Next Time Deformers Trot Out The "China's Kicking Our Ass On Test Scores" Meme

The high scores on standardized tests that Chinese students garner have not brought increased wisdom to the geniuses running the country, that's for sure.

Between the poisoned environment, the "casino capitalism" of the economy, the "ghost cities," the increasing cancer rates and other health-related crises,  and the explosions from toxic chemicals that are so large they can be seen from space, perhaps we have enough evidence that we should stop worrying about how well China does on standardized tests?

To be frank, the high test scores don't seem to translate to all that much that is positive.

The Insanity Of The Chinese Education System

This is the education system that Barack Obama and Arne Duncan admire so much:

Nearly 9.8 million Chinese high school students took the National College Entrance Exam, called gaokao, on June 7 and 8.

The emphasis on a two-day test has sparked criticism from some educators because of the incredible amount of pressure it places on students leading up to just one test. Gaokao has also been linked to China's rising suicide rate because of mounted pressure and poor test results.

Hengshui High School, the highest achieving secondary schools in gaokao over the last 14 years, has these as its two mottos:  “Life is not a rehearsal, because you won’t have the chance to live it all over again,” and “If you haven’t died from hard work, just work harder." At Hengshui, students study from 5:30 a.m. to 9:50 p.m., cannot have cell phones and are allowed just one day of vacation every month. Cameras are placed in each classroom to monitor students for laziness. These types of tactics are increasingly common at what many are calling gaokao-sweatshops — schools that exclusively prepare students for gaokao.

“I usually spent three to five minutes eating dinner,” a former student of Hengshui told China Daily.

Needless to say, the stakes are insanely high. 

Check out the photos in this Business Insider piece, along with the captions, and then ask yourself, why would anybody admire this kind of education system?

Jeb Bush Channels David Coleman In A Defense Of The Common Core

College Board President David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core State Standards, famously told an audience in New York State that one of the things you learn in life when you get older is that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel about stuff.

Jeb Bush channeled that Coleman sentiment in a recent defense of Common Core:

Bush has repeatedly explained the standards, implemented and controlled by the states, are designed to make the United States more competitive with the rest of the world. He said those who oppose the standards support the “status quo,” oppose testing and are worried too much about children’s self-esteem.

“Let me tell you something. In Asia today, they don’t care about children’s self esteem. They care about math, whether they can read – in English – whether they understand why science is important, whether they have the grit and determination to be successful,” Bush said.

“You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21st Century: The one that worries about how they feel, or the one that worries about making sure the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody’s lunch?”

We've covered how the education system is in China just a bit here at Perdido Street School blog, but I'm going to revisit two recent posts as a rebuttal to Jeb Bush's jive:

Tell Me Again Why The U.S. Should Mimic The Chinese Education System?

A lot of these suicide stories are coming from South Korea, another country with a high stakes education system that leads to an awful lot of stress and pressure on children and teens, but this one's from China:

Surveillance cameras have caught the shocking moment an under-pressure Chinese student jumped to his death during class.

Heart-stopping footage claims to show the at first motionless boy suddenly leaving his desk, running over to a ledge and leaping out.

His actual jump occurs out of shot, and was not filmed due to the camera's angle.

But the devastated reaction of his fellow classmates, who sprint over to see what's happened before pacing up and down with their heads in their hands, appears to suggest he had tried to commit suicide.

A commenter at the Daily News writes:

How much longer are we going to pretend that children are something to ignore, mistreat, and mis-educate..... This child was coerced into believing this test was so important that combined with the rest of the stress he was feeling he ended his life. Here in the US the children are equally mistreated but they are ignored and mistreated along with being misled.

The older you get the more you realize it's not that big of a deal, and that you should be focusing on aspects of education that actually aren't in the curriculum. This common core crap and the overstressing of test results are completely destroying our children's futures.

And that's absolutely what the plutocrats in power want.

 

And this one:

Many In China Hate The Chinese Education System - Even If Arne And Barack Love It!

From The Guardian:

The streets surrounding Shijia primary school in Beijing were mobbed by a crowd of parents so dense that cars were obliged to beat a retreat.

At 3.45pm on Friday, 11-year-old Zou Tingting, five minutes late, bounded through the school's west gate and into her waiting mother's arms. Tingting's classes were over, but her day was just beginning – she had an hour of homework, plus lessons in ping pong, swimming, art, calligraphy and piano.

