TIMES reporter Amanda Ripley was in the habit of sidestepping stories on education—until she saw a graph showing the United States’ educational standing compared to other nations. The United States was consistently average. By contrast, three countries—Finland, Poland, and South Korea—had come out of nowhere, and are now topping the charts. What were they doing that the United States was not? Has the United States failed to understand what does and does not make for a quality education? The Smartest Kids in the World is the story of what these countries teach us about educating effectively. Ripley’s conclusions will surprise some.

There was a grand mystery surrounding education: Why were some students learning a lot, and other students not so much? Politics, race, economics, and culture have all been invoked as explanations. But the data is in, and it shows that the divide between the learned and the not-so-learned does not fall neatly along any of the typical sociological divides.

One might suspect that money and social privilege explain the discrepancy, but here, too, the data does not back the thesis. Consider the results of PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), an exam that grade school students from most of the world’s countries now take. Even though the United States is a well-off nation and is second in the world in per capita educational spending, its students’ scores are consistently average by international standards. American students from well-to-do families and access to the best preparatory schools do not score significantly better than similarly privileged students from other countries. In fact, they did worse than twenty-seven different countries in math. In 2009, the United States ranked twenty-sixth in math, seventeenth in science, and twelfth in reading.

Long story short—the world has changed. The United States is no longer the golden standard for education, and money is clearly not the main determinant of success.

The United States has been thoroughly mediocre in education. By contrast, Poland, South Korea, and Finland were consistently topping the international charts. But which system is worth emulating? The three countries have three radically different ways of going about it.

This led to an in-depth study of the three countries’ educational systems. There were already heaps of data, but the best way to figure out what was actually happening in the classrooms was to involve students. Student exchange programs made this a real possibility. And so, three American high schoolers—a boy from Pennsylvania in Poland, an Oklahoma girl in Finland, a Minnesotan boy in South Korea—became invaluable members of the research team.

These high schoolers provided an in-depth glimpse of what student life was like—a glimpse that an adult could not easily get.

The results are not discouraging, but ultimately cause for optimism. We’ve wasted time and devoted resources to things that don’t matter, but the good news is that change is attainable. The examples of Finland, Korea, and Poland offer clarity for how this could be done. It begins with a firmer grasp of the why behind education.

The Finnish educators were just as surprised as the rest of the world by the results of the first PISA test. They had come out of nowhere to become the smartest people in the world. And that change happened extremely quickly—within a generation! 

When PISA came out in the early 2000s, it was met with skepticism and criticism. While even its creator, Andreas Schleicher, would admit that the test is not perfect, it is still the best out there for determining capacity for critical thinking and creative problem solving in reading, math, and science. For example, in the math section, students are asked questions that require not just plugging in numbers to formulas, but opinions about a problem or data presentation, with blank spaces to explain reasoning.

During the day, Korean students attend classes like students from any other country. But there’s another piece to the Korean educational experience that sets it apart: hagwons. These hagwons—more literally, “cram schools”—are private, for-profit tutoring businesses that provide supplemental education for students after the school day. They are popular means of boosting scores, getting remedial help, or learning material not covered in school curricula. 

These hagwons are an intimate part of the South Korean educational experience, and they are more intentional about connecting and staying connected with families than the schools are. They court parents and students by touting the graduation and college admissions rates of students who have studied with them. Once parents sign on, the hagwon sends frequent updates, including texts about daily attendance and several phone calls each month to update parents on their child’s progress. If the parents don’t get involved, this is considered the fault of the hagwon—not the parents. What would happen if there were this level of coordination between parents and teachers in the United States? In 2011 alone, Korean parents spent over $18 billion on hagwons or cram schools—that’s more money than the United States government ever spent on the war on drugs.

The word “tutoring” does not begin to describe the gargantuan operation that one hagwon teacher, Andrew Kim, leads in Seoul. Kim has thirty employees helping him keep things running at his business. In addition to hosting English lessons online which students can join for a fee of $3.50 per session, he has a publishing house where his 200 workbooks and textbooks are edited and printed. Success—and arguably, celebrity—of this caliber is uncommon, but the hagwon structure is about as pure a meritocracy as they come. Teachers build up a reputation through respect for students and competently conveying information; and the more successful their students are on exams, the more esteemed the teachers and desirable their classes. It’s worked out for Kim, who makes about $4 million dollars a year.

According to both Kim and Korea’s Education Minister, Finland’s education is superior to Korea’s. A school system that was average but supplemented by hours in hagwons meant a life consumed by education, a pressure-cooker education that left Korean students exhausted. No one spoke highly of the Korean system—even those on top, like Kim, who benefitted from it. At points, the government has tried to limit or even ban hagwons, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere. Students anxious for enrollment in top universities continue to go to hagwons for that edge over the veritable army of competitive peers.

The America student studying in Korea did not end up finishing his school year in a Korean high school. He was so fed up with the pace, the classmates who barely had the emotional energy to sustain a five-minute conversation, the obsession with test scores, the sleep deprivation, that he was willing to wrap up his year abroad at a vocational college where he would be learning business Chinese. His professor at the vocational college was shocked that the American had endured half a year in the Korean system.

The Finnish teacher-training program is no joke. Admission into a Finnish teacher-training college is about as impressive as getting into medical school in the United States. One Finnish teachers union advertised that their teachers were among the most educated in the nation. The same could hardly be said for Elementary Ed majors here in the United States, where the programs are not rigorous, the applicants are below-average in SAT and ACT scores, and the training they receive is usually impractical and inefficient.

