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The Forum > Article Comments > Why Singaporean education works and Australia's doesn't > Comments

Why Singaporean education works and Australia's doesn't : Comments

By Chris Golis, published 19/3/2012

Security of tenure and subjective assessment lead to substandard results.

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That is a very interesting system they have in Singapore.

I think it could be introduced in Australia and may do a lot of good.

Chances of anything even aproximating such a system being accepted in public education: Nil

It would have to be a private initiative.

In fact to do the most good it woould probably have to be come kind of public-private partnership.
Posted by stevenlmeyer, Monday, 19 March 2012 8:16:29 AM
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If you think a culture of rote memorisation followed by mindless regurgitation represents 'effective' teaching, learning, and assessment then this would work very well.
Posted by Cambo, Monday, 19 March 2012 8:33:04 AM
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But Cambo, according to school teachers and their union there is apparantly no effective way of assessing teaching and learning in schools. Parents like myself see this as nothing more than union protection of under-performing members at the expense of my children's education.
Posted by Tartarus, Monday, 19 March 2012 10:38:56 AM
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What about also attacking the issue from intake. Make entry into teaching degrees require a higher score accompanied by higher salaries to attract good applicants.

It is not a failsafe certainly given that many bright people with a good grasp of their area of teaching may not be able to teach. However many low scoring students enter into teaching courses in the current system compared to the benchmark for example for Law or Communications and Journalism. Making the standard higher has to be part of the solution.

Secondly, in regard to rote learning. Many years ago the Japanese were worried about the lack of innovation among graduates who had primarily come through a highly disciplined rote style education without much room for creativity. That realisation meant factoring in a level of creative thinking or problem solving beyond a rote memory approach. Knowledge is one thing, how to use it another.
Posted by pelican, Monday, 19 March 2012 11:08:51 AM
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Entry scores into university courses are determined by demand Pelican - part of the KPI's that the tertiary and vocational sectors have learned to work by. The better the course, the greater demand and so the higher the entry score. The more students, the higher the score, the greater the funding that the university receives. Its not perfect of course but it has worked to focus universities on student outcomes much more than they were prior to those reforms.
Simply raising salaries without measuring performance would perhaps improve the quality of the teacher pool but overall the quality of the pool is not the main issue so really, it's a poor policy option and a waste of money. I'd agree with the author that there's a lot that can be done with the current level of funding that isn't being done before we have to start throwing more money around.
Posted by Tartarus, Monday, 19 March 2012 11:34:43 AM
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Applying the Singapore method of assessment would be a great plus for our kids, & in the long run for teachers. The current method of keeping the incompetent, & the no hopers in the class room has much to do with the low esteem in which teachers are held.

In my experience the average assessment of teachers by parents is "over educated, over paid, & under worked". This obviously makes it hard for anyone to justify any increase in pay.

I would also suggest a few hard changes in university efforts. It is obviously detrimental to the institutions income to weed out the poorly performing student, but it must be done. I guess some even claim the moral high ground, of "helping" the less competent to graduate.

Make the courses much harder to graduate & we will get firstly a reduction of applications from marginally adequate students, & a better trained graduate. Only after that improvement can we expect results to show in schools.

HEX has some blame here. When I was of uni age, you needed extremely good results to get most scholarships. A lot of very bright people took trade courses because of this, & many extremely bright people took teachers scholarships, as their only way of gaining a degree.

Yes some left teaching, after the 5 year required service, but many who today would not do a Dip Ed, found a happy home in high schools. Rather than higher pay, a percentage of HEX could be forgiven for every year of teaching by a graduate.