Tingting's mother, Huang Chunhua, said that, like many Chinese mothers, she once considered Tingting's academic performance her top priority; now she realises the importance of a well-rounded education. "I've seen British curricular materials, and I'm actually kind of jealous," she said. "British teachers guide students to discover things on their own – they don't just feed them the answers, like in China."

In recent weeks British parents and educators have been in a panic about the discrepancy between the Chinese education system and the UK's. In December the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2012 results for its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test – a reading, maths and science examination administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries. Shanghai students topped the rankings; the UK ranked 26th.

Next week education minister Elizabeth Truss will lead a "fact-finding mission" to Shanghai to learn the secrets of China's success. She plans to adjust the UK's education policy accordingly.

Yet Chinese parents and educators see their own system as corrupt, dehumanising, pressurised and unfair. In fact, many are looking to the west for answers. Huang said that some parents bribe Shijia primary school to admit their children (though she declined to say whether she had done so herself).

Tingting attends an expensive cramming school at weekends, leaving her tired. She will probably have to abandon extracurricular activities in high school to devote more time to the college admission exam, called the gaokao. Many parents consider the gruelling nine-hour test a sorting mechanism that will determine the trajectory of their children's lives.

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

Read the whole article - this is an important piece of journalism that gets at the lie that Asian education systems like the one's in China or South Korea, are vastly outperforming public schools in the United States or Britain.

We keep hearing from Duncan, Obama, et al. that the Chinese or the South Koreans are vastly outperforming us.

We hear the same from Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein et al.

But the truth is much more complex than the test scores these deformers hawk.

Later we'll take a look at the epidemic of suicides in South Korea and the misery many children in the South Korean education system feel over their circumstances.

I've asked this before, I'll as it again - is this the kind of education system we want to mimic here in the United States?

Tell Me Again Why The U.S. Should Mimic The Chinese Education System?

A lot of these suicide stories are coming from South Korea, another country with a high stakes education system that leads to an awful lot of stress and pressure on children and teens, but this one's from China:

Surveillance cameras have caught the shocking moment an under-pressure Chinese student jumped to his death during class.

Heart-stopping footage claims to show the at first motionless boy suddenly leaving his desk, running over to a ledge and leaping out.

His actual jump occurs out of shot, and was not filmed due to the camera's angle.

But the devastated reaction of his fellow classmates, who sprint over to see what's happened before pacing up and down with their heads in their hands, appears to suggest he had tried to commit suicide.

A commenter at the Daily News writes:

How much longer are we going to pretend that children are something to ignore, mistreat, and mis-educate..... This child was coerced into believing this test was so important that combined with the rest of the stress he was feeling he ended his life. Here in the US the children are equally mistreated but they are ignored and mistreated along with being misled.

The older you get the more you realize it's not that big of a deal, and that you should be focusing on aspects of education that actually aren't in the curriculum. This common core crap and the overstressing of test results are completely destroying our children's futures.

And that's absolutely what the plutocrats in power want.

Putting Common Core In Perspective

A commenter at the Newsday story reporting Cuomo is going to run his own pro-CCCSS ads:

CC is part of a world-wide corporate globalization initiative to dumb down teachers, currricula and students and turn them into scared, uncreative, unimaginative, test- taking drones. The de-skilling of teachers and students will turn them into lower-paid, passive people with the ultimate goal of increased corporate profits by cutting wages, benefits, teacher pay and destroying teacher unions. Junk it and go back to the old system which has produced outstanding students, teachers, districts and exceptional American innovation. Asians have a test-centered CC system producing uncreative drones. They rely on stealing US innovation or buying patents and US companies.

The corporate reformers, especially the politicians like Obama, keep talking up South Korea and China for their education systems.

But as we have seen here at Perdido Street School, we shouldn't be emulating either the South Koreans or the Chinese education systems.

How The Chinese Rig Their PISA Scores - And Why It Doesn't Matter Anyway

The next time some education reformer type spews alarmist clap trap around the PISA scores, you can lay this on them:

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

According to an analysis of the rankings, the children of Shanghai's cleaners and caterers are three years more advanced than UK lawyers' and doctors' children in maths. Yet the figures are an unreliable measure of equality. Although Shanghai's 23 million people make up less than 2% of China's population, its per capita GDP is more than double the national average; its college enrolment rate is four times as high.

