Despite media coverage, China not 'eating our lunch' on tests - rural immigrants barred from schools

[Hannah Bell]

By Kam Wing Chan
Special to The Times

Kam Wing Chan is a professor in geography at the University of Washington. His research focuses on China's migrant labor and urbanization.

**

THE lackluster performance of our 15-year-olds in math, science and reading in a standardized test compared with Shanghai's students scoring first in all three subjects, have stirred some interesting and somewhat self-deprecating comments. President Obama declared it a "Sputnik moment," and columnist Esther Cepeda opined alarmingly about China "eating our lunch."

We know that China is a master of turning out sparkling economic statistics. Some of those are real and deserve congratulation — China's economy is indeed on a meteoric rise. But many others are not so real...Cepeda is right in pointing out that the contrast of the U.S. scores with Shanghai's is not totally appropriate: It is comparing the entire U.S. population — including many who are on free or reduced-price lunches — with China's cream of the crop, the Shanghai kids.

Even more important, but far less-known, is that in Shanghai, as in most other Chinese cities, the rural migrant workers that are the true urban working poor (totaling about 150 million in the country), are not allowed to send their kids to public high schools in the city. This is engineered by the discriminatory hukou or household registration system, which classifies them as "outsiders." Those teenagers will have to go back home to continue education, or drop out of school altogether.

In other words, the city has 3 to 4 million working poor, but its high-school system conveniently does not need to provide for the kids of that segment.

In essence, the poor kids are purged from Shanghai's sample of 5,100 students taking the tests. The Shanghai sample is the extract of China's extract. A fairer play would be to ask kids at Seattle's private Lakeside School to race against Shanghai's kids...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2013808513_guest03chan.html


As the author goes on to say, in the US, children of internal & external immigrants have the right to be educated wherever they reside. This is a strength of our system.

[HEyHEY]

1. I said this from the beginning

And I'll tell ya this much too. I promise you those kids in Shanghai were cropped from the best schools in the city and they took THEIR best students and forged what they had to in order to get them all to do that test.

After living here two years there's one thing I know, there's ALWAYS dirty play afoot in China. ALWAYS. Not only that, standardized testing is a memorization thing, something the Chinese do well thanks to wrote learning. That's why they can make a perfect copy of a Sony Trinitron... however see if they can invent the trinitron.

[Hannah Bell]

2. The same thing was said of the japanese. that they could only copy. wasn't true then,

isn't true about the chinese.

chinese are as capable of invention as any other group.

i wouldn't be surprised if the populations taking int'l tests are handpicked.

but it irks me no end to see people touting the chinese education system as superior to the us system -- when, as the article states, it doesn't even educate internal migrants.

when it is free only to the ninth grade, & a fairly large percent of chinese don't even make it that far.

the chinese studying abroad or attending chinese universities are in general a privileged subset of chinese.

the majority of chinese are still poor rural laborers who receive a basic education in spartan circumstances.

[HEyHEY]

3. No, trust me, the Chinese aren't capable

It is too acceptable to steal ideas here, that combined with years of discouraging independent thought has destroyed their ability to create. Event modern Chinese academics constantly condemn it, particularily because 1000 years ago they had so many great innovators. This is why the government is now paying big bucks to get US academics to China to try to fix this problem, actually THAT is a good argument for the point you're making as well.

[Hannah Bell]

4. I can only say what you just said mirrors exactly what was said in japan by japanese in the 80s.

but i saw for myself that japanese students could be highly creative. no, they weren't creative in their regular classrooms -- the classrooms weren't structured for that, they were structured for lectures & tests.

china has a lot of people. they aren't all clones.

not meaning to contradict you, i'm sure lots of chinese/chinese leaders say that & it's a media meme (it's the reverse face of ours, telling the chinese they're defective in a different way).

i only dispute that what "people say" is necessarily true, in china or the us or canada.

i've known quite a few native chinese: some intensely rigid, some astonishingly the opposite. mostly young & studying abroad, so i suppose not a representative sample.

i guess you're working in china in the business sector? not a representative sample either, right? i'd guess that chinese management would be highly risk-aversive for various reasons.

just, when i lived in japan there was a persistent meme, spread by books & media, that japanese were "uncreative" -- & because japan is so media saturated, lots of people would tell you this worriedly.

it was rather orwellian, i felt.

so i'm skeptical of chinese lack of creativity.

my impression was japanese were on the whole "conformist" in a different way from people in the us -- but not uncreative at all.

[NuttyFluffers]

5. oh but HEyHEY does have a point. cultural shenanigans galore afoot.

China and Japan (and Korea) do emphasize rote learning, do hammer down wild leaps of creativity and innovation, and do like to finagle data to suit their image to the world. Culturally they come down far harder than we do when it comes to "free spirits." And that's so obvious it has no room for debate. Free spirits exist there, lord knows I hung out with plenty when there, but they have a monumentally harder time there than here.

edit: Also, I've always said, USA has a harder time on these comparative tests because we are dedicated to teaching everybody, not just our most talented. Most of the world laughs at that idea and just see these lists as games to present the best image for foreign investment, etc. Americans are nowhere half as dumb as people think -- propagandized to the Nth degree, yes, but nowhere as stupid.

[Hannah Bell]

6. i agree with hey hey's general point, just disagree with the idea

that chinese are only capable of copying.

[AngryAmish]

7. Like using kids in Los Alamos to represent the entire nation

(lotta smart kids there)