The Chinese Education System, Despite The Education Reformer Myths, Is Actually A Mess

When the 2010 PISA test scores came out, the NY Times published this:

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.

American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.

About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.

Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China’s rapid modernization.

The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.

“Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education, referring to the groundbreaking Soviet satellite launching. Mr. Finn, who has visited schools all across China, said, “I’ve seen how relentless the Chinese are at accomplishing goals, and if they can do this in Shanghai in 2009, they can do it in 10 cities in 2019, and in 50 cities by 2029.”

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“We have to see this as a wake-up call,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview on Monday.

“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported the following this week:

In an international survey released just over two years ago, high school students from Shanghai scored at the top in math, science, and reading. Some Americans saw this as a Sputnik moment—a wake-up call for the rest of the world to better educate its young or risk falling behind the Chinese. In March, China’s leadership announced that education spending totaled 7.79 trillion yuan ($1.26 trillion) over the last five years, reaching a target of 4 percent of gross domestic product. “The quality and level of education in China was comprehensively raised,” said outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao on March 5. 

The reality is China’s students receive educations of greatly varying quality. Their parents often pay a lot for it, depending on where they live and how ambitious their choice of school—even though China is committed to a system “implemented uniformly by the State,” with “no tuition or miscellaneous fee,” according to the 1986 Compulsory Education Law. Yet some rural families struggle to pay school costs as high as one-half their meager incomes, while up to 130 students crowd country classrooms, according to Yang Dongping, an education expert at the Beijing Institute of Technology and the dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute. Yang adds that urban parents pay introduction fees of as much as $10,000 to middlemen to win entry into the better schools.

The central government’s decision in 1994 to have localities return the lion’s share of their tax revenue to Beijing has made it much harder for poor cities to afford a decent school budget. The annual education expenditure per middle school student in 2010 in Beijing totaled 20,023 yuan, more than six times the 3,204 yuan spent in the poor province of Guizhou, according to the Ministry of Education. Students in an impoverished district of Hubei province were told to bring their own desks to class last year. After the media widely reported this, Chinese vented their ire at officials. “This brings shame on the government,” wrote one microblogger on Sina Weibo (SINA). Says Bill Bikales, chief of social policy and reform for children at Unicef China: “When China did the recentralization of finances 20 years ago, they never really confronted the issue that there would be huge gaps in services between wealthy and poor areas.”

The consolidation of country schools—in response to declining numbers of rural kids as China urbanized—has worsened conditions, as closings outpace shrinking enrollments. In 1997, China had 630,000 primary schools; in 2011 it had 254,000, with average class sizes soaring, says education expert Yang. Primary schools are now more than five kilometers away from home on average, says Yang, so children face long commutes on dangerous country roads.

Rural families pay up to 2,000 yuan annually in education costs, due in part to higher transportation expenses or dormitory fees for students who opt to board. To secure desks near the teacher, families pay 300 yuan per month, says Liao Ran, who runs programs in Asia combating graft for Berlin-based Transparency International. While a few years ago the youngest students almost all went to school, now as many as 900,000 6- to 8-year-olds drop out every year, says Yang.

Oh, and if you think waitlists for TriBeCa kindergartens are bad, here's how they do that kind oif thing in China:

Even registered urban children face heated competition to get into so-called key schools. Officials focused resources on such schools to train experts to industrialize China in the 1950s. While elitism was supposed to stop with the 1986 law, Yang says parents pay middlemen fees, and make school donations from 200,000 to 800,000 yuan, to win entry to the most sought-after institutions. “Corruption in education has become rampant,” says Transparency International’s Liao. 

“In China you are supposed to be able to enjoy free education. But in every good school, all the children are from families with money or connections,” says Guo Jing, 38, who tried to get her daughter into a key school in 2008. “Good connections are all based on spending.” She says she paid a middleman 20,000 yuan to secure a spot in Beijing’s exclusive Zhongguancun No. 3 Primary School but balked when he wanted an extra 10,000 yuan. Her 11-year-old daughter is now at a less prestigious school.

Despite the caterwauling from education corporatists like Chester Finn and Arne Duncan, the Chinese education system is a mess.

