Tom Loveless had the nerve and courage to publicly rebuke OECD for giving a distorted view of Shanghai’s test scores on the latest international test (PISA). He said that the tests excluded significant numbers of children from migrant families, and OECD ignored this practice.
I posted both his articles on the subject.
The director of OECD said Tom Loveless was wrong.
The Néw York Times wrote up the controversy, and the story left no doubt that China gamed the system, and OECD looked the other way.
Tom told the Times:
““They are presenting Shanghai in the best possible light” as “a paragon of educational equity, and that’s not accurate,” said Mr. Loveless, who objects to PISA’s comparison of Shanghai to other major world economies. “It’s such a unique system, I wouldn’t compare it to anybody,” he said in an interview.”
Congratulations, Tom, for calling out an obvious wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tom Loveless has done yeoman service in bringing this issue to the attention of the public, domestic and international. After the National Superintendents Roundtable visited OECD in 2012 to examine PISA, we sent two lengthy letters to the PISA and OECD leadership outlining the very serious questions about what seemed to be an apartheid system of schooling in Shanghai. Household registration requirements appeared to exclude hundreds of thousands of rural migrant children from Shanghai’s schools, a situation with obvious implications for the Shanghai PISA results. Our point was that the results might be excellent but the system was hardly the model of equity lauded by OECD. Our letters were greeted with a shrug and bland denials.
The Roundtable was referring to the 2009 administration of PISA, reported in 2010. Now the same issue resurfaces around the 2012 administration, reported in December 2013. By encouraging a public discussion of this question, Loveless has raised central issues about the credibility of OECD and its PISA program and the extent to which PISA is a reliable comparative assessment that compares apples and oranges on a global state appropriately.
James Harvey
Executive Director
National Superintendents Roundtable
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Gives the term “Shanghaied” an additional connotation doesn’t it.
This is all so very sad. Education has been a composite of our best thinking: the search for ultimate values: good, truth, and beauty and relied on quality research, integrity et al. To see it degraded into political intrigue denies the essence of education. Where it all will lead only God knows. It frightens me.
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Shanghaied….good one!
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Here is Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Tsinghua University High School (in Beijing) writing about Shanghai’s recent PISA scores and the social and moral cost of China’s hyper-competitive exam system:
Excerpts:
“The dog-eat-dog and winner-take-all mentality of China’s school system isn’t just making children unhappy and unhealthy — it’s also causing cheating and bribery, leading to an unfair and unequal school system. . . . ”
“This culture of bribing public school officials means I can’t maintain friendships, make new ones, and date — a girl I dated in 2010 told me she’d give me 200,000 yuan ($32,800) to get her sister into my school.
And because Shanghai’s elementary school classrooms have 30 or 40 students, parents trip over each other in the mad rush to take teachers out to dinner and offer gifts in the hope that their only child gets a little more attention.
The bribery is on top of every other advantage that Shanghai’s wealthy parents have bestowed upon their only child: Weekend piano, math, and English classes, private tutoring, summer camp in America, vacations in Europe and above all a born-to-succeed attitude.”
“There’s substantial social science research — popularized in books such as Daniel Pink’s Drive — that suggests performance-based incentives are bad for students and teachers. . . . Incentives do not just make students stressed, lonely, and unhappy — they also kill student’s innate curiosity, creativity, and love of learning.
And high-stakes testing has led to a culture of cheating in China. Last year, when authorities tried to stop cheating, a riot broke out — parents were angry that their children were being singled out when everyone was cheating.”
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/opinion/china-education-jiang-xueqin/
Xuegin says that enlightened Chinese admire Finland and that some Chinese parents are even trying to replicate American private schools, with small classes and a humane pedagogy.
I can’t believe Andreas Schleicher, PISA’s head, touts Shanghai’s results as a good thing. But then he is not an educator but a statistician, and apparently one with moral tunnel vision, not an educator (I am tempted to say, not a human being).
He and his corporate-oriented friends profess to believe in capitalism, but capitalism quickly degenerates into mere chaos and gangsterism where cheating and deception are rampant.
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Reformers and others forget that there is always a human cost to these “enterprises.” As a former special forces soldier, the human cost was known to all who volunteered. We willingly accepted the privation and pain. No one informed the public and parents of what the human cost of “rheeform” might be. I would like to think that the elites simply did not know, but my instincts tell me that just don’t care, we are disposable in their world view. The certainly would not subject their children to this treatment.
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There is no way we can compare the PISA test scores of Chinese students in Shanghai with any other country—let alone the United States.
First: Shanghai is where China has focused its efforts to reform and modernize education after having sent teams of education scholars to other countries to find out what’s working. The Chinese have even formed partnerships with public schools in the United States and Europe to make this happen.
Beijing is the second city to see the reforms take place. The rest of China is waiting for the reforms to catch up with them and that may take decades.
Second: Public education in China is only guaranteed to age 15 and then students must compete to get into senior high school [they compete again to go on to university—and the competition is fierce leaving no time to be a child as Americans think of children]. That means by senior high school half the kids who started school at age five or six are gone. Most of them are rural children and migrants who may not have the proper documentation to even attend public schools in Shanghai.