For a while, Finland had its own version of No Child Left Behind and a uniform, compulsory curriculum approved by the centralized government. There were standards that teachers had to meet, and regular classroom inspections from the government employers. Then, in the 1980s and 90s, Finland overhauled their educational system, particularly the ways they prepared teachers. They shut down subpar institutions and established high quality, rigorous training centers affiliated with top universities. More talented, dedicated teachers emerged from these programs, which removed the need for stifling regulation. In fact, the stifling regulation needed to be removed so the teachers could actually teach.

The few attempts to raise requirement levels for teacher training programs in the United States have met with serious resistance and criticism of elitism. But why? In the United States, teacher supply exceeds teacher demand by almost two and a half to one. In other words, there are two to three teachers vying for every teaching position available. 

Figures were even more lopsided in Rhode Island, where such reforms were seriously attempted. The state’s teacher-training colleges graduated 1,000 teachers when only 200 positions were available. 

All ten of the Finnish teachers at the school where the American exchange student enrolled graduated in the top third of their high school class. In America, only one in five teachers graduated with a similar class ranking.

The US exchange student who studied in Poland entered a nation undergoing an educational metamorphosis, a process that Finland and South Korea went through decades earlier. Poland was a poor, beleaguered country for most of the twentieth century: blitzkrieged by the Nazis and then under the Soviet Union’s thumb for more than half a century. When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the future looked bright for Poland, and for most of the ‘90s their economy and infrastructure was improving dramatically. The growth was unsustainable, and there were growing fears that collapse and inflation were coming, which would usher in a return to Soviet-esque conditions.

Poland’s Minster of Education in the late 90s made an unorthodox series of educational reforms. After traveling the country and drawing from his several years abroad in the United States, he compiled a 200-page bright orange handbook in order to get Poland through the transitional phase.

The reforms involved making the system more rigorous, introducing accountability in the form of standardized tests, raising expectations of what students were capable of achieving, and preserving the teachers’ autonomy to select texts and design curriculum. Accountability going hand-in-hand with greater freedom for teachers are hallmarks of the Polish system, a theme also present in the Finnish system.

The reform was controversial and met with strong disapproval, as reforms often do. In 2000, Poland, eager to become a respected member of the developed world, had its fifteen-year-olds take PISA. The results? Poland was at the bottom of the stack among developed countries. When the world’s students took PISA again three years later, Poland’s rankings jumped significantly in all three subjects. They’d been the butt of jokes, but not anymore—far less so after 2012, when Polish teens kept pace with high-performing countries like Finland and Canada. The first round of students had grown up under the Communist regime. Poland and the rest of the world were able to observe the extent to which the educational reforms were helping. By 2012, students had started in school under the new educational system, and their high school graduation rates were seven percent higher than the United States’.

Poland’s case shows us that quality education is possible even in a poor country with a  haunting legacy of oppression and bloodshed. What is more, it can happen quickly. Looking back on the period of reform, Poland’s Minister of Education says its teachers were the lynchpin that made a world of difference, and they are key to continued success for Poland. It’s safe to extrapolate this to the rest of the world, considering the theme of good teachers has emerged not just in Poland, but in Finland and South Korea as well. Top performing nations prize good teachers.

In most countries, parents have some level of choice about where to send their children for school. After conducting thorough research on four continents and extensive conversations with teachers, students, and their families, several indicators have emerged to help identify schools offering world-class educations—or that are merely pretending to do so.

The first thing to do is to observe the students in the classroom—not the teacher. The amount of money spent per student and on open houses with aesthetically pleasing brochures don’t amount to much. South Korea, Finland, and Poland all spend far less than the United States and, clearly, obtain better results. Class size is also not that significant a factor either. Keep an eye on students –not the bulletins or lesson plans. See if the students are engaged and challenged. Don’t let the presence of order and neatness lull you into the belief that a quality education is necessarily being delivered. Sometimes clutter and noise are signs of rigor. If you walk into a classroom, see how many students seem to be mentally checked out—One? Two? Nine?

Another clue is student opinion. Talk with the students. Ask them questions that their teachers couldn’t answer. Don’t think of them as too young or too cynical to have valid opinions. If you ask intelligent questions that convey genuine interest and curiosity, they will likely open up.

Are you learning a good amount of material each day?

Does this course keep you busy or is there a lot of time wasted?

What are you studying right now? Why?

In the case of that last question, most students can readily state what they are learning, but get hung up on the why. Students don’t often ask why—they need to be reminded, and, frankly, the teachers do, too. Perhaps the true reason for education gets muddled by all the self-esteem training, high school football, and high-tech props.

An aside on technology: Don’t be fooled by the presence of state-of-the-art technology. It tends to have very little impact on student success. In fact, the best educational systems in the world are surprisingly spartan when it comes to technology.

Listen to how the parents of students at a school talk. What do they value? Exactly how important is their child’s education? Is reading or basketball a close second to arithmetic? Is basketball even second? Some parents in America seem to rank sports above academics. This confusion is not present in South Korea, Finland, Poland, or other countries with top notch educational systems.

It’s also advisable to grill the principal. Ask hard questions about things like teacher selection, actions taken to push teachers and students to improve, metrics for judging success at the school.

This is not a set-in-stone formula, but observing students and asking the right questions in conversations with students, parents, and principals will give you a good idea as to what kind of education a school is providing.