China's 9/11

“An attack by knife-wielding men at a railway station in Kunming in south-west China has left at least 29 dead, the state news agency Xinhua says.” –BBC

I was idling away my time browsing aimlessly online yesterday (March 1st, 2014) when the news of the terrorist attack in Kunming swamped my social media news-feeds. Sitting in front of my computer, I had a hard time grappling with the tragedy and react to the assorted voices pouring out of governmental agencies, news outlets, and individual netizens. It was heartbreaking to see pictures of the blood-smeared floor of the deserted train station and people’s faces distorted by agony. 24 hours have passed since the attack, many questions remain unanswered but limited evidences have led the Kunming city government to blame separatists from Xinjiang as being behind the attack.

Xinjiang is a peripheral province in China where minority Uighur Muslims population concentrates. It has always been tricky and “sensitive” when it comes to the policies and treatments ethnic minorities in China receives. (While the Han majority maintains absolute dominance, the combined population of officially recognized minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population.) I have seen Uighur intellectuals compare the hardships they have to endure to those experienced by American Indians. Equipped with little knowledge and understanding of their culture, history, and struggles, I dare not to verify such comparison. Just as with issues related to American Indians, I find myself not able to engage in an informed discussion on the issues facing ethnic minority groups  in China. Not only did I barely have any personal experiences mingling with ethnic minorities in China, I am aware that I have been consuming the distorted and biased images of those groups projected by media and public school curriculum. It is not just me, most of my peers are equally ignorant on the topic.

With little factually information about the attack at hand and no knowledge on the ethnic minority issues, I remained silent and was not sure what kinds of public sentiment and discourses were brewing. After people recovered from the initial shock, trending tweets and blogs voicing opinions surrounding the incident began to emerge. The number-one trending tweet related to the incident on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter, since the ‘real’ Twitter is blocked in mainland China) was re-posted over 300,000 times within 24 hours. It reads: “I abhor any terrorist attack against civilians. No matter how miserable is your life and how noble is your motive, if you attack the innocent and do so as a tool to reach your goal, you are the enemy of human race. I don’t care about your story, your appeals and won’t negotiate or surrender. The only thing we need to do is to annihilate you all if not at the moment we will after we get you. No mercy (shall be shown).”

What shocked me were the masses behind the opinions that refused to examine the purposes of the extremist group and the disinterests people exhibit over ethnic minorities’ appeals and voices. I want to ascribe such sentiment partially to people’s ignorance and their inability or unwillingness to acknowledge it. I know these conversations are hard to have but I wonder if we don’t try to understand where this terrorist group is coming from, why they did what they did, how they were able to do what they did; if we don’t try to grapple with the root causes of the antagonization; if we only see the terrorists as insane fanatics with no history, background, or any social connections; how are we supposed to resolve conflicts and prevent reoccurrence of such incidence? Rather than silencing ourselves, much needed to be discussed, examined, and conversed.

The Troubled International Tests Data

About two years ago, I was first introduced to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), when taking a class on education and globalization. PISA is a worldwide study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. First carried out in 2000, PISA assessments have been following a triennial cycle, testing students from a growing number of countries (in 2000, 43 countries participated; the number rose to 65 in 2012) and producing reports after a-year-and-a-half analysis period. Last December, educators, policy makers and academics around the world anxiously waited for OECD to release its report on PISA 2012 results. The ranking, once again, ignited heated debates and discussions in the international education community.

I have remained skeptical about PISA since the first encounter. Personally, I have had detrimental experiences with standardized tests. Although I believe that testing could be used as a method to help teachers monitor student learning, I tend to take any standardized tests that go beyond the purpose of understanding individual students’ development with a grain of salt. Test results analyzed and reported in a collective manner (like what OECD is doing) take education systems and the discourses around them out of their social, political and economic contexts and lead to inaccurate and dehumanized understanding and policies talks around education reform. Over the years, I have kept an eye on the PISA data and discussions revolving around it. What I have found is that more and more educators and policy makers have spoken  about the troubling interpretation of international tests data.

In Daniel Koretz’s book, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, he discussed the trickiness of interpreting international test data. First off, the term “international mean” used by many media outlets and policy makers to compare American students’ performance to a seemingly “objective” standard is a fallacy. “International mean” varies from test to test depending on the participating nations. Secondly, more specific comparison between countries could still be inconsistent. Depending on the test content and ranking system, countries perform differently on different test. It is dangerous to draw conclusions based on an individual source. Koretz warned people not to “treat either one of these assessments as the definitive answer.”

Koretz did however make the point that it is relative safe to conclude that countries like Japan ranking above the U.S. with a large margin consistently perform better. But many people take such conclusions too far by claiming that East Asian countries have a better education system or better math/science curriculum without shedding a critical light on those tests. When the 2012 PISA report came out last December, Shanghai impressed the world with its students ranking number one again (after its initial appearance on PISA 2009 report) in all three areas PISA tests. PISA has turned Shanghai into this magic land whose superb student achievement educators around the world envy. When I was studying abroad in France last spring semester, PISA test was briefly discussed in my Comparative Education class. The professor was absolutely impressed by Shanghai’s scores and commented that “amazing things are happening there.” Not only did I have to disagree with her comment, I was also alarmed by such a misleading impression. Back then, I was not informed enough to explain to my professor why her interpretation of the data was incomprehensive and misguided. A year later, when the new report comes out, I was able to send my professors articles written by educators around the world who are critically examining PISA results and speaking up against the misleading information propelled by PISA report.

Tom Loveless enlightens the public of OECD-PISA’s negligenceof the migrant student population in Shanghai, which makes the Shanghai data a skewed depiction of the reality. Due to China’s kukou system that ties people to their geographic origins, many children of families that have moved to the city from rural areas of China are excluded from Shanghai school system. Loveless claims that those children were abandoned by OECD-PISA assessment. Their plight is brushed under the rug while Shanghai enjoys international praise for its education success.  Benjamin Riley, a Fulbright public policy fellow, also sheds doubt on the PISA data. Coming from a more technical perspective, he questioned the methodology used by PISA to analyze its data. He pointed us to the critique of PISA by Svend Kreiner, one of the world’s leading experts on the Rasch model, who argues that the OECD is using the Rasch model incorrectly. I am incapable of psychometrician analysis, but such critique should not be taken lightly.

I want to close this blog with a quote from Daniel Koretz’s book: “Scores describe some of what students can do, but they don’t describe all they can do, and they don’t explain why they can or cannot do it.” With that said, I believe standardized tests (both international and state-mandated ones) have enjoyed overly-exaggerated validity and attention over the past few decades. It is time to refocus and reframe our discussion on education reform.