Sad but true

One thought about something that the article does not mention. I have seen the effects of mainstreaming of Ethnic Minority Students and it is not better. Students get placed in the "lower ability" classes automatically regardless of their intellectual ability but purely on the basis of their language ability. The result is lower self-esteem and the feeling of inferiority. These children are labelled from a young age and their life prospects are severely damaged. In effect there is segregation within the school. So here is the choice for Ethnic Minority Students in Hong Kong: segregation through separate schools or segregation through streaming. This is what we call a Lose-Lose situation.   

Equal Opportunities Commission may probe schooling for ethnic minorities

www.scmp.com

In some schools 90 per cent of pupils are non-Chinese, watchdog chief York Chow says

How the pendulum swings

Nick Ward Hi Simon. I came across this article which suggests that China proposes to adopt a more Western model. Some scholars are arguing that the pressure putt on students as a result of this exam-orientated system is stifling China's ability to succeed in the modern economy where creativity and innovation are paramount. What are your thoughts?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101032516

China's education plan ... from Finland's playbook

www.cnbc.com

China looks to be lightening the load for its students, or perhaps it's just making them even better.

Thanks for Nick for stimulating thought and discussion on this subject and sharing that article with me.

The three aspects you mention have long been concerns regarding Chinese learners and Asian students more generally. It is often argued that the lack of innovation and creativity displayed by students is a result of an overly competitive and fact driven exam-orientated system which relies on teacher-centred instruction. My aim is not to evaluate the truth or the ethical considerations of this issue here today.

However, the issue is well and truly there and out in the open being discussed. Functionalists would argue that it is hurting the Chinese economy and society because it hinders the development of value-added industries and sources of knowledge. For humanists, it destroys the human soul, reduces learning to regurgitation and impedes human expression. Both schools of thought are thus in agreement despite the differences in the fundamental reasons behind their reasoning.

My point today though is that the article you shared is a timely illustration of how the “pendulum swings” in many fields and educational policy in particular. For a variety of reasons, teaching methodologies or systems of educational organisation come and go out of favour. The binary choices in Western democracies largely explain this process with incumbent political parties having the “opposite” political ideology to the precedent. The result is not necessarily productive and can lead to waste as the whole system is “rethought” and “deconstructed” for partisan reasons as opposed to educational ones.

Once again PISA rears its ugly little head in this article and has governments worrying about their educational systems. Instead of serenely addressing what are local issues over the longer term, they worry about what is happening in other countries whose contexts have little to do with their own.

The obsession with the results which appear in “league tables” leads to short-termism. This is symptomatic of the new neo-liberal age of abundant and constant information. Just like the relationship between markets and enterprises, schools have to look at short-term indicators and are tributary to the media cycle in which a particular ranking might appear. This is neither good for long-term planning nor for the inherent quality of the “product” being offered. Furthermore, it is frequent to see extreme measures implemented in order to “please the crowds”, just as industrials have to play to their shareholder’s by cutting staff etc.   

I personally believe that China would be well-advised to carry through with such reforms from a humanistic perspective but am not sure what their underlying reasons to do so are. Is it the students that they have at heart or the fact that they want to imitate what is done in the west for whatever reason that might be. Indeed, for many years now Chinese policy has been borrowing from the West.

Coming back to the point I wish to make, it is ironic that in other countries such as the U.K. or the U.S., after lower-than-expected positions in the PISA rankings, they now look towards Asian countries that regularly monopolise the Top 5 spots for inspiration. Thus times change and Western “progressivists” begin to take into consideration the worth of rote-learning, testing and hard skills. “Back to basics” was once a slogan and indeed a return to this “basic” style of instruction will have dire consequences on our children. Are we seeing a global swing of the pendulum?

So there we have it, on the one hand we have the Chinese who want to be seen as modern, just like their Western counterparts and the other Western elites are in awe and even fear of the stellar rise of the Chinese learner. Just a few days ago I was writing about how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is used in marketing and is used as technique too in the process of policy promotion. This is another illustration of that point; fear and aspiration.

To summarise, those who wish to communicate a message, whose aims are to “sell” an idea, concept, product, etc, do so by playing on psychological factors relating to human behaviour. Societal choices are being played out in the same way. The government in China has to pander to its growing middle-class and propose a “nicer” system or else... Western elites sense that its citizens are in a weaker bargaining position and can therefore do as they please in repealing advances for which their citizens have struggled for over the course of centuries.        

