Competing With China!

Students From Blair International Baccalaureate H.S. in Pasadena with Beijing 181 students in a cultural exchange. Pasadena, CA January, 2008

The talk of U.S. exceptionalism is waning in the early hours of the 21st Century. Certain political stripes hold onto it dearly, the neo-cons launched two wars to defend it, but for most the sobering acknowledgement of a more competitive post-colonial, post-Cold War world are here. A G-8 dominated by the U.S. has been enlarged to a G-20 of more independently minded nation states. The backdrop to this story is that the world’s fastest growing developing economies, the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China are set to overtake the developed areas of the world (U.S., E.U. and Japan) by 2050.

GDP and profitability of Bric countries will overtake developed areas by 2050

Long-term GDP forecasts for Bric countries show that tomorrow's giants, China and India, seem set to take first and third place on a GDP basis by 2050 (with the US in second place), shifting the centre of gravity of the global economy.

The reaction from the front pages of the New York Times is a renewed emphasis on education reform. The results from Shanghai’s latest PISA exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, are intimidating for a nation like ours, which is struggling to engage its young people in formal education. Arne Duncan is calling it a “wake up call”, and other former government officials refer to this as a Sputnik moment.

The knowledge that our educational system is being outperformed in comparison to other developed economies is well known. Thomas Friedman in his Flat Earth rants is calling for a Teach For America West Point academy to train the best and the brightest to teach in our nation’s schools. He is echoing the refrain from the new generation of education reformers that since the early 1990’s have pushed for data driven reforms, teacher accountability, and school choice.

The challenge to educate all of America’s children to high standards is important enough to be the one of the few issues in contemporary politics that crosses political lines. Although it is anathema to ideologies from either side, Obama Democrats and a new breed of mayors are joining with hedge fund managers and Republican governors to embrace the market and implement innovation in an industry that has been resistant to change. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberger’s $100 million parachute of aid to the city of Newark is the most recent public example. Democrats for Education Reform and The Manhattan Institute are on the same side.

"Rather than expecting new funding from Washington or from the cash-strapped state government, Booker has turned to private foundations and charities for help in enacting his agenda." Steven Malanga, The Next Wave of Urban Reform: Mayors Cory Booker and Dave Bing fight to Save two of America’s Most Distressing Cities, City Journal

For the progressive educators who have worked tirelessly to make a bad system more humane, those committed to the Civil Rights agenda of making public education a true source of social mobility, pace of privatization in the system is scary. Stan Karp, from Rethinking Schools, sees the rush to fund unproven and un-scaleable innovations as dangerous to the public good. They have created an entire website to dispel the myths of the Michelle Rhee, Harlem Children Zone, and the No Excuse for Poverty model.

“The larger goal is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.” Stan Karp, Superhero School Reform Heading Your Way, November 29^th, 2010

"There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye." Jonathan Alter, A Case of Senioritis, Newsweek, November 28th, 2010

The battle over education reform is big business! The Unions are big, the Gates Foundation is big, Rupert Murdock is big, but our children’s future is bigger! Fighting to hold onto the industrial model of education that has served our nation’s children so poorly does not make sense to me. Embracing innovation and redesigning the role of the educator and the learner for 21^st Century learning is paramount.

We need to be careful to have a real conversation about what this change is going to be and who is going to drive it. Private foundations are pushing the agenda, but who are they accountable to? Data driven reform is reshaping how we teach, but what are these exams really assessing? In the end, can we beat China at their own game?

A 259-page Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on the latest Pisa results notes that throughout its history, China has been organized around competitive examinations. “Schools work their students long hours every day, and the work weeks extend into the weekends,” it said.

Top Test Scores From China Stun Educators, New York Times, December 7th, 2010

According to many Middle class parents, probably not… http://www.racetonowhere.com/

Or can we develop an education system that is adaptable enough, supportive enough, and honest enough to do what we have never been able to do… connect our poorest citizens to the people and resource rich environments around them and stop viewing the competition of nation states as a zero sum game. A rising tide lifts all ships and the increasing prosperity of a developing world is not a threat, but a goal we should all responsibly work towards!

Gitanjali's Vision

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power,- that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.

But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old worlds die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from thy heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, XXXVII

When the heart most wants to hide, it must find a new way to be itself. When the mind hits against the walls of its thinking, it must find a way to walk through walls. Tagore is a poet and a teacher and a visionary who has no equal in the 20th century, and he was completely unknown to me until I visited India in August of 2009. I had no idea he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and was the first non-Westerner to do so, nor that he was a world class thinker in debate with Einstein, Gandhi, and other great writers, scientists, thinkers and feelers of his day. He established a school in his native Bengal at Shantiniketan, where he experimented with an educational philosophy based on direct experience and educated the children of India's political liberation movement. I admire him immensely because of his global vision, his marriage of East and West, his arguments against Gandhi's rejection of modernity, and his ennobling of learning. Together with Rumi, another poet with an expansive embracing of humanity, still relevant today, I am in awe at the beauty of the worlds they reveal with their words and wonder at the stilted legacy handed down to us today.

