First book we are discussing here is devoted to education and competing visions of how children learn. Amandas book, the smartest kids in the world and how they got that way takes us to north and poland. Rland, she does this through the eyes of three American Kids learning in those school systems. Analysis r a unique of this. L the Washington Post says is is the most iluminating book ive seen, and the New York Times says this managed to make our culture look strangely new. Trust me, the conclusions have insights for kids of all ages as important parents. Amanda is an investigative journal with the times. Hes also the author of the unthinkable who survives when disaster strikes and why. Please join me in welcoming Amanda Ripley. Thank you. Is great to be here on many levels. One reason is this is the city in which i live. The other reason is i grow most of my articles in the library of congress. It was the only place where i could find some focus and peace. I had a new baby at the time of my first book, the unthinkable. I would go to this beautiful staste space scomprk there is part of it where you cant get on the internet, which is a wonderful luxury. It was really a salvation and to have such a beautiful place that a an all access is privilege. I am glad to be here for all those reasons. I am psyched i got put into the cience pavilion. What i want to do is talk about a mystery. I want to talk about something that has implications for a lot of kids around the world. What i really want to do is hear questions and thoughts from all of you. We want to save time at the end and turn this into a conversation at the time. It is, after all, saturday morning. Have you come out here, and you deserve to have more of a conversation than just to be spoken to. The mystery ive mentioned i think is a mystery weve all heard about. It is kind of in the ether. The mystery was this. It appeared that there were a handful of countries that were managing to educate all their kids to high levels of thinking in math, reading, and science. And i would hear various theories about why that was so. Weve all heard these theories. I would buy into one or the other of them for a while. Then i would encounter some exapplicable barrier to that theory being true. Let me give you an example. One of the reasons that i heard for why these other countries were doing so great is that we dont spend enough on education, right . In fact we spend more through pupils on education in the world than all the top four countries in the world. It became clear that we werent spending enough but that we werent spending it the same way , which made sense. The other thing i heard is that we were too big and too diverse to compare to a place like finland. Which is totally fair. I mean, finland . This is a huge country we live in. In some ways i start to think of our country as 50 different countries, particularly when it comes to education, because so much of education is fisscally fiscally controlled when you go to vermont, texas, california. Then i tried looking at the data on a statebystate basis, comparing them to other countries, imagining all our states are countries. When you do that you see not only a huge variation from state to state, but you see that not homogeonousll, most like maine, which is were white, those kids performing about like portugal. They werent seen seeing the high fliers we would have expected. Then i compared massachusetts. We had two states that were not in the top 10 but were in the top 1020 of countries in the world. Then the thing i heard about why we werent doing so well overall was poverty. That made a lot of sense to me. We know that all over the world poverty influences education outcome. We know we have an unacceptably high Child Poverty rate given our wealth as a country. Right around 20 , depending on how you are measuring it. Then i started looking deeper into the data. We are, for better or for worse, awash in data in education. We have more data than we know what to do with. Sort of like health care. If you look at it more deeply, you see that, well, look, there are actually countries that have very low Child Poverty rates. Norway has a 6 Child Poverty rate, which is close to finland, which is as low as it gets all over the world. What you see is that norways 15yearolds are performing at the same level ads american as american 15yearolds which is to say average. You will see math is a recurring weakness for the u. S. Then if you look within our data set for the u. S. , you see something really astonishing, which is that if you look at our most affluent, these are parents that have all kinds of resources again, this data includes private resources, if you look at those kids, you see they are scoring below their affluent peers in 27 other countries in math. They do better in reading, still not at the very top of the world. If you look at our lowest quartile of kids and compare them to under prifflidged kids around the world, they, too, are scoring below 27 other countries in math. So there seem to be some systemic problems that interacted for sure with poverty, that interact with diversity, that interact with our history of institutionized race, but onalized it isnt just one thing. I stopped everything i was doing writingize and decided to spend a year trying to understand what was really going on in these countries. I admit, i did part of this sort of cynically. I didnt believe it actually. I kept hearing about these kids that were brilliant in finland and singapore and north korea. Everyone was involved and the parents were involved, and it didnt pass the smell test to me. It didnt seem like any country was that simple. I wanted to visit these countries, but i knew that to have any remote chance of seeing what was going on, i needed to try to see it through the eyes of students. I learned in my reporting in the u. S. That until you talk to spents students, you really dont know the half of it. Students are experts in their particular classrooms. They sit there all day long thinking about what could be better and what they like and what they dont. They have strong opinions, if