Describing her high school experience in the United States, a Finnish exchange student put it this way:

“It was like elementary school in Finland.”

Sixteen-year-old Elina wasn't the only foreign visitor to think schools here are ridiculously easy. Surveys show about 90 percent of international students believe classes are easier in the United States than at home.

That singular statistic helps explain why international student achievement tests in math, science and reading show students in the United States are learning less in school than their peers in dozens of other countries.

In the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test of 15-year-olds worldwide, students from the United States ranked 30th of the 56 participating nations in mathematics, 23rd in science and 20th in reading.

Privileged children from affluent U.S. schools fared little better. A typical student in Beverly Hills did worse on the PISA test than the average of all students in Canada. And economically disadvantaged students here did worse, often far worse, than poor kids in many other countries.

The one area where U.S. schools excel is in per-pupil spending. We rank second there, trailing only tiny Luxembourg.

The PISA tests are given every three years. And the 2009 results prompted Amanda Ripley, a Time Magazine reporter with a long and impressive journalistic resume, to go on a year-long “field trip to smart-kid countries” designed to find out why so many places are succeeding where the United States is treading water.

The result was “The Smartest Kids in the World,” an enlightening and engrossing New York Times best-seller that’s a must-read for everyone who cares about education. Ripley spent time in South Korea, Poland and Finland - three established democracies that have rocketed past the United States in student achievement. She also reported on foreign exchange students, like Elina, who was attending high school in a middle-class Michigan community.

The education models most worth emulating are in Finland and Poland.

Admission to education school in Finland is as prestigious as being accepted at medical school in the United States. Teachers make more than here. And they earn it. In Finland, teachers, principals, politicians and union leaders work hand-in-hand to improve schools.

With 1.6 million teachers in the United States due to retire between 2011-21, Ripley thinks the time is right to make education colleges more selective and inject large doses of rigor into the teacher training process.

“We say teaching is important and it’s hard,” she told me in an interview. “Now we need to act like it. And we need to act like it from the beginning. Not halfway through a teacher’s career ...

“In this country we’ve done a lot of reforms aimed at improving teaching performance once teachers are already in the classroom, and in some places to remove teachers who are ineffective. And that, as you know, can be incredibly toxic.”

Poland took a slightly different approach. It established strict testing standards, built thousands of new schools and sent a quarter of the nation’s teachers back to school for extensive training.

In 2000, Polish students scored below average in the PISA test. Three years later, they passed U.S. students. And a decade later, they were in the upper echelon in all three categories. Poland’s economically disadvantaged students, who tend to be worse off than those in the United States, did significantly better than poor kids here.

South Korea’s education model has enabled a nation with virtually no natural resources to grow its economy by 40,000 percent in 50 years. Children there spend long and grueling days in school, then several hours at night with tutors. And they do it about 11 months a year.

But children in South Korea have little or no life outside of school. That system wouldn’t work here. Nor is it worth trying.

What could work here is a version of what worked spectacularly in Finland and Poland.

“There was a consensus in Finland, Korea and Poland that all children had to learn higher order thinking in order to thrive in the world,” writes Ripley near the end of her book. “High school in Finland, Korea and Poland had a purpose, just like high school football practice in America.

“There was a big important contest at the end, and the score counted.”

Elected officials here also keep score, but their counting usually involves money and votes. That’s why few of them will ever admit that mere tinkering on the margins of educational reform is putting at risk the theory of American exceptionalism.

But it is.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.