Asia ditches standards

High-ranking Asian countries are ditching standards and testing in schools because they’re not producing the creative graduates needed to compete in a global economy. Jane Blaikie reports

Here’s the paradox. China wants to be more like the US; the US wants to be more like China. China is dismantling its centralized test-based education system so that it can produce creative entrepreneurs, stop relying on cheap labour, and become a knowledge economy.
The US is frightened the Chinese economy will overtake theirs, and is desperately trying to lift its dismal ranking in the international education tables by way of high-stakes standards and testing.
“We could have swapped students – sent American students to China and Chinese students to America, it would have made it a lot better,” says Chinese-born Professor Yong Zhao, now Presidential Chair for Global Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon, US.

Passion
But it’s not just China – all the high-ranking systems across Asia (South Korea, Hong Kong Singapore, Japan) are reforming their education systems in the opposite direction to the West.
Professor Zhao told the New Zealand Principals Federation that Asian countries had realized that their focus on high test scores came at the expense of other qualities – confidence, creativity, passion, innovation – and that in a globalised economy these qualities matter more than high test scores.
Longitudinal research shows minimal correlation between high test scores and the economic prosperity of a nation, he says. “It just isn’t useful to use test scores as an indicator of future success.”

Creativity
Professor Zhao cites another East-West contrast that throws more light. The 2003 PISA tests asked maths students a set of questions about satisfaction and confidence. Ironically, US students were very happy and confident about their performance, even though they rated poorly, while Chinese students rated at the top but they didn’t think they could do maths.
Testing destroys confidence – and creativity, he says. In rankings of creativity, US students rate well (although its ranking has begun to decline), while Chinese students are at the bottom.
But creativity is essential to economic growth. It’s confident, creative adults who’ve made the US the world’s top producer of intellectual patents and high tech industries, he says. “The US exports knowledge [as opposed to exports that rely on cheap labour].”
Growth
There are three factors that are strong predictors of a country or community’s growth, he says, and these are technology, talent and tolerance – and testing is detrimental to talent.
“When Asian friends come to the US and ask me how Americans teach creativity as they haven’t found the unit in the book, I have to tell them that creativity is born. It cannot be taught, but it can be killed.”
The second best kept secret, he says, is that “children are like popcorn, some pop early, some pop later. We cannot expect everyone to perform the same way because they are at a certain age, we grow differently, we come from different families.”
According to Professor Zhao, the whole sad story of self-defeating educational reform results from the US psyche requiring an external enemy – first the Russians in the 1950s, then Japan in the 1980s, now China. “They always like to look for enemies. They cannot live without enemies.”
So what’s our excuse?

Download Professor Zhao’s presentation from www.educationaotearoa.org.nz. Read his blog at http://zhaolearning.com/


National disgrace – the government has bullied the Rudolph Steiner schools into submitting school charters with targets for National Standards. The standards run directly counter to the Steiner philosophy of not teaching children until they are developmentally ready – children may not start learning how to read until they are seven, eight or even nine. But the Minister of Education threatened to can their funding as state-integrated schools, and the schools felt they had no choice but to comply as otherwise their families could not afford this unique education.

Shifting standards – the meat in the sandwich, aka the Ministry of Education, is struggling to align existing assessment methods with “fuzzy” and “aspirational” standards. Year 8 PAT maths tests have been “recalibrated”, as the earlier version had only 35% of students at or above the standards. Summary results of GLoSS and IKAN have also been removed from its website and are being “redeveloped”. How to reconcile the irreconcilable, that is, the goal of lifting educational achievement with National Standards? – no wonder there are reports of a brain-drain from the ministry.

Educators are standing up for children in the face of the government’s heavy-handed tactics to impose National Standards on public primary schools. Private schools are exempt. On July, hundreds of school board chairs and principals from the Boards Taking Action Coalition handed their school charters to the Ministry of Education – without targets on National Standards, as the minister had demanded. Around 350 schools around the country are refusing to implement the standards, while hundreds more are making token gestures in the face of strong-arm tactics.