Please read below an editorial that the British Secretary of State for Education wrote regarding how envisions education in the United Kingdom and the teachings he feels we can draw from China. The parallels he draws between educational reform in the U.K. and the “Cultural Revolution” in China are either disturbingly Machiavelian or just downright stupid, either of which are rather worrying for a man who has reached the top echelons of state apparatus.

Michael Gove: my revolution for culture in classroom - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk

Why we must raise education standards so children can compete with rest of the world

Supply and Demand

On a light note and in homage to my father; it’s all about the market stupid!

Degrees in Marxism are now officially worthless in Vietnam and thus free…

A Master’s Degree in Comp. Ed. @ HKU costs approx. 100,000 HK $

We can therefore infer that despite the fairly high price tag attached to the HKU qualification, it is in fact value for money because its value is infinite compared to the Ho Chi Minh City Social and Human Sciences University’s Degree in Marxist Economics!

Vietnam offers free degrees in Marxism

www.theguardian.com

Students have been shunning courses on Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh because employers are not interested

Comparative Education and the Psychology of Marketing

Just reading another paper this morning from Anderson-Levitt (2003), Local Meanings Global Schooling, and found what I thought was a very fitting quote with regards to the underlying theme of yesterday's video (Hong Kong Connection: Fewer Students, Larger Classrooms; RTHK, 2004).

"Educational reform or change is based on the prestige of the source of the loan, which interests potential clients in borrowing. The prestige of the source provides the legitimacy for the change."

The background in the study is similar to the concerns invoked in the RTHK report. The study is set in Israel where the school system was seen to be failing thus requiring a new set of measures to provide a fresh impetus. The Israeli Ministry of Education decided to look abroad to find answers. The ex-Soviet model of education especially in maths and science was seen or portrayed as a role-model and associated with excellence. As a result Russian teaching strategies were imported to Israel and Jewish Russian immigrants were encouraged to teach in Israeli schools.

The parallels that can be drawn from these two “case studies” are manifold but there are two which stand out in particular. First, comparative education, in its broad sense, is used as a means to an end by policy-makers, journalists or other stakeholders in society to promote any given agenda which often leads to a reform. Second, and most interestingly for me, is that when presenting comparative data they use psychological techniques to “sell” their policy.

In another life I studied at a business school majoring in marketing and funnily enough it was there that I first discovered Maslow and not on the benches of a teacher training institute. Yet business schools do not approach “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” in the same way as educators do.

Educators use this knowledge to ensure students have fulfilled all of their deficiency needs as this is the sine qua non condition that they engage in learning and become enlightened individuals. Marketers and Publicists use this knowledge of the human psyche to exploit individuals and sell them things.

The process works the same way in the sphere of politics and policy-making of which the media is a part. Two “angles” are used in “psychological marketing”: deficiency needs and “self-actualisation needs”. In layman’s terms we could define these as our “inferiority complexes” and our “aspirations”. The RTHK report played on both these veins to “sell” its message. Aspiration: we all want to be like the successful Americans. Inferiority complex: Shanghai is going to outstrip us.     

While, as a teacher, I agreed with the premise of the RTHK reporter, his use of the same techniques as those used by the establishment to pass on messages was questionable, though maybe necessary. One thing is for sure though, comparative educational data is often formatted in this manner by those who have something to sell.

One System Two Countries

Despite the great differences between China and Hong Kong it would seem that pressures on their students are just the same.

Chinese University Asks Students to Sign ‘Suicide Waivers’ | TIME.com

world.time.com

A university in southern China asked students entering its freshman class to sign a document absolving the school of responsibility should the student commit suicide — a macabre sign, say some, of the growing 

Greek police scuffle with school guards, teachers kick off strike

Only days after writing about what was happening to Mexican teachers, it was the Greek teachers’ turn. The pattern is not new and will continue.

Greek police scuffle with school guards, teachers kick off strike

www.reuters.com

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek police fired teargas to disperse school guards trying to enter the Administrative Reforms Ministry in central Athens on Monday as teachers began a strike against public sector

Globalization for the children of tomorrow

Globalization for the children of tomorrow

Globalization is now a reality and for the better or the worse, there is no turning back. The question that we must ask ourselves is not whether we accept it but what shape we want it to take. The title of this blog, “The Arrow”, is an open question to us all about what form of globalization it is that we want and how we will educate our children in this new world.  

