Why China excels
DECEMBER 23, 2010 BY LEAVE A COMMENT
Shanghai;s 15-year-old students are way better than the rest of the world in reading, science and, especially math, notes Education Gadfly’s Amber M. Winkler, looking at the latest PISA results. “In math, they scored nearly a full standard deviation above the OECD average.” And it’s not just rote learning: PISA asks students to apply knowledge to real-world problems.
As an authoritarian regime, China “can force educational change in ways that are unthinkable in democracies,” Winkler writes. Still, “despite our vastly different governments and cultures, there may yet be a few lessons that America can learn