Education is not free in
China... (2)
Peter Wu &
Others
3 December 2012
Dr. Hon: Come on, Bob, even if you don't like the results, it is unfair to
rubbish a report you haven't read.
This league table
reported by the BBC is only a small part of a publication called the
Learning Curve developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, commissioned
by Pearson. The report looks at international evidence on school system
performance. The publication of the league table is Pearson’s way of gaining
media coverage for the report.
http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/
The study aims to
provide an insight into what contributes to successful education outcomes, both
economic and social. It involves a programme of
rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large body of
internationally comparable education data. The target audience is educators,
policy makers, academics and specialists which is why the general public may
find the indicators used baffling.
Thirty nine countries’
school systems are ranked using 60 indicators (criteria, in lay man’s term).
These 60 indicators are structured in 3 sections:
1.
Inputs to education such as education
spending, school entrance age, pupil teacher ratio, school life expectancy,
teacher salaries etc;
2.
Outputs of education like cognitive skills
measured by international test such as PISA (Programme
for International Student Assessment), literacy rates, graduation rates,
unemployment by educational attainment, labour market
productivity etc; and
3.
Scio-economic environment
indicators
such as social inequality, crime rates, GDP per capita, unemployment etc.
The study puts
together a Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment which
compares the performance of 39 countries and one region (Hong Kong is used as a
proxy for China due to the lack of test results at a national level) on two
categories of education, cognitive skills and educational attainment. The index
provides a snapshot of the relative performance of countries based on their
education outputs.
The report has been
well received by educators and has been lauded for making a big step forward in
how we ought to approach the measurement of educational performance. It has
been praised for its explicit acknowledgement that there is no magic bullet
existing at the international level. The black box of education remains largely
impervious even to the heaviest of methodological firepower.
On the other hand, it
also has its shortcoming. The study has left out one very important intangible
outcome, creativity & critical
thinking, a factor which most Asian nations’ school systems are said to
be lacking in. Certainly, it is extremely difficult to assess creativity and
critical thinking. However, I would want
to ask, if creativity or critical thinking values or measures were factored
into the indices, would the USA ranks at the 17th, with UK, Australia and
Canada lagging behind Japan?
The study, in fact,
comes up with several valid recommendations for education policy makers and I
have listed them below in verbatim.
1.
There are no magic bullets: Throwing money at
education by itself rarely produces results, and individual changes to
education systems, however sensible, rarely do much on their own. Education
requires long-term, coherent and focussed system-wide
attention to achieve improvement.
2.
Respect teachers: Good teachers are
essential to high-quality education. Finding and retaining them is not
necessarily a question of high pay. Instead, teachers need to be treated as the
valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational
machine. (This, I totally agree! )
3.
Culture can be changed: The cultural
assumptions and values surrounding an education system do more to support or
undermine it than the system can do on its own. Using the positive elements of
this culture and, where necessary, seeking to change the negative ones, are
important to promoting successful outcomes.
4.
Parents are neither impediments
to nor saviours of education: Parents want their
children to have a good education; pressure from them for change should not be
seen as a sign of hostility but as an indication of something possibly amiss in
provision. On the other hand, parental input and choice do not constitute a
panacea. Education systems should strive to keep parents informed and work with
them.
5.
Educate for the future, not
just the present: Many of today’s job titles, and the skills needed to
fill them, simply did not exist 20 years ago. Education systems need to
consider what skills today’s students will need in future and teach
accordingly.
Now how come
Finland ends up being at the top of the league?
Here’s what I gather from the
media analysis. First, economically, Finland is doing much better than nearly
all of the other EU member states. Income per capita is high, exports are
diverse, and heavy public spending on welfare programmes
has raised standards of living across the whole country.
In Finland, standardized
testing is frowned upon. So is homework. Students, especially young children,
are encouraged to learn creatively. Teachers have a high degree of independence
when it comes to curricula and assessments.
Perhaps most importantly,
Finland has made educational advancement accessible to virtually everyone. All
schools – even universities – are funded publicly. Child healthcare and welfare
services are widely available. By law, pre-schools are situated in every community.
So, is it possible to
reproduce the Finnish model elsewhere? My thinking is policies like these are
easy to implement in societies like Finland’s where the population is small and
essentially homogenous. Elsewhere in countries like China where the population
is vast and budgets are tight, an emulation of the Finnish system could prove
to be almost impossible.
Stella Tse: I like
this Finnish model.
----- To be continued -----