I have been out of America for almost 7 years now. I was in Switzerland for five years as Headmaster of a wonderful international boarding school with students from 70 countries, and then in the gulf region last year for one abortive year as director of a new school that aimed and promised to be all sorts of things and then turned out to be another kind of thing altogether. (That was the first time in my administrative or teaching career that I was threatened with incarceration for disrespect by my board chair.) And so this year, having resigned in June and not being able to buy an administrative post at that time, I am here teaching English in Qingdao, China at a Public Middle school (here a middle school is a high school). In the meantime, through my on- line reading of this publication as well as the TC Record and the New York Times, I have been sporadically following the controversy over “high stakes testing.”
From afar, it seems the arguments related to big tests are essentially about teacher autonomy and creativity versus measurable teacher and school accountability; about dumbing down curriculum to insure student competency in basic skills as opposed to viewing tests as beefing up curriculum to make sure that all students have greater objectively measured competency; about (at the risk of making it sound like Jonathan Swift’s “big- endeans” versus “little-endeans” in Gulliver’ Travels) the values of the left versus the values of the right, the constructivists versus those who want to train a competitive American work force.
Well, here in China, I think I may be observing what lies way down the road (or is it way back up the road?) of ultra high stakes testing. In this, the most rapidly developing of developing countries, where less percentage of GDP ( last year about 3.8%) is spent on education than in many other more slowly developing countries, I am observing remarkably talented, persistent and cheerfully oppressed students every day. I am thinking that all education happens in a societal (social, economic and cultural) context. Americans, or some, want young people and children to be more motivated, more smart, more competitive not only with fellow college applicants, but with other young people, in other words other potential workers, around the world. For years, I have observed independent school parents, people so worried about their kids’ education that they will dispose $20,000 of their income on it, who would like, essentially one thing: for their kids to be more hungry! This after they have given their kids so much to eat. My kids here have parents who want the same thing, but in China the air is diffused with social, economic, and cultural hunger. It is “promise cramm’d”, as Hamlet said, but with a billion and a half packed into the ship of state, many, also like Hamlet, “eat of the air.” I am wondering if this lean and hungry milieu is where America is headed, especially as this sleeping giant, China, awakens, dusts itself off, and starts adding amazing pressure to the global economy. The French know this is happening, and the Germans, and just about everyone else, and they are over here in China building “bridges”, not to mention opera houses, and factories, and office buildings and power plants. (This is the French cultural –aka business- exchange year in China. Has someone in the white house who follows world news told the president about China? Sometimes I get the impression that no one in the white house has been assigned to follow world news).
I am preparing 10th graders at this public boarding school for the CAEL (Carlton Assessment of English Language), a newly designed English entrance test for Canadian university. My students’ parents pay 24000 rmb ((around $3000) extra per year beyond the normal tuition of 4,000 rmb because this special program gained their kids entrance into this, the most competitive school in the province, into which they would not have gotten without the special program. Virtually everyone pays tuition for public education in China, which is compulsory to grade 9, and in that respect the US may be much more socialist than China. But with this new entrepreneurial arrangement at our school, an example of the new free market loopholes, these parents have banked on the fact that their kids will probably not get into one of the most competitive Chinese universities. Without admission into one of the top Universities, they probably won’t get a very good job, which means they won’t earn as much here being a professional as many unskilled laborers can earn in America. Their parents have more resources than most. According to the Statistical Communiqué of National and Social Development in 2004, “In 2004, the per capita annual net income of rural households was 2,936 yuan (US$353). It registered the highest growth since 1997 with a real increase of 6.8 per cent after price factors were deducted. The per capita disposable income of urban households was 9,422 yuan (US$1,135), a real increase of 7.7 per cent.” Even for my kids’ parents, a foreign university would be a significant stretch. A young doctor earns about 3000-5000 rmb per month, a beginning practical nurse around 400-500, a teacher around 2000, maybe 2,500 at career peak. Do the math. Business people have money, but few have enough for American university tuition. Thus they are turning to UK and even more so Canadian universities, not just because the post 9/11 paranoia has made it very difficult for some marvelous, brilliant students from all over the world to enter the US (and I am speaking of students who love the idea of America), but also because other countries, especially Canada, offer a better educational buy. I am also teaching a few hours a week in a foundation year program for British and Australian Universities. Parents of those high school grads (kids who, in many cases, didn’t cut it on the university exams) are paying around 70-80,000 rmb per year. As I write this, jackhammers and dynamite can be heard outside my campus apartment until 10:30 each night- lights out in the dorms- literally moving a mountain, to make way for the new international studies center. An incredibly entrepreneurial bunch, the school leaders here, already taking a cut from housing my program and the foundation year program, know that there is a big market for preparing students for overseas post secondary study, and they are going to cut out the middle men, I guess. Is it a sign of a country’s prosperity that educational loopholes and back doors, such as the “development pools”in US college admission offices, and private counselors and test prep centers, start to pop up all over the place? I think it’s a sign of prosperity that many of my foundation year students are blasé and unappreciative of the extra chances they are getting.
