The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way

For many years, journalist Amanda Ripley avoided working on education stories because they seemed to lack evidence, clear points, and the excitement she craved in her research. This was the case until the late 2000s, when she covered a story about the controversial teacher and education reformer Michelle Rhee, who was changing the face of education in Washington, DC. Rhee’s sweeping performance-driven approach—firing hundreds of underperforming teachers and basing teacher compensation on their students’ success rates—compelled Ripley to find out more about the US education system compared to other countries. The results that she found were startling, as it seemed apparent that the United States was stagnating in its test scores while countries like Finland and Canada were rapidly improving. At the same time, Norway, which is a wealthy country, saw rapidly declining scores, indicating that child poverty alone could not explain the root cause of these differences.

Ripley found that studies often focused primarily on poverty as a factor in poor student performance, or on the cultural emphasis on education, but none of this accounted for the full scope of the trends that she observed. Critical thinking was strongly emphasized in countries with escalating scores, which Ripley suspected to be a major factor.