Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

It’s hard to get excited about President Obama’s push for more states to require school until age 18. I know kids’ life chances improve if they make it through high school. That’s a big deal. But don’t we have an obligation to make school better before we force kids to spend even more time there?

There isn’t much empirical evidence that raising the drop-out age actually reduces drop outs. So this feels a little retro. Kind of like No Child Left Behind: all stick, no carrot. You can hammer on kids (and teachers) all you want; but if you don’t simultaneously raise the quality of the whole system, then it won’t get you very far.

For 10 years, most American school districts kept the same inequitable funding schemes, the same lackluster principal and teaching pools, the same subpar education colleges. Then, under federal duress, they injected a bunch of lame tests into the system and pounded on schools to do better. Guess what? Most of them didn’t.

Washington, DC, requires that kids stay in school until they are 18. Let me tell you what that looks like. I have been in classes in DC schools that were fantastic, classes in which I had to consciously stop myself from joining in. Classes in which all the kids came in below grade level in the fall, and all the kids left at or above grade level come spring.

I have been in other classes—sometimes in the same schools—that would have driven me to drop out, too. I swear to God, the message in those classrooms was: Your time doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. It was like time stood still.  Nothing happened. The teacher moved at the speed of mud. When she spoke, it was to tell kids to shut their mouths.

I know kids should stay in high school. Kids know kids should stay in high school. The cash price for dropping out has never been higher. You can’t even join the military if you drop out of high school. The disincentives are all in place. What’s missing are the incentives.

I want kids to stay in high school. But more than that, I want kids to want to stay.

It’s important to listen to the reasons kids drop out, as summarized in this 2009 Rennie Center policy brief:

Both national and local research studies have found that dropping out of high school is a gradual process of disengagement. Loss of interest in school, poor relationships with teachers and impersonal learning environments are among the factors that lead to the decision to drop out.

Spend the money on empirically proven methods to engage human beings. Then see if your dropout rate goes down—all by itself.

We won’t know for some time exactly what went wrong on the Costa Concordia off the coast of Tuscany a few days ago. But already, the survivor reports contain some clues as to what may have gone wrong with the evacuation.

From the BBC:

“We told the guests everything was OK and under control and we tried to stop them panicking,” cabin steward Deodato Ordona recalled.

It was about an hour before a general emergency was announced, he said.

Then the ship rolled again, now listing to the right, and the captain ordered the ship to be abandoned.

From the Daily Mail:

...But although it soon became clear that the problem was far worse, passengers continued to be told for a good 45 minutes that there was a simple technical problem. Even when the situation became clearer crew members delayed lowering the lifeboats even though the ship was listing badly. ‘We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side,’ said Mike van Dijk, a 54-year-old from Pretoria, South Africa. ‘We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get on to the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.’ Robert Elcombe, 50, from Colchester but who now lives in Australia, said he and his wife Tracy got into a life boat – but were ordered out again when staff said it was ‘only a generator problem’ that could be fixed.

In almost every disaster, predictable human distortions slow down the response. This is normal—which is not the same thing as inevitable.

The first predictable phase is a period of profound denial—a disbelief that the ship could really be sinking (or the plane could really be crashing or the hurricane could really be barreling towards you). The brain works according to pattern recognition, so it fits whatever is happening into scripts for what has happened before. It usually takes a surprisingly long time to accept that something terrible has happened.

The second behavioral threat is the fear of panic. People—especially people in charge—fear the crowd, sometimes more than they fear plunging into the cold sea. They do this even though most people do not panic in most disasters. They are frightened, and they try to escape death—but widespread anti-social behavior rarely happens. The bigger problem, time and again, is the fear of panic—which causes officials to withhold vital information.

Both of these tendencies can be overcome with realistic and smart training that includes the passengers and the crew. The research on this—especially from plane disasters—is very clear and reassuring. But if that kind of training doesn’t happen (and too often, it does not, for all sorts of reasons), then you can be sure that things will slip quickly from bad to tragic, as minutes are lost and people are left without information—the one thing they need more than anything else.

Just seconds after takeoff from DC’s National Airport, Air Florida Flight 90 hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge like a wrecking ball, destroying seven cars, killing four people, and tearing away a section of the bridge wall. The plane broke into a dozen pieces on impact.

The anniversary has me thinking back to the story of one person who happened by the crash site on Jan. 13, 1982. The man who jumped into the river when no one of sound mind would. From the heroism chapter of The Unthinkable:

The snow started out lovely, blurring the edges of Washington’s hard buildings and bleaching the memorials storybook white. But by midafternoon, it had turned unforgiving.

Great groaning piles of snow fell from the sky like mud. Government employees were liberated early, stacking the city’s streets with traffic. Normally, it took Roger Olian, a sheet-metal worker at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, half an hour to get home. On this day, after driving for two hours, he was only halfway there. It would have been faster to walk.

By the time he got to the Fourteenth Street Bridge, which crosses over the Potomac River from D.C. into Virginia, Olian’s old red Datsun pickup truck was protesting. It had needed a new battery for a while and now it was desperately low on gas, too. Worried the car might stall and never start again, Olian kept the radio and the windshield wipers off.

When the Boeing 737 sliced into the bridge span next to him at 4:01 P.M., Olian didn’t even see it. Encased in his snow-covered truck, he didn’t hear or feel the crash. It was only when the car in front of him stopped that Olian had any indication that something strange had happened. The driver got out and walked back to his truck. Olian rolled down his window, and the man’s shouts jangled through the snowbound quiet.

“Did you see that?”

“What’s that?”

“A plane! A plane just crashed into the river!” the man screamed.

Olian dismissed him. “I thought, ‘This guy is nuts.’ All I wanted to do was to get out of there.”

But the man kept yelling. “I think that plane might explode!” “So get in your car and go!” Olian told him, rolling up his window. The man did as he was told. But as Olian started to follow him, he noticed that the other cars were behaving oddly too. “It was as if you’d dropped food into the middle of an anthill and all of a sudden the ants started to move in weird ways. So I thought,‘Maybe that guy was right.’”

Without thinking too much about what he was doing or how he would start his truck again, Olian eased over to the shoulder and parked. If a plane had gone down without him even noticing, he thought, it must have been a small private plane. “Well, maybe I could see what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Or maybe somebody needs help, maybe I could do something—some nominal thing, and it will be interesting.”

An emergency manager I met in Las Vegas recently called my attention to a December Harvard Business Review piece that is worth a look. The article attempts to explain why the employees of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai went to such extraordinary lengths to help protect the guests during the nightmarish 3-day siege of the hotel.

Restaurant and banquet staff rushed people to safe locations such as kitchens and basements. Telephone operators stayed at their posts, alerting guests to lock doors and not step out. Kitchen staff formed human shields to protect guests during evacuation attempts. As many as 11 Taj Mumbai employees—a third of the hotel’s casualties—laid down their lives while helping between 1,200 and 1,500 guests escape.

Interestingly, the authors, Rohit Deshpandé and Anjali Raina, look to the corporate culture of the Taj hotel to explain this behavior. They interviewed the hotel staff and reviewed the company’s HR policies, and came up with a theory of heroism:

We believe that the unusual hiring, training, and incentive systems of the Taj Group—which operates 108 hotels in 12 countries—have combined to create an organizational culture in which employees are willing to do almost anything for guests. This extraordinary customer centricity helped, in a moment of crisis, to turn its employees into a band of ordinary heroes.

It is surely true that the culture of a company—or a family or a city—can encourage (or discourage) heroism. Organizations like the Coast Guard, for example, systematically empower their lowest-level members to use their discretion—and maintain a bias for action.

But in my experience, the heroism of the Taj employees is the norm, not the exception. When disasters happen, people tend to stick to whatever role they were playing before everything fell apart. They feel responsible for fulfilling their duties, even when they are earning pennies (or rupees) per hour.

On May 28, 1977, an explosive fire ripped through the Beverly Hills Supper Club near Cincinnati, killing 165 people. It was, as the Cincinnati Enquirer later described it, “a night of horror and heroism, of unspeakable carnage and unshakeable courage.” Sociologists Norris Johnson and William Feinberg later conducted an analysis of the behavior of everyone involved, and, as I describe in The Unthinkable, they found a remarkable pattern—that should sound familiar to the survivors from the Taj:

As word of the fire slowly spread, people reacted like actors in play, each according to role. Servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated, but bypassed other sections. Cooks and busboys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving. Age mattered too. The younger cocktail waitresses seemed more confused. But the banquet waitresses, who tended to be older, were calm and reassuring.

But this role-playing works both ways. Employees are more likely to become rescuers, and customers are more likely to, well, sit back and watch:

And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the room. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills.