Hard in this day of demanded equity for the individual, this kind of inducement could be offered in areas like physics & math, where competent teachers are unusual, rather than the norm.
Posted by Hasbeen, Monday, 19 March 2012 12:44:59 PM
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What Chris Golis should have told us but did not is that Singapore reformed its education system around 2003-04. That system along with others in Asia has since outperformed Australia's - a point mentioned in the recent Gonski report. I was also initially sceptical that the comparison was across cultural boundaries and had to do with rote leaning, but it is not so.. below is the link to the Grattan Institute report.. Thre were a number of reforms but the reprot speaks with more authority..

http://www.grattan.edu.au/pub_page/129_report_learning_from_the_best.html
Posted by Curmudgeon, Monday, 19 March 2012 12:59:11 PM
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"Entry scores into university courses are determined by demand Pelican - part of the KPI's that the tertiary and vocational sectors have learned to work by. The better the course, the greater demand and so the higher the entry score. The more students, the higher the score, the greater the funding that the university receives."

Understanding the current modus operandi Tartarus, and acknowledging these factors cannot be necessarily tackled in isolation, perhaps in a holistic approach there needs to be questions about the current commerical model under which universities operate.

But that aside, if the salaries of teachers are raised as an acknowledgment of the value placed on the profession surely that will increase demand.
Posted by pelican, Monday, 19 March 2012 1:26:12 PM
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The fact Singers performs better than Oz probably only has a little to do with how Oz teachers are performance managed compared with those in Singers. By far the greatest factor is the lower emphasis of Australian curricula in the areas measured internationally and flavour of the week new-wave teaching approaches, both forced upom teachers by the educrats and the politicians they advise/control.

"Good" teachers in Australia are defined as those that adhere to the the curricula and methodoligies set down by educrats who, with odd exceptions, couldn't teach a pig to be dirty.
Posted by Luciferase, Monday, 19 March 2012 2:27:36 PM
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To quote: 'The school had rapidly grown over the past two years and to the relief of the board and investors looked like breaking even in the New Year with the promise of substantially increased enrolments.'

That sounds to me like a school that's doing very well. So what was the point of letting a a few judgmentally loaded questions make the school board feel that both the teachers and students are just a bunch of underachievers?

Nowhere in this article was there a single thought given to the students - who have a right to a childhood. Looks like no time for that in this galloping education production line. And no time for teachers to enjoy their jobs with the perpetual threat of being one of the automatic 10% booted out each year hanging over their heads.

And for what? So that politicians can do a bit of boasting that the national grades average has climbed a few percentage points? Or that this year we beat the country that was just above us last year?

We're already wasting billions on an education system dominated by very expensive and time-consuming skills testing that keeps confusing education with the Olympic Games. This wastage bleeds money away from the much needed funds to support comfortable school environments, adequate resources, decent teacher salaries and smaller class sizes.
Posted by Killarney, Monday, 19 March 2012 4:54:45 PM
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Killarney,

Spot on!

It's chilling in the extreme to realise that children (being the raw material) and their educators are reduced to being compared with funds and their managers.

Is there nothing to be said for a child's humanity - or does the sleekness of a system override all other considerations?
Posted by Poirot, Monday, 19 March 2012 5:50:36 PM
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Singapore is a Low Entropy, High free energy, Highly ordered environment because of its proximity to 5000 years of culture to its North and Equatorial Sun to its South and a combination of the best that the Indian and Pacific Basins can offer.

The Education component takes care of itself. Free energy is supreme in human development both mentally and physically.

Australia has enemies to It's North, a frozen pole to its south and the worst of the trade winds from Pacific and Indian ocean basins.
Australia's Free Energy is locked up in 5-7Km deep Earth geological heat reservoirs at a minimum of 800Deg C.

Until Australia can unlock 100% of its primary energy needs from those Geothermal vaults, NOTHING you can do will change the education standards of Australians compared with Singaporeans.

What you are up against: "Jeez mate don't go waltzin the Matilda with us, get yer footy boots on and hit a coupla sixes and come on Aussie come on!"

Its all about Physics and Entropy. Ah Entropy! The only place I've ever felt it in Australia is walking at twilight around the Moore Reserve Wetlands at Kogarah Municipality in Sydney. Maybe you could build a school there!

