I am very pleased to announce that Corwin Press has released my new book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students in association with the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP). The book is about preparing global, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. It is my attempt to answer a number of pressing questions facing education today. These questions are exemplified by two new stories that have dominated the media recently, one around the Facebook IPO and the other the debt and jobs of college graduates.
100 billion, 900 million, and 28 …

More about the book
I am very pleased to announce that Corwin Press will release my new book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students in association with the National Association of Elementary School Principal (NAESP) next month, June 2012. The book is about preparing global, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. It is my attempt to answer a number of pressing questions facing education today. These questions are exemplified by two new stories that have dominated the media recently, one around the Facebook IPO and the other the debt and jobs …

America has almost caught up with China, and actually in some areas surpassed it. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, America can now claim to have even more frequent high stakes standardized tests than China. It can also be proud to be more serious than China about the test results because it uses test scores to break up schools, fire school leaders, and publicly humiliate teachers, while China does not have the guts to do any of that. China only gives those schools and teachers with high test scoring students …

A version of this post is published in Kappa Delta Pi Record, 48(1), p. 17-22 in Feb. 2012.
To build a better education system, America must build on what we have—differentiation, uniqueness, and diversity.
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
–Justice Louis D. Brandeis, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 1932
America is on the precipice of ruining its foundation …

Education has a new god: data. It is believed to have the power to save American education and thus everything in education must be about data—collect more data about our children, evaluate teachers and administrators based on data, and reward and punish schools using data.
The US federal government has been dangling $4.35 billion to recruit worshipers through the Race to the Top (RTT) program, and possibly a lot more through the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  Already 40 states have somehow made the conversion, although …

Today’s young people (8 to 18 year olds) spend on average 7 hours and 38 minutes a day with media: watching TV (TV, videos, DVDs, pre-recorded shows), playing video games, listening to music, talking on the phone, and chatting with friends online, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation report Generation-M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds released on January 20, 2010. This is an hour more than the group found in 2004, when young people were found to spend nearly 6 and half hours a day on entertainment media. …

Yesterday(September 24, 2009)  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered his first major speech about the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) 1965. The law’s last reauthorization took place in 2002 and resulted in what is known today as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In his speech, Duncan acknowledged that NCLB has significant flaws and promised to work with Congress to correct the problems. But based on this and his previous speeches as well as the actions of the US Department of Education under his leadership, I must …

CV in PDF
Curriculum Vitae
Yong Zhao, Ph. D
Foundation Distinguished Professor
School of Education and Human Sciences
University of KansasLawrence, KS 66049
Professor in Educational Leadership
Faculty of Education
University of Melbourne
Email: yongzhao@ku.edu
 
Education
Ph. D. in Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.

in Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994.
in English Language Education, Sichuan International Studies University, 1986.

Employment

June 2020–Present, Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne.
August 2016-Present, Foundation Distinguished Professor, School of Education, with courtesy appointment with School of Business, University of Kansas.
January 2018–, Global Chair, University of Bath, UK (visiting appointment).
May 2012 – 2018, Professorial Fellow, …

This is the draft of my chapter on creativity in the book Creative Provocations: Speculations on the Future of Creativity, Technology & Learning co-edited by Danah Henriksen and Punya Mishra that is recently published online. Read the published article here.
 
How Not to Kill Creativity?
Yong Zhao
University of Kansas
University of Melbourne
People in education have a very bad habit. Whenever something is said to be important, we try to teach it. Social and emotional learning (SEL) has gained importance so there are programs to teach it. Computational thinking is now considered important, so schools should teach. …

This article was published in the New Internationalist on August 31 2017.
Why is the West racing to copy Asia’s education system as fast as the East scrambles to reform it? Yong Zhao takes an unhealthy and deluded romanticization of education to task.
Across the world, Western governments are hard at work making their schools more Chinese. In 2016, the UK Schools Standards Minister, Nick Gibb, announced that over 8,000 primary schools would adopt Chinese-style teaching of mathematics, backed with $53 million in funding. Less than a year later, publisher HarperCollins announced …