New York Times columnist Tom Friedman had a column a few days ago saying that PISA would soon make it possible for everyone to compare the scores of their school to schools all over the world. No one will be average anymore! Just being able to take tests and compare scores will drive us all to the top!
After I read this with a sinking sensation, thinking of the whole world competing to get better test scores (why?), I asked the eminent scholar Yong Zhao to react to this column.
He sent the following as he was traveling in Australia:
“Imagine, in a few years, you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world,” says Schleicher. “And then you take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’ ”
Sounds like a commercial for a global standardized testing service? Well, it is. And it is from one of the most influential media outlets The New York Times and endorsed by one of the most popular voices about globalization Thomas Friedman in an op-ed piece last week http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/opinion/friedman-average-is-over-part-ii-.html.
The product is OECD’s PISA, the international assessment program that claims to test reading, math, and science skills of 15 year olds. PISA should a great case study of marketing strategy in business schools. In about 10 years, it has been successfully marketed to governments and educational authorities in over 70 countries.
PISA has convinced many that it is the gold standard of education quality. Although there are other international assessment programs, which has had a long history, but more countries participate in PISA, which by itself is a great marketing slogan, just like “More Doctors Smoke Camel” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI.
Up until now, PISA has remained at the system level, reporting averages of groups of students, which has already generated a “PISA Score Race” across the world. With this new round of PISA and the system OECD is developing, it is coming to a school near you and your house. But before you log on and “march to your local superintendent and ask ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland,’ it would be good if you ask the PISA advocates the following questions:
- Why didn’t the Chinese have a big party celebrating its stunning PISA performance? When the last round of PISA results were released in 2010, China’s Shanghai scored #1 in all three areas, but China, a country eager to celebrate any international achievement, did not even have much national media coverage. In fact, whenever PISA was discussed inside China, it is often associated with “so what?” (Read my blog posts: The Real Reason Behind Chinese Students Top PISA Performance http://zhaolearning.com/2010/12/10/a-true-wake-up-call-for-arne-duncan-the-real-reason-behind-chinese-students-top-pisa-performance/ and The Grass is Greener: http://zhaolearning.com/2011/09/18/the-grass-is-greener-learning-from-other-countries/)
- Why the Chinese, who supposedly enjoy the best education according to PISA, spend their life’s savings to send their children to U.S. schools, which supposedly offer a much inferior education? Those who cannot afford to send their children overseas work hard to send their children American schools inside China. If they cannot even do that, they send their children to after school programs modeled after American schools. One of the programs that spread like wildfire in China claims to offer “authentic American K-12 education.” “Attend American Schools in China” is its marketing line.
The reason is perhaps best illustrated by OECD itself. A report (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581016.pdf) about lessons to learn from high PISA performers produced by OECD says:
Compared with other societies, young people in Shanghai may be much more immersed in learning in the broadest sense of the term. The logical conclusion is that they learn more, even though what they learn and how they learn are subjects of constant debate. Critics see young people as being “fed” learning because they are seldom left on their own to learn in a way of their choice. They have little direct encounters with nature, for example, and little experience with society either. While they have learned a lot, they may not have learned how to learn. The Shanghai government is developing new policy interventions to reduce student workload and to refocus the quality of student learning experiences over quantity. (p. 103)
Essentially, the issues (and questions we must ask) are:
- Is what the PISA measures truly valuable? Ultimately, we all want a great education for our children, but does PISA scores really measure the quality of education our children will need?
- What is sacrificed to achieve such high scores? Are the sacrifices worth the scores?
- If China has such a great education, why don’t we just outsource it to China?
Read my op-ed in Education Week: Doublethink http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/07/18/36zhao_ep.h31.html)
In a nutshell, American education is far from perfect, but China is not a model for emulation. For more about China, PISA, and American education, read my latest book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students http://zhaolearning.com/world-class-learners-my-new-book/or Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Leading-Way-Education-Globalization/dp/1416608737/ref=pd_sim_b_1
Maybe we should all agree that Friedman is NOT an expert on everything.
He recycles the same stories and vignettes over and over again. And we all know how his daughter did TFA so it must be a great organization. I skim his pieces because I don’t learn anything.
Mike Taibbi has a great piece pointing out all his broad generalizations and name dropping. There is even a video of him blabbering.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/thomas-friedmans-new-state-of-grace-20120627
He also learns a lot by talking to taxi drivers and unnamed experts. Trust him.
Thanks for this link.
It is hilarious: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/thomas-friedmans-new-state-of-grace-20120627
We should not take him seriously.
Arne Duncan tweeted about this column earlier this week and this was my reply: “Thomas Friedman has earned a reputation for profiting from promoting his questionable ideas to America’s gullible elites.”. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet.
Thomas Friedman, the NYT’s “thinker,” is not that bright. He thinks that everyone will need to be “special” or have a “special app (added value).” to get a job in the future. I hate to break it to him, but not everyone is going to be a Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, etc. Most people aren’t “special.” What are they supposed to do, collect aluminum cans on the side of the road? He doesn’t seem to understand that Americans cannot compete with workers working for ten dollars a day. Globalization is a failure, and that is why our country is getting ripped apart right now. Go to youtube and type in Sir James Goldsmith. He went on Charlie Rose and described exactly how the world would be by now: no jobs, high instability, little opportunity, etc. Of course, Charlie Rose was siding with the corporate propagandists, excactly how he sides with the education reformers today. Sir James Goldsmith spent the last few years of his life trying to save the middle class in America, in Europe, and was ridiculed for his opposition to Globalization.
