Fooling the Emperor: how is creativity misapplied in China?

This was written by Yong Zhao who is the author writes and speaks about education reform. He blogs here and tweets here. This post was found here.

This was originally published in China-US Focus on October 23, 2014. Adapted from my book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.

by Yong Zhao

China’s capacity for innovation has become a hot topic for China, the U.S., and the rest of the world today. There is no question that China must innovate its way out of the “middle income trap.” But whether the country – which over the last thirty years has proven to be able to make everything – can create anything new remains questionable.

The question is not about whether the Chinese people are creative. Creativity is human nature. Genetically speaking, creativity should not have any ethnic bias or favor any one nation. If creativity is evenly distributed, China should have its equal share of the same genetic stock of creativity as any other nation. Given that its population size is more than three times of that in the United States, China should possess three times the number of great creative geniuses such as Steve Jobs. It also claims to be the only ancient civilization that has a non-stop history of over five thousand years and the most powerful empire in the world, which should have given it more time to accumulate creativity and innovation.

But China has produced very few inventions in science and technology that matter much in the modern world, at least not enough protect the nation from Western aggressions backed by scientific and technological innovations. Even today, despite its stunning growth in patent applications and scientific publications, the country has yet convinced many of its ability to innovate and invent.

China apparently has failed to turn its creative potential into significant innovations and inventions. What happened to all the creativity China had? How does creativity get lost in China?

Speculations abound. No single reason can be used to answer such complex questions. But a major culprit is the authoritarian spirit that advocates complete obedience to authority and results in policies that rewards compliance and punishes defiance. While many people believe obedience results in less creativity, it actually can boost creativity, making people more creative. But the creativity is not productive, in fact counterproductive because it is applied to simply demonstrate obedience, without actual compliance, resulting in token compliance – a form of cheating.

For example, to show compliance to the government’s anti-corruption wishes, which include measures such as prohibiting government officials to enjoy expensive alcohol and elaborate banquets in luxurious restaurants, Chinese government officials have been found to be extremely creative: they put ultra-expensive alcohol such as Moutai in Coke bottles or ordinary drinking bottles; they move elaborate banquets to farm houses; they bring chefs from five-star hotels to cook their “working meals” in their local cafeterias. To comply with environmental regulations, local officials in more than one place creatively ordered mountainsides painted in green. In more than one provinces, local officials rushed to cover paved roads with soil and plant vegetables and soybeans to show the inspectors their compliance with government regulations about conserving farmland.

Shangyou Zhengce, Xiaoyou Duice, literally “the higher authorities have policies, the lower have countermeasures,” has become a common phrase to describe the phenomenon of “emperor-fooling.” This is why in China, the authority seems to always have their demands met and wishes granted by its people, albeit at great cost with wasted resources and creativity.

China’s recent campaign for innovation has met the same fate. To stimulate innovation, the government has employed all sorts of carrots and sticks. The Chinese people have again applied their creativity to realize the government’s wish.

Last month, a number of convicts received a reduction of prison term as a reward for their patented inventions. Former police chief of Chongqing Wang Lijun, now serving a prison term of 15 years for abuse of power was granted 254 patents, 211 of which were filed in one year. His counterpart Wu Changshun in Tianjin has 35 patents granted. Most of their patents were related to police equipment and accessories. They were commercialized but mostly purchased by their own departments, and earned them both royalties and fame.

About 10 years ago, Chinese governments showered money and glory upon Chen Jin, who claimed to have invented a sophisticated computer chip Hanxin #1 (or China Heart/Chip #1), which turned out to be a chip he bought from Motorola. However, he creatively hired some migrant workers to remove the Motorola label and managed to pass the inspection of Chinese officials and experts. A professor at Jinggangshan University found a creative way to have over 40 papers published in international journals, which earned him hundreds of thousands of RMB. But these papers were later retracted, together with about 30 from the same university, for fabricated and falsified data.

