2012 Columbia China Prospect Conference Education Panel

[Note: I was invited to moderate the panel on education at the Annual China Prospect Conference at Columbia University in early November 2012. The panelists, including scholars on migration education, testing and evaluation, cross-cultural adaptation and civil society participation were really informative in sharing insights from their own field/projects. Below is a quote from the organizers, Future China Initiative, on the theme of this panel and link to videos of all sessions.]

         Starting with the restoration of the college entrance examination in 1977, education in P.R China has entered a new stage of reform and development. Enormous competitive pressure of human resource market, the scarcity of high-quality education resources and the unbalanced allocation of education resources, the potential inequity of selection system, the universalization of study abroad and oversea standardized exams and the booming education industry to meet the diverse demands,all these jointly depict a unique and huge education market in China. Every movement of Chinese education reform deeply affects the development of China and even the entire world. During the past few decades, what ups and downs the educational reform and development in China has experienced, how people's ideas about education has been changed, what kinds of problems the development of China's urban and rural education system are encountering, what kinds of opportunities and challenges the increasingly large group of oversea Chinese students are now facing, how the current education system should be reformed under the overall background of globalization, these are all topics worthy for further exploration. Let’s reflect on the past and prospect to the development of education in the future.

Some updates about CHNS newest biomarker data

[Forwarded from the UNC CHNS data center]

Dear CHNS data users,

Since we released the biomarker data collected in 2009, many users are excited to explore the data and of course have some questions. Assuming you may have  the same question, I make a response to the mailing list instead of emailing one by one.

To better understand the biomarker dataset, you may need to review the codebook first, which is available at http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china/data/datasets/C10BIOMARKER.pdf.

For documentation, please visit http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china/data/datasets/biomarker-data.

In general, each biomarker has a set of 8 variables. Take Y48_1 (blood glucose) as an example:

Y48_1: Blood glucose measured in mmol/L in the field

Y48_1CD: Whether or not glucose levels are within normal range (.=missing ; 0=normal; 1=abnormal high but within linearity; 2=abnormal high and  beyond linearity; 99=status unknown because age/gender is missing)

Y48_1CS: Whether or not glucose data are available for the participants(.=missing; 1=assay available)

Y48_1SD: At which level the glucose value is (.=missing; 0=within +/- 3  standard deviations; 2=above 4 SD; 3=blow -3 SD)

Y48_1MG: Blood glucose measured in mg/dL in the field

Y48_1MG_CD: same as Y48_1CD

Y48_1MG_CS: same as Y48_1CS

Y48_1MG_SD: same as Y48_1SD

Some biomarkers were measured twice: one in local hospitals in the field (labeled as Field) immediately after blood samples were drawn; and one in the central lab in China-Japan Friendship Hospital (labeled as CJFH) after frozen samples were shipped to Beijing and unthawed. Generally speaking, biomarkers measured in the field were named with a prefix Y, and biomarkers measured in the central lab were named in a way that people can easily recognize them, e.g. glucose, urea, HDL, etc.

In analysis, if you use glucose, we recommend that you use glucose measured  in the field as blood glucose may depreciate when frozen and unthawed. For other biomarkers, we prefer to use those measured in the central lab as they were measured by the same people with the same machine.

Thank you for your interest in our study.

Happy Holidays.

Shufa Du

Research Assistant Professor

123 W. Franklin Street

University Square East, CB# 8120

Chapel Hill, NC 27516

(919) 843-4128

Rethinking Higher Ed Open Online Learning More universities should develop high-quality online degree programs

[Yao's note: This article by Gallagher is quite a good read, published today on USNEWS. Undoubtedly the trend for

online learning is upward hiking. The article's analysis provided some good points of cost-benefit analysis of an high-

er education investment families would make when deciding between a traditional college degree vs. an online one. 

Lots of scholars (including myself) have been tracking data for a more robust quantitative analysis for online

learning. Stay tuned for updates on this front.]