And American engineers can’t compete with engineers in China and India who are paid 1/5 or less what Americans expect and need to live. Not because China and India have better-trained engineers; they don’t. But because their engineers work for less than a living wage by American standards.
And thus the lie about needing more STEM folks in this country. The yahoos want cheap labor. We do not have a STEM crisis.
Freidman is an expert on absolutely NOTHING. Don’t believe me? Then just read some of the garbage he writes. He should apologize to his alma mater for making such ridiculous statements and claims.
Any of us could have been bill gates, given the advantages he had due to his luck in choosing who to have for parents. Being born on 3rd base really helps one get ahead.
If bill gates had been born in rural Oklahoma or Montana, I wonder how he would have turned out? I am guessing asst. manager at wal-mart, at best.
This article was originally published Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 4:00 PM in the Seattle Times. Keep it in mind, when you are discussing PISA and China’s test scores.
Guest columnist
Despite recent test scores, China is not ‘eating our lunch’
American students are not getting their lunches handed to them by Chinese students despite the scores of a recent test.
By Kam Wing Chan
Special to The Times.
THE lackluster performance of our 15-year-olds in math, science and reading in a standardized test compared with Shanghai’s students scoring first in all three subjects, have stirred some interesting and somewhat self-deprecating comments. President Obama declared it a “Sputnik moment,” and columnist Esther Cepeda opined alarmingly about China “eating our lunch.”
To be sure, our 14th-to-25th ranking in the Program for International Student Assessment is no cause for complacency. Neither is China eating our lunch, or any meal — at least not yet.
We know that China is a master of turning out sparkling economic statistics. Some of those are real and deserve congratulation — China’s economy is indeed on a meteoric rise. But many others are not so real, gamed by bureaucrats whose careers are tied to certain short-term statistical yardsticks, or as a result of our ignorance of how China functions.
Cepeda is right in pointing out that the contrast of the U.S. scores with Shanghai’s is not totally appropriate: It is comparing the entire U.S. population — including many who are on free or reduced-price lunches — with China’s cream of the crop, the Shanghai kids.
Even more important, but far less-known, is that in Shanghai, as in most other Chinese cities, the rural migrant workers that are the true urban working poor (totaling about 150 million in the country), are not allowed to send their kids to public high schools in the city. This is engineered by the discriminatory hukou or household registration system, which classifies them as “outsiders.” Those teenagers will have to go back home to continue education, or drop out of school altogether.
In other words, the city has 3 to 4 million working poor, but its high-school system conveniently does not need to provide for the kids of that segment. In essence, the poor kids are purged from Shanghai’s sample of 5,100 students taking the tests. The Shanghai sample is the extract of China’s extract. A fairer play would be to ask kids at Seattle’s private Lakeside School to race against Shanghai’s kids.
More fundamentally, I would argue, the winner of the next true “Sputnik race” will not be called by PISA test scores.
It will be decided, instead, by other strengths the U.S. still has over China. We have a more open and receptive social system. For example, Washington state, like many other states, accepts undocumented immigrant children in their public schools and universities. Whereas in China, children of migrant workers — and these kids are Chinese nationals, not foreigners — are barred from attending high schools in cities where their parents work.
Moreover, U.S. education is generally far broader than simply getting good test scores, while top Chinese schools fixate on those. Kids in many American schools are exposed to a wider, sometimes open-ended, learning experience and are encouraged to explore beyond the conventional.
It is the openness and creativity of the American system and the opportunities it brings — the crucial factors that unleash the Bill Gateses of the world — that not only determine who eats the lunch but even what’s on the menu.
After all, just a mere 20 years ago the menu did not have anything to do with American inventions like iPods, Google, Twitter and Facebook.
Kam Wing Chan is a professor in geography at the University of Washington. His research focuses on China’s migrant labor and urbanization.
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2011/01/be-like-shanghai-sorry-mike.html
This blogger taught in China for some years, and describes his experience and the differences in our schools.
Chinese education has better overall throughput but supress the best ones on creative. USA education is optimized for genius but has lower overall throughput. Chinese education system is exam driven and all Chinese know that this is serious drawback. The problem is the corruption issue. Exam scores are relatively an objective criterio. Without such an objective criterio, the poor and disadvantaged pupils won’t have any chance to compete with the wealthy and advantaged ones, who will monopoly all the education resources. But the consequence is that exam scores become the sole goal of Chinese education systems. With the progressing of China, when education resources can be relatively fairly shared by the haves and the have-not, China will skew its education system to less dependent on Exam-driven. But the real issue for any education system is how to balance the optimizations for both the overall throughput and the producing of genius.
Dr. Yong Zhao is helping China get away from their DYNASTY educational system of the testing. I was in D.C., and met a young male from China who was working an an intern at the hotel where I stayed. I asked this young male if he knew who Dr. Yong Zhao is. HIs response: “Yes! He’s famous American educator who is trying ot help China get away from their narrow educational system.” Then I asked him, “Why are you in the United States working as an intern at this hotel?” His response, “To learn to think out of the box.”