There are many more forms of creative and entrepreneurial token compliance. Fabricating research papers and faking journal publications for sale have become a multimillion-dollar enterprise in China, so has the creation and sailing of junk patents. Less courageous professors, medical doctors, nurses, engineers, and professional researchers resort to other forms of creative compliance: publishing the same paper in multiple places, splitting a paper into multiple publications, creatively modifying existing publications, or plagiarizing. As a result, China now receives more patent applications than the U.S. and publishes millions of scientific papers. But the majority of them are of low quality.

By nature, Chinese are no less creative than other people; nor are they less inclined to take risks, or more predisposed to cheating. The authoritarian spirit of absolute obedience to authority seems to direct creativity to risky cheating in order to realize the wishes of the high authority, which may or may not be shared by the people. In other words, while the emperor’s wishes cannot be denied, but people can creatively fool him.

China’s future rests on its ability to turn creativity into constructive innovations and inventions. But whether it can do so depends on how quickly it can change the authoritarian mindset.

Hitting the target, but missing the point

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Jonathan tweets here. This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website.

by Jonathan Teghtmeyer

Lance Armstrong is a cheater.

If I had written that a few months ago, I’d have had the pants sued off me. But since Armstrong admitted to doping in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, the chances of a lawsuit have greatly diminished.

Armstrong doesn’t believe that he is a cheater. He explained to ­Winfrey that the definition of cheating is to gain an advantage over a rival and he didn’t view his actions that way—he viewed it as a part of a level playing field. Armstrong attributes his actions to a ruthless desire to win at all costs; a desire that served him well on a bike but ultimately caused his unceremonious downfall.

Cheating is common in a world that focuses on winning. For ­example, in 2000, in the U.K., Tony Blair’s government allocated money to the British public service based on agreed-upon targets. Inquiries into this so-called “target world” found examples of “creative compliance.” In its 2002 report, the UK Commission for Health ­Improvement related the case of one particularly creative hospital, in which too many patients were waiting too long in emergency wards and, conseque-ntly, the hospital was in danger of missing its target for finding beds for patients in a timely manner. The hospital met its target by turning gurneys into beds by removing their wheels. A senior civil servant characterized this incident of cheating as “hitting the target, but missing the point.”

In another case, in 2010, Georgia’s State Department of Education ­suspected rampant cheating after it analyzed erasure marks on test bubble sheets and found that changes from incorrect to correct ­answers were inexplicably high in some schools; the state ordered an investigation.

Of the worst offenders, 21 of the 27 were from the Atlanta Public School District, where in four schools 80 per cent of classes were flagged for cheating. Could the $2,000 cash bonuses (aka merit pay) given to teachers at schools that met improvement targets have had anything to do with this?

Daniel Pink, a renowned academic on motivation and the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that traditional if–then rewards tend to produce the opposite of what they were meant to achieve. A rewards system extinguishes intrinsic motivation, diminishes performance, crushes creativity, fosters ­short-term thinking and encourages cheating.

The more a system is based on rewards and winning, the more people will cheat. Armstrong didn’t feel bad about cheating because he saw it as part of the system—part of a popular culture that ­worships winners.

Cultural values are incredibly powerful, so we need to be very ­careful about the types of cultures that develop in our schools. ­Cultures based on ruthless competition divide people into winners and losers. Some will win by cheating, and people who lose in the system can become disenchanted and quit. Such a culture damages the core task of public education—preparing all learners for life.

Although some welcome increased competition in education, ­teachers must focus on collaboration and reject a culture of competition and the bad ideas, like merit pay, that come with it.

Standardized tests with high stakes are bad for learning

In her article Standardized tests with high stakes are bad for learning, studies show , Carolyn Heinrich writes:

I was part of a National Academies of Science committee that was asked to carefully review the nature and implications of America's test-based accountability systems, including school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, test-based teacher incentive-pay systems, pay-for-scores initiatives and other uses of test scores to evaluate student and school performance and determine policy based on them. We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated, focusing on the most rigorous and credible studies of incentives in educational testing and sifting through the results to uncover the key lessons for education policymakers and the public.

Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance

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Testing and teaching are at odds

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come.

 --Lord Molson, British politician (1903-1991)

The Washington Post ran a piece On Leadership July 18 and 19, 2011, that featured responses to the Atlanta cheating scandal from Dan Ariely, Arne Duncan, Howard Gardner and Steven Pearlstein.

Despite the evidence mounting against high stakes, standardized testing, Arne Duncan and many other advocates for test and punish accountability want to stay the course with their "despite cheating scandals, testing and teaching are not at odds" mantra. So powerful is Duncan's need for consonance, his reaction to disconfirming evidence is to criticize, distort and dismiss cheating as the sole responsibility of those individuals who did the cheating.

In other words, Duncan is saying "mistakes were made, but not by me." This mental jockeying is known as confirmation bias, and at the moment Duncan is its poster boy.

False dichotomies make choosing easy. Duncan frames his argument very carefully -- either you are for accountability (with him) or you are against accountability (against him). But in reality, the situation is far from this simple.

In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan writes about "the ostrich instruction":

We all recognize the human desire at times to prefer ignorance to knowledge, and to deal with conflict and change by imagining it out of existence... In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn't exist and that we don't have to change... A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compels us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflict we just don't want to deal with.

Sometimes it's the leaders with the most power and responsibility who are the most blind because they believe they know what they were doing -- or feel like they have to look like they know what they are doing.

In their book Mistakes Were Made but not by Me, Carol Tavris Elliot Aronson write:

In a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information about George Bush or John Kerry, Drew Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored. These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observations that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them. 

Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

In light of this, it's not surprising that when test and punish accountability supporters like Arne Duncan are faced with evidence that shows cheating as an inevitable and inherent characteristic of high stakes testing, they simply turn to discrediting the facts and become even more committed to their own argument. At this point, I'll be fair to Duncan and say that this behavior is as predictable as it is unfortunate, especially if he believes staying the course is his only option. Because people become more certain they are right if they can't undo it, nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

At this point, I'm reminded of what Edward De Bono meant when he said:

If you never change your mind, why have one?

This is precisely why we need to listen to people like Bob Schaeffer from Fairtest who say:

The failure of NCLB and its state-level clones cannot be reversed by “staying the course,” “raising the bar” or any of the other faith-based notions frequently invoked by high-stakes testing true-believers.

Test scores are low, make them go up

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.”

~ John Dryden

Some people make the case that good teaching and real learning are the best ways to achieve high test scores. The argument goes something like this: Help your students become thinkers and learners and the scores will take care of themselves.

Let's for the moment ignore the evidence that suggests this might not be true. 

There is a growing body of evidence that shows you can improve test scores without improving learning. Some of these strategies range from illegal cheating such as changing students answers -- to legalized cheating, otherwise known as teaching to the test. 

Cheating has always been frowned upon, and at one time so was teaching to the test, but in response to the ever increasing demands for higher and higher test scores, teaching to the test has gone from something even the test-makers vehemently opposed to something that is encouraged as best practice. And when the pressure to raise scores threaten the very existence of schools and the employment of educators, system-wide forms of cheating are encouraged from as high up as administrators and superintendents.

In reaction to this systemic pressure, many educators now experience professional development as nothing more than "test scores are low, make them go up."

Anyone who has played the game of school as a student knows that there are ingenius ways to achieve high grades without learning too much and there are also ways to learn a lot and still earn low grades.

Here's what I mean. Here are two students:

One student has a teacher that artfully guides them to play an active role in constructing and discovering a love for learning; the other has a teacher that focuses on scripted test preparation and direct instruction that has this student play a passive role in reproducing right answers on tests. The former experiences school as something done by them -- the latter as something done to them.

Here are their testsandgrades data:

So which student is which? Which one sees learning as a means to an end and which sees it as an end in and of itself? Which one has a teacher that artfully guides them and which has a teacher that does test prep?

