Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

In today’s New York Times, Diane Ravitch responds to David Brooks and other critics by hoisting well-worn foreign flags.

“No high-performing nation tests its students every year or uses student test scores to evaluate teacher quality.”

This is a point Ravitch makes again and again. I usually just glide right by it, since it comes wedged between so many other questionable claims and also some valid points. But since I just got back from visiting these high-performing nations, I must note that Ravitch’s version of reality does not match what I saw.

Everywhere I went, testing was absolutely embedded in the system. It took different forms, and in some places it was done more intelligently and more subtly than we do it, but it was always there. In South Korea, kids are tested in elementary, middle and high school. How do I know? Teachers, principals, students and the Education Minister told me so. It was not a secret.

Just to be clear: Korean kids, who score at the top of the world in international tests, take standardized tests administered by the Korean government to measure what students know—and identify which students and schools need more help. Yes, they do!

And guess what? The results of these tests are used to evaluate principal and school quality. Yes, they are!

What about teachers? Teachers are evaluated, too, using criteria that do not currently include test data—but do include surveys of students, parents and other teachers about the effectiveness of the teacher. (And by the way, everywhere I went, I could find teachers and principal who complained about these evaluations, calling them unfair, just like teachers do here. It’s a small world after all.)

Now bear with me for a second: Ravitch is careful to use the caveat “every year.” And it’s true that Korean kids do not take standardized tests every year. Neither do American kids! Under federal law, our kids must be tested in grades 3-8 and at least once between 10th and 12th grade. That’s seven years out of 13. Is that too much? Probably. Should our tests be smarter? Definitely.

But to imply that tests are irrelevant in high-performing countries is misleading.

Even in Finland, which has the best schools in the world by multiple measures, tests are part of life. Are they annual, standardized tests, the results of which are made public? No, they are not, and teachers in Finland thank God for that. But make no mistake: the Finnish national government routinely and systematically tests samples of students around Finland to make sure that schools are meeting high standards.

And Finnish teachers told me that of course they test their students regularly—and they compare their students’ results with the results of their colleague’s students to see what they need to work on. Of course they do. Why wouldn’t they? You don’t get to be high-performing without actually performing.

In reality, Korean high-schoolers—and Finnish high schoolers—obsess over one test in particular far more than most American kids ever will. In both countries, kids graduating from upper secondary schools must take an all-important, standardized, end-of-the-year test before they graduate. So tests are not only present; they are truly high-stakes in a way that they are not in most U.S. schools (where most tests are only high-stakes for the people who work there.)

I believe in learning from high-performing nations. That’s why I am writing a book about it. In fact, I am convinced that these comparisons are a matter of economic and even moral urgency. And that’s why we have to do this work with great care and humility—as if we want our schools to be better more than we want to be right.

Meet the German scientist who is shaping education reform from West Virginia to Tokyo. My profile of Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s education guru, is in the new Atlantic.

As always, there is one missing link—one point that I failed to work into the story. So that’s what a blog is for! The story never ends. So the missing point is this: Schleicher’s conclusions about what makes a great school system do not fall neatly into either the reform or the teachers’ union camp. He is skeptical of performance pay for teachers, for example, but he is also insistent that poverty and immigration are not insurmountable barriers to high-level learning—and he is convinced that great systems must find, train and support excellent teachers and principals.

This complexity of his has three important implications, I think. First, it makes Schleicher infinitely more powerful. Both sides can—and do—claim him as their own, so he has become very hard to dismiss (unlike, say, Michelle Rhee, Diane Ravitch, Randi Weingarten or almost any other demagogue you can think of in America’s polarized education debate.)

Secondly, it means Schleicher is probably right. The truth is usually complex.

But thirdly, and paradoxically, this nuance makes his mission much harder. At the moment, education policy makers can pick and choose from Schleicher’s recommendations like cruise ship passengers at a midnight buffet. Don’t want waffles? They don’t fit your political or emotional needs? Then skip it! Bring on the bacon! I have yet to find a state that is intentionally benchmarking itself to international standards in all the ways that Schleicher suggests. And yet it is the interaction of these magical ingredients that matters most—not the existence of a few best practices in isolation.

