third gunfighters. it is a movement story. and why they chose to take the action they took to gain freedom and guns were an important factor. . .

>> up next from last weekend's national book festival, few authors from the science room for the number few hours hear from the scientists. first here's amanda rip lee, the author of "the smartest kids in the world and how they got that it way. ." >> on behalf of the library of conditioning, welcome to the 2014 national book festival. my name is carlos, and i'm editor of the judd outlook section of the "washington post." the post has been the charter sponsor of the festival since it began in 2001. hope you're enjoying the new location here at the convention center. before we begin i should inform you the presentation are being filmed for the library of congress' web site and archives so be on your best behavior. and there will be time for

questions, and there's mics in the two rows here on either side. so just go up to the mic for your questions. it is my sincere honor to introduce amanda ripley. the first time the book festival has had a formal science pavilion, and it's completely fitting the first book we're discussing here is devoted to education and to competing visions of how children learn. amanda's book, "the part e kid thursday in the world" takes us to finland, south korea, and pole poll loaned, and observes how three educational systems work, and she does it through the eyes of three american kids who are spending a year at each of those school systems. so it makes for a unique combination of her analysis and the insights that the high school kids provide. we're doing the book in the "washington post." jay matthews wrote it's the most illuminates report on the

difference between schools in america and those abroad. and "the new york times" said amanda ripley gets well beneath the glossy surface of foreign cultures and makes our culture look strangely new, and as they dad of a first grader, the conclusions have insights for kids of all ages and for the parents. ammann days an investigative journalist with "the atlantic" and "time." the author or "the unthinkable. who survives when a disaster strikes and why." she'll be signing books at 11:00 tonight. join me in welcoming amanda ripley. [applause] >> thank you very much. grates to be here on many levels, one of which is this is the city where i live. how many people live in washington, dc. i assume almost all of you, or in the area. the other reason is i wrote much

of my first book oar many of the parts that were decent in the library of congress. the only place where i could find some focus and peace. i had a new baby at the time. this is my first book, "the unthinkable," and i would go there to this beautiful space, and there's part where you can't get on the internet, chase wonderful luxury, and it was really a salvation, and to have such a beautiful place that we can all access, is a privilege. so, i'm very glad to be here for all those reasons. very psyched i was put into the science pavilion. you never know where you're going to end up when people categorize your book. what i want to do today is talk a little bit about a mystery, and it's a mystery that starts with data and has implications for the lives of millions of kids around the world.

but what i also want to do is to hear questions and thoughts from all of you. so we're going to make sure to save time for that at the end and turn this into a more conversation if we can. it is, after all, saturday morning, and you have come out here, and you deserve to have more of a conversation rather than just be spoken to. the mystery that i mentioned is a mystery that i think we've all sort of heard about, as kind of in the eether, and as a reporter i kept hearing about it and the mystery is this. its appeared there were a handful of countries that were now managing to educate virtually all their kids to high levels of critical thinking, in math, reading and science. and i would hear various theories about why that was so. we all there'd the theories. and i would buy into one or the other of them for a while. and then i would encounter some inexplicable barrier to that

theory being true. so let me give you an example. one of the reasons that i heard for why these other countries were doing so great was that we don't spend enough on education. right? and in fact, we spend more per pupil on k through 12 education in all but four countries in the world. and if you look at the four countries, they don't line up with the top performing education systems in the world. so, it became clear that it's not that we weren't spending enough. we weren't spending it the same way maybe. we weren't spending it wisely maybe. which made sense. other reasons i heard were that we were too big and to diverse of a country. to compare to a place like finland. which is totally fair. i mean, really. finland? this is a huge country we live in. and in some ways they start to think about our country as 50 different countries, particularly when it comes to education. because to are so much of education is locally controlled,

and is very different when you go from texas to vermont to california. so that satisfied me for a while. then one day i tried looking at the data on a state-by-state basis and seeing hour our kids were doing compared to other countries, imagining all of our states were countries. when you do that you see not only huge variations from state to state but you see that not even in of smallest, most homogenous states, like maine, which which is 94% white and has a quarter of the population of finland, those kids were performing at the level of kids in portugal. which was below average or right around average for the developed world. so we weren't seeing the kinds of high fliers you expect. the two exceptions were massachusetts and minnesota. do we have anyone from massachusetts or minnesota? there we go. we have states that were maybe not in the top ten but certainly

