Review by Choice Review
Few books are this impressive and depressing, and few authors have assessed and evaluated US education as thoroughly as Ripley. After several trips to Europe and a number of schools in the US, the author reports on the many ways that US schools fall below (often far below) international standards of public education. Following three American public school students studying in Europe and their teachers, the author points out the many ways that their general performance is clearly, categorically deficient (although primarily in mathematics). How these American students adjusted to local standards clearly calls into question the educational backgrounds they arrived with. The hows and whys of their deficiencies are discussed throughout the book. They clearly concern the author and should concern every US reader of the book. Ripley does not specifically address the deficient conditions of US schools, but she does address many of the reasons these conditions exist. Everyone associated with US education, from school board members and teachers to parents and interested members of the public, should read this book, and everyone concerned about US education should address and alter this reality. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, graduate students, and above. G. A. Clark emeritus, Indiana University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"If you want the American dream, go to Finland." These blunt words from a British politician , quoted by Amanda Ripley in "The Smartest Kids in the World," may lead readers to imagine that her book belongs to a very particular and popular genre. We love to read about how other cultures do it better (stay slim , have sex , raise children ). In this case, Ripley is offering to show how other nations educate students so much more effectively than we do, and her opening pages hold out a promising suggestion of masochistic satisfaction . "American educators described Finland as a silky paradise," she writes, "a place where all the teachers were admired and all the children beloved." The appeal of these books, which include "French Women Don't Get Fat," "Bringing Up Bébé" and "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (excerpted in The Wall Street Journal under the headline "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" ), comes from the opportunity to wallow enjoyably in envy and self-loathing - and then to close the cover, having changed nothing. We're Americans, after all. We're not really going to do it the Chinese way or the French way, superior as they may be. But Ripley, a contributor to Time magazine and The Atlantic and an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation (where I am also a fellow) , has a more challenging, and more interesting, project in mind. Yes, she travels to Finland to observe the "Nordic robots" who achieve such remarkably high scores on international tests - and to South Korea and Poland , two other nations where students handily surpass Americans' mediocre performance. In the best tradition of travel writing, however, she gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures , and manages to make our own culture look newly strange.. In reporting her book, Ripley made the canny choice to enlist "field agents" who could penetrate other countries' schools far more fully than she: three American students, each studying abroad for a year . Kim , a restless 15-year-old from rural Oklahoma, heads offto Finland, a place she had only read about, "a snow-castle country with white nights and strong coffee." Instead, what she finds is a trudge through the cold dark , to a dingy school with desks in rows and an old-fashioned chalkboard - not an iPad or interactive whiteboard in sight . What Kim's school in the small town of Pietarsaari does have is bright, talented teachers who are well trained and love their jobs. This is the first hint of how Finland does it: rather than "trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis," as we do, they ensure high-quality teaching from the beginning, allowing only top students to enroll in teachertraining programs , which are themselves far more demanding than such programs in America . A virtuous cycle is thus initiated: better-prepared, better-trained teachers can be given more autonomy, leading to more satisfied teachers who are also more likely to stay on . Kim soon notices something else that's different about her school in Pietarsaari, and one day she works up the courage to ask her classmates about it. "Why do you guys care so much?" Kim inquires of two Finnish girls. "I mean, what makes you work hard in school?" The students look baffled by her question. "It's school," one of them says. "How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?" It's the only sensible answer, of course, but its irrefutable logic still eludes many American students, a quarter of whom fail to graduate from high school. Ripley explains why: Historically, Americans "hadn't needed a very rigorous education, and they hadn't gotten it. Wealth had made rigor optional." But now, she points out, "everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor." Rigor on steroids is what Ripley finds in South Korea, the destination of another of her field agents. Eric, who attended an excellent public school back home in Minnesota , is shocked at first to see his classmates in the South Korean city of Busan dozing through class . Some wear small pillows that slip over their wrists, the better to sleep with their heads on their desks . Only later does he realize why they are so tired - they spend all night studying at hagwons , the cram schools where Korean kids get their real education . Ripley introduces us to Andrew Kim, "the $4 million teacher," who makes a fortune as one of South Korea's most indemand hagwons instructor, and takes us on a ride-along with Korean authorities as they raid hagwons in Seoul , attempting to enforce a 10 p.m. study curfew . Academic pressure there is out of control, and government officials and school administrators know it - but they are no match for ambitious students and their parents, who understand that passing the country's stringent graduation exam is the key to a successful, prosperous life . Ripley is cleareyed about the serious drawbacks of this system: "In Korea, the hamster wheel created as many problems as it solved." Still, if she had to choose between "the hamster wheel and the moon bounce that characterized many schools in the United States," she would reluctantly pick the hamster wheel: "It was relentless and excessive, yes, but it also felt more honest. Kids in hamster-wheel countries knew what it felt like to grapple with complex ideas and think outside their comfort zone; they