Tag Archives: education system

Educational Failure: Learning How to Learn, Thinking About How to Think

As indicated by our last post, one focus at the moment is on the education system. But we are always interested in education in a broader sense, in terms of an intelligent and informed citizenry. We were raised by parents who not only were college-educated but in teaching professions, one a speech pathologist in public schools and the other a professor in state colleges. From a young age, we had instilled in us curiosity, critical thinking, and a love of learning. And that has been reinforced by spending most of our life in a liberal college town.

Nonetheless, we are college dropouts and, because of a learning disability, never did well with conventional pedagogy. Most of our own learning has been informal self-education, as we’ve been highly motivated to do so, quite obsessive at times. By way of parents and cultural osmosis, we’ve picked up a lot about how to learn and how to think, more important than merely memorizing factoids. And besides, memory recall was always our weak point, causing us to compensate with other intellectual skills. Anyway, memory recall has become less relevant now that anyone can look up detailed info in an instant.

The point is that, all in all, we lack much in the way of the kind of formal knowledge that would be emphasized in the mainstream education system. For example, our math skills are pathetic and we have little technical grasp of statistics, which sadly just makes us normal Americans. Yet through intense self-study, we’ve picked up a strong grasp of reading comprehension, media literacy, and critical thinking. This has given us an intuitive sense of what is likely true or false. That is to say our bull shit detector is finely tuned. Also, we are able to pick up quickly on lingo and ideas, so as to be able to follow scholarly debates.

These are rare abilities, so it seems, or else the average person is intellectually lazy to an extreme degree, but even such intellectual laziness would often be learned from and modeled in the failed education system. We were reminded of this in having various discussions this week. In one particular Reddit discussion, the topic was United States data on drug overdose deaths, as mapped out with statewide data. West Virginia had by and far the worst rate, whereas South Dakota had the best. We made a comment about natural resource states usually measuring well on indicators of social health, largely because they tend to have stable and prosperous economies with low poverty and inequality. This is something we know from our past research, as we live in a natural resource state.

We’ve looked a lot at this kind of data, and our pattern recognition abilities have allowed us to correlate data in meaningful ways, giving us a general sense of what to expect. So, even when confronted by new data, we already have a framework for understanding what it might mean, what are the larger contexts (social, economic, historical, etc), and what are the likely causal and contributing factors. We have this basic familiarity that allows us to quickly ascertain the relevance and veracity of something, but combined with a curiosity to simply look something up to find out what is true.

Someone responded about this view not squaring with the supposed fact, as they suggested, that West Virginia is also a natural resource state, in its historical coal mining. Without having any specific knowledge about the coal industry, we instantly suspected this was a wrong assessment. We have enough breadth of knowledge to realize the larger conditions that have developed over generations. Coal mining in general has been in decline for a long time and what’s left of it employs few people, all of which we consider common knowledge. Why wasn’t this obvious to this other commenter? We can only presume they were responding to a media image, as portrayed in movies and shows, of West Virginia as a coal mining state.

Based on various readings we’ve done over the decades, we felt fairly confident that the coal industry, at this point, most probably represents a small part of the West Virginia economy. Call it an informed guesstimation. Then after doing a quick search, requiring about 30 seconds of effort, our assessment was confirmed. The top result in a web search showed that coal represents 4.8% of state earnings and 2.5% of employment. Because of decades of reading broadly on thousands of topics, we have a lot of background knowledge. For example, we once did a deep survey of Appalachian economics and social problems, as part of an exploration in determining if white poverty really is any different from black poverty (it’s not).

Here is another example from the same discussion. Someone else brought up Native American reservations in South Dakota. They argued such places would have higher drug overdose death rates. There is little doubt about that, whether or not it’s all that much higher. But how is that significant and relevant? There would be specific areas of concentrated drug-related deaths in nearly every state. Why pick on impoverished minorities? It’s not clear that this was dog whistle politics, though it had that feeling about it. Once again, a purely intuitive sense told us that reservations, in being relatively smaller populations, are unlikely to have much impact on statewide data. Indeed, Native Americans, both on and off reservations, are only 8.57% of South Dakota residents.

