(digital music)
(soft electronic music)
In the modern world, we ride the crest of a wave.
Every day, innovators discover new
and better ways of meeting our needs.
The greatest innovations are routinely replicated worldwide,
except in education, which has remained stubbornly at anchor
while the rest of the world has sailed past it.
In the next hour policy analyst Andrew Coulson
explores why our classrooms have yet to be transformed
by a similar wave, the same kind of innovative wave
that has revolutionized and improved
every other aspect of our lives.
We crisscross the globe in our search
for answers to the essential question:
how do we attain educational excellence?
In the barrio neighborhood of East Los Angeles,
a uniquely gifted teacher becomes an unlikely hero,
showing his Garfield High School students
how to shatter expectations.
He taught us to be strong and to stand up
for what you believe in.
Time?
Three seconds.
But the same drive and determination
that fueled Jaime Escalante's unparalleled success
with the students of Garfield High,
also proved to be his downfall.
He was setting a precedent.
A lot of the teachers were resentful
and it was very public.
5,000 miles away, in a very different culture,
Andrew Coulson finds an amazing similarity
in the competitive spirit of a baseball game
and what students must do to get into college.
In my case, I stay up all night before an exam,
maybe during six weeks.
Here, in Seoul, South Korea,
the fierce competition for entrance
to the very best colleges, paired
with cutting edge technology,
has propelled a unique educational industry
to soaring heights.
95% of all South Korean students attend intensive
after-school tutoring sessions called Hagwons.
It is a market, like, it is an entire market,
and the consumer, a student, likes the product
that is better than any other.
So teachers compete within the market to become,
like, entertaining and educative at the same time, you know?
For the last 10 years, my whole lecture revenue
is over $100 million.
Isolated examples of success
and innovation do occur in education,
but seldom have such examples been expanded or scaled up
to improve the educational systems that serve the masses,
that improve the basic quality of life,
that lift people out of poverty.
Join us as Andrew Coulson explores the challenge
of replicating educational excellence in School, Inc.
(thrilling instrumental music)
(rock music)
It's often said that education is different
from other fields.
And there's one respect in which that's certainly true.
But to really see it, we have to stop...
(tires screeching)
And step back in time to the late 1970s.
(rock music) (car engine roaring)
Recognize this?
It's the original Sony Walkman, introduced in 1979,
the first mainstream personal music player.
And on the eve of its release the Japanese media were
in solid agreement, they thought it would flop.
Sony itself expected to sell only about 5,000 a month.
(rock music)
And then a funny thing happened: people kind of liked it.
Within two years, Sony had sold a million-and-a-half
Walkmans worldwide, sparking similar products
from other companies that sold millions more.
(car engine roaring)
But that was just the beginning.
Every year or two, new and improved models hit the market.
To earn enough to buy the original Walkman,
you had to work two weeks at a typical minimum wage job.
And that was for lo-fi sound on cassettes you had
to flip over every half an hour.
(clattering)
What's really amazing about the rapid spread
and improvement of personal audio players
is that it isn't amazing at all.
It's perfectly normal.
Great new gadgets and services are appearing
and going viral every day.
A decade ago, no-one had ever heard of Google.
Now they do tens of thousands
of internet searches per second.
Facebook went from zero to half-a-billion members
in just five years.
And the same thing is true outside the high-tech world
in everything from organic grocery stores
to disposable diapers.
Basically, invent something good, and it gets big.
And these days, it gets big fast!
(thrilling instrumental music)
But of all the products we make and the services we provide,
there's one that stands out as an exception
to that overall pattern; one activity in which excellence
doesn't spawn countless imitators
or spread on a massive scale.
And that exception is schooling.
(bell rings)
For generations, there hasn't been a single innovation
in teaching that has transformed classrooms
and improved student achievement worldwide.
The closest thing to it can be found here,
inside this 19th century schoolhouse.
Let's have a look.
And here it is: the blackboard.
For the first 2,000 years of education history,
it was hard for teachers to communicate
complex visual information to groups of students.
Wax tablets, like the one shown in this Greek vase painting,
had been around since the 5th century B.C.,
and that's how children learned to write:
etching letters into the wax, rubbing them out,
and starting over.
Useful as they were, they didn't allow teachers
to reach the whole class all at once.
20 centuries later, we'd made the great leap forward
to these: slate tablets and chalk.
Bit of an improvement, certainly they're easier to erase.
But it wasn't until the late 1700s
that a Scottish schoolmaster named James Pillans
had a really clever idea.
He took all of those tablets off of students' laps
and he hung them together on the wall.
Suddenly, every student could see exactly
what Pillans was talking about at the same time.
