Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World
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Despite cheating scandals and stressed-out students, America doesn't seem ready to be rid of its villain. Many Americans still believe standardized tests are needed and that problems like widespread cheating can be fixed through superficial means. Since the cheating scandals went public, most of the attention has gone to the crimes committed by a few individuals and technical fixes that would have prevented them—everything from prescribing more severe punishments to increasing testing security and inventing better tests. Political leaders have pushed aside the call to abandon high-stakes testing altogether. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that while he was “stunned” by the Atlanta cheating scandal, the problem “is an easy one to fix, with better test security.”7 Most parents support standardized testing and the use of test scores in teacher evaluation. Even some educators and school leaders support standardized testing, including the two largest education unions: the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
Herein lies the tragedy for America—and the reason for my writing this book.
The tale told by Chinese education illustrates the full range of tragic events that can happen under authoritarian rule. As one of the perfect incarnations of authoritarian education, China has produced superior test takers who have maintained a great civilization for millennia—but failed to cultivate talents to defend against Western aggressions backed by modern technology and sciences in the 1800s. Since that time, China has struggled to retreat from its tradition of authoritarian education. Although it has already benefited from a gradual withdrawal from central dictation, as evidenced by its recent miraculous economic growth, authoritarianism still rules.
Technical fixes won't stop the damage and embarrassment of cheating scandals. Reducing the amount of high-stakes standardized testing does little to limit its destructive influence. The damage done by authoritarianism is far greater than the instructional time taken away by testing, the narrowed educational experiences for students, and the demoralization of teachers. The deeper tragedy is the loss of values traditionally celebrated by American education—values that that helped make America the most prosperous and advanced nation in the world. Erase those values, and you lose the creative power of a culture that celebrates diversity and respects individuality. You also lose the time, resources, and opportunities you need if you are to invent a new education that will continue to lead the world.
High-stakes testing is America's Faustian bargain, made with the devil of authoritarianism. Under the rule of authoritarianism, which gave birth to high-stakes testing in the first place, disrespect of teachers as professional colleagues and intrusion into their professional autonomy are praised as characteristics of no-nonsense, tough leadership with high expectations. Beverly Hall became national Superintendent of the Year for having “demonstrated a commitment to setting high standards for students and school personnel.”8 That commitment turned out to be authoritarian rule, as a 2012 New York Times report points out: “For years, Beverly L. Hall, the former school superintendent here [Atlanta schools], ruled by fear.” Principals were told that if state test scores did not go up enough, they would be fired—and 90 percent of them were removed in the decade of Hall's reign. “Underlings were humiliated during rallies at the Georgia Dome,” to set an example of Hall's “rule by fear,” the New York Times report continues. “Dr. Hall permitted principals with the highest test scores to sit up front near her, while sticking those with the lowest scores off to the side, in the bleachers.” Moreover, “she was chauffeured around the city, often with an entourage of aides and security guards. When she spoke publicly, questions had to be submitted beforehand for screening.”9
Lorenzo Garcia, the former El Paso superintendent, was another action-oriented leader praised for his miracles. He kept almost half of students eligible for tenth grade from taking the tenth-grade exam by not allowing them to enroll in the school, retaining them at ninth grade, or rushing them into eleventh grade. Although what he did was reported and investigated by both the US Department of Education and the Texas Education Agency, twice he got away “because he held people's careers in his hands.…If you said no to him, you were gone,” said El Paso's director of student services, Mark Emmanuel Mendoza on NPR.10 El Paso has a large population of Mexican immigrants, and Garcia also exploited the community's fear of the courts, fear of the Border Patrol, and trust in the school system. The students excluded from the tenth-grade exam “were made to feel like they did something wrong,” said Linda Romero, the drop-out prevention counselor who blew the whistle.11
Under the spell of authoritarianism, the Obama administration has consistently disregarded the law, not to mention the checks and balances of American democracy. Instead of reworking the expired No Child Left Behind Act, President Obama and his secretary of education have given out waivers to states, exempting them from the law in exchange for their willingness to accept the administration's wishes. States have responded favorably, and Congress has largely forgiven, if not condoned, the administrations' actions.
Under the spell of authoritarianism, 50 million American children are being taught a de facto national curriculum, then subjected to a de facto national standardized test. The Common Core State Standards Initiative, created with little input from the people or their representatives, is now enforced with tax dollars in nearly all states. Although the federal government did not technically pay for its development or officially adopt its standards, the billions of dollars in the Race to the Top program, which required the adoption of common standards and assessment, undoubtedly helped the CCSS spread.
Under the spell of authoritarianism, Americans have willingly surrendered their beloved local governments to state and federal control. Locally elected school boards have turned into bureaucratic branches of state and federal government, for in effect, they only collect local taxes. They then use that tax money to implement the wishes of the state and federal governments in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.
