The Smartest Kids in the World (5 page)

As a mother, Charlotte figured Kim was going through a phase. She was nearly a teenager after all; she was entitled to slam doors and play Avril Lavigne at excessive volume. But, as a teacher, she also knew that middle school was a kind of limbo for children, the years when American kids began to slip behind—and when it became obvious that some of them would eventually drop out altogether.

This
Kim, the one who wanted to drive three hours to take the SAT, reminded her of the old Kim, the one with plans. As she drove home, Charlotte silently added up the cost of going to Oklahoma City. They would probably need to spend the night in a hotel to get to the test on time, not to mention gas and food. As they pulled into the driveway, she made up her mind: “Okay, let’s go see how you do.”

A few weeks later, at a mostly empty Oklahoma City high school, Kim sat down with a small group of kids to take the SAT. She answered the essay question as best she could, twisting her long brown hair round and round her index finger. She’d always liked to write, and people had told her she was good at it.

When she got to the math section, though, the problems had letters in them where there should have been numbers. Maybe it was a misprint? She looked around; no one else seemed confused, so she focused on the word problems and guessed on the rest. By the end, she’d twirled her hair into a nest of knots. She had a grinding headache, like her brain had been slowly cooked over a low flame. She took four aspirin and slept the whole ride home.

One month later, Kim’s teacher handed her an envelope with her
SAT scores. When her mom picked her up from school, the two of them sat in the car and stared at the paper, trying to decipher what the numbers meant.

“Oh, look here: It says you’ve done better than 40 percent of college-bound Oklahoma high-school seniors in critical reading!” her mom said.

“What?” said Kim, grabbing the paper. “That can’t be right.”

Kim read and reread the words. How could she have done better than
any
college-bound high school seniors, let alone 40 percent? What had those kids been doing for the past five years?

“Wow, I am very disappointed in my state right now.”

“Oh, Kim,” her mom said, rolling her eyes and putting the car into drive.

But as they drove home, Kim had a second reaction. This was the
first time she had ever won anything. It wasn’t a cheerleading trophy, but still. She looked down at the scores again. Then she turned to look out the window so her mom wouldn’t see her smile.

Later that spring, Kim and her parents drove to Tulsa for a recognition dinner for the top-scoring SAT takers. Kim wore the yellow flowered sundress she’d gotten for the band recital. The
Sequoyah County Times
ran a short article, along with a picture of Kim and her silver medal. Usually, the newspaper ran stories about Sallisaw basketball and football players, the local celebrities; it felt strange to see her name in the same font.

Back at home, Kim put the medal in her desk drawer. It made her nervous to have it out in the open. What if it was the last thing she won? Better to forget about the whole episode until she took the SAT for real in high school.

But a few weeks later, a brochure arrived from Duke’s summer camp for the gifted and talented. Her SAT scores had gotten their attention; the story was not over after all. She was invited to learn Shakespeare and study psychology in Durham, North Carolina.

Reading the pamphlet, Kim felt disoriented, as if she’d stumbled upon a new planet. The program was billed as “intense and demanding,” equivalent to one year of high school in just three weeks. How was that possible? The camp looked like an unusual place: the kind of place where it was acceptable to care about things like Shakespeare and psychology.

She ran to tell her mom; her mind buzzed with the idea of meeting people her own age who wanted to have serious conversations. “This is my chance to be normal. We can discuss things—real things!”

Kim had never been good at small talk; it felt awkward and fake. Maybe this camp was a place where she could be herself, where she could go left or right at will, and let her questions come tumbling out into the open.

But the program cost money and, besides, Charlotte was in no hurry to let her youngest child leave home for the summer. She said no.

Oklahoma, like the rest of America, had been trying to fix its schools for a long time. Between 1969 and 2007, the state had
more than doubled the amount of money it spent per student in constant dollars. Over the years, Oklahoma had hired thousands of new
teachers’ aides, granted badly needed raises to teachers, and
lowered the student-to-teacher ratio. By 2011,
over half the state budget went to education, but most of Oklahoma’s kids still could not demonstrate competency in math.

