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Continue reading →: Entrepreneurship and Creativity: Where Do They Come From and How Not to Destroy Them
(This is a fairly long post. I am working on a conference (see last paragraph) on preparing students as global entrepreneurs. If you are interested, please let me know.) In his recent weekly address, recorded while touring an Intel plant in Oregon, President Obama once again emphasized the importance of education…
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Continue reading →: “It makes no sense:” Puzzling over Obama’s State of the Union Speech
“It makes no sense:” Puzzling over Obama’s State of the Union Speech “It makes no sense” is perhaps President Obama’s favorite phrase, using it twice in his 2011 State of the Union speech. I like the sound of it and what lies behind it—a simple way to point out the…
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Continue reading →: You must be joking, Professor Chua: An open letter to the Chinese Tiger Mom
You must be joking, Professor Chua: An open letter to the Chinese Tiger Mom Dear Professor Chua, By now, your Wall Street Journal article Why Chinese Mothers are Superior has circled around the globe and you have appeared on many media outlets. Undoubtedly you are aware of the firestorm the…
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Continue reading →: Chinese version of Catching Up
The Chinese version of my book Catching Up or Leading the Way has been published recently by East China Normal University.
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Continue reading →: John Richard Schrock: Why Doesn’t China Get Off the Teach-to-the-Test System?
I was very impressed with John Richard Shrock‘s reaction to the NPR story on Chinese students PISA performance and asked if I could repost it here. He generously agreed. Thanks, John. What is most important in John’s message is his analysis of why China cannot easily get off the damaging…
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Continue reading →: A True Wake-up Call for Arne Duncan: The Real Reason Behind Chinese Students Top PISA Performance
Big news! China has become the best education nation, or at least according to some experts and politicians. Chinese students (a sample from Shanghai) outscored 64 countries/education systems on the most recent PISA, OECD’s international academic assessment for 15 year olds in math, reading, and science. U.S. Secretary of Education…
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Continue reading →: The Value of a College Degree: High Test Scores, Low Ability
The value of Chinese college degree: $44 per month according recent statistics. “China’s college graduates on average make only 300 yuan, or roughly $44, more per month than the average Chinese migrant worker,” writes a Wall Street Journal blog article citing data released by the director of Institute of Population…
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Continue reading →: Cargo Cult Science: McKinsey’s Report on Teacher Recruitment
The late Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once criticized some educational and psychological studies as cargo cult science: In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen…
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Continue reading →: Who will invent the next Apple or Google: My (imaginary) speech at NBC’s Education Summit
I received an invitation to NBC’s Education Nation summit last week (September 20) by email. The letter has a date of July 22, 2010 and I was told it was sent via USPS. Somehow I never received the letter in the mail. I became aware of the invitation only through…
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Continue reading →: Don’t Romanticize Testing in China
Don’t Romanticize Testing in China A number of people alerted me to an article in the New York Times entitled “Testing, the Chinese Way.” The article suggests more testing for American students based on the author’s over-generalized and romanticized experience with her children’s testing experience in a Western school that…












