Mr. Kristof, Please Stop Idealizing China's Education System!

A week ago, Nicholas Kristof published a NY Times column in which he equated China's recent success in chess, embodied by a freakishly talented sixteen-year-old female named Hou Yifan, to success in its national education system. As if Bobby Fischer might have been a model for America's education system; Fischer's devolution into hermit-like irrationality and irrelevance is likely an analogue of the decline of American education in Mr. Kristof's rather confused world view. The notion that a three-sigma chess champion discovered (by her parents, not the education system) in a country of 1.3 billion people represents anything other than the laws of chance never seems to have occurred to our intrepid journalist, nor the fact that in China, the State immediately extracts three-sigma talents in any field from their standard educational system and shunts them into highly restricted, one-dimensional, "talent development" schools.

In his column published in this Sunday's New York Times, titled "China's Winning Schools?," Nick Kristof seemed finally to have redeemed himself, managing to get much of his assessment of Chinese education correct (although his assertion that Chinese teachers are respected is not really true; "feared" would be a better choice of words that "respected"). Nevertheless, he presented a balanced assessment for a change, one that acknowledges Chinese students' book learning excellence and the country's national educational efforts while also identifying some of its limitations (inability to promote creativity, inquisitiveness, and critical thinking skills).

Then, just when I was beginning to hold out some modest hope for him, Mr. Kristof inserted this sentence near the end of his column:

"But the real challenge [to America] is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it."

Kristof has persistently and repeatedly confused "passion for learning" with societal and family pressure for economic survival, family dignity (traditionally called "face" in the West), and parental old-age security (children, particularly sons, have always been expected to do well enough to support and care for parents in their own age). Most Chinese families see education as virtually the only way to future security, an attitude drawn in no small part from a thousand-year-plus culture in which Confucian education was indeed the only path to government service and hence to economic success. Anyone who has studied Chinese culture and history also knows that Confucian education was grounded in the Chinese classics. Confucian education denigrated new (Western) knowledge and scientific fact-gathering (what the Chinese once labeled with pedestrian-sounding disdain "the investigation of things,"). Furthermore, educational mastery was demonstrated and measured not by what one could do with his knowledge but by its practitioners' ability to memorize and regurgitate classical texts and poetry verbatim. The carryover into the modern Chinese education system is blatantly obvious.

In reality, there is little or no passion for learning in China today, and most certainly not in Chinese schools. Students participate only to get through the system, to be successful in the exams which are the single sole measure of their "learning" (just as the multi-level civil service examinations were, for centuries, the single sole measure of Chinese scholarly learning). Few students today are curious to know anything beyond what their classes require of them, and no one reads for learning other than self-help-style books that many in China perceive as possessing the secrets to future success and wealth. The vast, vast majority of Chinese students are little more than sentient databases, spewing factoids and formulas on demand but grossly lacking inquisitiveness, creativity, and critical thinking skills; they are unable to use what they've learned to reflect in any meaningful, philosophical way on their lives or the world around them. Few Chinese homes contain books, few Chinese adults read books or magazines, and few Chinese at any level express interest in added knowledge from "documentaries" such as we find here on public television, cable, and movie theaters.

In my experience, "learning" in China means beating the education system to get the best possible results with the least possible exertion of effort; cheating is entirely permissible because only the ends count, not the means. Worse still, precious few adults among the many I've met in China show the slightest interest in learning anything new whatsoever once they are out of the education system. For an educated society, adult Chinese citizens are among the least curious about the natural world and about other societies and cultures of any people I have ever met.

Contrary to Mr. Kristof's view, there is in fact little or no "passion for learning" in China; there's only passion to bend the system to one's own ends in order to appear learned long enough to make it work for you, or until you find the path that will lead you to some modicum of economic well-being. That may be pragmatism, and in that culture it may be entirely reasonable. But it most surely isn't passion.

