The Smartest Kids in the World (13 page)

Immediately, critics called her elitist, lobbing the same accusations critics had used against reformers in Finland in the 1970s. Some argued that a teacher who struggled in school was actually a better teacher, because that teacher could relate to students who were failing. It was a perverse logic. Would a doctor who had botched several surgeries be an ideal medical-school professor?

Others worried that higher standards would lead to a teacher shortage. Yet Rhode Island’s teacher colleges already churned out 1,000 teachers a year, about 800 more than the school system needed to hire. Supply, particularly of elementary school teachers, was not a problem. Moreover, the laws of human nature applied: Once it became harder to be a teacher, it could also become more attractive. More people might want to do it, and fewer established teachers might leave the profession.

Because this was America, a diverse country with a long history of racism in colleges, public schools, and every other institution, Gist’s efforts were also attacked as discriminatory. Higher education leaders warned that the new standards would prevent minority students, who tended to score lower on tests, from becoming teachers.

In reality, the Rhode Island teaching force was already far too white and far too female; to become more diverse and attract more men, in particular, it could be argued, the profession needed to be more prestigious, not less. More to the point, minority students needed highly educated
and
diverse teachers. It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.

Rhode Island’s teacher-preparation programs produced
five times
more teachers than Rhode Island’s public schools actually hired each year. The only institution benefiting from this system seemed to be the colleges themselves, but college leaders still complained that they
would lose too many students if the standards were higher. They voiced this concern to newspaper reporters, and reporters quoted them without irony.

“It will disenfranchise too many students,” Roger G. Eldridge Jr., interim dean of the School of Education at Rhode Island College told the
Providence Journal
. It was a revealing word choice: Disenfranchise usually means to deprive someone of a sacred legal right, such as the right to vote. And that is in fact how many people viewed the job; most Americans said teaching was a hard and important job, but many of them, including teachers and teaching professors, didn’t seem to believe it required serious intellectual heft.

Under the new, higher standards, about 85 percent of Rhode Island College’s education students would not make the cut, the dean threatened. Coming from the college that produced more Rhode Island teachers than any other, this was an astounding statistic, one that should have been a source of deep shame, but was not.

Gist did not back down, however.
“I have the utmost confidence that Rhode Island’s future teachers are capable of this kind of performance,” she said. She did agree to phase in the higher cut score gradually over two years and to allow colleges to ask for waivers for highly promising candidates who did not make the cut score. Three years later, she had not received any waiver requests. At Rhode Island College,
the percentage of minority students studying to be teachers went from 8.8 percent to 9.24 percent, remaining essentially unchanged despite all predictions to the contrary.

For some American teachers, the lack of serious training didn’t matter; they made up for what they didn’t know by learning on the job. Some got lucky and had a strong principal or mentor. For other teachers, though, this education gap did matter. As more of their students aspired to attend college, and the economy increasingly rewarded higher-level thinking, more teachers were being asked to teach material they’d never really learned themselves.

Beyond the practical effects, the lower standards sent a demoralizing
message: In America and Norway and many other countries, we did not expect our teachers to be the best and brightest of their generation. We told them so in a thousand different ways, and the messaging started the day they went to college.

When Kim was starting kindergarten in 2000, ten out of ten new Finnish teachers had graduated in the top third of their high school classes;
only two out of ten American teachers had done so. Incredibly, at some U.S. colleges, students had to meet
higher academic standards to play football than to become teachers.

In Finland, the government paid tuition for Stara and all university students. In Oklahoma, Bethel’s tuition was paid, too, but his free ride came from a carefully cobbled together safety net of Pell grants, a partial athletic scholarship, and Indian grants. Most students could not manage this feat.

During his sophomore year at Northeastern State University, Bethel had applied to the university’s education college. Here was another chance for the university to select its best and brightest to become teachers. But to be admitted, Bethel had to have
a grade-point average of just 2.5 or higher (out of 4). He would have needed a higher GPA to become an optometrist at the same university today. To be a teacher, he also had to have at least a C grade in freshman English and a C in speech or a class called the fundamentals of oral communication.

He also needed a score of 19 or higher on the ACT, a standardized test like the SAT.
The national average for the ACT back then was 20.6. Let’s consider what this meant: It was acceptable to perform
below average
for the country on a test of what you had learned throughout your educational career if you aspired to dedicate your career to education.

At the education college, Bethel discovered that he didn’t have to major in math to become a high-school math teacher. So he didn’t. Nationwide,
less than half of American high-school math teachers majored in math. Almost a third did not even minor in math.

The problem was even worse among students training to teach younger children.
“A large majority of elementary education majors are afraid of math,” one Oklahoma math department chair said in response to a 2005 survey. “This fear will be passed on to their students.” Another estimated that about a quarter of teachers graduating from his or her college actively hated math and showed no interest in improving.

Bethel liked math, but his primary goal was to become a coach, so he majored in physical education and minored in math. When he took the required test for high school math teachers in Oklahoma, he passed easily.
Most of the material was at a tenth or eleventh grade level, and he didn’t find it difficult. However, if he had, he would have been allowed to retake the test until he passed.

