If you often find yourself in conversations about education reform, then by now you’ve probably been informed that the Poles are beating us. Along with the Finns and the South Koreans.
Speaking to the sold out crowd of 720 at The DoSeum’s 6th annual Outside the Lunchbox Luncheon, Amanda Ripley, author of the book “The Smartest Kids in the World & How They Got that Way,” drove that point home. At the heart of the somewhat depressing statistics, however, was a call to action.
“I bring a message of hope,” said Ripley.
Those gathered in the Tobin Center’s H-E-B Performance Hall were no strangers to big dreams fueled by high ideals for education. Before Ripley took the stage The DoSeum CEO Vanessa Lacoss Hurd celebrated the raving success of the new $47 million facility, which opened in June.
“We have welcomed, since June 6, 250,000 kids, parents and educators,” said Hurd.
The sold out crowd produced the funds to provide 25,000 hours of museum programming. But the event didn’t stop there. The DoSeum board chair Michael O’Donnell highlighted additional opportunities to increase access to the museum through the The DoSeum for All fundraising campaign.
At the heart of The DoSeum is educational engagement. Hurd’s background with Teach for America has made her a passionate advocate for education, and she envisions The DoSeum as a resource and a leading voice in the community.
“Our job is really about inspiring kids…we do know that moments matter. Sparks matter,” Hurd said.
Ripley then took the stage to talk about what else matters. And what doesn’t.
She presented the startling Polish statistic. According to an OECD study of 24 countries, U.S. senior citizens rank third in literacy rates for their age group. Polish citizens of the same age rank 15th. Americans in their 20s, however, ranked 16th. Polish 20-somethings ranked 7th.
Ripley doesn’t use that statistic to focus on American slippage. She focuses on Polish ascendency.
Another study revealed that between 2000 and 2009 Polish 15-year olds went from lower than average on international assessments to above average. Nine years is not a long time. Certainly not long enough for Poland to become the kind of wealthy, well-resourced utopia we imagine high performing students to come from.
“It’s not like everything’s all perfect in Poland,” said Ripley.
On the contrary, Poland is still a complex, messy place with poverty and cynicism and all the other supposed roadblocks to education reform.
But they got something right.
That “something,” based on Ripley’s research, is not a simple something.
Ripley compared high performing educational systems to a great breakfast taco. No one ingredient can make a great breakfast taco, she said.
“It’s the interaction of things that matter,” said Ripley.
Her analogy was admittedly limited, of course. One bad element can ruin a taco. But it takes more than one shortcoming to cripple an education system. Even money is not the deciding factor one would believe it to be if one listens to the campaigns, news headlines, and excuses offered by failing schools.
“Past a certain baseline, money is not predictive,” said Ripley.
Poverty matters, she claimed, but more in some countries than in others. In the United States, poverty is a much stronger indicator of student outcomes than in other countries. Poverty matters in the United States because of the way it interacts with our education system. In other words, our educational culture is not designed to account for poverty the way that it is in other countries.
That’s pretty damning for a state like Texas with a child poverty rate of 25%.
Understanding interactions and systems is very difficult using only statistics, so Ripley took an ethnographic approach. She shared the stories of three exchange students in some of the worlds highest performing countries: Finland, South Korea, and yes, Poland.
A student named Kim went from rural Oklahoma to rural Finland to find that it wasn’t as big of a deal that she wasn’t a cheerleader.
An overachiever named Eric went from a high performing suburban school in Minnesota, presumably for an academic sabbatical in South Korea, only to find the country’s fervor for education allows for no such rest.
A quirky scholar named Tom went seeking the source of Eastern European philosophers in Poland. He left a well-resourced school in Pennsylvania to find that while there were no iPads in the Polish classrooms, there was inspiration to spare.
Through her interviews with these and others Ripley drew conclusions about the interactions that have created the educational superpowers. She pointed to the discourses surrounding education, and how they differ in other countries.
U.S. kids care more about sports.
U.S. schools have more technology.
Classes in those U.S. schools are easier.
Ripley does not believe that sports, technology, or rigor are inherently good or evil. She wants to interrogate the signals they send, and how they work together to create a system of priorities and expectations around learning. Including how we do it, and who is most capable of doing it.
In a later Q&A session with Hurd and UTSA Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Senior LecturerJulian Trevino, Ripley again approached the topics of what matters and what does not matter, and how to create a system that focuses on the right things.
Probably the most enlightening claim, at least the one that drew the biggest sigh of relief, was that the children whose parents are the most active in the PTA and volunteering at the school are not better off academically. The children who are better off are those whose parents read to them (and for their own pleasure!) while they are young and talk to them as they get older.
