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Continue reading →: How Does PISA Put the World at Risk (Part 4): Misleading the World
How Does PISA Put the World at Risk: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 China’s poorest beat our best pupils—The Telegraph (UK), 2-17-2014 Children of Shanghai cleaners better at math than kids of Israeli lawyers—Haaretz (Israel), 2-19-2014 Cleaners’ children in China beat kids of US, UK professionals at…
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Continue reading →: How Does PISA Put the World at Risk (Part 3): Creating Illusory Models of Excellence
Few numbers command as much power as PISA scores, not even the number of Olympic medals or Nobel Prize winners in the world today. It is utterly shocking and embarrassing to see some otherwise rational and well-educated people (or at least they should be) in powerful positions believe that three…
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Continue reading →: How Does PISA Put the World at Risk (Part 2): Glorifying Educational Authoritarianism
authoritarian: of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) authoritarianism: principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual freedom of thought and action (Encyclopedia Britannica) PISA’s glorification of educational authoritarianism goes beyond its romanticization of the misery children suffer in authoritarian education systems as discussed in…
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Continue reading →: How Does PISA Put the World at Risk (Part 1): Romanticizing Misery
PISA, the OECD’s triennial international assessment of 15 year olds in math, reading, and science, has become one of the most destructive forces in education today. It creates illusory models of excellence, romanticizes misery, glorifies educational authoritarianism, and most serious, directs the world’s attention to the past instead of pointing…
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Continue reading →: Déjà vu: Too Late to Learn from China
In researching for my book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the World’s Best and Worst Education, I realized that PISA should have been invented about 300 years ago. Its advice and influence would have been perfect 300 years ago but are misleading today. Here is…
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Continue reading →: China’s Determination to End School Choice and Testing: New Development
(from my new book: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the World’s Best and Worst Education to be published by Jossey-Bass) For those who admire the Chinese education system, here is another cautionary tale. The Chinese government has (re)issued another round of orders to end two…
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Continue reading →: Reading the PISA Tea Leaves: Who Is Responsible for Finland’s Decline and the Asian Magic
“Finland Fell from the Tip of PISA,” says the headline of a story in the largest subscription newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in Finland, according to Google Translate (I think it should be Finland Falls from the Top of PISA). I don’t know Finnish but thanks to Google Translate, I was able…
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Continue reading →: China Enters “Testing-free” Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform
No standardized tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new actions China is taking to lessen student academic burden. The Chinese Ministry of Education released Ten Regulations to Lessen Academic Burden for Primary School Students this week for public commentary. The Ten Regulations are introduced as…
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Continue reading →: Green Evaluation: China’s Latest Reform to Deemphasize Testing
Last week the Chinese Ministry of Education launched another major reform effort to reduce the importance of testing in education. In a document sent to all provincial education authorities on June 19th, the Ministry of Education unveiled guidelines and a new framework for evaluating schools. China has engaged in numerous…
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Continue reading →: More Questions about the Common Core: Response to Marc Tucker
I have been waiting for a serious conversation about the sensibility of the Common Core State Standards Initiative with its staunch supporters. I am thus very pleased to read Marc Tucker’s response to my five questions about the Common Core. I am honored that Tucker considers my questions worth responding…
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
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