Global Strategies

Photos: North Portland Parkways Sunday

Today I camped out for three hours in front of Ockley Green K-8 school in North Portland. It was Parkways Sunday in North Portland (here).  Roads were closed to automobile traffic on an eight mile circular route through neighborhoods. Lots of bicyclists, skaters and walkers were out. I sat with my “Make a Year of Study Abroad an Option for High School” placards. And I introduced my new placard “Shame on the Teacher Unions for Opposing High School Study Abroad,” because they do (and are the major obstacle to such programs).

China Pop Star Jane Zhang sings “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”

Jane Zhang is a current popular music star in China. Her wikipedia entry reads, in part (here):

Zhang auditioned for the Super Girl contest in 2005. Super Girl (simplified Chinese: 超级女声; traditional Chinese: 超級女聲) is the Chinese equivalent to the popular Idol franchise where only female contestants were allowed to participate. She auditioned in Chengdu, and after progressing through the preliminary rounds, she entered the national competition with Li Yuchun and He Jie (simplified Chinese: 何洁; traditional Chinese: 何潔).

Throughout the series, she had established a fan base whose members called themselves "Liang Fen" (simplified Chinese: 凉粉), a phrase that combined the Chinese pronunciation of her name and the English word "fan." The term "Liang Fen" originated from Hong Kong years ago, but is now used to define a particular type of bean jelly snack in central China.

Zhang demonstrated her ability to sing in foreign languages, with performances of "I Still Believe," "What's Up," "Beautiful,” and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina." As such, she was recognized by judges, critics and musicians to be the most talented singer in this competition. Some critics even regarded her as one of China's best artists. Nevertheless, she was not the most popular contestant among young supporters. Her final number of votes by text messaging was 1.3 million. Consequently, she placed third behind Li Yuchun and Zhou Bichang. Her loss did not come as a shock because Li and Zhou had garnered more popularity during the competition. Their creative eccentricity and tomboyish appearances triumphed over Zhang's "old, introverted, [and] pretty-girl" image

 

“Bridge Comes to San Francisco with a Made-in-China Label”

This article speaks for itself. From the NY Times article “Bridge Comes to San Francisco with a Made-in-China Label” by David Barboza (here): 

Talk about outsourcing.

At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.

The project is part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer.

The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans. But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair. California officials say the state saved hundreds of millions of dollars by turning to China…. (more)

"Beginning of the Great Revival" - Chinese historical movie

China is now screening a two-hour historical movie that begins with the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty. It's titled “Beginning of the Great Revival.” From the NY Times article “People, You Will See This Film. Right Now!” by Xiyun Yang (here):

This month China’s great masses are being mobilized by their leaders for an unusual purpose. Employees at state-owned companies and at all levels of government are joining students from grade school to universities as they leave their homes, head out into the heat and do their duty: ensure the financial success of the government’s latest propaganda film, “Beginning of the Great Revival.”

The movie, which opened on Wednesday on almost all of the country’s 6,200 screens, is part of a campaign to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party next Friday. It is also playing in 29 American theaters, including ones in New York and Los Angeles.

“Colleges in Crisis: Disruptive changes comes to American higher education”

What should Oregon do with its public universities as their costs rise and the “disruptive technology’ of online learning increasingly provides lower cost alternatives? I’ve blogged previously and regularly about the possible “bubble” in higher education. I’ve advocated a total rethink of the structure of public higher ed: letting the Oregon big three go private, shifting to vouchers (usable for online programs as well) for students, and finding a new way to fund research. Recently, I was excited to note that Tim Nesbitt now advocates “extending Oregon financial aid (Opportunity Grants) to students taking online courses at the Western Governors University” (here). That would be a good step in the right direction.

Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn (authors along with Curtis W. Johnson, of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns) provide further perspective in their Harvard Magazine article “Colleges in Crisis: Disruptive changes comes to American higher education” (here):

…. The success of these online competitors and the crisis among many of higher education’s traditional institutions are far from unique. These are familiar steps in a process known as “disruptive innovation” that has occurred in many industries, from accounting and music to communications and computers. It is the process by which products and services that were once so expensive, complicated, inaccessible, and inconvenient that only a small fraction of people could access them, are transformed into simpler, more accessible and convenient forms that are also, ultimately, lower in cost. We are seeing it happen more rapidly than one could have imagined in higher education, as online learning has exploded: roughly 10 percent of students took at least one online course in 2003, 25 percent in 2008, and nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009.

What is exciting about this emerging reinvention it that it has significant potential to help address the challenges facing American higher education by creating an opportunity to rethink its value proposition—its cost and quality.

When America’s traditional universities arose, knowledge was scarce, which meant that research and teaching had to be coupled tightly. That is no longer the case. Today, the Internet is democratizing people’s access to knowledge and enabling learning to take place far more conveniently in a variety of contexts, locations, and times.

Online education can effect the transformation not only of curriculum but also of learning itself. Judging it by the metrics used to govern the old system is both inappropriate and limiting (as is true of all disruptive innovations). Online learning allows education to escape from the focus on credit hours logged and “seat time” in classrooms to new standards that tie progress to students’ competency and mastery of desired skills. Online courses can easily embed actionable assessments that allow students to accelerate past concepts and skills they have mastered and focus instead on where they most need help at the level most appropriate for them. In this environment, learning outcomes will be a more appropriate measure for judging students and institutions.

Although this transition has begun, much of online learning’s promise for higher education is still on the horizon…..

 

 

 

Political Ad: China, the Debt Limit and Nevada's Special Election

Nevada’s US Representative Dean Heller has replaced John Ensign in the US Senate (Ensign resigned), thus leaving his seat vacant and to be filled by a special election. Running in that special election is Mark Amodei, whose political ad is the subject of this blog post.

James Fallow brings the following political ad to our attention and writes (here):

Unlike many people, I admired the panache and artistry of the "Chinese Professor" ad used during last fall's campaign to warn about the self- destructive tendencies of America's borrow-and-spend era.

But the similar ad being run by Mark Amodei -- at right, with his mother -- a Republican candidate for Congress in Nevada's special election, is like a lobotomized version of the Chinese Professor. It loses the wit and holds onto only the xenophobia. You can judge for yourself, but the beauty part is his connection between "raising the debt limit" (which he promises never to do) and PLA troops goose-stepping across the plaza in front of the U.S. Capitol. It's tedious to have to point this out, but: refusal to raise the debt ceiling is the move most likely to touch off a panicky dumping of U.S. securities and increase doubt about America's status as a power that knows what it is doing.

 

"The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers"

I just finished reading “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers” by Richard McGregor. It describes well the organizational structure of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how it runs China. It’s full of stories of the CCP’s control of various sectors of Chinese life. What remains a mystery is the internal politics of the CCP and how decisions are made. Like politics anywhere, China has lots interests competing for state decisions and resources. How, and if, such interests are organized into factions within the CCP, and how decisions are reached, remains murky.

From the book’s description by its publisher Harper Collins (here):

As an organization alone, the Party is a phenomenon of unique scale and power. Its membership surpasses seventy-three million, and it does more than just rule a country. The Party not only has a grip on every aspect of government, from the largest, richest cities to the smallest far-flung villages in Tibet and Xinjiang, it also has a hold on all official religions, the media, and the military. The Party presides over large, wealthy state-owned businesses, and it exercises control over the selection of senior executives of all government companies, many of which are in the top tier of the Fortune 500 list.

In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China's inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military, and how it keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party's decisions have a global impact, yet the CPC remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law, unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world's only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is steadfastly poised to think the worst of the West.

In describing the role of the Central Organization Department, as an example from the book, McGregor writes:

A similar department in the US would oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, Exxon-Mobile, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices of the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the head of think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. Not only that, the vetting process would take place behind closed doors, and the appointment announced without any accompanying explanation why they had been made.

 

 

Go, China, & emphasizing "long-term planning over quick tactical advantage"

From the Wall Street Journal article “What Kind of Game Is China Playing” by Keith Johnson (here)

A 2,000-year-old board game holds the key to understanding how the Chinese really think—and U.S. officials had better learn to play if they want to win the real competition.

