Importantly, teachers also broadly share an authoritative vernacular or “folk pedagogy” that shapes understandings across the system regarding the nature of teaching and learning. These include that “teaching is talking and learning is listening”, authority is “hierarchical and bureaucratic”, assessment is “summative”, knowledge is “factual and procedural,” and classroom talk is teacher-dominated and “performative”.
Clearly, Singapore’s unique configuration of historical experience, instruction, institutional arrangements and cultural beliefs has produced an exceptionally effective and successful system. But its uniqueness also renders its portability limited.
And:
…teachers only make limited use of checking a student’s prior knowledge or communicating learning goals and achievement standards. In addition, while teachers monitor student learning and provide feedback and learning support to students, they largely do so in ways that focus on whether or not students know the right answer, rather than on their level of understanding.
The article, by David Hogan, is interesting throughout.
How do we know the Singaporean system is better? The U.S. also does a good job of educating students of Chinese ancestry. Some American homeschoolers and after-schoolers do use a curriculum called Singapore Math, which I recommend.
WTF does “assessment is summative” mean?
Edspeak talks about two types of assessment: formative and summative. Formative assessment is finding out what a student knows at this point. It can be anything from a practice test to a classwide, “When I tell you, give me a thumbs up if you think you understand this, thumbs down if you don’t, and thumbs to the side if you sort of understand.” Formative assessment won’t mean much for a grade but will be used to guide how a teacher will teach.
Summative assessment sums up what a student knows. It occurs when the teacher thinks that some section of the course has been covered adequately (or time has run out) and does go into determining a grade.
Whew. Thank you.
“its uniqueness also renders its portability limited.”
I’d argue the same for Finland.
Speaking of which:
“The huge flow of foreigners from all over the world to visit the remarkably successful Finnish schools made the authorities fearful of changing anything.” That’s from this article: http://www.ncee.org/2014/02/global-perspectives-pasi-sahlberg-on-finlands-pisa-rankings/.
The article is just a standard exercise in “Blank Slate” fantasizing.
Singapore’s schools thrive because the students are Singaporean and not because of the particular teaching methods in use. A few notes.
1. Most of the students are Chinese. The rest of from a range of Asian nationalities. Chinese / Asian students excel worldwide.
2. Singapore has no underclass and underclass behavior, attitudes, drug use, etc. are simply not tolerated. Serious criminal are executed, not excused.
3. Singapore’s children come from (god forbid) two-parent families. Illegitimacy rates are close to zero.
Focusing on pedagogy is just a distraction from the real issues. Of course, distractions are important if you have a political agenda that favors flooding the United States with immigrants who flounder in our schools along with their children.
According to a certain political party, everyone is a blank slate, (except sexuality). IQ is malleable. Environment, instead of genetics are responsible for the differences between individuals.
Potential headline:
“Chinese students excel academically in education shock!”
That is a very interesting article. I think the take away that the author wants to impress on the reader is that while the Singapore system is very ‘teach to the test’, that is not what makes the system effective (although it certainly is helping the international scores). I think the author views the professionalism, organization and funding to be very important. And the fact that Singapore is trying to move away from teaching to the test is a very valid data point there.
I do think that teaching to the test methods are not as good for learning as discovered high leverage techniques, but I wonder if it is easier to implement a medium to high quality teach to the test approach at the system level? If you try to implement a system that encourages high leverage techniques I wonder if you’ll get a handful of extremely high performing teachers and schools and then a bunch of medium to low performing ones.
There is, though, a huge difference between teaching to the test and teaching facts and skills and then accurately testing what you’ve taught.
I can’t speak to which Singapore does, but it seems like the second, not the first.
You can only really “teach to a test” if you know in advance what’s on the test, right? Or the test tends to vary trivially on each occasion.
With a well designed test that tries not to repeat stuff how can anyone really “teach to a test”? And fine, in principle you could “teach to all potential versions of a test” but if someone actually did that, it’s success in my book.
As far as I can tell, the complaints about “teaching to the test” are about either the test not being worth teaching to (so time is wasted teaching less important subjects or areas of learning than the ones that would have been taught otherwise), or the teachers essentially using cheats to get the classroom scores up in a way that doesn’t really promote real learning. The teachers have a lot of access to information on what to stress and how to stress it during the year in order to essentially make the kids look more competent than they are. That’s not to say most teachers would or could use that info for that purpose.
The onus ought to be on the test designers to make their test impossible to teach to, I wouldn’t blame the teachers. If it’s a predictable test it’s natural teachers would teach to it.
Yes, that’s why the teachers complain. Their salary is these days often linked to a degree to test results for their classroom. It creates some weird effects. One teacher I know noted that she is a strong teacher so the kids that are struggling get put in her 5th grade room, then when she has a disproportionate number of kids who do poorly in her classroom it dings her income. I think the effect in both directions was probably exaggerated, but it’s a factor.
