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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…
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Continue reading →: Master of Myth: What Arne Duncan Says and Does
Master of Myth: What Arne Duncan Says and Does The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. —John F. Kennedy U.S. Secretary of Education has been called the most powerful education secretary in…
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Continue reading →: NBC Hosting Education Summit: Can we stop bashing education?
NBC News is convening an education summit in September. “The two-day ‘Education Nation’ event in New York will be carried online, and is part of a week of programming concentrating on education issues on NBC News broadcasts such as “Today” and “Nightly News,” and the MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo TV…
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Continue reading →: What are high, really high, test scores worth: Competition among Schools in China
The advantages of academic excellence are clear and substantial. Securing a top score not only grants you admission to the most prestigious and competitive high school at no cost, but it also entitles you to a generous signing bonus, often in the thousands of RMB. Furthermore, as an additional perk,…
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Continue reading →: Mass Localism: How Might the Race to the Top Money Be Better Spent?
“It has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics,” writes Steven…
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Continue reading →: A Pretense of Science and Objectivity: Data and Race to the Top
Education has a new god: data. It is believed to have the power to save American education and thus everything in education must be about data—collect more data about our children, evaluate teachers and administrators based on data, and reward and punish schools using data. The US federal government has…
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Continue reading →: Just in case you have not read, seen, or heard: a few links you may be interested in
#1: In an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, education historian Diane Ravitch discusses: What could be wrong with promoting charter schools to compete with public schools? Why shouldn’t we demand accountability from educators and use test scores to reward our best teachers and identify those who should find…
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Continue reading →: A Discussion on China’s Recent Education Reform on CCTV 9
When I was in China recently, I was asked to commend on China’s new education reform plan on China’s national TV network (China Central TV — or CCTV). The program is in English. While there are manly proposed reform measures, one of the most significant is reform on college admissions,…
More about Yong Zhao
Dr. Yong Zhao is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. He previously served as the Presidential Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Prior to Oregon, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. Additionally, he worked as a professor of educational leadership in the Faculty of Education at University of Melbourne and senior researcher at the Mitchell Institute of Victoria University in Australia. He was a visiting Global Professor at University of Bath and a visiting scholar at Warwick University in the UK.
Selection of Books
Home: Learning in the Age of AI 