Side. So just go up to the mic for your questions. It is my sincere honor to introduce main da ripley. This is the first time the book festival has had a formal science pavilion and its completely fitting the first book were causing here is devoted to education and competing visions of how children learn. Amandas book takes to us finland, south korea, and poland, and observes how three highscoring, highly successful educational systems work, and what is unique is she does it through the eyes of three American Kids who are spending a year at each of those school systems. So it makes for a unique combination of her analysis and the insights that the High School Kids provide. Were doing the book in the washington post. Jay matthews wrote this is the most illuminating reporting ive seen on the differences between schools in america and abroad. The New York Times said in the best tradition of travel writing she gets beneath the glossy surface of cultures and makes our culture look strangely new and as the dad of a first grader, the conclusions have insights for kid of all ages and for the parents. Amanda is an investigative journalist with the Atlanta Atlantic and time. Also the awe thundershower previously of holiday pi the unthinkable, who survives when disaster strikes and why. Please join me in welcoming amanda ripley. [applause] thank you very much. Its great to be here on many levels. One of which is this is the city where i live. How many people live in washington, dc . I assume almost all of your, or in the area. The other reason is that i wrote much of my first book, or at least any of the parts that were decent 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. This is my first book, the unthinkable. And i would go there to this beautiful space and theres part where you cant get on the internet, which is a wonderful luxury, and it was really a salvation, and to have such a beautiful place we can all access is a privilege. So, im very glad to be here for all those reasons. Very psyched i got put into the science pavilion. You never know where youll end up when people categorize your book. What i want to do today is talk a little bit about a mystery. And its a mystery that starts with data and has implications for the lives of millions of kids around the world. But what i also want to do is to hear questions and thoughts from all of you. So were going to make sure to save some time for that at the end and turn this into a more conversation if we can. It is, after all, saturday morning, and you have come out here, and you deserve to have more of a conversation rather than just be spoken to. The mystery that i mentioned is a mystery that i think we have all sort of heard about. Its kind of in the eager, and ther. It appeared there were a handful of countries who were managing to it indicate all their kids to high levels of Critical Thinking in math, reading and science, and i would hear various theories why that was so. And i would buy into one or the other of them for a while. And then i would encounter some inexplicable barrier to that theory being true. Let me give you an example. One of the reasons i heard for why these other countries were doing so great was that we dont spend enough on education. Right . And in fact, we spend more per pupil on k through 12 education than all but four countries in the world. If you look at those four countries thaw dont line up with the Top PerformingEducation Systems in the world. So, it became clear its not that we werent spending enough. Its that we werent spending it the same way, maybe, werent spending it wisely, maybe. Other reasons, we were too big and diverse of a country to compare to a place like finland, whiches totally fair. Really, findland . This is a huge country we live in, and i stuart think about our country as 50 different countries, particularly when it comes to education, because so much educations locally controlled. And is very different when you go from texas to vermont to california. So that satisfied me for a while. Then one day i trade looking at the data on a statebystate basis and seeing how our kids were doing compared to other countries. Imagining all of our states were countries, and when you do that, you see north, only huge variations from state to state, but you see that not even some of our smallest, most homogenous states like those kids were performing at the level of kids in portugal, which is right around average nor developed world. So we were seeing the kinds of high flyers you would expect. But two exceptions were massachusetts and minnesota. Anyone from massachusetts or minnesota . There we go. So we have two states that really were maybe not in the top ten but certainly the top 15 to 20 countries in the world. So that was encouraging. But then the most convincing theory i heard for why we werent doing so great overall or in some of these smaller states, was poverty. And that made a lot of sense to me. We know that all over the world poverty influences education outcome, and we know that we have a realup accept blue high Child Poverty rate, given our wealth as a country. Right around 20 , depending on how youre measuring it. So that made a lot of sense to me. Then i started looking deeper into the data, and now we are, for better or worse, awash in data right now. In education. More data than we know what to do with. Sort of like health care. And if you look at it more deeply you see that, well, look, there are actually countries that have very low Child Poverty rates, like norway has a six percent Child Poverty rate, which is close to finland, fours are four percent, as low as it gets all over the world and what you see is that norways 15yearolds are performing at the same level as american 15yearolds, chris which is to say average for the developed world in reading and science and below average in math. Youll see math its recurring weakness for the