A similar kind of thing comes up with the right-wing moral panic, scapegoating, and explicit dog whistles of using ‘Chicago’ as a proxy for ‘blacks’. Every time there is some shooting incident or a brief uptick of deaths in Chicago, all of the right-wing media obsesses over it, often along with much of supposed ‘liberal’ corporate media. Yet, as we know, Chicago’s rate of violent crime tends to hew closely to the national average of big cities. It occasionally goes up a bit, but at other times it goes down. Besides, we also know that rural areas actually have higher per capita violent crime rates. It’s a basic level of statistical analysis to comprehend that larger populations, even with lower per capita rates, will have higher overall numbers.

But this most basic level of intellectuality evades even many highly educated people. For the most part, we are statistically ignorant and yet we understand some basic statistical concepts. So, we have enough media literacy to know when to realize data is being spun as a narrative, is being used to deceive and mislead. Most Americans apparently, in lacking intellectual and ideological self-defense, are vulnerable to such propaganda campaigns. The corporate media repeats the name ‘Chicago’ so much that it takes on an importance in political and public imagination far beyond it’s importance as seen in actual data. But why are most people so incurious as to research the data for themselves?

Most of this kind of analysis seems like common sense and it’s relatively easy to do, but it can help to have a diverse familiarity with all kinds of background knowledge, to realize something is off and what it might be, in order to know what to interrogate. It’s interesting that so many people are inadequate in what used to be idealized as a liberal arts education, in knowing a little bit about a lot of things. As an autodidactic dilettante, we’ve probably ended up with more of a liberal arts education than most people with a college education, as colleges these days are mostly designed to spit out professional workers with a narrow range of abilities, not informed and critical thinking citizens and leaders.

The problem here isn’t only about the formal education system, not even whether it’s well funded or not. We know some older people lacking in such critical thinking skills who attended college in the post-war period during the height of public education funding, when higher education was practically free to the public and sometimes was entirely free to state residents. Those same people will complain about the decline of education while not seeing the deficiencies in their own education. There is a certain set of skills that aren’t being taught to most U.S. citizens, at any level of education, and it’s far from a new problem. Few of us are learning how to learn, much less how to think for ourselves.

Here is the deeper problem. One suspects that most Americans don’t realize how uneducated and miseducated they are, similar to how they don’t likely grasp their state of historical amnesia. Even ignoring the disinfo and spin, the average person surely doesn’t like to think of themselves as one of the ill-educated victims of the education system. It’s only those other inferior people who are gullible ignoramuses. For whatever reason, we’ve always been more open to acknowledging and admitting our own ignorance, as we see it as the starting point of knowledge. It’s not a point of shame, just a reminder of how much there is to learn.

Yet in our experience, the more educated someone is the less likely they are to admit to the deficiencies in their education (i.e., smart idiot effect). That is understandable, after having invested so much time and money into their own higher education, which in our society confers respectability and status, an outward achievement that is meant to prove that one is above average or somehow basically worthy. After all, what is being described above is a rather demoralizing conclusion about the state of American education. But without talking about it, specifically in how it affects us personally, how are we to seek education reform? And in the meantime, if we don’t know what we lack, how are we to seek improvement through self-education?

Could we democratically educate a democratic citizenry?

The problem of the primary and secondary education, in the United States, is largely dependent on the local tax base. So, poor communities have poorly funded schools, while rich communities have well funded schools. This is one of the many ways of how historical inequalities and inequities, based on racism and classism, are re-created generation after generation with inherited wealth, advantages, and privileges. Disparities are multifaceted, overlapping, cumulative, and reinforcing (i.e., intersectional).

The underlying issue goes back to the original debate upon which the country was founded. It’s an ideological conflict, between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, that has never been resolved. Inequality hides behind too often superficial divides of power, where real power remains concentrated. And the entire centuries-old debate about inequality is continuously suppressed in the ‘mainstream’ by political and media elites.