To motivate kids and schools to do better, state lawmakers decided to create an incentive. In the late 1980s, they passed a law requiring students to take a test to graduate from high school. This kind of
end-of-school test was standard in the countries that performed at the top of the world on the PISA test. It gave kids and teachers a clear mission, and it made a diploma mean something.

A few years later, however, Oklahoma’s lawmakers delayed the test. It was a matter of compassion, or so they said. The lawmakers were worried too many students would fail. How would that look? Those kids would have attended four years of high school without getting a diploma. That didn’t feel right. The parents wouldn’t like it, either. So, the test was set aside, and the kids were left to fail a little later, in the real world, if they didn’t know enough math to take college classes for credit, or couldn’t get a job that paid above minimum wage.

After that, the governor of Oklahoma tried a kinder, gentler strategy. He signed an executive order requiring kids to pass a series of literacy tests, starting in eighth grade. That meant they had four years to retake the tests if they failed. However, just before the new mandate could take effect, Oklahoma’s legislature scrapped this requirement, too. Lawmakers said they were worried about lawsuits from angry parents.

The state’s history read like a slow-motion tug of war between hopes and fears, as if no one could agree what Oklahoma’s children
were capable of doing—a lack of faith that surely trickled down to the students.
“Kids have a really good detector about what adults take seriously and what counts,” as a 1997 teachers’ union report noted, “If they see that it doesn’t count, then they’re not going to do the hard work.”

In 2005, Oklahoma tried yet again, passing a law to require students to show a mastery of English, algebra, geometry, biology, and U.S. history in order to receive a diploma. The state had seven years to phase in the requirement, gently and humanely. Kids who failed could retake the test up to three times in one year, or they could take alternate tests, like the SAT. They could even opt to do special projects demonstrating their competence in any subject that they’d failed.

In 2011, as the graduation test was finally about to take effect, local newspapers warned that thousands of kids might not graduate. An Oklahoma School Boards Association official predicted that the results would be “devastating.” One superintendent told the
Tulsa World
that the graduating class of seniors might be known as the
“lost generation.” A Republican legislator introduced a bill to delay the test for two more years.

When I first visited Kim’s hometown, the young new superintendent of Sallisaw gave me a tour of the brick, one-story high school, past the orange and yellow lockers lining the cinderblock hallways. The last high school had been built by WPA workers during the Depression. This one, opened in 1987, looked like many American high schools: institutional but tidy, with blocks of color and light. The basketball court was the school’s jewel. The school’s black-diamond mascot, gleaming on the hardwood floor, dated back to the 1920s, when coal mining was a major local industry.

Scott Farmer had just been appointed the town’s first new superintendent in twenty years. He had short brown hair and a boyish face. The state of Oklahoma had
530 superintendents like him, each with their own fiefdom. There were about as many superintendents in
Oklahoma as there were members of Congress for the entire country. This tradition of hyperlocal control, hard-wired for inefficiency, hinted at one reason that the United States spent so much more than other countries on education.

Farmer made about $100,000 per year, which made him
one of the top earners in Sallisaw. He had an assistant superintendent, too, along with eight director-level managers and a school board. It was quite an operation for a district that included just four schools. But it was
hardly unusual. Compared to the rest of the state, in fact, Sallisaw was one of the more efficient school districts in Oklahoma.

When I asked Farmer to describe Sallisaw High School’s biggest challenge, he talked mostly
about parental involvement, lamenting the low turnout for parent-teacher conferences. “I’m just not convinced that parents quit caring,” Farmer said, shaking his head, “but that’s something we need to work on—reminding them of the importance of lifelong learning.”