(drum rolling)
In a flash, the blackboard leapt across the Atlantic
to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
And just a few decades later, it was a common item even
in remote rural schoolhouses, like this one.
So there's an example of a brilliant educational idea,
simple and effective, that took the world by storm
in barely a generation.
We know it can happen.
But that was 200 years ago, and nothing quite like it
has happened since.
Why haven't our classrooms been transformed
by that same pattern of improvement and innovation
that we take for granted in every other aspect of our lives?
It's not that we haven't tried.
Schools have adopted all sorts of new technologies
over the years, from projectors, to personal computers,
to smart white boards.
The trouble is that none of these new inventions
has improved outcomes, measurable outcomes,
on a global scale.
Let's take a look at something.
(rumbling)
American test scores at the end of high school
have been flat since we started keeping track of them
all the way back in the early 1970s,
and the same thing is true in most other countries as well.
Basically, educational quality has been stuck
in the era of disco and leisure suits for 40 years,
while the rest of the world has passed it by.
(disco music)
Classrooms and clothes look a little different now
than they did back then.
But we've changed the trappings of education
without really improving the substance.
The best schools haven't grown
and taken over the less successful ones.
The best teaching methods haven't been replicated
on a mass scale.
(crowd cheering)
And while our top athletes
and pop stars reach huge audiences,
our greatest teachers seldom reach more
than a few dozen kids at a time,
despite all our technological advances.
Why not?
That's the question at the heart of this series:
why doesn't excellence scale up
and spawn imitators in education
the way it does in other fields?
We'll travel the globe in search
of an answer to that question.
And we'll take a few detours along the way,
because the shortest route isn't always a straight line.
(playful orchestral music)
But maybe we're just being impatient,
and if we wait a few years, education will catch up
to the pace of progress in other fields.
After all, the rapid spread of new technologies and ideas,
that's an incredibly recent phenomenon, isn't it?
(lively orchestral music) (water purling)
To find out, we've come here, to Lowell, Massachusetts,
because in 1821 it didn't exist.
A local map from that year bears the title A Plan
of Sundry Farms etc. at Pawtucket.
For miles south and east of the Pawtucket Falls,
this was just agricultural land incorporated
into the nearby town of Chelmsford.
The one notable man-made structure was this,
the Pawtucket Canal.
It bypassed the falls and the rapids below.
It allowed lumber and other products
to be transported down the Merrimack River
from its headwaters in New Hampshire
all the way to the shipyards of Newburyport
on the Massachusetts coast.
(folk music)
Completed in 1796, it was a pretty sweet racket,
generating a steady revenue stream from its toll fees.
At least it did until 1803, when a more popular competitor
opened for business right next door.
So, the Pawtucket Canal lost its monopoly,
and a lot of its business and revenue along with it.
As a result, this whole area remained a rural backwater
for a generation, population 200.
Until, in 1821, something happened that changed all that.
(rumbling)
This!
(rattling)
The owners of the Pawtucket waterway sold
their entire operation, lock, stock and canal,
to the Boston Manufacturing Company.
Its Founder, Francis Cabot Lowell,
had studied textile factories while living in England,
studied a little more closely
than their owners seemed to realize.
And thanks to his, well, industrial espionage,
Lowell was able to recreate a functioning mechanized mill
just outside Boston.
The machines were powered by belts connected
to rotating shafts along the ceiling.
Those shafts, in turn, were driven by a massive fly-wheel
in the basement.
And in the early 1800s, the way you got one
of those great big fly-wheels up to speed was
with one of these...
The same kind of water wheel
that had been driving grain mills in Europe
since the middle ages.
And that's why, after Francis Lowell's death,
his partners brought his mechanized mill design
to the Pawtucket Falls.
It offered enough power to drive dozens of these wheels.
Other entrepreneurs took a chance and followed their lead,
and the newly incorporated town of Lowell
quickly went from rural backwater
to the biggest manufacturing center in North America.
Their gamble paid off.
Making cotton textiles in automated factories was faster,
cheaper, and more precise than doing it by hand.
So demand went through the roof.
But there was a catch: in order to meet that demand,
factory owners had to find thousands of workers willing
to take on grueling 12-hour days and six-day weeks.
As it turned out, girls and young women flocked
to fill these new factory jobs.
In 1836, a mill girl named Hannah Wilson wrote
to discourage her friend Mary from coming to Lowell
in search of factory work.
I think you are better off where you are,
for there is more girls than you can shake a stick
at the Lawrence Corporation.
Holly Thompson has gone to doing housework
at Doc Hubbard's; she could not get
in the factory nowhere in Lowell.
