In this post, Yong Zhao chastises Marc Tucker for admiring Chinese authoritarian education methods. Tucker, he says, praises China for its high standards and excellent exams, but he is wrong. This is part 2 of Yong Zhao’s critique of PISA. He calls this one “Gloryifying Educational Authoritarianism.”. His first was called “How Does PISA Put the Word At Risk? Romanticizing Misery.”
The secret of China’s high scores, Zhao says, is constant test prep and cheating.
Zhao writes:
“Tucker is wrong on all counts, at least in the case of China. Students may work hard, but they do not necessarily take tough courses. They take courses that prepare them for the exams or courses that only matter for the exams. Students do not move on to meet a high standard, but to prepare for the exams. The exams can be gamed, and have often been. Teachers guess possible items, companies sell answers and wireless cheating devices to students[1], and students engage in all sorts of elaborate cheating. In 2013, a riot broke because a group of students in the Hubei Province were stopped from executing the cheating scheme their parents purchased to ease their college entrance exam[2]. “An angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: ‘We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,’” read the story in the U.K.-based newspaper The Telegraph.
“Tucker’s assertion, that “because the exams are of very high quality, they cannot be ‘test prepped,’” is completely untrue. Chinese schools exist to test prep. Every class, every teacher, every school is about preparing for the exams. In most schools, the last year of high school is reserved exclusively for test preparation. No new content is taught. All students do, the entire year, is take practice tests and learn test-taking skills. Good schools often help the students exhaust all possible ways specific content might show up in an exam. Schools that have earned a reputation for preparing students for college exams have published their practice test papers and made a fortune. A large proportion of publications for children in China are practice test papers.”
Worse, Zhao asserts, the standardization crushes imagination and ingenuity. Everyone is taught to think alike, squelching creativity.
This is definitely worth reading in full, especially if you happen to work in Congress or the U.S. Department of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I teach a Chinses exchange student. Several months ago, he wrote a post for me in which he compares his American school experience with his Chinese school experience:
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/chengs-views-on-chinese-and-american-education/
Chinese
I’m glad I’m not the only one who “does that”.
High stakes testing goes back thousands of years in Chinese history. It is documented at least as early as 124 BC and probably was in existence well before that date. For a long time nothing like it existed anywhere outside East Asia. In the late eighteenth century Europeans became aware of this system and began copying it.
To a Western such as myself East Asians often seem excessively conformist and respectful of authority. However a study of world history since the time of the Shang dynasty suggests that East Asian culture certainly has it’s strengths and should not be underestimated.
Diane, could you please post a link to the original Marc Tucker article? I may have my students read both articles as a set of pro and con essays. As someone who taught in Japanese public schools for two years, I also observed a lot of test prep. In fact, when I asked why one girl pulled out of my English club, her friends told me that her mother made her leave in order to study for the big 9th grade exam (which, ironically, has a section on English–but I think it’s written English and not spoken English). So that girl lost an opportunity to converse in real English in order to study test English.
In Japan doing well in written “test English” is probably a lot more important than fluency in spoken “real English”.
I have worked with students from mainland China and Taiwan. I had to TEACH them how to critically think and analyze. One student came from Shanghai, this student hated school. This 9th grader told me that when it would rain, this person would go outside to play hoping to get sick so no school. This student is really, really smart, too. This student dropped out of school in China, and both parents and grandparents were not able to make this student go back to school in Shanghai. Student also told me that American teachers who taught this person how to speak English is amazing and they didn’t even know Chinese, this young person’s mother tongue.
I bet the privateers have read something like this–what they learned from it, or to use the new jargon, the takeaway, is that the schools developed their own teaching (cheating) materials and made a fortune selling these. Capitalism works!! Money to be made!! And this is how the ed reformers are selling this scam to the investor class–money to be made.
Great comments from Zhao. I’d add that his characterization of Chinese education fits exactly with the direction our reformers want to take this country—A population having just enough literacy to do simple jobs and no spirit to expect anything better. We’re fighting for nothing less than the preservation of Western culture.
I’m not opposed to “Western culture” however your dismissive attitude toward Chinese ( and more generally East Asian culture ) seems very strange in view of the historical record from as far back as the Shang dynasty. You might do well to learn something of this historical record before lightly dismissing the strengths of East Asian civilization.
Jim, I didn’t dismiss anything or anyone. Chinese culture has been highly patriarchal for centuries, especially after Confucius. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, just that it’s different from the Western culture of inquisition that began with the ancient Greeks and runs through our own society. For both better and worse, our cultural foundations reach back to the ancient Mediterranean, not China.
But my point was addressing a comment made by Zhao himself:
Perhaps you should read the full article before commenting on other’s posts.
It is silly to believe that the Han Chinese are what they are supposedly because of the personal idiosyncracies of one individual such as Confucius. Confucius is a reflection of Chinese culture whose origin goes back more than a thousand years before Confucius.
And your point is …?
You think the “ancient Greeks” were matriarchial?
No. And the weren’t Confucian either.
If Marc Tucker thinks high-stakes exams of any type cannot be test prepped…
Here’s the last paragraph of a statement by Deborah Ellinger, CEO of The Princeton Review, on the recent kerfuffle re the SAT and ACT:
[start quote]
Ultimately, to put the whole matter into perspective, this is nothing more than a Coke versus Pepsi battle. In this case Pepsi (the ACT) has taken market leadership from Coke (the SAT), and Coke has responded. When viewed through that lens, these changes make a lot of business sense. From The Princeton Review’s point of view, the College Board has never designed a test that we couldn’t help students crack.”
[end quote]
Link: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-princeton-review-comments-on-the-sat–changes-announced-by-the-college-board-on-march-5-249031981.html
Do a “closet” er “close” reading of her statement in conjunction with Yong Zhao’s.
And what conclusion can we make as far as test prep for high-stakes exams and Marc Tucker? Ah, as is so often the case, foretold long long ago by an old dead Greek guy:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
😎
A word to the wise, Messers Andreas Schleicher and Bill Gates: People will not stand indefinitely for having their lives ruled and ruined by corrupt and unfair high-stakes tests.
In 1843 a Chinese citizen failed his high-stakes Imperial examination for the fourth time and sparked a rebellion that killed 20 million people: the Taiping Rebellion.
According to wikipedia two subsequent Chinese revolutionary leaders drew inspiration from and expressed indebtedness to this event: Sun Yat Sen and Mao Tse Tung.
autostart=1http://www.dancarlin.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=28364
Mao Tse-Tung was possibly the greatest disaster in Chinese history since the Mongol invasion.
That’s a pretty sweeping statement. Are you familiar with China before Mao?
I’m not a defender of Mao Zedong, simply of truth. One has to be very diligent to get to the truth about Mao, and I suspect only more so in a place so heavily propagandized against that truth as is the USA.
«”Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
— Mao, February 1927.[85]»
On its own, is there something vaguely Jeffersonian perhaps, about that statement?
This is a short paper (PDF) by Dr Chalene Tan (2004) on ‘indoctrination,’ which I find very illuminating.
Click to access Tan_Charlene.pdf
I first read a much shorter version, in a book called Key Questions for Educators, by my course director at the time, John Portelli. I recommend… well, everything he’s written.
Click to access Leading-for-Equity-Edphil-Books.pdf