Third: China has residency requirements. For instance, someone who has official residence in Shanghai can’t take advantage of public services such as schools and health care in another city or area of China without getting permission from the bureaucracy of the CCP to change residency. Most migrants have no official status in the major first tier cities like Shanghai. If they need health care, they have to pay cash or take a train back to the rural village and local clinic where they’re covered.
Fourth: By the time PISA shows up in Shanghai to give its latest test to kids who are 15, they are the best students in China, the royalty of public education. The rest were filtered out long before. In fact, many of the migrant and rural children drop out before they reach the age of ten to help the family earn a living.
Fifth: poor students [mainly rural and migrant] in China from the lower socioeconomic strata can’t compete with the upper middle class and wealthy where parents pay thousand in US dollars annually to send their kids to private schools during the week after the public schools close and also to private classes on the weekends to help the kids get ready for the next week in public school.
For many of China’s children and teens who keep succeeding in the schools earning their way to the next level, there’s no childhood comparable to growing up in the United States where the average parent is obsessed with their child’s self-esteem. In China, parents prepare their kids for failure while working hard to succeed. In the U.S. the average middle-class parent promises their child nothing but success no matter how they do in school [after all failure in an American public school isn’t the child or parents’ fault—it’s always the teachers fault while in China the parents accept the burden of blame.]. In America, the average parent says if you dream it then it will come true. In China if the child talks too much of their dreams of a future, they’ll probably get lectured and maybe even slapped.
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By “only guaranteed” do you mean in Shanghai education is only compulsory to age 15? That is the same as in many countries (only it is tuition free to age 16, as I understand). Or only tuition free until age 15? Most of the other OECD countries have free secondary education, and usually free tertiary education, as well.
Could you please clarify? Thanks.
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The first nine years is compulsory starts between age 6 – 7. Primary school takes the first six years; then there’s middle school for grades 7, 8, and 9.
After that, senior high school is only for students who want to continue their educations. It is not mandatory. Add nine to the age of six or seven and that means kids who are fifteen/sixteen are starting senior high school.
But wait, the CCP has acknowledged a “9-6-3 rule”, that nine of ten children began primary school; six compete the first five years and three graduate grade six with good performance. This means about 30% of primary students actually complete the first six years of school. Ten percent never started.
By the time you reach senior high school—grades 10, 11, and 12—most of the enrollment is centered in the cities and not in rural China. Most rural Chinese don’t value education as much as urban Chinese do. And many of the migrant workers from rural to urban China still have family back in the villages where they leave the younger children with older relations. Most migrant workers still have their family home and half acre plot to farm back in the village. And many, when they retire from factory work return to the village.
The United States, by comparison, keeps most of the kids in school until the end of high school at age 17/18. About 75% graduate on time and another 15% earn their high school diploma or equivalent GED by age 24—-all are on an academic track because there is no vocational track.
But China has a vocational track in the secondary vocational schools separate from the academic schools for those teens who don’t plan to go to college. From what I’ve read, Japan and South Korea have similar secondary education systems and only 70% of high school graduated in Japan graduate on a college prep academic track.
In addition, there is the Zhongkao, the Senior High School Entrance Examination, that’s held annually in China to distinguish the top students who then are admitted to the highest performing senior high schools. This means that if the top high school in Shanghai has 1,000 openings, the top 1,000 scores on the Zhongkao are admitted and then the second highest rated high school takes the next batch moving down until the lowest rated senior high school in Shanghai gets the kids that scored at the bottom.
I don’t think the PISA tests kids who go to secondary vocational schools. I”m sure they only test kids who are in the academic schools.
To compare the PISA test in China with the U.S.—to be fair—we’d have to use standardized test scores to eliminate the bottom 70% and only compare the top 30% of the highest scoring US students to the Chinese students who took the PISA.
But that’s not what happens with the critics of public education shout how horrible we are int the U.S. compared to countries like China.
In the US, the PISA selected 15 year old at random from all segments of the socioeconomic scale but in China that doesn’t happen. The only fifteen year olds that are available to take the PISA in China are those that are still in school by that age.
Maybe actual numbers will help clarify what I meant:
In 2010, 121 million Chinese kids attended China’s primary schools with only 78.4 million junior and senior secondary students.
And according to World Education News & Reviews, “In 2010, senior high schools [in CHina] accommodated 46.8 million students, among which nearly 52 percent were enrolled in general senior high school, 48 percent in vocational senior high schools.”
http://wenr.wes.org/2012/07/wenr-junejuly-2012-senior-secondary-mathematics-education-in-china/
The answer: 121 million kids in China attend primary school but only 24.3 million attended the academic senior high schools, and the PISA tests is selecting its students from the first year of the academic senior high schools only in Shanghai and Shanghai’s schools are considered the best in China.
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My understanding is that the hukou system of residency requirements has created two social castes in urban China. Under hukou, when rural workers move from the country to the city, they are not allowed to register as residents, but continued to be documented as residents of their home villages. As non-residents their children do not qualify for city services such as education, but must move back to their parents’ home villages and go to high school there, if they wish to attend high school. Obviously this is impractical and these children are forced to drop out. This is why rural parents leave their children with relatives.