Globalization imposed itself on me in 1979 at the age of one when my parents moved from the United Kingdom to France. It is rare to refer Britons in this way, but I was born to a family of immigrants. In turn, I would come to epitomise what it means to be a part of the global workforce, moving from France to mainland China to Hong Kong, for economic reasons. This will not be my last move.

The places in which I have lived, studied and worked define me yet I am not really a part of any of them, forever the outsider, the stranger… the foreigner. I am not on my own in this situation, as mass immigration has been with us for many years now. Yet the phenomenon has started to accentuate itself. How do we define ourselves and where can we say that we belong? The current cultural and societal frameworks seem to be inadequate.

Looking around me here in Hong Kong, I see a growing community of people that we can call trans-nationals. How will we fit into national schemata? Indeed, cross-cultural migration is no longer linear and binary but complex and multi-dimensional. What are my daughter and my son, born in Hong Kong to a French mother and a British father? We are at the frontlines of a new race, a new nation and a new culture being created.

It is in that search for a common thread, an explanation or a sense of belonging, that I Googled “England France China Hong Kong history”. Surely there had to be a way that they could all be related. It was then that the pieces of the puzzle came together, “The Arrow War” otherwise known as the Second Opium War, appeared as the search result on my screen. The Arrow, a Hong Kong registered ship laden with opium, was seized by Chinese authorities which led Franco-British troops to invade China once again.

There it was, the timely reminder that globalization has been with us now for a long time already. The most important event, in the gospel according to Google, to have brought these four countries was a war, a trade war over drugs. I then remembered that in fact I had visited the Summer Palace in Beijing a number of years ago with my wife and I had been ashamed to see a plaque commemorating how British and French troops had looted and burnt it down during the Second Opium War.

We still live in an age of continued imperialistic aggression, where trans-national organisations have learnt how to exploit the loopholes and the failings of outdated forms societal organisation and governance. Nation-states can no longer adequately answer the needs of a growing proportion of its citizens.

Education in particular will play a preponderant role in answering those needs. We need to fight for the improvement of the quality of the education that is provided to our children. It should be equitable and open to all as an inalienable basic human right. Privilege and wealth should not determine access to it. Education should bring about social justice and instil values of tolerance and charity in our children. Our offspring are now well and truly global citizens who need to learn how to share and sustain our planet. They should be enlightened, reflective and critical. Education should be child-centred, respecting those children and not disparaging them. Their physical, intellectual and emotional integrity needs to be protected. The holistic development of our offspring has to be pursued and not a narrow model of education focussing only on economic efficiency. Our youth are not human capital but human beings.   

When curriculum implementation turns ugly

Rare is it to see refusal and resistance in the educational policy-making process expressed in such a radical way, yet it epitomises the zeitgeist of the post-financial crisis age. 

Police battle striking Mexico teachers

www.aljazeera.com

Anti-riot police use water cannons and tear gas to disperse protesters camped in Mexico City against education reforms.

Forbes explains to us that the teaching system in Mexico is uncompetitive and that as per the World Bank mantra; teachers need to professionalise in Mexico. Furthermore, the influence of unions needs to be reduced and performance-based systems need to introduced. PISA rankings provide us with the proof as to the poor quality of the Mexican education system. Indeed “as global companies invest in increasingly complex factories and service provision centers in Mexico, demand is growing for well-educated young workers”.    

Labor Day Protest: Mexico Teachers Union Works To Block Education Reform

www.forbes.com

Why then are the teachers angry? Most of us now are conditioned to believe that these sets of values are highly beneficial to society. Economic efficiency and human capital models surely improve the livelihood of millions and take nations out of poverty. Let us examine the possible reasons for the Mexican government to push ahead with these reforms through another lens.

Instead of taking responsibility for the failures of the system, the government has put the responsibility squarely upon the teachers and their lack of professionalism instead of on the paucity of the Mexican educational infrastructure in which certain schools do not have running water or toilets. It may also be just be a cynical attempt to axe senior unqualified teachers on higher salaries and replace them with cheaper and younger "qualified" teachers.

