Insights from a tour of Chinese schools: Series introduction

China is widely seen as America’s primary economic rival in the 21st century. That rivalry extends to K-12 education, where China’s upstart performance has challenged the U.S. and other developed economies for more than a decade. The world has been on notice since 2009, when China’s first round of participation in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (sampling students from the city of Shanghai only), returned a stratospheric result in all three tested subjects.

Since then, China’s results (always sampling Shanghai, plus a moving selection of other developed jurisdictions) have been at or near the top in every successive round of PISA testing in which it has participated. Experts have challenged these results for a variety of reasons—including sample selection, the country’s internal hukou registration policy, and the broader unrelenting cultural pressure to get ahead in China’s urban centers—casting doubt on the generalizability of the results across the country. Yet, China’s top-tier performance—at least in its most economically developed regions—warrants serious attention.

How do China’s public schools in these regions attain this performance? And, more critically from my perspective, how are teachers contributing to those outcomes?

These are some of the motivating questions that I (Hansen) took with me as I traveled to China this summer as a participant in the Eisenhower Fellowships Zhi-Xing China program, which facilitates bilateral exchanges for mid-career professionals across a variety of industries. During my three-week tour, I attended meetings with scholars across preeminent universities and research centers, visited over a dozen public schools (from middle grades through university) across five major cities, and spoke with many educators about the challenges they face in staffing schools across the country.

This was not my first interaction with public schools in China; I worked as a foreign English teacher in Zibo Normal School in Shandong Province in 2002. I had studied Mandarin Chinese for several years prior and chose to teach in China primarily to provide an opportunity to solidify my language skills. Though my career path did not take me directly into China’s orbit, I have stayed attached to the language through my children’s enrollment at a dual-language immersion school and I monitor U.S.-China issues as a hobbyist observer. Thus, this summer’s fellowship trip to China provided an opportunity to both get a new perspective on my professional research interests and refresh my understanding of China and its education system.

The trip was enlightening on many levels. Over the coming months, I will be writing a series of articles that offers some reflections learned from this experience. As I prepared, I enlisted the help of Ariel Chung, a Taiwanese doctoral student in education policy at the University of Maryland, who has proven to be a valuable thought partner, document translator, and is a full co-author on all this work.