Learning from Shanghai
Learning from Shanghai

Author: Charlene Tan

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9814021873

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The Shanghai school system has attracted worldwide attention since its impressive performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2009. The system ranks as a ‘stunning success’ according to standards of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Shanghai also stands out for having the world’s highest percentage of ‘resilient students’ – students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds who emerge as top performers. Learning From Shanghai: Lessons on Educational Success offers a close-up view of the people and the policies that have achieved such world-class performance. Based on research and personal observation gathered during the author’s recent field work with school principals, teachers and students, this book explores the factors that explain Shanghai’s exceptional success in education. The approach combines high standards of scholarly research and analysis with the author’s unique personal insights, as evidenced by chapters entitled Education is Filling a Bucket and Lighting a Fire and Tiger Mothers, Dragon Children. Drawing on her experience as an education professional and a teacher of teachers, Charlene Tan thoroughly examines and analyzes the people, the policies and the practices that distinguish Shanghai educators. The contents include comprehensive details on the Shanghai approach to quality education, from discussion of the balance between centralization and decentralization, to school autonomy and accountability, to testing policy and professional development for teachers. The book includes detailed tables on curriculum and school performance targets, sample appraisal forms for teachers and students, and dozens of photographs. The author is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Surpassing Shanghai
Surpassing Shanghai

Author: Marc S. Tucker

Publisher: Harvard Education Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1612504574

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This book answers a simple question: How would one redesign the American education system if the aim was to take advantage of everything that has been learned by countries with the world’s best education systems? With a growing number of countries outperforming the United States on the most respected comparisons of student achievement—and spending less on education per student—this question is critical. Surpassing Shanghai looks in depth at the education systems that are leading the world in student performance to find out what strategies are working and how they might apply to the United States. Developed from the work of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which has been researching the education systems of countries with the highest student performance for more than twenty years, this book provides a series of answers to the question of how the United States can compete with the world’s best.

Little Soldiers
Little Soldiers

Author: Lenora Chu

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0062367870

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New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; Real Simple Best of the Month; Library Journal Editors’ Pick In the spirit of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Bringing up Bébé, and The Smartest Kids in the World, a hard-hitting exploration of China’s widely acclaimed yet insular education system that raises important questions for the future of American parenting and education When students in Shanghai rose to the top of international rankings in 2009, Americans feared that they were being "out-educated" by the rising super power. An American journalist of Chinese descent raising a young family in Shanghai, Lenora Chu noticed how well-behaved Chinese children were compared to her boisterous toddler. How did the Chinese create their academic super-achievers? Would their little boy benefit from Chinese school? Chu and her husband decided to enroll three-year-old Rainer in China’s state-run public school system. The results were positive—her son quickly settled down, became fluent in Mandarin, and enjoyed his friends—but she also began to notice troubling new behaviors. Wondering what was happening behind closed classroom doors, she embarked on an exploratory journey, interviewing Chinese parents, teachers, and education professors, and following students at all stages of their education. What she discovered is a military-like education system driven by high-stakes testing, with teachers posting rankings in public, using bribes to reward students who comply, and shaming to isolate those who do not. At the same time, she uncovered a years-long desire by government to alleviate its students’ crushing academic burden and make education friendlier for all. The more she learns, the more she wonders: Are Chinese children—and her son—paying too high a price for their obedience and the promise of future academic prowess? Is there a way to appropriate the excellence of the system but dispense with the bad? What, if anything, could Westerners learn from China’s education journey? Chu’s eye-opening investigation challenges our assumptions and asks us to consider the true value and purpose of education.

A Critical Ethnography of 'Westerners' Teaching English in China
A Critical Ethnography of 'Westerners' Teaching English in China

Author: Phiona Stanley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-11

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1135135681

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Tens of thousands of Western ‘teachers’, many of whom would not be considered teachers elsewhere, are employed to teach English in public and private education in China. Little has previously been known, except anecdotally, about their experiences, about the effect they have on education in the context, or on students’ perceptions of ‘the West’ that result from this contact. This book is an ethnographic study of Westerners’ lived experiences teaching English in Shanghai, China. It is based on three years of groundbreaking research into the pre-service training, classroom practices, personal identities and motives, and local socially constructed roles of a group of ‘backpacker teachers’ from the UK, the USA and Canada. It is a study that goes beyond the classroom, addressing broader questions about the sociology, and politics, of transnational education and China’s evolving relationship with the outside world.