What the real choices are for Cathie Black and NYC kids

With all the furor over Cathie Black's comments about “birth control” and “many Sophie’s choices” in relation to school overcrowding, I hope the larger issues are not ignored.

There is a huge school-age population explosion in downtown Manhattan, not because people are reproducing like rabbits, but because of the rampant development that Mayor Bloomberg and other city officials have encouraged.

(For information about the downtown population explosion, see this presentation, Why downtown's kids need to keep Tweed, by Eric Greenleaf, NYU professor and public school parent; it was in response to Eric's projections, which have been right on the mark that Cathie Black made her joke about birth control.)

The DOE has failed to build enough schools to accommodate these kids, as well as throughout the city, and has repeatedly underestimated the need for new seats. Yet instead of saving critical space within its headquarters for downtown Kindergarten students, the Department of Education has decided to donate space in Tweed to a charter school for middle school students, run by a for-profit company headquartered in Sweden.

This is no "Sophie's choice," but a deliberate decision to benefit a charter school over neighborhood children. The charter operation is run by Kunskapsskolan, or KED, which had revenue of more than $37 million in the third quarter of 2010, and could afford to build its own school, or lease space elsewhere. But instead, KED is not only getting free space, they are being given it right inside the DOE's headquarters, which represents tremendous advertising and promotional value to the company. (For some of the reasons this charter school should never have been authorized by SUNY in the first place, see our comments to the SUNY Charter Institute.)

So why would DOE prefer to give space to a Swedish charter school, rather than provide for the needs of the downtown community, and the wishes of their powerful Assemblymember, Speaker Shelly Silver? Because KED is an online charter school, and right now, DOE officials are hugely enamored with the potential of virtual instruction.

Here is how one of KED’s Swedish schools was described in the British paper, the Telegraph:

It’s 10 o’clock at Kunskapsskolan Nacka, a Swedish school for 12 to 16 year-olds, and no one seems to be working. One pupil plays Nirvana on a guitar. A second walks about barefoot eating an apple. Two more sit on desks, chatting. Suddenly the head enters. One might expect rebukes, or reprimands. None come. Instead, the head, Lotta Valentin, smiles and ruffles the hair of a nearby pupil. ''I really enjoy walking about the school and seeing the children at work,’’ she says.

One supposes that they also spend some time at computers.Get a Professional QualificationChoose from more than 40 courses from the UK’s leading home study college and start gaining new skills today!

As Elizabeth Rose of DOE's Portfolio planning explained at an earlier meeting, they intend to tear down walls within Tweed and install glass, so that all the educrats in the building can observe these students walking around and receiving virtual instruction online.

The population explosion is occurring not just downtown, but all over the city, as a result of Bloomberg's policies to encourage development, rezoning 76 neighborhoods, and in many cases, allowing more density and high rises to be built. Many other factors have also contributed to the citywide increase in the public school population, which the DOE’s “expert” consultants said would not occur until 2016 or 2017, but began as early as last year – and in most districts even earlier than that. These include a rise in the birth rate, the closing of many parochial schools, and the tendency of families to stay in the city longer, because of lower crime rates and the perception of an improved overall environment.

Yet city officials have carelessly failed to plan for the school population that would be generated. (For a good article on this, see the NY Magazine article from last year.) This, despite numerous warnings in reports detailing the population boom that was imminent, from Class Size Matters, the City Comptroller’s office, and the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

So what can be done? Again, there are several decisions that should be made –not difficult ones for any rational policymaker, but so far for DOE.

First of all, the Chancellor should call a stop to all the co-locations, which not only cause intense conflicts within buildings and communities, but make overcrowding worse, since every new school that is inserted into an existing school subtracts valuable classrooms to make room for administrative and cluster spaces – with an estimated 10% loss of capacity each time.

