Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Just seconds after takeoff from DC’s National Airport, Air Florida Flight 90 hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge like a wrecking ball, destroying seven cars, killing four people, and tearing away a section of the bridge wall. The plane broke into a dozen pieces on impact.

The anniversary has me thinking back to the story of one person who happened by the crash site on Jan. 13, 1982. The man who jumped into the river when no one of sound mind would. From the heroism chapter of The Unthinkable:

The snow started out lovely, blurring the edges of Washington’s hard buildings and bleaching the memorials storybook white. But by midafternoon, it had turned unforgiving.

Great groaning piles of snow fell from the sky like mud. Government employees were liberated early, stacking the city’s streets with traffic. Normally, it took Roger Olian, a sheet-metal worker at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, half an hour to get home. On this day, after driving for two hours, he was only halfway there. It would have been faster to walk.

By the time he got to the Fourteenth Street Bridge, which crosses over the Potomac River from D.C. into Virginia, Olian’s old red Datsun pickup truck was protesting. It had needed a new battery for a while and now it was desperately low on gas, too. Worried the car might stall and never start again, Olian kept the radio and the windshield wipers off.

When the Boeing 737 sliced into the bridge span next to him at 4:01 P.M., Olian didn’t even see it. Encased in his snow-covered truck, he didn’t hear or feel the crash. It was only when the car in front of him stopped that Olian had any indication that something strange had happened. The driver got out and walked back to his truck. Olian rolled down his window, and the man’s shouts jangled through the snowbound quiet.

“Did you see that?”

“What’s that?”

“A plane! A plane just crashed into the river!” the man screamed.

Olian dismissed him. “I thought, ‘This guy is nuts.’ All I wanted to do was to get out of there.”

But the man kept yelling. “I think that plane might explode!” “So get in your car and go!” Olian told him, rolling up his window. The man did as he was told. But as Olian started to follow him, he noticed that the other cars were behaving oddly too. “It was as if you’d dropped food into the middle of an anthill and all of a sudden the ants started to move in weird ways. So I thought,‘Maybe that guy was right.’”

Without thinking too much about what he was doing or how he would start his truck again, Olian eased over to the shoulder and parked. If a plane had gone down without him even noticing, he thought, it must have been a small private plane. “Well, maybe I could see what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Or maybe somebody needs help, maybe I could do something—some nominal thing, and it will be interesting.”

An emergency manager I met in Las Vegas recently called my attention to a December Harvard Business Review piece that is worth a look. The article attempts to explain why the employees of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai went to such extraordinary lengths to help protect the guests during the nightmarish 3-day siege of the hotel.

Restaurant and banquet staff rushed people to safe locations such as kitchens and basements. Telephone operators stayed at their posts, alerting guests to lock doors and not step out. Kitchen staff formed human shields to protect guests during evacuation attempts. As many as 11 Taj Mumbai employees—a third of the hotel’s casualties—laid down their lives while helping between 1,200 and 1,500 guests escape.

Interestingly, the authors, Rohit Deshpandé and Anjali Raina, look to the corporate culture of the Taj hotel to explain this behavior. They interviewed the hotel staff and reviewed the company’s HR policies, and came up with a theory of heroism:

We believe that the unusual hiring, training, and incentive systems of the Taj Group—which operates 108 hotels in 12 countries—have combined to create an organizational culture in which employees are willing to do almost anything for guests. This extraordinary customer centricity helped, in a moment of crisis, to turn its employees into a band of ordinary heroes.

It is surely true that the culture of a company—or a family or a city—can encourage (or discourage) heroism. Organizations like the Coast Guard, for example, systematically empower their lowest-level members to use their discretion—and maintain a bias for action.

But in my experience, the heroism of the Taj employees is the norm, not the exception. When disasters happen, people tend to stick to whatever role they were playing before everything fell apart. They feel responsible for fulfilling their duties, even when they are earning pennies (or rupees) per hour.

On May 28, 1977, an explosive fire ripped through the Beverly Hills Supper Club near Cincinnati, killing 165 people. It was, as the Cincinnati Enquirer later described it, “a night of horror and heroism, of unspeakable carnage and unshakeable courage.” Sociologists Norris Johnson and William Feinberg later conducted an analysis of the behavior of everyone involved, and, as I describe in The Unthinkable, they found a remarkable pattern—that should sound familiar to the survivors from the Taj:

As word of the fire slowly spread, people reacted like actors in play, each according to role. Servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated, but bypassed other sections. Cooks and busboys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving. Age mattered too. The younger cocktail waitresses seemed more confused. But the banquet waitresses, who tended to be older, were calm and reassuring.

But this role-playing works both ways. Employees are more likely to become rescuers, and customers are more likely to, well, sit back and watch:

And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the room. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills.

An estimated 60 percent of the employees tried to help in some way—either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17 percent of the guests helped. But even among the guests, identity influenced behavior. The doctors who had been dining at the club acted as doctors, administering CPR and dressing wounds on the grounds of the club like battlefield medics. Nurses did the same thing. There was even one hospital administrator there who—naturally—began to organize the doctors and the nurses.

