This is stunning news from Yong Zhao of the University of Oregon.
Zhao, who was born and educated in China, reports that Shanghai education officials may stop participation in PISA.
Zhao, a critic of the international race for test scores, writes on his blog:
““Not interested in #1 on International Tests, Focusing on Reducing Academic Burden: Shanghai May Drop Out of PISA” is the headline of a story in Xinmin Wanbao[original story in Chinese], a popular newspaper in Shanghai. Published on March 7th 2014, the story reports that Shanghai “is considering to withdraw from the next round of PISA in 2015” because “Shanghai does not need so-called ‘#1 schools,’” said Yi Houqin, a high level official of Shanghai Education Commission. “What it needs are schools that follow sound educational principles, respect principles of students’ physical and psychological development, and lay a solid foundation for students’ lifelong development,” says the article, quoting Mr. Yi.
“One of the shortfalls of Shanghai education masked by its top PISA ranking, Mr. Yi, pointed out, is excessive amount of homework, according to the story. For example, teachers in Shanghai spend 2 to 5 hours designing, reviewing, analyzing, and discussing homework assignment every day. “Over half of the students spend more than one hour on school work after school [every day]; Teachers’ estimate of homework load is much lower than actual experiences of students and parents; Although the homework is not particularly difficult, much of it is mechanical and repetitive tasks that take lots of time; Furthermore, our teachers are more used to mark the answers as ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ while students are hoping their teachers can help them open their minds and point out their problems.”
“Homework is only one of the elements that supports student development,” an unnamed PISA official told Xinmin Wanbao. “Their skills and qualities should also be acquired from a variety of activities such as play, online activities, and games instead of merely completing academic assignments or extending homework time.”
If Shanghai drops out of PISA, this would send a powerful message to the rest of the world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
sanity, at last
…or they don’t believe in comparing nation’s scores with other nation’s scores (what is that about). Are we to be afraid we might “lose our empire” if another nation has higher scores? Do nations rise and fall based on test scores, or the internal and external morality of its’ citizens?
I take them at their word, here. They are going to put their children first and avoid the distortions and narrowing of their curricula and pedagogy that come from absurd overemphasis on invalid standardized test measures.
The sad thing is, the whole symptom of this, the ultra-wealthy 1% determining everything for the rest of us, may actually be what destroys our nation.
Bill Gates may have to quickly send some cash to the government over there for reconsideration! What if other countries follow suit? This is an urgent situation.
Sounds like they want to avoid scrutiny.
This reminds me of when Seinfeld beat Duncan in the sprint with a false start and immediately retired with his legend intact.
Sounds to me like they want to think about what’s best for their kids and understand that a narrow emphasis on extrinsic punishments and rewards doled out by testing consortia is damaging and counterproductive. Thus the emphasis on “sound educational principles, respect principles of students’ physical and psychological development, and lay a solid foundation for students’ lifelong development” as opposed to on outcomes from dubiously validated standardized tests.
Could be some of that. But I always ignore these press releases and read what is behind the grandstanding and altruistic proclamations. The PISA also brings with it intense global attention to the top performers. They must justify the high standings. Systems are gamed and PISA is no exception. They probably do not want that gaming revealed whether limiting test pools, test prep industries, or outright cheating.
Bob, sounds like you’re naive.
There’s nothing naive about thinking that sometimes people want to do what is good for their children because they believe it to be good for their children.
I don’t think it is naive to think that people want what is best for their children. I think you are naive to think the Chinese state is concerned about human rights.
you have a point there, janine. For example, the Chinese government delayed addressing the poisoning of babies by contaminated formula because the problem broke at the same time that the Olympics were about to begin, so they covered it up for a while, put in on the back burner, and then dealt with it later.
But, as Sting once said in a song, “The Russians love their children, too.” And sometimes, even that big, ugly thing remembers something this basic. We love our children, and we want the best for them.
And here, Kurt Vonnegut’s idea applies, I think: “You are what you pretend to be, so be very careful what you pretend to be.” Even if this is a stance taken for other reasons, it’s good for kids.
I do know that this is an insanely competitive, standardized, extrinsic-punishment-and-reward-driven, zero-sum system and that there has been a lot of concern, of late, about undoing the excess of that. I wish them well in learning that lesson which we, evidently, still have ahead of us.
Bob: Sting sang, “I HOPE the Russians love their children too.” And “if.”
I hope Shanghai drops the tests.