Still, the mill owners couldn't rest on their laurels.
In order to stay profitable and to stay ahead
of the competition, they had to find new ways
to boost productivity.
And that's why the clever chaps at the Appleton Mill
hired an eccentric, vegetarian, tee-totaling engineer
named Uriah Boyden.
They asked Boyden to build them a couple
of new, improved, water wheels.
Nothing brilliant about that.
The clever part was to promise Boyden
that the more efficient those wheels turned out to be,
the more he'd get paid.
Well, with an incentive like that,
Boyden did what any good engineer would do:
he started by copying off the smartest kids in class.
Boyden studied the latest French water power systems,
called turbines, and then modified their intakes
and outlets to bump up efficiency.
His design performed so well that it blew the old technology
out of the water.
In the coming decades, mills around the country ripped out
their medieval-style water wheels and replaced them
with ever-more-efficient turbines.
Productivity just kept rising,
and the innovations behind it spread like wildfire.
The cost of manufactured goods steadily fell
while quality continued to improve.
It was the dawn of the American Industrial Revolution,
which brings us back to the reason we visited Lowell
in the first place.
From our vantage point at the beginning of the 21st century,
it certainly seems as though great new ideas
and innovations were already scaling-up 200 years ago.
And that, with the exception of the blackboard,
education just wasn't keeping up.
(lively orchestral music)
Not everyone required the benefit of historical hindsight
to see that.
One man in particular noticed it at the time.
He was born in 1796, the same year
that the Pawtucket Canal was completed.
Became a lawyer, was elected to public office,
and eventually served here in the Massachusetts State House
as president of the Senate.
His name was Horace Mann, and this is how he saw
his state's fledgling public school system in 1837.
Sound familiar?
Like us, Horace Mann was frustrated
that the common schools, as public schools were then known,
weren't enjoying the same spread of innovation
that he was seeing happen all around him
in places like Lowell.
And so he resolved to do something about it,
to find a way to make educational excellence go viral.
(intense orchestral music)
In 1837, Mann closed his law practice, resigned his seat
in the state legislature, and became the first head
of the first state board of education in the country.
From that position, he changed the course
of American history.
But to understand the plan that he came up with,
we first have to understand what education was like
during Mann's time.
(playful instrumental music)
There were common schools all across New England,
but there was no state or federal authority dictating
what they taught or who could teach.
It was parents who hired the teachers,
and often picked the textbooks as well.
In fact, to save money, families sometimes billeted
the teachers in their own homes.
So if little Johnny couldn't read, figuring out why might be
as easy as walking into the next room.
But all that parent power came at a price, literally.
If you sent a child to a public school in the early 1800s,
they sent you something that looked like this...
(clinking)
A bill.
Local education taxes were levied
so that the poorest students could attend at little
or no charge, but everyone else was expected
to pay tuition fees.
In fact, half to two-thirds of common school budgets came
from these fees.
Since the public schools weren't giving education away
for free, parents had an incentive to hop in the carriage
and check out what the private sector competition
had to offer.
And they liked what they saw.
Most students in the early American republic
attended private schools.
Some of them were large academies enrolling hundreds
of students, but many were also run by individual teachers.
Anyone who wanted could put out a shingle
and solicit paying pupils.
And finding them was easy...
(knocking)
You could just open up the local paper.
Miss Boardman informs her friends
and the public that her spring term
for instructing young ladies and misses commenced
on Monday, March 11th.
Terms for instruction in reading, orthography, chirography,
arithmetic, geography, astronomy, English grammar,
rhetoric, composition, history and plain needle-work,
$8 per quarter.
$8 for three months.
Still, that wasn't pocket change in the 1820s and 30s,
but there were teachers offering instruction
for less than half that amount.
There were also private school options for the poor,
with free and reduced-price tuition.
Those were run by mutual aid societies, religious groups,
and tradesmen's guilds.
And, unlike today, many of the larger private academies
received public subsidies, allowing them
to reach a wider audience than they otherwise
would have been able to.
Competition helped, too.
Just as the opening of the Middlesex Canal put pressure
on the Pawtucket Canal operators, the creation
of all these new, small independent schools
forced the larger private academies
to lower their tuition fees.
This jumble of competing private schools
didn't use the same textbooks or methods,
but it seems to have been effective.
Student enrollment and literacy were high and rising,
newspaper readership was exploding,
and the standard of living was improving
from one generation to the next.
None of this was lost on Horace Mann
or his friend James Carter.
It was Carter who spearheaded the creation
of the State Board of Education
from his seat in the Massachusetts legislature.