u. S. And 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 top 25 of most affluent 15yearolds kids kids who he lots of advantages, highly educated parents, hightech schools, resources, and by the way this data set includes private schools. If you look at those kids, you see that they are scoring below their affluent peers in 27 other countries in math. They do better in reading, although not at the very top of the world. And if you look at our lowest group of kids socioeconomically speaking, and compare them to underprivileged kids around the world, theyre scoring below 27 other countries in math. So there seemed to be some systemic problems that interacted for sure with poverty. That interact with diversity, interact with our history of institutionalized racism. But it wasnt just one of those things. And no single one could fully explain what we were seeing. So, i stopped Everything Else i was doing, writingwise, and decided to spend a year trying to undet was really going on in these countries, and i admit i did part of this sort of cynically. I didnt i just didnt believe it, actually. I kept hearing about these brilliant kids in finland and singapore and korea, and everyone was perfect, and and there were no tests and everything was awesome all the time. The teachers were geniuses and the parents were involved. It just didnt pass the smell test to me. Just didnt seem like any country is that simple. So, i wanted to visit these countries, but i knew to have any remote chance of seeing what was really going on, needed to try to see it through the eyes of students. Ive learned in my reporting in the u. S. That until you talk to students, you really dont know the half of it. And students are experts in their particular classroom. They sit there all day long, thinking about what could be better, what they like and what they dont, and they have strong opinions if you ask them. Luckily there are tens of thousands of teenagers who every year essentially trade places. They leave the United States and go attend public high schools abroad and live with a host family for a year. So i want teed follow these kids in particular because they could to some small degree see the water they swam in. Night they could have some they didnt know everything. None of us do. But they knew their schools and homes and neighborhoods. Back in the states and abroad, and they were essentially amateur anthropologists. Part of the reason kid goes abroad is because theyre interested in the differences between cultures and places, and actually have strong opinions about what they see, what they like, dont like, what is surprising, not surprising. So in addition to all this data, which is totally fascinating and im happy to geek out on that more in the q a after wards. I had to have these kids to see in the blind spots that the data couldnt answer, that the data didnt get into. So i knew from the data which places i wanted to visit. There are lots of International Tests these days. One thing we dont have, especially in the u. S. , is a shortage of test. Not a problem we have. But there is a test i found to be most useful when thinking about the future of the economy, which was called the psa test, tests a merchandize to half a million 15yearolds in 70 countries every three years by the oecd. And this test is not perfect. None of them are. What i liked about the test is it tried to get at not your ability to regurgitate information but your able to apply information to solve a problem you have never seen before that comes right out of real life. Its the kind of thing that we all have to do every day. Not just in our jobs but if were picking a Healthcare Plan or trying to figure out a credit card bill, all the kinds of things we have to do given we have an excess of information, and a dearth of real insight sometimes. So we have to macombs, we have to solve problems, make arguments, higher orderer skills which is what the p test tries to do. So this test is interesting. Its a test ill be referring to i looked at other test data as well, and you obviously want to look at metrics Like High School graduation, college attainment. But this test i found to be compelling because we dont actually know what jobs will be available in 20 or 30 years. But we do know that those skills, those abilities to solve problems to make judgments to make argumentswill be valuable. So i took the psi test to see what that was all about because it seemed, again, the cynic in me didnt believe it was possible to assess Critical Thinking. I still think its hard. But i did find the test to be far smarter than any standardized test id ever taken, for whatever thats worth. I routinely realized there was not right answer and i had to write out my answer and make the case, and i would get different points depending on how cogent and compelling my argument was, which is a lot like my actual life, my actual work. So i was impressed with this test, realizing its not perfect, and if you look at the outcomes on the tests you see something, first of all, something awesome. If theres nothing else that you take from International Education 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. But we are actually the outlier. So, theres been 60some countries that have taken this test since it was introduce ned 2000. Four of them have seen significant improvement in at least one subject. Just because we are not one of them, dot not mean we could not be. Right . When you see the dramatic gains that some countries have made, fairly recently, it gives you should give all of us a surge of hope, because once you know it is possible for countries like estonia, canada, vietnam, poleland, countries with significant poverty rates to make those kinds of gains, that not only should that be encouraging and we would want to learn from what the country did, but theres a moral imperative. Once you know its possible, it can be