the top 10 to 20 countries in the world. so that was encouraging. then the most convincing theory i heard why we weren't doing so great overall, was poverty. and that made a lot of sense to me. we know that all over the world poverty influences education youngs, outcomes and be have an unaccept blue high child poverty rate, given our wealth as a country. right around 20%, depending on how you're measuring it. so that made a lot of sense to me. but then i started looking deeper into the data, and now we are, for bert or worse, awash in data right now. in education. more data than we know what to do with. sort of like health care. if you look at it more deeply, what you see is that, well, look, there are actually countries that have very low child poverty raise, like norway has a 6% child poverty raid, close to finland, 4%, low as it

gets all over the world. and what you see is that norway's 15-year-old are performing at the same level as american 15-year-olds, which is to say average for the developed world in reading and science, and below average in math. and you'll see math is a recuring weakness for the u.s. and then, if you look within our data set for the u.s., you see something really astonishing, which is that if you look at our top 25% of midnight affluence 15-year-olds, kids who have lots of advantages, highly educated parents, high-tech schools, all kinds of resources, and by the way, this data set includes private schools. if you look at those kids, you see that they are scoring below their affluent peers in 27 other countries in math. they do better in reading, although still not at the very top of the world.

accomplish if you look at our lowest kids socialow economically speaking, and compare them to underprivileged kids around the world, they, too are scoring below 27 other countries in math. so, there seemed to be some systemic problems that interacted for sure with poverty. that interact with diversity, that interact with our history of institutionalized racism, that interact with many things. but it wasn't just one of those things, and no single one could fully explain what we were seeing. so i stopped everything else i was doing, writing-wise, and decided to spend a year trying to understand what was really going on in these countries. and i admit i did part of this sort of cynically. i just didn't believe it actually. i kept hearing about these brilliant kids in finland and singapore and korea, and everyone was person, and there were no tests, and everything was awesome all the time, the

teachers were geniuses and the parents were involved, and it just didn't pass the smell test to me. like it just didn't seem like any country is that simple. so, i wanted to visit these countries, obviously, but i knew to have any remote chance of seeing what was really going on, i needed to try to see it through the eyes of students. i'd learned in my reporting in the u.s. that until you talk to students, you really don't know the half of it. and students are experts in their particular classroom. they sit there all day long, thinking about what could be better, and what they like and what they don't, and they have strong opinions if you ask them. so luckily there are tens of thousands of teenagers who every year essentially trade places. they leave the united states and go attend public high schools abroad and live with a host family, or vice versa, for a

year. so i wanted to follow these kids in particular because they could to some small degree see the water they swam in. right? they could have some -- they didn't know everything, number of us do. but they knew their schools and homes and neighborhoods back in the states and abroad, and they were essentially amateur an to the pollingists. kid -- anthropologists. kid goes abroad because they're interested in the to differences between cultures and places and they have strong opinions about what they see, what they like, don't like, what is surprise, not surprising in addition to all there is data, which is totally fascinating and i'm happen to geek out on that more in the q & a afterward, i had to have these kids to try to see in the blind spots that the data couldn't answer, that the data didn't get into. so i knew from the data which places i wanted to visit, there are lots of international tests

these day. one thing we don't have in the u.s. is a shortage of tests. not a problem we have. but there's a test i found to be most useful when thinking about the future of the economy, which was called the pizza test, a test administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 70 countries every three years by the oecd. and this test is not perfect. none of them are. what i liked about this test it tried to get at not your ability to regurgitate information but your ability to apply information to solve a problem you've never seen before that comes right out of real life. it's the kind of thing that we all have to do every day, not just in our jobs but if we're picking a healthcare plan, or we're trying to figure out a credit card bill, all the kinds of things we have to do, given that we have an excess of information, and a dearth of real insight sometimes. so we have to make judgments, we have to solve problems, have to

