The Smartest Kids in the World (36 page)

In 2003, when math was the primary focus of the PISA test (which has a different subject-matter emphasis every three years), America’s most advantaged kids ranked twenty-first. (See U.S. Department of Education,
Table B.1.70
at
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/tables/B_1_70.asp
).

Outside a handful of researchers at the OECD and the U.S. Department of Education, few people seem to have noticed this index, possibly because it was so hard to find. Instead, various education bloggers and commentators have seized on another, more readily available breakdown of scores. That data shows how different
schools’
students did on PISA within the United States, broken down by the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch at those schools. Nothing wrong with that. And, indeed, that data, included in a U.S. Department of Education publication, shows that U.S. schools with very few low-income kids performed very well on PISA compared to U.S. schools with high numbers of low-income kids. It is a useful way to compare schools
within
the United States

However, these same bloggers concluded that kids in affluent American schools performed better than
all kids
in Finland or other top-performing countries. Education pundit and New York University research scientist Diane Ravitch has repeatedly made this claim—on television and in print. “If you look at the latest international test scores, our schools that are low-poverty schools are number one in the world,” Ravitch said at the 2011
Save our Schools
rally on the National Mall. “They’re ahead of Finland! They’re ahead of Korea. Number one. The schools that are less than 10 percent poor and the schools that are 25 percent poverty are equal to the schools of Finland and Korea, the world leaders. Our problem is poverty, not our schools.”

That is nonsense. Other countries do not have data on which students would qualify for free or reduced-price lunch under U.S. regulations;
that is an American policy with American definitions. This breakdown of PISA scores came from a survey of principals conducted in the United States
only.
The OECD does not collect comparable data from principals in any other country. So we cannot use the free-lunch data to compare different countries’ results.

For example, Finland has less than 5 percent child poverty using one standard definition of poverty (i.e., the percentage of people earning less than 50 percent of the median income for
Finland
). That definition of poverty is totally different and unrelated to the criteria used to qualify kids for free or reduced-price lunch in the United States (i.e., parents earning less than 185 percent of the
U.S.
poverty level).

The bottom line: The only existing way to compare how kids at different income levels do on PISA is to use PISA’s own index of socioeconomic status. That is the data I have cited here and throughout the book. That data does not show that low-poverty U.S. schools rank number one in much, unfortunately, except perhaps spending per student.

Beverly Hills:
Greene and McGee, “When the Best Is Mediocre
.
”

Research and development:
National Science Board,
Science and Engineering Indicators.
The United States still invests more money in absolute dollars than any other nation in research and development. It’s worth nothing, however, that the U.S. rate as a portion of GDP now falls below several other education superpowers, including Finland and Korea.

The world had changed:
Author interviews with Craig Barrett, former Chair and CEO of Intel, March 27, 2012; Sir James Dyson, founder of the Dyson Company, June 1, 2011; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, August 18, 2010; Sir John Rose, former CEO of Rolls-Royce, December 5, 2011; executives at Adecco, a global staffing and recruiting agency, December 14, 2011; as well as economists, public officials, and other business leaders around the world.

Apple pies:
Author interviews with Paula Marshall, CEO of the Bama Companies, on November 9, 2011, and Shelly Holden, vice president of people systems at the Bama Companies, on December 16, 2011.

Manpower:
Joerres,
Atlantic
panel. “The bar has risen,” Joerres said. “Salespeople are the hardest to find—not because people don’t want to do it. Companies have changed the entire definition of what it means to sell.”

Twenty countries:
High-school graduation rates for 2009 come from OECD,
Education at a Glance 2011
, Table A2.1.

Norway:
Child poverty rates come from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)
analysis of poverty around the world. Children are considered poor if they live in a household earning less than 50 percent the median household income in their country of residence. Scientific literacy scores come from OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. I).
Norway’s average scale score was 500 compared to the US score of 502.

President Barack Obama:
In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama applauded South Korean teachers’ reputation as “nation builders.” He spoke admiringly of Korean parents in 2009 remarks for the “Education to Innovate” campaign.

Survey:
This survey, conducted in collaboration with AFS in the spring of 2012, included 202 former exchange students from fifteen countries. Marie Lawrence from the New America Foundation helped design and administer the survey and analyze the results. A detailed summary of the methodology and results can be found in the appendix.

chapter 1: the treasure map

Andreas Schleicher:
Details about the history of PISA come from many interviews with Andreas Schleicher, in-person, on the phone, and via email and Skype, between 2010 and 2012; interviews with Thomas Alexander; and archived newspaper clips from around the world. More details about Schleicher can be found in Ripley, “The World’s Schoolmaster
.”

A third of a million teenagers:
OECD,
Messages from PISA 2000.
The coin question comes from the OECD’s
PISA Released Items.

Other international tests:
There are other tests besides PISA, each of which provides valuable data in its own right; for the purposes of this book, I was most interested in which countries prepared students to think, learn, and thrive in the modern economy. PISA was designed with this purpose in mind. The OECD’s 1999 report,
Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills
, describes the difference between PISA and other international tests this way:

“The knowledge and skills tested
. . .
are defined not primarily in terms of . . . national school curricula but in terms of what skills are deemed to be essential for future life. This is the most fundamental and ambitious novel feature of OECD/PISA. . . . PISA examines the degree of preparedness of young people for adult life and, to some extent, the effectiveness of education systems. Its ambition is to assess achievement in relation to
the underlying objectives (as defined by society) of education systems, not in relation to the teaching and learning of a body of knowledge. Such authentic outcome measures are needed if schools and education systems are to be encouraged to focus on modern challenges.”

