{"id":6117,"date":"2014-06-21T16:09:49","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T20:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=6117"},"modified":"2014-06-21T16:09:49","modified_gmt":"2014-06-21T20:09:49","slug":"smartest-kids-in-the-world-american-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/21\/smartest-kids-in-the-world-american-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"Smartest Kids in the World: American Schools"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Part of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B0061NT61Y\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0061NT61Y&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pgreenspun-20&amp;linkId=VSNDYSKRJD72L4ZD\">The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important;margin: 0px !important\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=pgreenspun-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=B0061NT61Y\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/> concerns American schools. Unfortunately it is mostly to contrast them with effective schools elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Amanda Ripley identifies the following major problems with American schools:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>people who are poorly educated are hired as schoolteachers<\/li>\n<li>teachers have limited autonomy (partly as a result of their low level of knowledge and ability)<\/li>\n<li>schools have multiple missions, only one of which is education, which leads to a loss of focus<\/li>\n<li>teachers and administrators dwell on student and family backgrounds so as to build up a catalog of excuses for poor educational outcomes<\/li>\n<li>parents are complacent regarding the low expectations set for their children<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here are some excerpts from\u00a0this interesting book:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Scott Farmer had just been appointed the town\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>That, too, was a common refrain among educators all over the United States. Whatever the problem, it was, it seemed,\u00a0largely outside their control.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0success 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\u2019s best students were paying good money for college, often in the form of student loans, but they weren\u2019t getting college credit.<\/p>\n<p>I asked Principal Martens about all the Sallisaw alumni who were retaking math or English. \u201cThat really doesn\u2019t bother me,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause at least they are trying.\u201d \u200aThe main goal was to go to college. Whether his graduates succeeded there was out of his control, or so it seemed.\u00a0The fact that those kids had spent four years in his school preparing to get to college\u2014and that he\u2019d given them a diploma that was supposed to mean they were ready\u2014did not seem relevant.<\/p>\n<p>American teachers taught with textbooks that were written to appease thousands of districts and many states all at once, as education researcher William Schmidt has documented in detail. That meant that American textbooks tended to be far too long\u2014covering (and repeating) way too many topics in too little depth. Internationally, the average eighth grade math textbook was 225 pages long; in the United States, eighth grade math texts averaged 800 pages. That was about 300 pages longer than all thirteen volumes of Euclid\u2019s Elements.<\/p>\n<p>The end result was that American students ended up learning about, say, fractions every single year, from first to eighth grade, while their peers in smarter countries covered fractions in grades three through six.<\/p>\n<p>By eighth grade, seven out of ten kids went to schools that did not even offer algebra courses with the kind of content that was standard in most other countries. It was only logical that American kids were behind their peers in the smart-kid countries; they were essentially taking remedial math, whether they needed it or not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Aside from the high cash compensation, three months of summer vacation, and secure pension, what motivates Americans\u00a0to\u00a0work in an environment where failure is almost guaranteed?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230; consider Kim\u2019s math teacher back home, Scott Bethel. He\u2019d decided to become a teacher mostly so that he could become a football coach. In America, this made sense. As a student at Sallisaw High School, he was an all-state quarterback in 1989. \u201cMy dad taught at a school about ten miles from here,\u201d Bethel told me. \u201cHe was also a football coach, and I was always good at sports, and I thought, \u2018You know what, I\u2019d like to become a coach.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If you too wanted to be a high school sports coach\/math teacher, what would you have to do?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Although Bethel hadn\u2019t taken calculus in high school, he\u2019d always been pretty good at math. So, he figured the best way to become a coach was to become a math teacher. Bethel was one of several coaches that Kim had as teachers over the years, a hybrid job that would be considered bizarre in Finland and many countries, where sports lay beyond the central mission of\u00a0schools. In Oklahoma alone, Bethel could choose from nearly two dozen teacher-training programs\u2014almost three times as many as in all of Finland, a much bigger place. Oklahoma, like most states, educated far more teachers than it needed. At most U.S. colleges, education was known as one of the easiest majors. Education departments usually welcomed almost anyone who claimed to like children. Once students got there, they were rewarded with high grades and relatively easy work. Instead of taking the more rigorous mathematics classes offered to other students, for example, education majors tended to take special math classes designed for students who did not like math. Bethel did his training at\u00a0Northeastern State University, like the Sallisaw superintendent and many Oklahoma teachers, including Kim\u2019s mom. The university prepares more teachers than any other institution in the state and has a good reputation. However, it also has a 75 percent acceptance rate, which means that it admits, on average, students with much weaker math, reading, and science skills than Finnish education schools.<\/p>\n<p>During his sophomore year at Northeastern State University, Bethel had applied to the university\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>At the education college, Bethel discovered that he didn\u2019t have to major in math to become a high-school math teacher. So he didn\u2019t. Nationwide, less than half of American high-school math teachers majored in math. Almost a third did not even minor in math.