Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

What if we force ranked every state in the country and every country in the world, based on the percentage of high-school kids with the most marketable skills? Which league would your state be in?

My latest story in the Atlantic features new research by Eric Hanushek at Stanford, Paul Peterson at Harvard and Ludger Woessmann at the University of Munich. They ranked the world, comparing countries to individual states.

What’s new about this is that they compared states to a long list of developed countries, and they looked specifically at the percentage of kids scoring high in math—which tends to be a good indicator of future earnings and a relatively reliable way to compare student learning across oceans. (For those of you who think minorities or low-income kids drag down the U.S. rankings, they also carved out the white-kids only data on a state-by-state basis.)

They wanted to do this not just as an intellectual exercise, but because it is essentially what more and more companies are doing when they hire employees. Kids from California are not just competing with kids from New Jersey anymore. They are competing with kids from Canada and Australia. And they are not winning.

To see how well your own state (or city, in some cases) competes with any of 57 countries, check out the Atlantic‘s super-cool interactive tool. Unless you’re from Finland, Korea or Massachusetts, prepare to be humbled…

The country lost one of its most devoted and creative disaster-preparedness advocates on Monday. John Solomon, a journalist and blogger, was a force for change and for resilience. He believed that the public was the nation’s most vital asset in dealing with terrorism and emergencies of all kinds. He was curious, modest and dedicated until the end.

He will be missed.

The New York Times obituary is here.

And a press release from FEMA head Craig Fugate is pasted below:

Dear friends and colleagues,

Below is FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate’s Statement on the passing of preparedness advocate John Solomon. John’s passion and energy to prepare the public and to voice his opinions earned the respect and friendship of the National Office of Citizen Corps, as well as emergency managers at all levels of government.  Please honor John’s work by reading his blog postings, http://incaseofemergencyblog.com, and re-dedicating yourself to the mission of public preparedness.  Thank you.

FEMA News Release: FEMA Administrator Statement on the Passing of Preparedness Advocate John Solomon

Release Date: November 2, 2010
Release Number: HQ-10-213

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate issued the following statement today on the passing of John Solomon, a leading advocate for strengthening community and personal preparedness for disasters.  Solomon was also the founder of a leading emergency management blog, “In Case of Emergency” and a volunteer with his local Community Emergency Response Team in New York, which helps prepare communities for emergencies.

“Sheree and I were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of John Solomon, a critical voice within our emergency management community.  Like many of us, John knew the value of a prepared public, and worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the need to prepare our families, neighbors, workplaces, and communities for all hazards.  Through his blog, he was able to deliver this message far beyond his own community, encouraging citizens to get involved and sharing key resources and opportunities for them to do so.

“John was both an important ally and critic of emergency managers.  I always appreciated his willingness to offer candid assessments of where we stood as a country as far as preparedness, and respected his honest feedback about our work here at FEMA.  He pushed all of us to always do more to engage and prepare the public - and set the standard for what it meant to be part of our nation’s emergency management team.  Sheree’s and my thoughts are with John’s family and friends during this sad time.  We will continue to do everything we can to honor what John stood for and carry on his fight - to create a prepared and resilient public.”

Check out my story today in Slate about what the best classrooms in the world look like. Hint: old school is good school.

Nicholas Lemann has a mystifying piece in the New Yorker about the “overblown crisis in American education.” The basic argument is that American schools are just fine, same as they always were. And while black and Hispanic kids may be stuck at the bottom of the charts, white kids are doing reasonably well. (And oh yes, any ambitious movement to reform schools is dangerous—akin to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, he did!)

No fewer than a dozen people have mentioned this piece to me at this point. All of them white, naturally. And since I am white, along with most American school children, I can see why this claim might be reassuring on some self-interested level, if it were true.

Let’s consider his arguments:

First, Lemann notes that, “by the fundamental test of attractiveness to students and their families,” the system is doing great. Evidence? Enrollment in public schools is up. Well, I suppose by the same fundamental law, our unemployment benefits are also phenomenally attractive. Enrollment is way up these days!

But given that most people do not have any choice other than public school (and that many of the parents who used to have a choice have recently pulled their kids out of private school due to the recession), I’m not sure this is such a solid indicator. Perhaps a better measure of “attractiveness” would be to ask people if they find the system attractive. That’s what Time Magazine did in an August 2010 poll, finding that only 37% of surveyed adults are satisfied with public schools. Among parents with children in public school, 50% are satisfied. Overall, 67% said our education system is “in a crisis.”

But OK, maybe the public is just being bamboozled by the media hype. What about the actual results of our system?

Lemann again:

“Measures of how much American students are learning—compared to the past, and compared to students in other countries—are holding steady, for the most part, even as more people are going to school.”

Holding steady? Really? Since 1969, the high-school graduation rate has dropped from 77% to 69% in America. Kids are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has decidedly not “held steady.” Germany, Japan, Korea and the U.K. now have high-school graduation rates of 90% or more. As for college graduation rates, the U.S. used to lead the world in the ratio of 25- to 34-year-olds with degrees. Today it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

Over the past 30 years, many developed countries have radically improved their systems—largely by professionalizing their teaching force and raising their academic standards in ways that we have not begun to do. Since we now compete with these countries for jobs, these comparisons matter. On a 2006 international exam, American 15-year-olds ranked 21st in science and 25th in math out of 30 industrialized nations. That means our kids score about two grade levels below top-ranked Finland in math and science—even though the Finns actually start school a year later than we do.

Well then, what about the white kids? Aren’t they cruising along just fine? White kids are doing better than African-American and Hispanic kids, that’s true. But they are not doing so great internationally. On that same 2006 international test of mathematics, white American teenagers did about average for rich countries, but still scored below all kids in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany (sorry, this list just goes on and on…), Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland. Even by our own standards, our supposedly good (and often white) schools may not be as good as we think. One recent study of 300 middle or upper-class schools in California, from Silicon Valley to Orange County, found that 50% of kids were scoring below grade level on California’s own assessment test.

