China’s spy balloon should be a wake-up call — about US schools

Two recent news stories converge into one urgent plea. One is the alarming and well-covered story of the Chinese spy balloon. The other: At 23 Baltimore public schools (out of 150), zero students tested proficient in math. That includes 10 high schools. Not surprisingly, this story received far less coverage, including none in The New York Times.

Also ignored was the follow-up news: 77% of Baltimore high-school students read only at elementary-school grade levels. Ignored too was the copy-cat story for Chicago: that of 649 Windy City public schools, 22 have zero students grade-level proficient in reading, and 33 have zero grade-level proficient in math.

Yet the appallingly bad performance stats are not the full horror, because “grade-level proficiency” in America is itself a scam.

And what unites this with the balloon stories is this: We cannot let our education problems fester any longer.

Among New York City activists for rigorous public education, protesting parents with roots in China, the old Soviet Union or the Caribbean all instantly react with disdain when we hear the words “grade-level proficient.”

“They do that in eighth grade? When I was little in (insert appropriate country), we did it in fifth grade!”

Often, that’s in discussing math or sciences, where different education systems are directly comparable. But even in the humanities, our foreign-born parents graduated from their high schools knowing Shakespeare, Sophocles and Hemingway, while their kids finish our US high schools remembering mostly ersatz “lived-experiences” of “literature” of the “I, me and myself” ilk.

Here’s how our “grade level” stacks up internationally: In OECD’s latest (2018) Programme for International Student Assessments report, America ranked 27th in math, with the Beijing-Shanghai district, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the top five slots. In science, America ranked 18th, with Beijing-Shanghai, Singapore, Macao, Estonia and Japan in the top five.

Even in reading, America is still 13th, with Beijing-Shanghai, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong and Estonia in the top five.

This, despite America having the highest per-student spending of every country listed above.

Instead of making our schools more rigorous, the educracy is all about running further and further away from educating, and diverting ever more resources to playing at babysitting, indoctrination and unlicensed therapy.

What does this have to do with China’s spy balloons? Well, China is now America’s biggest rival. Its progress (thanks to theft and native innovation) in both overt and covert military capabilities continues to take us by surprise. (The spy balloon may not be a simple apparatus.)

And China casts a huge shadow, from its global Belt and Road Initiative to its penetration of US education. Economically, just try to live for one day without using anything that has a Chinese-made component!

Yet China is not a rich country; it suffered mass starvations only a few decades ago. And its per-capita GDP is still less than one-fifth ours.

China doesn’t have our individualistic ideals and impartial institutions that attract and reward the best talent from around the world. It doesn’t have our competitive, dynamic capitalism that constantly directs eager risk capital to fertile opportunities with an efficiency that’s unimaginable under China’s statist command economy. And China is uncertain about the loyalty of many in its highly surveilled, constrained populace.

So how does China project power so much above its weight? The answer must be schools.

China’s schools set rigorous standards and demand strong performance. If it weren’t for schools that drive human capital to higher and higher levels, China’s other limitations would have been determinative. China shows the importance of schools.

Back to the unrelenting catastrophes at Baltimore and Chicago public schools: America is taking a massive national risk by continuing to grant near-monopoly powers to bloated, failing educracies and their politically powerful union allies.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. It’s time to unleash competitive, dynamic energy into education and let families, not bureaucrats, unions or politicians, choose the future of education. Maybe then, grade-level proficiency will mean something again.

Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.