<\/p>\n<p>Bethel liked math, but his primary goal was to become a coach, so\u00a0he 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\u2019t find it difficult. However, if he had, he would have been allowed to retake the test until he passed.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe American teachers get more practical training to compensate for their weak college experience?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In Oklahoma, Bethel\u2019s 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,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Has any state ever tried to &#8220;pull a Finland&#8221; and restrict teacher education and hiring to those who were reasonably good students?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Why hadn\u2019t that evolution ever happened in the United States\u2014or in most other countries? Had anyone even tried? The examples were few but revealing. As the new education commissioner in Rhode Island, one of Deborah Gist\u2019s first acts was to raise the minimum test scores for teachers-to-be in 2009. At the time, Rhode Island allowed lower scores than almost any state in the nation. She had the power to change this unilaterally, and she did, taking one small step in the direction of Finland by requiring new teachers to score significantly higher on the SAT, ACT, and the Praxis, a teacher certification test. 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.<\/p>\n<p>Others worried that higher standards would lead to a teacher shortage. Yet Rhode Island\u2019s teacher colleges already churned out 1,000 teachers a year, about 800 more than the school system\u00a0needed to hire.<\/p>\n<p>Because this was America, a diverse country with a long history of racism in colleges, public schools, and every other institution, Gist\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s teacher-preparation programs produced five times more teachers than Rhode Island\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Under the new, higher standards, about 85 percent of Rhode Island College\u2019s 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. \u201cI have the utmost confidence that Rhode Island\u2019s future teachers are capable of this kind of performance,\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What does a good American high school look like to a Finnish teenager?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Elina discovered one important difference about America. Back home, she\u2019d been a good student. In Colon, she was exceptional. She took Algebra II, the most advanced math class offered at Colon High. On her first test, she got 105 percent. Until then, Elina had thought it was mathematically impossible to get 105 percent on anything. She thought she might have more trouble in U.S. history class, since she was not, after all, American. Luckily, her teacher gave the class a study guide that contained all the questions\u2014and answers\u2014to the exam.<\/p>\n<p>Elina was unsurprised to see she\u2019d gotten an A. She was amazed, however, to see that some of the other students had gotten Cs. One of them looked at her and laughed at the absurdity. \u201cHow is it possible you know this stuff\u200a?\u201d \u201cHow is it possible you don\u2019t know this stuff\u200a?\u201d Elina answered.<\/p>\n<p>I talked to Elina after she had left the United States and gone to college in Finland. She was planning to work in foreign affairs one day. Now that some time had gone by, I wondered if she had a theory about what she\u2019d seen in her American school. Were the students too coddled? Or the opposite\u2014too troubled? Too diverse? Maybe they were demoralized by all the standardized testing? Elina didn\u2019t think so. In her experience, American kids didn\u2019t study much because, well, they didn\u2019t have to. \u201cNot much is demanded of U.S. students,\u201d she said. In Finland, her exams were usually essay tests, requiring her to write three or four pages in response. \u201cYou really have to study. You have to prove that you know it,\u201d Elina told me about Finnish high school. In the United States, her tests were typically multiple choice. \u201cIt was like elementary school in Finland,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>In my own survey of 202 foreign-exchange students, an overwhelming majority said their U.S. classes were easier than their classes abroad. (Of the international students who came to America, nine out of ten said classes were easier in the United States; of the American teenagers who went abroad, seven out of ten agreed.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Don&#8217;t American schools do something well? Or at least intensively?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sports were central to American students\u2019 lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans. Without a doubt, sports brought many benefits, including lessons in leadership and persistence, not to mention exercise. In most U.S. high schools, however, only a minority of students actually played sports. So they weren\u2019t getting the exercise, and the U.S. obesity rates\u00a0reflected as much.\u00a0In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids, while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone.<\/p>\n<p>In countries like Finland, sports teams existed, of course. They were run by parents or outside clubs. As teenagers got older, most of them shifted their focus from playing sports to academics or vocational skills\u2014the opposite of the typical U.S. pattern. About 10 percent of Kim\u2019s classmates played sports in Finland, and they did so in community centers separate from school. Many of them quit senior year so that they would have time to study for their graduation exam. When I asked Kim\u2019s Finnish teacher if she knew any teachers who also worked as coaches, she could only think of one. \u201cTeachers do a lot of work at school,\u201d she said, \u201cand that\u2019s enough I guess.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Where can teachers and students bond over the impossibility and lack of rationale for learning math? The U.S.!<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There was much to be said for American teachers, who, in many schools, worked hard to entertain and engage their students with interactive classrooms. In my survey of 202 exchange students, I was struck by how many of them brought up their affection for their U.S. teachers. One German exchange student surveyed described the difference this way: \u201cThe teachers in the U.S. are way more friendly. They are like your friends. . . . In Germany, we know nothing about our teachers. They are just teachers. We would never talk to them about personal problems.