Wonderful blurbs for THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD by Amanda Ripley
“Amanda Ripley observes with rare objectivity and depth. She finds a real and complex world ‘over there’—schools with flaws of their own but also real and tangible lessons about how to do better by our kids.The Smartest Kids in the Worldgave me more insights, as a parent and as an educator, than just about anything else I’ve read in a while.”
—Doug Lemov, author ofTeach Like a Champion
“Such an important book! Amanda Ripley lights the path to engaging our next generation to meet a different bar. She makes an enormous contribution to the national and global discussion about what must be done to give all our children the education they need to invent the future.”
—Wendy Kopp, founder and chair, Teach For America, and CEO, Teach For All
The review below just went live on the Kirkus website and will be published in theJune 15th edition ofKirkus Reviews.
THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD
And How They Got that Way
Author: Amanda Ripley
Review Issue Date:June 15, 2013
Online Publish Date:May 22, 2013
Publisher:Simon & Schuster
Pages:320
Price ( Hardcover ):$28.00
Publication Date:August 13, 2013
ISBN ( Hardcover ):978-1-4516-5442-4
Category:Nonfiction
Chronicle of a journalist’s global travels to visit schools, interviewing educators and talking with students and their families in order to answer the question, “Why were some kids learning so much—and others so very little?”
Ripley (The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, 2008) examines why there is a disparity in performance on tests of mathematical and scientific competence between American students and their global counterparts, even when factors such as poverty and discrimination were taken into account. She explains that America's poor showing translates into lost jobs for Americans, who cannot compete with foreign labor even in semiskilled jobs. Many of the arguments about American education fail to address the real issues behind the competitive failure of American schools compared to Finnish and South Korean schools (where students are in the top tier on international tests), as well as Poland, where the rate of improvement is remarkable. Ripley builds her narrative around the experience of three American teenagers, each of whom spent a year abroad as exchange students—in Finland, South Korea and Poland, respectively. The author describes a political consensus in each of the three countries that nearly guarantees the creation and maintenance of a highly educated workforce, from top to bottom. The importance of education is a reflection of national consensus on the respect for teachers. A large portion of their education budgets go to teachers’ salaries, and the instructors are chosen from the top third of their graduating classes and must meet high professional standards on a par with engineers. Per capita, America spends more money on education, but the money is allocated differently—e.g., to sports teams and programs that provide students with laptops, iPads and interactive whiteboards.
A compelling, instructive account regarding education in America, where the arguments have become “so nasty, provincial, and redundant that they no longer lead anywhere worth going."