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Chinese Hosts Turn Tables on Ed Week Reporter

Beijing

I’d spent the better part of a day in the offices of China’s top curriculum agency, asking some of the nation’s leading school mathematics and science experts about their work. Now, it was their turn.

One of those government officials, sitting across from me in a conference room deep within the agency’s headquarters in west Beijing, put a question to me that seemed perfectly simple, but was complicated when you looked at it from the Chinese perspective. It went something like this: The United States has many of the world’s top colleges and universities, he noted. In order to get into those elite schools, students in the United States presumably need strong grades and top-notch scores on college-entrance exams. So why would parents there, he asked, ever be satisfied with letting their children settle for going to a less-selective college or university? Why don’t parents put more pressure on students to do everything they possibly can to get into those schools—do more homework, for instance, or study more?

One question revealed two distinctly different educational worldviews. That of China, where the competition to get into the top universities, among the country’s 230 million K-12 students, is intense, and success hinges largely on national exam results. And then the United States, where students can choose from a broad menu of colleges and universities, from the very elite (if their test scores and grades are good) to the less selective (if their SAT or ACT scores leave much to be desired, or a less-selective school is...