I never heard of Tagore until I spent time in bookshops in New Dehli, and I did not know anything about India, except the Christ like story of Gandhi and the wonders of the information revolution in Bangalore from the pages of the New York Times. I was never taught anything in school about Asia or Africa except through the lens of contact with Europeans. The language, geography, politics, literature, history, and contributions of billions were left out of my formal education. Cultural nuances that make up one out of six people on the planet were never discussed. I travel, I read, I teach. I love literature and I love history. I've been to 27 countries and speak a handful of languages. But when I arrived in New Dehli, and later arrived in Ghanali village in the Punjab, I was starting from zero.

My friend Christine Yap, had arranged a visit for a group of youth and educators to explorer her husband's homeland, and I jumped at the opportunity to immerse myself in a new culture. I love international travel and global education. I 2006 with Carlos Herrera I founded a non-profit, Education Without Borders Intl., because I believe in experiential, self-directed learning. While in Punjab, and later in Himachal Pradesh and Nepal I soaked up as much as I could. I read Amartya Sen, and learned as some Punjabi and Hindi... Me tori Hindi al Punjabi ati he. Muche chai acha lag ta he. I spent time with my new friends in Sikh temples, on the back of motor cycles, drinking chai, dancing banghara, and discussing culture. A world that no one in my life had every told me was valuable contained 1/6 of the world's population, is the fastest growing economy, one of the oldest centers of human civilization. It had never been on my cultural radar before. And despite the shifting sands of the Global economy, it is still not on the radar of most Americans.

In fact, most of the world is not on the radar of your average U.S. citizen, despite the fact that we are the home to the most cosmopolitan society on the planet. In the Bay Area where I live, or New York City where I was born, there is not a nation not represented, nor a language family not spoken by someone. As a people we are all new to this land, hybrids, and yet we are caught up in the cultural wars of the 19th century, the ethnic ghettos- balkanization- and Americanization response of the early 20th century, and the slick corporate homogenization of post-war America. Everyone is talking about the 21st Century, lamenting the ending of an American golden age, because the free ride of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism is running out and a flat world is catching up. Op-ed columnists bemoan the lack of optimism, economists the lack of consumer confidence, and everyone has someone to blame. I don't think complaining about George Bush or big government, the Harlem Children's Zone or teacher's unions, the Tea Party or the Oscar Grant verdict, or any of the old conversations are going to get us to where we need to be. As my mentor, Steve Jubb says, that's still fighting inside the box. We need to embrace the complexity of our history, of our politics, of our heterogeneous population and see it for the advantage it is. In an age of interdependence, where we recognize that humanity is part of an ecosystem, a living network, the United States is a hub that cannot fail. Diversity is a strength. Global connections are a strength. Life long learning is a necessity.

I visited a state college in Rupnagar, Punjab. In an English class I introduced myself and had a conversation with a handful of students, explaining my interest in their education system. I was curious because I know that in the near future, "China will be the world's largest economy, India the second largest, and the United States the third." A young woman, the daughter of one of the school's professors stood up and corrected me. "No, no, no. INDIA will be number one, China second, and the U.S. third." She left no room for doubt. And based on the growth of e-based business, the hunger of a growing educated class in the developing world, and the quagmire of American politics and institutions, the realignment will happen quicker than we know it. But why should that be scary? Why is permanent U.S. hegemony an ideal in a world where 1 billion are overweight, 1 billion malnourished? Why shouldn't the world's two largest nations, with two of the largest culutral heritages, not have the largest economies 80-90 years after the end of European colonization?

In this blog, the first time I have ever put my thoughts online, I hope to explore issues of complexity. Why is it, an educated fairly worldly person like myself had a stereotypical-romanticized view of India, when it is the home to so much wisdom, knowledge and human experience? Why is it history in the U.S. is so narrowly defined as the European experience? Why, as an educator on the front lines in the Bronx, and Pasadena, completely committed to innovation did I miss the e-learning revolution happening around me, in pockets around the country? Why does innovation travel so slowly in the field of education? Why do business people think educators are incompetent and why do educators think money is bad and the people who have it are greedy? Why do people like simple narratives for complex problems, and how does that keep us from solutions? How can we change from a monolingual nation, with a multicultural population, in a global economy to embrace the Global Capital of the Americas? And by that I mean the human capital that is the birthright of this hemisphere, home to all of the cultures of the world.