Furthermore, nearly half of Shanghai's school-age children belong to migrant families and were effectively barred from taking the test: because of China's residence registration system, these students are forced to attend high school in their home provinces, where schools are often debilitatingly understaffed. Although students from 12 provinces took the test in 2009, the government only shared Shanghai's scores.

"The OECD has not disclosed if other Chinese provinces secretly took part in the 2012 assessment. Nor have Pisa officials disclosed who selected the provinces that participated," wrote Tom Loveless, an education expert at Harvard University, on a Brookings Institute blog. "There is a lack of transparency surrounding Pisa's relationship with China."

In short, the Chinese PISA scores are rigged and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) help them to hide the chicanery - here's more from Tom Loveless:

Shanghai is portrayed as a paragon of equity in PISA publications. A 2010 OECD publication, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, highlights model systems that the world should emulate. Shanghai is singled out for praise. One section on Shanghai is entitled, “Ahead of the pack in universal education.” The city is described as an “education hub,” and the only discussion that even remotely touches upon migrants is the following:

 “Graduates from Shanghai’s institutions are allowed to stay and work in Shanghai, regardless of their places of origin. For that reason, many  ’education migrants now move to Shanghai mainly to educate their children.’ “[2]

That description is surreal. PISA’s blindness to what is really going on in Shanghai was also evident in the official release of PISA’s latest scores. The 2012 data appear in volumes organized by themes. Volume II is entitled, PISA 2012 Results: Excellence through Equity, Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed. Shanghai is named as one jurisdiction where schools “achieve high mathematics performance without introducing greater inequities in education outcomes (p. 28)” and one with “above average socio-economic diversity (p. 30).” In the 336 pages of this publication on equity, the word “migrant” appears only once, in a discussion of Mexico. The word “hukou” does not appear at all.

The OECD responded to Loveless' criticism by saying he is relying on old stereotypes of Shanghai, that things have changed there and migrant families are able to send their children to high school in Shanghai rather than having to send them back to schools in their home provinces.

But Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post countered that rebuttal with this:

I asked Post reporters who have covered China about Shanghai, and they said that despite the 2008 change in Shanghai policy, things have improved slightly for migrant families but not very much. Children who do not have Shanghai registration can now in theory get into Shanghai public schools, but only through very complicated and often arduous means that require either a brilliant kid, valuable inside connections or bribe money. (See this Washington Post story that talks about how Chinese parents pay bribes to get their children into top schools.) And while  the government recently announced that the hukou registration system is going to be reformed in the next few years, this does not mean families can suddenly get registered in big cities such as Shanghai.

So bear all this in mind the next time you see a statement like this:

If we don’t emulate China by establishing common nationwide education standards and implementing even more standardized testing, we will fall behind internationally. So goes the argument of Common Core advocates like Michelle Rhee.

“You need to reframe the debate,” Rhee said, speaking to Florida lawmakers in May. “This is about China kicking our butts. Do you want China to kick out butts? No!”

Even if the Chinese PISA scores were accurate - which they do not seem to be  - writer Mitchell Blatt calls into question the lessons Rhee claims we can take from them:

China’s education system is uniquely positioned to produce students who will do well on tests. It’s based on national standards, the knowledge of which is evaluated in a series of nationwide tests. Before entering high school, students take the zhong kao — the high school entrance exam — and before entering college, students study non-stop for a year to take the gao kao — the college entrance exam. Schooling is based heavily on tests and rote memorization.

So it’s no surprise that China did well on PISA.

The important question to ask is, Is China creating a competitive, innovative economy?
China has 19 percent of the world’s population, but in 2011, China only accounted for 9 percent of the world’s share of patent applications. The United States, by contrast, has 4 percent of the world’s population but accounted for 26.7 percent of the world’s patent applications in 2011, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

In China, the use of standards has fostered a high-pressure system that kills creativity.
“When [my son] Star was young, he was very imaginative,” Frank Chen, director of Asian operations for OnSpeX, said. “Now, he appears to be losing his creativity.”

“If he writes whatever he wants in an essay, he will get a bad grade, because the teachers do not like it. But there’s nothing to do about it. I want him to go to a good college. The teachers get bonuses if he goes to a good college.”

Because a student’s performance on the college entrance exam determines which college he goes to, teachers teach to the test, and there is a greater emphasis on memorization than on learning.