Our failed education system, for example, conveniently teaches little to nothing about the Anti-Federalists, convenient in that it is the Anti-Federalist position that could help us to understand that failure. They were seeking a different way of governance — of the people, by the people, for the people. A key component was division of power and our education system is divided, rather than centralized, if not in a successful way, assuming democratic processes and results are the purpose. Supposed local self-governance of education has been cynically used as a rationalization for abandoning the poor in economic segregation.

Interestingly, it’s the same mentality that causes the problem that potentially could solve it. To my mind, one major part of it is a carryover of the Anti-Federalist position of decentralized power, that those affected by decisions should make the decisions. That can be a good thing, if it actually does empower local self-governance, which obviously hasn’t been the case of underfunded schools that further entrench disenfranchisement, specifically within a high inequality society where most power otherwise remains centralized.

Anti-Federalists opposed authoritarianism and defended democracy. So, they sought to devolve power to as small and local of self-governance as possible, based on the idea that government should be closest to the people in order to ensure transparency and accountability. But right-wingers have had a way of wielding decentralization when it serves their purposes, in undermining rather than promoting democracy, as seen with education.

Ironically, though most public schools are run at a district level and largely funded by local tax base, the federal government has increasingly played a deciding role in educational policy. It’s a cobbled together education system, including elements of both Federalism and Anti-Federalism, but often not the best elements of either. There is no coherent and consistent principle to how and why our education system is structured this way.

The one area of our education system that most clearly fails Anti-Federalists standards is funding. Anti-Federalists saw the main problem of our society being the inequality that inevitably underlies authoritarianism and social dominance. They were all about redistributing wealth, such as Thomas Paine’s citizens dividend and Thomas Jefferson’s egalitarian land reforms. Such redistribution requires bigger government, though.

This is the one aspect that Anti-Federalists tended to be more in favor of centralized governance (as a necessary evil), in order to undo the centuries of accumulated wealth and power (as a greater evil). But the ideological rhetoric of the Anti-Federalists (e.g., states rights) has too often been used to attack and undermine Anti-Federalists principles and agendas (e.g., slave abolition and universal suffrage). Then this has had the unfavorable effect of delegitimizing Anti-Federalist rhetoric as regressive, oppressive, and perverse.

That is why Republicans seek to hobble democratic government in defending a plutocracy with concentrated wealth and centralized power, indicating how they are ultimately Federalists (or rather nationalists or even imperialists), even when occasionally throwing out Anti-Federalist talking points (liberty!). And so we can never have an honest public debate about either principled action or pragmatic policy. To the reactionary right, none of this is a problem. It’s all a Machiavellian game of power to them.

Assuming we could ever get to the point of collectively and genuinely aspiring to democracy, the question is at what level should this redistribution be implemented. It could be tackled, as you suggest, state by state. But even then the wealth disparity between states is also vast. Also, it would do no good if a poor state poorly funded all of its public schools equally, while the rich kids went to wealthy private schools.

The US education system is such a mess that it’s not certain we can reform it within the system itself. If the problem is how it’s cobbled together, further cobbling more reforms onto it might just make it an ever more grotesque Frankenstein monster. It might need to be leveled and rebuilt from the ground level. Though I’m generally libertarian in an Anti-Federalist sense, this might require a Federalist solution at the national level because the wealth concentration and inequality problem is at a national level.

All of these are reasons we Americans need to stop being so narcissistically insular and, instead, should allow ourselves to be humbled by acknowledging many other advanced countries have better education systems. We need to learn from elsewhere what works. For example, Finland has a nationalized education system that, nonetheless, maintains much local control. The teachers, highly trained and unionized, are given immense power and authority in being treated as qualified experts to determine how to run their own classrooms.

Yet funding, as we recall, is entirely from the central government. There is no such thing as poor schools in Finland. All citizens have equal access to the same high quality education, from grade school to college and job training. And they ensure that schools most in need of funding are prioritized. So, it’s actually when a school has a concentration of struggling students, typically linked to poverty, that they are given increased funding to improve outcomes. That is the opposite of what happens in the US where those with the most are given more.

