Yong Zhao, Keynote MASC

his website is here; he comments that most of his slides are on it
great to follow the state auditor
school boards "are a unique American thing"
around the world people don't understand what it is
China "saves the money and bypasses the election process" (yes, that's a joke. There will be many)
something "that America has done very well"
"you are here to work with the people...most places, they're branches of the government"
but you've lost most of the power of the last twenty years
"I'm not a member of the Tea Party; I'm fron China, and we do have tea..."
"have lost most of the most precious control"
"in your hands is the future of Massachusetts, the future of this nation"
"not how hard you work; it's what you're working on"


Easter Island: very organized civilization, but were destroyed by the Easter Island heads
"these are their AYPs"
sacrificed everything to make these
"we've been trying to build giant statutes that don't really matter and may be dangerous"
"how we were seduced by them"
"Thank God NCLB was an unfunded mandate; if it had been funded, it might have been dangerous"
"no evidence to say that American education was bad, except for test scores"
"American education is not in decline, it's not getting worse, it's always been bad... MEASURED BY TEST SCORES"
"if that has been happening over half a century, you should not still be here. You should have ruined this country a long time ago!"
"American students have never been good, but they've always been confident"
"chopstick countries do well on math...you use spoons and forks, you don't do well on math"
"you look at this data, you think our kids are too happy for their own good"
people say it's because "they don't know how bad they are"
"test them often and tell them they are REALLY bad"
and "now you test them with PISA, you're not even worse than your neighbors; you're worse than countries you've never heard of"
Asian countries meanwhile concerned about low confidence; kids can read but don't want to
"a lot of numbers lie about education systems"
"do they ever tell you the side effects" of changes in education policy
this reading program may improve their scores "on MCAS, but will cause them to hate reading forever"
"education is about the future but " we're looking at the past
"everything worked until it stopped working"
"when we plot correlations, we think it's going to go on forever. Nothing goes on forever!"
with Race to the Top, we've gone to the bottom; all those millions "we have not improved"
my definition of a good education is "out of the basement readiness"
(so they don't come home and live in their parents' basements)
53% of recent college grads jobless or underemployed (that was 2012 data)
"we have the best educated bartenders in the world"
"everybody is having trouble created jobs for their kids"
Boomerang generation "you threw them away and they come back, and they're not just back for Christmas"
shift in how we do things (like shift from farming; then needed fewer farmers, but were still creating farmers)
we talk to employers "as if that company will always be here"
that worked in the past, but now things change too fast
"what do you want tomorrow, but tomorrow, they've been bought by a Chinese company and they outsource somewhere else"
Henry Ford's assembly line: employee oriented education
"why do you want kids to be ready for kindergarten? Kindergarten should be ready for every child that comes"
readiness for kindergarten previously: being able to walk in a straight line ("that way you're ready when you get pulled over by the cops")
and staying awake during class
"but that paradigm isn't working anymore...entering second machine age"
Google car does not need a human driver. "you're thinking of your school bus savings now, aren't you?"
"if you don't need a driver, you don't need drivers' licenses, you don't need driver instructors"
also, if a job cannot be replaced by machines, it can be outsourced
"if it can be done cheaper somewhere else, it will be there"
are we preparing our children with skills and knowledge that should not be outsourced
"everyone is good at something, but no one is good at everything"
"are you allowing enough variety for children" to find their own passions and skills and have time to practice them?
Not all of the passions where valuable before
while changes are getting rid of jobs, "they're creating new opportunities"
in the MCAS of reindeer, "Rudolph failed" as his nose was too red, "so he was put in special education"
but when the standards changed "and Santa was looking for his GPS" Rudolph was valued
new technology leads to new opportunities
"everything has become valuable...the foggy Christmas eve has arrived"
lose about 80% of our kids, because they're disengaged
"make sure very child is valued and is valuable"
"we don't compete with Chinese kids or Indian kids...we create our own opportunities"
"develop entrepeneurship: use your skills to be valuable to other people"
"our children are not fitting into existing paradigm; they create them"
"help them to be great in their own way, and they will stay out of your basement"