Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

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.

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.