Secondly, she should immediately re-align spending priorities. In November, the DOE added a billion dollars to the school capital plan, to be spent on technology, in addition to the $800 million that was already in the plan for that purpose. Why? So virtual learning and the “Izone” experiment can be inserted in 200 more schools over the next two years, and 400 schools thereafter. They want to proliferate these programs rapidly, supposedly to “personalize” instruction (ironically, by means of computers) without any independent evaluation of the success of the Izones that have already been implemented. (Here is a dizzying presentation of the theory behind this.) And they want to spend all this billion dollars in one year alone, over the next school year.

With all the millions that the city has misspent and wasted on high –tech projects in the last few years, from ARIS, the $80 million super-computer super-boondoggle that never lived up to expectations, to the bloated contracts of Future Technology Associates, to the ongoing scandal that is City Time, none of these can compare to the potential for waste involved in the DOE’s new proposal to spend one billion dollars in one year, amidst all the other budget cuts – on online learning.

These funds should instead be spent on leasing or building new schools, including some of the 27 parochial schools closing this year in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, and the 19 closed last year in Brooklyn and Queens, to alleviate overcrowding, allow for smaller class size, and actual “personalized” instruction – with real teachers, in real classrooms, instead of subjecting kids to an an expanded online system, with unknown risks and benefits, and the potential of a billion or more dollars down the drain.

The Kindergarten class size crisis as brought to you by Bloomberg/Klein

Today the office of Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer released the results of an online survey of over 1000 education stakeholders, including parents, teachers and principals. As a group, class size and school overcrowding were their greatest concern.

Reducing class size has been the top priority of parents, year after year, on the DOE’s own parent surveys. And yet class sizes have risen sharply the last three years, and now are larger, especially in the early grades, than they have been at any time in more than a decade.

Meredith Kolodner wrote an excellent article about the class size crisis in Kindergarten, quoting Kenneth Sampson, father of a daughter in a Kindergarten class of 30 at PS 298 in Oceanhill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, where only 19% of children are at grade level in math:

"The teachers are good here, but my kid's not getting the attention she needs...I think there's not enough commitment to it. They gotta get it right so the children can learn properly. These are very smart kids. They want to learn."

As another parent said, in response to MBP Stringer's survey:

"You can have a perfect curriculum and a perfect teacher, but if there are 30 kids in the class, then you don't stand a chance of your child actually getting a good education,"

See the chart above; showing that the number of large Kindergarten classes plunged from 1999-2002, under Chancellors Crew and Levy; until the Bloomberg/Klein regime took hold, and then started to rise again.

This year is the first since 1999 in which there are more Kindergarteners in classes of 25 or more than 20 or less.

Also see the chart to the left showing the sharp rise of children in large Kindergarten classes over the last three years; now 42 % of these children are in classes of 25 or more in the Bronx -- the city's poorest borough.

Cathie Black said she intends to take the concerns of parents seriously. She sent her own children to schools where class sizes average 12 students per class.

Research is crystal clear that class size, especially in the early grades, is a major determinant in a child’s success in school and in later life. This is especially true for poor children, who benefit twice as much as middle class children from small classes. We have seen the class size situation stagnate and now grow steadily worse, under a Mayor and chancellor who claimed to care about the achievement gap and who had total control over our schools.

If Cathie Black cares about improving opportunities for NYC children, she will make absolutely certain that class sizes do not further increase under her watch, but begin to decrease instead.

Stop School closings and charter takeovers!

Come to the Panel for Educational Panel meetings on January 19th, Feb. 1st, Feb. 3rd and March 1st, where the fates of more than thirty schools, either closings or co-locations, will be decided.

Let your voices be heard against the forces that would privatize and undermine our public schools -- and damage the future of most of the students in these schools.

Let Cathie Black, our new Chancellor, hear how parents really feel about these proposals. She has said that she wants to listen to parents and other stakeholders; find out how sincere she is.

Click on the GEM flyer to the left, to print and distribute in your schools.

Who's striking out and who's sliding home?

