Conference on Global Entrepreneurship: Economic Development for Asia and the U.S. – Session 2A: Global Entrepreneurship and Education Institutional Reform

Kathy Lee: My name is Kathy Lee and I am the Program Director for the Committee of the 100. I would like to thank the conference organizers for trusting me, a non-educator, with the task of designing this afternoon’s panel and to thank the Chancellor for giving us such a warm introduction around the importance of global education. I would like to mention how this panel came about. For the past three years or so, the Committee of the 100 has been a partner with the Asia Society around its Asian school initiatives and the person spearheading that at the Asia Society is Vivian Stewart, the Vice President of Education. The thing that I would like to do with all these distinguished folks from Higher Ed is really kind of use this session as a working session to brainstorm about whether we could find natural collaborations to build towards a K through 16 pipeline. How do you create a global entrepreneur? Does it start when you enter a four year institution like CUNY? Or does it start way before? So we can share experiences and perspectives from all the innovative and great work that all of these folks are doing. My hope is that we could come up with some problem solving or brainstorming today. So I want to turn it over to Vivien, and I thank everyone for participating.

Vivien Stewart: OK. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for that introduction, Kathy. This one of those interesting panels where the panelists actually don’t know each other. It is not usually the case. We are each going to be talking about different aspects of the problem that Matt Goldstein started to talk about today. We are not going to talk about scientific literacy unless John Frankenstein is, but about the lack of international knowledge, especially the knowledge of Asia, on the part of American students, whether in schools or in higher education. We are also going to talk about some of the efforts that are being made to rectify that, about issues of how we might finance it, and then I think we might go into a general discussion on how we can move forward. I am going to go very fast through a few slides just to set the context and to tell you about the work of a large coalition of organizations and states at this point; it is certainly not all the Asia Society.

It started in 2001 with the National Commission on Asia in the Schools, which concluded, which lots of other people who have looked at this issue have also concluded, that American students learn very little about the rest of the world in their schooling. Asia is obviously particularly important, since it is 60% of the rest of the world. For example, student knowledge of geography and history is absolutely rudimentary. These are if you like trivial questions, but if you ask anything more complicated the responses get worse. Teachers, and this is something that Roberta Martin will talk about, almost no teachers take courses dealing with the rest of the world, even if they are going to be teaching things like world history. Our languages instruction is very weak and reflects a past period. Only about 50% of high school students take any language, 70% of that is introductory Spanish. We have very limited capacity in Asian languages currently. I will come to that in a minute.

Why is this important? I think I will go through this pretty quickly since I assume this was what the morning discussion was about: that globalization is fundamentally changing the market place that students are going to go into, that whereas 30 years ago international trade was a very tiny part of the American economy, it is now quite large and growing very rapidly. There are some local statistics here on the amount of trade in general and also with the New York City area. Access to good jobs is increasingly requiring international skills, and not just in international business, even things like health care and law enforcement are increasingly requiring languages and an ability to work across borders.

In Washington there is certainly a lot of discussion that is less in economic terms and more in national and human security challenges, and the kind of skills and knowledge that are going to be needed to deal with that, with a particular focus on languages in that discussion. Matt Goldstein talked about increasing diversity in schools, work places, and communities, and the need to be able to deal with that. Finally, we shouldn’t just think of international education, which is the broad rubric under which all this work fits, as being just about teaching through the curriculum here about people over there, but about the fact that with technology these days it is actually possible to have international classrooms and joint projects between schools of various kinds, so that there is direct learning from peers, which also may have a beneficial effect not only for our students but for students in other countries, and certainly on the perceptions of the U.S. in parts of the world where it is pretty negative right now.

Very quickly, what is being done? There are many things being done. Many of them come together under something called the National Coalition on Asia and International Studies in the Schools. It is a mouthful. It is co-chaired by two former governors, Hunt and Engler of North Carolina and Michigan. All the major K-12 education associations now belong to this, so it has the teacher’s unions, the principals, the school boards, all the of the disciplinary groups, as well as some experts in the field. The goal there is to begin to get them working on this issue, whether it is at the level of school boards, the level of school superintendents, or at the level of thinking about how science should be taught in the 21st century.

What does it mean to have an internationalized science curriculum? I can talk later about some of the efforts that different organizations are making. In Washington I wish I could say that the U.S. Department of Education is paying attention to this issue, but it is not. The State and the Defense Department certainly are, mainly on the languages front. Just one example that Kathy asked me to highlight with the work at the National Coalition is the work of the College Board, which is a major member of the coalition that is now trying to develop high school courses in Chinese and Japanese that will be available nationwide starting next year. When they polled high schools across the country to see how many were interested in offering them, thinking they might get a couple of hundred, they got 2,400 schools that said they wanted to offer Chinese. Almost none of those are currently offering Chinese and we have very few certified teachers. But what it does show you is that there is beginning to be an interest in this issue.

At the state level, and I am not going to talk about this, there is now an annual State’s Institute on International Education in the Schools, which is for state legislatures, boards of education, commissioners of education, and, as a result, we have now had about 18 states that have established various kinds of committees and task forces to look at the issue of in the global economy what should we be thinking about, the content of our education? This is a selection of states and the kinds of reports they are beginning to push out, all having very similar kinds of themes.

Finally, I think that at the same time that policy makers are beginning to think about this, something of a grass roots movement is going on across the country. We run something funded by the Goldman Sachs Foundation to recognize schools that are doing a good job of teaching about the world and in the first two years we have had 400 schools apply for recognition. Not all of them are teaching about the world in ways that we would consider excellent, but large numbers of them are. I think there is something of a movement, a recognition of the need to do this.

We are also creating, with the support of the Gates Foundation, a network of international studies secondary schools in about half a dozen cities which will have international content across the curriculum and which will offer Asian, as well as European, languages. So that is a quick sketch of some of the kinds of developments, not all of them by any means, that are happening around the country. I will now move on to John Frankenstein who is going to talk more at the higher education level about entrepreneurship education.

