Shanghai knows better

NPR did a good follow-up to the news that Shanghai had topped the world in their first outing on the international PISA tests. As sharper news organizations mentioned when the results were released, the PISA is just the sort of rote memorization test that the Chinese educational system excels at prepping students for. The NPR follow-up caught that Chinese educators know that this puts their country at a great disadvantage, however:

Liu is very frank about those problems — the continuing reliance on rote learning, the lack of analysis or critical thinking — and he says the system is in dire need of reform.
"Why don't Chinese students dare to think? Because we insist on telling them everything. We're not getting our kids to go and find things out for themselves," he says.

And why don't they rid themselves of the university test that's the crux of the problem? John Richard Shrock answers:

Poor people in China accept that they are poor because they do not have an education; but if their child has the opportunity to get an education, then all is calm.  Therefore, allowing some students to get into college without going through the merit exam is a problem for China because of where they come from in history…the severe social injustices of pre-1949.  

Shrock's implications for America are even more concerning:

The implications for the U.S. are big.  We have just seen 43 states and DC adopt a Common Core curriculum that will have a Common Core national test (common “yardstick”) in 2014-15, and another name for that national test is “gao kao.”  It will drive U.S. education for decades and we may never be able to get off of it.  The American teacher was always unique in deciding what to teach, when to teach, and how to teach it…and the variability in creative questioning has gained us 270+ Nobel Prizes.  (Score for China-educated doing research in China is zero…but that will soon change due to many who return after receiving a graduate education in U.S.) But now, partly from test envy and international ignorance, we have headed down a path to standardization in testing that we will not be able to get out of in our lifetime.

h/t Yong Zhao