Ripley said that the discourse of parent involvement centers too much on fundraising and volunteering. She wishes they would use those avenues of communication to help parents talk to the children, or give tips for how to integrate reading into the family culture.
If our cultural system could value the right things, it would make it easier for schools to institute the reforms that, in the current climate, would be unpopular, if not impossible. It would save the country a lot of money as well.
The average student costs $142,052 to educate in the United States over the course of their K-12 career. The per student spending in Poland is roughly half that, $74,025. The discourse of fundraising campaigns would have us believe that this results in an American education that is twice as effective as a Polish education. However, this does not seem to be the case. Ripley’s exchange students confirm what the test scores seem to indicate. Those Polish kids are smart.
So, how did they do it? While Ripley reminded the crowd that the system is complex, she did highlight four key reforms that made Polish schools very different from American schools.
- A new, more rigorous core curriculum.
- Better tests. Not more tests. They test their students less than the United States.
- More teacher autonomy.
- Delayed tracking. Children were not put into “honors” or “accelerated” pipelines until as late as possible. By keeping the kids together, outcomes improved across the board.
How those things worked together in the particular system in Poland is much too complex to explain at a luncheon, but Ripley hinted that it was replicable.
“If they can do it in Poland, I know we can do it in Texas,” said Ripley.
*Top image: More than 700 people attended the at the DoSeum’s 6th annual Outside the Lunchbox Luncheon. Photo courtesy of the DoSeum.
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This is a weird and misleading pull quote. Volunteering and creating active PTA’s are not about YOUR child. They are about all the children in the school and the school itself. So setting up this silly this or that scenario is false. Read to your children, talk to your children, volunteer, and build your PTA.
“Probably the most enlightening claim, at least the one that drew the biggest sigh of relief, was that the children whose parents are the most active in the PTA and volunteering at the school are not better off academically. The children who are better off are those whose parents read to them (and for their own pleasure!) while they are young and talk to them as they get older.”
Indeed, I am often grumpy when my hours volunteering take me away from my kids. But this doesn’t give parents a free pass.
Take robotics. A few parents donate a ridiculous number of hours to fundraising for the supplies, developing the curriculum, and committing to coaching the students while working crazy schedules to make up for the time they take from their regular 40-hour per week jobs. Due to limited funds and *volunteer* staff, the program was limited to less than 20 kids last year though there were more than 100 applicants. This year those volunteer parents have worked hard to adapt it to allow for more kids, and 120 applied (in a school of just over 500, kids are chosen by lottery). [The program was initiated a few years before that by another parent, with a small group of kids]
Take Art. For years parent volunteers who wrote grants and raised money made an art program possible at the school. Now, after at least 10 years of paying for an outside program, the district is supplying a full time art teacher.
Take advanced English curriculum materials. For years, parents raised funds to pay for these materials. Now, after a number of years, the district is paying for them.
Take Regional Science Fair. For years, the school never sent any kid. Bring in one dedicated teacher and a group of parents who said “Don’t worry about registration costs. Get the kids doing their projects and we will make sure the costs are covered.” And you have a group of kids who thought they could never be scientists compete – and win – against some of the top private schools in the city.
These pet projects “forced” on the school have meant that a group of kids who otherwise would have no exposure to engineering or art now have whole new worlds open to them. And fortunately, the school’s current administration is both open and supportive to this type of help.
While it’s true that an individual kid does better with parents who are more involved in their daily lives, until our schools receive more funding to pay for a broader spectrum of academic options, many kids in our inner city school – the kids whose parents definitely would not have been able to attend yesterday’s luncheon because they’re working multiple part time jobs – rely on the rest of us who can put in those hours of volunteering and fundraising to provide academic opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have.
I’d love to stop volunteering and just do stuff with only my kids. I’d love to not spend 10-15 hours a week fundraising to provide materials for a school gardening program to enhance the environmental science program, or media club, or Spanish grammar texts for teachers, or teacher training programs, or a playground, or iPads or any materials the teachers ask for to enhance their ability to teach. But my kids aren’t the only ones who matter. They may be sitting next to the next Einstein, whose parents may have a 3rd grade education and work 3 jobs between them.
I can’t fix the poverty their school mates live in. I can offer them opportunities they would not have otherwise.
Another quote to react to, which Ripley made during the luncheon: “testing 5-yr-olds for giftedness is basically an income test.”
I’m sad that I missed it but will it be available online?
Gustavo Jalón
Wow – I never considered joining the PTA so that my kid would achieve academically. I joined the PTA to help ALL of the kids at the school and serve teachers. Silly me – volunteering and giving others a chance to imply my intentions were selfish. I am going to spend more time at home reading, because that makes the whole community better.
This was an amazing conversation! So many rich voices and thought-provoking questions!