What's wrong with US Schools???

This researcher asked kids what's wrong with U.S. schools. Here are their ideas.

 Curator: Alisha Huber

Who knows the most about school? Students.

This is not news: America does pretty badly when it goes up against other countries academically.

This is true even if we take it one state at a time—no single state, no matter how wealthy or small, matches the top scoring countries. And yet, the U.S. spends more per student than many other countries in the world.

In the above image, each state is mapped to a country that had similar scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test of mathematical reasoning given to 15-year-olds. The top 15 countries are in purple. No, there isn't any purple on this map.

Reporter Amanda Ripley wanted to figure out why U.S. education outcomes are so mediocre.

She started asking random people what they thought and she followed up on their ideas. The same theories came up over and over: People blamed poverty and diversity for the difference between U.S. students and students everywhere else. But when Ripley dug into the numbers, she discovered that, while those are factors, they don't fully explain the difference.

No adult could give her a satisfactory answer, so she went to the experts: kids.

Kids spend more time in school than anyone. They've got strong opinions about school. They have opinions on what is working.

She talked to the only students who could have firsthand knowledge of the differences between schools in top-performing countries and those in the U.S.: American kids who were exchange students in those countries.

She surveyed hundreds of exchange students and found three major points that they all agreed on.

The students all said that in their host countries:

1. School is harder. There's less homework but the material is more rigorous. People take education more seriously, from selecting the content to selecting the teachers.
2. Sports are just a hobby. In the U.S., sports are a huge distraction from the business of school, but that's not the case in other countries.
3. Kids believe there's something in it for them. The students in other countries deeply believe that what they are doing in school affects how interesting their lives were going to be. Even if they don't like a class, they see their education as a stepping stone to their future.

To hear more from these amazing kids (and a great story about how an education reporter managed to take an international standardized test), check out the video from PopTech.

Transcript:

Amanda Ripley: Thank you. So I want to talk to you today about a mystery. And it's a mystery that starts with data and becomes about the life chances of kids all around the world. It's a mystery that I first noticed as a reporter writing about education for Time Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly. And I kept stumbling across this mystery in different forms to the point where I finally decided I was going to stop everything else and spend a year just traveling around the world trying to collect clues to help make sense in this mystery.

So I want to start to introduce you to this mystery with this map. And this map, to understand that, you have to imagine that every state in the U.S. is its own country, which makes sense. Because if you've ever been to certain states, say Texas. Anyone ever been to Texas? Anyone from Texas? You know, it's like its own country, right? I mean, in a lot of ways. And it's particularly true with education. Because in the U.S., education is almost entirely funded and controlled at the state and local level.

So what happens if you look at all of the states and pretender countries and you look at how 15-year-old kids perform on a fairly sophisticated test of critical thinking in Math. So this isn't, "Do you know the quadratic equation?" This is, "If we give you an equation, can you use it to do something useful that you might actually have to do in life?" This is, can you think? Can you reason? Can you make an argument?

This is an interesting test and we'll talk more about it. But if you do that, then this is the Math that you get and these are how states are performing on average compared to countries. And you see interesting things, like the state that we're standing in right now, that we're sitting in right now, Maine, 15 year olds are performing at about the level of Portugal. You also see that the top performing countries in the world, it's like the top 15 in the world, which are not all in Asia despite what people think, are purple. No purple, right?

So that's mystery number one. And I say it's a mystery because the U.S. does still spend more than any country in the world per student on kindergarten through high school education still. The U.S. still has some of the smallest class sizes in the world, still. The U.S. has doubled what it spends on education over the past few decades. So why are there no purple States? That's one question. And I kept coming across this in different ways. It's actually a fun party game.

If you go to parties full of huge nerds which I do, and you ask them why do you think that is? Why our education outcome is so mediocre? And people have really interesting, sensible theories about this, which I'm sure all of you have as well. And one theory that I heard a lot was that the U.S. is too diverse. The U.S. is too diverse. And it's true that compared to some countries, we do have a relatively high level of racial and ethnic diversity. But if you look at it this way, one thing that's interesting to think about is that the U.S. also has some very white states, and you're sitting in one.

Maine, 96% of people are white. If you are not white, you have probably already noticed this. This is a very white state, okay? Also Vermont, also New Hampshire. There are lots of states like this. Actually, despite what we think most American kids go to school in very homogeneous places where kids look just like they do. So I think obviously, race is a part of this complicated equation, but not necessarily in the way that we think.

So diversity wasn't a very satisfying theory. So I kept asking people, "What do you think? What do you think?" I'm asking teachers, principals, education experts, students, kids, parents, and I heard a lot of things. One of the most compelling arguments I heard was poverty. And this satisfied me for quite some time. Because as we know, as we talked about this week, the U.S. has a shamefully high child poverty rate of about 20%. And as we know, it is really hard to learn when you're living with the grinding stress of poverty, uncertainty, violence. It's also really hard to teach in that environment.