Check out the presentation of the "Media Bullpen", the new project of the pro-charter school organization, Center for Education Reform, funded by Gates, along with the right-wing Bradley and Walton Family Foundations, which will grade reporters and news articles as to whether they accept their pro-privatization, pro-testing spin.





"The media bullpen is setting out to change the way the media covers education reform...Holding the media accountable; Changing covering of education reform; Driving smart legislation."

Apparently Gates is not satisfied with buying up most of the DC think tanks, funding fake "parent groups" like Stand for Children, and the new Michelle Rhee organization, Students First, to push for even more damaging policies on the state and national level.


He managed to control several days of coverage by NBC and MSNBC, by co-sponsoring the propaganda extravaganza, Education Nation, and supporting and promoting the film "Waiting for Superman."

But that's not enough. Now he also apparently wants to control all the media's coverage of these issues.

I think this is kind of scary. What do you think?

Cuomo: Cut taxes on the wealthy, and slash school budgets to the bone

New York's new governor, Andrew Cuomo is insisting that that the surtax on individuals making over $200,000 should be allowed to lapse – why? Because "working families can't afford it" !!! Cuomo is quickly turning out to be a DINO (Democrat in Name Only.)

He is, of course, quite willing to layoff state employees, cap property taxes, and cut education spending to the bone instead.

According to Frank Mauro of the Fiscal Policy Institute, allowing the surtax to lapse will cost $5 billion per year.

Meanwhile, check out a new FPI report, revealing that NY State has the most unequal income distribution of any state in the country; and NYC the most unequal among cities. See the graph to the right, showing that one percent of NYC residents now make almost half of all income.

In discussing the PISA results, Diane Ravitch reveals that more than 20% of US kids live under the poverty line. Most of the nations (and cities) that compete on PISA have far lower rates of poverty.

At a time of fiscal stringency, it seems crazy to talk about helping lift children and families out of poverty. Critics say, "We can't afford to do anything anymore," "Sorry, the money is all gone," "No one should pay any new taxes," "This is not a time for social innovation; it is a time for educational innovation." But in light of the overwhelming evidence of the dire consequences of persistent poverty, it seems even crazier to ignore it and to assume that we can reach the top of the international achievement tables by closing schools, firing teachers, and hastening privatization.

See also this chart, below, from the Shanker blog, showing the unfairness of the current tax structure; and that the poorer you are, the larger percentage of your income you pay in taxes.

Cuomo of course is not alone. Chris Christie, the new Governor of NJ, also wants to cut taxes on the wealthy…. at the same time as he’s cutting funding for the state’s poorest schools, in violation of a court order.

But not everyone connected with education will be happy at the decisions to cut taxes on the wealthy. Joel Klein will get to keep more of his hard-earned cash, as he goes to work for Rupert Murdoch. He’s due to make an estimated $4 million the first year at NewsCorp, heading up their new online learning division.

And on it goes.

Joel Klein will rake in the dough

Joel Klein will reportedly make over $4 million a year at NewsCorp.

Let’s hope that Murdoch takes a total bath on this one, and he and Klein aren't able to make a penny off of poor kids – either here in NYC or in Africa – by selling bogus “educational” video games supposed to lead to real learning.

Kids, parents and teachers have suffered enough as a result of Klein's delusional and damaging fantasies about what constitutes a quality educator; see what principals said were their hopes for an entirely new direction for our schools now that he is gone.

Klein was reportedly a poor manager at his last private job –Bertelsmann — and was a terrible manager at DOE. The only reason he lasted as long as he did with all the expensive blunders, no-bid contracts, consultants , reorganizations, and wasted millions was because he had a boss, himself wrongly purported to be a good manager, who either wasn’t paying attention or didn’t give a damn.

Be Like Shanghai? (Sorry, Mike)

Nick Kristof does it, as does Thomas Friedman. So in his own uncritical way does Arne Duncan. And so do the many other media alarmists who accept at face value Shanghai city schools’ recent PISA results and use those scores to forecast a coming American apocalypse. They all see China as the world’s great education success story, the “model” for American education. But they really don’t have a clue.