make arguments, higher order skills, which is what the pizza test tries to do. so this test is interesting, and this is a test i'll be referring to i looked at other test data as well, and you also want to look at metrics like high school graduation, college attainment, other things. this test i found to be compelling because we don't actually know what jobs will be available in 20 or 30 years, but we do know that those skills, those abilities to solve problems to make judgments to make arguments, will be valuable. so i took the test, among other things to see what that was all about because it seemed, again, the cynic in me didn't believe it was possible to assess critical thinking, and i still think it's hard, but i did find the test to be far smarter than any standardized test i'd ever taken, for whatever that is worth. i routinely realize thread was no right answer and i had to write out my answer and make the

case and i got different points depending on how coagents and compelling my argument was, which is like my actual work. i was impressed with the test, rafaelizeing it's not perfect. if you look at the outcomes on the tests you see something -- first of all, something awesome. if there's nothing else you take from international education comparisons, this is the one thing. are you ready? the one thing is that all over the world, you see incredible amounts of change. we have not seen that at scale, but we are actually the outlier. so, there's been 60-some countries theft taken this test since it was introduced in 2000. 40 of them have seen significant improvement in at least one subject. just because we are not one of them does not mean we could not be. right? when you see the dramatic gains that some countries have made,

fairly recently, it gives you -- or should give all of us the surge of hope, because once you know it is possible for countries like estonia, canada, vietnam, poland, countries with significant poverty rates to make those kinds of gains, the not only should that be encouraging and we would want to learn from what those countries did, but there's a sort of moral imperative at that point. once you know it's possible, it's not merely an act of faith, then blast do it. -- then you must do it. right? that is the number one reason to look at international data. another thing you notices when you look closely, poverty matters in all countries, of course, but matters to different degrees. so if you look at country like the united states, you see 15% of cower kid's scores can be explained by socioeconomic status. a little math magic.

we're trying to control for everything and see how much is influenced by what, and imperfect. but 15%. if you look at place like estonia, which -- has anyone been to estonia? surprising number of people have been to estonia. this is not finland. this is still a fairly complicated place. and in estonia, socioeconomic status complains nine percent of teenagers' scores on the test. so you see variants in different countries. france is worse than the u.s. on this. so for what it's worth there are countries that do worse, not only on average -- plenty of countries that do worse on average score -- but in equity and fairness and how much the so-you're economic status matters. when you look at the really high-flying countries, the education super powers, what you see is they could be roughly divided into two categories. very roughly.

i sort of made this up for my own brain to think about this. one category is the utopia category, of which the best and most clicheed example is finland. finland is a country where there truly are very few standardized tests, where teachers do have a lot of autonomy. where students do not work night and day. and in fact very few of them attend after-school tutoring and that sort of thing. and there's almost no variation from one school to the next in fibland. imagine if you could just live wherever you wanted without record for the schools, because -- without regard nor schools because they were all basically just as good as the next. so that's incredibly cool about finland, and that's the utopia version. turns out there are multiple ways to get to the top of the mountain in education, just like an actual mountain. you can do switchbacks and take breaks and drink water, which is finland. or you can just slog right up the mountain, like a vertical

line, which is south korea. so the other model would be the pressure cooker model, where kids are getting to the same place, very impressive levels of critical thinking. i know people, especially people in korea, say they're not raising creative kids, it's memorization and there's some truth to that. but when you look at what their kids are capable of doing, it's not just rote moment morization, it's critical thinking and math, read and science, but they're get through are there through enormous pain and suffering. so 77% of korean 15-year-olds attend some kind of after-school tutoring session, and by that i don't mean what kids in long island do for the s.a.t. that is in the same universe? but not on the same planet. the market for education in south korea is not unlike to market for sports in the united states. it is very sophisticated, very

lucrative. it plays upon people's greatest hopes and fears, and if you think about sports, and you think about education, and you just switch countries, you will understand perfectly what is going on in south korea. so, this is a place where there's a lot of anxiety around test scores, around getting into a great university. there are lots of countries like this, south korea is maybe the extreme version. in fact there was a singapore education minister who was asked bay reporter about all the kids going to tutoring session in singapore and wasn't he worried. he said, at least we're not south korea. so, this kind of the extreme case for various reasons. and so that's the pressure cooker model. where kids are not u -- they're going to school all day for fairly long school day, and then going most of them to some kind of private after-school academy which literally mirrors