By KAREN SYMMS GALLAGHER

December 12, 2012

Karen Symms Gallagher is dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California.

With the rush of pronouncements, you'd think Higher Ed 2.0 is here, all online, all the time. Brick-and-mortar and ivy are passé.

Not so fast. Much of what's touted as innovation in traditional higher education falls short for students seeking high-quality online degrees that will serve them in a tough job market.

It's worth decoding what's out there and what isn't.

Professors at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard and many fine academic minds have put thousands of top-notch college courses online. Millions of people around the world watch classes ranging from astronomy to cryptology and game theory. "Massive open online courses" bring some of the most brilliant lectures in the world to people who may never set foot on an elite university campus.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Is a College Degree Still Worth It?]

Logging on to these lectures is often like watching through a one-way mirror—albeit for free and, say, with 15,000 classmates. Coursera, EdX, Udacity, and others are providing courses, but they are not providing the kind of lively, participatory learning that today's technology makes possible.

I can't help thinking that the massive open online course explosion so far is a bigger, better delivery system of The Great Courses, which my husband and I have enjoyed for years. Great Courses has sold tapes of the best classes from Stanford, Oxford, Princeton, and others for 20 years.

Some open online courses award students a certificate of participation, an academic currency without much heft in today's job market. Only a small handful of courses give students credit toward a degree.

[See the U.S. News Top Online Education Programs.]

But that's not what worries me about open online courses. What troubles me is the fig leaf that they provide higher ed leaders who appear to be embracing the full promise of online learning while actually doing little more than installing cameras and brighter lighting in the most popular classes. So much more is possible.

Many higher ed leaders have yet to fully embrace the challenge and the promise of the digital revolution, because it's hard. It takes a willingness to rethink how we've been teaching since Socrates. It requires a willingness to restructure and re-examine decades, sometimes centuries, of conventional wisdom about how students learn. It requires updating longstanding curriculum to match today's digital native students.

Most of all, embracing the promise of online learning requires leadership. It calls for the hard work of cultivating and winning over skeptical faculty, who are some of the most talented and change-averse people on campuses today. And while I salute the free availability of greater knowledge on the web, we in higher ed must be forthright in saying that providing high-quality, fully interactive degree programs online is costly and, at this point, cannot be free.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Should Foreign STEM Graduates Get Green Cards?]

At the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, we have found our answer: online education is delivered live in real-time with students and the instructor appearing on screen simultaneously (think "The Brady Bunch"), connected, conversing, and learning. There are chat rooms, small group discussions, multi-media presentations, videos. We also provide self-paced course material, but that's not the core of the educational experience. And, most critical, it is combined with in-real-classrooms fieldwork for each student from the beginning of the program.

Delivered through the educational technology company 2U, our virtual classroom allows us to offer the same rigorous graduate degrees with the same faculty and same curriculum as we do on campus, and it demands that students do just as much as they would if they attended courses on campus. We even have students who live in Los Angeles and choose the online program (but that may say something about the LA traffic).

[See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.]

We offer several online masters degrees—some with a credential—for teachers in the United States and around the world who want to improve their practice. Yes, teaching teaching, of all things, online. In addition to providing small, interactive classes, we pair students with K-12 classrooms wherever they live. Students film their teaching and then review the videos with their classmates and instructor online. We've gone from conferring about 50 graduate degrees in teaching in 2008 to well over 1,200 since then, amid a national need to raise the level of teaching in our public schools.

We are pleased to be among the pioneers in high-quality, interactive, for-credit, online degree programs, along with Georgetown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The George Washington University, Washington University in St. Louis and others. We'd love more company.

Decoding the DNA of a Classic Education: Yale vs. Harvard

I mixed the topics of the two really good recent videos on BigThink, worth checking out for anything interested in the essence of a good education.

