Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

When I visited Korea for the book this summer, I met a teacher who makes $4 million a year; I interviewed kids who study 16 hours a day; I had long, fascinating talks with principals, politicians and teachers, all of whom patiently and generously tutored me in the ways of the Korean education system.

But the strangest moment came when I did a ride-along with the local study-crackdown squad. Check out my new Time Magazine story about Korea’s crusade to get its kids to chill out.

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul’s Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. “There was no place to hide,” Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. “I told them, ‘It’s the hagwon that’s in violation, not you. You can go home.’”

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. “We don’t leave at 10 p.m. sharp,” he explains. “We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses.” Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul’s busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit’s female member knocks on the door. “Hello? Hello!” she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, “Just a minute!” The inspectors glance at one another. “Just a minute” is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins.

You can find the rest of the story here.

One of many smash-ups left in the storm’s wake. Washington, DC, Aug. 28, 2011

I had a cart full of produce and was reaching for sunflower seeds when it happened: the rumbling at first sounded like a truck and then maybe an explosion. Then people were running for the supermarket doors and spilling into the streets. Bottles of olive oil toppled from the shelves, and the remaining shoppers stood in quiet disbelief. We were, after all, in Arlington, VA, two miles from the Pentagon, and a terrorist attack seemed more probable than a 5.8 earthquake.

But if it was an earthquake, then we had another problem: most of us had no clue what to do.

The earthquake that shook the East Coast on Tuesday left many people—officials included—baffled. What are you supposed to do in an earthquake anyway?? To the amusement of some (especially grizzled West Coast quake veterans), many of us did not exactly follow earthquake protocol.

Running into the streets of Midtown Manhattan while the shaking is still going on is not generally considered safe—although it is certainly understandable. Most New Yorkers think one thing when buildings shake—that there has been a terrorist attack, and they need to get out fast.

But now that the aftershocks have quieted and we await the arrival of a more-traditional hurricane, it’s a good opportunity to get smarter. New York City officials, to their credit, did not pretend to know everything. They set up a conference call to get advice from the California Emergency Management Agency on what to tell the public. The advice? Next time, stay inside. Drop under anything sturdy and brace yourself until the shaking stops. In other words, get away from anything that could fall you, from shelves to windows, but don’t try to run too far. In most earthquakes in the U.S., where most buildings are semi-sturdy, you are more likely to get hurt while running (and falling) during an earthquake than you are to get flattened by the building collapsing.

And once you get outside, you are not necessarily safer. If you can get out into the open, great! Go for it. But in dense cities, the danger from flying glass and other detritus can make the sidewalk more dangerous than the inside of a room.

Or, as FEMA puts it:

The greatest danger exists directly outside buildings, at exits and alongside exterior walls. Many of the 120 fatalities from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake occurred when people ran outside of buildings only to be killed by falling debris from collapsing walls. Ground movement during an earthquake is seldom the direct cause of death or injury. Most earthquake-related casualties result from collapsing walls, flying glass, and falling objects.

Seems simple enough. But unless you have experienced earthquakes before, it is going to be very hard to remember and follow this advice in real life. The brain defaults to its most worn scripts when it is frightened. So if you want to improve your performance for the next quake, the only way to do it is to practice physically ducking, covering and holding on—at least twice a year. You need the muscle memory, because that’s all you’ll be able to rely on. You won’t have time to search FEMA on Google.

Which may be a blessing, since FEMA’s What to do in an earthquake advice, while generally useful, starts off with this classically absurd line: “Stay as safe as possible during an earthquake.”

Compare that pearl of wisdom to the first line of the earthquake page on the Israeli homeland security site:

Do not regard earthquakes as an invincible force – experience accumulated throughout the world proves that appropriate preparations and correct behavior during an earthquake can and will save lives!

The difference in tone speaks volumes about our different approaches to surviving disasters.

On Tuesday, when the rumbling had stopped, my fellow shoppers stood around dumbstruck for a few minutes, unsure of whether to continue shopping. Many of us automatically went to our phones to check on loved ones. There were a lot of uncomfortable chuckles and strangely bemused employees trying to clean up broken salsa jars. Just like in all kinds of disasters, even ones with far worse consequences, most people focused on normalizing the situation—aftershocks be damned.

So now we know what does happen in top countries (including some standardized testing in Finland and some union conflict in South Korea), despite what we keep hearing.

What doesn’t happen?

One major difference, about which we hear far too little, is that kids virtually never repeat grades in Finland or South Korea. Now this is counter-intuitive in a way. Isn’t it better to repeat a grade than to promote a student who isn’t ready? Don’t kids benefit from the extra year of schooling?

Not so says a new PISA In Focus Report. High rates of grade repetition are not associated with better performance; they are associated with higher costs per student.

“PISA 2009 shows that countries with high rates of grade repetition are also those that show poorer student performance. Some 15% of of the variation in performance among OECD countries can be explained by differences in the rates of grade repetition, and students’ socio-economic background is more strongly associated with performance in these countries, regardless of the country’s wealth.”

When a country transfers a large percentage of students to another school, whether for low achievement or behavior issues, overall performance suffers again. Even though such a transfer is supposed to send a student to a school that can better deal with their individual learning needs, the PISA 2009 results point out an unfortunate irony:

“[...]transferring students tends to be associated with socio-economic segregation in school systems, where students from advantaged backgrounds end up in better-performing schools while students from disadvantaged backgrounds end up in poorer-performing schools.”

Happily, transferring, repeating or suffering are not the only options. Or they shouldn’t be. In countries with low rates of transfers, teachers have more autonomy to determine the best curriculum for different kids and better training to know how to do so effectively. In those countries, schools with the most poverty and other challenges also tend to receive the most resources.

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.