The Smartest Kids in the World Read Online Free Page B

be original, and expectations were high. Worldwide, only four out of ten teenagers got that question right.
    The questions varied slightly from country to country. Students from Mexico, for example, would not have been asked to measure the diameter of Lake Erie. Details like that didn’t matter very much, because PISA was not just a test of facts. It was a test of the ability to do something useful with facts.
    Finally, I announced my score to my chaperone, since there was no one else to tell. I had gotten just one wrong (a science question).“Good job!” she said generously. We both knew I had twenty-two more years of life experience than normal PISA takers, including four years of college.
    After I left the building, my sense of relief faded. My score, I realized, did not bode well for teenagers in my own country. This test was not easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. On one question that I’d gotten right, only 18 percent of American fifteen-year-olds were with me. There were other questions like that, which many or most of the Finns and the Koreans were getting right, just as I was, but most young Americans were getting wrong.
    PISA demanded fluency in problem solving and the ability to communicate; in other words, the basic skills I needed to do my job and take care of my family in a world choked with information and subject to sudden economic change. What did it mean for a country if most of its teenagers did not do well on this test? Not all of our kids had to be engineers or lawyers, but didn’t all of them need to know how to think ?
    I still didn’t believe PISA measured everything, but I was now convinced that it measured critical thinking. The American Association of University Professors had called critical thinking“the hallmark of American education—an education designed to create thinking citizens for a free society.” If critical thinking was the hallmark, why didn’t it show itself by age fifteen?
    It was hard to escape the conclusion that American kids and taxpayers had been squandering a lot of time and money. In 2009,U.S. teenagers ranked twenty-sixth on the PISA math test, seventeenth in science, and twelfth in reading. We rankedsecond in the world in just one thing, spending per pupil. (The only country that spent more was Luxembourg, a place with fewer people than Nashville, Tennessee.)
    The implications of that waste were painful to think about. Economists had found an almostone-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation’s long-term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic growth, of course, but the ability of a workforce to learn, think, and adapt was the ultimate stimulus package. If the United States had Finland’s PISA scores, GDP would be increasing at the rate ofone to two trillion dollars per year.
    For students, PISA scores werea better predictor of who would go to college than report cards. Kids who scored poorly on the PISA reading test were far more likely to drop out of high school. PISA wasn’t measuring memorization; it was measuring aspiration.
    I left the test with an unsettled feeling. The exam and the one thousand pages of analysis that came with the PISA results sketched out a kind of treasure map of the world. This map could help me sort out which countries were teaching all of their children to think, and which were not.
    Most successful or improving countries seemed to fit into three basic categories: 1) the utopia model of Finland, a system built on trust in which kids achieved higher-order thinking without excessive competition or parental meddling; 2) the pressure-cooker model of South Korea, where kids studied so compulsively that the government had to institute a study curfew; and 3) the metamorphosis model of Poland, a country on the ascent, with about as much child poverty as the United States, but recent and dramatic gains in what kids knew.
    Still, PISA could not tell me how those countries got so smart, or what life was like for kids