You wouldn't know that from the news, would you?

Or from the education reformers.

Or the Obama administration.

But it's true.

Let me hit some of the highlights from the Bloomberg Businessweek article again, just for emphasis:

Close to a million 8 and 9 year old's are dropping out of school every year in China.

Some rural schools have class sizes of 130.

Parents pay to get their kids seated closer to the teacher's desk.

Some kids have to bring their own desks to school.

Parents have to tender enormous bribes to get their kids into the "right" schools.

And the way schools are financed across the country is a nightmare, making even the American school financing system look okay by comparison.

These are the realities and they surely are a Sputnik moment for me.

It means the meme we have heard all these years - the Chinese are beating us! the Chinese are beating us! - is starting to look like those warnings in the 80's about the Japanese becoming the most powerful economy in the world.

How'd that work out?

What Bloomberg Businessweek describes is a very uneven education system at best in China, with many kids having a pretty terrible education experience and either dropping out or getting "left behind" while the ones from families of means receive an excellent education that opens the door for all kinds of opportunities.

Funny, but that's the meme that Finn, Duncan and the rest of the education corporatists tell us about the American system.

Turns out it's the case in China too.

Why Aren't You In Saturday School, You LAZY BASTARDS???!!!!"

It's 11:06 on a Saturday morning, I am sitting in front of my computer typing up this blog post, drinking coffee, listening to Siouxsie Sioux's solo album Mantaray, doing some laundry and getting ready to go outside and enjoy the nice weather.

But Chester Finn and the Wall Street Journal say "Not so fast, you lazy American! It's Saturday and you should be working at your school, teaching children how to prepare for standardized tests instead of enjoying time off!!!"

And of course they say the same thing about time off in the summer too.

It's unpatriotic, it's harmful to the individual and the country as a whole, and of course it hurts the kids:

In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans—and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries—and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.

Some U.S. schools have figured this out. Those that boast extraordinary success with poor and minority youngsters typically surround them, like Mesopotamians, with learning from dawn to dusk. The celebrated Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a network of over 80 charter schools around the country, subjects its middle-schoolers to 60% more instructional time than the typical public school—including eight- to 10-hour days, Saturday morning classes and abbreviated summer breaks.

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Our deeper problem is the enormous amount of time that typical American schools spend on gym, recess, lunch, assembly, changing classes, homeroom, lining up to go to the art room, looking at movies, writing down homework assignments, quieting the classroom, celebrating this or that holiday, and other pursuits. It's not all wasted time but neither are these minutes spent in ways that boost test scores, enhance college-readiness or deepen pupils' understanding of literature, geography or algebra.

Visit a KIPP school or another high-performance institution and you find that a big reason for the longer day is that it accommodates these nonacademic pursuits without sacrificing the instructional core. They tolerate remarkably little wasted time, particularly in the classroom setting. Their teachers squander minimal class time on discipline challenges or distributing and collecting materials. They systematically deliver lessons that are carefully planned and structured—and youngsters who need additional help to understand something get it later, sometimes in the evening via the teacher's cellphone, so that the entire class doesn't need to pause for an explanation.

Longer school days and years also aid working parents; for many of them, 2:30 dismissal times and three-month summer breaks are more burden than benefit. And the more time kids spend in safe schools, the less time they have to go astray at home or in the neighborhood.

...

Which brings us back to high-performance schools, institutions that commandeer far more than 9% of their students' lives and use the extra time to accomplish three things: more hours to imbibe important skills and knowledge; fewer hours outside school to waste or get into trouble; and a de facto culture transplant, wrought by dynamic teachers who instill in their young charges the college aspirations, appreciation of learning, good behavior and orderly habits that are too often missing from homes and neighborhoods.

Disadvantaged youngsters really need—for their own good—the benefits of longer days, summer classes and Saturday mornings in school. But nearly every young American needs to learn more than most are learning today, both for the sake of their own prospects and on behalf of the nation's competitiveness in a shrinking, dog-eat-dog world. Yes, it will disrupt everything from school-bus schedules to family vacations. Yes, it will carry some costs, at least until we eke offsetting savings from the technology-in-education revolution. But even Aristotle might conclude that this is a price worth paying.

