates took the ACT to begin with, so ability levels for the entire population would presumably be significantly lower.)
“Success is going from failure to failure”: Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 579.
Minnesota: Peterson, Globally Challenged, 8-9 and SciMathMN, Minnesota TIMSS.
American textbooks: Schmidt and McKnight, Inequality for All.
Sixty minutes per day: MSU News, “MSU Scholars Help Minnesota Become Global Leader in Math.”
A larger universe of math: In his book The One World Schoolhouse, Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, writes persuasively about the problem of stove-piping in U.S. schools:
“Genetics is taught in biology while probability is taught in math, even though one is really an application of the other. Physics is a separate class from algebra and calculus despite its being a direct application of them . . . In our misplaced zeal for tidy categories and teaching modules that fit neatly into a given length of class time, we deny students the benefit—the physiological benefit—of recognizing connections.”
Fourth graders said their math work was too easy: Boser and Rosenthal, Do Schools Challenge our Students?
Schools that did not even offer algebra courses: Schmidt and McKnight, Inequality for All.
In 2009, most American parents surveyed: Johnson, Rochkind, and Ott, “Are We Beginning to See the Light?”
chapter 5: an american in utopia
It made everyone more serious about learning: When I visited Kim in Finland, I wondered if her impressions of her fellow students were skewed by the fact that she was at an academic high school in Pietarsaari—not a vocational one, where the less-driven students might have ended up. Kim disagreed, pointing out that she was comparing the drive of students in her AP and honors classes in the United States to the students in her Finnish academic school—and still noticing the same disparity in engagement.
In any case, the dropout rate of Finland’s vocational schools (about 8 percent) was still much lower than the dropout rate of the vast majority of U.S. high schools. Partly due to an infusion of resources from the government, Finland’s vocational schools were generally more popular than U.S. vocational schools. So, it is likely that the student level buy-in was high at the vast majority of schools in Finland, not just Kim’s school.
Teachers rarely got fired anywhere: OECD, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, 238. Many U.S. education reformers insist that unions are the reason for the country’s mediocre education outcomes. After all, U.S. teachers’ unions have a history of adversarial relations with government, and over the years, specific union leaders have obstructed basic, common sense changes at the expense of millions of students.
That said, the top performing countries in the world have unions, too. These countries offer irrefutable evidence that it is possible (and preferable) to radically improve entire systems with teachers’ unions, rather than against them. That cooperation is much more likely to work if teaching has already evolved into a knowledge-worker profession, with high standards of entry and rig
orous training (a development that has not yet happened in the United States and most countries worldwide). Consider this excerpt from the OECD report, Strong Performers:
“[M]any of the countries with the strongest student performance also have the strongest teachers’ unions, beginning with Japan and Finland. There seems to be no relationship between the presence of unions, including and especially teachers’ unions, and student performance. But there may be a relationship between the degree to which the work of teaching has been professionalised and student performance.”
She knew the odds were still against her: Author interviews with Tiina Stara, in-person and over email and Skype, in 2011 and 2012.
Only 20 percent of applicants were accepted: The acceptance rate for the University of Jyväskylä in the mid-1980s comes from Ossi Päärnilä, who works in the Finnish literature department and kindly researched the historical acceptance rates at my request. Acceptance rates today vary depending on which department and university students select; but most Finnish teacher-training programs take between 5 and 20 percent of applicants.
About as selective as Georgetown or the University of California, Berkeley: U.S. News and World Report, “College Ranking Lists.”
Just one out of every twenty education schools: Walsh, Glaser, and Wilcox. What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning.
“A Finnish teacher has received the highest level of education in the world”: Jauhiainen, Kivirauma, and Rinne, “Status and Prestige through Faith in Education,” 269.
Norway is not choosy about who gets to become a teacher: OECD, Improving Lower Secondary Schools in Norway 2011.
Norwegians have fretted: Afdal, “Constructing Knowledge for the Teaching Profession.”
Even the most privileged among them: U.S. Department of Education, Table B.1.70. Norway’s most advantaged teenagers rank twentieth in math compared to other countries’ top quartile students.
He’d decided to become a teacher mostly so he could become a football coach: Author interviews with Scott Bethel via phone and email in 2012.
Nearly two dozen teacher-training programs: Oklahoma Commission for Teacher Preparation, Teacher Preparation Inventory 2012.
They were rewarded with high grades: Koedel, “Grading Standards in Education Departments at Universities.”
It also has a 75 percent acceptance rate: Northeastern State University, Fact Book: Academic Year 2010-2011. The university did not respond to requests for historical acceptance rates dating back to the time of Bethel’s admission.
The university’s typical ACT score is lower: Northeastern State University, Fact Book: Academic Year 2010-2011 and ACT, 2010 ACT National and State Scores. In 2010, incoming freshmen at NSU had an average ACT score of 20.1, compared to 21 for the U.S. overall. (The average for Oklahoma in 2010 was 20.7.)
A master’s degree did not make American teachers better at their jobs: For a summary of this research and other insights into what does (and does not) seem to make teachers stronger, see Walsh and Tracy, Increasing the Odds.
Two and a half times the numbers of teachers it needed: Greenberg, Pomerance, and Walsh. Student Teaching in the United States. About 186,000 new teachers graduate in the U.S. each year. About 77,000 actually take a teaching job.
Finland, it turns out, had its own No Child Left Behind moment: Simola and Rinne, “PISA Under Examination,” and Landers, “Finland’s Educational System a Model for Dallas.”