An estimated 60 percent of the employees tried to help in some way—either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17 percent of the guests helped. But even among the guests, identity influenced behavior. The doctors who had been dining at the club acted as doctors, administering CPR and dressing wounds on the grounds of the club like battlefield medics. Nurses did the same thing. There was even one hospital administrator there who—naturally—began to organize the doctors and the nurses.

Does this mean we shouldn’t celebrate the employees of the Taj? No, by all means, we should, and I am so glad the authors interviewed the employees and collected their stories.

But if we recognize that this kind of behavior is predictable and not exceptional, then perhaps we can move the dial one notch further—beyond customer-centric HR policies. For example, how can we train employees so that their urge to help the guests will be even more productive—and less deadly? Can we train them to expect guests to become passive—and override that instinct with aggressive commands (as well-trained flight attendants have learned to do in aviation disasters)? What happens if we anticipate heroism (or at least decency), and work backwards from there?

Sometimes it feels like we will never be able to be perfect, like the Finns. Ah, the Finns! In the U.S., our descriptions of the education system are so euphoric that it can be hard to relate.

But I have to say, I didn’t feel that same level of bliss when I was in Finland. I mean, I felt like it was an inspiring place—a lot more civilized in many ways, a place we can learn from. But in real life, it seemed like it was also a complicated place inhabited by…human beings.

It’s important to keep this in mind, so that we don’t dismiss the Finns as another Nordic fantasy land that has no connection to our lives and schools.

In that spirit, here is a quick reality check from the Finland media…

Some parents in Finland choose not to send their kids to the neighborhood school because of the high level of immigrant students there. Sound familiar?

Helsinki parents at pains to avoid schools with high proportion of immigrants

Pasi and Merja live in a neighbourhood of small houses in Metsälä in the north of Helsinki. More than a dozen children who start school next autumn live in the neighbourhood of about 1,000 residents, and nearly all of them applied for admission to a school outside their neighborhood. Many of the neighbours have pulled similar stunts….Some have even acquired a second home to make sure that their children attend school somewhere other than their nearest one in Maunula.
   
...An invisible wall exists along the border of Maunula and Metsälä.
    The average income of Maunula residents is EUR 22,400 a year, while the Metsälä residents earn EUR 37,000.
    Maunula has many low-income pensioners, and half of the homes in the area are built on the partially publicly-funded Arava subsidy scheme, compared with only ten per cent in Metsälä.
    And then there is the sensitive issue: about a tenth of the residents in Maunula speak a language other than Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue.
    In Metsälä, with its 1,000 residents, just 43 speak a foreign language at home. The entire foreign language-speaking population there could nearly fit in a single city bus.
   
    ...“Undoubtedly we all want to live in a multicultural and tolerant atmosphere, but the fact is that if there are many children who do not speak Finnish, the teacher’s time is spent on them”, the mother of two says.
    She does not know any children who have actually attended school in Maunula, but she has “heard stories”.—Helsingin Sanomat 2011

Violence and substance abuse affect the lives of Finnish kids, too…

Tens of thousands of children exposed to violence or substance abuse at home
Study shows that thousands of children in need of help remain unnoticed

Thousands of children living in conditions in which they are exposed to violence and substance abuse fail to get the help that they need, says Dr. Mirjam Kalland, a family research expert at the University of Helsinki.
    A substance abuse problem of some kind affects one in six families, while violence afflicts one in five. “For instance, 20 to 30 percent of children in the Helsinki region live in fairly serious risky conditions. Only five to six percent are within the scope of child protection support measures. Quite a few of the children who would need help are never noticed”, Kalland says.—Helsingin Sanomat 2006

And Finnish teachers sometimes complain about Finnish parents…!

Nearly one in five Finnish schoolteachers and one in three principals are targeted with bullying and mental violence by students’ parents. The primary level comprehensive school headmasters, in particular, are harassed.
    This was the finding of a survey conducted by the Opettaja (Teacher) magazine.
    Teachers interviewed by the trade journal said the bullying manifests itself in various forms varying from the spreading of unfounded rumours to verbal abuse and phone calls that can last for hours.
   
Bullying parents have threatened they would contact the board of education, the provincial administrative board, or the press.
    The root of the problem is often diverging views on education and upbringing.—Helsingin Sanomat 2005

Why do I bring this up? Must I ruin everything? Really? Well, it’s a bit perverse, I guess. But I find it encouraging to remind myself that while the US has its own extremes of dysfunction, we are all human. And excellent education outcomes are possible—-even in imperfect places occupied by humans.