Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

The biggest myth that Americans tell about other countries’ schools is that they are perfect. In fact, as with health care, people always complain about their systems—wherever they are. Education is complicated, important and emotional. And no one has achieved bliss. Teachers do not like change—even in South Korea. Native-born parents do not like immigrants moving into their schools—even in Finland.

Why does this matter? Because making schools better is hard—in any language. I think union leader Randi Weingarten knows this even better than I do, and she can be far more creative and collaborative than she gets credit for being. But even she routinely makes fast-and-loose international comparisons that polarize the debate without much concern for accuracy. Here’s an example from the Wall Street Journal:

“A month ago, education ministers and teachers union presidents from the 16 top-performing and improving countries—including Finland, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil and Canada—came to New York to participate in an international conference on public education sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.S. Department of Education. The education leaders of these countries presented with impressive clarity all the methods they are using to improve student learning and strengthen teacher quality….

These countries emphasize teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration. They revere and respect their teachers; they don’t demonize them. Virtually all of them are unionized. In fact, school leaders in these countries work very closely with their unions, and most said they would never introduce changes or legislation without union collaboration.”

Really? Because the South Koreans were not actually at that summit in New York.

Know why? Well, they were invited—but the invitation required that the education minister come with the teacher union leader. And Korea’s education minister and the union leader are not BFF’s right now, despite what we keep saying. So they, um, didn’t come.

Hmmm…not so blissful anymore, right? I mean, even our union leaders and our education secretary came to that summit—and they even sat next to each other. I actually saw Arne Duncan kiss Randi Weingarten on the cheek when they said goodbye! True story! The Koreans should be so lucky.

In real life, if you ask Korean teachers whether their government would ever dare to make changes without union collaboration, they might start laughing at you. In fact, the Korean government recently banned corporal punishment and began evaluating teacher and principal performance more rigorously. Many of the teachers I met last month did not like these changes at all.

Clearly, it’s much better if we can all get along. It is probably the only way to make reform work in schools. But oversimplifying the problem for short-term rhetorical gain does not seem like a path to sustainability.

On Aug. 4, I’ll be in New Orleans at the NCS4 conference—talking to about 400 men and women whose job it is to make sure tens of thousands of people can come to a game or a concert and leave in peace a few hours later. That is a complicated job. I look forward to hearing their stories.

I increasingly hear folks like Randi Weingarten and Diane Ravitch criticize America’s current experiments in education reform as “market-driven” or “corporate.” On some level, I understand what they mean. But on another level, it’s worth considering what kind of assumptions this language implies.

First of all, what makes a reform “market-driven”? Well, Weingarten and Ravitch are usually referring to the increasing use of student test-score growth to evaluate teachers; the dismissal of those teachers who are low-performing; and the opening up of more charter schools. And that’s fair on a superficial level. Education, like health care, does not lend itself to a free-market solution. And accountability and competition are indeed hallmarks of a free market.

But seriously now. Accountability and competition are more than just that. At their best, and that is a huge caveat, they are integral to how human beings function—which is why they exist at the heart of many institutions that we hold dear. Elections, for example, rely on accountability and competition. Does that make them bad? No. Does it make them vulnerable to gaming and in need of supervision? Yes.

Accountability and competition are also hallmarks of other things….like Sports, for example. Consider the evils of “corporate” high-school soccer and “market-driven” tee-ball. (In fact, it would be fun to see what would happen if you told a high-school football coach that he could not use touch downs to assess player performance—because, after all, the player cannot control the weather, the other team, the rest of his team, etc.)

More to the point, education, like health care, is not and never has been (and never will be) a free market. The use of this kind of rhetoric is calculated, but not remotely accurate.

For example, the vast majority of American teachers are not now (and never have been) subject to dismissal for a failure to improve student test scores. Even in DC, most teachers are still not evaluated based on test scores. They are evaluated by their principals and master educators. We do not consider that market-driven. (Although perhaps we should, since most private-sector employees are evaluated by their bosses as well.)

Charter schools do indeed inject more competition to the education system. But how many of our kids are actually in charter schools? About 5%, according to the Department of Education. More kids attend private schools.

So why all the anxiety about market-driven reforms? The fear is that these kinds of policies will eventually become common place. And it is true that charter schools and value-added evaluations are growing in practice every day. In 1999, only 2% of our kids attended charter schools.

But this kind of pre-emptive fear-mongering is not helping anyone. If we are to focus on what works in education—and stay very disciplined in looking for solutions—then we can’t rule out entire classes of ideas just because they have been effective in the private sector. After all, one thing this country still does better than any other is to generate productivity and innovation in large groups of people known as companies. These companies do a massive amount of research on basic human behavior: How do people work? What motivates them? How can we make employees happy? While it may feel good to reject this kind of knowledge, it is unwise.

What we need in this country is not market-based reforms or nonprofit-based reforms; what we are human-driven, evidence-based reforms.

