The Smartest Kids in the World (18 page)

By 2010, when Tom arrived from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Poland had joined the European Union. The country still struggled with deprivation, crime, and pathology of all kinds, however. While Tom
was there, the local soccer teams started playing in empty stadiums, silent but for the sounds of their feet kicking the ball. There’d been so much violence among the fans that they’d been banned from their own teams’ games.

Nearly one in six Polish children lived in poverty, a rate approaching that of the United States, where one in five kids are poor. It is hard to compare relative levels of sadness, but the data suggested that poor children in Poland led jagged lives. In a United Nations comparison of children’s material well-being,
Poland ranked dead last in the developed world.

Like the United States, Poland was a big country where people distrusted the centralized government. Yet something remarkable had happened in Poland. It had managed to do what other countries could not. From 2000 to 2006,
the average reading score of Polish fifteen-year-olds shot up twenty-nine points on the PISA exam. It was as if Polish kids had somehow packed
almost three-quarters of a school year of extra learning into their brains. In less than a decade, they had gone from below average for the developed world to
above
. Over the same period, U.S. scores had remained flat.

Tom was living in the transition that Finland and Korea had finished decades earlier. To see this change up close was the next best thing to time travel. Poland still had not joined the top tier of education superpowers. But, unlike the United States, it had dramatically improved its results in just a few years—despite crime, poverty, and a thousand good reasons for why it should fail. It was an unfinished narrative, but one that had turned, quite unexpectedly, in the direction of hope.

I met Tom in the center of Wrocław at a grand old hotel where Adolf Hitler, Pablo Picasso, and Marlene Dietrich had all stayed. He wore jeans and a rumpled, button-down shirt, untucked, with the sleeves
pushed up above his elbows. He was eighteen, a senior in high school. Since he’d arrived from Gettysburg, his Polish host mothers had been trying, without success, to fatten his skinny frame.

We walked through the old city, and it looked exactly the way Tom had described it to me months before: an eclectic collage of baroque cathedrals, cobblestone streets, and large, brutalist Soviet-style apartments. In the medieval square, known as the Rynek, tourists drank Piast beer at outdoor cafés underneath a sixteenth century clock that tracked the phases of the moon.
Babcias
, Polish grandmothers, shuffled by, scarves tied under their chins, packages tucked under their arms. The Rynek had been rebuilt and restored many times. This version was slightly too resplendent, the paint a shade more vibrant than it should have been, but still magnificent in its scale and sweep.

We stopped for coffee at Literatka, which represented, as much as anything, the reason Tom had left Pennsylvania. It was a small, cloistered café with smoke purling through the air. A few people sat alone, hunched over books or laptops. No one looked up when we entered.

Tom guided me through the café with the pride other teenagers reserve for showing off their new car. The walls were lined with bookshelves, stacked up to the ceiling. Small volumes about chemistry leaned up against faded tomes about philosophy. When Tom had imagined Eastern Europe back in the States, this was the scene he had pictured. Exactly.

It had been six months since his Polish math teacher had called him up to the chalkboard to solve a problem—and he’d failed. Since that day, his math teacher had not called on him again. He had, however, managed to learn Chopin (“Prelude in E Minor”) on the piano, just as he’d imagined he would. His Polish had gotten quite good, too. And even though he didn’t hear many references to Nabokov, he’d once overheard two old men arguing about philosophy at one of Literatka’s small, marble-topped tables. Tom had stared at them from behind his MacBook, delighted.
“Nie rozumiesz filozofii!”
(You don’t understand philosophy!) one man had yelled as he rose to leave. It was perfect.

We left Literatka and walked toward Tom’s school, LO XIII, known as number thirteen. The ambiance changed abruptly as we walked. The high school was located beside a dodgy neighborhood known as
Trójkạt Bermudzki,
or the Bermuda Triangle. It had earned the nickname years ago, when outsiders who’d wandered into the neighborhood seemed to vanish, never to be heard from again. The crime rate had come down since then, but it remained a complicated place. Just a few weeks before, a friend of Tom’s had been mugged at knifepoint there, in broad daylight, as he’d walked home from the school.

The streets in the Triangle were lined with tall, ornate row houses that had survived World War II but were now dilapidated tenements. Blackened statues stared down from the battered facades. The entryways stank of urine, and graffiti was scrawled across the pink, faded frescoes on the walls. Finland felt very far away.

As we walked, a child ran past us, on his way to a small playground tucked behind a stretch of row houses. Until 2007, the spot had been a dirt field, and the children of the Triangle had played there then, too, lacking other options. When an excavator had arrived one day to turn the field into a parking lot, the children had protested, refusing to surrender their square patch of dirt. They’d made signs out of wooden planks:
“We demand a playground!” “Excavator Go Away!” The leader among them, a sixteen-year-old named Krystek who would likely go far in life, had called the newspapers. The developers had backed down, agreeing to build a few parking spaces and a modest playground.

The Triangle kids did not have easy lives. Some had fathers in prison; others had mothers who drank too much vodka. On some days, kids came to school tired and hungry. To an outsider, it didn’t look all that different from an American ghetto.

Yet something had changed for the Triangle kids rather dramatically in the past decade, something that was hard to see on the street.
These kids spent their days in an education system that had reimagined what was possible. The changes had not been in the margins, where most reforms happened everywhere else on the planet; they had broken through to the core, fundamentally altering the structure and substance of an education in Poland, giving these kids better odds than they would have encountered in many school districts within the United States, a much richer country. These kids still lived in the Triangle, but they were less likely, statistically speaking, to be lost forever.