[The above was part of some responses to a comment by Rex Kerr. His comment was a critique of Argumentative Penguin’s article Is “The End Of Affirmative Action Really A Terrible Thing?” Rex suggested turning our thoughts into an article, and so here it is. Though having written much about Anti-Federalism, this probably is the first time we’ve used the Anti-Federalist frame to analyze the American failure of the education system.]

America’s Less-Than-Smartest Education System

I came across a great talk by Amanda Ripley about her book, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. It is from C-SPAN in their coverage of this year’s National Book Festival (see video here).

She compares education systems in various countries. Her purpose seems to primarily be to understand the problems, challenges, and unique qualities of American education. In order to do this, she focuses on some of the best education systems in the world. It is the most intelligent and insightful analysis of education that I’ve come across. She also comes across as intellectually humble, something I always admire.

Here is a short video where she gives a brief introduction and overview:

The C-SPAN video happened to be playing on television while I was visiting my parent’s home. My mother likes C-SPAN. She was a public school teacher for her entire career. She has also been a conservative her entire life. She is critical of many things about public education, but she is still an ardent supporter of it, unlike my more libertarian father.

Amanda Ripley comes across as being somewhere on the left side of the spectrum, probably a fairly standard mainstream liberal. It was interesting that my mother agreed with everything Ripley spoke about. However, after the C-SPAN talk was over, both of my parents brought up the issue of tracking which they see as the solution. As that didn’t come up in the talk, I decided to buy the e-book and do a quick search. She does cover that issue in the book, but it isn’t what my parents would like to see. It doesn’t confirm their beliefs on this one aspect (pp. 137-138):

“Intuitively, tracking made sense. A classroom should function more efficiently if all the kids were at the same level. In reality, though, second tracks almost always came with second-rate expectations.

“Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger the tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect : Once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down.”

Of course, it isn’t just my parents who love the idea of tracking. It is a mainstream position in the United States. Even many on the left will argue tracking is one of the answers to educational failure, although those on the right emphasize it the most. Conservatives say that some kids are just low IQ or lazy or untalented. Not all kids deserve equal education, because not all students are equal. In their minds, it would actually be unfair to treat all kids equally.

However, as this author demonstrates, it is precisely because Finland treats all students equally and gives all students equal opportunity that they have the greatest schools in the world. You go to one school in Finland and it is basically the same quality as any other. They direct their funding to where it is needed, not to where rich people send their kids to school.

No Finnish student gets permanently tracked, not even special education students, for in Finland they assume special education is a temporary condition. They have high expectations of all students and so all students improve, unlike in the US. Americans don’t realize how highly unusual is our version of tracking (pp. 138-139):

“When most people thought of tracking, they thought of places like Germany or Austria, where students were siphoned off to separate schools depending on their aspirations. Tracking took different forms in places like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Norway, and Sweden. But that didn’t mean it was less powerful.

“Tracking in elementary school was a uniquely American policy. The sorting began at a very young age, and it came in the form of magnet schools, honors classes, Advanced Placement courses, or International Baccalaureate programs. In fact, the United States was one of the few countries where schools not only divided younger children by ability, but actually taught different content to the more advanced track. In other countries , including Germany and Singapore, all kids were meant to learn the same challenging core content; the most advanced kids just went deeper into the material.

“Meanwhile, the enduring segregation of U.S. schools by race and income created another de facto tracking system, in which minority and low-income kids were far more likely to attend inferior schools with fewer Advanced Placement classes and less experienced teachers.”

There are many things that are fundamentally different about the U.S. education system, like so much else in this country. The author notes that the American obsession about extracurricular activities is one of the most unusual aspects.

Americans are obsessed about school more than are the Finnish, but there is a disconnect in this obsession. U.S. teachers give more homework, for example, and yet in Finland students get higher quality homework that demands more challenging independent thought. Finnish schools are laidback by American standards and parents are almost entirely uninvolved, but what they do is heavily invest in quality everything, especially teachers (who get their teacher training in the Finnish equivalent of U.S. Ivy League colleges). They don’t waste their time and money on keeping students entertained with sports, clubs, and other activities.