everything they just inside school after school. so all the subjects, again, which is i think we can all agree a pretty inefficient and also inequitable way to get throw top of the world because the best teachers in korea charge the most money in the after school market which leads to being millionaire teachers in associating so, which, while being very cool, even they will criticize this system that nobody seems to be able to disrupt once the anxiety machine gets going. so you have the pressure cooker, utopia. i found quickly american students who agreed to by my sort of fixers on the ground, who were going do these places. kim was going from oklahoma to finland. now, you may ask, why finland? i mean, i don't know about you but if i had the chance to go somewhere when i was 15, finland

would not have been on the list, even at number 75 or 80. it wouldn't have even cleared the list. so, kim is this remarkable young woman who had never left the united states, actually. she was born in oklahoma. her mother -- a single mother who also had never left the united states. was a teacher, actually. and yet kim always felt this kind of craving to see the world, this curiosity about what else there was beyond oklahoma, and so she would complain, as teenagers occasionally do, she would complain about her town and the small town and the onlying there was was a wal-mart, and this and that, and finally her half sister, who is in texas, said to her once, why don't you just -- she called her bluff. say, why don't you just go live in some other country if you think it's so great? and she said, was there do you mean? she said, you know, like on one of those exchange programs where kid goes to another country.

she said that's for rich kids. that's not for me. but that night the seed was planned and kim began googling, which is how all great and terrible ideas begin. and she started googling exchange programs and found there are these organizations that will literally help you go police in another country for a year. so this captured her expansion she started researching other countries, and she found many of them to be very interesting, and when she read about finland, she read they had the smartest kids in the world, and she said, that's where i want to go. so she told her mom the next day. i'm going to spend a year in finland. and her mom -- this is her last child at home. and again, kim had never left the country. and of course her mom's first overriding stink was to say, the hell you are. but instead, very cagily, because she new kim was sub are stubborn and what is a teenager

and sometimes you have to be clever. she said, okay, well, how much does it cost? and kim looked it up and said it costs $10,000. and she said, well, if you can raise the $10,000 yourself and do all the paperwork and everything you need to do by yourself, then you can go. so kim spent her freshman year of high school in oklahoma raises thousands. nobody, including kim, thought she would succeed, for at least half of the year. she started with a bake sale at her local super market. stayed up ought night making rice crispy treats treats and ce chip cookies and found out bake sales are not a highly profitable way to raise money and the would need to have something like a thousand of them before she could go to finland. so she tried other things. ordered a case of beef jerky off the internet and sold it door-to-door which turned out to be very lucrative. just as a side note. she did real request well with that.

and then she wrote a letter to all 60 businesses list ned the dallas chamber of commerce, asking them for money, for sponsorship to support this crazy american girl with the dream. created a letterhead and everything. no one responded. no one. now, remember, this is at the tail end of the recession, the businesses in the city had other things to worry about. but what i love about this story, and which is why i'm dwelling on it, almost unreasonably, is that she didn't give up. she didn't give up. she created a blog and the asked strangers for money, and bizarrely some of them gave me money. she applied for scholarships, who she got. but what i like about the story is that it's a story about a particular kind of american girl. an american young person who doesn't quit. she was entrepreneurial, a dream, curious. so, as much as we are critical

of our education system, it's important to hold in our head at the same time all of the strengths we have, which are embodied in kids like kim all over the country. so kim raises $10,000, and because god has a sense of humor she is placed in rural finland, on the west coast, and actually placed with another single mother. the mother of two five-year-old twin girls. so off she goes to the utopia. and what will she find is the question. she has all kinds of ideas, of course, about what finland will be like and what it won't be like and how it will by different from her school in oklahoma which she didn't like and struggled to fit in. before we get to what she found i want to tell you about the other student who went to the eextreme to at the pressure cooker country. now, interestingly, this kid, eric, in some ways grew up in a different country than kim, for

all intends and purposes. this kid was from minnesota. he had the good fortune to attend one of the highest performing tricked out, most beautiful suburban high schools in the state. he had an intact family. he had lots of advantages. he did theater, the international baccalaureate program. he had teachers who to this day tears up talking about. he kind of dramatic, eric. but as senior year approached he realized he was burnt out and just wanted a change. he wanted a break from all the academic intensity of minnesota. so this is where he makes his one big mistake, which is he decided to take an academic bleak south korea, which i cannot think of a worst place to