But before Carter ran for public office,
he ran his own private school.
He'd seen their growing popularity first-hand, and,
like Horace Mann, he worried that the common schools
were lagging badly.
In fact, Carter wrote for the Boston Patriot newspaper,
that unless something was done...
Faced with that prospect, Carter and Mann devised a plan
to ensure that every child would have access
to the dynamic private education marketplace.
Okay, I might have made that last bit up.
What they actually did was to try to get everyone out
of the private sector and into the common schools.
That sounds a little odd when you think
about the way they felt about common schools
versus private schools, as far as performance went,
but when you understand the way they thought
about parents and government, it begins to make sense.
Carter in particular thought that the reason private schools
performed so well was that elite parents chose them.
So if he could get those same elite parents
to send their kids to the common schools...
Well, problem solved!
Much as they respected the educational decisions
of the nation's elites, they had a pretty dim view
of the average parent.
Referring to young children Carter had this to say...
Both men thought that it was wisest to take control
of education out of the hands of parents
and place it into the hands of state-appointed experts
and state-trained teachers, which is why we're here
on the Battle Green in Lexington, Massachusetts,
site of the Shot Heard 'Round the World
that marked the beginning of the American Revolution.
Right across the street from this green,
the two reformers kicked off a revolution
in American education, creating the first state teachers'
college in the country.
State teacher-training was just one part of their plan.
The common school reformers also advocated higher state
spending, prohibiting the common schools
from charging tuition, and gradually centralizing power here
in the state legislature.
They believed that that would allow the best pedagogical
practices to scale up, bringing them within reach
of every child.
But there was more to it than that.
Horace Mann, in particular, believed that the public schools
could transform society for the better.
Horace Mann believed in the perfectibility of humanity,
and that a well-funded state school system
would achieve that perfection.
Through his tireless campaigning and inspiring words,
he eventually won the hearts of the American people.
In the 150 years since, we have expanded
and funded the public schools
beyond his wildest expectations.
Has it worked?
Here are a few people who can help us find out.
I've been in banking for about years now;
I'm with Wells Fargo.
When I graduated law school and I passed the bar exam,
I got a job at the office of the Federal Public Defender
here in LA.
I chose the profession of architecture.
I'm currently the assistant director of facilities
and construction for the Los Angeles County Office
of Education.
(upbeat music)
The people you've just seen have a lot in common.
It's not just that they're all high achievers
with successful careers.
Every one of them went to the same public high school.
(lively instrumental music)
This is Beverly Hills High School, as seen on TV.
(bell ringing)
98% of its seniors graduate, and virtually all
of them go on to college.
Every year, 600 of its students
take advanced placement courses,
and virtually all of them pass.
It has more National Merit finalists and semi-finalists
than you can shake a stick at.
But this isn't where our illustrious group
of high achievers went to high school.
(lively orchestral music)
Taxi!
This is the real alma mater
of our illustrious group: Garfield High in East L.A.
(intense orchestral music)
But in the late 80s, early 90s,
there was something magical happening
at Garfield High School.
I came into the school in 1988;
at the time it was a three-year high school.
Garfield High School was a fantastic school
while I was there.
There were committed teachers,
there were committed students and committed parents.
Up until the late 1970s,
it was a pretty typical inner city school.
Test scores were poor and the mostly low-income
Latino students weren't even offered
the most challenging courses.
I would say most of the students in this particular school
come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
We didn't even know we were poor, right?
Like, we had no idea we were these disadvantaged kids
and that kind of thing.
But by 1988, more students were passing
the advanced placement calculus test here at Garfield
than at Beverly Hills High.
One out of every four Mexican-Americans
who passed AP calculus, nationwide, attended Garfield.
Why?
Jaime Escalante.
Time?
Three seconds.
As a teacher, he was fantastic.
Steadly?
You can talk to a number of students
about Jaime Escalante, and they tell you
what a wonderful teacher he was.
What I could say today is that he had a major impact
in my life.
Each of us remembers the great teachers,
the ones who touch our lives.
From the time he started teaching at Garfield
in 1974, Jaime Escalante worked as if his life depended
on the success of his students.
The mathematics program chair, and driven by Mr. Escalante
at the time, was very rigorous.
There was nothing but excellence expected of us students.
Hence, we had to step up to the challenge.
I did not want to disappoint him,
and that is something that I think
you'll probably find from other students.
We did not want to disappoint Jaime.
By 1982, the results were
beyond belief, literally.
His students performed so far above expectations
on the AP calculus test that the Educational Testing Service
suspected cheating and threw out their scores.
Undaunted, they re-took it and came through
with flying colors a second time.