🙂
I can say, based on the Russians I’ve known, that that’s definitely the case!
It’s definitely the case among all peoples, of course.
Let me rephrase the posting slightly: at least part of the Shanghai establishment is leaning more towards providing significantly higher quality learning in actuality than they are in giving the mere appearance of doing so.
Trending in the opposite direction here among pillars of the education status quo. Subordinating all genuine teaching and learning to the scores generated by PISA and the like is, for the self-styled leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time,” the only way to stave off existential threats to the USofA. The self-proclaimed leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” here call their own thinking cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st century “education reform.” No need to change course from empty pageantry to genuine progress; just double down on proven failures and frauds. There’s a whole world of $tudent $ucce$$ out there yet to be conquered…
The time may soon come when we will have to translate into Chinese Albert Einstein’s observation:
“Until two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
Time to learn Chinese characters, dontchathink?
😎
P.S. All the above only applies to mandates for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN [aka the vast majority]. As for the children of the edupreneurs and eduapparatchiks and edubullies, well, THEIR OWN CHILDREN [aka the advantaged few] are ensured a world-class education. Now that we’ve got that straight…
😡
What percentage of Einstein quotations did Einstein actually say?
That’s too easy FLERP!
Why, 100%, of course!
Are you sure you aren’t a test question writer for Pearson????
Hey, I see what you did there. That’s a good one, Duane, I mean, TAGO.
FLERP & Duane Swacker: there is a 98% “satisfactory” [thank you, Bill Gates!] chance of certainty that Señor Swacker is correct.
Or at least that 10 years hence [thanks again, Bill Gates!] we will know for sure if Señor Swacker was correct or not.
How can I be so convinced? “Dr.” Steve “Strap Up Head Injuries” Perry has declaimed with a sureness that admits of no error: “Men lie and women lie but numbers don’t. [Although in all truth, he was channeling rapper Jay-Z]
Don’t argue with the data points. If it’s a quantity not a quality it can’t be questioned. After all, when in the space of 1 year a teacher can take her students from the 13th to the 90th percentile, then any challenge must be met with a resounding—
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
Now wasn’t that easy?
😎
P.S. Ok, ok, Señor Swacker, I exaggerated a teensy weeny bit. Noel Wilson wasn’t completely wrong. I owe you a frosty one down at Pink Slip Bar & Grille…
😏
This is why, whenever I encounter an Einstein “quotation” and like it, I immediately try to source it. BTW, I recommend to all Einstein’s collection of essays Ideas and Opinions, which contains a number of his occasional pieces on educational topics. He was not a fan of centralized, regimented, authoritarian, standardized education. He rebelled strongly against this.
Think of Professor Rath in the Blue Angel and you can see why Einstein wasn’t too thrilled about German education.
Hurray, an expert (or is it “ex-spurt”, someone under pressure spitting out something) finally recognizes that test scores do nothing more than telling us that that student has the skill for that one test. Can scores be generalized as indicators and predictors of a students success in “real life”, as being a “well prepared citizen” or a “positive contributor to GDP”? We like to think so, and we assume a positive correlation between test scores and “success in life”, but the actual data is lacking and the probable number of outliers is great.
Success in life is a much more complicated and greater thing that that which can be measured on any paper, or computer, based exam. Will the students perservere and spend their time wisely at work? Will they love their wife and never get divorced, and never leave a trail of damaged-souls? Will they avoid addictions and never need to spend (waste money and resources) capital on remediating a problem that could’ve been avoided in the first place.
Do test measure the potential to stay out of legal trouble, the probability of having a happy and functional family with well-balanced children, who will not need social services later in life because they grew up learning and practicing good morals and intergrity?
Is all we care about “cognitive capacity” with no concern of the affective domain, no concern whether morality and a sense of social ethics are taught and practiced?
Should we care more about a student’s potential to do high-level math, science and technology, while they may end up contributing negatively to society because of all the dysfunctional behaviors they practice? Is society better because we have more “apps of ease” that keep us entertained, while our jails are becoming more full and our TV sitcoms more perverted? Do we test about these things, or do we falsely believe that our problems will be fixed by a “better app”, rather than better moral decision-making?
“. . . finally recognizes that test scores do nothing more than telling us that that student has the skill for that one test.”
