The Smartest Kids in the World (40 page)

Sports were central to American students’ lives and school cultures:
The centrality of sports in U.S. schools is a fascinating oddity that bears further research. We know from the 2009 PISA dataset that 98 percent of U.S. high schools offered sports as an extracurricular activity, compared to 71 percent in Finland, for example. We don’t, however, understand all the many ways this difference affects the lives of kids.

A survey of exchange students conducted a decade before this one found a similar consensus about sports: Eight out of ten exchange students said that it was more important to their American friends to do well in sports compared to students in other countries. (See Loveless,
How Well Are American Students Learning? With Special Sections on High School Culture and Urban School Achievement,
and Loveless,
How Well Are American Students Learning? With Sections on Arithmetic, High School Culture, and Charter Schools.
)

Those reports also pointed out that schools and students can excel at both sports and academics. They are not mutually exclusive, and athletes can, of course, be scholars. Still, it is hard to measure how the glorification of sports undermines academics in the minds of all the other American students (most of whom, it should be noted, are not serious athletes and never will be).

For more about the (rarely acknowledged) trade-offs between sports and academics, see Conn, “In College Classrooms, the Problem is High School Athletics.”

American students spent double the amount of time playing sports:
Won and Han, “Out-of-School Activities and Achievement Among Middle School Students in the United States and South Korea.”

About 10 percent of Kim’s classmates played sports in Finland:
Author email correspondence with teacher Tiina Stara on May 27, 2012.

More and more studies:
The study of how personality impacted earnings started with Marxist sociologists and economists like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, who wrote a book called
Schooling in Capitalist America
. The research into all kinds of noncognitive skills accelerated in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, led by scholars like James Heckman at the University of
Chicago and Angela Lee Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, among others.

Best predictor of academic performance was not the children’s IQ scores:
Duckworth and Seligman, “Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents.”

Motivation, empathy, self-control, and persistence:
Almlund et al., “Personality Psychology and Economics.”

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania had an idea:
Boe, May, and Boruch,
Student Task Persistence in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study.

When May repeated the analysis with the 2009 PISA data:
May, Duckworth, and Boe.
Knowledge vs. Motivation
.

It even predicted how long people lived:
Almlund et al., “Personality Psychology and Economics.”

chapter 7: the metamorphosis

The children of Breslau:
For a richly detailed, gripping account of the siege of Breslau—and the history of the city before and after—see Davies and Moorhouse,
Microcosm
.

Sometimes before they’d been abandoned by their owners:
Ibid, 432.

They renamed Adolf Hitler Street:
Kamm, “The Past Submerged.”

Hyperinflation took hold:
Sachs, interviewed on the PBS program,
Commanding Heights
.

Nearly one in every six Polish children lived in poverty:
Measuring child poverty is a complicated business. There are different ways to do it, none of them very good. In this case, I’ve chosen to use the Luxembourg Income Study analysis of poverty around the world. By this metric, children were considered poor if they lived in a household earning less than 50 percent the median household income in their country.

The latest data for Poland was from 2004, which meant that it did not reflect the effects of the global recession that began in late 2007. Still, the LIS data set was the only one I found that allowed comparisons of child poverty in Finland, the United States, South Korea,
and
Poland. In 2004, about 16 percent of Poland’s children were living in poverty, under this definition. Nearly 21 percent were living in poverty in the United States that same year.

It’s worth noting that the OECD’s analysis of the socioeconomic status
of students around the world (known as the Economic, Social and Cultural Index) found something different than the measures of poverty based on income. By this more holistic metric, which takes into account parents’ education levels, occupations, and the number of books and computers in the home, among other factors, 21 percent of Poland’s fifteen-year-olds were living in the least advantaged category in 2009 compared to 10 percent of teenagers in the United States See OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol. I),
Table 1.2.20.

Poland ranked dead last:
UNICEF,
Child Poverty in Perspective,
2-4.

The average reading score of Polish fifteen-year-olds shot up twenty-nine points:
PISA International Data Explorer, accessed December 2012.

Almost three-quarters of a school year of learning:
OECD,
The High Cost of Low Educational Performance,
3.

“We demand a playground!”:
Czajkowska, “Kids Revolt.”

“We have to move the entire system”:
Author interview with Mirosław Handke on April 16, 2012. Translation by Justine Jablonska.

“Give students a chance”:
Mourshed, Chijioke, and Barber,
How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better.

School systems that used regular standardized tests tended to be fairer places:
OECD,
PISA 2009 Results: (Vol. IV).

Delaying tracking meant creating four thousand new junior high schools:
Mourshed, Chijioke, and Barber,
How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better.

That autonomy was the fourth reform:
Author interview with Handke.

“This is our ticket to Europe and the modern world”:
Kruczkowska,
“Reform Without Miracles.”

“We can look forward to a deterioration in the standard of education”:
Kalbarczyk, “Against Gymnasium.”

There were a lot of distractions:
Author interview with Jerzy Wiśniewski on May 18, 2011.

On September 1, 1999:
Author interview with Handke and
Catholic Information Agency,
“Gniezno.”