Nationwide, people studying to become math teachers in the United States did not have to actually know that much math compared to teachers in the education superpowers. The deficit was particularly alarming among middle-school math teachers. When researchers tested thousands of aspiring teachers in sixteen countries, they found that future middle-school math teachers in the United States
knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand and Oman. They had nowhere near the math competence of teachers-in-training in Taiwan, Singapore, or Poland. So it was not surprising that those same teachers’ students would perform just as unimpressively later on. You could not teach what you didn’t know.

Still, the most valuable part of any teacher preparation program may be the hands-on practice that student teachers get in a real-life classroom. There is no better way to prepare for teaching than to actually teach—and get meaningful feedback on how to improve.

In Oklahoma, Bethel’s student teaching experience helped him learn to plan lessons and manage a classroom. But it lasted just twelve weeks, compared to the year-long residency typical in Finland. Nationwide, U.S. teacher-training colleges only require
an average of twelve to fifteen weeks of student teaching, and the quality varies wildly depending on the place.

When Bethel got his first teaching job, he quickly realized that it would have been helpful to major in math. But what was done was done. By the time he taught Kim, he was earning about $49,000 per year, which was more than the typical salary in Sallisaw but still not a lot. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Stara was earning about $67,000. The cost of living was higher in Finland, but Stara’s salary was still higher. And her salary was closer to what other college graduates earned in Finland than Bethel’s salary was in the United States.

Interestingly, large salaries did not necessarily coincide with greatness worldwide.
The world’s highest paid teachers lived in Spain, where teenagers performed worse in math, reading, and science than students in the United States. But in higher-functioning education systems, larger salaries could help schools attract better-educated teachers and retain them over time, establishing a baseline of professionalism and prestige. In all the education superpowers, teachers’ incomes were closer to the salaries of other college-educated professionals than they were in the United States. In most cases, classes were also larger than they were in the United States, making the cost of the salaries more manageable.

As I listened to teachers like Stara and Bethel, I started to suspect that all these differences interacted, in chronological order. Because teacher colleges selected only the top applicants in Finland and other education superpowers, those schools could spend less time doing catch-up instruction and more time on rigorous, hands-on training; because teachers entered the classroom with rigorous training and a solid education, they were less likely than American teachers to quit in frustration. This model of preparation and stability made it possible to give teachers larger class sizes and pay them decently, since the turnover costs were much lower than in other countries. And, since they had all this training and support, they had the tools to help kids learn, year after year, and to finally pass a truly demanding graduation test at the end of high school.

The subconscious effects were just as powerful. As one U.S. exchange
student to Finland explained in the survey conducted for this book:

“My Finnish school fostered a great deal of respect for the institution and faculty in the students. This can be partly explained by the academic rigors that teachers had to endure in their journeys to becoming educators. The students were well aware of how accomplished their teachers were.”

One thing led to another. Otherwise, one thing led to much less. If the rigor didn’t start at the beginning, then the most challenging high-school graduation test in the world would not succeed. Federal mandates could only go so far. Without highly educated and well-trained teachers and principals, kids could make only limited progress each year. Realizing that they could never pass the graduation test, many would tune out and give up.

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality.

What if the main problem was not motivation? Was it possible to hammer 3.6 million American teachers into becoming master educators if their SAT scores were below average?

The lesson from Finland had a linear elegance: If we wanted to get serious about education, at long last, we needed to start at the beginning. Following Finland’s example, education colleges should only be allowed to admit students with SAT scores in the top third of the
national distribution or lose government funding and accreditation. Since 1.6 million U.S. teachers were due to retire between 2011 and 2021, a revolution in recruitment and training could change the entire profession in a short period of time.

Why hadn’t this been done in any state in America? Given that colleges already prepared far more teachers than schools needed, this change would not necessarily have led to a teacher shortage. Over time, it might have actually increased the popularity of the profession by making it more prestigious.

It was a bizarre oversight. For all the time and energy that American educators had spent praising Finland, it was remarkable that they did not insist upon this most obvious first step. It was almost as if we wanted the prestige of Finland’s teachers—but didn’t really believe that our teachers needed to be highly educated and unusually accomplished in order to merit that prestige. But why, then, did Finland?

After class, Kim had a free period—a full seventy minutes with nothing scheduled. This was the other big difference she’d noticed about Finland: the inexplicable stretches of luxurious freedom. She kept finding herself released into the ether, trusted to find her way through long stretches of time. She could even walk out of the school in the middle of the day and go to a coffee shop in the village until her next class began. It was hard to get used to.

Even outside school she felt this freedom. She had learned her way to the Halpa-Halli supermarket by bike and, although it took her an embarrassingly long time to find the simplest ingredients, her host mother didn’t seem to worry if she wasn’t home on time.

Parents in general seemed to trust their kids more. Kim routinely saw eight-year-olds walking to school alone, wearing reflective vests to keep them visible in the dark. At the high school, she rarely saw parents for any reason. Teenagers were treated more like adults. There
were no regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences. None. If teachers had a problem with the student, they usually just met with the student.

Kim wandered into the central lobby of the school and sat on one of the gray couches. Back home, she’d had five minutes free between classes, and anyone caught hanging out was in trouble. Part of her was still in Oklahoma, waiting for someone to come bust her.