NO! Test scores do not tell us that a “student has the skill for that one test”. A test score is an abbreviated abomination of a description of the interaction, the event of the test taker interacting with a particular assessment device at a specific time and location. It tells us nothing of the test taker’s skills. That little logical leap doesn’t clear the far wall and is splattered on the rocks at the bottom of the canyon. (see #2 below-and “no, not that #2” as Buckwheat says to Porky in the remake of The Little Rascals)
To understand why, may I refer you to Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
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.
Thanks Duane,
I reinforce my point, the test proves nothing more than that one event (an event that is biased by the one in power mandating the subjected one to “measure up”). I too love Foucault and constructivism, though I am a realist and believe in absolute truth, good and evil, sin and righteousness, God and so-called “gods” and an eternal realm.
The French constructivists and existentialist go down the path “from and to” nothingness, and come up with nothing but Satre’s “Nauseau”. I know there is something real and better, as compared to what fallen, unenlightened humanity can invent.
“Sartre Went From and To Nothingness and All I Got Was This Lousy Novel”
“[T]he education system . . . consists in making children ashamed of what they are.” –Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part III, Chapter 1. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes.
So true. Tests only measure what tests measure. This self-referential flaw means we must look beyond the numbers. The problem with The Reformers is their view of tests as the end game when tests should be the beginning. Tests can not predict the future and do a poor job summarizing the past. A test is just one part of a dialog between teacher and student.
Mathvale,
“Tests only measure what tests measure. This self-referential flaw means we must look beyond the numbers.”
Yes that is one flaw but not the main conceptual flaw. The main flaw is these tests DON’T MEASURE ANYTHING! THEY ARE NOT MEASURING DEVICES, assessment devices, yes, and crappy ones at that that are COMPLETELY INVALID and most of their uses UNETHICAL.
…and another reason “another one bites the dust” is that standardized testing means we believe in a “standardized student” who will have a monolithic “standardized career”. Yet, if there are diversity of students who need to be prepared for a diversity of careers, or at least have a general set of knowledge and skill that are applicable to many careers, then why do we offer a “narrow gate” to the real of possible realities? The argument for a wide, robust, broad, all inclusive liberal arts education is that it teaches one “how to think”. In contrast, standardized tests mandate a specific set of “what to think”. Yet, the self-destructive irony and stupidity in testing a specific set of facts is that the probabliity is high that much of this set has no relevance in the real world, or even if one scores low on it, they (being human, adaptable and inventive) can learn what they need to know, when they need to know it, for the career demands they find.
The generation that put us on the moon only had high school, no standardized tests, not even SAT, and they were well prepared for life.
So, if past pedagogy produced that generation with no standardized tests, then why do we think we need them (except for the imagined, and marketed, “fear” that our empire is crumbling….which it may well be, but not because of the “failures” of public schools).
The education opinion of an oppressive regime with an endless tract record of human abuses is not an opinion I hold in high regard.
Some would agree that testing in the U.S. would be considered child abuse.
And I would agree with them.
Let us not “throw out the baby with the bathwater”. Testing has its place, maybe just not in trying to make generalizations of a population and then use that data in a unjust manner. I want my chemistry and nursing students to document content mastery, or I would not trust them to practice their profession.
Rick Lapworth, it is not necessary to spend billions on standardized tests to get the information you need about your students. The amount of testing today is unprecedented in our history
Rick, the national ELA tests now being created are utter garbage. They are completely invalid. NOTHING that students do on them EVEN REMOTELY resembles real reading and writing, and so they cannot, ipso facto, be valid tests of real reading and writing. And because of the high stakes attached to them, they are leading to extreme distortions of curricula and pedagogy. These tests are what one gets when philistine bureaucrats and technocrats run amok, completely unchecked by the larger community of scholars, researchers, classroom practitioners, and curriculum designers who actually know something about the subjects presumably being tested.
They are well aware that the rank doesn’t have any meaning.
Always retire when you’re on top??
This illustrates the only real reason America should be concerned about the quality of education in other countries vis a vis ” global competitiveness ” Other countries that have identified the lack of critical and creative thinking as a problem are moving away from that failure while we here are being driven unwillingly toward it by those whose only goals are extracting profit from our classrooms and the destruction of public education itself for purely ideological reasons, if I dare call them reasons in the first place.
This has been our unheralded secret in the past:
We have understood, viscerally, that ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. We have reacted, viscerally, negatively, definitively to attempts to centralize, standardize, and regiment our THINKING.
The LAST THING that the United States needs is a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Kudos to the Chinese! Wonder if the big business idiots in this country will take a hint.