The recent announcement of the performance ranking of 15-year-old students from 34 developed countries in reading, math and science basically showed that when it comes to academic achievement, China is eating our lunch.
This shouldn’t come as a shock, except to those who haven’t been paying attention to China’s decade-long meteoric rise.
The Program for International Student Assessment standardized test ranked U.S. students from 14th to 25th worldwide in the three content areas — above average in science and reading, but below average in math. The big story was the top scores of China’s Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macao school systems.
The main critique of the rankings is that evaluating the U.S. against selected parts of China is not a true comparison. It is a fair criticism — China’s gleaming, modern cities have little in common with rural areas where teachers are paid very little and classrooms have few resources. If the U.S. had broken out scores from only the public schools where less than a quarter of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, our performance would have seemed much stronger, but below-average-scoring low-income students were included in our nationally representative sample.
Also understand that even when you count only the Chinese who live in cities — estimates vary from 30 percent to 47 percent — you’re still looking at millions more well-educated Chinese than the entire population of the U.S.
That startling number distracts us from the secret of Chinese students’ academic superstardom: a culture in which the only motivation in life is to test into a good high school and then into the best college likely to lead to a white-collar career. Unlike U.S. students, Chinese children are single-mindedly focused on the academic achievement needed to get that job so they can secure their parents’ and their own livelihoods — in that order.
“The children in cities are almost all ‘only-children’ and they are the only hope for their families’ future,” said Vanessa Fong, a Harvard Graduate School of Education associate professor focused on Asian education systems. “It’s that child’s education that can enable attaining the very basic life necessities — housing, medical care — for themselves, their parents and their children.”
Fong’s firsthand experiences studying Chinese schools revealed a culture in which families aren’t fearful of what they might lose because they don’t have much to begin with — their attitude is that the sky is the limit. “They have a sense that anyone can rise up, anyone can attain a life that can provide for their own and their parents’ well-being,” Fong said, stressing the strong ties that bind small Chinese families and the lack of basic Social Security and Medicare safety nets that Americans enjoy.
“Even if you’re the child of poor workers, there’s a sense that any child can get a basic decent standard of living — but . . . failure is not an option.”
Never mind the reality that many U.S. schools are just woefully underprepared to deal with the economic and social difficulties students face, there is no way education could ever compete for even our poorest students’ attention and dedication like China’s. That’s not our culture — just like it isn’t the American custom to plan not only for your own future, but for your parents’ future as well.
Lacking a cultural shift of our own, America’s relatively affluent standard of living is keeping us from yielding the same academic achievements as our hungry No. 2 competitor.
