Why is the United States moving toward a centralized reform of education in a society that is based on democratic principles, and at a time when other countries are moving in the opposite direction? In his book, Catching Up or Leading the Way, Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, the University of Oregon, compares and contrasts the changes that are taking place in the United States and China. He points out at the beginning of his book that China wants an educational systems that America seems to trying to destroy. China is moving toward an educational system that:

respects individual talents, supports divergent thinking, tolerates deviation, and encourages creativity; a system in which the government does not dictate what students learn or how teachers teach; and a culture that does not rank or judge the success of a school, a teacher, or a child based on only test scores in a few subjects determined by the government.

According to Dr. Zhao, China is moving to transform its educational system that will create individuals that are capable of working in an innovation-driven knowledge based society.  And according to Zhao, the Chinese education is actually changing from a “test-oriented education” into “talent-oriented education.”   Finally, China searched the world for a model or system of education that might exemplify innovation, and guess what?  They identified education in the United States as the show-stopper.

During the time that China has been moving from a centralized, government-dictated education to a decentralized, locally organized education, what have we been doing in the United States?  We’re moving in the opposite direction.  Dr. Zhao puts it this way:

An increasing number of states and the federal government have begun to dictate what students should learn, when they should learn it, and how their learning is measured through state-mandated curriculum standards, high school exit exams, and the No Child Left Behind Act.  There are calls for even more centralization and standardization through national standards and national testing, as well as through rewarding or measuring schools and teachers on test scores.

And why is the United States moving in this direction.  I agree with Dr. Zhao when he says that we are in the process of destroying much of what is good in America’s approach to education in order to “catch up” with other countries in test scores.  Every time international test results from TIMSS or from PISA are released, American politicians, organizations and corporations that will benefit from a test oriented culture use the same refrain: America’s educational system is failing; we need to raise the bar, and make each student accountable for the same standards in a few subjects.

Yet, we have a choice, and as Zhao says, that choice is to keep our educational system that is based on innovation and creativity, and move forward to making improvements, and developing schools that are widely diverse, and based on the aspirations, goals, and needs of the students and teachers at the local and community levels.

From China to Russia

For more than 20 years I traveled with many North Americans to the Soviet Union, before and after Perestroika (restucturing) and glasnost (openness) under the auspices of the Association for Humanistic Psychology’s (AHP) Soviet Exchange Project.  During our early visits to the Soviet Union, we entered a very structured and closed system of government and education, but because we were intent on forming relationships with peers, we created opportunities for us and our Soviet colleagues (educators, researchers, scientists, psychologists, therapists, teachers) to collaborate and work together to open lines of communication, and build trust.  We did this year after year, for half a decade, in Russia and in the United States through people-to-people exchanges.  We did this without government funding; it was financed exclusively by the individuals that traveled with the AHP groups each year.

For myself, and others who worked with me, our experience focused on schools and learning in American and Russian schools.  We developed a series of teacher and researcher exchanges from 1987 – 1995, and during that time visited and worked in each others schools.  It was evident that the Russian educators (teachers and researchers) were eager to learn about American education and the pedagogy that we practiced, and indeed, experimented with such ideas as cooperative learning, constructivist learning, inquiry-based science, and project-based learning.  It was also quite evident that American educators (teachers and researchers) were eager to learn about Russian pedagogical approaches.  We uncovered much to admire, and even discovered a group in St. Petersburg that had developed a model of cooperative learning that cognitively based.

During this period of time, it was clear that Russian educators were ready to embrace the notions of perestroika and glasnost.  One concrete example of this was their willingness to collaborate with us on the development and implementation of the Global Thinking Project (GTP), a web-based inquiry-oriented environmental science curriculum.

The GTP was based on a student-centered and innovative education model, and the Russian teachers, and researcher were eager to implement the program in their schools.  In fact, when the USIA started funding US/Russian exchange projects, the GTP received three major grants from 1995 – 1998 to exchange teachers and students (grades 7 – 12), and engage in not only Internet based learning on computers that Apple Computer had donated to the Project in 1991 (Mac SE 20s).  So at the time when the United States was intent on developing national standards (National Science Education Standards were published in 1996), the Russian educational system was moving in such a way that more and more control of curriculum was being left to local schools.

Democratize American Education

The move to centralize education in the United States is one that has gained momentum over the past ten years.  Americans are being convinced that its school system is broken, old, and in crisis.  Zhao puts it this way in one of his blog posts:

in short, the argument goes, to save America, to retain America’s preeminence in the world, to ensure America’s global competitiveness, we must dismantle America’s education system and import policies and practices from other countries.

The core group of “reformers” who want to create a single test-based curriculum have oddly suggested that we ought to import educational ideas from other countries since their economies are improving or better than ours, and their students do so well on PISA and TIMSS international tests.  As Zhoa writes in his blog post entitled The Grass is Greener: Learning from Other Countries:

The belief that education in certain other countries is superior has mostly started with and reinforced by a myopic perspective of what constitutes high quality education. This perspective easily leads to the tendency to quickly jump to the conclusion that when a country rises economically (in the case of Japan and China) or militarily (in the case of the Soviet Union), it must have an excellent education system. The same perspective also leads to the conclusion that high test scores indicate educational excellence. As a result, observers rushed to Russia, Japan, China, Singapore, Finland, and Korea to search for their secrets to educational excellence and of course found what they wanted to find: standardized curriculum, focus on academic subjects that “matter,” teachers prepared and incentivized to deliver the prescribed subjects efficiently, and well-disciplined students devoted to mastering the prescribed content, with parental support.

The mistake we are making in educational reform is taking away from local educators and local systems the ability to make the policy decisions that will affect the students they know best, and of course they are the students in their own schools.  We need to stop enabling the “think-tank mentality” as evidenced so well by the Fordham Foundation, and Achieve, Inc. and their view that all kids should learn the same stuff, at the same time, and in the way that are defined by a collection of central common core standards.