“Not hammering redundant information into the head”:
Kaczorowska, “The New Need to Improve.”

60 percent of Poles:
Rich, “Minister who got his sums wrong is forced to quit.”

“The only other developed country still opposed is Turkey”:
Author interview with Wiśniewski.

Over two-thirds scored in the rock-bottom lowest literacy level:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
225.

Thirteenth in reading and eighteenth in math:
OECD,
Learning for Tomorrow’s World
, 81, 281.

Despite spending less than half as much money:
OECD
, PISA 2009 Results (Vol. IV), Table IV.3.21b.
As of 2007, Poland was spending about $39,964 to educate a single student from age six to fifteen, the age at which students took the PISA test; meanwhile, the United States was spending about $105,752 to do the same thing. Figures are in equivalent U.S. dollars, converted using purchasing power parity.

Poland’s poorest kids outscored the poorest kids in the United States:
For reading results, see OECD,
PISA 2009 Results (Vol II),
152; for math results, see U.S. Department of Education
, Table B.1.70.

85 percent of Polish students graduated from high school that year, compared to 76 percent in the U.S:
OECD,
Education at a Glance 2012,
Table A2.1.

PISA scores for U.S. kids remained largely unchanged:
U.S. students’ performance in math and reading remained about the same between 2000 and 2009; science scores did go up a bit in 2009 compared to 2006, ringing in at about average for the developed world. OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
26.

The variation in scores from one Polish school to the next had dropped:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education.

Over one-third of Polish teens scored in the top two levels of literacy:
OECD, “The Impact of the 1999 Education Reform in Poland.”

The delay in tracking:
Ibid.

The reforms had postponed the gap, not eliminated it:
Ibid.

Tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality:
Hanushek and Woessmann,
Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality?

The applied track:
Author interview with Principal Mark Blanchard and teachers at Gettysburg High School.

A uniquely American policy:
Schmidt and McKnight,
Inequality for All.
“Teachers, principals, school superintendents, and school board members may see their policies with respect to tracking in practical, harmless terms . . . .[In fact] what we are experiencing is the hidden destruction of the hopes of millions of children.”

About a third of kids got special help:
Hancock, “Why Are Finland’s Schools So Successful?”

Only 2 percent repeated a grade in Finnish primary school:
PISA In Focus No. 6
and PISA 2009 dataset.

The poorest school districts spent 20 percent less:
U.S. Department of Education, Education Dashboard.

One of the most obvious differences between the United States and other countries:
Tucker,
Surpassing Shanghai.

In almost every other developed country:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
32
.
Student-teacher ratios did not necessarily reflect quality, but the ratio did reflect spending power and the values of the larger society.

He figured he could fix Gettysburg:
Author interviews with Blanchard in person and via email in the spring and summer of 2012.

The school spent almost twice as much per student:
Boser,
Return on Educational Investment.

No one dropped out because “bonehead English” went away:
Author interviews with Blanchard.

All jobs had gotten more complex, including blue-collar jobs:
For a vivid case study of how blue-collar jobs have changed, see Davidson, “Making it in America.”

The state’s own test, which wasn’t very hard:
The lack of rigor in the Pennsylvania state test (the PSSA) is evidenced by the fact that 78 percent of eighth graders tested proficient in math on the PSSA—but only 39 percent tested proficient on the NAEP.

When Tom’s classmates took the SAT:
Pennsylvania Department of Education, “SAT and ACT Scores.”

Spałka and other principals had about $4,681 to spend:
OECD, “Country Statistical Profile: Poland,” Education Expenditure Per Student: Non-tertiary.

Compared to $11,000 per student in Gettysburg:
OECD, “Country Statistical Profile: United States,” Education Expenditure Per Student: Non-tertiary. Separately, Principal Blanchard estimated that Gettysburg spent about $11,000 per student as of 2012.

“We’re not too excited about the reforms”:
Author interview with Urszula Spałka on May 20, 2011. Translation by Mateusz Kornacki.

It hadn’t changed enough:
For an excellent, in-depth analysis of the phases of reforms that countries go through to get from poor to fair, fair to good, good to great, and, finally, great to excellent, see Mourshed, Chijioke, and Barber,
How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better.
The report includes a detailed assessment of the trajectory of Poland and 19 other countries, illustrating the importance of systems-based reforms that occur in sequence.

chapter 8: difference

She felt like two people:
The description of Kim’s depression is based in part on her blog post: “I swear one side of my head was metaphorically curled up with ice cream and watching a romantic comedy and cuddling a box of Kleenex, the other side was lacing up her combat boots, swiping that black grease under her eyes and finding the latest edition of,
I swear I’m mentally stable. Let me rationally convince you of this.”

“A compound of bravado and bravery”:
Time
, “Northern Theatre: Sisu.”

The big matriculation exam:
Details on Finland’s graduation test come from Sahlberg,
Finnish Lessons,
and author interviews with Finnish educators.

Performed over sixteen points higher on PISA:
OECD,
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education,
256.

Finnish kids cited the high number of tests as one reason that they didn’t like school:
Kupiainen, Hautamäki, and Karjalainen,
The Finnish Education System and PISA,
22.