tack an academic break. so he makes this decision. we all make decisions for reasons that in retrospect look questionable. he weapon to an exchange student fair and there were booth with kids from different countries, and the korean kids were so fun, super joyful. and it is actually true, while i'm making sweeping stereotypes, the korean kids were super joyful. like i have never met a group of kids who are more exuberant, and in fact when he first arrived at his high school in south korea, a big, booming city on the coast of south korea and walked in, the kid started screaming the way kids screamed for the beatles. he sort of high pitched, oh, my god, something is terribly wrong kind of sound, until he realized that was for him. so, in some ways he was right in other ways he was very, very wrong. and so he ends up in south korea. what did they find?

some of the things they found i want to tell you about, since i have limited time i'll talk about things that surprised me and may surprise you. and then we'll open it up for questions. some of the things they found were obvious on the very first day, include didn't expect. because they were esthetic. when they got to their schools no these countries, and there was a third student -- i don't want to leave him out -- he went from pennsylvania to poll land poleland, all three of them in their first days of school, they found the schools to be rather lackluster. to look at. and anecdotally when you go around the world, that is generally true. schools are not super impressive esthetically but inside there's not a lot of technology compared to many american schools. actually, on average, american secondary schools, high schools, have a one-to-one ratio of students to computers at this point. and that is way above the

average of the developed world. so, finland and south korea have more like one computer for every two students. so you didn't see a lot of the diggal white boards you see in classrooms in america. you didn't certainly didn't see a lot of green lush fields for playing sports. tom's school in pollland didn't have a cafeteria. there was a sad area that kids used. that was one thing that was obvious. another thing they didn't see any schools were parents. almost never saw parents anywhere. and it's true. if grew to a school, even an elementary school in finland you don't see a lot of parents hanging around, selling things, handing things out, signing things, whatever it is that you see in many american schools. it turns out, actually, that the there have been studies of this. of different parenting styles in

different countries, and they're not perfect. one thing we know is that all around the world the more time the parents spend on extracurricular activities in the kid's schools, things that classically american pta activities, selling things, baked sales, chaperoning, coaching, those kind of things which are great community-building fun things -- the worst those parents kid does on the test by age 15, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, is surprising, as an american parent i was like, what? i've been lied to all of these years. and then the more kids -- the more parents talked to their kids about their days, about movies, about the news, and read to them, of course, whether enthey were little, the better kids did on the test by age 5 even after controlling for socioeconomic status. so, this is something that the teenagers, northwestern

teenagers noticed. they felt like they had a lot more autonomy in the countries. i served hundreds of teenagers who had gone on exchange programs to see if there were patterns and there were. one thing they said, seven out of ten international exchange students felt like they had less freedom in the u.s. than back home, and seven out of ten also said they saw more technology in the u.s. classrooms than back home. and i mentioned this not because i think technology is a bad thing. but because it comes up again and again when you look at the data and talk to people, talk to kids and teachers. what you see is not so much the technology itself is the problem, but that there is a lack of focus in american schools on actual learning. so if you are very focused on learning, if it's a kind of-under general economic imperative, which it became in these countries, then you do things a little differently. right?

so, there is no evidence that the enormous investments we as a country have mode in education technology have actually led to learning on average. quite the opposite in many cases. i hope that will change. i have great hopes for what we are seeing in customized learning and blended learning and that kind of thing. however, there is maybe sometimes a tendency for us to be enchanted by shiny objects in this country, and you see that in all parts of the country and also in schools, and school is about so many things here and that's part of the beauty of it. but something when exchange students tom here they notice right away. school is about track and yearbook and french club and definite football. that's huge. right? and they're kind of amazed by this because in most countrieses, school is just about learning. which is much less fun. let me be totally clear about that. however, if you think about any