The backdrop of ultra high stakes testing in China.
When I visited Moscow a few years back, someone there told me, “Of the 10 million people in this city, about 200,000 of them have money.” Similarly, as China transforms to a market economy, very few among its billion and a half people have scurried into the golden courtyard. In extreme cases, people like Anthony Zhang, Beijing real estate developer, who was recently portrayed in an International Herald Tribune article (Kahn, 2004), have usurped whole courtyards for themselves. Mr. Zhang figured out how to buy out whole tracts of prime suburban farm land from local officials and turn them into housing developments and in one case, even a $50 million replica of a French chateau which will be the centerpiece of the development. The farmers who were kicked out were bought off with monthly stipends of around $50 and promises of employment as grounds keepers.
For many, life or the possibility of a better life, has improved. Indeed, I am struck by how many people own apartments as soon as they get married or shortly after, but this is because families pool resources, because companies often provide help in procuring housing, and because the Chinese are amazingly frugal, unless they get caught up in Mahjong or other gambling. (A common story is the man who finally has to promise his fiancée or wife that he will cut his finger off if he ever gambles again; another is the housewife who drops 12,000 yuan in one mahjong afternoon.) Indeed, I have stood waiting with friends in sub zero temperature for 25 minutes to take a bus for 24 cents when the same taxi ride would have cost us 1 dollar each; or watched them engage in complex disputes with street vendors over the price of two dee gua (sweet potatoes roasted in an old metal drum -around 12 cents). Every part of every animal is consumable. I have eaten lung and pig blood for the first time here, and had a hard time seeing a turtle being carved up for a customer in the supermarket. Having dinner with friends recently, I could not bring myself to eat what was finally explained to me as “the colon of pig.” That said, it is also apparent that eating well, eating a wonderful array of excellently prepared foods, is also natural in the average Chinese household.
The rural poor have been hardest hit by the transition to market economy. According to China Daily (Feb 23, 2005) there were 310 million surplus laborers in the agricultural sector in 2003 (only around 180 million of them found jobs in other sectors), and thus one sees here one of the largest worker migrations in history from country to city. The papers are filled with stories of husband and wife migrating to different cities and leaving the child behind with grandparents. When migrant workers reach the cities, their pay is often delayed, they live in horrible conditions, and they survive on noodles and bread. On the backs of these migrant workers the new China and the Chinese economy are being built. Those who can, especially women, go to work in other countries and may wind up becoming prostitutes so they can send money home to their husbands and children (often with the blatant or tacit knowledge of their husbands.) Horrible you say, and yet isn’t this how New York and Dubai and all the “great cities” were and are being built, on the backs of immigrant and migrant workers? Often the main reason for going? To pay for their child’s education in a poor rural school with a leaky roof, not enough hand me down books, and in many reported cases, not enough money to pay teachers, if qualified teachers can even be found. Why? As in so many other times and places, education seems to be the answer, the way out, and this is why teachers are still so highly esteemed by the working classes, even though only 30% of recently polled college graduates said they would want their children to become teachers( China Daily 9/11/04). But given the vast population and the still undeveloped economy, higher education remains an unrealized dream for many people in China.