John Frankenstein: Thank you very much. I will try to keep this very short, because a lot of what I planned to say was already said before. Dr. Wong spoke about educating entrepreneurs. Chancellor Goldstein has talked about the challenges that are ahead, and we have learned about the Baruch efforts in global entrepreneurship. We have heard as well about the necessity of scientific education and cultural literacy. So let me run through this from a somewhat different perspective. Not so much from what is going on in global business, but from what do I as a teacher of international affairs, what do I confer? I think that the topic of Global Entrepreneurship and Institutional Educational Reform with an emphasis on Asia and America, is a very interesting one, and it makes a number of assumptions.

First we have to figure out not only how do we develop this global mindset but how do we develop entrepreneurial skills? I would be very frank to say that within the educational community, certainly within the business community and business education community, while we have these programs, there is a certain degree of skepticism about whether or not we can educate entrepreneurs or whether entrepreneurs bring their entrepreneurialism with them and we let them flower by giving them the right kind of direction and encouragement. I leave that for other people to deal with.

We also have the issue of how do we develop global mindsets in America, particularly about Asia. As a Californian, I happen to believe that those of us in New York are on the wrong ocean as far developing a mindset about Asia, but there is this issue. It strikes me, however, that one thing that we do have to pay attention to, and this is where the initiatives that we have just heard about are so important, we have to start early. By the time we get to the university, it is too late. Can tertiary education help? Yes and no. If the demand is not there, if the interest is not there from the beginning at a lower level, at an earlier level, let me say it is not going to be as effective as it could be. One of the things we have to realize is that what entrepreneurship really is, is that it is a human activity, it is a liberal art. It is just as important to have that as it is to have a good science background and I will forego any comments about teaching Darwin in America. But I think it requires not only business skills, but also an understanding of human behavior that involves developing coordination, understanding motivations.

Peter Drucker has often pointed out that the real job of a business and that the real job of entrepreneurs is to create costumers, and that the really legitimate roll of business is innovation and marketing. This is what we really have to train people and encourage people to do. In a way, what we have here is global entrepreneurship is really about teaching people and helping people to recognize and act upon the opportunities that exist in the global context. This means, as many of the speakers this morning have pointed out and as Chancellor Goldstein pointed out, not only an understanding of the technicalities of business and a general cultural literacy which is also important, but also a more profound appreciation of the global environment and the political environment, which is something that Clark, one of my former students here, reminded me of.

If we are to stimulate the drive in creativity that marks the entrepreneur, then we have to figure out ways to present the global context in a way that is meaningful to the entrepreneur. It is not just enough to teach about Asia and the rest of the world, we have to make it meaningful for him or her as he or she goes out to try to maximize those opportunities he or she may perceive there. It is difficult to do, and it requires a lot of institutional reform and, as Chancellor Goldstein pointed out, educational institutions are slow to reform, so it is difficult.

There is another issue: getting the business community to really understand that this is important. Steve Coburn a number of years ago did a study on this and came away with the fact that a lot of business people look at this internationalism as a kind of book learning, as not really important. I know from my own consulting experience I found this to be true. There are too many stories about people who go to the airport to pick up their expertise, in China or Asia or whatever it is, from the airport bookstore, and not before.

What do we know that has to be done? I have done a lot of surveys on this; I have been teaching in this field for over a quarter of a century, and the one thing that comes up loud and clear from everybody is language. If you don’t speak the language, you are not going to get it done. A Japanese businessman I once talked to said people have to speak Japanese in Japan because otherwise people will not speak from their heart. I know, myself, from my really terrible Mandarin that working in China and not having Mandarin must be like being in America and not having English. We have to figure out ways to get into the minds of our costumers and our business partners and we can only really do that through language.

There is also a requirement to get involved in cross-cultural literacy or what you might call international organizational behavior. How in fact do people organize time in the international environment? How are decisions made? What is the role of the individual and the organization in a relationship, the role of the State, and all of these things that I have run out of time to talk about? There are lots of ways we can do this—will you give me one more minute? Classroom exercises, internships, trips and so forth and so on. At Brooklyn College we are introducing an Asian Studies minor which includes business, language, history, literature and cultural communication courses. It is just beginning and I am hoping that it will develop further. I think we have to keep on pushing on the language issue and the cultural literacy issue and hopefully this will excite the native intelligence of the entrepreneur, and go out and do great things.

I simply conclude by making the recommendation that if anybody wants to know what it is like to be an entrepreneur in China, I just finished reading a wonderful book. I recommend it highly, a book by Tim Clissold who went to China—a very skilled entrepreneur—with $400 million and lost it. The book is called Mr. China and it is one of the best books about the promise and perils of international entrepreneurship that I know anything about. Thank you.

Vivien Stewart: Thank you very much and we apologize for hurrying the speakers but we want to try and get some discussion. I am going to skip peoples’ biographies because they are in the program, in the interest of time. Next is Roberta Martin who probably has greater responsibility for teaching teachers about Asia than anyone else I know in the United States. Robin…

Roberta Martin: Thank you for the introduction. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. I have to confess I do not know much about creating an entrepreneur, but I do know, or I have worked for many years, in helping people learn more about Asia—teachers and students. It seems to me that when we look at the educational situation in the United States right now, despite some of the national federal programs like No Child Left Behind, which is making it very hard to teach any history or culture in the curriculum, there are many windows of opportunity for our students to learn about Asia.

There is more or less a common pattern in the United States that in elementary schools around the third grade, teachers start to introduce the world beyond our neighborhood. Then in the sixth and seventh grade, they often talk about our world possibly through a geographic window, maybe another way. Then in the secondary level in high school there is often an option of World History. Unfortunately it is not required as often as it might be, but there is an option there. The College Board, which Vivien Stewart was talking about before, has introduced an advanced placement exam for college in world history recently, and it has been wildly popular. China is well introduced in that AP curriculum and I am very impressed by watching the teachers who teach it communicate. Their students are learning quite a bit about China.

