Not to belabor the argument, but . . .
?The Shanghai Stunner,? says ABC News reporter David Muir about the recent performance of Chinese students on international, standardized tests. The president (shamelessly plagiarizing Checker) calls it ?our generation's Sputnik moment.? And Diane Sawyer, referring to the Sputnik analogy, comments on America's preternatural pluck: ?We did it before, we can do it again.? Of course, we didn't do it before. The comparison is flawed, apples?to rodents. Money and manpower can send a man to the moon, but it cannot?as we ought to have learned by now?fix a nation's educational problems.
Not everyone is so frightened by the latest PISA results, either. That China came out on top was, ABC News reports, ?no surprise to education experts or even to people familiar with China's progress as a global presence? (not quite; it was definitely a surprise to some education experts, just not all of them). Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Yasheng Huang was one among those unimpressed. ?The entire [Chinese] system is geared toward that one goal?taking [a] test,? he said. Furthermore, according to ABC News:
Beyond the classroom, the obsession with test-taking leaves many Chinese graduates ill-prepared for the job market. A McKinsey study found that 44 percent of executives in Chinese companies reported that insufficient talent limited their global ambitions. Multinationals also find the labor pool lacking.
UPDATE:?Good stuff, Nick Joch.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow