This is a video of Yong Zhao’s brilliant lecture on education reform at Wellesley College on Bovember 1.
He called it “What Works May Hurt. Side Effects in Education.” He recently published a book explains this paradox. I strongly recommend this book and every other book Zhao has written. He is a truly fresh thinker.
Here is an example. Suppose you discovered a method of teaching reading that is certain to raise test scores but equally certain to make students hate reading. Would you go with this approach?
His lecture is informed, witty, and entertaining.
I hope you will make time to watch this wonderful scholar at his best.
I endowed this lecture series a few years back. All the talks are archived here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Diane.
I look forward to buying and reading Yong Zhao’s new book. The “read by grade three” mandates that have been hardwired into state legislation are a wonderful example of bad policy with side effects not really treated seriously.
Anyone who reads all of the printed material from a new prescription will appreciate the point he makes on “side effects” of education. A wonderful lecture series, and worth holding in an archive. Thank you.
He has the ability to pinpoint the essence of an absurd education myth and then destroy it. Thank you, Diane, for sponsoring this lecture series and for highlighting Yong Zhao’s lecture here.
“Nonstandard Deviation”
(versification of Yong Zhao – aka “The Zhao
of Education”)
Deviation from the norm’s
Anathema to school reforms
But variance is future’s seed
And not a thing that we should weed
“The Zhao of Education”
Graffiti on the wall
Says “Question one and all”
As Zhao of Ed
Has wisely said
“Without it, we will fall”
The Zhao of Education”(2)
The Emperor told the Zhao
“The Test will boost the DOW”
The Zhao replied “You’re naked”
“The Test is simply fake ed”
He says, in the video “Chinese can be bad at math.” Well, I haven’t met one who got worse than B+. 🙂
I love the maps he shows in the beginning.
He grew up in China. He knows that not every Chinese person is gifted in math.
He’s hilarious, but everything he says has a grain of truth.
I think his audience was a little too serious. They didn’t laugh much at his jokes.
Well, I was only half serious, too. I obviously do not meet the average Chinese student here in the US.
I loved his recurring “if you are good at math”, which he used whenever some difficult numbers appeared and needed interpretation, like that a score of 2 is worse than a score of 3, and both are bad if they are out of 100.
Well, I certainly did smile throughout his talk. Even his somewhat scattered focus was pleasant. He just has too many stories and observations to talk about.
He often expressed things in a way that is easy to remember. For example, at 88 minutes in the video he says, in essence, something like “when it comes to education, don’t ever talk about averages, don’t talk ever talk about what the average student or teacher can or should do, and don’t try to assess students or teachers based on some discrete set of skills. The student and teacher is a human pair, and the only way to understand and preserve the humanity of education is to look at the relationship between the student and teacher in these individual human pairs.”
Imo, this is one powerful frame for education, that it is about these individual pairs, and serves as a quick reason to dismiss any education statistics.
Another concept which needs to be popularized is the widespread applicability of intrinsic motivation to do something vs doing it for reward or to avoid punishment. I think even teachers believe this only halfheartedly. They think it’s true only in the movies
I think the most important point he made was about variation.
The business model that people like Bill Gates have been trying to impose on schools with Common Core is basically the manufacturing model, which is all about reducing variation in the output.
But as Zhao has pointed out, this is precisely the opposite of what one should be trying to achieve in schools if one wants to develop entrepreneurs.
Here is a paper by Zhao on the same subject.
http://zhaolearning.com/2017/02/17/what-works-can-hurt-side-effects-in-education/
The “what works may hurt” principle is general but we acknowledge it only sporadically. Yeah, we have these mandatory warnings on medications and cigarette boxes. But I think it should be made mandatory that every statistics explicitly uses this principle.
Maybe we should demand that whenever a new policy, law is proposed, a research about their effects is also submitted, and is disclosed to the public.
So when Betsy DeVos proposes some cuts to scholarships quoting efficiency, she also needs to talk about, at length and in detail, about the side effects. If she cannot or unwilling to do it, the proposal is to be discarded.
This would slow things down a great deal in Washington and state Capitols, but that’s good, isn’t it?
There you go again fantasizing about having a reasonable person as Secretary of Education.
Sorry. Actually, my medical condition is much worse, because I am constantly daydreaming about laws that would make even unreasonable politicians behave reasonably.
Thank you for Dr.Zhao’s video – compelling and a times disturbing insight into American education.