Here we have elementary teachers who have a chance to do more if we give them the materials, and again at the middle school level. Much of my work has been involved with offering the teachers opportunities already in the classroom to learn more about China and Asia. In the university, as was pointed out earlier, they do not have to. The university is often too late. They learn it when they need it, and so many people say to us that, “before I came to this seminar for teachers I just skipped the chapter in the world history book because I did not know about it, but now that I know something I am so excited and I will spend much more time on this!” We know there is an audience there.

I am part of a national consortium for teaching about Asia that is offering seminars for teachers in 40 states at the moment. We have worked with more than 4,000 teachers, perhaps 5,000 now, since 1998, funded by the Friedman Foundation. From these teachers who take the seminars we then select those who would want to go travel on a study tour to Asia. My feeling is that we can keep doing this forever because there will be new teachers coming into the classroom forever, and the ones we have trained will retire. But the real way to get them is through the international experience. There is now a study being conducted on study tours, but I will say that I am certain that those educators who not only take the seminars, but actually get to go and see China, they are committed for life. They are hooked for life and they come back with so much enthusiasm and they tell us, and we have it on documentary film, that when they walk into the classroom and they say to their students, “I’ve been there,” everything changes. They have a certain kind of authority.

Now these teachers who have been to China: “I’ve got to take my students; this would be wonderful.” We have begun to encourage the second level of school-to-school exchanges at the high school level and at the middle school level. The first state that began this within our network was Oklahoma in the school districts in the suburbs of Tulsa, many of which I have visited and are not in any way distinguished suburbs. They are regular U.S. middle class suburbs. The parents in those districts were delighted to let their children have this opportunity, to travel to China, to stay in one city for a couple of weeks, to live in a dorm with a Chinese student, to go home to that student’s home on the weekend, sleep there, or sleep there every night if that was… Then they would receive the Chinese host a few months later. These exchanges were just wonderful, and within the first year, the principals of seven schools that began this experiment two years ago said that just before they left for China, our students were willing to give up six weeks of their summer for an introductory Chinese language course with a teacher. They gave it up; they got no credit for it. They gave up six weeks; they worked hard.

We are going to start Chinese in our schools. Again, schools with no other resources started Chinese, so it’s a movement that grows very quickly. The need which we have is to have business leaders in these communities see how important this is, and lend a small amount of money—$1000, it takes a $1000 to send a student on one of these trips—but also to get involved. Otherwise we have only foundations, and they cannot meet the demand that we can produce. It is out there. I think that you heard about the surveys this morning. The Committee of 100 has done several surveys of general public opinion about China and Asia and Asian-American public opinion and Senate legislative staff members, and I think that all these surveys show that the American public is way out there, and that these parents and children are in communities where one would think, why be interested in China in Oklahoma or Kansas or North Carolina? They are very interested. And we just have to provide them the opportunity. Thank you.

Vivien Stewart: Next we have Jack Chen, the founding director of the Asia-Pacific American Studies Program of NYU who is going to talk about the university level.

Jack Chen: I am an historian, so I always feel I need to provide some historical context and I really think it is quite compatible with the points that have been made. One of the fundamental questions that we are also looking at it on college-level APA studies, one of the questions we are looking at in terms of Asian Pacific Americans and U.S. education is that we are trying to figure out why is it Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are consistently absent, and perhaps to be more frank, ignored, in terms of policy and practices in U.S. education. Now to get to that question, I think we need to think about some of the larger underlying historical patterns. Certainly in the contemporary period we are aware of certain kinds of bashing that has gone on. We are concerned about the growing perceived competition and threat of China. Certainly all of us are old enough to remember the ’80s in which there was a comparable perception of Japan-bashing and the political culture and the popular culture that goes along with that. So there are those kinds of contemporary phenomena that I think we need to trace back historically. What are some earlier patterns that have existed? Certain kinds of ambivalences and contradictions that exist, and I think we can trace it back to some foundational parts in American history and American culture. Why does that, therefore, lend itself to certain blind spots, systemic ignorances or systemic absences, of thinking about certain parts of the world? I guess I would like to talk a little bit about that, and then very quickly talk about some of things that can be done and some of things that we are working on.

Why is it that Asia and Asian Americans, Pacific and Pacific Islanders are so absent from the American imagination beyond just beyond a few standard stereotypes? The other question I think is, why is it that so many places in Asia and the Pacific Islands are actually so aware of U.S. history and European history? I think that these are related questions. I would say, in having looked at this matter, that there are perhaps two patterns of how the American self, the American national self, the American identity has formulated itself as ‘We the People’ and how it has also formulated various kinds of others. One of them is a pattern in which others are seen clearly as a threat, the whole tradition of Yellow Peril and periodic perils that are seen as security risks to this country. It is not just recent but it is historic and has gone through patterns in the past. Of course, the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the perceived peril of Japanese Americans during World War II, those are just two examples but they are a part of a larger pattern.

The other pattern has been one of romance and has been an idealization, kind of falling into a romantic love with things Asian, whether it is Chinese or other places, in which there is almost a kind of blindness, as associated with this romantic love, about this Other. In many ways I think the way the U.S. has dealt with this Asian Other, this Chinese Other, or Indian Other has oscillated between one extreme and the other. In fact, were we to be more critical and historical about this, we would look at the more complex relationship between these two representations and really understand how they are not simply one or the other.

