I think it's a little disingenuous to generalize from two examples (Obama and Kristof) to "liberals." And it seems that, at least in the second referenced edito

I think it's a little disingenuous to generalize from two examples (Obama and Kristof) to "liberals." And it seems that, at least in the second referenced editorial, Kristof seems mostly impressed by the relative advances in Chinese education over the past 50 years or so. And though he does advocate that we should "take a page from the Chinese book and respond by boosting education," it's unclear to me that he's advocating directly modelling their system so much as their cultural attitudes towards education.