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By her own admission, journalist Amanda Ripley used to go out of her way to avoid writing articles about education. She'd rather cover almost anything else. But after she was assigned a story on a controversial educator, she became intrigued. What types of education helped children become smarter? Did particular skills help them tackle learning challenges better? During her research, Ripley happened to see a chart compiling half a century of student test scores and performance rankings, gathered from a variety of different countries and cultures. She was intrigued - and puzzled. The data in that chart (collected by economists Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek) greatly changed her perspective and upended her assumptions about what children need to reach their learning potential. The research revealed that in a handful of countries scattered across the world, kids seemed to be gaining critical learning skills, outpacing many other countries, including America (especially in math). From their earliest years, the students in these select areas learned effective and innovative ways to tackle reading, science, and math problems. Their skills also helped them master not only familiar but new information more quickly and easily. What accounted for these differences over time? How on earth did Canada go from having a mediocre educational system to one with impressive results- even rivaling Japan? Why did a country without child poverty, Norway, end up with students who still received inadequate schooling? Why did American teenagers (even those attending elite schools) rank 18th in math compared to kids in New Zealand, Belgium, France, and other countries? These questions are part of what Ripley calls "the mystery" and it is at the heart of this book: the reasons why some kids learn so much in some countries and so little in others. As part of her attempt to gain more insight into how a select group of countries excelled at educating their children, Ripley sought the help of three American teenagers - Kim, Eric, and Tom - who were sent to live and learn in "smarter" countries for a year. Much of this book is based on first-hand accounts of the teens' experiences while living and learning in another culture.Without them, Ripley notes, she "never would have glimpsed...the scenes that make it possible to understand why policy works or, more often misses the mark totally." The three American students have very different backgrounds. There is Kim, who left her rural area of Sallisaw, Oklahoma and a relatively mediocre school system to travel to Finland. Eric attended a high school in Minnetonka, Minnesota which was regularly ranked among the top schools in America by Newsweek. He traveled to Busan, South Korea to experience the "Korean pressure cooker" of education there. Tom left behind a high school culture in Gettysburg,Pennsylvania, one which was focused on sports and the Future Farmers of America and traveled to Wroclaw, Poland. I was fascinated by reading about these students' lives abroad and the challenges they faced when navigating different school systems and cultural traditions. Many of the descriptions are vivid, from Eric's sense of dread when he realized that Korean students attended school a staggering 12 hours a day to Tom's recollection of his first humiliating attempt at a math problem (in front of the class) in Poland. But this book is more than a series of personal perspectives from three teens. There is also plenty of hard data interspersed between their anecdotes. This does make for a certain scattered quality to the book at times. A description of Tom's initial struggles with math in his Polish classroom leads into a long section on math education in the United States before coming back round to Tom as he picks up the chalk and attempts to solve a math equation. When Kim struggles to understand a Finnish novel, her teacher brings her a children's book which simplifies the plot details. This section is the jumping off point for contrasting Finnish teacher training with that in the United States before returning to Kim and her discussion with some classmates. In spite of an occasionally bumpy flow, this book was still very engaging. It not only gave me a cross- cultural perspective but new insights into ways to help children become innovative and effective learners.