Caution to Canadians: Why Chinese educators worry about high PISA scores

TORONTO – When students in Shanghai earned the highest ranking on a well-respected international assessment, not all Chinese educators
were happy.

Instead of being proud of the top scores, some were concerned that it came at too high a cost.

Fifteen-year-olds in Shanghai beat out students from 65 other countries in reading, math and science in a test called the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) that was developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Dr. Yong Zhao, an education professor at the University of Oregon and director of the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence, says that the stereotype of Asian children studying all the time is often true.

Music, art and sometimes physical education have been removed from student timetables because they aren’t covered in public exams.

Instead of extracurricular activities, students in Shanghai were working long hours and studying into the weekends, mainly for exam preparation. About four out of five Shanghai children attend after-school tutorial groups to help prepare, according to the OECD.

But when asked if there’s any value in comparing the Chinese system to Canada to see what may be applicable, professor of the sociology of education at the University of British Columbia Charles Ungerleider doesn’t seem to think so.

“You want performance outcomes like Shanghai? Have a Chinese kid and live in Shanghai,” he says. “It’s a different cultural context. We want
our kids to play soccer or do stuff after school, when they’re adolescents they need to have a job…If all you do is go to school all the time, all other things being equal, you should be outperforming those who both go to school and do other things.”

Zhao says there’s a dark side to Shanghai’s achievement.

“China itself did not celebrate the great achievement on the PISA test,” said Zhao. “They were actually more worried about what this means: we can do tests but we cannot do anything else.”

Zhao, who grew up in China and moved to North America at 27, says focusing all student energy on tests puts them at risk to lose the ability to ask questions, use curiosity and develop creative talent. He worries that people with aptitude in other areas are left out of the Chinese system.

He links the narrow focus on written exams to a recent Chinese physical health report out of the health ministry that said more than 80 per cent of Chinese people never participate in any kind of physical activity.

One reason for all the studying could be that the Chinese have long considered academic achievement the only way to advance socially, but Zhao and others say things are changing.

Andrew Parkin, director of the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) says his exposure to the Chinese system leads him to believe it’s very much in development.

“They have their traditional approaches to schools and to education, but they are rapidly incorporating what they see as best practices
from western systems, not to westernize necessarily, but to develop a hybrid that they feel is best suited,” says Parkin.

Zhao adds that since the 1990s, the government in countries including China, Japan and Korea have been trying to get away from the system.

“They recognize the damages of their traditional way of overly centralized, standardized curriculum and over-emphasis on test results, and they’re trying to move away because they want more creative talent and they recognize their test scores do not translate to real abilities in work,” says Zhao.

Take a look at one of Shanghai’s recent initiatives-that focuses on teachers rather than tests-that has already earned positive results and international attention here.