The leader of Joe Biden’s Department of Education transition team has praised the Chinese Communist Party’s school system in Shanghai as doing “magical work.”
In Linda Darling-Hammond’s 2017 book Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around the World, she pointed to the Chinese province of Shanghai as doing “magical work” with education.
Shanghai possesses a “high-performing education systems creat[ing] a coherent set of policies designed to ensure quality teaching in all communities,” she added.
“This book describes how this seemingly magical work is done: how a number of high-performing education systems create a coherent set of policies designed to ensure quality teaching in all communities- and how the results of these policies are manifested in practice. Across three continents and five countries, we examined seven jurisdictions that have worked to develop comprehensive teaching policy systems: Singapore and Finalnd, the states of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia, the provinces of Alberta and Ontario in Canada, and the province of Shanghai in China.”
Darling-Hammond also praised teaching in China as an “open and publicly examined practice,” despite countless reports on the Chinese government infiltrating institution with spies.
Throughout the 304-page book, Darling-Hammond also shares figures regarding enrollment, graduation, and education investment provided by the Chinese Communist Party, failing to note that these figures are often inflated.
Joe Biden’s education transition team lead has a long history of praising China’s school system—a system the Chinese Communist Party designed to indoctrinate students.
Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor and the president of the California State Board of Education, has praised the Chinese Communist Party’s education system for its “magical work” in establishing a strong teacher-government presence in student life. In her 2017 book Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around the World, she explained the centrality of the teacher to Chinese students’ lives.
“Teachers in China are revered as elders, role models, and those whom parents entrust to shape the future of their children,” Darling-Hammond wrote. “In the Tao traditions of ritual, the phrase ‘heaven-earth-sovereign-parent-teacher’ is repeated and becomes ingrained in how people see themselves holistically governed and supported.”
The Stanford educator failed to mention that any other teacher-student “relationship” could result in imprisonment. The Chinese government continually cracks down on “Western values” in the classroom by sending state-sponsored inspectors to monitor teachers—particularly in higher education—for “improper” remarks. Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has said that China’s schools and teachers must “serve the Communist Party in its management of the country.”
Not serving it can carry steep consequences. In July, for example, Chinese professor Xu Zhangrun was placed under house arrest after he criticized Xi’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. He was subsequently fired from his teaching position at Tsinghua University—one of China’s most elite institutions—after he spoke out against Xi’s removal of presidential term limits.
In her book, Darling-Hammond also praised China for dramatically increasing spending on education. But that money has been unevenly distributed, resulting in persistent inequalities. Sixty percent of rural students drop out by the time they reach high school, and of the remaining 40 percent, only a small fraction take college entrance exams.
Similar disparities apply to teachers—yet in a 2011 Washington Post article, Darling-Hammond lauded China for boosting spending on teachers’ professional development. She also took a “detailed statement” from the Chinese minister of education at face value, in which he claimed that China had allocated “billions of yuen” to improving teachers’ “working … and living conditions.”
Such omissions appear in Darling-Hammond’s Twitter feed as well. In 2018, she tweeted that the United States had 71 times as many school shootings as China, but declined to note that Chinese crime statistics are notoriously inaccurate. She also ignored the numerous stabbings that plague Chinese schools. In October 2018, a woman stabbed 14 children in a kindergarten class. In April 2018, nine students were murdered at a middle school.
Darling-Hammond has spent nearly her entire life entrenched in Ivy League institutions, beginning at Yale University in 1969. In 2008, she served as the lead for Barack Obama’s education transition team. Darling-Hammond had been under consideration to be Biden’s secretary of education but claimed she was “not interested” in the position, citing her desire to continue working with California governor Gavin Newsom.
The Biden team did not respond to requests for comment.