This is stifling creative innovation. After Steve Jobs died, Jobs’ biography became a best-seller in China. Chinese people asked the question, “Why doesn’t China have its own Steve Jobs?”

Former Google China CEO Kai-Fu Lee said on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblog, that China’s education system has prevented China from developing such innovators.

It is a folly to think that raising America’s international test scores will automatically improve America’s education quality or economic competitiveness. A paper by Christopher H. Tienken, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University, notes: “According to the World Economic Forum (Schwab 2009), the United States has ranked either 1st or 2nd consistently in economic competitiveness since 1998. … Keep in mind that that U.S. students never scored in the top two spots on any international test during this same period or any prior time.”

An analysis by Keith Baker, a retired researcher for the Department of Education, found that when comparing the United States to countries that outscored us on the FIMS test, the U.S., on average, outranked those countries in the categories of economic growth, quality of life, livability, democracy, and creativity.

Moreover, even if we do make scoring higher on international tests a goal of education reform, Common Core isn’t the right way to do it.

“There is no strong, or even mild, correlation — and certainly not a cause-and-effect relationship — between national standards and national performance on international tests,” Tienken’s report notes.

Right now, the Chinese are discussing how to make China’s education system less reliant on standardized tests and rote memorization. If Michelle Rhee really wants to learn from China, she should look to Chinese reformers. As they know, standardization doesn’t build a globally competitive workforce.

Whether China is cheating on the PISA or not, the United States should not be trying to emulate an education system that is plagued by inequity, stifles creativity, and creates such high pressure on students, parents and teachers that nobody feels safe enough to, as the cliche goes, "think outside the box" and try something different, innovative or new.

Many In China Hate The Chinese Education System - Even If Arne And Barack Love It!

From The Guardian:

The streets surrounding Shijia primary school in Beijing were mobbed by a crowd of parents so dense that cars were obliged to beat a retreat.

At 3.45pm on Friday, 11-year-old Zou Tingting, five minutes late, bounded through the school's west gate and into her waiting mother's arms. Tingting's classes were over, but her day was just beginning – she had an hour of homework, plus lessons in ping pong, swimming, art, calligraphy and piano.

Tingting's mother, Huang Chunhua, said that, like many Chinese mothers, she once considered Tingting's academic performance her top priority; now she realises the importance of a well-rounded education. "I've seen British curricular materials, and I'm actually kind of jealous," she said. "British teachers guide students to discover things on their own – they don't just feed them the answers, like in China."

In recent weeks British parents and educators have been in a panic about the discrepancy between the Chinese education system and the UK's. In December the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the 2012 results for its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test – a reading, maths and science examination administered to half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries. Shanghai students topped the rankings; the UK ranked 26th.

Next week education minister Elizabeth Truss will lead a "fact-finding mission" to Shanghai to learn the secrets of China's success. She plans to adjust the UK's education policy accordingly.

Yet Chinese parents and educators see their own system as corrupt, dehumanising, pressurised and unfair. In fact, many are looking to the west for answers. Huang said that some parents bribe Shijia primary school to admit their children (though she declined to say whether she had done so herself).

Tingting attends an expensive cramming school at weekends, leaving her tired. She will probably have to abandon extracurricular activities in high school to devote more time to the college admission exam, called the gaokao. Many parents consider the gruelling nine-hour test a sorting mechanism that will determine the trajectory of their children's lives.

Chinese experts are also less impressed than Truss by the Pisa scores. "Even though Shanghai students scored well on the test, this doesn't mean that Shanghai's education system doesn't have any problems," said Lao Kaisheng, a professor in the education department of Beijing Normal University. "In fact, it's the opposite."

As long as China's education system remains vast but resource-constrained, Lao added, its schools will default to testing as a reliable indicator of competence. "The education system here puts a heavy emphasis on rote memorisation, which is great for students' test-taking ability but not for their problem-solving and leadership abilities or their interpersonal skills," he said. "Chinese schools just ignore these things."

Read the whole article - this is an important piece of journalism that gets at the lie that Asian education systems like the one's in China or South Korea, are vastly outperforming public schools in the United States or Britain.

We keep hearing from Duncan, Obama, et al. that the Chinese or the South Koreans are vastly outperforming us.

We hear the same from Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein et al.

But the truth is much more complex than the test scores these deformers hawk.

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.”

...

“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.