Wow - so much to unpack here.

First, let us note the explicit assumption and Hobbesian world view that the only experiences children should have are ones that lead to increasing their own and the "nation's competitiveness in a shrinking, dog-eat-dog world."

Next, let us note Mr Finn' s assumption that time outside school is "wasted" or an opportunity to "get into trouble." Indeed, even recess, changing classes or eating lunch is a waste of valuable test preparation time.

Let us also note that Mr. Finn sees that parents are already working 10 hour days and are exhausted from all that work on weekends so why not help them out by keeping the kids in school 60 hours a week, allowing Americans to work longer and harder without the "burden" of having to interact with their kids or have a family life outside of work/school.

Finally, while Mr. Finn sells his 60 hour school weeks/all-year round school years on the idea that this will help the American economy, what he fails too see is that 75% of the American economy runs on consumption of things, including stuff that gets consumed on evenings, weekends, and family vacations, so the short case scenario (and perhaps even the long-term one) for a country that no longer produces or manufactures anything but entertainment opportunities that tries to turn the school year into a Spartan dawn to dusk, year-round Race to the Top extravaganza would be economic disaster. After all, somebody's got to buy all those video games, watch all that mindless television, eat all that junk food, and play all that miniature golf.

And what would turning the American education system to a Spartan dawn to dusk, year-round Race to the Top extravaganza do the emotional lives of Americans, which have already been severely diminished in our alienated post-modern society which only privileges the pursuit of material wealth and consumption of bigger, better, newer goods.

Yikes - how anyone who is actually human could listen to this jive Finn and the WSJ is selling without laughing at them in disdain and mocking them accordingly is beyond me.

Simply put, they are looking to turn the clock back to a time when people had to work from dawn until dusk to survive their short, painful, miserable existences.

They want to bring back the days of feudalism when the vast majority of humans were owned by their lords and lived and worked solely to enrich the powerful.

This time around, the top 1% are the lords of the manor and the chains they are using to enslave us is debt and the threat of globalism.

Better work longer and harder or the Chinese will own us!!!

I'm so old, I can remember when they used to say that about the Japanese.

Better work longer and harder or you want be able to afford to purchase the latest, greatest toys and technology.

Never mind that despite all the toys and technology we have these days, Americans are the unhappiest they have been in a long, long time because the quality of their relationships and the amount of time they have to do things for themselves and their families has diminished as work hours has increased. Interestingly enough as work time has increased, so has alienation, loneliness, addictions and an overall dissatisfaction with life.

But I digress from the point, which is that Mr. Finn is a dehumanized soulless blowhard who wants to ensure that the rest of us are as empty and soulless as he.

And he wants to do this by having us work so long and so hard for the whole year through so that we have no idea whether we are coming or going and no idea whether this is the kind of society we actually want to live in.

Because we always could change what we value and privilege - we don't HAVE to value and privilege consumption and material wealth over everything else.

There are such things as family, friendship, community, spiritual growth, emotional awareness, and intellectual pursuits that are NOT part of a breathless Race to the Top competition where only the strong survive in a dog-eat-dog world.

But to get to that kind of world, we have to treat Finn, the WSJ, Bloomberg, Obama, Duncan, Klein, Gates, Broad, Jobs and the rest of the corporate whoredom with disdain and mockery as the soulless empty vessels they are.

And we have to vote with our money and our time.

We have to take back both these things from the vast corporatocracy that currently runs everything.

There are already some movements to do just this - the Take Back Your Time movement and various Simple Living movements.

Interestingly enough, these movements appeal to people on both right and left who are sick of our post-modern corporate culture and economy - sick of them for different reasons, to be sure, but nonetheless sick of them.

So we can fight the Finns and Bloombergs and Obamas of the world.

But we have to start now.

BTW, the Siouxsie album is done and I'm on to a Joe Strummer and the Mescalero's boot from 2002.

They're covering Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall."

I'm holding out hope that Mr. Cliff and Mr. Strummer are right.

And now I'm off to enjoy the nice weather, Thomas Hobbes, Chester Finn and the Kipsters be damned.