big complex organization, trying to do something hard, whether it's a hospital or a school, one of the number one things they need is focus. and in this country, i didn't even know this but i eventually found out in this country our high school principals spend sometimes half their days dealing with meetings about sports, athletic budgets, getting referees, getting people to line the fields, meeting with parents who are upset because their kid's been benched. meeting with a schoolboard member who they never met before but since they're hiring a football coach they heard from the person for the first time. these are true stories and if you talk to american high school principals this is hour how their days work. this doesn't happen in these countries. take half your plate off and just focus on learning. this is something that came up again and again. but probably the most important thing the kids noticed, and

whichs in some ways more profound, and took them longer to notice once they got the hang of the language and other things, they noticed the school in these countries was harder. it was certainly harder in korea, even for eric who had gone to a very high-performing school. sometimes harder bad, not harder good. one of the things eric noticed was that kids were going to school night and day and they had no time to socialize, and explore the city with him because they were going to after-school tutoring academies. so this was incredibly depressing to eric. he could see how much strain they were under and it's true, the korean kids i met, they lots of energy, very joyful culture, and then as soon as they started talking about school, all that drained from their faces and talked about how terrible the system was, they were pitted against each other -- i didn't realize i would actually make an

alarm. this is a new stop watch i'm trying out. anyway, did get my attention and yours. i'm trying not to go over me time. so, he noticed that they really loathed the amount of time they had to put in, the amount of pressure on them. at the same time, he loved his korean math class. this is something that really struck him. for the first time, he was learning trigonometry, geometry, and calculus all in one class. and by the way, these are kids who were two years younger than he was, and he was astounded how much more interesting it was. he had no idea those things connected. and that in fact they only make sense when they're connected. and so for him this was a true breakthrough. and other cases one of the things kim noticed in finland is that the kids had less homework than kids in the u.s. but the homework they had was much more demanding. it really required them to think for themselves.

there was a girl that it interviewed who had come from finland to go to a public school in michigan on exchange for a year, and it was similar to her school in many ways in finland, but one thing she noticed was that not as she put it, not much was asked of american kids. she felt like she was doing a lot of posters, the kind of thing she'd done in elementary cool in finland. a lot of cutting and pasting, and it was a little frustrating, but luckily she had track and yearbook and things that she really did enjoy. but she tells the example of one journalism class she took, where she loved the teacher, and everyone seemed to really be learning from the teacher and to respect her. and the end of semester project in the class was to write ten articles, which made sense. and then when that day came, elaine narks the finish golf, the only one who did ten articles and she sass amazed.

the teacher was disappointed but life went on. so somewhere along the way different messages had been communicated to elean na than to her american peers about not only what they needed to do or what the could do. so, this is a big issue, and something that came out in the surveys as well. nine out of ten international exchange students said their classes in the u.s. were easier. so if you get a group of exchange students together from all over the world, who are living in the u.s., they will disagree about many things, very different impressions, but one thing they w will almost certainly agree on is that school in the u.s. is super easy. this is a complicated subject. but it is so pervasive, not only in what kids tell us, by the way, half of american high schoolers say they're challenge ned their academic classes. but in the data itself, where we know that even our most privileged kids are not doing math at the level of privileged kids in other countries, so we

are systematically underestimating what our kid can do, sometimes out for are of the goodness of our hearts, which is the most poignant part. i just want to say that in this country, we have gotten along pretty well by letting kids graduate from high school with a sort of nominal amount of contribution. and then, once they're 18, we let them find out what the world has in store for them. that no longer works. because they're finding out too late that the world has changed and they need skills, they need to be able to think. they need a mental agility that they didn't need before because all of them will not only have to audition for their jobs, in ways that are much harder to fake, but they will have to

re-audition over and over and over and over, and they will have to adapt and change very quickly, as many of news the room have had to do as well. so, there are lots of things they noticed. there's a lot here, but the overriding principle was that school was harder in ways that made them have to think, and that this is possible, which is best represented by the country i didn't get to but it's in the book, which is poleland, a country with a 16% child poverty late, gone from below average in the world on the test to above. there are now greater percentage of polish 15-year-olds scoring in advanced level in math than there are 15-year-olds in finland, which i remarkable because poland -- who has been to pollland? it's a big sprawling country with a lounge history of