Jeffrey Brenzel (Yale): The Essential Value of a Classic Education

Lawrence Summers (Harvard): Decoding the DNA of Education in Search of Actual Knowledge

A Functioning Nation through Sandy

So here is the stormy nor'easter, right after the night of Mr. Obama's re-election. It is indeed heartening to think that there are still so many in New York City and regions around having no electricity, no gas, and hardiest part, no heating.

China was quite shocked by the scale of tolls caused by the flooding of a 6-hour heavy rain this summer. The government was severely blamed for slow responses to the disaster, inadequate rescue efforts and unnecessary and detrimental censorship of important disaster information.

The loss caused by Sandy is much much more significant on many levels. Just like how divided this nation is at the presidential election, Americans also have quite different, if not totally opposite, opinions about the emergency responses and disaster relief efforts made by current political leaders. However, living in a relatively safe region in New York City (very fortunate about this), as a witness to the many problems caused by the hurricane and community member receiving many messages from respective organizations in regard of how the society works together for disaster relief, I think how New York City and the US approached to the hurricane showed strongly that this country may face a very challenging new era in terms of government structure, this country and the people here are teaching the world about some rudimentary elements a functioning nation should have.

Below I will list some sources/ types of messages which in my view reflects the features of a functioning nation (I will keep running this list through this very prolonged recovery period, and will add cases for comparison purposes from other countries):

1.  Before the hurricane:
     Mayors speeches and calling for evacuation Emergency preparation alert text messages from Columbia University

2.  During the hurricane:
    24/7 broadcasting about the hurricane and its effects on TV Emails from schools about safety Emails/Notices from government/schools about road/subway shut-down, class cancellation
    Text messages/emails from energy companies about potential power cuts and how to respond

3.  Day 1 after the hurricane:
     Emails from banks/credit cards about fee waivers, considerable to hurricane affected regions
     Updates from university, graduate school, departments, student senate, different officers, about class cancellation, safe tips, food/water/clothes distribution, volunteering opportunities
     Updates about public transit status from various sources
     Updated maps about subway system recovery on mta.info
     Shopping sites (Amazon, Google Offers), social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) providing links for donations
     Alumni clubs (Columbia Club, Harvard Club, etc.) updates about limited services, and providing free hot showers for members Sport clubs and other business providing benefits for free such as showers & towels.

4.  Day 2 after the hurricane:
     All above from 3, as well as newest updates about governments' detailed plans for volunteer opportunities for projects such as checking out broken trees, dangerous road crossings, setting up yellow belt to passengers, rescue center, etc.

5.  Day 3 to Day 8:
     News reports started to cover the election, while still enough coverage on progress, issues, concerns about the rescue and relief actions.
     Updates on gas location and fuel availability:  http://www.gasbuddy.com/sandy/


6.  Day 9, Nov 7th, 2012, at the time of this article being posted:
     Several interesting things to note about some messages from authoritative sources such as the public security department of Columbia University.
     -Rumor Control Center: http://www.fema.gov/hurricane-sandy-rumor-control
     -FEMA's additional rental program for hurricane victims (I checked the sites and housing availability out of curiosity, checked several locations which rent range I am familiar with, the apartments with 2-4 bedrooms are from $0 to $200 a month, for 12 months sublease, versus a typical $2000-$4000/month market rental rate)

7.  From before, through and after the hurricane and now another attack on the region from the Nor'easter, these organizations that I subscribed newsletters to also shared messages:
    - Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum: about event cancellations, how some staff have been staying on site to make sure of things alright without going home for more than a week, and sympathies to members affected.
     - CUCSSA/ CUAsia: sympathizing words
     - Meditation Group at TC: Santra meditation sessions held over the phone through and after the hurricane to bring some peace to the practioners
     - Movie theaters such as AMC: updates on website about partial service suspension
     - Message board cross the college: people posting for car-pools, etc.

What I have done to be supportive to my communities?
     - Provided shelters to two families of friends
     - Packing up stuff for donation!
     - Keeping this note, hopefully worth sharing for better pre-disaster preparation and relief in the future.