He taught us to be strong and to stand up
for what you believe in.
Hollywood noticed, dramatizing the story
in the movie Stand and Deliver.
(students laughing)
This is basic math, but basic math is too easy
for you, burros, so I'm going to teach you algebra
because I'm the champ.
Seeing the movie makes me laugh, it gives me a lot
of memories as to how it was in the classroom.
The depiction of Mr. Escalante
was right on.
(students laughing)
You ever been to the beach?
He was a character, from the moment he walked in the door
to the hat he wore every single day.
A negative times a negative equals a positive.
Some of the things that were so striking in that movie
is the fact that he built a relationship with each one
of the students.
He knew them by name, he knew their story,
and that was not an exaggeration.
He knew our stories.
One of the things I still admire about him is his ability
to continue teaching even after he was famous
and he had attention.
He was still a teacher at heart,
and he taught me everything I needed
to be prepared for college.
In art as in life, Escalante had a simple message
for his students: with enough drive and hard work,
the sky was the limit.
Ganas is something that any of us can attain.
Culturally, it goes to kind of the gut
of who you are in your soul.
The lessons I learned from Jaime, I apply them every day,
I apply them with my children and I talk about Jaime
and I talk about the Ganas, the need to have the desire.
Nothing's for free.
You have to work really hard if you want
to achieve anything.
We live in a community that is generally poor,
but we are the most hardworking individuals
that you could find.
And that's exactly what Mr. Escalante tapped into:
the willingness to work and the willingness
to find that path.
Certainly his students did well
on their high school math tests,
but did they retain what they'd learned long enough
to build it into successful lives and careers?
It's an important question, because a lot
of technical jobs require math,
especially if you're reaching for the stars.
This is the Mount Wilson Observatory, high in the mountains
of the Angeles National Forest.
From this telescope, Edwin Hubble made observations back
in the 1920s that dramatically changed our understanding
of the universe.
Virtually everyone at the time assumed
that the universe was static.
It was Hubble who showed that it's continually expanding,
giving rise to the Big Bang Theory for the origin
of space and time.
Needless to say, for this kind of work,
you need a fair bit of math.
I work at JPL.
I've been there...
Actually, I hired there right out of high school.
I'm a supervisor of the mechanical integration group.
And what we basically do is assemble spacecraft.
Mars Science Laboratory is a beast of a spacecraft.
It's the size of a Mini Cooper.
Say you wanted to build a laser-packing,
rock analyzing, nuclear powered robot,
strap it to a rocket, and send it to Mars;
would having attended classes with Jaime Escalante
in high school have helped get you there?
Getting to his classroom was an incredible experience,
and I don't know how far I would have gotten without him.
I think my current job had to do with him.
I went to college, and in college we had calculus classes
to take, four levels of calculus;
and then there was still another three levels
of math classes above that.
And in every one of those classes that I took,
there was always a subject that I had already learned
in Mr. Jaime Escalante's class in high school.
Of course, engineers and scientists
aren't the only folks who use math,
nor is Sergio Valdez the only student who benefited
from his time in Escalante's classroom.
But what good is a fantastic math teacher
if you want to pursue a career in fine arts, or journalism,
or the law?
I often ask myself why is it that even now,
I'm 47-years-old, it's Jaime that I remember the most?
And I think it's because he inspired me the most.
Okay.
So, Jaime Escalante did have a lasting impact
and it reached beyond the students
who were particularly interested in mathematics.
But he was only one man, so there was necessarily a limit
to the number of students he could reach, right?
You might think so based on the nickname
that his students gave him; they called him Ke-mo,
short for...
Ke-mo Sah-bee.
(laughing)
You Ke-mo sah-bee.
Ke-mo sah-bee?
Ke-mo sah-bee is what the Native American Tonto character
affectionately called...
(lively orchestral music)
The Lone Ranger.
Mr. Escalante was very informal with his students.
He was a kidder, he was a joker.
You know, the whole concept of having...
Being that familiar with your teacher is probably one
of those things that defines the personality
of the teacher and the personality of the student.
He made it a point to keep his classroom interested,
and humor is one way he did it.
And having this nickname, Ke-mo,
and calling his students by nickname was a way
that he had, he made that personal connection with them.
(lively orchestral music)
It was a pretty cool nickname,
but Jaime Escalante wasn't really a Lone Ranger.
He had a posse.
Escalante partnered with several other
of Garfield's math teachers to create a program
that covered everything, from basic fractions
to advanced calculus.
There were other teachers also that participated
and that I had a lot of respect for.
And it was with this team
that Escalante created a program bigger than himself,
able to produce so many high achievers,
even ones who never set foot in his classroom.
