Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for January 20, 2006 REFORM SQUELCHING CREATIVITY?

An Op-Ed in the Detroit Free Press warns of the dangers inherent in the new emphasis on standardized testing. Instead of curing what ails United States public education, will it instead kill the "golden goose" of "Yankee ingenuity"? The author seems inclined to "Let Johnny be Johnny"...

Creativity can't be taught, but it can be killed

BY YONG ZHAO

Last month, government and industry leaders convened in Washington, D.C., to sound the alarm about flagging U.S. competitiveness compared to science- and tech-savvy Asian countries such as China. The charged rhetoric and urgent calls to action at the meeting suggest that pressure once again will be ratcheted up to fix K-12 education in the United States.

Yet a cautionary and decidedly contrarian warning is in order here. Any effort to boost excellence in math and science by focusing on standardized test scores risks squelching U.S. creativity and innovation -- the very things that our competitors in Asia are trying to copy in their own educational reforms.

Attendees at the Dec. 6 National Summit on Competitiveness, held at the U.S. Department of Commerce, pointed to a familiar list of crisis indicators, including poor performance of our students in math and science relative to their international peers, declining interest and enrollment in math and science courses at home, and growing numbers of college graduates abroad. However, this isn't exactly a new predicament.

The 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report, issued by the National Commission on Education Excellence in response to then-juggernauts Japan and South Korea, declared that "our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world."

Today, a new chorus of voices is decrying the state of U.S. math and science education and calling for more rigorous adoption of standards to blunt the new Asian threats of China and India. Yet these voices seldom mention the risk-taking, creative and can-do spirit inherent in U.S. culture and seldom measured in standardized tests or compared in international studies.

Even as American schools are encouraged, even forced, to chase after test scores, America's major Asian economic competitors -- China, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan -- have started reforms aimed at fostering creativity and innovative thinking in their schools.

China, for example, has reformed its curriculum through such drastic measures as minimizing the consequences of poor performance on tests; abandoning its one-nation, one-syllabus tradition; offering more electives and choices for students; and reducing students' homework burden.

In the decades since "A Nation at Risk" was published, almost all of the subsequent math and science education reforms have flopped, while the United States' economy has surged ahead of the global pack. U.S. innovation is the key to resolving this apparent contradiction between laggardly student performance and economic leadership.

Most of the innovations at the core of the worldwide digital revolution -- PCs, the Internet and mobile computing and communication -- have their origins in the United States. Even during the post-technology bubble hangover, U.S. innovation continues apace. As just one example, in 2003 the University California system alone generated more patents than did India or China.

The organizers of the recent meeting, a who's who of powerful industry, academic and trade association executives, published a statement sounding an eerily familiar list of concerns, including the middling math and science knowledge of U.S. high school students.

"If trends in U.S. research and education continue, our nation will squander its economic leadership, and the result will be a lower standard of living for the American people," the report states.

My concern is that the likely responses to rhetoric like this -- centralized curriculum, standardized testing, accountability, required courses of study -- could burden or kill outright the creativity of American schoolchildren. Worse, the reforms neglect the real problems in U.S. education, namely, how to work with our neighbors in the global village and how to really help the poor schools and poor children.

The United States will continue to be an innovation center, provided school reforms don't quash creativity in our children. In this "flat" world, the premium is on individuals who can market the innovations to other countries without being perceived as arrogant and imperialistic.

The real crises reformers should tackle? One is the lack of a global-minded, internationally oriented U.S. curriculum that prepares our children to engage actively in global affairs and competently interact with other peoples. Another is how children, especially those who are poor or otherwise disadvantaged, are being shut out of the globalization discourse in the name of increasing their test scores in math, science and reading.

YONG ZHAO is a university distinguished professor and director of the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence at the Michigan State University College of Education. Write to him at zhaoyo@msu.edu.