The other pattern that I think is important, and I will be very brief about this, is that there is a tendency to separate domestic policy from foreign policy. Therefore what happens to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders here is somehow very different than what happens to U.S. foreign policy and U.S. relations to parts of Asia. In fact, if we were to look critically and historically about the progression of the U.S. nation expanding westward, and certainly we have all learned about Manifest Destiny in history text books and this notion of the divine march of progress, both in terms of the spiritual and religious mission, but also accompanied with the advance of technology and progress and modernity marching westward along with the railroads and the telegraph lines. Of course when it reaches the edge of the Pacific coast of this continent then it looks continuously towards Asia. Manifest Destiny did not just end with that Pacific Coast, it expanded to Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and parts of Asia. That kind of notion that really formulated foreign policy and is at the roots of U.S. foreign policy is really important to understand in relationship to what is now defined as domestic policy. So of course as those trades and as those political ties were extended, then peoples, goods, and ideas were also flowing back and forth. So, there is an arbitrary separation between Asia and understanding Asia and Asian Americans and how these two have operated in the American imagination.

I am going to quickly leave it at that, but what can we do about this in terms of the courses that we offer, in terms of the resources that we need to build? Well, as a consequence of the systemic ignorance or the systemic absence, it is actually very hard for most Americans to gain access to reliable information about Asian people and Asian cultures. Of course there are university libraries and there are these excellent curriculum projects that are finally developing, but at the same time, a lot of these materials are fraught, and need to be critically interrogated, with their kinds of biases and limits. Certainly language education is critical. It is very hard to understand the Chinese point of view about its own history unless more people can read Chinese. That really comes without question. But also there is a built-in attitude at many universities that I would say is a systemic problem of whether if you are of Asian heritage whether you are actually quite qualified to be able to teach Asian history. If you look at the patterns of where Asians are teaching, the tendency oftentimes is to be teaching languages, that they are qualified to teach languages. But they are considered perhaps a little too biased to be able to teach about Asian history and Asian culture. There are these histories and patterns that up until recently have been continuing even in universities, but they also exist in terms of research collections. If we think about those of you who understand libraries, archives, and research materials, there are a limited number of Asian language materials that are in so many of our research libraries, and the necessity to go to more elite collections in order to gain access to them. But I think the issue is more complicated because there is also a systemic ignorance of the history of, for example, Yellow Peril, and how a lot of that material has actually been operative on the level of popular culture and of pulp fiction, pulp magazines, cartoons or comic books, and advertising, but in fact if we look at our libraries we have very little of that material to sustain our analysis.

There is an inability to recover some of this deeper more problematic history that I think is quite important for us to be able to come to terms with and understand. What is the role of the

U.S. in terms of the Opium Wars? That is something that Americans have no idea about. But in fact Americans were deeply involved in various kinds of trades, including the Opium Wars, including opium and including the coolie trade. Americans know nothing about those kinds of issues. Chinese, on the other hand, are actually quite aware of those issues. So how do we deal with these different knowledges, and create resources and programs and curricula that can really begin to address these questions more honestly? There are some concrete things that I think we can do and I think in the discussion period we can talk more about them.

Vivien Stewart: Thank you Jack. Finally Lynne Weikart is going to tell us how to fund the kinds of changes that are being advocated, or how difficult it is perhaps.

Lynne Weikart: Hi, I am Lynne Weikart and I am professor of political science at Baruch College here in the School of Public Affairs. I read, write, think, and talk about money and I think that is why I think I was invited. Actually I just came back from China and China is booming, absolutely booming. I want to talk about educational finance and how we finance education and what the impact is on our hopes to expand our relationships with Asia.

First with higher ed, I think that it surprises people that half of the world doctorates, its PhDs, come from the United States. The United States, up until now, has been the gold standard in higher ed graduate studies, and it is fast disappearing. One, because the competition. It used to be that we were the first and the most, and now of course China has its own graduate programs. They’re quickly going to outnumber us in terms of what they turn out and what we turn out.

It is not just competition; it is America’s lack of support of education. The 20th century is over, and that was the century where America did invest in education. In the 21st century, America is not investing in education. It is very clear that in higher education that the bulk of our dollars are coming from individual states and not from the federal government. We do not have a centralized system; we have a more decentralized system. Our public universities are the ones that are the big research universities, are the ones where we graduate all these wonderful PhDs. Those state universities are supported by individual states in many ways and that is now being withdrawn because the states are under fiscal pressure. So, higher education is radically changing very quickly in the United States in terms of the kinds of resources it needs to compete. In the 20th century we had those resources; in the 21st century we are not going to have them. We got to the point where last year, 2004, there were actually dramatic reductions in state support of higher education for the first time. Up until then, it was a little increase, followed by a little increase. In the 20th century you are talking about nine, ten, or fifteen percent every year. In the 21st century you are talking about two, three percent, and in 2004 they were actually cut. The states are under fiscal pressure and consequently our public universities are under fiscal pressure. We will no longer be the shining star, the gold standard, in graduate education. That is really problematic for us in terms of this global competition.

There is also a lack of investment from the federal government. There are two developments at the federal level that make a big difference in terms of educational finance. One is that we have transformed from the 20th century where we talked about needs-based grants for students to loans. I can’t tell you the number of students I meet who have twenty, thirty, fourty thousand dollars in loans from their undergraduate education before they even got to their graduate education. That was a phenomenon that was unknown in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s; it just did not happen. Even if you were a medical doctor it was not that high, but now it is. I think that the changing over from the need-based to the loans is something that hasn’t even been discussed as a national policy. It is not even a decision that has been discussed in terms of policy making. It is something that has evolved and it is indeed tragic for American students.

The second development on the federal level is the middle class relief from college costs in the form of tuition tax credits. Now I am not saying that we should have tuition tax credits. Thank you! I have three children. I am glad I have tuition tax credits, but that is for the middle class. There is nothing there for the poor students or the working class students. There is some Pell money for undergraduate, but not enough. If they want to go to graduate school, forget it. It’s all loans. This infusion of federal aid made an enormous difference in the development of the higher education system in the United States. The drawing back of this federal aid will also make an enormous difference, and not in a way that we would like.