I started teaching here at Griffith Junior High
around the corner from Garfield.
One of my ex-students, she was taking a class
with Escalante.
One day she said: "Mr. V, you have to meet Escalante,
"because you remind me of him.
She arranged the meeting, and I went there
and we sat down after school for an hour or so.
We talked, and we clicked.
And he said I want you to come and work with me.
I want you to be part of my team.
Louder!
A negative times a negative
equals a positive.
Why?
The movie Stand and Deliver ends on a high note
with Escalante's students proving the skeptics wrong.
But the story of his mathematics program
at Garfield does not have a Hollywood ending.
When the film was released in 1988,
Garfield's math program was bigger
and more successful than ever.
Before I came to Garfield, I had never heard
of Mr. Jaime Escalante.
But sure enough, as soon as you step foot on campus,
you hear about Mr. Jaime Escalante,
and you hear about the math program.
Every single week there was a new film crew coming in.
In any other field, we might expect this combination
of success, scalability and publicity,
to have catapulted Escalante to the top of his profession,
or, like Hubble's expanding universe,
to have spread all across the country.
That just isn't what happened.
(thrilling orchestral music)
My years were the years of controversy,
where a lot of the teachers were resentful,
and it was very public.
Jaime was the type of person that wouldn't settle
for normal goals.
He had big dreams and he wasn't afraid to reach for them.
Jaime was relentless, and he wanted, you know,
the best for the students.
The key problem was that Escalante's classes were big.
The number of students in the class worked for him.
He could handle it.
He was setting a precedent.
He was giving the message to the administrator, you know:
if Escalante can do it, why not you?
The union helped Mr. Jiménez,
who was the other calculus teacher, helped him to believe
that he could run as the chairperson,
and be the chairperson, which he did.
And that was done, you know, in the background.
They hide it from Escalante.
The union was able to get the votes
to oust Escalante as chairman of the math department
because his success and fame had started to arouse jealousy.
Maybe they felt that he had too much power,
too much attention given to him and his programs.
And, you know, I could see that happening.
Jealousy and union opposition
weren't the only problems Escalante faced.
He also lost one of his key supporters
with the departure of Principal Henry Gradillas in 1987.
The new principal was Maria Tostado.
Tostado took over, you know, and she basically
was an outsider, did not understand
what it implied, you know.
The validity of the program, you know, how much it meant
to Garfield, to the barrio.
She did not apply herself to understand
that that was the greatest gift the community had,
and never treasured that.
In 1991, demoted and resented
by many of his colleagues, Escalante left Garfield High.
I know that when he left, he did not leave on good terms.
To me it was just tragic, because he was a good man.
All Jaime Escalante ever wanted to do was
to help us achieve our goals.
And if there's anything wrong with that, I don't see it.
It is very difficult for one person or two
or three to make an impact that has that ripple effect.
It was amazing stuff that we learned.
And 20 years later, I know schools have come a long way,
but it was still a big challenge,
it was still a big achievement,
and I'm proud of having been a part of that.
(soft upbeat music)
Nearly two centuries ago, Horace Mann thought
he'd found a way to bring the greatest teachers and schools
within reach of every child.
But, as Jaime Escalante's experience illustrates,
we still haven't achieved that goal.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that there are places
where educational excellence is scaling up...
(crowd cheering)
Which is why our next stop is a baseball game...
In South Korea.
(crowd cheering)
Baseball has one of the heaviest schedules
in professional sports, but the Doosan Bears
and the Nexen Heroes are still giving it their all
despite the fact that this is a mid-week game,
and the skies are threatening to open up any second.
Playing ball isn't all fun and games,
but it has its perks: the top players
on that field are national celebrities,
and they earn big bucks because of their skill
and their hard work.
Wouldn't it be great if the best teachers
earned that same remuneration and that same recognition?
Well, here in Korea, they do.
(crowd cheering)
Okay, not exactly: the top teachers earn more
than the highest paid professional baseball players.
My whole lecture revenue is over $100 million.
(clinking)
How is that possible?
Well, it's an interesting story,
and it reaches back 1,000 years.
(soft instrumental music)
In 958, Korea's Goryeo Dynasty started doling out
government jobs to whoever scored highest
on a national service exam.
The subject matter was mainly Confucian literature
and mathematics, and only the ruling elite could afford
to prepare their children for it.
But it sent a powerful message:
academic excellence was the road to success.
It wasn't until the late 1800s
that the national service exam was finally abolished.
And the Hermit kingdom, as Korea had been known,
finally started opening up to the outside world.