Does this mean we shouldn’t celebrate the employees of the Taj? No, by all means, we should, and I am so glad the authors interviewed the employees and collected their stories.

But if we recognize that this kind of behavior is predictable and not exceptional, then perhaps we can move the dial one notch further—beyond customer-centric HR policies. For example, how can we train employees so that their urge to help the guests will be even more productive—and less deadly? Can we train them to expect guests to become passive—and override that instinct with aggressive commands (as well-trained flight attendants have learned to do in aviation disasters)? What happens if we anticipate heroism (or at least decency), and work backwards from there?

 

Sometimes it feels like we will never be able to be perfect, like the Finns. Ah, the Finns! In the U.S., our descriptions of the education system are so euphoric that it can be hard to relate.

But I have to say, I didn’t feel that same level of bliss when I was in Finland. I mean, I felt like it was an inspiring place—a lot more civilized in many ways, a place we can learn from. But in real life, it seemed like it was also a complicated place inhabited by…human beings.

It’s important to keep this in mind, so that we don’t dismiss the Finns as another Nordic fantasy land that has no connection to our lives and schools.

In that spirit, here is a quick reality check from the Finland media…

Some parents in Finland choose not to send their kids to the neighborhood school because of the high level of immigrant students there. Sound familiar?

Helsinki parents at pains to avoid schools with high proportion of immigrants

Pasi and Merja live in a neighbourhood of small houses in Metsälä in the north of Helsinki. More than a dozen children who start school next autumn live in the neighbourhood of about 1,000 residents, and nearly all of them applied for admission to a school outside their neighborhood. Many of the neighbours have pulled similar stunts….Some have even acquired a second home to make sure that their children attend school somewhere other than their nearest one in Maunula.
   
...An invisible wall exists along the border of Maunula and Metsälä.
    The average income of Maunula residents is EUR 22,400 a year, while the Metsälä residents earn EUR 37,000.
    Maunula has many low-income pensioners, and half of the homes in the area are built on the partially publicly-funded Arava subsidy scheme, compared with only ten per cent in Metsälä.
    And then there is the sensitive issue: about a tenth of the residents in Maunula speak a language other than Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue.
    In Metsälä, with its 1,000 residents, just 43 speak a foreign language at home. The entire foreign language-speaking population there could nearly fit in a single city bus.
   
    ...“Undoubtedly we all want to live in a multicultural and tolerant atmosphere, but the fact is that if there are many children who do not speak Finnish, the teacher’s time is spent on them”, the mother of two says.
    She does not know any children who have actually attended school in Maunula, but she has “heard stories”.—Helsingin Sanomat 2011

Violence and substance abuse affect the lives of Finnish kids, too…

Tens of thousands of children exposed to violence or substance abuse at home
Study shows that thousands of children in need of help remain unnoticed

Thousands of children living in conditions in which they are exposed to violence and substance abuse fail to get the help that they need, says Dr. Mirjam Kalland, a family research expert at the University of Helsinki.
    A substance abuse problem of some kind affects one in six families, while violence afflicts one in five. “For instance, 20 to 30 percent of children in the Helsinki region live in fairly serious risky conditions. Only five to six percent are within the scope of child protection support measures. Quite a few of the children who would need help are never noticed”, Kalland says.—Helsingin Sanomat 2006

And Finnish teachers sometimes complain about Finnish parents…!

Nearly one in five Finnish schoolteachers and one in three principals are targeted with bullying and mental violence by students’ parents. The primary level comprehensive school headmasters, in particular, are harassed.
    This was the finding of a survey conducted by the Opettaja (Teacher) magazine.
    Teachers interviewed by the trade journal said the bullying manifests itself in various forms varying from the spreading of unfounded rumours to verbal abuse and phone calls that can last for hours.
   
Bullying parents have threatened they would contact the board of education, the provincial administrative board, or the press.
    The root of the problem is often diverging views on education and upbringing.—Helsingin Sanomat 2005

Why do I bring this up? Must I ruin everything? Really? Well, it’s a bit perverse, I guess. But I find it encouraging to remind myself that while the US has its own extremes of dysfunction, we are all human. And excellent education outcomes are possible—-even in imperfect places occupied by humans.

A few people have asked me to explain in more detail why I think the PISA index of socioeconomic status is a better way to compare the performance of rich and poor kids around the world (versus the breakdown of scores based on how many kids qualify for free or reduced price lunch at a US school). So I’ll do my best for those of you looking to get deep in the weeds on this….

OK, first let’s talk about the PISA index on socioeconomic status. The data for that index is indeed self-reported by the students taking the test, as some of the commenters have noted. I can see why people would wonder if that is reliable. In fact, I had the same question when I first heard about this.

Two things:

First, the research suggests that students are surprisingly accurate when asked specific questions about their family’s situation (for example, see this report on students’ reliability on such questionnaires.)

Secondly, the students are not asked to give their parents’ income per se; they are asked a long list of questions about their parents’ education levels, occupations, the number of books and computers in the home, etc.—all things that give a holistic sense of SES (and some of which, including education level, can better predict educational success than income alone).