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What about learning about students&#8217; home lives?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To find out how diversity changed the culture of rigor, I went to the Tiistil\u00e4 school, just outside Helsinki, where a third of the kids were immigrants, many of them refugees. The school enrolled children aged six to thirteen. It was surrounded by concrete block apartment buildings that looked more communist than Nordic. In a second-floor classroom, Heikki Vuorinen stood before his sixth graders. Four were African; two wore headscarves. An Albanian boy from Kosovo sat near a Chinese boy. There was a smattering of white kids born in Finland. Vuorinen gave the class an assignment and stepped out to talk to me. Wearing a purple T-shirt, jeans, and small, rectangular glasses, Vuorinen proudly reported that he had kids from nine different countries that year, including China, Somalia, Russia, and Kosovo. Most had single parents. Beyond that, he was reluctant to speculate. \u201cI don\u2019t want to think about their backgrounds too much,\u201d he said,<\/p>\n<p>When pressed, he told me about one of his students in particular. She had six brothers and sisters; her father was a janitor and her mother took care of other people\u2019s children. Money was very tight. But she was, he said, the top student in his class. Vuorinen was visibly uncomfortable labeling his students. \u201cI don\u2019t want to have too much empathy for them,\u201d he explained, \u201cbecause I have to teach. If I thought about all of this too much, I would give better marks to them for worse work. I\u2019d think, \u2018Oh, you poor kid. Oh, well, what can I do?\u2019 That would make my job too easy.\u201d He seemed acutely aware of the effect that expectations could have on his teaching. Empathy for kids\u2019 home lives could strip the rigor from his classroom. \u201cI want to think about them as all the same.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[At Vuorinen\u2019s school, all fifth graders had been tested in math two years earlier.\u00a0Compared to the rest of Finland, the Tiistil\u00e4 kids performed above average.]<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d never heard a U.S. teacher talk that way. To the contrary, state and federal laws required that teachers and principals think about their kids as different; they had to monitor their students\u2019 race and income and report that data to the government. Schools were judged by the test scores of kids in each category. Most principals knew their ratios of low-income and minority kids by heart, like baseball players knew batting averages.<\/p>\n<p>Diane Ravitch, one of the most popular education commentators in the United States, had insisted for years that Americans should think about our students\u2019 backgrounds more, not less. \u201cOur problem is poverty, not schools,\u201d she told a roaring crowd of thousands of teachers at a D.C. rally in 2011. Kids were not all the same, in other words, and their differences preceded them. In Finland, Vuorinen said the opposite of what Ravitch was saying in America. \u201cWealth doesn\u2019t mean a thing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s your brain that counts. These kids know that from very young. We are all the same.\u201d The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to think that the diversity narrative in the United States\u2014the one that blamed our mediocrity on kids\u2019 backgrounds and neighborhoods\u2014was as toxic as funding inequities.<\/p>\n<p>It was becoming obvious to me that rigor couldn\u2019t exist without equity. Equity was not just a matter of tracking and budgets; it was a mindset. Interestingly, this mindset extended to special education in Finland, too. Teachers considered most special ed students to have temporary learning difficulties, rather than permanent disabilities. That mindset helped explain why Finland had one of the highest proportions of special education kids in the world; the label was temporary and not pejorative. The Finns assumed that all kids could improve. In fact, by their seventeenth birthday, about half of Finnish kids had received some kind of special education services at some point, usually in elementary school, so that they did not fall farther behind. During the 2009 to 2010 school year, about one in four Finnish kids received some kind of special education services\u2014almost always in a normal school, for only part of the day. (By comparison, about one in eight American students received special education services that year.)<\/p>\n<p>As I watched Vuorinen talk with his students, I thought back to a Washington, D.C., public school at which I\u2019d spent time a few years before. The school was in a poor part of the city, and many of the families were struggling. One veteran teacher I met had a warm manner and a bright, tidy classroom. She\u2019d paid for classroom supplies with her own money. However, when she\u2019d talked about her fourth grade students\u2019 backgrounds, she\u2019d stressed their disadvantages above all else. She\u2019d talked about her kids\u2019 families as if they were a lost cause: \u201cOur parents on this side don\u2019t have the know-how to raise their children,\u201d she\u2019d said. \u201cThey\u2019re not sure what it takes for their child to make it.\u201d She\u2019d felt genuinely sorry for her students, but what good had come from her sympathy? After a year in her class, her students were farther below grade level in reading than they\u2019d been when they\u2019d first met her. They\u2019d performed worse than other low-income kids who\u2019d started the year at the same level in the very same city. Yet she\u2019d seemed oddly sanguine about those results. The diversity narrative explained everything, even when it didn\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Part of The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way concerns American schools. Unfortunately it is mostly to contrast them with effective schools elsewhere. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Smartest Kids in the World: American Schools - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/21\/smartest-kids-in-the-world-american-schools\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Smartest Kids in the World: American Schools - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Part of The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way concerns American schools. Unfortunately it is mostly to contrast them with effective schools elsewhere. 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