"Searching for Lessons on Education at Schools Around the Globe" PBS Newshour 9/23/2013
Excerpt
SUMMARY: What makes for educational success for kids around the world -- and how can we apply that in the U.S.? Jeffrey Brown speaks with Amanda Ripley, author of "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way," on her conclusions after studying the diverse academic environments of Poland, Finland and South Korea.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Nineteen-year-old Eric, finishing high school in Minneapolis, decides to spend a year in school in a South Korea city where students study through much of the night, then fall asleep in class.
STUDENT: In Korean high school, home and school intersect constantly. If you're at home, you're either studying, eating or sleeping. If you're at school, you're studying, eating or sleeping.
JEFFREY BROWN: Kim, a 15-year-old in rural Oklahoma, jumps at the chance to study a year In Finland.
STUDENT: 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 they don't -- it's harder to get to university.
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JEFFREY BROWN: Now, when you say smart, you're using this measurement of a test called PISA, right, P-I-S-A?
AMANDA RIPLEY, "The Smartest Kids in the World": Yes. Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: We should explain that because it -- there are a lot of questions about how effective and what it really tells us, but you think it's a good measure.
AMANDA RIPLEY: Right.
Well, I don't think you ever want to just rely on one thing. Right? You want to hedge your bets and look at other things, like high school graduation rate and college complete rate and other things, other tests. But I really liked the PISA in particular because it was designed specifically to look at your ability not to memorize knowledge, but to take it to solve problems that you have never seen before, so to apply what you know, to communicate an argument, to reason, those kinds of things.
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AMANDA RIPLEY: So, Finland is really the utopia model, the Holy Grail of education, where you're getting 15-year-olds, virtually all of them, regardless of their background, reaching a really high level of critical thinking in math, reading and science.
And they're doing that -- this is the amazing thing -- they're doing that without working that many hours. They're not studying all night long. They're not going to after-school tutors. They're probably doing less homework on average than American teenagers.
South Korea is a great example of the pressure cooker model of Asia, so it's an extreme version of that model, where kids are working unbelievably hard day and night. Families are very, very focused on education. And they get to the same level as Finland, but the kids are working at -- studying at least twice as many hours.
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JEFFREY BROWN: Well, that of course is the key question for our audience. What does it mean for the U.S.? Having looked at all this, what do you conclude that we're not doing right or as well as we could?
AMANDA RIPLEY: I'm actually very hopeful. I came back here more hopeful than when I left.
And part of that is, we're against an economic crisis as well. And I think people are starting to realize that, whereas you didn't need rigor to succeed in America 20 years ago, you need it now. And our kids, in order to thrive in this economy, they need to be able to think, right, and to learn for their whole lives.
So, I think there's a consensus building around that. I don't know. We will see. It won't be every state, but in some places, we're seeing the Common Core standards adoption. We're seeing some movement towards more serious education colleges.
COMMENT: What PISA tests sounds much, much better than what the U.S. uses to evaluate students today.
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