Both sides of this debate have a tendency to latch on to policy agendas with very little regard for how real human beings actually function. And what we have found after decades of trying and failing is that no policy, no matter how well-intentioned, will work without considering the human beings who must implement it. Without measuring what actually works, what actually does not and listening to the teachers, parents, principals and most of all the students affected, we will just keep arguing in circles, with only the talking points changing.

Bloomberg’s Jane Williams interviews Marc Tucker, Linda Darling-Hammond and me about how U.S. schools compare to schools around the world. The link will be up for a little while at least right here.

Yesterday, the weather man in DC celebrated the “end” of the heat wave. It was 95 degrees at 5:00 pm, but I suppose it’s all relative.

At our house, this heat wave had us remembering the European heat wave of 2003, when we lived in France. If you’ve ever wondered: Would this heat be easier to bear if I lived in Paris? I have the answer! From the archives of Time Magazine:

Paris was not made for this kind of suffering. When it came, the heat choked this city like a wool scarf pulled tight over its pretty mouth. Starting on Aug. 4, the temperature, normally around 75 degrees F this time of year, began hitting 104. Paris, disdainful of air conditioning and never really comfortable with ice cubes, became a burned-out paradise, full of confused people roaming wide boulevards in search of air.

But that was later. This being France, everyone at first remained debonairly calm. The old men stayed at their posts in the cafes, stoically sipping espresso in the white, noon sun. Everything in me wanted to take action, hoard bottled water, build underground shelters. But only the slightest adjustments were made: wine and candles were taken outside to the Champ de Mars, and family dinners were held beneath the Eiffel Tower. Knowing how to live apparently means knowing that nothing will last and everything has happened before. ...

If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, you know what I would bring with me? Seriously, I would take all 5 volumes of the latest PISA results to a desert island and just read them. OK, so I would need food, water and an occasional cocktail. But I swear to God, every time I open up one of those reports I find something fascinating. I get distracted for an hour and then go back to what I was doing, wondering what else is in there that I don’t know about.

Consider Table IV.3.10 of Vol. IV. (I am not making this up! It’s like they actually don’t want us to read the report. We should make classified documents this hard to decipher; wikileaks would go out of business.)

Anyway, despite all the problems with testing, and I agree there are many, here is what principals in top-performing countries report about their use of standardized tests:

FINLAND: 96% of students are in schools that do standardized testing 1-5 times a year. (2% are in schools that do testing at least once per month.)

SOUTH KOREA: 97% of students are in schools that do standardized testing 1-5 times a year. (1% are in schools that do testing at least once per month.)

Here are the comparable numbers for the U.S.:

UNITED STATES: 95% of students are in schools that do standardized testing 1-5 times a year. (2% are in schools that do testing at least once per month.)

So what does this mean? That standardized tests correlate with high performance? No, they do not. It depends on the test—and a million other things. (It does mean that Diane Ravitch needs a new argument against testing.)

PISA Vol. IV also concludes that the regular use of standardized tests does correlate with equity in schools.

To be clear: Schools that use standardized tests regularly tend to have less disparity in outcomes based on income.

So in a country with devastating disparities in educational outcomes, we should probably pay attention to this paragraph before we do away with tests:

One explanation for the positive association between the prevalence of standardised tests and improved equity in school systems is that such tests provide schools with instruments to compare themselves with other schools. This, in turn, allows schools to observe the inequities among schools, which could be considered the first step towards redressing them. The results from PISA also show higher levels of socioeconomic equity in school systems that use achievement data to make decisions about the curriculum and track achievement data over time.

If you are enough of a nerd to want to join me on the desert island, Volume IV can be found here. I’ll bring the tequila.

A dispatch from my South Korean adventure ran on the Zócalo Public Square web site this week.

The other day, I sat in on a public school class at a high school just outside of Seoul. It was an English class, and the kids were doing comedy sketches as part of their midterm exams. Two by two, they pulled out sunglasses, electric guitars and assorted other props and performed skits they had written in English.

The Korean school system is not famous for fun. But in that classroom at Jeong Bal High School on that day, great fun was had. The kids blushed, laughed and cheered. I saw scorned lovers, burned-out rock stars and, perhaps inevitably, a “Who farted?” skit, which was the audience favorite despite its questionable narrative arc.

In fact, the class could have been in America, a country renowned for its creativity – except for one critical difference. After all the students sat down, still tittering about their theatrical exploits, the teacher walked to the front of the room and read their names and grades aloud. It happened so fast and with so little ado that I almost didn’t notice. The kids listened to their scores, which ranged from mediocre to perfect, and then headed off to their next class…

The rest is here.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I had the privilege of talking with three quiet revolutionaries about how to inject games into the classroom. Here is the video of that panel, featuring Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, John Hunter, creator of the World Peace Game, and Katie Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play.

And later that day, I saw the documentary film about John Hunter’s remarkable World Peace Game. I highly recommend it, if you get the chance to check it out. The story of a wise school teacher who turns a group of 9 and 10-year-olds into prime ministers, arms dealers and diplomats—and then sits in the back of the classroom while they solve all the problems of the world.