To understand the national weeding process in a country of 1.3 billion people, start with around 27 million students completing the “compulsory” grade 9. Around 52% of rural residents and 21% of urban residents have attained only a primary school education (China Daily, 2/14/05). Next, consider that only 24.5 % (6.67 million) of the junior middle school grads, go from junior high school into a 3 year academic high school program. Another 18.3%, or just over 5 million, go into vocational training programs. Of those 6.67 million who go to academic high schools, 80% (5.34 million) go to a post secondary program. Of those 5.34 million, 34% (1.8 million) go into less esteemed 3 year programs and 66% (3.52 million) go into actual 4 year bachelor’s degree programs. (“Basic Statistics on Education,” China Education and Research Network, 2001). Of those who go into 4 year bachelors programs, perhaps 30% go to highly esteemed universities. As my colleague Duan explains, “People in China consider ‘the 211 project universities’ to be the top universities ;it means to face the 21st century we especially focus on 100 universities and some subjects, actually there are 91 such universities at present and 19 in Beijing).” So, I ask Duan, would it be a victory to get into any one of these 91 universities? Would going to any one of them bring you more prestige and a better job? His simple answer is, “yes.”
The process is even more harsh in some areas. In Beijing, 49% of 18-22 year olds are enrolled in post secondary studies, but in places like Yunan Province less than 9% are enrolled. (China Daily, 2/23/05). In 2003 the media depicted the sad stories of two students aspiring to university study. Dalian student Zhang Hao, was accepted into University to study Traditional Chinese Medicine but hid her acceptance letter because she did not want to upset her poverty stricken parents, both of whom were ill. Her fears were inspired by the nationally covered story of Jing Yanmei of Shaanxi whose father killed himself when he learned that she was accepted into university and he would not be able to pay the fees. Both girls were eventually funded by donors and universities, and recently, with the inception of the Great Wall Foundation and an increased focus on government financial aid, thousands of students are receiving help.(China Daily,8/26/03).
From societal context to daily school life:
Each day here at school, I see an educational manifestation of China’s economic and social context. For teachers and students, tests overshadow everything they do: school quarter and semester exams graded by teams of grade level teachers; city exams graded by teams of teachers from all schools; and ultimately the university exams which overshadow not only all the other exams but also influence every teaching and preparation and learning minute of every day. Walk down a hallway here during any period of the day and you will most often hear either students chanting in unison, repeating what a teacher has said or the teacher lecturing, perhaps with the aid of the computer projector. Impressive, a beamer in each classroom, but when all is said and done, it is essentially a replacement for the blackboard, an aid for “information delivery.” The style of teaching is still that of the “virtuoso” described in Payne’s 1990 article in the Teacher’s College Record after she followed a cohort of Chinese teachers through their training and first lectures. Of course, it must be, with 50-56 students packed into every classroom in neat double rows of desks. However, I have, on occasion, been cheered to see a group of students standing in the front of a teacher’s class speaking. And I know that many Chinese teachers do research on alternative methods and would love to implement them, and perhaps they soon will. But for now, the test so overshadows their work that they must stay focused on anticipating its questions or else they and their school will later be judged as unsuccessful.
My Chinese teaching colleagues teach on average ten classes a week, two per day, the kind of teaching load American teachers dream of. However, they are required to be in school each day from 7:20 until 5:00. Why? To prepare. Walk into the English teacher’s office (as I seldom do because it saddens me) and you will find a rather grim scene most days. The only time anyone has spoken to me beyond brief niceties or a few questions about my origins, is to ask, not about teaching methods or theories, or the differences in American or European education, but rather about such burning issues as the difference between “all told” and “all in all,” or when you would use “in sum” as opposed to “in total.” Many people barely even look up from their work. I have invited people to come to my classes and said that I would love to visit classes. No takers either way. And these are lovely people, and smart, well trained people, as is evident when you can get their attention for a moment or two. They are driven to find all those little grammar points that could occur on the university entrance exams. They and their kids are not constructing language, finding language, building language. They are destructing language before it destructs them in the guise of the many headed test. Little wonder that some of the younger teachers, at least those who are not from the poorer rural cities, contemplate leaving this profession which, for all its daily anxiety and its more classes to teach than the veterans, and its requirement of doing chores, such as fetching hot water for the veterans, pays them perhaps 1,200 yuan per month. My young English teaching colleagues live in terror of trying to explain the distinctions between infinitives and gerunds, between definite and indefinite articles, countables and non-countables. But there is little or no time for actually using the language in class. Most teaching of English is conducted in Chinese.