So there’s the challenge. If you think you know of a state or a district that is really, truly trying to holistically follow the world’s lead, please let me know. I am on the hunt.

Some reflections on Finland: People put the lid down on the toilet in public restrooms. (Not just the seat; the lid!) There are a lot of statues of women (fully clothed). When the Finns win the World Ice Hockey Championship, it’s not a small deal. And finally, the schools are not perfect—which makes them more interesting than I’d thought.

I interviewed principals, teachers, students and researchers in five cities. I had some beers with American teachers who have spent the past four months obsessing over what the Finns are doing that we are not. I ate frozen cranberries covered in hot caramel sauce. I flashed across the fir-lined countryside in a train full of quiet Finns.

My favorite part of the trip was visiting with Kim, the American girl who chose to spend this school year in Pietarsaari, Finland, leaving Sallisaw, Oklahoma, far behind. Now I have a notebook full of treasures ready to be sorted and shined for the book. Many, many thanks to Kim, her host families, AFS and her school for so graciously putting up with me.

There was a time when a reporter on the road just needed a pad, pen and a corporate credit card. But today, as I head to the airport to go to Finland, I feel more like a secret agent. I have a magic pen that records what you are saying (for real!), a tricked-out camera that also captures hi-def video, a shotgun microphone for said camera, a teeny tiny tripod, a webcam, and 57 chargers, USB cables and assorted other crap to go along with all of them. Oh, and no corporate credit card at all whatsoever. Times have changed.

Anyway, despite all this baggage, I am excited. After a year of research, interviews and reckless speculation, I am headed off to investigate how other countries built smarter, cheaper, fairer public schools—all while spending far less money than we do per student. I’ll visit 5 cities in Finland and then 2 cities in Poland. I’ll meet up with the American kids and teachers I’ve been relying on for on-the-ground intel and finally see what they are talking about up close.

Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard Commander and one of the country’s leading thinkers on resilience and counterterrorism, has a scathing Foreign Affairs piece out this week about the state of our so-called Homeland Security. Putting aside the tedious debates over cargo screening and liquids in your carry-on, the fundamental flaw in our defenses is the failure to treat regular Americans like grown-ups and enlist them intelligently in this never-ending and complex fight. Ten years after 9/11, American officials continue to overestimate their own ability to prevent terrorism and underestimate the competence of the public. It is a scheme designed to fail, with certainty.

Flynn’s piece is behind a paywall, and it’s worth the price of admission. A few snippets to get you started:

For much of its history, the United States drew on the strength of its citizens in times of crisis, with volunteers joining fire brigades and civilians enlisting or being drafted to fight the nation’s wars. But during the Cold War, keeping the threat of a nuclear holocaust at bay required career military and intelligence professionals operating within a large, complex, and highly secretive national security establishment....By the time the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, two generations of Americans had grown accustomed to sitting on the
sidelines and the national security community had become used to operating in a world of its own.

To an extraordinary extent, this same self-contained Cold War–era national security apparatus is what Washington is using today to confront the far different challenge presented by terrorism….This is the wrong approach to protecting the homeland. Even with the help of their state and local counterparts, these federal agencies cannot detect and intercept every act of terrorism….A sidewalk T-shirt vendor, not a police patrol officer, sounded the alarm about Faisal Shahzad’s SUV in his May 2010 car-bombing attempt on New York’s Times Square. Courageous passengers and flight-crew members, not a federal air marshal, helped disrupt the suicide-bombing attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aboard Northwest Airlines Flight
253 on Christmas Day 2009....