So clearly, poverty is part of the explanation to this mystery, for sure. But then I started really geeking out on this data, really, and I found some interesting things no one was really talking about. And one thing is if, okay, let's say you split up the data and you just look at the kids who are on the top quartile, the top 25% of the country when it comes to socioeconomic backgrounds. So the kids who are more affluent than anyone else. And by the way, these kids tend to be better off than the most affluent kids around the world.

So these are kids who are going to private and public schools. This data set includes private schools to some of the more well-resourced schools in the world. I mean, I am talking iPads for everyone, my friends, starting in third grade. These are kids who have highly educated parents, who have books at home, computers at home. If you compare these kids, this top quartile of most privileged Americans who are very privileged compared to privileged kids around the world, to other top quartile kids around the world, what you'll find is that they're performing 21st in this test of critical thinking in Math.

Richest America's most privileged teenagers 21st in Math.

That is interesting, isn't it? It's also little depressing because Math is a great predictor of future income and this particular test tends to be very predictive of who goes to college, more predictive than report card grades. In fact, this particular test is worth talking about very briefly because I know a lot of people here know a lot about data and you're thinking to yourself, "For real, is this really?" Do we want to be purple? What is this even measuring? I mean, really.

I had the same response. And this data is from what's called the PISA test which is a relatively new international test that test about half a million kids in 70 countries every three years. And this test was designed differently. It was designed with the modern world in mind and it was designed to measure whether kids could solve problems they've never seen before in math, reading and science, whether they could think about things, whether they could communicate their thoughts in a way that was cogent and compelling.

And this was what I was kept being told by the OECD which puts out this test. But I didn't believe it, because how can a standardized test measure thinking? I mean, seriously. So I asked them if I could take the test, and they were a little freaked out because no reporter ever asked to take the test. We just all run these headlines for "24th in Math" every three years. This is the headlines you see. This is the test.

And so they said finally, eventually to their credit, that I could take the test. And I was more excited to take the test ever than anyone in the history of the world. And I came early and I had number two pencils and they had this young woman who was assigned to watch me so I didn't cheat, which I felt really bad for her because I was like, "Okay, I'm ready."

I took it just like a student, just like a 15-year-old. And it was the strangest thing, because as I'm taking this test, I'm feeling this uncomfortable sensation which was the sensation of having to think. This had never happened to me in a standardized test ever. So let me just give you a quick example of what I mean. Some of the silly standardized tests that we make our kids sit through year after year, they might ask you a question like, "If you have a number of coins and Bobby needs to buy something at the store, which combination of coins..."

PISA asks you to create your own currency. Draw it right there on the paper. Create your own fantasy country and talk about how you would manage that currency, for real. And you have to write. You have to write it in the Math section even. You have to write full sentences. There are empty lines staring at you. And you can get full credit if you have sound reasoning and communication skills, thinking skills, even if you get the actual number wrong at the end. Because they know in this world, it's easy to get information, right? That's not the problem.

The problem is learning to do something with that information, learning to assess that information quickly, learning to learn, right? And I started to realize that that's what this test was measuring. It wasn't measuring math. It was measuring the resilience of children. And what you see, if you look at the data in all different ways, if you look at the least privileged teenager in America and compare them to the least privileged teenagers in the world is a remarkable theme.

Poorest America's least privileged teenagers 24th in math

And if you look at children and you look across the world and you look at just low income kids and see what percentage are able to perform on this measure of critical thinking above where we would expect statistically given their background, we see the theme again. So you see that some countries, not most, a few countries are doing this exceptionally well. So poverty is part of our problem. Poverty is not our only problem particularly when it comes to math, as it turns out.

So I got obsessed with this as you can tell. And I decided, well obviously,
I needed to go visit these purple countries and figure out what the data is not showing me; what I'm missing. But I knew that I needed fixers in those countries obviously to introduce me to people, show me around, to help me visit real schools, normal schools, not the ones that the Ministry of Education would send me to.

And so I also realized I needed those fixers to be kids because I knew a great little secret that I ask you not to tell other education reporters, which is, if you do a story about education and you treat kids as sources, so you actually interview them, your stories can be so much better. But it almost never happens.

Kids have strong opinions about school. We forget as adults how much time they sit there contemplating their situation. They have strong opinions. They don't always know why things are the way they are, but they're happy to tell you what they don't like, what they wish was different if you ask. And they don't care about the political fights of adults. They're not going to talk about tiger moms and tenure. No, they're not. So it turns out, I needed fixers who are kids and I also needed them to be kids who could compare one country to another, who could see the water they swim in a little bit, just a little bit.

