Education Professor Zhao and Wash. Post Writer Mathews - "Compton Is Wrong"

I keep getting on the wrong side of the debate with two men I admire:

1- Jay Mathews -author, education reporter and online columnist with the Washigton Post. Mathews attended Hillsdale High and Harvard College and served in Vietnam.  He started at the Post in 1971, writing news reports and books about China, disability rights, the stock market, and several educational topics. His column Class Struggle appears weekly on the online version of the Post.

His rating system for high schools is used by the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine annually to rank U.S. high schools.

2- Dr. Yong Zhao - University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. He is a fellow of the International Academy for Education.

The latest from Jay's Blog - Class Struggle

In my debates with American high-tech entrepreneur Bob Compton, I argue that U.S. schools are way ahead of the Chinese, and likely to stay there, at least in the production of creative, job-producing go-getters like Bob.

Bob says I am not seeing what a great threat the rapidly improving Chinese education system is to our global economic superiority. Now we have a new book, "Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization," by someone who knows more about this than either Bob or me: Michigan State education professor Yong Zhao.

The latest from Dr Zhao's Blog - Yong Zhao University Distinguished Professor @ Michigan State University Quick Update: China and 2 million minutes

My Reply to Both Jay and Yong

Dear Jay and Yong - I have great respect for you both.

Here's how I would encourage readers to think about my film and Dr. Zhao's new book:

Dr. Zhao is a highly educated, brilliant, articulate academician, scholar and author.

Bob Compton a modestly educated, reasonably successful entrepreneur, inventor, venture capitalist and philanthropist. We each approach the issue of global education from our respective life experiences.

My perspective comes from 25 years of investing in high-tech, high-wage, high-growth start-up companies in the US, Europe and Asia.

And from my own non-expert explorations of schools, mostly high schools, in India, China, Europe, South America and the US - explorations which resulted in my film "Two Million Minutes." By training, I am neither an educator nor a filmmaker.

I'm a businessman on the global field of competition and have helped build over 30 new technology companies in the past 25 years. As Chairman, CEO or President I have had to lead companies in global competition every day. I still am, as Chairman of ExactTarget and as Founder and CEO of Vontoo.

In those 25 years, I have seen a marked decline in American's education and capabilities to compete with highly educated, highly motivated employees in many other countries - China and India, in particular. Hence I have had to hire large numbers of well-educated employees outside the US to stay in business.

My life experiences are not cerebral - they are visceral judgments in the daily battles that characterize global business. I don't win or lose debates - I win or lose customers, litigation, market share or money -- every day. Thousands of families - those of my employees - depend on my ability to make the right decisions and keep them employed.

My need is to find the best talent in the world, then recruit, motivate and reward them or my companies fail and my investors (myself included) lose millions of dollars and thousands of husbands, wives and children are put in economic jeopardy. My community loses its tax base. Daily that focuses my mind like a man to be hanged in the morning.

So I would encourage every American to read Dr. Zhao's books, articles and lectures and I would hope he would encourage people to see my film.

Account for our unique perspectives and decide for one's self - is American K-12 education, particularly high school, preparing our children to be globally competitive? What is the evidence?

Will America's children be able to create new technologies, invent new products and found the new companies that will produce the quality jobs of the 21st century? What is the evidence?

Are we educating our kids to an intellectual level that they will be the creators, innovators and entrepreneurs in bio-medicine, nano-tech, energy producing new materials, tissue regeneration, gene therapy, bio-polymers, alternative energy, etc, etc. What is the evidence?

These fields require knowledge of math, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science - even to be a sales rep or provide customer support or to manufacture these products.

To actually invent or create them one must be a world-class scientist or engineer.

Is American K-12 education equal to the K-12 education in other countries, particularly India and China. What data or empirical evidence tells us this?

My daily experiences tell me - "NO" and I see the evidence every day in the global market.

Comments

[coetsee]

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[MathTeacher]

This is all great information. For those of you with experience in schools in other countries; let us teachers know what we need to change! What needs to happen so we can catch out students up to the rest of the world?

[Oregonreader]

I have spent roughly half of my life in India and the other half in the US. At different times in my life, I have supported both sides of the argument.

In the early 1990s, I found myself supporting the merits of the American education system. My support was based on the better facilities, the care given to the safety of students, and a general concern towards the students' self esteem. It all came to a head when my eldest started falling behind in standardized tests, and I could not get anyone in the system to help me. That resulted in a long period of research into how the education system is set up and run, and what values and goals are generally espoused.

What I found was completely in contradiction with my expectations, so I ended up being very picky with schooling. I have tried private schools, home schooling, after school programs, you name it. In effect, I had to put myself in charge of my children's' education. The results, at least in terms of academic achievement, have been startling.

This brings me to my current position on public education, which aligns closely with Bob Compton's. I contend that the US has lost its momentum when it comes to leading the world in innovation. Bob is not alone in investing abroad. GE, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, Boeing, and other high tech companies have set up significant R&D presence in India.

What Bob found when he visited India was not the result of overnight transformation in Indian education system. It is the result of several decades of focused effort on the part of both public and private schools. Just to give one example, all 10th grade students must pass a state board exam in three languages (including English), Social Studies (World Geography, History, Indian History), Sciences (Physics, Chemistry and Biology) and Mathematics. This is a very high bar. And with less than a tenth of the investment, they achieve better results.

They still have a long way to go in building huge buildings, offering electives, etc., but I think they have been funding their priorities correctly with the limited resources they have. With over 200 million students in the system, roughly four times our student body, even if 25% of their students excel, they have now graduated a potential workforce that completely outnumbers our entire graduating class. Add China to the mix, which has been doing extremely well in educating their workforce, we have a situation where we can only hope to find a niche that we can call ours.

Jay and Prof Yang have been playing up the merits of the system, I wonder on what grounds? If the proof of a good K-12 education system is in how well the K-12 graduates perform in their freshmen year in college, the data have been depressing for decades. Remedial rates as high as 50% in four year colleges and higher than that in community colleges are not uncommon.

If the proof is in employment prospects for high school graduates, that does not look good either. High school dropouts can pretty much write off their entire futures in this economy. I fail to see how the current system is serving the best interests of their students.

Our only saving grace is a vast network of research universities, which is still arguably world class. Even with the trend of increasing numbers of foreign students, these universities have incubated innovation and good ideas. But I maintain that our K-12 system is not doing a good enough job of feeding the much needed raw talent into these universities.