Education and our future
I came across this article when reading the paper today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html
A few spots in the article caught my eye:
“We have to see this as a wake-up call,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview on Monday.
“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”
A wake-up call? The only reason it hits our nerves is because this is the first time our post-WW II global superiority is in question. Only with China’s rise as an economic force and consequent elevated global status has America started to feel threatened. But does it really take a PISA score to understand that we are no longer globally competitive? There are so many aspects of our national political, economic and social norms and incentives that render us uncompetitive in today’s world. We need to clear our heads from the decades of global success and realize that while we were enjoying our success, we have neglected too many aspects of what made our country so successful in the first place: competitive business conditions, a healthy middle class and the appropriate development of competitive human capital. How much more of a threat do we need to feel the need to make real change to work to retain our lead? How long will we keep hearing about the “depth, breadth and size” of our economy when China and other countries will soon provide good enough substitutes for our products? When will we start understanding that access to the best technology will not necessarily bestow the largest economic power especially in a global world where information flows freely and “older” technologies are good enough for many markets in the world? We have to get off the “high tech” drug that the US is on.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.
Mr. Schneider, however, noted some factors that may have influenced the outcome.
For one thing, Shanghai is a huge migration hub within China. Students are supposed to return to their home provinces to attend high school, but the Shanghai authorities could increase scores by allowing stellar students to stay in the city, he said. And Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well, he said.
“Can you imagine the reaction if we told the students of Chicago that the PISA was an important international test and that America’s reputation depended on them performing well?” Mr. Schneider said. “That said, China is taking education very seriously. The work ethic is amazingly strong.”
Sounds like poor rationalization to me. Are we seriously going to attribute such a poor showing to the lack of patriotic zeal? Conversely would patriotic fervor really have propelled us to competitive levels? Education is systemic, and is culturally and socially embedded deep in a country.
Chinese students spend less time than American students on athletics, music and other activities not geared toward success on exams in core subjects. Also, in recent years, teaching has rapidly climbed up the ladder of preferred occupations in China, and salaries have risen. In Shanghai, the authorities have undertaken important curricular reforms, and educators have been given more freedom to experiment.
You reward what you value. In our socio-economic system, you get what you pay for. In a low-income part of the country, state or city? Yeah well sorry you cant afford the best schools. Want the best teachers? Sorry independent schools pay a lot more. Our culture needs to start valuing basic education.
Ever since his organization received the Shanghai test scores last year, Mr. Schleicher said, international testing experts have investigated them to vouch for their accuracy, expecting that they would produce astonishment in many Western countries.
“This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China,” Mr. Schleicher said. “While that’s important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”
“Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” he said.
We have to shed our stereotypes and understand the import of the fact that significant proportions of the best academics and researchers in the most well-known universities as well as business leaders and entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants. So if their home countries offer just as competitive opportunities, why would they not apply their energies at home? The greatest irony is that this human capital is largely trained in the US.
