Poland has showed marked success in education. The World Bank recently reported that Poland now ranks 9th among all countries in overall reading scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, the only transition country to go from being below the OECD average on PISA to above average. The most recent The Education First (EF) English Proficiency Index ranks Poland as 8th in the world (high proficiency) in English language skills among adults.

Several articles note the basis for this success. See Poland: Education’s superpowers have a new kid on the bloc from the Sydney Morning Herald; Wittmeyer: Want to find an education miracle? Look to Poland from Newsday; and Poland imparts lesson on education to U.S. from the The Coeur d’ Alene Press. Here’s any interesting take from the Dallas Morning News: Will Texas follow the Poland model?

I want to move to Poland.

Really.

The just-released PISA exam — the Program for International Student Assessment – shows that Polish students finished ninth among developed nations in science. They also finished 10th in reading.

And the U.S. finish in those subjects? 28th and 24th, respectively.

To be sure, all these rankings can wear you out. And Wendy Kopp, the who started Teach for America, was right to suggest in her Wall Street Journal piece this week that we should not use these particular rankings as a rallying cry to go clobber other countries. Instead, we should learn from each other.

What we could learn from Poland is this: The country’s schools once were in the dumps. But Poland started using standardized tests to assess students, elevated academic rigor, wouldn’t accept poverty as an excuse and gave local schools more autonomy.

None of those reforms were put into place easily, but over time Poland’s scores went up. That includes on the PISA exam, which the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development administers. The exam focuses on applying classroom knowledge to real world problems.

There certainly is a Texas element to this story about Poland’s success. As this newspaper reported this week, the state has a
troubling number of high school students who have failed one or more end-of-course exams. As an example, 182,000 students have yet to pass last year’s English I writing exam. They get one more chance to do so this month.

The question is, what should we do about perennially failing students? Or ones who just keep struggling?

By raising this, I don’t mean more tests. The Legislature has made it clear they aren’t interested in additional end-of-course exams.

Rather, how shall the state respond to a large number of students who are behind? And how can the state keep students in the future from ending up in the same spot, assuming they don’t have learning disabilities that keep them behind?

Poland’s answer is you don’t give up on kids. It faced enormous poverty after suffering through decades of deprivation under the reign of communism. But it didn’t accept the notion that kids born into poverty couldn’t meet higher academic standards.

Amanda Ripley, author of “The Smartest Kids in the World,” noted in a recent Point Person interview that “Of all the changes Polish officials made, the one that seemed to matter most was that they held all students to more rigorous academic standards for a longer time period.”

In other words, they didn’t lowball expectations, even though plenty of students were struggling. Polish authorities even tried to get more kids out of our equivalent of vocational education.

Of course, raising expectations requires adequate resources to help teachers best reach students. The Texas Legislature must make sure that it spends smartly but adequately on students. But as Ripley also noted, Poland spends about half of what U.S. schools spend on their students. So, money alone is not the answer.

And Poland isn’t the only nation to do better while raising expectations. “Globally, the longer students stay together in demanding classes,” Ripley observed, “the better the whole country seems to do.”

So, there’s a roadmap here for Texas, or at the least start of one. The state could ease up on expectations. As an example, we could suggest that more kids go into vocational education, as some legislators pushed for this year. On the other hand, the state could keep encouraging kids to set their sights higher, as in for college or at least a two-year degree.

Poland went the high-bar route when conditions suggested otherwise. Will we?