This isn't easy for any of us. But it turns out there are tens of thousands of kids like this, who every year, choose for various crazy reasons, to go live in another country with a family of strangers and go to public high school. These are exchange students. So I hooked up with three remarkable young American teenagers who were going to spend one school year in higher performing education systems and they became my informants, my agents on the ground. And they were invaluable. So valuable that I decided I surveyed hundreds of exchange students to find out what they all thought.

And they agreed on pretty much everything. It was amazing, no matter where they were from. They could point to reasons for why there were no purple states in the U.S., that the data wasn't showing. So I want to introduce you quickly to these kids.

This is Eric. And he comes from Minnesota, which is one of the highest performing states in the country. And within Minnesota, he went to one of the highest performing suburban high schools. And within that high school, he was in the International Baccalaureate track. So this kid is getting pretty much the best the U.S. has to offer. So he decides, foolishly it turns out, that it would be fun to take a break and spend a year in South Korea not knowing that South Korea is sort of the pressure cooker of the world when it comes to education. But these kids work literally night and day. It's highly inefficient for the results that they get.

Then we have Tom. Tom went from a fairly rural middling high school, well-resourced but not great outcomes, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Poland. And when I say Poland, people are always like, "Poland. Did you say Poland?" And I bring up Poland because it's still not performing at the very top of the world but Poland has dramatically improved its education outcomes in the past 10 years. A lot of countries like the U.S., we've been flat in our PISA scores, so we think that's how it goes, that this is an intractable problem. Well, Poland looks like this. Dramatic improvement for all their kids including their low income kids. And they have a child poverty rate that's about the same as ours.

And this is Kim. Kim is a remarkable kid who's from a very small town in Oklahoma, had never left the country, neither had her mom, and she decided she wanted to get the heck out of Dodge. And so she read about these exchange programs. And her mom said, "If you can raise $10,000 honey, you can go," because that's how much it costs, never thinking that when you dare a 15-year-old, that's a dangerous bet to make.

So Kim went from Oklahoma to Finland, which is by most measures, the holy grail of education. You probably have heard a bit about that. And I want to tell you very quickly three clues that they gave me. One is very straightforward. In the top performing countries in the world, school is just harder. I don't mean more of it. In fact, Americans do more homework than most kids around the world. It's not about quantity, it's about quantity. It's about the rigor. Through and through, the rigor of how the teachers are selected and trained, the rigor of the content, the rigor of the whole business. School is serious business in these places and I want to let Eric explain that to you. This is his talk about math.

Eric: Clinically, by the way Koreans teach Math, because it's so much more integrated than the American system. They were learning advanced concepts of Calculus and they were learning algebraic concepts and geometry and trigonometry. You can only really explore math and fully understand it if you understand that Math, like any subject, it can't be compartmentalized, that everything has its own intricate connections.

2. Sports are Just a Hobby.

Amanda Ripley: You see what I'm saying about this dude? It writes itself. You know what I mean? Another thing, it sounds like a small thing. No country is like the U.S. when it comes to the obsession with children playing sports. We are training these children to revere and become professional athletes. It is a huge distraction from the business of schools, which in other countries is about schools. This is the picture of the field outside of Eric's school in Pusan, South Korea. It's very typical.

3. Kids Believe There's Something in It for Them

Another thing, and this might be the most important thing, I've got to say it quickly. And that is that the kids believe there's something in it for them. This is the biggest mystery of all. And if we could crack this, we could crack this whole mystery. In these countries where kids told me again and again, is that kids believe that what they're doing in school affects what kind of car they're going to drive in the future and how interesting their lives are going to be. They seem to care more about it. How does that happen? Because it wasn't always true in these countries. I want to let Tom explain one manifestation of this.

Tom: As on the first day of school, I was always wearing black suits, black ties, and there was this assembly and it was very formal. You could tell that people took their education a lot more seriously here than they would in America.

Amanda Ripley: And Kim, I think, explains it the best of all because she was really freaked out by this to the point where she actually said to two Finnish girls as they were chatting one day, "Why do you care so much?" She's really curious. And they looked at her like, "What are you talking about?" How else are we going to go to university? It's not that they love school. Let's have her explain it.

Kim, Oklahoma to Finland

Kim: There's a lot more care. The students here care more. They understand that it's important. They may not like a class but they know if they don't pass it, then they don't pass their tests and it's harder to get to university. They see the reaction. What they do now will affect them. It's more real to them.

Amanda Ripley: So I want to end with Kim's words and I want to end with also this message. If we want to know how to raise resilient kids, there are lots of ways that we need to find out and one of them needs to be to ask kids because kids can tell you things that no one else can. Thank you so much.

There may be small errors in this transcript.