Authoritarianism has driven America to admire, glorify, and emulate other authoritarian education systems because they seem to produce “results,” defined as test scores. Instead of valuing what their own educational methods can produce, American leaders envy countries with top test scores in a narrow set of subjects—which is simply a sign of how successfully those countries have homogenized their students. Mistaking China's miseries as secrets to success, American education pundits and political leaders have been eager to learn from the quintessential authoritarian education system. Ironically, they've condemned China's authoritarian political system in the same breath.
A survival strategy the Chinese people developed to cope with thousands of years of authoritarian rule has been glorified as China's secret to educational success. The belief that the Chinese attach high values to education is widespread in the United States.12 That belief has been used to explain the educational success of Chinese students; it has also been used to condemn Americans in general, and some racial and cultural groups in particular, for their poor test scores.
This belief is, however, an illusion at best and a cruel glorification of authoritarianism at worst. The Chinese people were deprived of any other means to succeed in life, both spiritually and materially. Their only option was to pass the exams dictated by the absolute authority—emperors in the past and the government today. When people are convinced that there are no worthy options to pursue in life except the narrow path prescribed by an authoritarian government, they are forced to comply, accept indoctrination, and be homogenized. For this reason, Chinese parents have to invest generously in their children's education and test preparation; their efforts mitigate the lack of sufficient investment from the government. When onlookers praise the efficiency of the Chinese educational system, in which minimal government investment begets huge gains in test scores, they ignore the resources Chinese parents throw into the pot.
The Chinese have also been praised for emphasizing effort and diligence instead of in
herent intelligence or social conditions. Again, this is no more than a mistaken romanticization of an authoritarian ploy to deny the existence of individual differences and unequal social conditions. Emphasizing effort is a convenient way for the authority to evade responsibility for leveling the playing field for those with diverse abilities and talents. It is an excuse for not providing programs for children with disabilities or those born into extremely unfavorable social circumstances. It also serves as a seductive marketing slogan, persuading individuals to welcome homogenization.
Admirers also glorify Chinese students' inability to question and challenge authority. For instance, Andreas Schleicher, in defending China's top PISA ranking, noted how much more likely Chinese students are to blame themselves instead of their teachers for their failure in math, compared to their counterparts in France.13 While the finding is correct, Schleicher fails to notice its cause: an authoritarian culture that tends to shift the blame from the authority, which no one dares to question, to the students. This is true in other authoritarian education systems as well; just look at Russia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
The Chinese national educational system has won high praise as an efficient system with national standards, a national curriculum, a high-stakes test (the college entrance exam), and a clearly defined set of gateways to mark students' transitions from one stage to another.14 Admirers note that every Chinese student has a clear and focused goal to pursue; Chinese teachers and parents know exactly what to do to help their students; and the government knows exactly which schools are doing well. What those admirers ignore is the fact that such an education system, while being an effective machine to instill what the government wants students to learn, is incapable of supporting individual strengths, cultivating a diversity of talents, and fostering the capacity and confidence to create.
I wrote this book to show how China, a perfect incarnation of authoritarian education, has produced the world's best test scores at the cost of diverse, creative, and innovative talents. I also tried to illustrate how difficult it is to move away from authoritarian thinking by showing how China has struggled to reform its education for over a century. The book is intended to warn the United States and other Western countries about the dangerous consequences of educational authoritarianism.
Education in the West must go through transformative changes. A paradigm shift will be necessary if we are to prepare children to live successfully in the new world: a shift I wrote about in my previous book, World Class Learners; Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students.15 As traditional routine jobs are offshored and automated, we need more and more globally competent, creative, innovative, entrepreneurial citizens—job creators instead of employment-minded job seekers. To cultivate new talents, we need an education that enhances individual strengths, follows children's passions, and fosters their social-emotional development. We do not need an authoritarian education that aims to fix children's deficits according to externally prescribed standards.
If the United States and the rest of the West are concerned about being overtaken by China, the best solution is to avoid becoming China. The empire that led the world for over two millennia was shattered by Western technological and scientific innovations in the 1800s. Its education represents the best of the past. It worked extremely well for China's imperial rulers for over one thousand years, but it stopped working when the modern world emerged. The Chinese system continued to produce students who excel in a narrow range of subjects. Only 10 percent of its college graduates are deemed employable by multinational businesses because these students lack the very qualities our new society needs.16
China's achievements over the past thirty years should be no reason for the United States and other Western nations to panic, as forewarned by French historian Nicolas Boulanger more than 250 years ago: “All the remains of her ancient institutions, which China now possesses, will necessarily be lost; they will disappear in the future revolutions; as what she hath already lost of them vanished in former ones; and finally, as she acquires nothing new, she will always be on the losing side.”17
Discussion questions for each chapter are available. Register at www.wiley.com/go/dragon using the password 87136.