sprawling and distrust of fer federal government. to you for being so patient. now let's open it up to questions. [applause] >> thank you. >> two quick questions. how do you spell pzza. eye lining to follow up on that. and secondly, did you find a gender difference in american students? i can only relate to me two ninth grader, both girls, never had a b in their life, in a difficult school, one explaining the entanglement theory of physics to me in the eight grade. >> wow. you know, interestingly -- first of all, its pisa, and you can read all about it. as far as gender, it's really interesting. in the developed world there are differences here between developed and developing

countries. in the developed world you see a most consistent pattern is that girls are pulling ahead of boys, particularfully reading. still in some places some gender gaps in math and science, but just as an example, finland has a worrisome gender gap between boys and girls on the pisa test. so girls are doing significantly better than boys. thissing something they have whole conferences about, trying to figure out. luckily for finland -- finnish boy, the a. boy is doing way bitter than the average american but that gap is still worrisome and something that i think should worry all of us as we start to see that gap growing in a different direction all over the developed world. >> first, main darks i spent four decades in education and thank you for your book. suppose on your walk to your book signing the phone rings and it's bone barack obama and he says --

>> always happens. >> and she says amanda, i've read your book. give me your three suggestions for american schools. they can be in priority. what you think we should do. what would you tell him? >> would that he could dofully of them. but i would tell him. so, one thing that i think we have underinvested our energy is the selection and training of teachers. we have some fantastic teachers all over this country, and the profession still is not treated like, or acting like, real profession. one of the things i always heard was, oh, teaching is hard, and i always said those things. the more time i spend in classrooms, the more i start to viscerally understand that. it's not hard like working at a soup kitchen is hard. it's hard like being a surgeon is hard. like being a judge is hard. it requires in the moment, complicated dynamic changing and thinking that is extremely,

extremely difficult to master. so, we have right now 1400 education colleges of wildly varying quality and selectivity scattered across the country, we have twice as many teachers as we need and don't confer rigorous training and expectations among many of the students until they're in the classroom, and then suddenly we're all, why can't you get it done? we're not supporting them or treating them like a real master profession in most places until very -- ever, actually. that is something that other countries have been through. we're not the only ones and that should be reassuring and i talk in the book lou finland shut down the education colleges and re-open them in the most elite universities, and today getting in ed school in finland is like getting into m.i.t. in the united states, which is important not only because you have highly educated teachers, which is nice, but not everything. part of it is its sends a signal to everyone necessary the

country that you're not just saying if you're barack obama that education is important and teaching is hard but your acting like it. heir he could just do that, that would make me happy. that alone. focusing on 0 education colleges at the beginning of a very challenging career that needs to have a year of hands-on student teaching. that would be a much more elegant reform than a lot of the things we have tried to do. thank you. >> my favorite question is, how did we put a man on the moon without standardized tests? i would answer, we did it with everything we have eliminated. the music that translates into higher order learning skills. so my questions are, one, in the education databases, before standardized tests took over and hundreds of millions of dollars were diverted from the classroom budget to pay for the tests, to companies that had nothing to do with education, the databaseses

documented the gifted and tale lented click la as by far the most effective, and if every classroom could become gifted and talented classroom with the high expectations, low student teacher ratio, that we would have what we really should be looking for. and then the second pouring -- >> guest: we're almost out of time. let me just answer that -- >> let in the just -- >> you asked a really good question. i don't want to run out of time to answer the question. so, if you look back at the international data to the degree there is data, what you see is that there was never a time when american kids were on top of the world, when it comes to these higher order skills, even before we that the extreme level of standardized testing we have now. it's true we do lot of testing and most of those tests are not very smart. so what you see running through this conversation is quantity over quality. part of that is because of federalism, honestly. the only thing that the -- that

barack obama can do is to keep demanding results, and he can't really do much to help kids and students and teachers get there. so, they keep pushing the feds keep pushing the testing lever, and now we see where it's gotten us. you have this kind of crazy quilt of testing. if there is something positive to say, then it is that the 40-some states that have adopted the common core state in other wordses are doing something that all of the world's education super powers have done. it's very, very hard to inject rigor into a system. one way to do it ises to set clear rigorous, more coherent targets for what kids should know at every agreed -- grade level than what you had before. that consistency and clarity is lacking from the u.s. system, partly because of federalism. so you're seeing huge fights over the standards, right? some of the fights need to happen.