To insure that teachers are really kept busy in preparing and improving (in order to improve exam results), the Headmaster even assigns them research projects, which they confess they try to complete rapidly by downloading and paraphrasing information off the internet. Beyond all this they spend time in preparing kids for contests and special exams and “olympics” in science English or math. The kid competitors’ victories mean special recognition for the sponsoring teacher and perhaps a small prize. If a teacher publishes an article, no matter how trivial or useless or groundbreaking, he or she wins a prize. If the teacher takes a couple of years to earn a Master’s degree, this could mean a salary increase of perhaps 200 yuan per month. Not surprisingly there is a strong but deeply submerged undercurrent of cynicism about the whole system and the means by which one gets ahead. But with the remaining clouds of the old authoritarian days, and with the still retained knowledge of what people suffered through and sacrificed not so long ago, few will give voice to their discontent. It would be either dangerous or self-indulgent to do so. Teachers may grin ironically in the teachers room when asked about school policy or “the system,” but when they go into the classroom, they are focused and earnest.
The pressure comes from the top down, especially after a local news article suggested last year that the school hadn’t gotten as many grads into top universities as it had in previous years. Of course there is a catch in all this. Universities admit quotas of students from each province. If one is from a more populated province such as ours, Shengdong, the competition is more fierce. So School management takes action not by saying let’s examine what we have been doing wrong, but by saying in effect, “let’s do more of what we have been doing!” Thus, QRJ starts in August and runs until the end of July. Thus, the 2,400 kids live on campus and go to classes 6 days per week and get to go home from Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon. (Recently, 200 students in one province staged a protest against weekend classes, but ironically the classes had been instituted at the request of parents who could not afford the extra private lessons that other kids were getting on weekends.) Kids here are in the classroom at 7:20 each morning and finish at 4:30 with a one hour nap after lunch .Then after campus cleaning assignments (fr both teachers and students by the way), sport, and some “free time”(in which students often wash or do laundry) followed by dinner, all 50 or 60 squeeze back into the classroom for evening study hall from 6:20 to 9:45 with two 15 minute breaks. Please note. Only a few teachers patrol the halls of the entire school during study time. The kids are chiefly and easily monitored by student proctors because they are focused and don’t need supervision. Last night I even saw around a dozen students using a break time to do laps around the track in sub zero temperatures, though I also saw one of my boys bashfully walking beside a girl, as though the two of them had hours to just stroll along. But he is a rebel who is laughing while he fails most subjects, perhaps because, with his parents’ resources, he can afford to laugh. (Like many American teens and a growing number in post miracle Japan, he can afford his malaise.) It’s lights out at 10:20 at which time the 8 students packed into each 9’x12’ room call it a day. They will not have taken showers because there are no hot showers. Like many people in China, they wash with basins of heated water. Like me, they do laundry by hand in a basin as well. In keeping with the national effort to save energy, the heating and out door lighting at night are minimal, even in sub-freezing temperatures. When the kids go home on Saturday night, the heat in the campus apartments for teachers goes off. No one complains, so I don’t either.
My kids have never dated, they have almost never traveled, never camped, never been to a dance. In a paired-discussion exercise in which they had to find something interesting about a classmate, everyone was astounded that “Nick” at his aunt’s wedding had danced with a girl who was not a blood relative. In Qingdao, I have observed that one of the hottest places to be on a Saturday or Sunday is not the mall but rather the Xin Hua bookstore, which is packed with people of every age reading, and from the looks of it, reading whole books that they will then not have to buy. However, the cell phone and the mp3 have arrived with the nation’s young people. In the first 11 months of 2004, according to a report in City Weekend Magazine, China’s 329 million “mobile phone users sent 196 billion short messages (SMS)”(8). Authorities at Beijing University prompted some outcry when they stipulated that students who own mobile phones or mp3 players would not be eligible for scholarship (China Daily 2/16/04).