“We were looking for the ability to think creatively:
” Taylor, “Finns Win, but Australian Students Are a Class Act.”

The education minister strode into the room:
Author interview with Jouni Välijärvi, professor at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, on May 13, 2011. Välijärvi attended the Helsinki press conference and was interviewed on television afterward.

“A tragedy for German education:
” “Bildungsstudie - Durchweg schlechte Noten,”
FOCUS,
and Bracey, “Another Nation at Risk.”

Others blamed video games:
Heckmann, “Schlechte Schüler wegen schlecht gebildeter Lehrer?”

A gulf of more than ninety points:
The data on the performance of affluent and less-affluent teenagers in the United States and around the world on the 2000 PISA is from Figure 6.1 on page 141 of the OECD report, “Knowledge and Skills for Life.”

“Average is not good enough:”
Paige, “U.S. Students Average among International Peers.”

Immigrants could not be blamed:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
29.

Private school:
Compared to many other countries, the United States does not have a large proportion of students in private school. However, the PISA sample for the United States does include private-school students. OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education
, 47.

Money did not lead to more learning:
OECD,
Strong Performers
, 28.

“And he tells me the truth:
” Author interview of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, March 21, 2011.

“The most important man in English education:
” Gove, “The Benchmark for Excellence.”

PISA attracted critics:
For one critique of PISA, see Schneider,
Education Next.
My own conclusion is that these critics raised important points, particularly regarding the challenges of extrapolating causation from PISA data. Schleicher and his colleagues at the OECD have imperfect information, and their own biases, of course. Still, on balance, the data from PISA represents an important portal into a large, complex problem. It seems better to attempt to understand what differentiates education
systems (with caution) than to abstain from the conversation altogether.

“A TV reporter showed this graph:
” OECD,
Take the Test.

Flu-shot notice:
OECD,
Take the Test.

Vitamin C:
OECD,
PISA Released Items
.

“Good job!”:
The PISA folks declined to translate my performance into a precise numerical score since a country’s mean score is normally derived from the aggregate score of all the kids who took the test. There are different versions of the test booklet given to different students to come up with a balanced sample. So, I can’t say with precision how I did compared to all kids in Finland or Korea. However, it seems safe to assume that we inhabit the same league, since I got all but one question right. I am of course, much older than PISA test-takers, so this does not mean much. But, anecdotally speaking, I can tell you that there was nothing on the test that I wouldn’t want my own child to know and be able to do by the age of fifteen. PISA is many things, but it is not rocket science.

“The hallmark of American education:
” Scott, “Testimony by Professor Joan Wallach Scott.”

U.S. teenagers ranked twenty-sixth:
OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. I)
. Note that students from Shanghai, which is part of China, earned, on average, the highest score in the world on PISA in 2009. I did not include Shanghai in my rankings for this book because Shanghai is not a country and not representative of China as a whole. (Millions of children in China still lack access to a basic education, despite exaggerated media accounts of China’s educational dominance.) If I had included Shanghai (and Hong Kong), the United States would rank lower in every subject.

Data from PISA can be most easily accessed using the PISA International Data Explorer, located at
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/idepisa/
.

Second in the world:
OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. IV)
, Table IV.3.21b. There are many ways to compare spending on education, all of them flawed. After looking at the options, it seemed most useful and fair to rely on OECD data for cumulative expenditures by educational institutions per student aged six to fifteen. The figures are in equivalent U.S. dollars, converted using purchasing power parity.

One downside of this figure is that it does not include all of high school (or prekindergarten). Since the PISA test score data is based on fifteen-year-olds, these figures do correspond to the most relevant years for our purposes.

A bigger downside is that these numbers do not include families’ private
spending on tutoring and other educational supplements (although the figures do include private
school
expenditures in most countries, including the United States). As discussed in more detail in the portions of the book focused on Korea, that spending can be very high in Asian countries in particular. But, in all cases, most education spending flows through the school systems, which is where these numbers come from.

One-to-one match:
Robelen, “Study Links Rise in Test Scores to Nations’ Output,” and OECD,
The High Cost of Low Educational Performance.

One to two trillion dollars:
McKinsey & Company,
Economic Impact
.

A better predictor:
The predictive power of PISA was analyzed in a longitudinal study of thirty thousand Canadian teenagers who took the test in 2000. OECD,
Pathways to Success.

chapter 2: leaving

Pretty Boy Floyd:
Ingram, “Family Plot.”

Officially classified as poor:
Poverty rates for Sallisaw School District from the Bureau of the Census, American Community Survey, 2005-9 Summary Tables, generated using American FactFinder.

On the state test:
In 2009, when Kim was finishing eighth grade, six out of ten of her Sallisaw classmates scored proficient or better on Oklahoma’s standardized test. Oklahoma State
Department of Education, “Sallisaw Public School No Child Left Behind Act Annual Report Card 2008-2009.”