you ask them. Luckily there are 10s of thousands of teenagers who every year essentially trade places. They leave the United States and o and attend abroad. I wanted to follow these kids in particular. Because they could to some small degree see the water they swam in. They didnt know everything, none of us do, but they knew their schools and their homes and their neighborhoods back in the states and abroad, and they were essentially amateur an throw policy jifts. Part of the reason kids go abroad is because they are interested in the differences between cultures and places and they actually have strong opinions about what they see, what they like and dont like, what is surprising, what is not surprising. Im happy to geek out on that ore in the q a, if you like, i saw there were situations that the data couldnt answer, that the data couldnt get into. So i knew from the data which places i wanted to visit thrfment are a lot of International Tests these days. There is one thing we dont have, and that is a shortage of tests. There is a test i found to be most useful when thinking about the future of the economy, which test, which apiza test administered to over 30 countries. What i like about this test is that it tries to get not at your ability to regurge at a time information, but your ability to solve a problem youve never seen before that comes right out of real life. Its the kind of thing we all have to do every day, not just in our jobs but if were picking a Health Care Plan or if were trying to figure out a credit card bill. All the things we have to do given that we have an excess of information and a derth of real insight sometimes. We have to make insights, solve problems. All those kinds of higher order skills which is what this test tries explicitly to do. So this test is interesting. This is a test i will be referring to. I looked at other test data as well. Will you also want to look at metrics Like High School graduation and other tests. But this test i found compelling because we dont actually know what jobs will be available in 20 years or 30 years, but we do know those skills, the ability to solve problems, make arguments, will be valuable. I took the piza test to see what it was all about. It seemed the cynic in me didnt seem it was possible to assess Critical Thinking. I still think it is hard. I did find of test to be far smarter than any standardized test ive ever taken for whatever that is worth. I routinely found there was no right answer. I had to write out the answer. And i would get different points depending on how compelling and concise my answer was, which is a lot like my actual work. I was impressed with this test, realizing it is not perfect. If you look at the outcomes on those tests, what you see is something awesome. If there is nothing else you take from international comparisons, this is the one thing are you ready the one thing is that all over the world you see incredible amounts of change. We have not seen that at scale. We are actually the outliar. 40 of them have seen significant improvement in just one subject. Just because we are not one of them does not mean we are not improving. When you see the dramatic gains that some countries have made fairly recently, it should give all of us a surge of hope. Because once you know it is possible for countries like estonia, vietnam, poland, countries that have significant poverty rates to make those kind of gains, not only should that be encouraging and we should learn from what those countries did, there is a certainly kind of moral imperative, once you know it is possible, you must do it. That to me is the reason to look at this International Data. Another thing to look at is that poverty matters, but it matters to different degrees. If you look at a country like the United States, you see that of our childs piza stores can be explained by sociomath socioeconomic mathematics. This is ok at estonia, not finland. This is still a fairly complicated place. Statusnia, socioeconomic explains 9 of students scores. By the way, frans france is worse than the u. S. On this. So for what it is worth, there are countries that do worth. Not only on average, but also in quity, in fairness and socioeconomic status. When you look at the highs fliers, you can see they could be divided into three categories. I made this up for my own brain to think about this. One category is the utopia category on which the best and d country is sweden. Where students do not work night and day. Students do have a lot of autonomy. In fact, very few of them attend after School Tutoring and that sort of thing. There is almost no variation from one school to the next in sweden. Imagine if you could live where ever you wanted without regard for the schools because they were all basically just as good as the next . So thats incredibly cool about finland. Thats the utopia version. If turns out there are multiple ways to get to the top of the mountain in education, just like an actual mountain, you can use switchbacks and take breaks like finland or you can slog to the top of the mountain which would be korea. You can see kids are getting to the same place to impressive levels of Critical Thinking. I know people in korea say they are not creating creative kids, there is wrote moslem zation, rote there is just memorization, and i can see some of that, they are getting there, but it is through a lot of pain and suffering. And they are doing it with a lot of tutoring and hard work. And by that i dont mean the kind of tutoring people are doing in new jersey for the s. A. T. Tests. That is insane, but it is on a different playing field. What they are doing in america is very lucrative, it plays upon peoples greatest hopes and fears. If you think of sports and education and you switch countries will you understand perfectly what is going on in south korea. This is a place where there is a lot of anxiety about getting into test scores, about getting into a great university. Th korea is maybe the same there was questions about going to singapore and isnt he worried and he said, well, at least were not south korea. So this is