When, such topics as buying or selling houses, how movies are made and stars hired, how businesses work, how public transportation works come up in our language units, I realize they know nothing about them. They don’t know where to begin to try to figure out how these things work. Initially, when I asked them a question that involved inference or deduction or virtually any kind of thinking, they stared at me in terror. And my kids, the slow class of the grade, would probably be high flyers at most American prep schools, at least in math and science. I love these kids. They are probably the most innocent and gracious and respectful and beautiful kids I will ever work with. And they are getting there. They are learning to think and to enjoy thinking. But they seem so beaten down. The saddest moments of my career have been those nights teaching them after they had gotten exam results. Of course my class is relegated to the evening on three days because it is stuck in on top of all their other courses. When they summon their good humor and grace and energy for class, I so admire them. And every Monday when they come in and I ask, “What did you do on the weekend?” I quickly add after the experience of their week one response,“besides, eat, sleep, and play computer games?” But they prevail. With such a big inexorable stick over one’s head and with only one real carrot in town, who would not? I wonder how many American kids could live so cheerfully under this kind of pressure. And I imagine a lot could of it were the only game in town. But should it be?
To the credit of the Chinese, they are working hard to reform testing, pedagogy, and the entire process of university admission. They are working to address the needs of the western provinces and the ethnic minorities and the migrant workers’ kids. Indeed, China has done a remarkable job in trying to improve mass education. Over a million people last year took college courses via the state funded “TV University.” The number of university students in China has grown from 1.08 million in 1998 to over 17 million in 2003. And the Chinese government has just launched a program to send 5,000 college teachers overseas each year for doctoral study or research. (China Daily 1/10/05). One gets the sense that the government is truly working to improve education, but education reform is a complex process in a country that currently educates over 300 million people at all levels, more than the U.S. population. Of course, education will improve more and more as society becomes more prosperous. Is it an axiom that prosperity may be measured in the number of educational loopholes that exist? Are my foundation year students so lax because they can afford to be? Are American students so lax because they can afford to be? Ironically, is the fruit of prosperity toward which great nations and empires strive such laxity?
A tale of two countries?
So here we see a country suffused with the hunger to succeed and progress, and it is succeeding and progressing with people obediently and in many cases devotedly participating in the weeding and testing because that’s how it is in a country with a massive population, they all concede, “that’s just how it is.” I am struck by the sense of nationalism here, which expresses itself not in the desire to build an empire, not in a need to overshadow others, except perhaps for the Japanese, against whom so many still bear such a deep grudge. No, the nationalism is inspired by a desire for China to be a stronger more prosperous, and thus respected country. In an atmosphere where individuals are so expendable to the dream, students rise when a teacher walks in the room, and they work like mad to prepare for tests that will try to determine not what they know, but what they do not know, even if what they do not know is an arcane and useless point of English grammar that 90% of native English speakers could not decipher. In the ship of state, there is not room for everyone in the upper berths, so of course only some can secure a place there. Thus, China has a massive, cheap, obedient, and relatively well-trained work force as well as a massive cheap and well trained professional class, which yielded a trade surplus of $32 billion in 2004 and attracted foreign investment from all over the planet.
Is this what so many voices in America are clamoring for? To raise the stakes, increase the hunger and whip America back into line so it can “compete” with the rest of the world? We see here all the items on the American business interest’s agenda for education: larger more economical classes; cheap labor everywhere, competing for low paying jobs; ultra-high standards and high stakes tests to measure them; a government driven focus on the useful subjects of science, math, and technology; many many more hours in the classroom; kids’ time strictly controlled; merit pay; strict accountability of teachers and schools; non-existent or fledgling unions, and on and on. It’s all here. Come see it in action. See its many sad costs including the erasure of childhood, the disheartening of well-intentioned professionals, the tests that always ask about what one is not expected to have learned.
