Three BCPS administrators travel to China to learn about education

For American students, struggling to perform well on the SAT or ACT can seem about as strenuous and painful as walking the length of the Great Wall of China. These tests affect the future of their education and career – pressure to score well can be overwhelming.

The Badaling portion of the Great Wall, where conference participants climbed, explored, and were amazed.

But Americans are not the only students whose futures sometimes seem to hinge on test scores. Upon visiting the Great Wall’s homeland (and the wall itself), Patricia Baltzley, Baltimore County Public Schools director of mathematics, Kevin Harahan, principal of Parkville High School, and Lyle Patzkowsky, principal of Dulaney High School, discovered that Chinese students must score well on a test to be admitted into high school – before they can even consider the “University Test,” a three-day test that almost entirely decides if, and where, students attend college.

Ms. Baltzley, Mr. Harahan, and Mr. Patzkowsky traveled to China for two weeks this July to represent Baltimore County Public Schools at the China 2005 11th Annual Educational Leadership Conference. They joined educators from across the United States in striving not only to learn of different testing systems, but, more significantly, to understand China’s interconnected educational system, history, and culture.

American and Chinese educators pose together against the background of Beijing # 1 High School. This is one of the schools with which Ms. Baltzley, Mr. Harahan and Mr. Patzkowsky hope to establish an exchange program.

China’s educational system
In China, conference participants learned, education is only compulsory until the ninth grade. Then, students take a test that determines whether they progress to high school, a vocational school, or a mechanical school. Only those in high school (about 60 percent in Beijing) have the opportunity to take the University Test. Ms. Baltzley found that Chinese students and their parents are “very focused on the University Test.”

According to some, pressure to study for the University Test sometimes threatens to diminish independent thought. Conference participants strayed from Beijing, where the conference was based, to Xian, where they visited historical sites and Xian Goa Xin High Tech High School. There, Ms. Baltzley encountered some American undergraduate students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who were teaching summer school courses. The MIT students said that their Chinese students “won’t answer questions.”

Ms. Baltzley remembers that, during a speech to the conference participants, His Excellency, Dr. Zhang Baoqing, China’s Vice Minister of Education, voiced concern that Chinese education has been “thousands of years of memorization,” and that as a result, students’ creativity and problem solving skills have suffered.

During the 270 school days per year, which span from 7:30 a.m. to 5:20 p.m., with a three-hour break in the middle, Chinese students remain in one classroom while teachers rotate from room to room. (By contrast, students in Maryland schools attend for 180 days each year.) The students are “used to information being shared and taking notes – a lot of rote learning,” according to Ms. Baltzley. The curriculum is “very much prescribed,” explains Mr. Harahan, and includes few electives. “It’s a very structured system, and their culture, both now and in the past, has been very structured,” expands Mr. Patzkowsky.

Ms. Baltzley, Dr. Zhang Baoqing, Mr. Harahan, and Mr. Patzkowsky take a break from speeches and site-seeing to pose.

Education is education, kids are kids
The Chinese school system faces many of the same problems as the American school system, regardless of differences. The Chinese school system administers exams similar to the High School Assessments (HSAs), notes Mr. Harahan, and has trouble “motivating students and finding relevant curriculum,” relates Mr. Patzkowsky.

“Educational issues are educational issues worldwide,” Mr. Harahan asserts – and kids are kids. Despite being more regulated at school, Chinese students are “just like our kids,” Mr. Harahan reflects. He recalls seeing a group of middle-school-age kids at the airport. “They acted just like our middle-school-age kids,” he said. “They were a bundle of energy.”

At Xian Gao Xin, conference participants had the chance to interact with a small group of students, gathered at the school despite being on summer break. The Chinese students thought that American students didn’t study at all after school, but, as Ms. Baltzley remembers, Mr. Harahan corrected them – using his Parkville High School pupils as examples of students who play sports, have jobs, and still study diligently. Some Chinese students claimed to do nothing after school except study, but in the group that Ms. Baltzley, Mr. Harahan, and Mr. Patzkowsky spoke to, two boys pointed to another and said: “We go to his house and play American video games.”