I’d heard this argument often in U.S. schools, not just in Oklahoma. It seemed to be common knowledge that parents were AWOL in our schools. Even other parents thought so. In a survey about the best ways to improve education, most American adults cited
more involved parents.

Reality was more complicated, however. Whatever U.S. parents were doing wrong,
they were in fact showing up at their children’s schools more often than they had in twenty years. In 2007,
nine out of ten parents said they’d attended at least one parent-teacher conference or school meeting that school year. Some were coming to school for disciplinary meetings—uncomfortable encounters with assistant principals and stone-faced kids. But whether they came for positive reasons or negative, American parents were not as hands-off as most of us seemed to think.

So, what explained the disconnect? It might have depended on how you defined
involved.
When I talked to Ernie Martens, Sallisaw High School’s principal for the past decade, he had no complaints about parental involvement. Sure, parent-teacher conferences weren’t as well attended as they were in the younger grades, but that was okay, he said. High-school students didn’t need that kind of handholding. Instead, about three-quarters of the Sallisaw parents got involved in some other way, usually with the football booster club, the basketball booster club, or the Future Farmers of America chapter. Only about one in four of his parents were what he would consider uninvolved.

In fact, Principal Martens said his biggest problem was not parental involvement at all. His biggest problem was expectations; they were, he said, too high.

Politicians and so-called reformers expected too much from his students. “We have a lot of our kids who come from dysfunctional homes,” he said. “We’re the only normal thing they have in their life.” It was all well and good to talk about high expectations in political speeches, but he lived in the real world, in a part of the country where some parents read to their children, and some never did. In his world, some mothers thought breakfast was a bag of potato chips, and some fathers hid methamphetamines in the backyard barbecue.

In Sallisaw,
nearly one in four students failed to graduate high school within four years. Martens and Farmer had different narratives about why that was, but they were both looking in the same direction. Neither saw education itself as the primary problem or the main solution. Both pointed to external forces: negligent parents, social ills, or out-of-touch government expectations. That, too, was a common refrain among educators all over the United States. Whatever the problem, it was, it seemed, largely outside their control.

And they were right, of course. A long list of grim factors lay beyond their reach, from how much kids slept to how much television they watched. The stress that kids endured in many families taxed their bodies and minds, doing damage that no school could undo.

The only problem with this narrative was that it was habit forming. Once you start locating the source of your problems outside your own jurisdiction, it is hard to stop, even when the narrative is wrong.

For example: Sallisaw had plenty of good students, too. Other than the destitute and the dropouts, Sallisaw High School had its success stories, like every town. About half the kids who graduated from Sallisaw enrolled in public colleges and universities in Oklahoma. Others went to out-of-state colleges or looked for jobs.

What happened to these success stories after they left? Their colleges tested their basic skills and found them wanting. More than
half
these students were promptly placed into
remedial classes at Oklahoma public colleges. That meant that some of Sallisaw’s best students were paying good money for college, often in the form of student loans, but they weren’t getting college credit.

These young men and women had been told their whole lives to get a high-school diploma and go to college; that was the dream. But when they got there, they were stalled in limbo, redoing algebra or English as if they’d never left high school. It wasn’t hard to understand why, as their debt mounted, many quit college altogether.
One out of two Oklahoma university students failed to graduate within six years.

I asked Principal Martens about all the Sallisaw alumni who were retaking math or English. “That really doesn’t bother me,” he said, “because at least they are trying.”  The main goal was to go to college. Whether his graduates succeeded there was out of his control, or so it seemed.

The fact that those kids had spent four years in his school preparing to get to college—and that he’d given them a diploma that was supposed to mean they were ready—did not seem relevant.

It was July Fourth weekend, the year after she took the SATs, and Kim and her mom were visiting Kim’s older half-sisters in Texas. It was too hot to do anything ambitious, so they stayed close to the air conditioning, playing Scrabble and petting the dogs. When her
mom went outside to smoke a cigarette, Kim told her sister Kate she wanted to leave Sallisaw.