Policy Metamorphosis in China
Policy Metamorphosis in China

Author: Xiaojiong Ding

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0739171860

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China has been experiencing great economic and social changes since the late 1970s when the Reform and Opening-Up policies were accepted. While some Sinologists argue that such changes have made the Chinese structure of authority fragmented and discrepant, and have weakened the directive power of the Central Government, a few others emphasize that despite a certain degree of economic decentralization and segmentation of public power, the Central Government has been seeking ways to hold the nation together. Consequently, while the former argue that due to the centrifugal nature of the political system, policy implementation is bound to deviate from the route specified by the Central Government, the latter hold that national policies are carried out faithfully, with minor deviations only in certain circumstances. This book studies the processes of policy implementation in contemporary mainland China by taking minban/private education at the level of basic education in Shanghai as an example. Based on 65 interviews conducted during 2001 and 2004, three moduses of policy implementation are proposed, and the Model of Structural Fracturation is advanced as the prevailing modus of policy implementation in contemporary China. The model argues that policy metamorphosis during implementation is not something random; in contrast, it is determined by structural factors that no single policy actor can manipulate. The pyramid of Chinese politics is a loose construction, with vertical and horizontal fracturations between different layers. The model highlights the fact that governments at the county/district level are remote from and beyond the control of the Central Government and the provinces. They deserve more attention than they have received. Contrary to Western perspectives which regard the structural fracturation in the Chinese polity as dangerous for national stability and unity, this book takes the fracturation as an important and delicate element of the Chinese mode of governance, and suggests that the very strength of the state lies in its capacity to tolerate local deviation and to embrace it into national institutions.

Middle Class Shanghai
Middle Class Shanghai

Author: Cheng Li

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780815739098

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In Middle Class Shanghai, Cheng Li, who grew up in Shanghai during the oppressive years of Mao's Cultural Revolution, argues that American policymakers must not lose sight of the expansive dynamism and diversity in present-day China. The caricature of China as a monolithic Communist apparatus set on exporting its ideology and development model is simplistic and misguided. Drawing on empirical research in the realms of higher education, avant-garde art, architecture, and law, Li's unique study highlights the strong, constructive impact of bilateral exchanges. Combining eclectic human stories with striking new data analysis, Li's book addresses the possibility that the development of China's class structure and cosmopolitan culture--exemplified and led by Shanghai--could provide a force for reshaping U.S.-China engagement. Both countries should build upon the deep cultural and educational exchanges that have bound them together for decades. Li concludes that U.S. .

How Shanghai Does It
How Shanghai Does It

Author: Xiaoyan Liang

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1464807914

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The Shanghai basic education system has garnered significant attention since its extraordinary performance in the 2009 and 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global assessment of 15-year-olds’ educational abilities. Among the 65 participating economies in 2012, Shanghai-China ranked first on all three major domains of PISA, i.e. mathematics, reading, and science. Shanghai also stands out for having the world’s highest percentage of “resilient students†?, students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds who emerge as top performers. Shanghai’s PISA story has generated intense discussions and diverse speculations in field of international educational development, and numerous studies have been done in the attempt to unravel the mystery. Missing from the picture however is a more comprehensive, systematic, in-depth, and objective rendition of the policies and practices of Shanghai basic education, benchmarked against others in key dimensions. This report presents an in-depth examination of how Shanghai scored highest in the areas of reading, science, and mathematics on PISA. It documents and benchmarks key policies in basic Shanghai education, provides evidence on the extent to which these policies have been implemented in schools, and explores how these policies have affected learning outcomes. The report uses PISA 2012 data to analyze Shanghai student achievement variation and to examine the extent school variables may be associated with the variation beyond family and student background. It also uses the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER), an existing systems diagnostic and benchmarking tool, as an organizing framework and for data collection. School-based surveys and other existing research shed further light on educational impact and implementation. While the report attempts to adopt a systems approach, particular emphasis is placed on teachers, education financing, balancing autonomy and accountability, and student assessment.

The Last Kings of Shanghai
The Last Kings of Shanghai

Author: Jonathan Kaufman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0735224439

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"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

Education and Society in Post-Mao China
Education and Society in Post-Mao China

Author: Edward Vickers

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1351719742

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The post-Mao period has witnessed rapid social and economic transformation in all walks of Chinese life – much of it fuelled by, or reflected in, changes to the country’s education system. This book analyses the development of that system since the abandonment of radical Maoism and the inauguration of ‘Reform and Opening’ in the late 1970s. The principal focus is on formal education in schools and conventional institutions of tertiary education, but there is also some discussion of preschools, vocational training, and learning in non-formal contexts. The book begins with a discussion of the historical and comparative context for evaluating China’s educational ‘achievements’, followed by an extensive discussion of the key transitions in education policymaking during the ‘Reform and Opening’ period. This informs the subsequent examination of changes affecting the different phases of education from preschool to tertiary level. There are also chapters dealing specifically with the financing and administration of schooling, curriculum development, the public examinations system, the teaching profession, the phenomenon of marketisation, and the ‘international dimension’ of Chinese education. The book concludes with an assessment of the social consequences of educational change in the post-Mao era and a critical discussion of the recent fashion in certain Western countries for hailing China as an educational model. The analysis is supported by a wealth of sources – primary and secondary, textual and statistical – and is informed by both authors’ wide-ranging experience of Chinese education. As the first monograph on China's educational development during the forty years of the post-Mao era, this book will be essential reading for all those seeking to understand the world’s largest education system. It will also be crucial reference for educational comparativists, and for scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds researching contemporary Chinese society.