The Smartest Kids in the World Read Online Free

superpowers, parents were not necessarily more involved in their children’s education, just differently involved. And, most encouragingly, the smart kids had not always been so smart.
    Historical test results showed that Finnish kids were not born smart; they had gotten that way fairly recently. Change, it turned out, could come within a single generation.
    As new rounds of data spooled out of the OECD, Schleicher became a celebrity wonk. He testified before Congress and advised prime ministers. “Nobody understands the global issues better than he does,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.“And he tells me the truth—what I need to hear, not what I want to hear.” U.K. Education Secretary Michael Gove called him“the most important man in English education,” never mind that Schleicher was German and lived in France.
    On every continent,PISA attracted critics. Some said that the test was culturally biased, or that too much was lost in translation. Others said the U.S. sample size of 5,233 students in 165 schools was too small or skewed in one direction or another. Many said that Schleicher and his colleagues should just collect test scores and stop speculating about what might be leading to high or low scores.
    For the most part, Schleicher deflected his critics. PISA was not perfect, he conceded, but it was better than any other option, and it got better each year. Like a Bible salesman, he carried his PowerPoint slides from country to country, mesmerizing audiences with animated scatter plots of PISA scores over time and across oceans. His last slide read, in a continuously scrolling ticker, “Without data, you are just another person with an opinion . . . Without data, you are just another person with an opinion . . .”
test pilot
    I met Schleicher for the first time in April 2010 in Washington, D.C., just after the cherry trees had blossomed on the National Mall. We spoke in the lobby of an office building next to the U.S. Capitol, during his only break in a whirlwind day of meetings. By then, Schleicher had white hair and a brown Alex Trebek mustache. He was pleasant but focused, and we got right down to business.
    I told him I was impressed by PISA, but skeptical. By the time of my quest, the United States had wasted more time and treasure on testing than any other country. We had huge data sets from which we had learned precious little. Was PISA really different from the bubble tests our kids had to zombie walk through each spring?
    Without bothering to sit down, he took each of my questions in turn, quietly rattling off statistics and caveats, like C-3PO with a slight German accent.
    “PISA is not a traditional school test,” he said. “It’s actually challenging, because you have to think.”
    No test can measure everything, I countered.
    Schleicher nodded. “PISA is not measuring every success that counts for your life. I think that’s true.”
    I felt vindicated. Even Schleicher had admitted that data had its limitations. But he went on, and I realized I’d misunderstood.
    “I do think PISA needs to evolve and capture a broader rangeof metrics. There is a lot of work going on to assess collaborative problem-solving skills, for example. We are working on that.”
    I got the sense that there was almost nothing, in his mind, that PISA could not measure. If not now, then, one day. Already, he insisted, PISA was radically different from any other test I’d ever taken.
    We shook hands, and he headed back inside for his next meeting. As I left, I thought about what he had said. Schleicher, of all people, was a man to be taken literally. If PISA was really different from any test I’d ever taken, there was only one way to know if he was right.
my PISA score
    I got there early, probably the only person in history excited to take a standardized test. The researchers who administered PISA in the United States had an office on K Street in downtown D.C., near the White House, wedged between