We are now not going to school as much as we used to go to school. In terms of college enrollment, we increase about one percent a year. Well, China is increasing 15% a year and Indonesia is increasing 20% a year. It won’t take China very long to catch up; it is only going to take a few decades. What is really appalling, and is something that most Americans don’t understand, is that as much emphasis as Americans used to put on education, only about 25% of Americans have attended a four year college, and over 47% of Americans don’t even have a high school degree, let alone a college degree. Our educational skill level is actually quite low; it is almost like an inverted “U”. The skill level for our least educated people is so low, and that is coming at a time when the jobs for people with no skills have just disappeared. In 1960, 80% of our jobs were mostly very low skill. Now 15% of our jobs are very low skill, but our people have not caught up. The only way we can compete in the global market is not low skill, but high skill, and we are not doing enough to make that happen. Most of our new jobs are going to require significant higher education, post-secondary education skill of some sort, and we will not be ready. We heard earlier in the discussion in the main room, that China can fulfill the low skill occupation and America can do the high-tech. We are not prepared to compete on the high tech level; we simply are not there. We are not graduating the number of engineers and scientists we need to keep up. We are not in good shape at all on the higher ed level.

On the elementary and secondary school level, we have a serious problem, because unlike other countries, we have a decentralized school system. It is the states that support about 50% of the funds that go into the funds that go into elementary and secondary. The local government supports about 43%, and the federal government is about 7%, which is the exact opposite of most places. There is an enormous loss in federal aid to the states over time, and that means that the states now have to make up some of that funding in different areas. They are starting to draw back from education because they have to fund other things, like highways, because the federal government is pulling back. What you’re seeing is 50 states’ school systems starting to say “we cannot afford this anymore.”

I do not think that we are in good shape financially as we come into this intense competition. I don’t disagree with globalization; I think that it is going to be here. We have to tackle it; we have to figure it out. But, in terms of how we are positioning ourselves, we are not in good shape. In terms of the recommendations we have, in terms of the financing of it, the first is that this is an extraordinary time for us in globalization to meet the demands of preparing our students, language-wise. I was in China a few weeks ago and they are starting to learn English in elementary schools. They are not doing that here. They are not learning any foreign language in most elementary schools in this country. Even in language development, we are saying let’s pour more resources into it, but we are not going to have those resources.

There are more recommendations and more things to talk about, but we are going to leave it for the question and answer period. Thank you.

Vivien Fox: Thank you very much. We have about ten minutes, so I would like to open it to anybody on the panel or in the room to raise a question or an additional point about any of the presentations.

Kathy Lee: Excuse me Vivien. We have good news: I think we have until 3:00.

Vivien Fox: Oh, then we have even more time! Questions?

Female Audience Member: I’m from CUNY, the Medgar Evers College, and we’re located in Central Brooklyn. We have Middle College High School that is from Medgar Evers College. They are actually now interested in offering Chinese. Some of us are getting together to develop the Global Leadership program for the younger aged students in middle school, high school, and college. When we were talking about this, of course the Chinese language runs itself in the governmental education domain, but, we boiled it down to: if we have an enrichment program like that, the Global Leadership program indicated that we need a fund to do that kind of program. We are brainstorming where to go from here. Do you have any suggestions where to look for support for this kind of program? CUNY does not have the money. Our operating budget, as you indicated, is very small and is getting cut. We don’t have many choices to support that kind of program.

Lynne Weikart: At Baruch College, we have a high school, and the high school students take classes in language at the college. The college is open to high school students to take language courses. It is a nice little trade, and we arranged it somehow that they did not have to pay tuition.

Same Female Audience Member: If a student would like to take some courses in China to see what is happening in China, or do a summer program, maybe parents could cover some of the cost, but that may not be, coming from certain economical situations. Where is other funding coming from? That route would have to be fundraising to do this kind of activity. Foundation money is probably limited. Is there any way the business part of the community could help this kind of activity? How would we try to approach or even try to get their mind open to education and support to education? Is that maybe AAARI or CUNY…?

Vivien Fox: Robin may have some additional points on the funding of student exchanges. I would just say a couple of things about the exchange point. There are a lot of student exchanges and there are directories of student exchanges. If you go on the website of the Council for International Exchanges you’ll find those that already exist. Some are federally funded; they are funded from many different sources, so that would be worth looking up. I think some New York City corporations are looking to support local schools; that would also be a place to go for that kind of thing. I think many schools that do this do it through local fundraising. I mean, you have to raise the fares to China, but once you are in China, it is very cheap. On a per student basis, it is actually feasible to do it through traditional methods of fundraising. There is a project in Massachusetts called the China School Exchange or something along the lines of that. They have written a whole handbook on how to do exchanges in China, including exactly how much everything costs and how you could raise money in the local community to do it. Either Robin or I could put you in touch with that. Do you want to add to that?

Roberta Martin: I would just say to take some of your students to the local Rotary Club and have lunch with them, and have them talk about how much they really want to go to China.

Male Audience Member: I have a question for Roberta and Lynne together. It is a basic question about the revision of curriculum for schools. As a president of a school out on Long Island, for the six years that I have followed this, people want to add on. And a lot of things are add-ons rather than getting people to revise the priorities because some of these things might have to be dropped off within a finite period of time. That is true with money too. You may have to shift things around. What is your experience with all these things that you are involved with in trying to get schools to integrate those things, rather than simply adding on? We have a big state court case that is eventually now coming to fruition to get refinanced. I was hoping that both of you would be able to speak to that.

Roberta Martin: In my opinion, the high schools have plenty of time if the curriculum is rigorous. California, for example, has a stepped curriculum right up, and they introduce World History in three levels six, seven, and ten. American history comes in at eight and eleven. It is just written down there. There are not firm guidelines in many states; there are suggestions. Every school district tries to reinvent the wheel and often the people writing the curriculum don’t sequence. They don’t have good experience. American history appears quite often and then a lot of electives, which I think kids can get later or get after school. Or add on the electives for the kids who have extra energy, but have the core curriculum be something that we know everyone should learn.

