As a teacher in an inner-city school, Lucy Crehan was exasperated with ever-changing government policy claiming to be based on lessons from "top-performing" education systems. She became curious about what was really going on in classrooms of the countries whose teenagers ranked top in the world in reading, math, and science. Determined to dig deeper, Lucy set off on a personal educational odyssey through Finland, Japan, Singapore, Shanghai, and Canada, teaching in schools, immersing herself in their very different cultures and discovering the surprising truths about school life that don’t appear in the charts and graphs. Cleverlands documents her journey, weaving together her experiences with research on policy, history, psychology, and culture to offer extensive new insights and provide answers to three fundamental questions: How do these countries achieve their high scores? What can others learn from them? And what is the price of this success?