Jennifer Walsh

“Parents who view themselves as educational coaches tend to read to their children every day when they are small; when their children get older, they talk with them about their days and about the news around the world. They let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work. They teach them good habits and give them autonomy. They are teachers, too, in other words, and they believe in rigor. They want their children to fail while they are still children. They know that those lessons—about hard work, persistence, integrity, and consequences—will serve a child for decades to come.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“In Oklahoma, the CEO of the company that makes McDonald's apple pies told me that she had trouble finding enough Americans to handle modern factory jobs-during a recession. The days of rolling out dough and packing pies in a box were over. She needed people who could read, solve problems and communicate what had happened on their shift, and there weren't enough of them coming out of Oklahoma's high schools and community colleges.”
― amanda ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way