I also think, however, that the American business people (by no means a derogatory shorthand) may be among the few who are really aware of life outside America. They have a concrete motivation to be aware. Very soon, I fear, the question of high stakes testing will not be a philosophical debate in America. The hunger will be a reality. All empires decline, do they not? Mr Bush and those of his ilk may be rightly seeing the decline of the American Empire and the re-ascendancy of the Chinese empire. Indeed, China is re-establishing itself as the center of Asia and its aspirations are large. Consider its recent diplomatic building with Latin America, its purchase of Canadian oil rights, its leadership role in the ASEAN summit, which will create a free trade zone of 2 billion people, the largest in the world. Just yesterday, I read in the New York Times that talk of China’s contribution to the U.S. trade deficit is becoming a big issue. Ironically, last month in a China Daily story, Gordon Brown, UK Finance Minister, released advance notes of his Beijing speech in which he said that protectionist voices decrying the rise of China are a sterile attempt to stop the lock.”(2/21/05)
Remember carefully, the Chinese have been through this cycle many times before and may have learned a few things. They are monitoring their growth with amazing precision. When American business people cry, “wake up, be stronger hungrier, more competitive,” they are well aware of the tendency of Empires to lose control because they become effete. And America from afar, I am sorry to say, seems remarkably effete. Competitive national tests, and a slimmer way of living have existed forever in the European Union and Asia, which to an American business man pretty much are the rest of the world, except for those places like Africa and the former Soviet block states that border China, places where everyone goes to plunder things out of the earth, or India, which may be on an ascent similar to China’s. So maybe they are seeing something about American education and the well-fed American way of life, these business men who would like to whip things into line in the classroom and thus the work place. But maybe what they are missing (beyond the fact that they may have to change their own executive lifestyles), and the Chinese may be missing it yet again, is that empires all fall because empire is a bad self-destructive idea. The business people, the Bush camp, annoy many people because what they are stamping their feet to hold onto is empire- business, cultural, ideological empire- instead of focusing on the quality of life within their own borders. It probably won’t get much air time in the US, but in response to America’s recently released “Country Reports on Human rights Practices for 2004, “ the Information Office of China’s State Council has just released a report on the “United States’ Human Rights Record, 2004.” It is propagandistic and retaliatory, but it has enough truth in it to make an American wince. The noise now about China’s newly passed anti-secession law will be used to repudiate China’s “gentle giant” approach. Imagine a country passing an anti secession law!
If we want to improve education in America, I think we should look perhaps to countries like Sweden, Hungary, even old driven Singapore. They stress high standards because they need them, they believe in them, because they are good for the people, they improve the quality and possibilities of life. NOT because they will fuel an empire. The proof is there: empires and empire builders have all ended in sadness and self destruction. Empire is no basis for the schooling of citizens; ideals about the quality of life and the value of the examined life are the basis for education. And we cannot look at teaching or testing anywhere without looking at the ways of living that surround them.
Sources:
Basic Statistics on Education (2001) China research and Education Network, http://www.edu.cn/20010101/22284.shtml
“Brown: China's peaceful rise not a threat,” China Daily 2/2/05
“China to send 5,000 young teachers abroad annually” China Daily 1/10/05.
Dongping, Yang 2000' Educational Evolution in China(I) Educational Evolution and Reform Website.
http://www.edu.cn/20010101/22290.shtml
Kahn, Joseph International Herald Tribune, 12/27/2004.” In Beijing a Little piece of France embodies a world of change: the gap between rich and poor yawns wider than the chateau’s moat.” New York times on the Web 12/27/04. http://www.nytimes.com
“Newsworthy,” City Weekend Magazine, Jan 13-16, vol 5, issue1.
“No student loans for phone or MP3 owners” China Daily 12/16/04
Payne, Lynn. The Teacher as Virtuoso: A Chinese Model for Teaching. Teachers College Record Volume 92 Number 1, 1990, p. 49-81
People’s Daily on-line,1/11/05 http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/other/about.shtml
“Poor students struggle to fund higher education” China Daily, Hong Kong Edition, 8/26/03.
“Serious Gap in Hgher Education Opportunities, C.D. 1/14/05
Shi, Li China Daily on line. Feb 23, 2005.
“Statistical communique of national and social development in 2004,” quoted in China Daily, 3/1/05.
“Teachers best regarded in China: survey,” China Daily 9/11/04.