Now, I think Shanghai is starting to provide free elementary education for its children of rural origin. This is the big reform that Andreas Schleicher and the Shanghai officials he relies on tout and it is indeed a step in the right direction. But the reform does not extend to secondary schooling, apparently.
Also, I gather that in China urban high school entrance is by competitive examination and is not free, though, from what I can gather, those who score well on tests are provided with some assistance from government scholarships. Therefore, high school in Shanghai is extremely selective both academically and financially. The possibilities for gaming the PISA test results Chinese system affords are therefore huge.
It seems that the OECD’s has “jumped the shark” — and what it writes (or rather what Andreas Schleicher writes) about Shanghai is completely untrustworthy. You wonder why the OECD would jettison its credibility in this wholesale manner.
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Are all cjildren tested in South Korea? or do they follow the Rhee method of deception?
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http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/nov/26/pisa-international-student-tests-oecd
Andreas Schleicher lives in Paris and sends his three children to the public schools there. Yet he publicly disparages the French Public School system, though unlike US ed “reformers,” who wouldn’t be caught dead putting their kids in a public school, he finds it good enough for his own kids.
Now, I have several cousins and also friends who live in France and have children in the French public system and all of them praise it to the skies. The middle classes at least are happy with French education and take full advantage of its early education and summer programs, especially.
I am sure it is not perfect, but I think what you want is good enough, and if the French system is good enough for Schleicher’s kids it must be pretty good indeed.
On the other hand, Schleicher seems to praise the Waldorf schools, which is where I sent one of my own kids. I was satisfied with it — she and her classmates all went to good colleges and several are now doctors, etc.
You can always make improvements, but there are many roads to the same goal. When you talk about human cultures, there can be no single, statistics-driven way.
Schleicher seems to be out of touch, as well as possibly compromised by Gates’s largesse (speaking of bribery).
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What the statisticians have forgotten to factor into their findings about education are the key factors of parent, teacher, and pupil satisfaction. They focus narrowly on efficiency and productivity, apparently.
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Isn’t turn about fair play? I say if it works for the Chinese, why not Americans too? Let’s just insist that only wealthier kids in Massachusetts stand in for all “Americans” and marvel at the dramatic gains American schools have made in the next round of PISA tests.
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What works in China may not work in the United States. I should have said, “will not work.”
For one thing, the average method of parenting is dramatically different.
Second: while China may have the largest, fastest growing middle class on the planet, there’s still 800 million Chinese who are not members of that middle class.
Third: middle class values in China don’t match lifestyle habits of those who are poor. China is a complex culture vastly different from the U.S.
Fourth: China’s culture is based on collective thought while in the United States, we think as individualists, for the most part.
Fifth: China’s schools are not all equal. Urban schools offer a better quality of education than rural schools that often have traveling teachers who move from village to village because of a teacher shortage. In China, a rural student who graduates from senior high school might find themselves recruited to teach in a rural primary school with little training other than literacy and math skills.
China is still a developing country and has a long way to go.
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Someone named Paddy Hadley posted the following comment on the guardian website:
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/nov/26/pisa-international-student-tests-oecd
“It is absurd that someone with no academic status as a statistician can have so much influence on the educational research. The world’s greatest experts on statistics have heavily criticised Schleicher’s methodology in peer-reviewed papers and in articles in the press. Anyone who doubts this should Google any one of Professor Spiegelhalter from Cambridge, Professors Svend Kreiner and Karl Bang Christiensen, from Copenhagen; Professor Harvey Goldstein from Bristol; and Oxford’s Professor Jenny Ozga. Look at their academic record and see what they say about PISA. They are not shrills in the pay of the teachers’ unions or left-wing zealots trying to harm our children’s education. They are gifted independent people who simply know what they are talking about, with no axe to grind, who can recognise an abuse of statistics when they see it.
Mr Schleicher simply does not really understand what he is talking about and it is embarrassing that so many people take so much notice of him.”
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Mr. Schleicher did not do well in a conventional school in Germany, and his parents therefore was sent him to a German Waldorf high school, where he did very well indeed, going into a STEM career in Australia. This is how he came by his original interest in education.
However, by entering Waldorf schooling as teenager, Schleicher missed out on the wonderful experience of Waldorf pre-school and early ed., which rigidly adhere to well-thought out and age-appropriate pedagogical practice and curriculum, based largely on hands-on artistic activities (Waldorf kindergarten and primary school teachers typically study for two years and then undergo an apprenticeship). Had he done so he would have more understanding of the sheer horror that Bill Gate’s Common Core, high-stakes tests, and other Corporate-driven reforms inspire in knowledgeable parents, teachers, and other informed citizens.
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Wow way to go. Scores always look better when you throw out the students who can’t do well. Hey, isn’t that what Charter Schools are doing too? Are they the Singapore of America..me thinks so..
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For hukou see wiki economics : http://wiki.econwiki.com/index.php/Hukou_System:_China
Then the is the Chinese culture of gift giving.
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