Male Audience Member: I was thinking also in elementary where you got to do the languages, because my kids all learn languages in elementary, but those have all been dropped now. So, the elementary schools are not doing that. If you are going to put it in the elementary schools, something has got to give. I wonder if with your experiences with that you have seen school systems that have done that.

Lynne Weikart: What is interesting about the standards-based reform is that it is having some consequences that people did not anticipate, or maybe they did and no one listened. We are pushing our students to study more, they are supposed to take tests, and there are standards they must meet. The problem with that, or the unattended consequence of that, is that some things are dropped. Physical education is dropped, music is dropped, and foreign languages are dropped, because that is not on the exams. What you have got are 50 different state systems. It’s an un­centralized system, so you cannot go talk about it in one place and try to force a change through. You are talking about 50 different places. That is the struggle and there aren’t any easy answers to it.

Vivien Fox: Just on the elementary languages part, you see things happening all over the place. You see languages being dropped, particularly in cities. There is a huge disparity in opportunities to learn foreign languages between city schools and suburban and private schools. It is almost doubled. But you also see Wyoming introducing languages in the elementary schools. So I would say there is no clear pattern in any single direction.

Female Audience Member: I have a question about the DOE comment. I think that your point is very well taken about the need for American students to be taught more about the issues on Asia, but I think that is systemic pretty much on anything. Americans don’t really know much about American history by and large. Ask them about the Vietnam War and they have not a clue, and that is somewhat recent history. Never mind something from 1812 or something like that. I think the issue needs to be addressed in that context. Do you have ideas why the Department of Ed has not been receptive or proactive?

Vivien Fox: Yes, I should say that for 50 years the federal government, through the Department of Education, has supported area studies, international studies, and languages at the higher education level, and that continues at more or less the same level. I think what we are all talking about is that that is no longer enough. That was 50 years ago when all we needed was a small group of experts. Today it needs to be much more a part of general education. In that respect, the Department of Education has not been interested because it has had an almost exclusive focus on No Child Left Behind, and reading and math scores. Their belief is, and I guess that is partly a corporate mindset, that you can only focus on one problem at a time. Although we do not have very firm data, we certainly have enough anecdotal data to know that is tending to push out things like languages and social studies in some places. That may change.

In the second Bush administration, there is going to be a focus on high school reform. One of the things that we are doing working with a number of states is to try to see how to alter the definition of a competent high school graduate so that it includes some of this sense that you need some international knowledge and skill. It is very hard because the high school graduation standards in many states were set 20 years ago, so you are sort of going back 20 years ago and saying that was then and this is now. The previous administration was actually more open, but did not necessarily get around to do anything either.

Male Audience Member: Just a multipart question, I guess: what John was talking about seemed to point toward curricular reform throughout all the levels of education. What Roberta was talking about seemed to rest on the volunteerism or the willingness of school boards or smaller school districts to expand the curriculum, to include international change and experience, which contributes to entrepreneurship. What Lynne was talking about in terms of standardizing things—I am not saying that standardized things are bad, I don’t know about that and a lot of people are mixed about them—but what evaluation do the Chinese use for their students because I know that all of them have to start learning English starting in the third grade? Do you know what sort of evaluative techniques the Chinese use? Because I do not know that standards are bad.

Lynne Weikart: I didn’t say they weren’t; I don’t think standards are necessarily bad either, but we have to have enough debate to agree on the standards that make sense.

Male Audience Member: Do you know what the Chinese are doing?

Lynne Weikart: No.

Male Audience Member: You don’t?

Vivien Fox: I do, but they actually don’t have their English language standards developed yet; this is very new. It started two years ago.

Male Audience Member: Yes, as soon as they got included in the WTO.

Roberta Martin: They have a centralized system, so they can say, “Let’s start it in elementary school” and it happens all over the country.

Vivien Fox: In the same way Roberta has been taking teachers to China, I have been taking State Commissioners of Education to China as a way of getting them interested in the fact that this is not being taught in our schools, don’t you think that is an omission? But the interesting discussion they get into between the Chinese and Americans on roughly the same level is about standardization versus flexibility. The Chinese who have had a very standardized system along certain subjects are beginning to believe that they cannot get their schools to the next level with that degree of rigidity and standardization. They want to free up their curriculum and they now have curriculum experiments in various provinces. At the same time, Americans are looking at the math and science standards particularly in China and are saying, “We need to raise our standards and we need to focus them and allow less of this experimentation because it is not producing what we want.” There is a very interesting debate going on about the balance between standards and experimentation.

Lynne Weikart: Just to add a little bit about standards, I think that we totally focused on the wrong thing in standards in this country. What we should be focusing on is the poor quality of teaching, the poor quality of our teachers. Nobody wants to talk about the mediocre teaching pool that we have in the country. Instead, we have standards-based reform where we have kids take tests. I can’t tell you how many people I offend all the time by talking about the fact that teachers in this country are not very well educated. If you want to get into a teaching education school, you probably don’t even have to have high SATs or anything else. There are very low standards. That is not true in many other countries. In China, Japan, France, you name it, they have very high standards. If you want to become a teacher you have to have very high grades, you have to be very good. That is not true in this country. In my mind, I don’t think we would have the struggle we have today if we did have a better teaching pool.

Vivien Fox: John, do you want to comment?

John Frankenstein: I just want to say that as China is trying to deal with flexibility as opposed to standards, China is also having to deal with educational finance issues. In whole provinces students can’t go to school because their parents don’t make enough money to pay the school fees because they are being ripped off by the local officials for all sorts of informal taxes. Of course certain Chinese elite schools have wonderful programs, while other Chinese schools are pretty abysmal. I have talked in Chinese schools, in one of the elite universities. I am very happy to be at CUNY.