Such demands for professionalization are also a disguised way of cutting back on union activity and ensuring teachers go through government-managed teacher training institutions. Such a process means that elites gain greater control of the minds of those teachers and thus better oversight over what they inculcate to students in the classroom. Reduced union activity means also lower levels of leverage for teachers when bargaining will arise in the future whether it be concerning workloads, salaries or policy issues.  

Another area of reform is the proposed performance-based systems. These increase the precarious nature of the teaching profession thus undermining job security. Performance targets are highly subjective and often set by those who are not in the "profession" of education. Targets are regularly shifted or changed dependent on political whims or interest group pressures placing teachers in a permanent state of apprehension.

Those in managerial positions, be it inside or outside the school, can use this system to demand more and more out of the employed staff as failing to meet those required standards of productivity might lead to job loss. This kind of subterfuge places workers in stress positions where they always have to be seen (and sometimes only seen) doing more.

Maslow’s theory applies to the teaching profession as much as to our students. If deficiency needs are not met it is impossible to proceed to higher levels of self-actualisation through which students will benefit from a teacher. Teachers who are not working in a harmonious workplace will not be able to pass on such feelings to their students.

While I have discussed the micro-level implications on the teaching profession let us consider what the macro-level ones are. The same pressures apply in the exact same way to schools as organisations. Those that do not meet pre-defined criteria will be shut down; the social-Darwinist vision of society exults. The market then jumps in and fills the void.

The evolution of the strongest allows national governments, following the “Global Elite’s” neo-liberal agenda, to unravel the welfare system. The contract which existed previously between society and its rulers has now been reneged upon. Access to the same quality of education was a right for all citizens of a society in which equity and meritocracy were the underlying foundations.

Education now becomes a for-profit enterprise allowing companies to draw revenues from the education of citizens.  Another up-side that the owners of capital will enjoy from the privatisation of education is the reduction in taxes paid to maintain the welfare system; in business terms, passing on the costs to the end-user. The profiteering is three-fold, as on top of making future employees pay for their education, enjoying reductions in capital operating costs, new privately owned schools better meet the needs of the corporations instead of those of the children. The workers of tomorrow will better fit the mould necessary to perform efficiently in their production tasks.

To conclude, those proponents of the liberalisation of education seem to have forgotten other aspects of economic theory. Performance-based systems as an economic model are often flawed resulting in distortions. For instance pay-per-unit-produced systems have been introduced in the past in factories in order to increase productivity. The theory being that the more we incentivise a worker’s rate of production the higher their gross output will be; if we are paid a flat rate whatever our output is, we will simply loaf around, whereas if we are paid by the unit we will try and produce as many units as possible.  

The problem is people often cheat (see article below) or cut corners to achieve those targets, especially if they are unrealistic, unachievable or workers are nervous about the consequences that below-par productivity might have on their employment prospects. The result is that while there is a rise in quantitative output qualitative measures of productivity suffer. Each unit produced is done so in a poorer fashion. In education we talk about the backwash effect or teaching to the exam; the aim is no longer to provide authentic learning opportunities but to meet targets.   

Lastly, performance-related systems fail to take into account a swath of imponderables; factors and variables that economics simply cannot quantify. The human being is, human. As educators we often talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and how the former is preferable. Economists prefer to focus on the latter as it easily manipulable in experimental conditions. We can change the variables and work out causality just like a scientific experiment. For the high priests of the market only that which is observable on the outside is relevant and of scientific worth the inner workings of the mind and the soul are irrelevant. Like a Pavlovian experiment teachers can be conditioned too. 

Yet it is slowly dawning on some in the school of behavioural economics that economics is less science than social. As is the case with every student being unique, so too is every teacher. Each and every teacher acts on different impulses and motivations which explain his or her actions. Many teach because of their passion; maybe there is a market for this too.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/14/ravens-wood-school-marks-investigation




Post-scriptum:
This an opinion piece and not an academic paper therefore I have not included references though there are many which influence this piece of writing and frame it's analysis. Feel free to ask should you wish.



  

What implications for national education systems as the flux of international migrants continues growing?

Number of international migrants rises above 232 million | UN DESA | United Nations Department...

www.un.org

More people than ever are living abroad the United Nations reported, with Asia seeing the largest increase of 

QS Rankings 2013

It's like being at Happy Valley! An all Anglo-Saxon line-up again.