[2:51pm, Nov 7th, 2012: I will keep adding links to this post as my archive of a hurricane witness. ]

Tiger Mothers and the Dictatorship of Talent

[This is the final version published today on Hechinger Report's Lessons from Abroad. ]

Chinese mothers living in America are often torn over whether to send their children to schools that drill them in hopes of producing good test-takers, or to embrace a less rigid education. It’s a conflict that pits the cultural values shaped by the two-millennia-old Chinese exam system against the view that ultimately creativity leads to success.

The debate is evident in online forums for Chinese mothers, as they discuss the pros and cons of the so-called “tiger mother” approach to raising children: snuffing out a child’s desire for a normal social life—no sleepovers, play dates, school plays or sports, and certainly no computer games or TV—and an expectation of straight A+s on all tests. Recently, one of the leading forums, spurred on by a New York Times article, featured a debate about whether the Waldorf approach to education can produce “real tigers in the future.”

Waldorf schools, according to the description in The Times, emphasize teaching students through activities like knitting socks and slicing food while minimizing the use of computer devices and technology-assisted learning in their classrooms. This unique pedagogy is “focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.” One parent, employed by a high-tech start-up, echoes this philosophy when explaining to The Times why he sent his three children to a Waldorf school: “Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers.”

It is the key word “engagement” that interests me more than the debate over the plusses and minuses of educational technology. Because of an absence of engagement, China—the world’s largest educational system—faces great difficulties in fostering innovation. The United States will likely retain its strength as the world’s leader in innovation thanks to a system that builds upon this notion.

Last fall and spring, I gave an overview of China’s education system to a broad audience at the China Scope Conference at MIT and Columbia, focusing on China’s long history of using nothing but exam results to select bureaucrats and determine the size of cohorts—which resulted in tremendous competition for social mobility. Schooling became essentially a competition among families rather than individual students. All of this still holds true today. Chinese students—who are often treated like assembly-line products in schools that only teach to the test—graduate from college only to find themselves unemployed.

David Brooks of The New York Times wrote in 2007 that such problems were the result of a “dictatorship of talent.” Brooks made his observations during a trip to Shanghai, which last December attained the highest PISA scores in the world.

Brooks borrowed the concept of “meritocratic paternalism”—elites ruling a society can make the best decisions for their people, like fathers have traditionally done within families—from one of his Chinese friends who argued for and defended the advantages of the Chinese way, using examples of the country’s economic success over the last 30 years. Ironically, it is the same economic development that makes American education accessible and affordable for many Chinese families, who send their children to study in the United States to nurture the “merits” in them. Yet increasingly, the students returning to China take government jobs and become part of the Chinese elite rather than striking out as entrepreneurs. Their career paths might be a clear sign of how little U.S. education altered the deeply rooted Chinese philosophy in such students.

It is neither rare nor regrettable that many leading scholars who achieved great distinction in their fields have returned to China and become governmental officials. Internationally renowned mechanical engineer Dr. Wan Gang and economist Dr. Yi Gang—who now head China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and Bureau of Foreign Reserves, respectively—and many others have exhibited impressive leadership. However, more and more parents prefer to see their children earn $300 per month in bureaucratic government jobs (after they obtain degrees abroad) simply because of the stability—and likelihood of under-the-table benefits—that such positions afford.

We might all agree logically that it is next “to impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.” Maybe a truly game-changing reform is to replace the “dictatorship of talent” with a “democracy of talent,” the center of which would emphasize engagement and peer interactions rather than obedience of fatherly know-it-all teachers. Efforts in this direction have been made by educators and policymakers in China since 1998, but students and parents have largely resisted the engagement, children-centered campaign. Instead, students and parents have doubled-down on the exam-centered approach. Chinese education companies such as the New Oriental Group, Ambow and Xue-Er have made huge revenues in the test-prep business driven students and parents desirous of higher scores.

