Higher Education Prices Continue to Rise; Education Programs in Other Countries Examined
ROMANS: The smartest kids in the world are not here in America. The U.S. spends more on education than almost every other developed country. What do we get for our money? U.S. high school students rank 31st in math and 23rd in science versus other developed countries. This is according to the highly regarded Pisa rankings. Our education system has barely made any progress in the last half century. Education levels can drastically change for better or worse, nations like Finland, South Korea, and Canada have made huge gains in international test scores while nations like Norway has more recently fallen. Amanda Ripley is the author of the incredible book, "The Smartest Kids in the World and How they got that Way." She's also a time contributor. Amanda, this book I think is required reading for anyone who cares about the education debate in the world, especially this country. You've been around the world. You looked at top-performing countries. You collected data on all this, which is so important, because so much what happens in education are opinions and feelings and not data. You also enlisted the help of some field agents. You got American high-schoolers studying abroad in South Korea, Finland, and Poland. They noticed a certain attitude in those schools. Listen.</s>TOM, AMERICAN STUDENT IN POLAND: On the first day of school everybody was wearing black suits, black ties, and it was very formal. You could tell people took their education a lot more seriously here.</s>KIM, AMERICAN STUDENT IN FINLAND: The students here care here. They understand it's important to perceive the reaction of what they do now will affect them. It's more real to them.</s>ROMANS: We are number 31 in math, 23rd in science. We only get 2,300 days in school to prepare our kids for a lifetime. What do we need to do differently?</s>AMANDA RIPLEY, AUTHOR, "THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD": You know, one of the most exciting things about this is that the smartest countries in the world were not always so smart, so change is possible. It sometimes feels like it's impossible, but one thing that all of these countries did was they made school harder. It sounds really simple, but in every conceivable way they made it much harder to become a teacher. They made the material more challenging, and the testing and the homework and everything was just of a more rigorous, higher quality. So it was quality over quantity.</s>ROMANS: And the information you got from these embedded students is just amazing. Another one you shadowed, a kid named Eric, he went from an affluent Minneapolis suburb to South Korea. That country spends $14 billion on afterschool tutoring. They actually have raids conducted to make sure children obey the 10:00 studying curfew because kids are so restive and so motivated. Listen.</s>ERIC, AMERICAN STUDENT IN SOUTH KOREA: I really like how Koreans teach math because it's so much more integrative than the American system. They were learning advanced concepts of calculus and they were learning algebraic concepts and geometry and trigonometry.</s>ROMANS: Interestingly, the stress eventually got to Eric and he transferred out. How do you strike that balance between what you call a hamster wheel and the moon-bound schools?</s>RIPLEY: Right now the United States is definitely in the moon-bound category in most places. So when we think our kids are under pressure in these high-stakes tests, they're not anything close to what much of Asia is dealing with. That is a pressure cooker, which is the other extreme. A much healthier model is a place like Finland where when the kids are in school, they're doing pretty high-quality, challenging work, and they've got incredibly well-educated teachers who getting into teacher training college is the same as getting into MIT in the United States. So you have that quality again over quantity.</s>ROMANS: And 10 percent of people who want to be teachers actually can be teachers. It's a very respected profession. Is that part of it, too, that you've got really dynamic teachers and not everyone can do it?</s>RIPLEY: Right, and this was something I knew would be important, but I was surprised at the ways it affects kids themselves. So obviously when you have very highly educated people becoming teachers, that is great because they know their subjects and they have a fluency for teaching. But the kids actually pick up on this, and that's what really exciting. If you send the signal to kids about how serious you are about education, when you make it that competitive to become a teacher to begin with. A recent study in this country found that 18 percent of teacher preparation programs taught all the most widely accepted practices here. Are we in this country failing to teach our teachers properly?</s>RIPLEY: This has been a longstanding challenge in this country and also many countries around the world where we give lip service to say that education is important but we're not very rigorous in the way we train teachers in most places. So most education colleges admit that almost anyone who is interested in studying education, and we end up educating twice as many teachers as we need as a result.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Why don't we care more about it? We talk about it, we care about it. There are a lot of opinions about education reform. But you say something in the book that's so interesting that wealth has replaced -- we don't need rig or in education because we have wealth. We've always been a wealthy country. And that's starting to change, and the patterns of wealth are starting to change, and it makes education that much more important.</s>RIPLEY: I think that's right. Historically, we haven't been able to produce millions of students who can think critically in math, reading, and science. We didn't need to do that. But now we're getting to a place where those skills are becoming more valuable than gold, and we really do know now that those international test scores you cited, there is nearly a one-to-one match between long term gdp growth and increases in those scores.</s>ROMANS: Really interesting book, "The Smartest Kids in the World." Amanda Ripley is the author. It's so nice to meet you and I think it's so well done. I love the kids who were your super spies in there to help you navigate through it. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you.</s>RIPLEY: Thank you.</s>ROMANS: Think sports cars are sexy? It turns out big spenders actually might be a big turnoff. That's next.