In most countries in the world, children simply go to school to learn and nothing else. Foreign students who come to the U.S. observe how easy is education here. And U.S. students that travel to the countries with better education systems observe that the students there take education more seriously.

The U.S. is atypical partly because of its dark history of racial segregation. Obviously, this plays into the dysfunctional tracking system that directs most resources to certain students. This leaves a substandard education for the rest of the students, mostly poor and minority. Tracking directly fits into a system of social hierarchy and social control. Those put on the lower track have little expectations placed upon them, or rather a great many negative expectations forced upon them.

Low expectations goes hand in hand with lowered standards and results. This isn’t surprising for anyone who knows about the research on the power of expectations, from the Rosenthal-Pygmalion Effect to Stereotype Threat. Tracking institutionalizes some of the worst aspects of our society, but it isn’t just about the failure of American society. Tracking, generally speaking, is just a bad system in any society.

Lessening the emphasis on tracking has been a wild success in countries all around the world. Americans should take note (pp. 139-140):

“By the early twenty-first century, many countries were slowly, haltingly, delaying tracking. When they did so, all kids tended to do better. In most Polish schools, tracking occurred at age sixteen. At Tom’s school in Wrocław, the sorting had already happened; only a third to half of the students who applied were accepted. Tom only saw the vocational kids when he came to gym class. They left as his class arrived.

“Finland tracked kids, too. As in Poland, the division happened later, at age sixteen, the consequence of forty years of reforms, each round of which had delayed tracking a little longer. Until students reached age sixteen, though, Finnish schools followed a strict ethic of equity. Teachers could not, as a rule, hold kids back or promote them when they weren’t ready. That left only one option: All kids had to learn. To make this possible, Finland’s education system funneled money toward kids who needed help. As soon as young kids showed signs of slipping, teachers descended upon them like a pit crew before they fell further behind. About a third of kids got special help during their first nine years of school. Only 2 percent repeated a grade in Finnish primary school (compared to 11 percent in the United States, which was above average for the developed world).

“Once it happened, tracking was less of a stigma in Finland. The government gave vocational high schools extra money, and in many towns, they were as prestigious as the academic programs. In fact, the more remote or disadvantaged the school, the more money it got. This balance was just as important as delaying tracking; once students got channeled into a vocational track, it had to lead somewhere. Not all kids had to go to college, but they all had to learn useful skills.

“In Finland and all the top countries, spending on education was tied to need, which was only logical. The worse off the students, the more money their school got. In Pennsylvania, Tom’s home state, the opposite was true. The poorest school districts spent 20 percent less per student, around $ 9,000 compared to around $ 11,000 in the richest school districts.”

Other countries came to realize tracking was ineffective, and so they changed their methods. For Americans, it has been just more cowbell (p. 140):

“That backward math was one of the most obvious differences between the United States and other countries. In almost every other developed country, the schools with the poorest students had more teachers per student; the opposite was true in only four countries: the United States, Israel, Slovenia, and Turkey, where the poorest schools had fewer teachers per student.

“It was a striking difference, and it related to rigor. In countries where people agreed that school was serious, it had to be serious for everyone. If rigor was a prerequisite for success in life, then it had to be applied evenly. Equity— a core value of fairness, backed up by money and institutionalized by delayed tracking— was a telltale sign of rigor.”

Many Americans, especially on the right, would argue these countries are successful because they are small and homogenous. They think that the main problem is that we have a large bureaucratic government that is trying to enforce a one-size-fits-all solution onto a diverse population. That of course misses the entire point of tracking. The U.S. has one of the least one-size-fits-all solutions in the world. Even ignoring that, can U.S. education problems be blamed on the government and on diversity?

To answer that question, I would put it into the context of what Ripley has to say about Singapore (pp. 160-161):

“In Singapore, the opposite happened. There, the population was also diverse, about 77 percent Chinese, 14 percent Malay, 8 percent Indian, and 1.5 percent other. People spoke Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil and followed five different faiths (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, and Hinduism). Yet Singaporeans scored at the top of the world on PISA, right beside Finland and Korea. There was virtually no gap in scores between immigrant and native-born students.