Intelligence is ultimately environmental in nature and Australia's Environment is pussy-whipped, industrially and agricultrally Fcuked and politically betrayed at the drop of a hat. Even the UN has us in its bad-guy sights.
Posted by KAEP, Monday, 19 March 2012 7:28:54 PM
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Normally I would consider letting a YouTube clip speak for itself lazy but this one from the Young Turks, who I'm into at the moment, lays it out beautifully.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlOfZL_J5fo

I know which system I would rather have been taught under and which one I would rather for my kids.
Posted by csteele, Monday, 19 March 2012 8:33:43 PM
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What staggered me about the article (just a little; it was written by an academic after all) was that anyone in the twentyfirst century still gives a flying fig what Jack Welch said back in the boom years of the 1980s and 90s.

>>Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, in his book Straight from the Gut, stated that a major key to his success was to ensure that everyone in his organisation was measured on some objective performance indicator and each year replace the bottom ten per cent.<<

The internal fallacy of this is obvious. While it might be seen as tough and manly to fire ten percent of your staff, it is no guarantee of overall performance improvement. For a start, you need to replace that ten percent with higher performers. What are the chances that a newbie is going to be more productive, in their first year, than the folk they replace? And the mechanics behind replacing 30,000 people a year, together with the appraisal systems that led to the firing in the first place, could only be, in themselves, detrimental.

But even more than that, the entire Welch tenure was fuelled by retrenchment and divestiture. Entire businesses were raped for their core value, then onsold. To use this as an example in the area of education is to miss the point of both asset stripping and performance measurement.

The uncritical acceptance of twentieth-century business ideology in the conduct of a university is a major part of the problem, and features nowhere as part of the solution.
Posted by Pericles, Tuesday, 20 March 2012 8:40:51 AM
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A fundamental management principal is that if you are not measuring something then you don't really care about the outcome.

I have heard all the self righteous squealing from the teacher’s union about not being able to effectively and objectively evaluate teachers given all the variability of student capabilities etc.etc. It is all hog wash.

If you know the business you are in, who your customers are and the process needed to delight your customers then you have the fundamentals for an effective evaluation scheme. I have been in the business world for over 40 years and have always had Key Performance Indicators for myself and those that worked for me. By setting these goals at the beginning of the year ( including how they will be measured) the employee knows exactly what needs to be done and how it will be evaluated at the end of the measurement term.

This is a very effective management tool to be used to identify your star performers (and justify their higher than normal bonus) and to ease out of the business those that can’t cut it. And there frequently are 5 – 10% that are collecting a salary that they are not earning and thus slowing down the others that must take up the slack.

I have managed high tech sales people, piece work employees, scientists and engineers and this process works well. It all comes down to knowing who your customers are and what they want and the process required to deliver the requirements and delight the customer.

In our Aus education system management I don’t think any of these basic tenets are known.
Posted by Bruce, Tuesday, 20 March 2012 9:59:22 AM
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Bruce, teachers work with children and, like actors working with animals and children, "A" does not necessarily lead to "B". By applying your business model for making widgets to the educational setting people will pay for this fact that it was not your intention should do so.

However, a positive outcome would be that teaching methodologies and attention to aspects of curricula that do not enhance measured results in areas needed, yet are handed down by educrats for adherence, would be rejected by teachers. They would be left feeling damned if they did and damned if they didn't follow orders. Promotion in education is based on following the party line set by educrats, not achieving results ("action research" is the term applied to testing new methodologies, with no real measurable results comparison against older ones to justify them, only anecdotal evidence that causes educrats' minds fly to unsubstantiated conclusions when they are in rooms together)

What seems to be what some posters expect of teachers is that they be subversive to ensure the good education of children at the cost of their career advancement/employment. How would they feel about this applying in other workplaces, say in banking, air traffic control or the military?
Posted by Luciferase, Tuesday, 20 March 2012 5:39:19 PM
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