Rena
 

This statement was delivered at a recent Washington State School Directors Association conference in Seattle.  Dr. Yong Zhao is a distinguished professor at Michigan State University and recent author of the book Catching Up or Leading the Way:  American Education in the Age of Globalization. Yes, he is comparing students to food.  He went on to say that some pop early, and some pop late.  I was not enamored by this remark and prepared myself to write this piece about this individual and all the things I did not like.    

I visited his web site http://zhao.educ.msu.edu.  Here I found someone that knows of which he speaks.  Dr. Zhao was raised in a village in China by illiterate parents, but he was not educated in the national Chinese school system.  He discredits the notion that the U.S. educational system has or is failing.  He believes that the qualities of American schools are the very qualities that other countries, including China, are trying to emulate.  The United States is at risk of replacing what works in our schools with what does not work in other countries – creativity and application for standardization and rote learning.  

He suggests that through the use of national standards on certain subjects, those subjects become the ones that are emphasized in school.  If you have national standards, you also have to have a way to enforce those standards.  Tests are the way that you enforce standards.  Once standards are enforced, a selection pressure is created.  People try to conform to that.  To prove that their schools and students are doing well. You also then highlight some subjects as more important than other subjects because they carry consequences and others don't. So, you automatically select out those other subjects. This does sound a lot like what our teachers are saying especially about the teaching of Science. 

There is a general notion to try to reduce something as complex as education to something simple like a test score and then use it to rank people.  Then we tend to take that number and attach a lot of meaning to it. For some reason we forget that a test score is a moment in time check of proficiency. Teachers have been expressing these concerns for the past 10 years.  We need to keep saying it until the decision makers listen.  In the meantime, we need to respect the individual differences of our students, provide them with the best quality education we can.  Give them opportunity to learn, time to practice and provide them with authentic feedback and evaluations to allow them to improve and succeed in a diverse and wide curriculum.