Author Archives: internationalednews

This post is drawn from a conversation with Lindy Amato, Director of Professional Affairs at the Ontario Teachers’ Federation.  She spoke with us about some of the next steps in education and educational policy in Ontario and shared links to a number of related resources and news reports:

Recently, Ontario has been cited by OECD and others as an educational “success” story and a “system on the move.”  That success has been marked by a concerted focus on a small set of key goals, collaboration, and the development of a high level of trust among all involved in the educational system.  Over the past ten years, those key goals included:

• increasing achievement scores
• raising the number of graduates from high school
• narrowing achievement gaps
• building public confidence in the public education system.

As Amato put it “everybody climbed on board, there was labor peace for the most part, and that was the focus for every teacher, every director, every school, and every minister.” This climate of cooperation facilitated collaborations between the Government and the teachers’ organizations on diverse initiatives including teacher performance appraisal, a New Teacher Induction Program, and the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program.  In a widely circulated paper, Michael Fullan, has also described how far the system has come from what he called good but stagnant results and a “downtrodden state” in 2003 and laid out what the next steps might be.

From Amato’s perspective, the challenge is to maintain the gains, address performance areas that need improvement, and then go further. In particular, the government wants to address declines in math scores as well as a continuing performance gap between aboriginal students and other students.  The Premier Kathleen Wynne also recently emphasized the need to broaden the focus of the educational system to include higher order skills, creativity, citizenship, and other capacities needed for work and life in the 21^st Century.  “That’s the tension in the system,” Amato explained, “to address those challenges and make further improvements.” The tension is reflected in the desire by some to move away from the traditional, content-heavy curriculum and allow much more flexibility in learning experiences while the system continues to rely on assessments of relatively narrow academic outcomes.

Adding to the challenges, concerns about the economy and the implications for the education budget are coming to the forefront with new negotiations between the teachers’ unions and the government slated to take place in the spring.  Although negotiations over the past ten years generally went smoothly, the most recent round was much more contentious. Ontario’s oversupply of teachers is another cause for concern.  The Toronto Globe and Mail cited one report revealing that almost a third of teacher education graduates in and near Ontario in 2011 were unable to find jobs in their fields, a sharp increase from about three percent in 2006.  In response, the government announced an expanded initial teacher education program to be launched in 2015.  The program is designed to halve the number of teachers who graduate every year while doubling the length of time required to get a degree.

Looking ahead, the next round of negotiations between the provincial government and the teachers’ unions will be crucial not only in determining if and how these issues will be addressed, but also setting the tone and determining whether the coming years will be accompanied by the same kind of trust, coherence, and collaboration that characterized the last ten years.  Adding to the uncertainty, the current government is a minority government and the next call for elections may come in the middle of the education negotiations expected to begin next spring.

Dr. Xiaodong Lin, director of the Advisory Board of Research for China’s new National Research Center for Ethnic Minority and Multicultural Education, was the subject of a recent profile, and recently met with IEN contributor Eun Kyoung Chung to discuss the issue of ethnic minority education in China. The advisory board consists of 20 scholars, educational leaders and teachers from China, the United States and other countries. As Dr. Lin explained, the Chinese government is working to develop research, theory and policy on minority education concerns such as student performance, teacher training, as well as access to quality education for all. During its first two years, the Center will research how to improve the motivation of learning for students from different ethnic and low-income backgrounds and remote areas, particularly on STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Education for multicultural students has been a growing issue in other countries such as South Korea as well.

Since the year 2000, when Education For All (EFA) was initiated by the World Conference on Education in Dakar and 164 countries, including China, pledged to meet EFA goals by 2015, compulsory education in China has expanded to cover a population of 160 million; however, universal education still has a long way to go, particularly concerning disparities between urban and rural areas, rising demands of the poor, migration, ethnic minority groups, and the changing economic situation.

The issue of unfair education policies for ethnic-minority populations has been in the news recently as the Equal Opportunities Commission has pressed the government to move more swiftly. The Commission would like schools to be provided with resources and teacher training that would facilitate cultural integration and a second-language curriculum for Chinese. One recent article also  suggested that a lack of economic or educational support ethnic minority students receive from their parents might be a contributing factor that needs to be taken into account.

President Xi Jinping noted that “the task of developing the educational cause is arduous,” especially when the country has 260 million students and 15 million teachers. With a resolute focus on reinvigorating the country through science and education, he plans to give priority to education development and the nurturing of ethnic minority talent.

Singapore’s recent education reforms have brought sweeping changes to the country’s approach to teaching, learning, and the curriculum, in an effort to promote a more “student-centered, values-centric” education.  In this post, Paul Chua, a Senior Teaching Fellow in Singapore’s Office of Educational Research of the National Institute of Education, provides a brief overview of the reform and the effort to implement a more nurturing education system.

What are the key features/steps in the current shift to a student-centric, values-driven education?

While there are many strands to the response to this question, I would put it as a 2-step process.  1) Laying out the vision of student-centric, values-driven education, and 2) Putting in place and implementing the many pieces of strategies and structures to systemically drive and support this vision.

First, the vision. The vision of student-centric, values-driven education is primarily about nurturing the children of Singapore to be equipped with the core skills and competencies to be economically productive and to flourish in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, as well as to be imbued with the Singaporean values to be successful, moral and committed citizens of the country. To unpack that vision, the ministry has spelled out four attributes: “Every Student, an Engaged Learner”; “Every School, a Good School”; “Every Teacher, a Caring Educator”; and “Every Parent, a Supportive Partner.”

