Incredible insight by Vietnam on standardized testing echoes experienced educators in the US [View all]

I have long maintained that it is the goal of Wall Street and the 3rd way to beat independent thinking out of American students so that they are more compliant, obedient and less likely to challenge authority, therefore, more likely to work for lower wages. The US emphasis on standardized testing is creating class divisions leading to an elite monoculture driving disparity in the US to the levels we typically encounter in Asia.

"Nguyen Vinh Hien, Deputy Minister of Education and Training, told Tuoi Tre (youth) newspaper on Friday that the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, does not assess students' overall competence...

"Even though PISA's 2012 results, announced early this week, ranked Vietnam over many wealthy western countries, including the US, in math and science, "we have to be honest and admit that if fully assessed, Vietnamese students' capacity is still poor," Hien said....

"Dr. Giap Van Duong also wrote in the newspaper that compared to "the four pillars of education" prescribed by UNESCO--learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be--PISA targets only a small part of the first pillar.

Duong holds doctorates in physics and used to work with universities in England and Austria.

"He said PISA tests were limited because they use 15-year-olds as their subjects. At that age, students are still immature and their knowledge is far from meeting the demand of practical fields like business, administration, culture, and arts, he said.

"If the test targeted older people such as 20-year-old university students or 30-year-olds who are working, Vietnam's results would "definitely" be much lower, according to Duong.

"In fact, many Vietnamese students fail to land a job after graduation. When they study overseas, many have difficulties in meeting the requirements of advanced education systems like team-work, problem solving and creativity, he said."

"Duong went on to quote the Asian Productivity Organization's 2012 report as saying that Vietnamese people's productivity is about 20 times lower than that of American people."

Duong added:

"Vietnamese education's focus is on learning to pass exams. The whole system operates to serve only one purpose: exams."

"Students here take exams to enroll in the first grade, the sixth-grade, the tenth-grade, and then universities, and every exam is "tense" and "competitive," the scholar said.

"The tradition of learning to pass exams" is typical of Confucian education systems and is also found in other Asian countries like China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, he said.

All these countries ranked high in PISA tests, although their development is on par with or lower than that of the US and western countries.

This indicated that the tradition probably affected the tests' results, Duong said.

"He noted that among countries with Confucian traditions, Vietnam ranked the lowest, so there was no reason to be happy about the country's ranking."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/vietnam-wallops-us-on-tes_b_7290682.html