The Best Schools In The World

We all know the indictment: American education has fallen behind the rest of the industrialized world. And we all know the reasons: everything from the collapse of the family to the prevalence of television to the abject failure of national leadership has been blamed. What we don't know is how the rest of the world is managing to do a better job of teaching its children.

For this story, NEWSWEEK interviewed dozens of American and foreign experts in international education to find the best schools in the world. We started with the goals of the Bush administration's "America 2000" reform plan. That document calls for overhauling math and science instruction--and led President Bush to make the improbable vow that our students would lead the world by the year 2000. Also on the agenda are goals that include making sure every child starts school healthy and ready to learn and improving the literacy rate. To that list, we added some other crucial subject areas: foreign languages, job training, teacher education, the arts and higher education.

There are, it turns out, pockets of excellence across the globe, happily including two notable examples in the United States. Where we found excellence, it tended to be on a national level: New Zealand in reading, the Netherlands in math and foreign languages, Japan in science, Germany in high-school education and teacher training, and Sweden in adult education. Americans have the most successful system of higher education, especially postgraduate programs; the California Institute of Technology represents the best of that tradition. In a few cases, we chose cities that are in the forefront of innovation. For preschools, we picked Reggio Emilia, in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region, as an example of a grass-roots project that has become an international role model. In the arts, we focused on Pittsburgh, which is using the ideas of Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner to foster creativity and critical thinking skills.

This is an optimistic story, for it demonstrates what nations can accomplish when they have the will. After World War II, Japan, Germany and the Netherlands rebuilt their school systems as they rebuilt their countries--often using American educational research. Today, students in those countries lead the world in advanced math, science and other technical subjects. During the same period, Americans turned into a nation of pedagogical groupies, following first one trend and then another without any sustained attempt to develop a coherent curriculum. Open classrooms were the rage in the 1960s and '70s, followed by back to basics in the '80s. The newest panacea is giving parents public money--usually in the form of vouchers-to choose their schools.

Consistency is a key to excellence overseas. Most industrialized countries have a national curriculum. Teachers get specific instructions. Our educational system has always reflected the American credo of independence. "We have so much autonomy," says University of Illinois professor Herbert Walberg, an expert on Asian schools. "Everyone does their own thing, to the point where a fifth-grade teacher can't count on a fourth-grade teacher having taught certain things."

Compared with youngsters overseas, American kids are long on leisure and short on learning. Japan's school year runs 240 days and Germany's 210. But most American kids are in class 180 days, with a long summer vacation. That's a holdover from the days when youngsters were needed to help on the farm. Dozens of American districts have begun trying to make their calendars reflect 1991 reality. In California, for example, 20 percent of the state's 5 million students are on an extended schedule, with long periods of school followed by shorter vacations.