At my request, videographer Vincent Precht prepared the final, best cut of Yong Zhao’s speech to the Network for Public Education. This is it. It has all the slides from his presentation.
Prepare to laugh while you learn what is wrong with standardized testing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fantastic…Yong Zhao is wonderful and can take over for Jon Stewart. Happy to add that my son who also went to U. of Chicago, but for a JD/MBA, not an Art History degree, has never lived in my basement. Thank you Diane for this gift…still laughing, which considering what is going on in California, is a tribute to Yong Zhao.
Thank you, Diane! Yong Zhao’s speech is GREAT … So right on. Happy to report that some friends of mine opted out their children from the PARCC!
Love his OUT of the BASEMENT READINESS. I totally agree. And his take on China is also right on. I could go on, but will stop now.
Alas, the pendulum swings again, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I am in a Race to the Top school and I hate RTTT for all the reasons hilariously shared in this clip. But why trash direct instruction? It has its place just as inquiry does. Why denigrate phonics when it is the best way to teach decoding skills? Certainly, whole language was a massive failure for teaching decoding as even Honig will attest. People, can’t common sense please be common?
My prediction that that middle and upper class communities will get their ‘freedom’ back (isn’t it interesting that when sanctions decimated poor communities all was fine and dandy, but once those with voice were impacted, then the opt-outs started?) and no one will care that my Title 1 kids will flounder and their sanctions continue. Okay, ‘no one’ is hyperbolic, but you get my drift. And my sense of abandonment.
The Easter Island analogy is brilliant – the message that civilizations are more likely to die from suicide than from murder – we are killing our civilization with the relentless focus on raising test scores. I’m so excited that Yong Zhao will be a provocateur at Camp Snowball, July 13-17, right here in Portland OR.
http://www.campsnowball.org/provocateurs-general-session-facilitators-and-hosts/
Gary Obermeyer, what was so impressive was that Yong Zhao spoke without a note.
omg, can i hug him? thank you, diane, for this – it made my day!