That's the pitch that David Lai, a professor at the Army War College, has been making in recent months to senior military officials in the U.S. and overseas. Learning the ancient board game of wei qi, known in the U.S. as Go, can teach non-Chinese how to see the geostrategic "board" the same way that Chinese leaders do, he says.

The game, already well known in the days of Confucius and still wildly popular in Asia, is starkly different from chess, the classic Western game of strategy. The object of Go is to place stones on the open board, balancing the need to expand with the need to build protected clusters.

Go features multiple battles over a wide front, rather than a single decisive encounter. It emphasizes long-term planning over quick tactical advantage, and games can take hours. In Chinese, its name, wei qi (roughly pronounced "way-chee"), means the "encirclement game."

"Go is the perfect reflection of Chinese strategic thinking and their operational art," says Mr. Lai, who grew up watching his father—who was jobless during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution—constantly play the game. A self-described midlevel Go player, Mr. Lai came to the U.S. about 30 years ago.

Mr. Lai's best-known work about the nexus between Go and Chinese geopolitical strategy is a 2004 paper called "Learning From the Stones," a reference to the 361 black and white stone pieces that eventually fill the 19-by-19 Go board. He described China's long-term and indirect approach to acquiring influence……

“What’s next for Portland’s public schools?”

Portland Public Schools superintendent Carole Smith has an op-ed in today’s Oregonian titled “What’s next for Portland’s public schools?” In it, she reviews some of the current focuses and accomplishments of PPS, and, then, of the future, says (here):

It's too early to say when we will again ask voters to approve a school modernization bond or what it might contain. School board members and I are actively seeking input from bond supporters and critics alike. We've heard clearly that our capital plans must be connected to our educational vision. For a year, we have been meeting with teachers,  principals, parent groups and community leaders to develop a five-year strategic educational plan. We will finalize this plan in the fall, following broader community input -- and it will incorporate our long-term priorities to renovate and maintain school buildings.

We still need safer and up-to-date learning environments to help students and teachers do their best work and sustain these gains. As we plan the next bond proposal, we will be thoughtful and deliberate in balancing their needs and the hopes and aspirations of our entire community

Let me remind Smith of the importance of expanding foreign language immersion programs, especially Mandarin and Japanese, and of expanding learning opportunities (especially foreign languages) and reducing costs through the use of online technologies.

Let me especially remind Smith that if the district does not create a high school study abroad program that I will again be opposing whatever bond funding measure is proposed.

“Chinese immersion programs in Utah continue to grow"

Utah is continuing to push foreign language immersion programs, especially Mandarin. From the 4/11/11 report “Chinese immersion programs in Utah continue to grow" by Steve Fidel for KSL.com (here)

….. By the time the next school year begins in the fall, the state expects to see about 2,200 elementary school students and 5,000 students in secondary schools studying Mandarin.

"We're adding schools as fast as we can," said Gregg Roberts, world language specialist for the Utah State Office of Education, who said limited funding is the only reason the immersion program is not growing even faster.

Roberts said the governor would like to have 100 dual-immersion programs in five languages with 30,000 students by 2015.

"Next year, Utah will have approximately one-third of all Chinese immersion programs in the country," he said. Programs will also continue in Spanish and in French. The state has chosen, but not announced, what additional languages it will add, Roberts said.

Carolyn Gough, world languages consultant for the Jordan School District's dual immersion program, said children learn languages quickly and see the greatest measure of success when they start young.

"People who are savvy about business recognize the world is no longer round. It's a flat, spreading economy, and China is where a lot of our business opportunities are going to be in the near future," Gough said. "I  think most parents recognize there's a great opportunity for their children to know and speak Chinese."

"It's all about economics, economics, economics," Roberts said. "We know that students will be farther ahead and have jobs skills if they are fluent in Chinese."……(more)

Oregon is falling behind. The Governor and legislature will not act, and the teacher unions are opposed to high school study abroad programs. How can Oregon have a global economic future?