When Amanda Ripley set out to find the “smartest kids in the world,” she followed American exchange students into classrooms in Finland, South Korea, and Poland. Her book captured something intoxicating: the idea that if we could just copy the right formula, our kids would rise to the top of global rankings. The story was compelling, the data clean, and the conclusions seductive.
But there’s a problem.
It’s not that Ripley was wrong about the power of high expectations or coherent systems. It’s that the book, like so many others, mistakes one narrow slice of human ability for the whole. Test scores, even international test scores, tell us only about the children who can play the game as designed. They don’t capture the brilliance of kids with dyslexia who solve problems in pictures, the autistic child who spots patterns adults can’t, or the student with ADHD who invents five solutions while others are still filling in bubbles.
These kids are missing from the narrative.
The Price of “Smart”
The very countries Ripley praised have gaps that rarely make the headlines. Finland’s system is often held up as inclusive, yet their proportion of students formally identified with learning disabilities is a fraction of the U.S., not because those students don’t exist, but because the system counts differently. South Korea’s famous rigor comes with some of the highest teen suicide rates in the developed world. Poland’s dramatic test score gains coincided with reforms that pushed many students with disabilities into separate tracks.
If “smartest” means highest averages, then the margin doesn’t matter. If “smartest” means serving every child, then the picture changes entirely.
America’s Quiet Advantage
Here’s the paradox: the United States, often mocked for middling test scores, has something no one else does, IDEA, a federal law that guarantees students with disabilities a right to a free and appropriate public education. Our system is messy, imperfect, and often underfunded, but it enshrines a radical principle: that all kids, not just the top scorers, are entitled to learn and thrive.
That is a different definition of “smart.” One rooted in equity, not averages.
What We Don’t Measure
We don’t rank countries on creativity, but we could.
We don’t test for resilience, but we should.
We don’t publish league tables of student self-advocacy, collaboration, or empathy, but those are the traits employers and communities actually depend on.
Students who navigate accommodations, who learn to speak up for what they need, who persist through challenges others never face, these students are building skills no standardized test can capture.
A Better Question
So maybe the question isn’t, “Who has the smartest kids in the world?” Maybe it’s, “How do we create schools where every child — not just the test-ready — can become their smartest self?”
That answer won’t fit on a PISA chart. It looks like smaller class sizes, trained interventionists, universal design for learning, access to literacy programs, and culturally responsive teaching. It looks like systems that measure more than compliance. It looks like valuing growth as much as mastery.
The SpEd Redhead Takeaway
The smartest kids in the world aren’t confined to Helsinki or Seoul. They’re in every classroom, every day, if we’re willing to see them. They’re the ones decoding a word for the first time after months of struggle. They’re the ones inventing new ways to solve old problems. They’re the ones learning that their needs don’t make them less, they make them human.
Ripley gave us a map of what high-performing systems look like. It’s useful, but incomplete. If we want to write the full story, we have to include the kids her book left out. Because the measure of a truly smart nation isn’t just how well its top students perform, it’s how deeply it believes in the potential of all of them.