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)...See more

QS World University Rankings 2013 | Top Universities

www.topuniversities.com

Welcome to the QS World University Rankings 2013/14. Compare the world's top universities, sort by region and subject, find the best universities in your academic field, and create your own personalized ranking based on what 

Inequality increasing among America's poor's access to education

When Class Became More Important to a Child's Education Than Race

www.theatlantic.com

In 1963, kids in the 10th percentile of income fell behind children in the upper echelon of wealth by about a year or so. Today, that gap is closer to four years.

Should educators be free to express their opinions?

Following this summer's debacle regarding Alpais Lam the question is now is being asked whether teachers should have the right to hold political opinions and be affiliated to political parties.

I had the experience of teaching at a university in China where they had a very efficient system for ensuring the "harmonious" nature of a teacher's teaching contents... a representative from the Communist Youth in every classroom monitoring what the teacher is saying.

`Spicy Girl' wants teachers to come clean on political links - The Standard

www.thestandard.com.hk

`Spicy Girl' wants teachers to come clean on political links - The Standard

Fifty years today since Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced his "I have a dream" speech in Washington, USA. 

Let us remind ourselves that the U.S. had an apartheid-type system which meant that among other things, Afro-Americans had to attend separate schools to Caucasian-Americans. Have things moved on in the U.S. regarding racial discrimination in education? 

It would appear not, according to this article. An interesting insight is that housing appears to be one of the driving factors creating educational inequality. 

Housing in areas with better schools costs more, thus the class divide is exacerbated. The same system is common in the Western world including France, England and to a certain extent here in Hong Kong. Another contributing factor to why social inequality has been growing in recent decades... the rich enjoy quality education while the poor get left behind.

In shadow of March on Washington, schools increasingly segregated in California | EdSource Today

www.edsource.org

Fifty years after the March on Washington, a major challenge facing California and the West in general is 

All 25,000 candidates fail Liberian university entrance exam

If it wasn't so tragic, it would be comical.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/all-candidates-fail-liberia-university-test

www.theguardian.com

Female students in Indonesia may be forced to undergo 'virginity tests'

Female students in Indonesia may be forced to undergo 'virginity tests'

www.theguardian.com

Indonesia's education chief Muhammad Rasyid has drafted plans to 'protect children from prostitution and free sex'

French Ministry of Education report concludes that girls are discriminated against at school in France.

Over a hundred years since the women’s suffragette movement gender inequality is still topical in Europe. Ironically, much attention is focused on developing countries around the world rather than sweeping up in front of one’s own front door.

UN Millennium Development Goal 3: PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWER WOMEN

Target: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015

L'égalité entre filles et garçons dans les écoles et les établissements - Ministère de...

www.education.gouv.fr

Le rapport de l'inspection générale de l'éducation nationale (IGEN) concernant l'égalité entre filles et garçons dans les écoles et les établissements.

HKU drops places in Shanghai Jiao Tong Ranking

Well there we have it HKU has dropped in the rankings compared to last year's figures. HKU ranked unimpressively somewhere between 201 and 300 and behind the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I'm sure that this one won't feature on the brochure but it begs the question of how there could be such a discrepancy between the QS rankings which put HKU at a very respectable 22nd place? Could there be a proxy war going on between the UK and China in determining the prestige of academic institutions?

2012 World University Rankings | Academic Ranking of World Universities

www.shanghairanking.com

Academic Ranking of World Universities is the first world university ranking. It ranks the world's top 1000 colleges and universities based on objection indicators.

78 % of French support the planned legislation to ban the wearing of a veil at university in France. 

Almost 10 years after a similar law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools is this a sign of the resilience of the secular educational system in France, a robust defence of women's rights or a worrying sign of a rise in Islamophobia.

Un rapport officiel préconise l'interdiction du voile à l'université

www.lefigaro.fr

Rédigé par la Mission laïcité du Haut Conseil à l'intégration, il conclut à une montée du communautarisme.

Rise in number of teachers claiming they are under pressure to inflate grades

From a comparative perspective it would be interesting to see how this kind of behaviour replicates from country to country. What is the relationship and is there a correlation between increased cum unreasonable targets set by governments and the likelihood of teachers manipulating grades.

From my own experience of teaching in a highly performance-orientated education system in Hong Kong I have been able to observe these kind of practices first-hand on a regular basis.

Rise in number of teachers claiming they are under pressure to inflate grades

www.theguardian.com

Charity concerned that increase in complaints from teachers at academy schools points to lack of oversight in new system