But before it got very far on the road to modernization,
Korea suffered a 40-year occupation by imperial Japan,
and then the partitioning of the country after World War II,
and another three years of war instigated
by the communist North.
After all that, South Korea was in ruins.
Illiteracy was high.
The infrastructure had been destroyed.
But the nation had two things going for it:
economic freedom, and the fervent belief
that education was the path to prosperity.
Schooling exploded, first elementary, and then secondary.
But the creation of colleges couldn't keep up.
So, to ration those scarce college places,
South Korea rekindled its ancient tradition
introducing a mandatory college entrance exam.
Only this one focused on modern subjects
and was genuinely open to all.
Well, with their children's futures riding so heavily
on that single test, Korean parents were keen
to provide the best preparation they could.
And since they lacked confidence
in the public school system,
families started looking for alternatives.
This was similar to the situation in 19th century America,
where most parents opted for private schooling.
But here in Korea there was a twist:
the private schools were so heavily regulated
that they didn't really look much different
from the public schools.
So, parents decided to opt outside the regular school sector
entirely, hiring private tutoring services called Hagwons.
These Hagwons were popular with parents,
but they weren't popular with everyone;
government officials in charge of public schooling worried
that they would lead to inequality in the education system.
And so, in 1980, they outlawed most private tutoring.
This prohibition on after-school tutoring was every bit
as effective as America's prohibition on alcohol.
(upbeat music)
Instead of driving Hagwons out of business,
the ban drove them underground.
They became illegal educational speakeasies,
like the illicit drinking establishments of the Roaring 20s.
The Korean government even offered cash rewards
to anyone ratting-out teachers engaged
in extra-curricular curricula.
Despite all this, the private tutoring industry boomed.
By the time the ban was struck down 20 years later,
the number of Hagwons had risen from 5,000
to more than 67,000.
With the outright ban on Hagwons overturned,
the government resorted to a cap on fees.
But this, too, was ruled unconstitutional.
Not to be dissuaded, the government set a 10 pm curfew
on Hagwon lessons that remains in place to this day.
In place, but not entirely effective.
Actually, my tuition, my Hagwon, at that time,
we had a time limitation on only 10 o'clock.
But they had a program from 10 to one o'clock.
(laughing)
So, what they did, we were studying at 10 o'clock and,
we were in the night, we had to finish the lesson.
And then, they send us all into the restaurant
just down below.
And then, when the police comes, right, you know,
they will check around whether this Hagwon
is ongoing or not.
After they went back to their police station,
(laughing)
they call us to the restaurant,
"Okay, now you can come up."
Then we come up again and we had a lesson.
And also sometime we were studying but,
by the window, we see a policeman.
Then, we turn off the lights.
Then we wait for they to cross the road.
Then we turn on again and we study.
It is illegal.
However, parents want it.
Do they ever?
95% of students have taken Hagwon lessons
by the time they leave high school.
It's typical to attend after school, several days a week,
sometimes well past midnight.
And, according to one study, three-quarters
of students prefer those Hagwon lessons
to their regular school classes.
Actually, I think the aim of Hagwon is helping us
to get better grades from the school.
And, for me, actually, Hagwon help me a lot.
I've seen many students asleep at school, like,
all subjects, from morning at eight
to afternoon, to five pm, and they just sleep.
And then, when they go to Hagwon,
their eyes are so sparkly, and they're ready to study,
and they study 'til two o'clock.
(speaking in Korean)
Of course it's that way;
it's because Hagwons are customer-oriented.
When students enroll in Hagwons, they are matched
with classes based on their performance level.
So it's possible to tailor the lessons
to those specific students.
But that's not the case for regular public schools,
which means the highly-advanced students
and those who are far behind are in the same classes,
classes that aren't really suited to them.
Public schools are divided by age in classes.
I think that makes a big difference.
And it's not the only difference.
(speaking in Korean)
Schools are places students are required
to attend, but they choose to come to Hagwons,
so they have more affection toward them.
That means they tend to pay closer attention in class and,
because of that, it is so fun to teach these kids.
(speaking in Korean)
Mr. Choi is a national star.
A lot of students have fallen in love with his lectures.
In the past, students from outside Seoul had
to come take these classes during vacation.
But as internet technology improved,
kids got the opportunity to listen to great lectures
in the comfort of their own homes.
Actually, I'm not from Seoul, I'm from Daejeon,
which, there aren't really many celebrity teachers,
so we have to take online courses.
So me and my friends, and we'd be all watching
the same teacher's education.
I actually met one of them at Seoul train station.
And me and my friends from back home are,
like, excited and we want to take pictures.