The latest insult to American education just arrived this week in the form of a NY Times piece describing how those Shanghai schools are so successful because of their classroom discipline, thereby managing to conflate bad teaching, institutionalized fear of public shaming, and educational rigidity with good classroom management. Based on what I saw while teaching several years ago at the high school level in a major, wealthy Chinese city near Shanghai, here is what typical Chinese education was really like, at its near-best, at the high school level:

-- Every classroom was a bare, cinder-block-walled enclosure, no heat in the winter, no cooling in the early summer, virtually nothing decorating the walls. Students spent their entire school day in the same room – teachers came to them.

-- Every classroom held 48 – 50 students, lined up in traditional, ramrod-straight rows. Textbooks and workbooks for students’ full set of the day’s classes were piled on and under their desks – no one had a locker.

-- Teachers lectured from a dais at the front of the room. Students sat quietly at their desks and listened, took notes, occasionally recited in unison or responded, standing, to a direct question from the teacher. Questions from students were a rarity.

-- Many, if not most, lectures were straight from students’ texts, sometimes nothing more than

teachers simply reading from the textbook.

-- Teachers appeared at students’ classrooms just before lessons began, departing back to their subject area offices immediately upon finishing their lessons. Casual student-teacher interaction was minimal at best. Teachers spent much of their office time (they only taught two class periods per day) playing video games and reading the daily newspaper.

-- Copying of assignments was rampant – and tolerated. As, all too often, was cheating on exams. Scores counted more than how they were achieved.

-- I saw no evidence of what in the U.S. we would call “student projects.” Classroom activity appeared to be the same lecture and recitation style every day.

-- Students were actively discouraged from asking questions. I was told on more than one occasion that students’ parents could actually be called into the school so that a teacher could complain that the child was disrupting lessons because he/she was asking too many questions.

-- Schools had no clubs or activities and minimal if any organized sports teams. One school where I worked claimed to have two or three interscholastic sports teams, but only for boys.

-- Students typically took seven or eight classes each semester, leaving no time for activities even outside of school.

-- Never once among the hundreds of students I saw and taught did I see a student with a physical handicap or a visible learning disability. I don’t know where those students were, or if they were even still permitted to attend school by high school age, but if so, there was no inclusion.

-- Physical education consisted mostly of lining students up in straight rows and performing low-impact calisthenics and movement.

-- The last semester of senior year is dedicated nearly exclusively to preparation for the gaokou, the national, three-day-long, college entrance examination.

-- Schools were evaluated, and principals and teachers rewarded, according to their students’ standardized exam results.

-- Teachers earn extra income from tutoring. They are allowed to accept money from their own students (or gifts from those students’ parents), a sure-fire disincentive to effective teaching in the classroom setting.

-- There was no parent involvement in the schools whatsoever. Parents visited a school for only one of two reasons: to be roundly chastised for their child’s behavior/performance, or to present a gift for extra tutoring services rendered.

I could go on, but this should be more than enough to convey the message: Do we REALLY want our education system to be like China’s?

How much of a price are we willing to pay in order to match the Chinese in “international competitiveness,” and are those measures the ones that are really important in our society, in our culture, in our children’s future successes?

And when will media folks (and senior education officials) cease their misleading and destructive opinion mongering based on little more than a standardized exam report, or helicoptering into a selective Chinese school for an hour or two and being strung along as though they were touring a Chinese-version Potemkin village?

The American public deserves better. It is only little-known Chinese education writers like Yong Zhao and Jiang Xueqin who are currently telling the true story about Chinese education. If NBC truly believed in their own ultra-inflated, “Education Nation” hype, they would devote a prime-time hour to it and tell the real story – not just about China or Singapore, but about Finland as well.

And, please, for at least that one hour, no Geoffrey Canada!