Near the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, historians and archaeologists are still discovering and piecing together these ancient warriors. They project that, once restoration is complete, there will be almost 7,000 sculptures of warriors, horses, and carriages.

Chance to visit history
Before visiting the school, the conference participants visited a nearby historical marvel –thousands of warriors, made of terra cotta, discovered in the 1970s near the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, a famous emperor buried in 200 BCE. While historians and archaeologists are still discovering and piecing together these warriors, they believe that, once restoration is complete, there will be almost 7,000 of these ancient sculptures of warriors, horses, and carriages. “I was absolutely flabbergasted, absolutely amazed,” Ms. Baltzley raves, impressed by both the site’s beauty and lengthy history. Ms. Baltzley was even more impressed, however, after discussing the Terra Cotta Warriors with the students at Xian Gao Xin.

“The Chinese students asked where the historical sites where we live are,” Ms. Baltzley says. “I used to live in Pennsylvania, so I was talking about Gettysburg – but I realized, and we told them, that our history is 250 years old, and your history is 4,000 years old. We joked about it, but that was part of what we needed to understand.”

The conference also included other trips to schools and historical sites in both Beijing and Xian. “In order to learn about the educational system, you had to understand the long history and culture,” explained Ms. Baltzley.

For Mr. Patzkowsky, the Great Wall was the most amazing place visited; “It’s hard to believe,” he said, “that 1,000 years ago something that magnificent could have been constructed using manual labor.” Mr. Harahan agrees, stating that “you have to see it” to appreciate the incredible feat of its construction, which, he says, took 1,200 years.

Besides visiting the Great Wall, conference participants bartered at open markets, dined at a four star Chinese restaurant (bypassing less distinguished native dining—offering, for example, snake on a stick), drove through bustling Beijing City and bucolic Beijing Province, and toured silk factories and historical sites including a palace, Tiananmen Square, and Confucius Temple.

History juxtaposed with modernization
Juxtaposed with this illustrious history, conference participants found modernization – vast economic and technological growth. Ms. Baltzley describes Beijing, where she stayed in a modern hotel flanked by old buildings, as “a city in flux.” The educational system is aspiring to keep pace with changes in the rest of China, trying to “find ways to as quickly as possible educate as many people as possible,” Mr. Patzkowsky explains.

As China strives to update their educational system, its long history and traditions are causing setbacks. According to Mr. Patzkowsky, “Those in rural communities are posing the greatest resistance, because they live in a very traditional way, and don’t see the need to change.” But even in the past decade China has significantly increased access to education, from the elementary to university level, Mr. Patzkowsky affirms.

Putting education in a cultural context
Ms. Baltzley, Mr. Harahan, and Mr. Patzkowsky hope to bring some of China back to Baltimore County, besides photographs and souvenirs. Ms. Baltzley explains that “we probably could not replicate their educational system because their society is different,” but her experience awakened her to the need to consider culture in making educational changes here in Baltimore County, as she believes is the intent of Superintendent Joe Hairston. “We need to look at our own culture and make sure education stays in tune with changes,” Ms. Baltzley explains.

Mr. Harahan and Mr. Patzkowsky hope to establish an exchange program with Chinese students and teachers. “It would be a wonderful opportunity for us both to learn about education and share ideas about what’s working in education and what’s not,” Mr. Patzkowsky advocates.

Overall, all three agreed that the trip was an “amazing,” “wonderful,” and “eye-opening” experience.

Ms. Baltzley, being the director of math, even picked up a math text book. She proudly displays it, smiling, although she admits she probably won’t find it to be very useful: it’s in Chinese.

Facts about China

Population: 1,306,313,812 (July 2005 est.) Adult Literacy: 90.9% Capital: Beijing Population below poverty line: 10% (2001 est.) www.cia.gov Area: 3,705,386 square miles Facts about great wall: Longer than1,500 miles Up to 25 ft high and 30 ft wide

 

Story by Tracy G., Communications Intern and senior at the Carver Center for the Arts and Technology. Photos courtesy of Patricia Baltzley, Director of Mathematics