Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

The new book Bringing Up Bebe has got affluent American parents all in a tizzy—again. Why aren’t our kids parfait, aussi?

Good question. I lived in France for a while, and anecdotally speaking, it did seem like French parents were less likely to indulge their children in some ways. My French friends put their children to bed at 7:30 pm and had a civilized dinner with their husbands. (Except for the ones who didn’t, of course.)

I suspect that France is a more pleasant place to parent in 1,000 different ways, as my New America colleague Brigid Schulte explained in the Washington Post recently, notably the subsidized childcare, generous parental leave policies and universal health care.

But putting that aside, I have another question: Are French kids smart? Does all that chic parenting translate into kids who know how to think critically and solve real problems?

The evidence suggests…. Non, pas exactement.

Here is how French 15-year-olds perform on the PISA, which is an international test of critical thinking skills, administered to half a million kids every 3 years by the OECD:

Reading: France ranked 15th in reading in 2009, which is a teeny bit worse than our own kids performed (we ranked 12th), but about average for the developed world.

Science: France ranked 20th in Science in 2009, which is again just slightly worse than our own kids (17th)—and about average for the develop world.

Math: France ranked 18th in Math in 2009, about average for the developed world. That’s the only subject in which their teenagers outperformed our teenagers on the PISA. American kids came in 26th, below average for the developed world.

In other words, French kids do OK on international tests of critical thinking in math, reading and science. But given their low rates of child poverty, they ain’t breaking any records.

What about privileged French kids? The ones Bringing Up Bebe is, truth be told, most focused on?

As with our own rich kids, the picture is mixed. The top-quartile of French kids—the ones with the most material advantages based on PISA’s index of economic, social and cultural status—outperform our own rich kids in science and math (even though they are not as rich as our rich kids).

Still, our rich kids do a bit better than their rich kids in reading. (This is a pattern which holds up around the world. American kids do better in reading than math or science at every income level. Too bad future income is predicted by math skills…)

This suggests that all of our schools, even our rich, suburban schools, are underperforming in math and science. Or else our parents are underperforming math and science… I’d argue that both are true.

Anyway, the point is, France is not doing wildly better than we are—for its rich or poor kids—when it comes to learning.

Low-income American kids AND French kids perform significantly worse than their high-income peers, which is less true in countries like Finland, Korea and Canada. Both the US and France have a problem with disparities in education outcomes, even though France has far less child poverty and far more generous social welfare benefits. Another reminder that a great education system requires more than anti-poverty programs. Beaucoup more.

No matter how many people I interview, no matter how many rewrites I do, I just can’t do what TV can do. There is something about good TV that captures the brain’s attention and doesn’t let it go. This month, a new PBS documentary based on The Unthinkable does what I couldn’t do.

Surviving Disaster deconstructs how the brain responds to life-or-death events—so that we can all learn to do better. The documentary includes many characters from my book, in addition to other survivors of all kinds of trauma, from tsunami to car crashes.

One young survivor describes in unflinching detail exactly what it felt like to get out of a house fire as a little girl in Texas. It is the kind of story you will never forget once you see it, and it is told with a purpose—to help the rest of us become smarter and stronger in our own homes and communities. I am so grateful to the folks at Santa Fe Productions for finding these survivors and sharing their stories.

PBS affiliates are showing Surviving Disaster at different times, depending on where you live. A handful of the air dates/locations are listed below, and you can find other towns here.

AIR DATES: Surviving Disaster

Chicago—Sunday 3/11/12—9:30 AM (WYINDT)

Cincinnati—Tuesday 3/6/12—9:30 PM (WPTODT)

Philadelphia—Sunday 3/11/12—9:00 AM (WHYYDT)

Pittsburgh—Thursday 3/8/12—9:00 PM (WQEDDT4)

San Francisco—Sunday 3/11/12—3:30 PM (KRCBDT)

*Please check local listings or Surviving Disaster for more locations and times.

What would a playground look like if it were designed the way kids actually play?

I’m collecting a list of the coolest playgrounds in the world. Send me one if you see one!

Here’s a good one from the U.S.A.

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.