Central authorities approved textbooks: Aho, Pitkänen, and Sahlberg, Policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary Education in Finland Since 1968.
Opponents argued that the new system was elitist: Jauhiainen, Kivirauma, and Rinne, “Status and Prestige through Faith in Education,” 266-267.
Some university leaders objected, too: OECD, Stronger Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, 117-135:
“University leaders initially resisted the idea that teaching was anything more than a semiprofession and feared that advocates for other semiprofessions like nursing and social work would now clamor to give their training programs university status. Their real worry was that the admission of teacher education candidates would lead to a dilution of academic standards and a consequent loss of status. Over time, however, as the new university-based teacher education programs were designed and built, these fears were not borne out.”
This liberation worked only because of all the changes that had come before: To be fair, other writers, some of them Finnish, have disparaged the country’s top-down, centralization phase as a total mistake. Instead, they cite the later phase—in which schools and teachers received more autonomy—as the key cause of Finland’s success. And they recommend that other countries jump to that phase immediately.
However, veteran teachers and reformers in Finland told me that Finland needed to go through both phases, in that order. The centralizing, top-down phase, which included the creation of more rigorous teacher-training programs, made the subsequent period of decentralization possible in the 1980s and 1990s. Without raising all levels to a respectable baseline, there could never be trust.
Irmeli Halinen, a former teacher and reformer, and a member of the Finnish Education Evaluation Council, put it this way in our 2011 interview: “It’s so difficult to speculate, but I think it would have been very difficult to be more collaborative in the first phase. People have to learn to work together. The national authorities have to learn to trust teachers, and the teachers have to learn to trust the national authorities. And that’s a slow process—to learn to trust. I don’t think we were ready for that in the beginning of the 1970s.
“It will disenfranchise too many students”: Jordan, “A Higher Standard.”
“I have the utmost confidence”: Ibid.
The percentage of minority students studying to be teachers: In 2012, with the higher standards in place, minorities represented 9.24 percent of students admitted to Rhode Island College’s education school—a rate slightly higher than the previous four-year average of 8.8 percent. That rate could change, of course, but it was an early, hopeful sign that raising standards did not necessarily lead to a whiter teaching corps. Figures for 2008 to 2012 provided in December 2012 via email by Alexander Sidorkin, Dean of Rhode Island College’s Feinstein School of Education and Human Development.
Only two out of ten American teachers: August, Kihn, and Miller, Closing the Talent Gap. In the class of 1999, about 23 percent of new U.S. teachers had SAT or ACT scores that were in the top third of the distribution for all college graduates. Only 14 percent of teachers in high-poverty schools had top-third scores.
Higher academic standards to play football: National Council on Teacher Quality, “It’s Easier to Get into an Education School Than to Become a College Football Player.”
A grade-point average of just 2.5 or higher: Details about Northeastern State University’s current and past requirements come from a review of current policies, a list of the admissions requirements for the Teacher Education program from 1990 as well as email correspondence with former education dean Kay Grant, who joined the NSU faculty in 1985.
The national average for the ACT back then was 20.6: U.S. Department of Education, Table 135.
Less than half of American high-school math teachers majored in math: Schmidt and McKnight, Inequality for All.
“A large majority of elementary education majors are afraid of math”: Johnson, Oklahoma Teacher Education Programs Under the Microscope.
Most of the material was at a tenth or eleventh grade level: Education Trust, “Not Good Enough.”
Knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand and Oman: Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education, Breaking the Cycle. One line from the executive summary bears repeating: “U.S. future teachers are getting weak training mathematically, and are just not prepared to teach the demanding mathematics curriculum we need, especially for middle schools, if we hope to compete in
ternationally.”
An average of twelve to fifteen weeks of student teaching: Wang et al., Preparing Teachers Around the World, 21-23. For a more thorough account of student teaching within the United States, see Greenberg, Pomerance, and Walsh, Student Teaching in the United States.
The world’s highest paid teachers lived in Spain: Relative to other workers with college degrees, teachers in Spain earned more in 2010 than teachers in all other developed countries surveyed, including Germany, Finland, France, Korea, Poland, and the United States. OECD. Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession, 13.
About four hundred Finnish kids travel to the United States: Poehlman, 2011-2012 International Youth Exchange Statistics.
Elina came to America: I first read about Elina in a newspaper story (see Gamerman, “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?”). To learn more, I tracked Elina down and interviewed her in 2010, and again in 2012.
Over half of American high schoolers echoed Elina’s impression: Boser and Rosenthal, Do Schools Challenge Our Students?
In my own survey of 202 foreign-exchange students: Details from this survey are contained in the appendix. Some of the results were mirrored in surveys conducted by the Brown Center on Education Policy a decade earlier. That study included a larger sample size, so the results may be more robust. In all, Loveless surveyed 368 foreign-exchange students and 328 Americans studying abroad. A majority of both groups agreed that their U.S. classes were easier. See Loveless, How Well Are American Students Learning? With Special Sections on High School Culture and Urban School Achievement, and Loveless, How Well Are American Students Learning? With Sections on Arithmetic, High School Culture, and Charter Schools.
chapter 6: drive
Thirteen countries and regions: Borgonovi and Montt, “Parental Involvement in Selected PISA Countries and Economies.” The thirteen countries and regions that participated in the parents’ survey were Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, Macao (China), New Zealand, Panama, Portugal and Qatar. Since the United States and other countries chose not to participate in this survey, we don’t know for sure if the dynamics would be comparable in those places. But it was interesting to see that clear patterns emerged even among these very different, far-flung thirteen locales.
The Smartest Kids in the World Page 28