understood the value of persistence. They knew what it felt like to fail, work harder and do better. They were prepared for the modern world." Not so American students, who are eased through high school only to discover, too late, that they lack the knowledge and skill to compete in the global economy. The author's third stop is Poland , a country that has scaled the heights of international test-score rankings in record time by following the formula common to Finland and South Korea: well-trained teachers, a rigorous curriculum and a challenging exam required of all graduating seniors . In the city of Wroclaw , Ripley meets up with Tom , a bookish teenager from Pennsylvania, and discovers yet another difference between the schools in top-performing countries and those in the United States. In Tom's hometown high school, Ripley observes, sports were "the core culture." Four local reporters show up to each football game. In Wroclaw, "sports simply did not figure into the school day; why would they? Plenty of kids played pickup soccer or basketball games on their own after school, but there was no confusion about what school was for - or what mattered to kids' life chances." It's in moments like these that Ripley succeeds in making our own culture and our own choices seem alien - quite a feat for an institution as familiar and fiercely defended as high school. The question is whether the startling perspective provided by this masterly book can also generate the will to make changes. For all our griping about American education, Ripley notes , we've got the schools we want. Historically, Americans 'hadn't needed a rigorous education. Wealth had made rigor optional.' Annie Murphy Paul is the author of the forthcoming book "Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter." Annie Murphy Paul reviews "he Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way," a book by Amanda Ripley who describes how other nations educate students so much more effectively than American education systems in light of economic and social systems that, for much of our history, have privileged hard work, luck and entrepreneurship over academic achievement as means of upward mobility.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 1, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Though the U.S. spends more to educate its students than almost any other country, its teenagers rank 26th in math, below Finland (third), Korea (second), and Poland (19th). Yet in "a handful of eclectic nations... virtually all kids [are] learning critical thinking skills in math, science, and reading." Setting out to discover how this happened, veteran journalist Ripley (The Unthinkable) recounts the experiences of three American teens studying abroad for a year in the education superpowers. Fifteen-year-old Kim raises $10,000 so she can go to high school in Finland; Eric, 18, trades a leafy suburb in Minnesota for a "city stacked on top of a city" in South Korea; and Tom, 17, leaves Gettysburg, Pa., for Poland. In addition to these three teenagers, Ripley interviews educators, students, reform-minded education ministers, and others. In riveting prose, Ripley's cross-cultural research shows how the education superpowers value rigor above all else; the "unholy alliance" between sports and academics in the U.S.; why math eludes the average American teenager; what parents in the educationally successful countries do; and how the child poverty rate doesn't necessarily affect educational outcomes. This timely and inspiring book offers many insights into how to improve America's mediocre school system. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This well-considered, fact-based book by Ripley (The Unthinkable) examines the factors contributing to the United States' poor global educational performance. A great deal is conveyed about the American educational system by comparing it to that of other countries, particularly South Korea, Finland, and Poland, that rank higher on an international test called PISA. Those three countries' school systems are also considered through the experiential lens of three American exchange students. Cultural differences aside, Ripley found that success boiled down to one element: rigor. When educators created high expectations and "a serious intellectual culture in schools, one that kids can sense is real and true," children responded with innate drive and grit. Narrator Kate Reading's serious, sonorous tone is spot-on. Verdict Of limited application for parents, this title is of primary interest to teachers and educational professionals.-Douglas C. Lord, New Britain P.L., CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Chronicle of a journalist's global travels to visit schools, interviewing educators and talking with students and their families in order to answer the question, "Why were some kids learning so much--and others so very little?" Ripley (The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why, 2008) examines why there is a disparity in performance on tests of mathematical and scientific competence between American students and their global counterparts, even when factors such as poverty and discrimination are taken into account. She explains that America's poor showing translates into lost jobs for Americans, who cannot compete with foreign labor even in semiskilled jobs. Many of the arguments about American education fail to address the real issues behind the competitive failure of American schools compared to Finnish and South Korean schools (where students are in the top tier on international tests), as well as Poland, where the rate of improvement is remarkable. Ripley builds her narrative around the experience of three American teenagers, each of whom spent a year abroad as exchange students--in Finland, South Korea and Poland, respectively. The author describes a political consensus in each of the three countries that nearly guarantees the creation and maintenance of a highly educated workforce, from top to bottom. The importance of education is a reflection of national consensus on the respect for teachers. A large portion of their education budgets go to teachers' salaries, and the instructors are chosen from the top third of their graduating classes and must meet high professional standards on a par with engineers. Per capita, America spends more money on education, but the money is allocated differently--e.g., to sports teams and programs that provide students with laptops, iPads and interactive whiteboards. A compelling, instructive account regarding education in America, where the arguments have become "so nasty, provincial, and redundant that they no longer lead anywhere worth going."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