kind of the extreme case for various reasons. So thats the Pressure Cooker model where kids are not just going they are going to school for a fairly long school day, and then they are going most of them to some kind of private after School Academy which literally mirrors everything they just did in school after school. So all the subjects again. Which i think we can all agree is pretty inefficient and also inequityable way to get to the inequitable way to get to the , which leadsuntain cost the t teachers most money for tutoring, which leads to the situation of million nare millionaire teachers, which is incredible, but you even have these teachers saying this is not the best way, but there seems to be no way to disrupt the anxiety machine. So next i went to finance lapped. Now, i dont know about you, but if i had the chance to go anywhere when i was 15, finland would not have been on the list at even 75 or 80. Kim is this remarkable young woman who had never left the United States. She was born in oklahoma who had never left the United States, he was born in oklahoma to a single mother who had also never left the United States. She was a teacher, as a matter of fact. Kim wanted to see the world. She would complain, as teenagers occasionly do, she would complain about her town, her small town, the only thing there was was a walmart. Finally her half sister who lives in texas called her bluff. She said, why dont you go live in some other country if you think its so great. And she said what do you mean . She said like on one of those Exchange Programs where kids live in another country. And she said thats for rich kids. Thats not for me. But that night the seed was planted and kim began googling is how all great and terrible ideas begin. [laughter] she started googling Exchange Programs that will literally help you live in another country for a year. This captured her imagination, and she started researching other countries, and she found many of them to be very interesting. When she read about finland, she read they have the smartest people in the world, and she said thats where i want to go. She told her mom the next day, i to spend a d a year year in finland. This is her moms last child at ome. Her moms overriding First Response was to say, no way, but she said, how much does it cost. Kim had looked it up and said it cost 10,000. She said well if you can raise the 10,000 yourself and do the paperwork and everything you need by yourself, you can go. So kim spent her freshman year in high school in oklahoma raising 10,000. Nobody, including kim, thought she would succeed for at least half the year. She started with a bake stale. She stayed up all night making rice krispie treats and chocolate chip cookies, and she found out for all its charm, bake sales are not a highly profitable way to raise money. She tried other things. She ordered a case of beef jerky off the internet and sold it doortodoor, which actually turned out to be very lucrative, just as a sidenote. And then she wrote to a letter to all 60 business in the chamber of commerce asking for sponsorship to support this crazy american girls dream. It is very sweet. She created this letterhead. No one responded. Member, this is at the tail end of the recession. But what i love about this story and why i am kind of dwelling in it almost unreasonably, is that she didnt give up. She didnt give up. She created a blog, and she asked strangers for money, and bizarrely some of them gave her money. She applied for scholarships, which she got. But what i like about the story is that it is a story about a particular kind of american girl. An american young person who doesnt quit. Whose entrepreneurial, who has a dream, who is curious. So as much as we are critical of our education system, it is important to hold in our head at the same time all the strengths that we have, which are embodied in kids like kim all over the country. So kim raises 10,000. Because god has a sense of humor, she is placed in rural finland, and actually placed with another single mother, the mother of two 5yearold twin girls. So off she goes to the utopia. Hat will she find . She has all kinds of ideas what finland will be like and wont be like and how the school will be different from her school. Before we get to that, i want to talk to you about the kid that went to korea. Eric. This kid was from minnesota. He had the good fortune to attend one of the highest performing, tricked out, most beautiful suburban high schools in the state. He had an intact familiar. Intact family. He had all sorts of advantages. He did theater, he had a back bacalaureate program. As senior year approached, he was realizing he was kind of burnt out. He just wanted a change, a break from all the academic intensity of minnesota, so this is where he makes his one big mistake. He decides to take an academic break in south korea. Literally, i cannot think of a worse place to take an academic break. He makes his decision we all make decisions that in retrospect look questionable. Went to an Exchange Student there, and the booth looked so fun. The korean kids were super joyful im making sweeping stereotypes the korean kids were so joyful. When he first arrived in south korea, a big booming city on the coast of south korea, he walked in, and the kids started screaming the way the kids screamed for the beetles. Sort of highpitched, oh, my god something is terribly wrong sort of sound, until he realized that was for him. So in some ways he was right. In other ways he was very, very wrong. So he ended up in south korea. So what did they find . I mean, i think there are lots of things, obviously, but some of the things they found i want to tell you about, because we have limited time, i want to talk about some of the things that surprised me, and then we will open it up for questions. Some of the things they found were obvious on the very first day, which i didnt expect, because they were aesthetic. There was a third student, and he went from fen pen from pennsylvania to poland. When all these students went to the schools, they found the schools to be rather lackluster to lo