Notes
1. “Atlanta School Leader Beverly Hall Named 2009 National Superintendent of the Year,” press release, American Association of School Administrators, February 29, 2009, http://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=1592.
2. “American Educational Research Association Presents Annual Awards,” May 2, 2010, http://www.aera.net/Portals/38/docs/News_Media/News%20Releases%202010/Annual%20Meeting%20Awards.pdf.
3. “Grand Jury Indicts 35 in Connection with Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal,” media alert, Office of the Fulton Country District Attorney, March 29, 2013, http://www.11alive.com/assetpool/documents/130329074503_APS-Indictment-Announcement.pdf.
4. A USA Today investigative report in 2011 revealed over sixteen hundred cases of cheating in six states and Washington, DC. Greg Toppo, Denise Amos, Jack Gillum, and Jodi Upton, “When Test Scores Seem Too Good to Believe,” USA Today, March 17, 2011, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2011–03–06-school-testing_N.htm.
5. Sharon Nichols and David Berliner, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2007).
6. Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
7. “Secretary of Education ‘Stunned’ by Scandal,” 11 Alive, July 6, 2011, http://www.11alive.com/news/article/196896/40/Secretary-of-Education-stunned-by-scandal?__hstc=215845384.d6c6693f407f802334dab4314f40436c.1365186589630.1365186589630.1365186589630.
8. “Atlanta School Leader Beverly Hall Named 2009 National Superintendent of the Year.”
9. Michael Winerip, “A New Leader Helps Heal Atlanta Schools, Scarred by Scandal,” New York Times, February 20, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/education/scarred-by-cheating-scandal-atlanta-schools-are-on-the-mend.html?pagewanted=all.
10. Claudio Sanchez, “El Paso Schools Cheating Scandal: Who's Accountable?” NPR, August 10, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/04/10/176784631/el-paso-schools-cheating-scandal-probes-officials-accountability.
11. Patrick Michaels, “Faking the Grade: The Nasty Truth behind Lorenzo Garcia's Miracle School Turnaround in El Paso,” Texas Observer, October 31, 2012, http://www.texasobserver.org/faking-the-grade-the-nasty-truth-behind-lorenzo-garcias-miracle-school-turnaround-in-el-paso/.
12. M. Tucker, Chinese Lessons: Shanghai's Rise to the Top of the PISA League Tables (Washington, DC: National Center on Education and the Economy, 2014); K.-M. Cheng, “Shanghai: How a Big City in a Developing Country Leaped to the Head of the Class,” in Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems, ed. M. S. Tucker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2011), 21–50.
13. Andreas Schleicher, “Are the Chinese Cheating in PISA or Are We Cheating Ourselves?” OECD Education Today, December 30, 2013, http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2013/12/are-chinese-cheating-in-pisa-or-are-we.html.
14. M. Tucker, ed., Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2011).
15. Y. Zhao, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012).
16. D. Farrell and A. J. Grant, China's Looming Talent Shortage (New York: McKinsey and Company, 2005).
17. Nicolas Boulanger, quoted in J. D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), 134.
1
Fooling China, Fooling the World: Illusions of Excellence
One hundred years ago, a Columbia University law professor named Frank Johnson Goodnow was dispatched to China to help design the nation's new government. Goodnow would find both irony and vindication in the West's idolization and envy of China today.
China needed a constitution.
Acting on the suggestion of Charles Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard and a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Chinese government sought out an expert to help draft its governing principles. Goodnow was selected from several candidates and appointed for a three-year term, with an annual salary of $12,000. On May 3, 1913, he arrived in Beijing. Although his duties were merely advisory and he left China the following year to assume the presidency of Johns Hopkins University, he developed two drafts—one in 1913, while in China, and another in 1915, after his departure.
The essence of his first draft made it into the provisional constitution that went into effect in May 1914. Called the “Goodnow Constitution,” it gave the nation's president unchecked power over Chinese citizens, “foreign affairs, war and peace, appointment and removal of officials, and budget and financial matters.”2 The second version, based on Goodnow's 1915 memorandum, would have made Yuan Shikai practically the emperor had he not died in 1916.
Goodnow became known as the “embarrassed monarchist”; he was sharply criticized for ending China's young democracy. A Baltimore Evening Sun cartoon portrayed him as a carpenter helping President Yuan tear down the infant republic and restore imperial rule. He “came to be remembered as the foreign stooge of a Chinese dictator.”3 Goodnow and his defenders claimed that he'd been manipulated, his words used selectively by President Yuan and his supporters. Nonetheless, Goodnow still maintained that “a monarchy is better suited than a republic to China” for reasons of stability and efficiency. He didn't think China was ready for popular self-government: “Chinese society is so unorganized and so unconscious of any common interests, that it is almost impossible to start parliamentary government here, as we started it in England, on the foundation of economic or social interest.”4 Instead of a powerful parliament, he said, “China required a stable, permanent government and a powerful, independent president.”5