When U.S. students step into the workplace, they face competition for jobs from around the world. Accordingly, U.S. college students’ relatively low scoring on some international tests has many policymakers clamoring for higher national standards.
In the search for a model, eyes have turned toward China, particularly to Shanghai, where—in both 2009 and 2012—students placed first on the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
In a forum held Wednesday at the George Washington University’s Jack Morton Auditorium, leading educational experts from China presented research designed to shed light on some of the problems facing educators worldwide. They also offered some of the reasons students from Shanghai schools have succeeded.
“Educational Standards in an International Context: Perspectives from the U.S. and China,” co-hosted by the Ameson Education and Cultural Exchange Foundation and the UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development within GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development, provided a forum to discuss the future of international education standards.
The United States and China face similar questions about the future of their educational systems, said GSEHD Dean Michael Feuer. Both, he pointed out, “are engaged in ongoing experiments in reform, trying to find ways to deliver high-quality education to an ever-increasing and increasingly diverse population of students.”
Yuan Zhenguo, secretary director for China’s National Education Consultation Committee, presented first with an assessment of the relative difficulty of textbooks used in 22 countries.
Speaking through a translator, Mr. Yuan clarified that the difficulty of a piece of educational material has no direct correlation to quality—only that the metric could be useful for assessing what was and was not useful for students.
Using a formula based on depth and breadth of coverage—breadth being the scope of topics within a subject, while depth is the degree to which a given book tested students’ knowledge, understanding and application of the subject in question—Mr. Yuan and his team evaluated the most popularly used textbooks in each country across a range of scientific subjects.
They found that of the countries tested, Russia’s textbooks were the most difficult. Textbooks from the United States ranked second.
China’s textbooks, Mr. Yuan said, had an average level of difficulty.
The burdens and challenges that students face, he said, are of course not limited to the difficulty of their textbooks. There are multiple shifting variables, including quality of teaching, motivation of students and more.
But “we want to turn [less-effective] textbooks into learning material for life,” he said, so that they can help students “be more proactive” in applying their knowledge.
The presentation was followed by a short panel and audience discussion in English and Chinese. Mr. Yuan was joined onstage by moderator Madelyn Ross, director of China initiatives and the Global Consortium at George Mason University; Judith Torney-Purta, professor emerita of human development and quantitative methodology at the University of Maryland; and James H. Williams, UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development and associate professor of international education and international affairs at GW.
Dr. Williams pointed out the complexity of ascertaining “difficulty” and also brought attention to the relative newness of the question. “Educational standards have not always been looked at in an international context,” he said. “I would bet we could not have had this conversation 30 years ago.”
Yin Houqing, president of the Shanghai Municipal Education Committee, was the next to present. He focused on what makes an effective school system. Mr. Yin is an expert on the subject. Students from the school district of Shanghai, which he has supervised and brought through numerous reforms, have consistently performed well on international tests.
The high rankings, however, are not Mr. Yin’s priority. “There are things about [Shanghai’s] system that might not be compatible with other countries,” he said, through a translator. “Being number one has nothing to do with how we’re setting our goals. But it does say something about both the process and outcome of education in Shanghai.”
The process of reform has been a long one, Mr. Yin said, beginning in the 1990s with the effort to ensure that every student received nine years of compulsory education. Then came standard-setting and curriculum reform. Now, he said, the goal is to look at K-12 education holistically: to increase quality, to reduce inequity and to “develop students’ personalities.”
One of the outcomes of which Mr. Yin is most proud is the minimal disparity between low-performing and high-performing students on PISA. High performers scored well on the test—but lower performers scored, relatively, less poorly than low performers in other countries.
“Shanghai students didn’t score well [on PISA] because of a minority of good students at particularly good schools,” Mr. Yin said. “These are students from all over.
“The Shanghai education system allows students the same rights, the same educational experience, regardless of family background,” he said. “It’s an ideal situation to achieve this balanced result.”