“Of course , Singapore was essentially another planet compared to most countries. It was ruled by an authoritarian regime with an unusually high-performing bureaucracy. The government controlled most of the rigor variables, from the caliber of teacher recruits to the mix of ethnicities in housing developments. Singapore did not have the kind of extreme segregation that existed in the United States, because policy makers had forbidden it.”

I doubt I’d want to live in Singapore, but it offers an interesting example. One of the points the author makes is that there are different ways to get high education results.

To Americans, Singapore seems authoritarian and dystopian. They have a highly centralized and powerful bureaucratic government. They don’t even have the benefit of a homogenous society.

That is everything that right-wingers use to rationalize America’s failing schools. And yet in Singapore it is the precise recipe for educational success.

It isn’t just about a few exceptional countries like Singapore. Diversity isn’t just that big of an issue. There are a high number of highly homogenous countries (homogenous in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, etc) that are extremely poor, have high rates of social problems, and measure low in their education systems. Sure, systems that work best in diverse societies likely will be different than what works in homogenous societies, but the basic point is that there are ways that both types of societies can attain very high standards of education.

Besides, even breaking down the U.S. education system into homogenous and diverse states still doesn’t explain this country’s low ranking in the world. Even many highly homogenous states (almost entirely white in some cases) don’t necessarily get all that great of results. She mentioned one state (one of the Northeastern states, as I recall) that had about average or slightly below average rankings in international comparisons. Even looking back at the supposed golden age of education during the low immigration mid-20th century doesn’t offer much solace. The U.S. never has had a top ranked grade school education system.

Diversity can’t be used as an excuse (p. 17):

“Other Americans defended their system, blaming the diversity of their students for lackluster results . In his meticulous way, Schleicher responded with data: Immigrants could not be blamed for America’s poor showing. The country would have had the same ranking if their scores were ignored. In fact, worldwide, the share of immigrant children explained only 3 percent of the variance between countries.”

Also, it can’t be blamed on poverty, typically associated with immigrants and minorities. Nor can it be blamed on the public schools where immigrants and minorities are concentrated. Ripley makes this very clear (p. 17):

“A student’s race and family income mattered, but how much such things mattered varied wildly from country to country . Rich parents did not always presage high scores, and poor parents did not always presage low scores. American kids at private school tended to perform better, but not any better than similarly privileged kids who went to public school. Private school did not, statistically speaking, add much value.”

It isn’t a matter of whether or not a country has a diverse population or not, but what one does with the population one has. This relates to spending. More funding of education in itself doesn’t correlate to better results. Instead, it is about how that money is used and if it is used equitably to help all students (p. 160):

“The rest depended on what countries did with the children they had. In the United States, the practice of funding schools based on local property taxes motivated families to move into the most affluent neighborhoods they could afford, in effect buying their way into good schools. The system encouraged segregation.

“Since black, Hispanic, and immigrant kids tended to come from less affluent families , they usually ended up in underresourced schools with more kids like them. Between 1998 and 2010, poor American students had become more concentrated in schools with other poor students.

“The biggest problem with this kind of diversity is that it wasn’t actually diverse. Most white kids had majority white classmates. Black and Hispanic students, meanwhile, were more likely to attend majority black or Hispanic schools in 2005 than they were in 1980.

“Populating schools with mostly low-income, Hispanic, or African-American students usually meant compounding low scores, unstable home lives, and low expectations. Kids fed off each other, a dynamic that could work for good and for ill. In Poland, kids lost their edge as soon as they were tracked into vocational schools; likewise, there seemed to be a tipping point for expectations in the United States. On average, schools with mostly low- income kids systematically lacked the symptoms of rigor. They had inconsistent teaching quality, little autonomy for teachers or teenagers, low levels of academic drive, and less equity. By warehousing disadvantaged kids in the same schools, the United States took hard problems and made them harder.”

Once again, dysfunctional tracking in the U.S. is rooted in a history of systemic and institutional racism. Kids are tracked both in the formal and informal sense. Race and class segregation divide up students, and most of the funding is going to wealthier students and white students. It isn’t necessarily that all that extra funding is being used well by those wealthier school districts, but that the poorest school districts have so little money to use for anything, whether used well or badly. Too much funding isn’t necessarily helpful. Too little funding, however, is obviously problematic.

