Yong Zhao is a brilliant, articulate scholar who was educated in China but is now a professor at the University of Oregon. He has written two books that I highly recommend: “Catching Up or Leading the Way” and “World-Class Learners.”
In this post, he reveals some inside information about PISA: Finland has slipped out of the top tier. He says this is not because the quality of education declined in Finland, but because so many test-centric Asian nations (and cities) participated.
He writes:
“While the Finns are right to be concerned about their education, it would be a huge mistake to believe that their education has gotten worse. Finland’s slip in the PISA ranking has little to do with what Finland has or has not done. It has been pushed down by others. In other words, Finland’s education quality as measured by the PISA may have not changed at all and remains strong, but the introduction of other education systems that are even better at taking tests has made Finland appear worse than it really is.”
And he adds:
“While the East Asian systems may enjoy being at the top of international tests, they are not happy at all with the outcomes of their education. They have recognized the damages of their education for a long time and have taken actions to reform their systems. Recently, the Chinese government again issued orders to lesson student academic burden by reducing standardized tests and written homework in primary schools. The Singaporeans have been working reforming its curriculum and examination systems. The Koreans are working on implementing a “free semester” for the secondary students. Eastern Asian parents are willing and working hard to spend their life’s savings finding spots outside these “best” education systems. Thus international schools, schools that follow the less successful Western education model, have been in high demand and continue to grow in East Asia. Tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean parents send their children to study in Australia, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. It is no exaggeration to say that that the majority of the parents in China would send their children to an American school instead of keeping them in the “best performing” Chinese system, if they had the choice.”
The previous two postings on Yong Zhao’s website address some of the same issues re Chinese education and testing.
The first link below is entitled “China Enters ‘Testing-free’ Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform” and the second is entitled “Green Evaluation: China’s Latest Reform to Deemphasize Testing.”
Link: http://zhaolearning.com/2013/08/22/china-enters-“testing-free”-zone-the-new-ten-commandments-of-education-reform/
Link: http://zhaolearning.com/2013/06/24/green-evaluation-china’s-latest-reform-to-deemphasize-testing/
Short postings; well worth reading.
😎
I can understand scare-quoting ‘decline’, but I wonder why you’ve scare-quoted ‘success’. Looking through the results from my country (Australia) http://www.acer.edu.au/documents/PISA-2012-In-Brief.pdf p.13 I note a comparison of proficiency levels for Australia, OECD average, and Shanghai, with the latter scoring very well at the highest proficiency.
Proficiency level 6 is defined as;
“Conceptualise, generalise and use information. They are capable of advanced mathematical thinking and reasoning; have a mastery of symbolic and formal mathematical operations and relationships; and can formulate and precisely communicate their findings, interpretations and arguments.”
Shanghai has 31% of their students at that level. OECD average is 3%.
To me, that looks like success.
R.T. Lindsay,
Since I don’t believe that international test scores predict the future, and since I believe they are massively misused and overemphasized, I don’t believe they indicate either “decline” or “success.” I would be truly impressed by scores that represent real improvements in the lives of children. Test scores do not.
I wish I could put what you just said, Diane, in 140 characters! The essential piece I took was that ed reformers may jump on the Asian model as the way towards improvements instead of looking toward Finland. but you really nail it here when you say the these scores don’t predict the future and I really think most people do think the test scores and our future are one and the same thing.
Shanghai educates the elite of the elite only. It has 500,000+ immmigrants that it locks out of its high schools entirely. Shanghai parents spend the equivalent of a years salary on mainland China for extra tutoring and classes on the weekends. And again, if equivalent poverty levels are compared, the US is always right at the top. Being good at tests is not the end goal of education, and is not a measure of a nation.
This is correct. There is not freedom of movement in China–I believe one needs official permission to change residencies. In the old Maoist days it was because jobs and comprehensivve social services were assigned and the government did not want to overburden the cities. These days the government does not want the workers in the Western factories to cause trouble and it gives the government a reason to kick out agitators.
It also is why Shanghai, a third world hole, does well on these tests…
I was heartened to read Dr. Zhao’s comments on the PISA results on the day that the scores were released to the rest of us. Dr. Zhao spoke at Joel Barlow High School in Redding, CT in June 2012. Eileen Fitzgerald of the Danbury Connecticut News-Times covered his talks and her column appeared in the paper the following morning. His comments and perspective then were so refreshing in comparison to so much of what we had been hearing about the sorry state of education in the US.
Eileen FitzGerald: Scholar tells area educators U.S. should prize creativity
Updated 10:48 p.m., Wednesday, June 6, 2012
“What is the purpose of education? How do you measure the quality of education?”