The offspring of “tiger mothers” in China are not going to take over the world as some American parents have worried. American schools and parents have the upper hand. People in Silicon Valley have been truly driving innovation and the world’s economic growth. As long as we all pay attention to what they believe about education, the momentum—the continuous wave of creative ideas—will be sustained by the children who are in schools that foster their creativity. After all, the Valley’s success has grown out of a democracy of talent, so let us hope American schools—whether Waldorf or not—can keep students engaged in learning and critical thinking to maintain the seeds of success in tomorrow’s global competition.

Democracy of Talent?

The discussion or rather self-reflections about the "tiger mothers" and "paper tiger kids" phenomena has never faded away from the headlines of Chinese expat forums. Recently, a hot debate on one the leading forums is whether the "Waldorf Approach" to education can make sure to produce "real tigers" in the future.

If you google "Waldorf education", you will notice a most-emailed-article on NYTimes this month. It is about one of Waldorf Schools, which is located in Silicon Valley, that emphasizes on teaching students knitting socks and fractioning cakes while minimizing the trace of computer devices and technology-assisted learning in their classrooms. This unique pedagogy is to "focus on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans." A Microsoft engineer-parent echoes with this philosophy when explaining why he sent his three children to Waldorf, "Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers (computers are distractions)".

This article aroused wide disagreements among readers, which you can glance in the comment section. However, it is the core word, "engagement", that interests me more than the debates over the effects and potential harms of educational technology. Because the negligence of such a component is leading the world's largest educational system, China, to face great difficulties in fostering innovation; while the US will retain its strength as the world's innovation leader thanks to the system that builds upon this notion.

Last fall and this spring, I gave an overview about China's education system to a broad audience at the China Scope Conference at MIT and Columbia. While there were many issues to cover, in the talks, I focused on China's thousand-years-old exam history to select bureaucrats, the size of cohorts and thus tremendous competition for upward mobility, and essentially a competition for life among families other than individual students, which all hold true till today. And those issues, by the end of day when a Chinese student graduates from college, unfortunately means unemployment and un-employability of the "assembly-line products" through schools teaching for tests.

Op-ed columnist David Brooks carefully coined those problems as "The Dictatorship of Talent". Although his observation was done in 2007 during a trip to Shanghai, the city which topped PISA's test earlier this year, my presentations indeed walked through the same issues as those mentioned in his article.

One of the issues that tearing the Chinese expat mothers living in America apart is whether to send their kids to a school that drills students heavily to prepare them as good test-takers, or to embrace a Waldorf-like schooling. And this mental conflict rises between the cultural genes shaped in the 2000-years-old Chinese exam system, and to the view that creativity will lead to ultimate success in information area.

Brooks borrowed the concept "meritocratic paternalism" from one of his Chinese friends who argued for and defended the advantages of Chinese way, using many evidences of economic success of the country in recent thirty years. It is the same economic development that turns American education accessible and affordable for many Chinese families, who send their children to study here to nurture "merits" in them; at the same time, the increasing wave of students returning to China and becoming part of the "paternalism elites" of Chinese society might be a clear indication of how little the American education shifted the deep-rooted Chinese philosophy in those students.

So all of us might agree logically that it is close to impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are. Maybe a truly game-change reform is to replace the "dictatorship of talent" with a "democracy of talent", the center to which is the emphasizing of "engagement and peer interaction", not "obeying to a father-like, know-all teacher". Efforts have been made by educators and policy makers in China on this direction since 1998, but it was the students and parents that were resisting the "engagement, children-centered" campaign. Instead, students even worked harder ever since then with exam-centered approach.

In other worlds, kids of "tiger mothers" in China are not going to take over the world as American parents worried. The card of the game is at the hand of American schools and parents. People in Silicon Valley have been truly driving the innovation and growth of our world, so as long as we all pay attention to what they believe about education, the momentum, the continues spell of creative ideas coming up from the Valley will be carried on by the kids who are in schools that preserve their creativity. After all, the Valley's success has grown out of democracy of talent, so let us hope American schools, whether Waldorf ones or public ones, can keep students engaged in learning and critical thinking.