Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I’ll be in Vegas this week giving a talk to the International Association of Emergency Managers. Incredibly, I’ve never been to Vegas before. I know, I know. I’m an embarrassment to my country. So it’s time, and I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends and sources. Plus, what better place to talk about risk, denial and panic?

Here’s a little screed I wrote about testing in Finland and other countries for NBC’s Education Nation blog, the Learning Curve. As Congress debates a rework of No Child Left Behind and our own culture of testing, it’s worth considering what really matters.

Before Jesus Christ was born, human beings were taking tests. Civil service exams date back to China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD.) Hiring test-prep tutors - and cheating - go back about as far, by the way.

U.S. students now take more standardized tests than ever. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, our kids get tested in grades three through eight, and at least once between tenth and twelfth grade.

Have we lost our minds? Many teachers and critics of school reform insist that we have, citing other, higher-performing nations as evidence of our relative insanity…

First of all, let’s be clear: Finland does have standardized testing. They have had it for at least 159 years. They have less of it, for sure. (Which is not to suggest that they have less testing overall, but more on that later.) In fact, in every high-performing nation, tests are embedded in the wiring of schools - particularly in high schools. In the developed world, 76 percent of students attend high schools that use standardized tests, according to the OECD.

Read more here.

The following is a dispatch written by guest blogger Marie Lawrence, a researcher at the New America Foundation. As a recent college graduate watching the Wall Street protests, she saw a connection that I had not considered. Here is her take:

A few days before my 6th-grade graduation in Richardson, Texas, my teacher asked us to write poems about the jobs we hoped to have in 10 years. In clumsy rhyme and loopy cursive, we proclaimed our intentions to become singers, pilots, doctors, race car drivers and pastry chefs. With the audacity of youth, I predicted my own success as an author, lawyer or architect. (I was keeping my options open.)

Mrs. Babb affixed a gold star to each page and lovingly pinned them to the bulletin board, silently affirming that yes, these jobs are waiting for you if you work hard. Not a single child prophesied his future as a barista, a telemarketer or a perpetual job-seeker.
Since then, I have graduated from college and been fortunate to find a job that allows me to use my brain and pay the bills. But some of my highest-achieving friends are still grasping for the very bottom rung of the career ladder.

We know that the Occupy Wall Street protest is partly a response to corporate greed, but I suspect it also reflects the disconnect between our aspirations and our reality. It feels like the engines of social mobility (namely education) are failing us. After talking with the protesters in Zuccotti Park, the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri described the sentiment this way:

“Growing up, we were told: You are special. You are brilliant. Go to school, get a degree, pursue what you love. Four years later, we are mired in debt. Jobless, with no prospects. This is not what it said on the motivational poster.”

It’s as if we are catching up to the data, which has for years shown a mismatch between our academic performance and our occupational aspirations. In its 2007 report Child Poverty in Perspective, UNICEF evaluated countries’ performance along 40 indicators of child well-being, six of which measured educational well-being. Among 25 “economically advanced” nations, the U.S. ranked 21st in educational achievement of 15 year-olds in reading, math and science. The U.S. also had higher drop-out rates than similarly prosperous countries. Of the 23 countries ranked, the United States ranked 21st in “percentage of 15-19 year-olds in full-time or part-time education.” In fact, the United States ranked second-to-last (20th of 21 countries) in child well-being overall.

But at the same time, U.S. kids trounced all others when it came to optimism about their careers. Just 14% of 15 year-olds surveyed said they expected to go into low-skilled occupations—the lowest rate in the world. Although many could not compete with average students elsewhere in core academic subjects, very few believed they would pay a price for this mediocrity. (By contrast, over half of Japanese 15-year-olds expected to be doing low-skilled work—while the country ranks fourth in overall academic achievement and has a lower unemployment rate than we do.)
Can we continue to peddle the American Dream in classrooms that don’t prepare students to compete in a globalized labor force? One anonymous blogger wrote on the “We Arethe99 Percent” tumblr page:

“I have a bachelor’s degree from a top-ranked liberal arts college and a master’s from an Ivy League university. After graduation, all I could find was a year-long internship that only pays about 1/4 of my living expenses. The fellowship ends in under three months, and I still don’t know if they plan to hire me on permanently.”