Lemann is correct when he says that our kids’ scores have not gotten worse: since the early 1970s, high schoolers’ math and reading scores have barely budged. But the scores of other kids around the world have gotten much better over the same time frame.  All the while, we have doubled the amount we spend per pupil on K-12 system—outspending most countries in the world. In return for this investment, we have seen no major improvement. Call me hysterical, but I tend to think that when you double your money and get nothing back in return, something is seriously amiss.

Not so, says Lemann: “Over all, the American education system works quite well.” Compared to what, I wonder?

He goes on:

“It should raise questions when an enormous, complicated realm of life takes on the characteristics of a stock drama. In the current school-reform story, there is a reliable villain, in the form of the teachers’ unions, and a familiar set of heroes, including Geoffrey Canada, of Harlem Children’s Zone; Wendy Kopp, of Teach for America, the Knowledge Is Power Program; and Michele Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. And there is a clear answer to the problem—charter schools.”

However, not one of these people has ever, to my knowledge, said that charter schools are the clear solution.

To wit:

* “The monopoly needs to be broken up. I could care less about the structure. I am just as happy to see great schools as traditional public schools and to shut down charter schools if they don’t work.”—Geoffrey Canada in my interview for Time this summer

* “Like anything else, you know, charter laws alone aren`t going to solve the problem, but they`re a huge enabler I think for many really committed visionary people who really want to change the way things are for kids.”—Wendy Kopp of Teach for America on the Charlie Rose show in 2008

* ‘‘Part of my job is to make sure that all kids get a great education, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s in charter, parochial or public schools.”—Michelle Rhee in the New York Times

Why don’t these reformers think charter schools are the clear solution? Because they know that only 17% of charter schools are significantly outperforming their public-school counterparts—and because, thanks in part to teacher-union opposition, there are only enough charter schools to enroll 5% of U.S. kids.

It’s time for this tedious debate about charter schools to evolve already. Charter schools are not The Answer; they are case studies in what’s possible. Just like the Mayo Clinic is not The Answer to health care reform.

As Atul Gawande masterfully explained (also in the New Yorker) last year, the Mayo Clinic offers evidence of what works. Excellent charter-schools show us how much better the rest of our schools could be—and offer lessons that we are foolish to ignore.

But Lemann (and others) warn that we should be careful before making any big decisions:

“One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it.”

Except, of course, for health-care reform, come to mention it—another large system that Lemann seemed to think was quite awry last year before Democrats passed reform legislation.

But schools? Ah, they’re fine. They were fine for me, right? Fine for Lemann, right? God forbid we get carried away and start worrying about everyone else.

 

 

If you turned the Empire State Building on its head and drilled it into the ground, you’d be about as deep into the Earth as the 33 miners trapped in a void in Chile since Aug. 5. What is happening down there? What will happen in a month when the men are rescued, as it seems likely they will be?

My Time colleague Jeff Kluger has a fascinating story about this in the Sept 20 issue. He writes about the importance of groups and leaders in these kinds of disasters—and about the civilizing influence of small tokens of normalcy.

“One of the first thing the men requested when a communication link was established was toothbrushes, and they’ve since been sent clean clothes and razors….Tidiness translates into discipline, and that can be lifesaving. ‘I talked to leaders in Vietnam who would take men into the jungle for 40 days at a time,’ says [West Point psychologist Col. Tom] Kolditz. ‘Every day the men would have to wash off their face paint and shave. That creates civility, and civility prevents conflict and even atrocities.’”

To learn more about how groups have functioned in past mining disasters, check out this detailed 2000 study (warning: PDF) on human behavior in underground fires. As I discuss in The Unthinkable, men in mining disasters (just like all humans in all disasters) tend to form groups and experience a profound desire to stay with the group at almost any cost. As the report details, this phenomenon may be even more powerful in mines, where hierarchy and rules are deeply embedded in the normal workplace culture.

These kinds of prolonged disasters have predictable phases. The first is the initial period of fear and uncertainty, followed by a kind of euphoria when it becomes clear that death has been averted. Now the miners are enduring what may be, in some ways, the most grueling phase. They have clean clothes and food, but the euphoria is long gone. The miners’ requests for wine and cigarettes have been denied, much to their annoyance. Recently, one of the miners returned a shipment of canned fruit in protest. Girlfriends of some of the married miners have allegedly begun showing up at the site, requesting financial compensation, which one can only presume makes for an intense conversation during the one-minute video conferences the miners get to have with their families.

If and when the miners are successfully rescued, the next phase will be another round of euphoria—followed, as the Washington Post foreshadows today, by a disorienting and surreal media circus:

“A half-dozen documentaries are in production - including the Discovery Channel’s look at the mechanics of the rescue and a planned HBO program. Tabloids are reaching out to families, offering thousands of dollars for the first interview, and hotels in the usually sleepy mining town of Copiapo are full….A ‘media platform’ half the size of a football field has been built at the scene to accommodate the estimated 500 to 1,000 reporters expected to flood the usually abandoned corner of the Atacama Desert.”

Thankfully, psychologists are working to prepare the men for this period, conveying lessons in how to talk to reporters and how to manage money. If history is any guide, the miners will do better if they try to maintain cohesion as a group—and resist the media’s powerful urge to personalize and elevate individual members and their stories. This will be hard to do, but as the 2000 report concluded, it is the way groups like this function best—above and below ground:

“...[I]n this environment, as in others where group survival is problematic, there is little tolerance for personal aggrandizement. Rather, a lot of concern is focused on the ideals of shared expectations and coordination of efforts.”