Doing the George Costanza in China

So China is now deciding that for public education, the idea that testing is best, is now going out the window.  From The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post:

China just began a major education reform effort that is aimed at reducing the importance of standardized testing in determining school quality and including factors such as student engagement, boredom, anxiety, and happiness. 

As scholar Yong Zhao notes in the following post, the approach is the opposite of the education reform path in the United States, which in recent years has increased the importance of test scores for accountability purposes.

We all know that China was never famous for individual thought or creativity.  But even they seem to realize to create a better educated populace, that testing will not do it.  They realize that using only test scores to send students to higher level schools is a bad idea. 

From the Chinese Ministry of Education:

“However, due to internal and external factors, the tendency to evaluate education quality based simply on student test scores and school admissions rate has not been fundamentally changed,” says the document. “These problems [of evaluation] severely hamper student development as a whole person, stunt their healthy growth, and limit opportunities to cultivate social responsibilities, creative spirit, and practical abilities in students.”

I know.  The U.S. is not China.  But given that the top-performing countries in the world - Finland and China - are not using testing as the main evaluation of their teaching outcomes, the U.S. might want to consider what it's doing.