[Ohiogift] Curricular Activities

[Katie Thurston]

'For all our griping about American education, Ripley notes, we’ve got
the schools we want.'
Not me. I finally have withdrawn Zachary from his public high school,
a place which was allowing him to quietly fail even as they collected
government funds for his attendance there.
If he flounders now, it's his responsibility, and mine.

Katie T.

On 9/10/13, Will Fitzhugh <fitzhugh at tcr.org> wrote:
>
> “In Tom’s hometown high school [Gettysburg HS, in PA], Ripley observes,
> sports were ‘the core culture.’ Four local reporters show up to each
> football game. In Wroclaw, [Poland] ‘sports simply did not figure into the
> school day; why would they?’”
>
>
> New York Times
> Likely to Succeed
> Amanda Ripley’s Smartest Kids in the World
>
> By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
> Published: August 22, 2013
>
> “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 SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD
> And How They Got That Way
> By Amanda Ripley
>
>
>
> 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 off to 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 teacher-training 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 in-demand hagwon instructors, 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 clear-eyed 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.
>
> Annie Murphy Paul is the author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The
> Science of How We Get Smarter.
>
>
>