To improve the nation’s capacity to manage dangers, federal agencies must avoid alienating the very people they are responsible for protecting. Regrettably,Washington’s growing homeland security bureaucracy has largely overlooked the need to garner support from the public. New security measures are advanced without spelling out the vulnerability that they are designed to address. When the TSA introduced full-body x-ray scanners and enhanced pat-downs at U.S. airports last fall, it prioritized public compliance over public acceptance.

Please forgive the plug, but I have to shout from the mountain tops that Ben Ripley, who is a very talented screenwriter in addition to being an excellent brother, has a movie opening this week.

The Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan and Vera Farmiga, opens April 1. Time travel, disasters, romance…and Jake Gyllenhaal, let me just say again.

I am sure it is true that the Japanese are resilient, trained as they have been by a long history of disasters. But am I the only one who finds the reporting on their “stoicism” to be a bit much? Today’s Sidney Morning Herald is just one example of hundreds…

“The stranded hotel guests, consisting mainly of the elderly, nod their heads respectfully, ask important questions and receive detailed and respectful answers. Everywhere, Japan’s stoic resilience and its tightly woven community fabric are on display. Outside the hotel front door is a line of locals waiting patiently, as perhaps only Japanese people can.”

There’s something a touch patronizing in all of this, and I suspect it says more about the rest of us than it does about the Japanese. Namely, that we expect panic and hysteria and are awed when we don’t see it. Indeed, we are awed again and again, year after year, in very different places.

A short (and far from comprehensive) history of stoicism in disasters…

“Stoicism Hides Suffering”—Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1986, referring to Chilean earthquake, which left nearly 1 million people homeless.

“[T]he Cameroonians appeared amazingly stoic in the face of a natural calamity that claimed at least 1,500 lives and virtually wiped out three villages…. As elsewhere in the Third World, black Africans live close to death, and that shapes their attitudes toward it.”—Los Angeles Times, Aug. 30, 1986, referring to a toxic gas disaster in Cameroon

“Her demeanor was as stoic as that of many other flood-hardened residents here. There was no panic and no hysteria…. Mayor Bartel invoked the spirit of the town’s 19th-century founders.”—New York Times, July 10, 1993, referring to a victim of a flood in Hermann, Missouri

“The Chinese can be very stoic in the face of disaster.”—The Irish Times, Jan. 12, 1998, after an earthquake

Why do we expect people to behave otherwise? When humans endure trauma and stress, they are usually quiet, passive and obedient. That’s not because they are superhuman. That’s because in most circumstances, it is in their survival interest to gather information and help each other.

It reminds me of the way some reporters tend to marvel at how “articulate” an African-American official can be, or how “normal” a gay couple turns out to be. We reveal ourselves with words like these.

Clearly, culture matters. And the Japanese are famously resilient in many ways. Their building codes, preparedness drills and support networks have been—and should continue to be—models for the rest of us. But let’s start expecting decency from the public—and planning for it well before we need it most.

Tsunami is a Japanese word, and we are reminded why today. Our thoughts go to the victims and survivors in Japan as we await more information on the 8.9-magnitude quake that rocked the country earlier today.

One story to watch: Initial reports suggest that Japan’s early warning system for earthquakes (Kinkyu Jishin Sokuho in Japanese) did indeed work in some locations. That system, launched in 2007, is the only one of its kind. It only gives people a few seconds warning at the most (via TV and cell-phone alerts), but it is also designed to automatically send warnings to train operators, elevators, construction sites and gas and power facilities. The system is triggered by the fast-moving but less-powerful waves that tend to manifest themselves seconds before the more powerful tremors.

But the more important technology will undoubtedly prove to be the old-fashioned kind. Strict enforcement of rigorous building codes remains the only way to prevent mass casualties in any significant earthquake. From ABC News today:

Last year’s earthquake in Haiti had a magnitude of 7.0—about a hundredth as violent as the 8.9 earthquake in Japan—but the number of deaths was much higher. The Haitian government eventually reported a death toll of more than 200,000 people. Scientists said Haiti was as much a victim of poverty as geology; it could not afford to build better housing.