More recently, I have had the opportunity to see a range of Chinese education, going from various kinds of tech schools to universities and things. A particularly interesting thing, which is kind off topic and is something that if we are interested in Chinese education that we need to pay attention to, is the growth of private education in China. Some of the private schools that I have been to in China are mind-bogglingly interesting. One that I will tell you about, this sort of combines global entrepreneurship with China: I was taken to a school in the outskirts of Beijing that was located in an abandoned clothing factory. The local authorities had given an entrepreneur this factory, and a Chinese factory, as most of us know, is really a small city. You have the production facilities, you have the dormitories, you have the infirmary in a huge enclosed space. This gentleman who was running the school took me around; he was obviously revamping a lot of the classrooms. He took me to their computer lab, and there were a thousand work stations. A thousand work stations! He said, “This semester we are going to have 800 students. By this time next year, we are going to have 10,000.” That is really exciting. It is very vocationally orientated. There is no question about it: he is training people to go out to work in the factories, run the IT, and stuff like that.

But there is another element there that I think that we have to pay attention to in terms of the kind of dynamism in educational reform. Let me put a plug in for community colleges. I didn’t know much about community colleges before I started working on the project that brought Chinese American counterparts together. I was really impressed. I was in Berlin recently. In the plane going over, there were kids from BMCC, John Jay, LaGuardia, and Kingsborough all going to spend a week at the Schloss Leopoldskron, the American academy in Salzburg. I forget exactly how they got the money for it, but it was really very exciting and very possible. So there is some hope there.

Vivien Fox: Community colleges are clearly the most entrepreneurial part of our system. I did not mean to imply that all Chinese schools reach high standards, but a very large number of them do and they are much higher than our best schools.

John Frankenstein: I could not agree with you more.

Vivien Fox: Do Robin or Jack want to comment?

Jack Chen: I think that one of the hallmarks of contemporary globalization is that there is increasing divides both in China, between the city and the country, and also in this country as well. Even though I am at NYU now, my heart is still with Queens College and CUNY, in which I see vast differences and the growing divides in this country as well. I think that the point that is being made in part is the question of political will and investment. Therefore, there is a certain kind of centralized command economy, political will in China. How can this very decentralized, standards-driven approach that is being given out, how can political will be infused from more of a grassroots perspective? I think that is a very fundamental question.

In a partial response to Professor Coran’s question, I think that part of the issue is how can we take advantage of the resources, the sometimes very limited resources, sometime non-financial resources, that we actually have. I think that one of the ongoing problems is how can we think of our students and communities as resources, and how can we draw from them? I understand that we absolutely have to raise money, so I am not saying that we can do this just by breathing air. But I really do believe that the immigrant populations from Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, who have lots of languages and bi-cultural skills, need to be tapped in terms of the language education and there can be great partnerships that can happen between communities and different colleges. I think that they can create models that are very entrepreneurial. They are models that perhaps can get some foundational grants. I think that language issues obviously are not simply what you learn in the classroom but also are deeply about the trans-valuation. How do you value, how do you shift evaluation, how do you understand and interpret the relative value of one language, one cultural and historical system to another. I think that we can still miss the boat if we just focus on language; it has to be language, history, culture in a context. There needs to be a deep understanding of how cross cultural communication can happen. In fact, I think that our immigrants are a major resource for a lot of that to happen. How can we, therefore, strategically think about developing teacher training programs, drawing upon the strengths that are already there and further cultivate strengths so that they are really in positions to be teaching these kinds of courses? I think that there are a lot of possibilities, especially within CUNY in pushing these kinds of resources.

Vivien Fox: Just a comment on that, in looking across the schools that have applied to the Goldman Sachs competition, it was very interesting, almost bimodal, distribution of where these applications were coming from. They are from schools that consider themselves as producing global citizens. One was at the very high end, lots of private schools. The other were schools that had a sudden influx of immigrants within the last few years which had caused them to think that they had to rethink their curriculum. That is an illustration of that dynamic. Is there anyone who has not asked a question yet?

Male Audience Member: You were going to make some recommendations…?

Lynne Weikart: Sure, the first goes back to the poor quality of teaching. I don’t think American education is going to meet the challenges of globalization unless we attract a better group of people to teaching. That is hard to do because the best teachers are siphoned off into the richest suburbs and the poorest teachers are left in the cities. It is not addressed, recognized, or talked about statewide, but I would like to see much tougher standards for teacher certification in the country. I would like to see much tougher standards and a much longer internship for teachers. The Netherlands has 12 to 18 months internships for teachers before you get your certification. I’d like to see something like that. I really think that that’s the one act that we could do that would make the biggest difference in the educational system in this country: the quality of teaching. I used to visit a lot of schools, and I cannot tell you how appalling some of the teaching was in high schools in the city of New York that I saw. I could not believe that those people had master’s degrees. And it is true for many places in this country.

I think that the second recommendation has something to do with removing the financial barriers for poor and working people to attend college. Whether it is community college or a four year colleges, there are just too many barriers. Just to give you one example, TANIF. In 1996 we restructured welfare. If you were on welfare, you were only allowed to go for 18 months. The new TANIF that is going to be released shortly, it is in House-Senate conference now, is that you will only be allow to go for higher education, including community colleges, for three months. I mean what are policy makers in Washington thinking? Work is good, I am sure it is, but you won’t have work if you don’t have a decent education. That whole concept of opportunity to education I think has to make a difference.

Then there is the whole piece on globalization and a recognition on the part of the federal government and the state governments to say—I would like to see the state governments do what South Carolina did—to say “What can we do to embrace globalization?” And I would like to see that happen on the federal level and the state level, and what do we do? We embrace globalization educationally and we know what those answers are. It is more foreign languages, more trade. We have 15,000 students at any one time in England studying in higher education; we have 1,000 in China. I mean, that is our history. Our history is our kids go to Europe. Let’s turn that history around, and what does that take? The other recommendation is on the state and the federal levels, let’s have discussions: why doesn’t the Conference of Governors…and they have a big conference every year and you should get in on that… Have you gotten in on that?

Vivien Fox: Yes. They are inviting Tom Friedman and the Vice Minister of Education from China to their summer institute.