In 1997, when Mirosław Handke became Poland’s minister of education, he was an outsider. A chemist with a white mustache and dramatic, black-slash eyebrows, he looked like an Eastern Bloc version of Sean Connery. Handke was accomplished in his own world at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. He’d published more than eighty papers on the obscure properties of minerals and become the head of the university, one of Poland’s best. However, he knew next to nothing about education policy or politics. His cluelessness would serve him well, at least for a little while.

By then, Poland’s thirty-eight million citizens had undergone years of economic shock therapy, designed to catapult the country into the West after the fall of communism. So far, deregulation and privatization had worked, making Poland one of the fastest growing economies in the world; unemployment had been steadily falling, along with inflation.

Now the country was on the precipice yet again; without urgent social reforms, the health care, pension, and education systems could suck the life out of the Polish economy, sending inflation soaring again and jeopardizing Poland’s trajectory from a Communist backwater to a European power.

Most damning of all, Polish adults did not have the skills to compete
in the modern world. Only half of rural adults had finished primary school. The Poles would be relegated to doing the low-skilled, low-wage jobs that other Europeans did not want.

Faced with this existential crisis, Handke studied the education systems of other countries, including the United States, where he had lived for two years. He traveled around Poland meeting with teachers, researchers, and politicians. In the spring of 1998, he and his boss, the new prime minister, Jerzy Buzek (another chemistry professor), announced a series of reforms the likes of which they might never have contemplated if they’d had more experience with the political sensitivities of education.

“We have to move the entire system—push it out of its equilibrium so that it will achieve a new equilibrium,” Handke said. He was still teaching chemistry, this time to thirty-eight million people.

To get to the new equilibrium, the country would enter what scientists called a
transition phase.
This phase would, as Handke put it,
“give students a chance.” It had four main parts, laid out in a 225-page orange book that was distributed to schools all over the country. First, the reforms would inject rigor into the system. A new core curriculum would replace the old, dumbed-down mandates that had forced teachers to cover too many topics too briefly. The new program would lay out fundamental goals, but leave the details to the schools. At the same time, the government would require a quarter of teachers to go back to school to improve their own education.

Along with rigor came accountability. To make sure students were learning, they would start taking standardized tests at regular intervals throughout their schooling—not as often as American kids, but at the end of elementary, junior high, and high school. Those tests would be the same all over the country, for all of Poland’s several million children.

For younger kids, the tests would help identify which students—and teachers and schools—needed more help. For older students, the tests would also have consequences, determining which high schools and then universities they could attend. For the first time, all students
would take the university entrance exam at the end of high school, and the exams would no longer be graded by local teachers. That way, universities and employers would be able to trust that the results meant the same thing from place to place.

The Poles couldn’t know it yet, but this kind of targeted standardized testing would prove to be critical in any country with significant poverty, according to a PISA analysis that would come out years later. Around the world,
school systems that used regular standardized tests tended to be fairer places, with smaller gaps between what rich and poor kids knew. Even in the United States, where tests have historically lacked rigor and purpose, African-American and Hispanic students’ reading and math scores have gone up during the era of widespread standardized testing.

Why did tests make schools fairer, generally speaking? Tests helped schools to see what they were doing right and wrong, and who needed more help. That insight was a prerequisite, not a solution. Rendering problems visible did not guarantee they would be fixed, as thousands of U.S. school districts had proven under the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind. But identifying problems seemed to be a necessary first step in places with wild variation in what kids knew.

The third reform was the most important one: to literally—not just rhetorically—raise the expectations for what kids could accomplish. To do this, the reforms would force all kids to stay together in the same academic environment for an extra full year, through the equivalent of freshman year in high school. Instead of getting streamed into either vocational or academic programs around age fifteen, a practice known as
tracking
, students would go to the same junior high schools, together, until age sixteen. The difference was only twelve months, but it would have surprising consequences.

In Poland,
delaying tracking meant creating four thousand new junior high schools, virtually overnight. There was no other way to accommodate all the students who would normally have gone off to vocational school at fifteen.

Handke might have stopped there. A new core curriculum, a stricter testing regiment, and thousands of new schools would represent a massive disruption, the likes of which no American state had ever seen in such a short time.

But there was an obvious problem. The Poles had recent, traumatic memories of communism. It was politically impossible to impose changes like this from the central government without granting other freedoms in exchange. To extract more accountability, Handke decided to reward schools with more control.

That autonomy was the fourth reform. Teachers would be free to choose their own textbooks and their own specific curriculum from over one hundred approved options, along with their own professional development. They would start earning bonuses based in part on how much professional development they did. In a booming country where people were judged by how much money they made, the cash infusion would telegraph to everyone that teachers were no longer menial laborers. The principal, meanwhile, would have full responsibility for hiring teachers. Local authorities would have full control over budgeting decisions, including where and how to open the new junior high schools.

In other words, the new system would demand more accountability for results, while granting more autonomy for methods. That dynamic could be found in all countries that had dramatically improved their results, including Finland and, for that matter, in every high-performing organization, from the U.S. Coast Guard to Apple Inc.

All this change would happen, Handke declared, in one year.

The orange book provoked extreme reactions. Some Poles applauded the audacity of Handke’s plan:
“This is our ticket to Europe and the modern world,” proclaimed a journalist at
Gazeta Wyborcza,
one of Poland’s biggest newspapers. However, the Union of Polish Teachers came out against the reforms, accusing Handke of trying to change too much too
quickly with too little funding. In another article in the same newspaper, one principal prophesied disaster:
“We can look forward to a deterioration in the standard of education for most young people, a deepening of illiteracy and a widespread reluctance to pursue further education.”