Alright, as for the Free/Reduce Price Lunch (FRPL) breakdown of the PISA data referenced by people who insist our low-poverty schools are “No.1” in the world: this data comes from a totally different survey done in the U.S. only. Principals at U.S. schools where some number of students took the PISA were asked this question. They were told to respond in reference to the entire school—not just the students who took the test. So this is already a different unit of measurement than the average PISA scores for, say, Finnish students.

Moreover, the number of principals who said that between 0 and 10% of their students are eligible for FRPL is small; only about 10% of the 2009 U.S. PISA sample attended these schools.

But that’s all well and good. This FRPL data surely gives us a sense of the huge gap between the performance of the 10 percenters and the rest of the schools in the U.S.

But those last three words are key. This data is collected only to look at variance in the U.S. I agree that it would be fascinating to compare these figures to the same figures in Finland and around the world. However, we don’t have that information. We don’t know how Finnish schools with 0-10% of students from families earning less than 185% of the U.S. poverty level do on PISA.

We do know that Finland overall has far less poverty than the U.S. But the oft-cited figure—that Finland has about 4% child poverty—refers to a totally different definition of “poverty” than the FRPL definition. That 4% figure refers to the percent of people who earn less than 50% of the median income in Finland. (The comparable figure for poverty in the U.S. is about 20%—whereas under the FRPL definition of “poverty,” it’s about 40%, to give you a sense of the difference.)

Just to be sure, I spoke to the data experts who crunch this FRPL data in the U.S. and know it far better than I ever will, and they confirmed that it is inappropriate to use this data in the way that Ravitch is using it. You can’t compare the FRPL data from US schools to an entire country; it’s apples to oranges. The best option that I know of to compare apples to apples is PISA’s own ESCS index. And again, on that index, our richest kids do fine in reading—and not well in math and science.

OK, now back to writing the book! If you’ve read this far, you are probably trying to procrastinate doing something, too… Thanks for the company!

The other day, I posted the country rankings you never hear about—the only legitimate ones to show how countries’ most privileged 15-year-olds do on the PISA test of what kids know around the world.*

Our richest kids rank No. 7 in reading. OK, so it is not No.1, as others keep insisting, and we spend way more money per student to get there. But I’ll take it. No. 7 is still a perfectly respectable performance—well above the OECD average for rich kids.

But it got me thinking: What about math and science? How did our most privileged kids (who are, by the way, more privileged than most countries’ well-off children) do in math and science?

Oh Lord…Brace yourselves, suburban parents:

With thanks to the folks at the Education Trust who helped me ferret out this data from the PISA results, here we go:

MATH ACHIEVEMENT of the most privileged teenagers around the world:

1. Belgium

2. Netherlands

3. South Korea

4. Finland

5. New Zealand

6. Japan

7. Switzerland

8. Czech Republic

9. Canada

10. Australia

11. Germany

(Still going…)

12. Denmark

13. France

14. Sweden

15. Austria

16. Hungary

17. Slovak Republic (!)

18. Iceland

(Hang in there…)

19. Luxembourg

20. Ireland

21. Norway

22. Poland

23. UNITED STATES

There it is, No. 23 out of 29 countries in math, according to the 2003 PISA exam (which was the last time math was the primary focus of the test, yielding enough data to make such comparisons).

Wow. How to explain this? Our most privileged kids attend, on average, the most well-resourced schools in the world with some of the smallest class sizes and among the most credentialed, experienced, well-paid teachers. They have educated parents, books at home and computers to use, and this sample includes our private-school students.

And yet they score below the OECD average in math when compared to other countries most-privileged students. What is going on here?

SCIENCE ACHIEVEMENT of the most privileged teenagers around the world:

1. Finland

2. New Zealand

3. Netherlands

4. Canada

5. Australia

6. Germany

7. United Kingdom

8. Czech Republic

9. Belgium

10. Switzerland

11. Japan

12. France

13. Austria

14. Hungary

15. Ireland

16. Sweden

17. South Korea

18. UNITED STATES

In science, our most privileged students ring in 18th out of 30 countries, per the 2006 PISA test (the last one that had science as its primary focus.) This is, as in math, just below the OECD average for similarly affluent kids.

Why does it matter?

I bring this up just to point out that it is possible for kids to learn at much higher levels than our kids are learning—even our most-advantaged kids. I am not (repeat, not!) saying that poverty doesn’t matter; it obviously matters enormously. Let’s just stop talking about poverty as if it is some dark force that acts in isolation from the rest of our institutions.

Even if we could magically eliminate poverty in America (which would be a beautiful thing and something we should try much harder to do), then we still would not have world-class education outcomes.

Anyone care to offer a theory for why our most affluent kids score 23rd in math and 18th in science? Is it a lack of motivation? An overabundance of wealth? If so, why aren’t we below average in reading, too?

*And remember, before you send me links to wildly misleading blog posts and demand a recount: these rankings listed here rely upon PISA’s own carefully administered survey of students’ socioeconomic status known as the index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status—not a hijacked table regarding free-or-reduced price lunch ratios that was never ever intended to be used for international comparisons.