Occupy Wall Street is not just about deadlock, dysfunction and disenfranchisement. It is about our nation’s willingness to over-promise and under-educate. It is about the urgent need to finally get serious about making our education system worthy of our ambition.

I got the chance to spend an evening interviewing two American entrepreneurs in Times Square recently. One was Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, and the other was Zoe Damacela, a 19-year-old who runs her own clothing company. We were the halftime show during the national business competition held by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship—an organization that goes into low-income high schools to help kids learn to start their own businesses. We watched four kids pitch their business ideas to a panel of accomplished entrepreneurs, and then, while the judges deliberated, we realized a few things:

* Entrepreneurs come out of the closet early. Both Steve and Zoe started businesses before they could be legally hired as employees. Zoe sold greeting cards as a little girl, and Steve did, too. But both had trouble getting taken seriously. We say we love innovation in this country, but we don’t always celebrate the just-this-side-of-crazy risk-taking and hard work it takes to start a business.

* Steve Jobs could have ended up in a jumpsuit instead of a black turtleneck. We talked a bit about Jobs, since he had just passed away. He knew the value of a great education—and how it can make or break a child. Here is what Jobs said in 1995:

“I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail. I’m 100% sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would have absolutely have ended up in jail. I could see those tendencies in myself to have a certain energy to do something. It could have been directed at doing something interesting that other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that maybe other people didn’t like so much.”

* The recovery of the U.S. economy and U.S. jobs will be led by entrepreneurs. We can choose to help them—by changing immigration laws to help attract and retain talented entrepreneurs from around the world, by making it easier for people to start businesses without worrying about losing their health insurance, and by helping successful companies grow more quickly. Or not.

Case and others recently met with President Obama to push him to pursue a 16-point plan for energizing entrepreneurship in America. I don’t know if this strategy is the right one—or if it has any chance of succeeding, given what has happened with Obama’s jobs bill.

But I agreed with Case when he says this:  “If we’re worried about the economy, and everybody should be, if you’re worried about employment, and everybody should be, the answer is really doubling down on entrepreneurship as a core American value….We have to. Because there really isn’t a Plan B.”

After that, the judges announced their winner: Congratulations to Hayley Hoverter, CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE from Los Angeles, CA, the 16-year-old winner of the NFTE 2011 Challenge. Hayley won $10,000 in venture money to grow her business selling dissolvable sugar packets (no paper, no nonsense) to high-end coffee shops. Watching Hayley pitch her business plan, which was meticulous and smart, I started to think there may be hope for America after all…

When I visited Korea for the book this summer, I met a teacher who makes $4 million a year; I interviewed kids who study 16 hours a day; I had long, fascinating talks with principals, politicians and teachers, all of whom patiently and generously tutored me in the ways of the Korean education system.

But the strangest moment came when I did a ride-along with the local study-crackdown squad. Check out my new Time Magazine story about Korea’s crusade to get its kids to chill out.

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul’s Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. “There was no place to hide,” Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. “I told them, ‘It’s the hagwon that’s in violation, not you. You can go home.’”

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. “We don’t leave at 10 p.m. sharp,” he explains. “We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses.” Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul’s busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit’s female member knocks on the door. “Hello? Hello!” she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, “Just a minute!” The inspectors glance at one another. “Just a minute” is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins.

You can find the rest of the story here.

One of many smash-ups left in the storm’s wake. Washington, DC, Aug. 28, 2011

I had a cart full of produce and was reaching for sunflower seeds when it happened: the rumbling at first sounded like a truck and then maybe an explosion. Then people were running for the supermarket doors and spilling into the streets. Bottles of olive oil toppled from the shelves, and the remaining shoppers stood in quiet disbelief. We were, after all, in Arlington, VA, two miles from the Pentagon, and a terrorist attack seemed more probable than a 5.8 earthquake.

But if it was an earthquake, then we had another problem: most of us had no clue what to do.

The earthquake that shook the East Coast on Tuesday left many people—officials included—baffled. What are you supposed to do in an earthquake anyway?? To the amusement of some (especially grizzled West Coast quake veterans), many of us did not exactly follow earthquake protocol.