On the strategies and initiatives, numerous of them have been announced to comprehensively and systemically drive and support the vision.  For example, the 21CC framework and the new Character and Citizenship curriculum has been launched and efforts have been made to embed them into the practices and culture of the school.  Yet another example is the abolition of school league tables and modification of the school achievement awards to change the incentives for schools to focus more sharply on holistic development of the students, and blunt the focus on academic achievements.  A quote in the Minister of Education’s recent work plan seminar 2013 speech to illustrate the seriousness of the ministry in its efforts to strengthen the focus on holistic development is: “To deal with the demands of a VUCA environment, good grades in school are not enough. In fact they might not even be relevant.”  Very recently, the ministry has publicly said that they have posted the most experienced and senior principals to lead heartland schools, in an effort to make “Every School, a Good School” a reality.

Why is Singapore making this shift? 

The previous quote cited that, “To deal with the demands of a VUCA environment, good grades in school are not enough. In fact they might not even be relevant” (Leo Yip, cited in Heng, 2013). This is indicative of why the Ministry of Education is making such a shift to rebalance the education system towards holistic education and values-centricity. Nurturing the students with the right competencies and core skills, as well as the right personal, moral and citizenship values is a national imperative.  The different strands of values “are intertwined and are critical for the success of the individual and society” (Heng, 2011).  Ensuring Singapore’s continued relevance and competitiveness in the new economic landscape in a globalized world is always on the minds of the policy makers. In the face of modernization and globalization, it is also imperative that the Singaporean identity and way of life is preserved.

What are the biggest concerns of policymakers, teachers, and the public in making this shift?

The biggest concern of policy makers, I surmise, is to ensure the shift is successfully carried out so that Singapore continues to be economically relevant and prosperous. The assumption is that with economic prosperity,then the social and cultural well-being of Singaporeans will be looked after.  Essentially, it has been said that the best social policy is economic growth.

For the public, we learned quite a lot about their concerns through the recently concluded series of national conversations with the different segments of the populace, called “Our Singapore Conversation.” Many of the members of the public recognize the importance of education in providing opportunities for all, despite their expressing concerns that the Singaporean society has become more stratified. Some specific worries include the high stress levels faced by our students, the over-emphasis on examinations, and the proliferation of tuitioning to supplement schools. Nonetheless, the public do acknowledge that the Singaporean children need to be adequately prepared for life in the VUCA world (Heng, 2013).

For teachers, the biggest concern is how to implement all the new initiatives effectively for the benefit of the students, as well as to manage the various work demands in a work-life harmonious manner.

What has happened so far? What should we be looking out for in the future?

While no data on the progress so far has been published, we can look forward to the upcoming release of the PISA 2012 results for some assessment of impact of the recent policies and the on-going educational efforts of the ministry.  If we see Student-Centric, Values-Driven Education as educating the children for the future, the education system in Singapore has been focused on this agenda for many years already.   So, we can take the PISA results as a good proxy of the efforts of the Ministry in educating the young for the future.

We can also look out for efforts by the Ministry to gradually shape the public’s perception of what counts as success in schools by expanding the emphasis from just academic grades alone to a broader basket of holistic education measures.  A key plank of that effort is the impending tweaking of the grading system of the national examinations for 6th graders as well as broadening of the criteria for discretionary admission to secondary schools to include more non-academic attributes such as student character and student leadership.

For more information:

Singapore Education Plans Announced

In the following scan of news and views on issues related to educational policy streaming across our screens over the past week, Thomas Hatch notes a number of links to protests and demonstrations, inter-continental educational alliances, teacher status and concerns about teacher training and “quality.”

Protests

News stories on educational policy have again demonstrated that debates over education – particularly around funding, access, and teachers’ unions – are often a source of protests.  Most recently, those protests have included school takeovers in Argentina and Greece and riots in Brazil and Mexico City.

“Globalization” of education

Reports have also highlighted “cross-over” in education systems as South Koreans are going to China for schooling, China is providing funding to support teacher education in Africa, Japan is working on education in Myanmar, and the “Finnish model” is being imported into some parts of India and Indonesia.

International Comparisons (teachers’ status)

In one of the most recent international comparisons, the Varkey GEMS Foundation compared 21 countries through their Global Teacher Status Index.  While there are of course challenges to developing any index like this, some interesting contradictions emerged:  respondents seem to trust teachers in many countries, though when asked questions related to respect and status responses varied considerably; perceptions of what teachers are paid are often inaccurate (estimates too high in some countries and too low in others); but in almost all of the countries surveyed, respondents felt teachers should be paid more; and while respondents in countries like the US and Japan thought that unions should have less influence, those in the UK and in many European countries thought unions should have more influence.

Also, see a blog by Marc Tucker and commentary from Tucker, Linda Darling Hammond, and John Jackson for a comparison of test-based approaches to improvement in the US to what they see as multi-pronged approaches in higher-performing countries.

Teachers, teaching, and teacher quality

Efforts to improve education through the recruitment and allocation of “higher quality” teachers were in the news in an initiative to staff schools in rural China, and in an IEN interview with, Geoff Whitty, former Director of the Institute of Education (IoE) in London, who laid out some of the key developments in the marketization of teacher education in England. The current Director of the IoE, Chris Husbands also reflected on the critical distinction between strategies that focus on teacher quality and teaching quality.  The importance of a focus on practice inside the classroom and out was also evident in a series of blogs from Education Week in the US drawn from the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone.

Taken together, these stories about status, teacher recruitment, and teaching practice illustrate different ways of framing the challenges of education:  as a cultural issue, a human resource issue, and as an issue of the capacity for powerful instruction.   To what extent is it possible to take into account multiple ways of framing the problems at the same time?