He was like a celebrity to us and he actually helped me
with the subjects that I did not really do well on.
(speaking in Korean)
I teach around 1,000 students a year
in person.
As for online, it's around 10 or 15,000 students a year.
Every online lecture has a demonstration lecture.
Almost all students should see that first,
and then they are free to choose.
Online and in-person lectures,
on average over 100,000 students taking my lessons.
It is a market, like, it is an entire market.
And the consumer, a student, likes the product
that is better than any other.
So teachers compete within the market to become, like,
entertaining and educative at the same time, you know?
I must study hard, even harder than my students,
so the lecture is very enlivened,
and interesting, and exciting.
For online Hagwon teachers,
if they deliver passionate lectures
and give good service, many students will subscribe
to their classes, and their earnings reflect that.
For the last 10 years, my whole lecture revenue
is over $100 million, and my share is $25 million.
But, at this point, the regular schools' teachers,
if they worked harder, there would be nothing.
There could be nothing for their more efforts.
Not just in Korea but also in America,
there's nothing like that motivational compensation system.
(speaking in Korean)
The best thing about teaching at Hagwons
is the freedom it guarantees about everything,
as long as I'm doing a good job.
But at Hagwons, you must renew your contract every year.
If the feedback and surveys from students are not good,
you could be let go.
It's a sort of carrot-and-stick approach:
you could be let go, or you could be paid more.
So Hagwon teachers have no choice
but to develop themselves in the best ways they can.
There is a book called
Professor Farnsworth's Explanations in Biology.
It left a lasting impression on me.
In that book, he says that everybody has a natural instinct
to share what they know.
To be able to share the things that you know
and get paid for doing that is actually a miracle.
The same freedoms and incentives
that are driving the success of Hagwons
have also created what people call the Miracle
of the Han River, Korea's rise in barely two generations
from war-torn ruin to, well, this.
(lively orchestral music)
During the 1960s, average income per-person was less
than $500 in both North and South Korea.
But by the early 1970s, the nations began
to diverge: the South adopted an open market economy;
the North, a centrally-planned government system.
Today, per-capita income is 20 times higher in the South.
It's not hard to spot the difference, even from space.
The two Koreas at night: the North, a sea of darkness;
the South, awash in light.
South Korea's new wealth has spawned a proliferation
of colleges.
This view of Seoul is from the top
of the Classic 500 Building, which itself was built
by a university foundation.
But, though there are now enough college places
for everyone, the high-stakes university entrance exam
remains, and the competition to score well
and attend a top-ranked college is fierce.
It's fair to say that Korea's combination
of hiring practices, high-stakes exams,
and intense education culture have combined
to make life pretty tough for students.
In my case, I stay up all night before an exam,
maybe during six weeks.
So I got under pressure a lot.
(speaking in Korean)
Traditionally, in Korea,
the educational level of a person has played a crucial role
in determining his or her status in society.
(speaking in Korean)
Actually, I find this deeply troubling.
I feel that the kids are suffering
in this system that is created by adults.
And yet other students seem
to take the academic pressure in stride.
If I look back, I think, it was not all just study.
You know, I had fun with my friends studying.
And I kind of enjoyed it.
And I wanted to do more to, you know, succeed and do better.
And I liked learning.
So, I think, not all Koreans are, like...
I don't want everyone to pity the Korean students
because we study a lot.
Sometimes we kind of enjoy it,
because we are doing it for ourselves.
And it's hard to undo 1,000-year tradition.
But there are signs of change.
For one, businesses are finally starting to look
beyond elite college degrees when sifting
through their applicants' resumes.
Korea's challenge is to find a way
of easing the pressure on its students
while building on the key strength of its Hagwon sector
the ability to bring top teachers
within reach of a massive audience.
Our challenge is to figure out how they do it.
Could it have something to do with the
freedoms and incentives of Korea's tutoring sector?
Its teachers have tremendous autonomy
and they're constantly striving to improve their services
to stay ahead of the competition.
And the more students they serve,
the more money they bring in.
All of that's also true of private schools back here
in the United States.
So, if that's the recipe for replicating excellence,
we'd expect to see the same kind of growth
among U.S. private schools.
Do we?
Let's find out.
(lively orchestral music)
On the next episode of School Inc.:
Andrew Coulson's journey takes him to one
of the top 10 performing private high schools in America
to find out why replicating their reputation of excellence
is not part of their highly successful traditions.
In Austin, Texas, he visits a remarkable charter school
system where scaling-up and expansion has become a source
of community pride.
And Coulson visits Chile to ask:
what could wine-making and education
possibly have in common?
(upbeat music)
(digital music)