Lynne Weikart: That is wonderful! That is what ought to be happening on that level, because the governors actually come and you can influence what goes on in their states.

Vivien Fox: Well it is three o’clock so I think I have to close up. Is that right Kathy?

Kathy Lee: I think that we can go to 3:10.

[laughter]

Vivien Fox: OK! Then fine, we will just keep going. We are obviously having a very engaging discussion. So, on this point about the numbers of students going to China versus England: you might be interested to know that next Friday Senators Lieberman and Alexander are introducing a bill to fund Chinese language instruction in schools and Chinese cultural exchanges. That has been hanging around for a long time, but I think that now Alexander who is a senior Republican in the Senate is now picking up on it is another indicator. There is a long way between a bill introduction and anything happening, but that is another story in the wind.

You had another question?

Male Audience Member: It is a comment about the teachers in China. There are four of us in this room who have been deeply involved for 20 years in the Shanxi Province. We have seen tremendous changes in China, but one thing is very interesting about what has been said about the teachers. Primary school teachers in China begin teacher education after the 9th grade. They have three years, and they do not go to colleges in the way we think about colleges. It is as easy to romanticize China as it is to denigrate it, as you have said. I think what is really helpful when people go on study tours is to get involved. One of the things I would do if I were going to have people look at China, is look at the villages, which exist all over. Go see the movie Not One Less and you will see a village school. Frank has seen them, John has seen them, Donald has seen them, and I have seen them. Some of you have seen them. That is quite different from seeing a key school in Shanghai and Beijing that they are teaching at. There is a wide range and I think that it is important for us to understand that and see that, so that our students who are going to learn about other cultures really get a breadth and depth in the culture. As you said, it is not just the language, when you go there, you really get involved in the culture to the extent possible.

Vivien Fox: I think that everybody would agree with you. China has greater inequalities than in the U.S. I think on some measures. I think the reason that the higher standards in the urban schools are so impressive to people is because that is where the competition is coming from to the U.S. You have to look at that.

Lynne Weikart: It is interesting: the figure that there are about 350,000 engineers being graduated from China every year and fewer than 50,000 thousand here. China does not have to educate everybody. In sheer number, globally and economically they can surge ahead in high tech jobs—not just low tech jobs—because they do not have to educate everyone; just in sheer number, they can do it.

John Frankenstein: A number of factoids from the current issue of Newsweek because it has a movie star on it, that is why I bought it. There is a little factoid in an article that is largely on the mark. Intel Corporation of course has the science fairs; it is open around the world. Last year the United States had 65,000 entrants, pretty good number. China had six million. Work it out on a percentage basis, just play around with the numbers and you suddenly discover some really scary things. China’s population is roughly four to five times ours. We are talking about almost 100 times the number of people going into the Intel competition. I do not know if anyone in China made it even to the second rounds. The point is that that is the level that they could get six million kids encouraged to go compete in an international competition in science. I find that, as a father of somebody who went through that process and did not get very far, I find that very bothersome.

Jack Chen: Just to add to that, when we look at who are the winners when it was more of a national competition, many of them are children of Asian immigrants. The domestic-international connection is prevalent.

Roberta Martin: Well what I wanted to say is that the problem with us as Americans is that we are complacent. We just assume that we are always going to be number one. I think the advantage of showing the very best of what China has to offer when we take groups there is that it shakes people out of their complacency. Vivien and I were both at a meeting a few years ago, where one of the people who had not been to China said, you know we have got to be careful pushing this education about China because we already getting backlash in my state. We talked to Chinese about how to be competitive, being disciplined. And then someone else said “Oh, we have that problem with Japan too.” However the people at the table who had just been to China, said, “You know, we saw some schools and it is just amazing; we have something to learn from the Chinese in way they do…It was particularly concerning the early childhood things. It was the shock in their voices that this was suddenly two-way. That is the only way to shake up this society and get the entrepreneurs out there. I think the business community is aware of it and the population is interested, but I do not think anybody has got the message yet that not only is there another major power, it may be the major power in the future.

Are we going to have another half-hour?

Vivien Fox: No! We have two minutes! Oh yes, go ahead.

Female Audience Member: I am from Brooklyn College and we have been talking about Asian Studies for over five years now. This conversation took place a couple of decades ago and is taking place again now. We are on the cusp of a minor. Listening to everybody reminds me of all the challenges that there are. We talk about institutional change being slow, that there is no funding—someone brought that up in a different aspect. I wanted ask these questions: How do we interest colleges to hire qualified teachers? How do we interest existing professors who may not have an interest in this, or understanding of this, to seek grants or diversity initiative grants? They exist, but professors who are there are not seeking them. It is also about space. It is not just about the curriculum, it is about creating a space. I am always interested in the idea of starting an Asian Studies Center. Starting the minor in the curriculum of course is a beginning but I think that creating a space for the discussion and the development of programs is also very important. I am talking very locally and in a very grassroots way of how to address these things. They are very real issues and we deal with them on a daily basis. Where can we get funding alternatives? Our businesses, are there ways we can learn how to approach businesses or bring this attention to other places? There are areas here that are wonderful resources in terms of creating space and providing the resources to create programs like this, but also in other places.

Vivien Fox: There are people at the door knocking to come in, but are there any people from higher education who have a couple of comments. I know nothing about higher education.

John Frankenstien: A lot of the Brooklyn College initiative came from students. They wanted it, and somehow, and I can’t claim to be privy to all the secrets at Brooklyn College, since I am only a visitor, but it has somehow percolated up to the provost. The provost is a wonderful woman, a very far-sighted lady, she said, “Okay, let’s get an Asian studies program going; there is some interest in the faculty to get it going.” So it percolated up through the system. But, you know, it percolates; it doesn’t rush. I think that is an issue we advocate for. Higher education is a very conservative, turf-jealous business. Nothing happens in it, but student demand, I think, will do something.

Vivien Fox: I would just like to thank the panelists very much and the participants: they put together a really good discussion.