You can read the original article at: http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Eileen-FitzGerald-Scholar-tells-area-educators-3614702.php#ixzz1xlKf7oo2
“Yong Zhao, professor and associate dean for global education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon, asked those two questions to educators at Joel Barlow High School in Redding recently.
His theme reflected his newest book, “World Class Learners, Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students.”
Zhao said he’s worried about the United States’ efforts to have national common core standards when the world needs more creative and entrepreneurial thinkers.
Traditional schools prepare employees for jobs rather than to be creative entrepreneurs, he said.
Zhao also believes commonly accepted measures of good education are not good indicators.
For instance, the Programme for International Student Assessment, is viewed by many educators as the goal standard of achievement.
In 2009, the United States placed at the bottom and China at the top on the test that evaluates education systems worldwide by testing 15-year-old students in participating countries.
Zhao said that test has the wrong focus for the future and even the PISA test for perceived entrepreneurial capability found that those with great entrepreneurial scores had poor math scores.
As a native of China, Zhao said he knows his country will never have a entrepreneur like Steve Jobs unless it revamps its educational system.
China has 20 percent of the world population but only 1 percent of the patents, he said.
“The products that dominate the globe are made by the United States,” he said. “Bad education has not ruined the United States.”
Now Asian countries are trying to find new ways to give students more experiences just as the United States pushes for more rigor, he said.
“To me, as a parent, I want students to be confident, to come out of school curious. When you are confident, you can learn other things but once you ruin confidence, it’s hard to get it back,” Zhao said.
Lady Gaga, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs are happy accidents, he said.
“The American system allows people like Lady Gaga to survive,” he said. “You tolerate people like Lady Gaga. Most systems force a student to conform, some more than others.”
The question educators should ask is: “Does your educational system allow for the existence of exceptional talent?”
America has more resources, more computers, museums, arts and sports than China or many other countries, Zhao said.
“Eighty-five percent of the kids in other countries don’t have the opportunity to be entrepreneurial.”
Education must change from creating employees to creating entrepreneurs, who are risk-takers, confident, creative and motivated, he said.
“The next generation of education must enhance every student,” he said. “We need to allow the curriculum to follow the child and have the school support a child’s interest.”
He said the United States needs children who remain passionate, remain curious and never refuse new experiences.
This is a lot to consider.
Zhao turns education reform in the United States on its ear just as the topic has captured the attention of the country.”
Finally someone making sense! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Not finally. There are those who have been making sense concerning standardized testing from the very gitgo of it. Most have chosen to ignore them and what they have been saying.
Noel Wilson has definitively shown the inanities and insanities that educational standards and standardized testing are in his never rebutted nor refuted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
As he states on page four of chapte twelve:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
And that is just one gem of many gems found in the jewely box that is his dissertation.
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
I wholeheartedly agree with Zhao. PISA works best for a country that emphasizes test-based education. I read the news about Japan’s surge on the test scores. They say Japan has turned the things around since their fall in 03 and 06. Does this mean that students are receiving quality education and good health, mental, and emotional care? Hardly. Japanese schools today are dealing with numerous problems including bullying, sexual harrassment, violence, corporal punishment, and suicide. Many students are having hard time to survive a secular learning environment.
“Many students are having hard time to survive a secular learning environment.”
What??? What do you mean by that statement?
So only a religious learning environment will prevent the many problems you mentioned????
I’m not talking about religion. It’s a taboo in my country.
Japanese students are dealing with emotional stress of rote-learning, drilling practice from 8 to 3, M-F. Teachers are discouraged from making their own lesson plans because of ineffective ministry’s instructional guidance.
Higher scores by East Asian countries are simply a reflection of the high IQ’s of East Asians. This average IQ is 107-108 for the Japanese and Koreans based on extensive data. While the data on the Han are not as extensive an average IQ of 105 is a reasonable estimate. The Finnish average IQ is about 102.
Average brain size of East Asians is about 2% greater than that of Europeans.
“they are not at all happy with the outcomes of their education”
East Asians are never happy about anything. Finns are happy as long as they drink enough.
Tracy – The Han have been very good at tests for thousands of years and throughout most of that time have been very successful. Unlike China and Korea, Japan has never had much of a testing tradition but has also been very successful.