Running into the streets of Midtown Manhattan while the shaking is still going on is not generally considered safe—although it is certainly understandable. Most New Yorkers think one thing when buildings shake—that there has been a terrorist attack, and they need to get out fast.

But now that the aftershocks have quieted and we await the arrival of a more-traditional hurricane, it’s a good opportunity to get smarter. New York City officials, to their credit, did not pretend to know everything. They set up a conference call to get advice from the California Emergency Management Agency on what to tell the public. The advice? Next time, stay inside. Drop under anything sturdy and brace yourself until the shaking stops. In other words, get away from anything that could fall you, from shelves to windows, but don’t try to run too far. In most earthquakes in the U.S., where most buildings are semi-sturdy, you are more likely to get hurt while running (and falling) during an earthquake than you are to get flattened by the building collapsing.

And once you get outside, you are not necessarily safer. If you can get out into the open, great! Go for it. But in dense cities, the danger from flying glass and other detritus can make the sidewalk more dangerous than the inside of a room.

Or, as FEMA puts it:

The greatest danger exists directly outside buildings, at exits and alongside exterior walls. Many of the 120 fatalities from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake occurred when people ran outside of buildings only to be killed by falling debris from collapsing walls. Ground movement during an earthquake is seldom the direct cause of death or injury. Most earthquake-related casualties result from collapsing walls, flying glass, and falling objects.

Seems simple enough. But unless you have experienced earthquakes before, it is going to be very hard to remember and follow this advice in real life. The brain defaults to its most worn scripts when it is frightened. So if you want to improve your performance for the next quake, the only way to do it is to practice physically ducking, covering and holding on—at least twice a year. You need the muscle memory, because that’s all you’ll be able to rely on. You won’t have time to search FEMA on Google.

Which may be a blessing, since FEMA’s What to do in an earthquake advice, while generally useful, starts off with this classically absurd line: “Stay as safe as possible during an earthquake.”

Compare that pearl of wisdom to the first line of the earthquake page on the Israeli homeland security site:

Do not regard earthquakes as an invincible force – experience accumulated throughout the world proves that appropriate preparations and correct behavior during an earthquake can and will save lives!

The difference in tone speaks volumes about our different approaches to surviving disasters.

On Tuesday, when the rumbling had stopped, my fellow shoppers stood around dumbstruck for a few minutes, unsure of whether to continue shopping. Many of us automatically went to our phones to check on loved ones. There were a lot of uncomfortable chuckles and strangely bemused employees trying to clean up broken salsa jars. Just like in all kinds of disasters, even ones with far worse consequences, most people focused on normalizing the situation—aftershocks be damned.

So now we know what does happen in top countries (including some standardized testing in Finland and some union conflict in South Korea), despite what we keep hearing.

What doesn’t happen?

One major difference, about which we hear far too little, is that kids virtually never repeat grades in Finland or South Korea. Now this is counter-intuitive in a way. Isn’t it better to repeat a grade than to promote a student who isn’t ready? Don’t kids benefit from the extra year of schooling?

Not so says a new PISA In Focus Report. High rates of grade repetition are not associated with better performance; they are associated with higher costs per student.

“PISA 2009 shows that countries with high rates of grade repetition are also those that show poorer student performance. Some 15% of of the variation in performance among OECD countries can be explained by differences in the rates of grade repetition, and students’ socio-economic background is more strongly associated with performance in these countries, regardless of the country’s wealth.”

When a country transfers a large percentage of students to another school, whether for low achievement or behavior issues, overall performance suffers again. Even though such a transfer is supposed to send a student to a school that can better deal with their individual learning needs, the PISA 2009 results point out an unfortunate irony:

“[...]transferring students tends to be associated with socio-economic segregation in school systems, where students from advantaged backgrounds end up in better-performing schools while students from disadvantaged backgrounds end up in poorer-performing schools.”

Happily, transferring, repeating or suffering are not the only options. Or they shouldn’t be. In countries with low rates of transfers, teachers have more autonomy to determine the best curriculum for different kids and better training to know how to do so effectively. In those countries, schools with the most poverty and other challenges also tend to receive the most resources.