There’s nothing wrong with teaching to the test, as long as the tests are good enough. That is, the exam needs to test knowledge and understanding and not memorization. See the International Baccalaureate system, for an extremely successful example. Look at this booklet that is provided with the physics exams: http://www.pcvet.cr/wp-content/uploads/PCVET/brochures/IB%20Physics%20Data%20booklet%201st%20exams%20098.pdf. It makes the memorization of equations irrelevant, and forces the test writers to create questions that test the application and understanding of those equations instead.
The AP program is pretty good too and definitely teaches to the test.
“teaching is talking and learning is listening”, authority is “hierarchical and bureaucratic”, assessment is “summative”, knowledge is “factual and procedural,” and classroom talk is teacher-dominated and “performative”.
If you say any of those things in an interview for an American K-12 teaching position, you will very severely reduce your chances of being hired.
Yes, and they will laugh at you when you leave.
If they even understand what you are saying at all.
@mpowell, I think that’s a good summary. And I took it that the author is seeking to basically justify their own “liberal” (i.e. left wing) educational approach, by talking down much of what makes singapore distinctive. I did not find it convincing for that reason. I think there are limits to “teach the test”, but I just don’t see how for the average student (which is what PISA is measuring) there is any good reason to be down the scale on the international rankings. Of course you want your very brightest to be taught to think outside the box, to be creative, etc, but as a starting point I’d want the average student to do well in international comparisons.
I agree somewhat with @Peter Schaeffer that there is a racial element but I think the cultural element is more important i.e. heirarchical, teacher teaches, student studies.
So if you noticed that the author of the article had a dig at Michael Gove, the politician in charge of schools in the UK. And to be clear, I’m a big fan of Michael Gove.
Seriously, all the above excerpt says is that the kids are expected to listen, the teachers are expected to actually teach content and skills, and then the kids are evaluated based on whether they are learning what is taught.
This is hardly only a match-up for Asian kids.
But in American you often have no expectation of any of the above. Last high school math class I subbed in, the kids were taking a test. As a group. That they had started the day before.
I’m guessing in Singapore you take your own test and you don’t get to go home and look up the answers over night. I’m also guessing the kids in Singapore would pass the test a lot more frequently than the kids here. And it’s not because they are Asian, it’s because when the schools (and community, and families) so strongly telegraph to the students that it doesn’t really matter at all if they really learn anything, the kids are smart enough to figure out spending the night looking up answers so the jerk in the assigned group with you can get an A along with you is a much worse way to spend your time than texting.
Of course the system is portable. It’s just no one wants to do the carrying.
Singapore is a demonstration of a number of things, notably the moral and practical bankruptcy of the dominant ideologies of the West. The West is (currently) dominated by a perverse combination of social liberalism, racial/ethnic identity politics, welfare statism, and libertarian economics. Singapore rejects the first three and embraces (mostly) the last. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Singapore is thriving. The U.S. rejected the first three back when it was a successful nation.
There is plenty of ethnic identity politics in Singapore, it is the concept the country was founded upon. The main difference with the West is that it is prescriptive – the state curtly informs you what it means to be Chinese/Malay/Indian, and this identity has been pre-emptively modified to be compatible, so there is no threat to this prescribed multiculturalism. The institutional tradition inherited from Britain is that the country instinctively treats ethnic lobby groups as strictly subordinate to the state. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce may be consulted on issues that affect it, and said Chamber may feel it deserves to be consulted and may protest if it is not, but it does not get a vote per se and any overt influence would feel to be a corrupt violation of governance norms. Instead, the institutions who get nominally formal influence are… the trade unions congress and the employer’s federation, a la how Britain of the 1960s envisioned the future of industrial governance, and these institutions are then likewise nominally above ethnic politics.
There is also the welfare state, albeit likewise in a way inherited from how a 1960s Labour minister might view welfare in the departing colonies. There is universal public housing, but it’s not so that everyone has a right to a home, it’s so that there are no slums, which is not exactly the same thing. The ‘right’ is a social one rather than an individualistic one. The Singaporean welfare state sweeps up “almost everyone” through generous broad-based subsidies, then partners with NGOs to take care of the expensive edge cases. Likewise healthcare and, yes, education. Adjusting every school to be able to take care of special needs students is difficult, so most schools just don’t have the staff for it.
Singapore’s embrace of relative deregulation only dates to the 1985 recession and the Economic Committee report. Its fastest growth was when it was still solidly dirigiste.
David,
If five sentences (mine) lots of things get lost. My intent was to provide a broad brush summary, not delve into the details. One example, social liberalism.
In some respects, Singapore is socially liberal. It is certainly not socially conservative as defined by religious conservatives in the U.S. Abortion is legal, as are divorce and prostitution. However, a quick read of Singapore’s abortion laws shows them to be on the conservative side (compared to the U.S.) and the U.S. abortion rate is much higher than in Singapore (UN Data). The same is true for divorce. Divorce is legal in Singapore but doesn’t appear to be as easy as in the United States and rates are considerably lower.