done, its not merely an act of faith, then you nuss do it. Right . Another thing is that poverty matters in all of these countries, of course, but matters to different degrees. So if you look at country like the United States you see that 15 of our kids scores can be explained by socioeconomic status. A little bit of math magic, right . So were trying to control for everything and see how much is influenced by what, and imperfect. But 15 . If you look at place like estonia, which has anyone been to estonia . Okay. Surprising number of people have been to estonia. This is not finland. This is still a fairly complicated place. And in estonia, socioeconomic status can be explained explains nine percent of teenagers scores on the test. So you see variances. And by the way, france is worse. So some country does worse, not only on average but in fairness and how much socioeconomic status matters. So when you look at the really highflying countries, the education super powers, what you see is they could be roughly divided into two categories, very roughly. This is i made this up for my own brain to think about this. One category is the utopia category, of which the best and most clicheed example is finland. Finland is a country where there truly are very few standardized tests, which teachers have roosevelt autonomy. Student does not work night and day, and in fact very few of them attend afterschool tutoring and that sort of thing. And theres almost no variation from one school to the next in finland. National if you could just live wherever you wanted without regard, because schools were just basically as good as the next. So thats incredibly cool about finland, and thats the utopia version. Turns throughout are multiple ways to get to the top of the mountain in education, right . Just like an actual mountain. You can do switchbacks and take breaks and drink water, which is finland, or you can just slog right up the mountain, like a vertical line, which is south korea. So the other model would be the Pressure Cooker model. Where kids are getting to the same place, very impressive levels of Critical Thinking. Now i know people, especially in korea, saying theyre not raising creative kids, its memorization, and i think theres some truth to that. But when you look at what their kids are capable of doing, its impressive level of Critical Thinking in math, and science, but their getting there through enormous pain and suffering. 77 of korean 15yearolds attend some kind of afterschool tutoring session, and by that i dont mean what kids in long island do for the s. A. T. Thats the same universe but not on the same planet. The market for education in south korea is not unlike the market for sports in the United States. Its it verse sophisticated, very lucrative. It plays upon peoples greatest hopes and fears and if you think about sports, and you think about education, and you just switch countries, you will understand perfectly what is going on in south korea. So, this is a place where theres a lot of anxiety around test scores, around getting into a great university. A lot of countries like this. South korea is maybe the extreme version. There was singapore Education Minister who was asked about kids going to tutoring sessions in singapore, and he said, well, at least were not south korea. So, this is kind of the extreme case for various reasons. And that is the Pressure Cooker model. Where kids are not just going theyre going to school all day for fairly long school day and then going, most of them to some kind of private safer Afterschool Academy which literally mirrors everything they need school, after school. So all the subjects again, which i think we can all agree is pretty inefficient, and also inequitable way to get to the top of the world because the best teachers in korea charge the most money in this after School Market which leads to the incobble phenomenon of their being millionaire teachers in south korea which, while very cool, even they will criticize this system that nobody seems to be able to disrupt. Once the anxiety machine gets going. So, you have the Pressure Cooker you have utopia. I found, luckily for me, very quickly, American Students who agreed to be my are my fixers on the ground, who were going to these places kim was going from oklahoma, to finland. Now, you may ask, why finland . I mean, i dont know about you but if i had the chance to go somewhere when i was 15, finland would that have been on the list, even at number 75 or 80. It wouldnt have even cleared the list. So, kim this remarkable young woman who had never left the United States, actually. She was born in oklahoma. Her mother a single mother wholes had never left the United States. Was a teacher, actually. And yet kim always felt this kind of craving to see the world, this curiosity about what else there was beyond oklahoma, and so she would complain, as teenagers occasionally do, she would complain about her down and the small town and the onlying there was was a walmart, and this and that. And finally her half sister, who livers in texas can said she called her bluff. Said, just go live in some other country if you think its so great. And she said, what would you mean . She said can like one of those Exchange Programs where kid goes to another country. She said, well, thats for rich kids. Thats not for me. But that night the seed was planted, and kim began googling, which is how all great and terrible ideas begin. And she started googling Exchange Programs and found there are these organizations that will literally help you go live in another country for a year. So this captured her imagination. She started research ago countries and she found many of them to be very interesting, and when she read about finland, she read they had the smartest kids in the world, and she said thats where i want to go. So the told her mom the next day, im going to spend a year