Amanda Ripley

Well, there isn't any one profile of a survivor, but there are profiles. Depending on the disaster you have certain advantages and…

— Amanda Ripley

“Kids meet the expectations you set for them,”

— Amanda Ripley

Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a believe that they can influence…

— Amanda Ripley

By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of…

— Amanda Ripley

The one thread that was most surprising and most consistent was the lack of fear that people felt at the worst moment.…

— Amanda Ripley

“Since 9/11, the U.S. government has sent over $23 billion to states and cities in the name of homeland security. Almost none…

— Amanda Ripley

“One thing was clear: To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered…

— Amanda Ripley

“Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one.…

— Amanda Ripley

My anxiety about disasters is lower. The more you know, the less scary any of this stuff is. And that's my hope…

— Amanda Ripley

“In almost every other developed country, the schools with the poorest students had more teachers per student; the opposite was true in…

— Amanda Ripley

“These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as…

— Amanda Ripley

“Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse…

— Amanda Ripley

“Economists had found an almost one-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation's long term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic…

— Amanda Ripley

Narrative is the beginning of recovery.

— Amanda Ripley

“The Iron Child culture was contagious; it was hard for kids and parents to resist the pressure to study more and more.…

— Amanda Ripley

“The Korean private market had unbundled education down to the one in-school variable that mattered most: the teacher. It was about as…

— Amanda Ripley

“rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn’t take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance…

— Amanda Ripley

Most serious plane crashes are survivable. There's a sense that, 'Oh, if we go down, that's it, it's out of my hands.'…

— Amanda Ripley

Women are far more likely to follow orders to evacuate, especially women with children. At the same time, women were much more…

— Amanda Ripley

“Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you…

— Amanda Ripley

“The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In…

— Amanda Ripley

The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it's not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.

— Amanda Ripley

“Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something…

— Amanda Ripley

Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.

— Amanda Ripley

We gauge risk literally hundreds of times per day, usually well and often subconsciously. We start assessing risk before the disaster even…

— Amanda Ripley