Jim
You should do some quick research on education system in my country. Students are required to take the entrance exams twice in their lifetime–first at 9th grade to get into high school, and second at 12th grade (if they want to go to college). This was a historical tradition that lasted over 100 years. Japan’s Monkasho(national education ministry) is mandating all 6th graders and 9th graders to take national achievement tests every year since 2007. What makes students “successful” in education totally depends on how you describe it. But getting a high score in international test/national achievement test is hardly a key indicator of success that predicts students’ bright future in a country that suffering from the “Two Lost Decades.”
I’m not sure Lady Gaga is a great advertisement for the American Way.
East Asians are certainly far more conformist than Europeans but history really doesn’t offer a clear verdict that that is a disadvantage in the long run. Advantageous cultural\technological innovations developed by a particular group can generally be readily acquired by any high IQ group such as East Asians so there may be little longterm advantage to a group being highly creative.
Ken – 100 years isn’t much of a historical tradition compared with China’s tradition of testing.
Ken – By success I am referring to the general success of East Asian cultures. Japan for example probably had the highest standard of living in the world for about a thousand years until surpassed by Western Europe in the late 18th century. While Japan lagged behind Western Europe in the 19th century that has since returned to normal.
The “Two Lost Decades” has nothing to do with education.
Jim–
Those who were students at schools in Japan in the 90s and 00s are having completely different perspective from their parents and grandparents, while national education system has maintained its high academic competitiveness. They are not living in the same time as their parents in the 80s’ when Japan was enjoying economic bubble. It was pretty easy to get a job and make a 6-digit money for many people in Japan but +25 years ago, if they successfully climbed up the academic ladder from K-12 through college and university.
Today in Japan? Forget it. It’s not gonna happen. National population has been shrinking by 13% and will become half by 2050. Kids are getting more inward-looking today. Many of those are refusing to step outside the country for study—even for traveling. Bullying and corporal punishment are pushing them to the edge of the cliff to jump off and say farewell to life! I don’t see any significance in high a ranking of international test scores because it doesn’t give them any promise to their success in life.
I think Jim was joking. In any event, I taught in Japan and it seemed pedagogy was limited, kids slept in class, and kids just kind of passively hung-out. Teachers did not seem stressed and, when bonuses were included, paid much more than most American teachers. There was no poverty in the schools, though some bumbs were allowed to live in the park. The trend was for less homework, less school day (back in 03). What am I missing?
Also, Ken, can you elaborate on the generational shift? I taught those students–I saw some spoiledness, but nothing huge–still very similar to what Westerners perceive Japan has. Granted I’ve missed the last ten years of hip hop craze.
Great post! Sadly, the “decline” of American PISA test scores was the first item on my radio channel’s
99 second News Update at 7 o’clock this morning.
Hi Diane,
I hope you are feeling better.
I agree that Yong Zhao is a pretty brilliant scholar, and I was therefore interested in the different snips that we chose to comment on in Yong’s post. Here’s the one I pulled:
“The East Asian education systems may have a lot to offer to those who want a compliant and homogenous test takers. For those who are looking for true high quality education, Finland would still be a better place. But for an education that can truly cultivate creative, entrepreneurial and globally competent citizens needed in the 21st century, you will have to invent it. Global benchmarking can only give you the best of the past. For the best of the future, you will have do the invention yourself.”
I’m wondering what your reaction to that part of his thinking is. He’s suggesting a total reinvention of the system to meet the needs of future students. Do you agree?
Thanks for all you do on the behalf of kids.
Best,
Will
Thanks, Will Richardson,
I appreciate Yong Zhao’s views about “reinventing” education. But I wonder how that will happen. In the US, our leaders want to reinvent the schools of a century ago. Where is the leadership for a new vision? As a historian, I know how elusive reinvention is. Incrementalism is likelier to succeed. But first you have to point in the right direction: forward, not backwards.
I don’t disagree that we have to point in the right direction. My concern, however, is that the way most want to move “forward” does not take into account profound new contexts for learning and education as increasingly mediated by technology. Leadership at the national or state level that fully understand what these shifts mean is no doubt hard to find. But at a local level, look to Mike McGill at Scarsdale, Chris Lehmann at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, or Pam Moran, superintendent in Albemarle, Va. They are engaged in “reinvention” as we speak. And their definition of “forward,” I believe, are evidence of a third narrative for reform that is growing, one that speaks of honoring a child’s right to learn what they have a passion or interest to learn given the access to the abundance of content, knowledge, teachers, and tools we now have access to.
With less than one hour homework done each day during schoolyears us Finns are doing well. Be ware when we really start studying. Asian pupils take whiplashes and read round o’clock rock to achieve their position. I’ve said, that Finnish is superior “operating system” for brains. Learning it’s logical system brains must create much more connections than less demanding languages.