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! :) happy)

 

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 -----