The Chinese school testing system is the full culmination of accountability that the US educational system is being modeled after. Do we want this type of system for our children? Nothing consumes the lives of Chinese families more than the ever-¬looming prospect of the gaokao. The exam — there are two versions, one focused on science, the other on humanities… Today, more than nine million students take the gaokao each year (fewer than 3.5 million, combined, take the SAT and the ACT). But the pressure to start memorizing and regurgitating facts weighs on Chinese students from the moment they enter elementary school. Even at the liberal bilingual kindergarten my sons attended in Beijing, Chinese parents pushed their 5-year-olds to learn multiplication tables and proper Chinese and English syntax, lest their children fall behind their peers in first grade. “To be honest,” one of my Chinese friends, a new mother, told me, “the gaokao race really begins at birth.” China’s treadmill of standardized tests has produced, along with high levels of literacy and government control, some of the world’s most scarily proficient test-takers. Shanghai high-school students have dominated the last two cycles of the Program for International Student Assessment exam, leading more than one U.S. official to connect this to a broader “Sputnik moment” of coming Chinese superiority. Yet even as American educators try to divine the secret of China’s test-taking prowess, the gaokao is coming under fire in China as an anachronism that stifles innovative thought and puts excessive pressure on students. Teenage suicide rates tend to rise as the gaokao nears. Two years ago, a student posted a shocking photograph online: a public high-school classroom full of students hunched over books, all hooked up to intravenous drips to give them the strength to keep studying. Maotanchang’s all-male corps of head teachers doles out lessons, and frequently punishments, with military rigor; their job security and bonuses depend on raising their students’ test scores. Security guards roam the 165-acre campus in golf carts and on motorcycles, while surveillance cameras track students’ movements in classrooms, dormitories and even the town’s main intersections. This “closed management practice,” as an assistant principal, Li Zhenhua, has termed it, gets results. Like the ancient imperial exam, the gaokao was meant to introduce a measure of meritocracy into an otherwise elitist system, creating a path of upward mobility for students of meager backgrounds. (The top scorers on the keju, after enduring days locked in a windowless cell, had the honor of entering the Forbidden City in Beijing by the emperor’s middle gate.) But rural students are still at a severe disadvantage. Villages like Yuejin, where Yang’s father is the Communist Party secretary, have poor school facilities and a paucity of well-trained teachers. Wealthy urban families can hire private tutors, pay for expensive preparation courses or bribe their way into the best city schools. The university quota system also skews sharply against rural students, who are allocated far fewer admissions spots than their urban peers. nytimes/2015/01/04/magazine/inside-a-chinese-test-prep-factory.html?hpw&rref=education&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=2
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 03:20:28 +0000
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