The discussion in America tends to focus only on the average amount of funding for each American child, all the while ignoring the vast disparity of funding between populations. This is how serious attention on the real issues gets avoided. No one wants to talk about the elephant in the room, the historical inequalities that are continually reinforced, not just inequalities between wealth and poverty but inequalities of political power and real world opportunities, inequalities of racial prejudice and privilege. These are among the most politically incorrect issues in this country.

As all of this shows, there is more going on here than can be understood in the ideological frame of mainstream American politics (pp. 163-164):

“The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to think that the diversity narrative in the United States— the one that blamed our mediocrity on kids’ backgrounds and neighborhoods— was as toxic as funding inequities . There was a fatalism to the story line, which didn’t mean it was wrong. The United States did have too much poverty; minority students were not learning enough. Parents did matter, and so did health care and nutrition. Obviously.

“But the narrative also underwrote low aspirations, shaping the way teachers looked at their students, just as Vuorinen feared. Since the 1960s, studies have shown that if researchers tested a class and told teachers that certain students would thrive academically in the coming months, teachers behaved differently toward the chosen kids. They nodded more, smiled more, and gave those kids more time to answer questions and more specific feedback.

“In fact, the kids had been chosen at random. The label was fictional, but it stuck. At the end of the school year, teachers still described those students as more interesting, better adjusted, and more likely to be successful in life. As for other kids who had done well in the classroom, but were not chosen? The same teachers described them as less likely to succeed and less likable. The human brain depends on labels and patterns; if a researcher (or cultural narrative) offers teachers a compelling pattern, they will tend to defer to it.

“What did it mean, then, that respected U.S. education leaders and professors in teacher colleges were indoctrinating young teachers with the mindset that poverty trumped everything else? What did it mean if teachers were led to believe that they could only be expected to do so much, and that poverty was usually destiny?

“It may be human nature to stereotype, but some countries systematically reinforced the instinct, and some countries inhibited it. It was becoming obvious to me that rigor couldn’t exist without equity. Equity was not just a matter of tracking and budgets; it was a mindset.

“Interestingly, this mindset extended to special education in Finland, too. Teachers considered most special ed students to have temporary learning difficulties, rather than permanent disabilities. That mindset helped explain why Finland had one of the highest proportions of special education kids in the world; the label was temporary and not pejorative. The Finns assumed that all kids could improve. In fact, by their seventeenth birthday, about half of Finnish kids had received some kind of special education services at some point, usually in elementary school, so that they did not fall farther behind. During the 2009 to 2010 school year, about one in four Finnish kids received some kind of special education services—almost always in a normal school, for only part of the day. (By comparison, about one in eight American students received special education services that year.)”

This isn’t something unique to particular societies. It isn’t as if we must resign ourselves to a lesser fate in the global scheme of things. There is evidence that high education standards can even be achieved demographically diverse groups of students in the United States (p. 218):

“Unlike most schools in America, including the best public charter schools, these new schools were actually diverse, in the literal sense. Moskowitz wanted a true mix of white, Asian, African-American , and Hispanic students at a range of income levels, and she got it. That is how kids learn best— together, with a mix of expectations, advantages, and complications— according to the hard-earned lessons of countries around the world.

“There are stories like this all over the country: Success Academy charter schools in New York City, the closest thing to Finland in the United States; William Taylor, a public-school teacher who has almost Korean expectations for his low-income students in Washington, D.C.; and Deborah Gist in Rhode Island, a leader who has dared to raise the bar for what teachers must know, just like reformers in Finland and Korea.

“These world-class educators exist, but they are fighting against the grain of culture and institutions. That fight drains them of energy and time . If they ever win, it will be because parents and students rose up around them, convinced that our children cannot only handle a rigorous education but that they crave it as never before.”

It isn’t just that we Americans have low expectations of American students, especially poor and minority students. The real problem is we have low expectations for our entire society. We expect failure at a collective level, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.