The information provided about Liam and Samantha is as common-place as it is limited, which means we can't possibly know which student is which based on the (lack of) information provided --and when I say we need more information, I don't mean we need more testsandgrades.

The ultimate point here is that inferences made from testsandgrades can be undermined leaving the successful and superficial students indistinguishable. The reductionist data gleamed from testsandgrades is by definition necessarily incomplete -- making the use of this limited and narrow kinds of data to make any kind of decisions or judgements about a student at best unhelpful and at worst harmful.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole debacle that I call chasing "testsandgrades and calling it learning" is that there is a whole generation of beginning teachers who have known no other education than one that makes testsandgrades both the means and end to learning. The distinction many people make between real learning and testsandgrades makes no sense to them because they have been taught from the beginning that testsandgrades are good teaching and learning; they simply do not have any other model to draw from.

The mantra of test scores are low make them go up and the cult following we have in our culture of education for testsandgrades may prove to do more long-lasting harm to our education systems than we can fathom.

Learning from cheating

The cheating scandal in Atlanta is an important event to learn from. As a solutions focused parent and teacher, I see all problems not as a time for punitive measures but as teachable moments.

Teachable moments are by definition acts of working with people - that's why we must resist simply doing things to people via punishment. The conventional wisdom around punishing cheaters is as tempting as it is distracting. After all, there's a big difference between preventing students from being able to cheat and focusing on why they wanted to cheat in the first place. The former may feel productive, but only the latter is productive.

Cheating is rarely solved by simply more rules and regulations followed by harsher reinforcements. We must refrain from attributing the problem of cheating solely on the cheaters themselves. The teachable moment here can be found in thoughtfully reflecting upon the circumstances and environments that the cheaters were immersed in when they cheated. The real question here is not "How will the cheaters be punished?", but instead "Why did the cheaters cheat?"

Alfie Kohn writes in his article Who's Cheating Whom?:

One major cause of cheating, then, is an academic environment in which students feel pressured to improve their performance even if doing so involves methods that they, themselves, regard as unethical. But when you look carefully at the research that confirms this discovery, you begin to notice that the worst environments are those in which the pressure is experienced in terms of one’s standing relative to others.

Kohn goes on to describe a grocery list of ways to create an environment ripe with cheating. Cheating is more common when:

• teachers have little to no relationship or connections with their students

• teachers care care more about other things than their students

• students experience their learning as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming

• learning is prescribed rigidly in a prefabricated curriculum

• students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades

• there is an emphasis on honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades

• parents offer financial inducements for academic success

• schools value product more than process, results more than discovery and achievement more than learning

• students are led to focus more on how well they're learning than what they're learning

• teachers emphasize good grades, high test scores and being smart

• competition is valued over collaboration

Alternatively, Kohn explains that cheating is far less common when:

• learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to the students

• exploring ideas remains a priority over a single-minded emphasis on rigor

• students' opinions are respected and welcomed in a democratic classroom

• a disposition to finding out about the world is nourished

• teachers made it clear to kids that the point of school is to enjoy learning and that understanding mattered more than memorizing and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of exploration.

When people are encouraged to do whatever it takes to achieve, we shouldn't be surprised when they do whatever it takes (read: cheat). If school is about performance over process and a premium is placed on results, then cheating makes perfect sense; after all, if all you need is to look smart, then cheating can get you there. However, if real learning is your objective, then cheating suddenly makes very little sense. Where cheating might make you look smart, it will never actually make you smarter.

Devising and implementing more rigorous punishments for cheaters is the equivalent to shutting the barn door after the horses have all run out - in other words, it's a massive exercise in missing the point.

When we stop to reflect upon why cheaters cheat, we dedicate ourselves to understanding that cheating has less to do with the characteristics of individual cheaters and more to do with the priorities of schools and practices of educators. In fact, seeing cheating as symptom of a larger systemic problem may the be the only hope we have of reducing the frequency of cheating.