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.
