By Linda Chion Kenney

In the ongoing push to strengthen the math, science and reading curriculum, American education policymakers are missing measures that apparently matter more than standardized test scores.

Forget these measures that compare youngsters internationally, argued Yong Zhao, director of education psychology and educational technology at the United States-China Center for Research on Education Excellence in East Lansing, Mich.

Speaking Friday afternoon as a featured presenter, Zhao found it much more informative to showcase studies comparing countries through such measures as wealth distribution by population, royalties and license fee exports, patents and even the number of college-dropout billionaires.

Asian countries “want college dropouts like these,” he said, referring to a slide depicting Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Dell’s Michael Dell and Apple’s Steve Jobs, among others. “They want innovators like these,” he repeated.

Toward that end, the greater aim is for “children to be able to think,” Zhao said. “What you (as Americans) want to get rid of, give to us.”

Zhao made the case for reforming American schools so they become more like what American schools have been moving away from because of the overemphasis on testing. This era of high-stakes tests, he added, has come with great collateral damages, including cheating, demoralization and the deadening of creativity.

“Education is really to tolerate imagination, to sustain curiosity and not just to pass on knowledge,” Zhao said. “We should not forget the moral purposes of education.”

With changes in technology comes a new realization of necessary knowledge, Zhao said, pointing to such watershed moments as the invention of the printing press, the factory-driven advancements of the Industrial Age and today’s increasing globalization and technological sophistication.

“It has created a completely different economy, a completely different society, a completely different environment,” Zhao said. “We may be ignorant of that but our students are not.”

Today, Zhao said, we live in what Thomas Friedman called a “flat world” and what Marshall McLuhan called a “global village,” where human resources are fluid across national and geographical boundaries. Moreover, workers can find employment and outsource their businesses internationally, both in the real and virtual worlds.

For such a world, the three T’s — technology, tolerance and talents — have become of paramount importance, Zhao said. So, he added, “what abilities are you instilling in your students that will make them employable globally?