Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Finland’s Core Math Curriculum for 1st & 2nd graders:

“Pupils…will derive satisfaction and pleasure from understanding and solving problems.”

“Pupils will…learn to justify their solutions and conclusions by means of pictures and concrete models and tools, in writing and orally; and to find similarities, differences, regularities and cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena…”

Enough said.

International education guru Andreas Schleicher has profound affection for data, as I’ve written before. This affection has fueled his quest to find and learn from the world’s top-performing education systems, helping to develop the OECD’s PISA test of 15-year-olds and share the findings far and wide. But his dedication to data can sometimes make it hard for regular humans to understand what he is saying.

Happily, in a TED talk (filmed this summer but posted online this month), Schleicher has distilled his thoughts into points that almost everyone can follow. You still can’t really see the data on his slides, but never mind that. His words get the job done. The data, I think, is really for him, like a security blanket woven by PowerPoint.

If you have 19 minutes for a coffee break, I’d suggest checking it out. If you don’t, here are a few highlights:

On Spending:

“Spending per student explains less than 20% of the performance variation between countries.”

On Cultural Capital:

“I know you won’t believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those places exist.”

On Mindset:

“[P]lacing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is to believe that all children are capable of success.”

Jennifer Senior has an entertaining (and deliciously illustrated) piece in New York magazine about the toxic effects of high school. She makes a great point about the tendency of “experts” to focus on childhood (which is critical for academic learning)—and their relative silence about the importance high school, which shapes people’s personalities and neuroses in all kinds of horrible ways.

My one question is: Couldn’t high school be less toxic? Senior doesn’t get into this, suggesting that the problem is endemic to grouping large numbers of strangers together in one building. I don’t know if I buy that; I think there are probably huge degrees of toxicity, just as their are in different families or offices.

I would love to know what makes one high school more sadistic than another…

For the record, Time Magazine printed a correction last week with regards to a graphic that accompanied my story about gunfights.

I had nothing to do with this graphic. It was compiled by Time’s graphics folks.

For what it’s worth: I agree it was a foolish mistake. I am glad Time has acknowledged the error.

The correction appears to be behind a paywall, so I’ll reprint it here: “In a graphic, we listed the price of a 600-round magazine but mischaracterized its use. That magazine is for an airsoft pellet gun, not an actual firearm.”

Embarrassing. Wish I had noticed it. Please stop the hating.

This week, I’ll be moderating a panel in San Francisco on global education and technology. About 61 million elementary-age kids are not enrolled in school at all; another 250 million are not able to read, write or count, even though they’ve been in school for at least four years.

Can technology (finally) disrupt this narrative? I am skeptical but still curious…