According to Wikipedia LGBT rights are seriously restricted in Singapore. Perhaps more significantly, illegitimacy is rare and clearly not acceptable. The law appears to strongly discriminate against illegitimacy and single motherhood. See “Survival guide for single mums in Singapore” for details. Quote
“After all, since the government is not making it any easier (single moms do not get welfare or handouts in Singapore), you certainly need all the help you can get.”
With respect to drugs, there is no comparison. Singapore is tougher than America ever was.
The general attitudes of Singaporeans were expressed by the Prime Minister a few years ago.
“In his concluding speech on the debate over the repeal of Section 377A, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told MPs before the vote that “Singapore is basically a conservative society…The family is the basic building block of this society. And by family in Singapore we mean one man, one woman, marrying, having children and bringing up children within that framework of a stable family unit.””
Can anyone imagine Obama saying anything like that? How many Republicans would dare to express such an opinion? What would the media reaction be?
By American standards, Singapore is socially conservative and repressive. Revealingly, almost all of the criticism of Singapore comes from the left, not the right.
Your statement “There is plenty of ethnic identity politics in Singapore, it is the concept the country was founded upon” is literally true, but not accurate by comparison to the U.S. Singapore as a separate country was established when Malaysia expelled Singapore to maintain a Malay majority in Malaysia. If that’s not identity politics, what is?
However, the converse is more relevant. American style identity politics are not welcome in Singapore. Using race to claim discrimination and demand benefits is not acceptable in Singapore. It is quite likely that a Singapore equivalent to Al Sharpton or David Duke would end up in jail. If you doubt this, type ‘Singapore identity politics’ and ‘United States identity politics’ into Google. The article about Singapore focus on the creation of a national identity. The U.S. articles are about as depressing as you might expect.
I can certainly imagine the US Speaker of the House saying that. Is that really difficult?
I think you are not quite grasping the elaborate kabuki theater being played by the Singapore government at present, with regards to gay rights. The government knows that there are large pro-Western and pro-conservative groups. The government sees its primary role not as dictating the outcome but as ensuring that the culture war occurs with minimum fuss and no escalation into areas that the government actually cares about. At present, its strategy is to let controlled debate happen, with the Ministry of Health/Education periodically provoking the issue by reforming sexual education, and the Ministry of Home Affairs playing the other side. The state media – the Straits Times – is where the ensuing debate will be permitted to happen; if it gets too feisty, the state ends the public debate in the media and lets things settle for a bit. If the NGOs get too passionate – if the rights groups try to hold an public ‘political’ event, or if the church pastors start telling their congregations that The Government is siding with the liberal West in a conspiracy against Christianity, then the hammer comes down hard and Internal Security gets involved (cf the AWARE issue).
The government is not really interested in enforcing the conservative norm at present, which is why 377A is explicitly not proactively enforced, and has not been since the PM himself publicly disclosed this policy in 2007. Churches are, incidentally, not welcome to publicly attack the government for this laxity. Doing so would be a grave threat to religious harmony and nice men from the ISD start paying friendly visits to the pastor’s house.
This sort of thing is why American style identity politics would not be welcome in Singapore, but I do not think you understand Singapore style identity politics.
david,
I was not aware of the AWARE issue until you mentioned it. However, research isn’t hard. Take a look at the following from the Straits Times
“Singapore government’s position on AWARE Saga”
http://newasiarepublic.com/?p=18093
Can you imagine an American political leader saying anything ever vaguely like it?
david,
“I can certainly imagine the US Speaker of the House saying that. Is that really difficult?”
Not these days. My guess is the he does think that way. Just a guess.
If I cannot imagine an American government ever taking a similar position on an AWARE-like pressure group, it is because American governments do not typically assert their intention to simply refuse to be pressured by NGOs in a democratic society.
In Singapore, conversely, it is a point of pride.
Peter-so when are you moving to Singapore. Heaven on earth!
dswarts,
Never. I am a snow person.
Singapore does not practice ‘libertarian economics’.
Carolospln,
“Singapore does not practice ‘libertarian economics’”
Mostly it does. It is true that a significant fraction of the economy is owned/controlled by the government via the sovereign wealth fund. However, free trade is the norm, taxes are low, private property well protected, commercial contracts are enforced, etc. There is certainly no “Licence Raj” nor are there restrictive labor laws. Singapore is frequently described as one of (it not the) easiest places in the world to do business. Singapore ranks number 2 in the global index of economic freedom. The top income tax rate is 20%.
Libertarian economics indeed.
Pete
Understand fractions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-owned_corporation#Singapore
LibTard indeed for that remaining 40%!
carlospin,
Fractions. Troubling thing fractions. Temasek publishes an annual report giving a breakdown of its holding in Singapore and around the world. It looks like Temasek’s investments in Singapore are worth around $S65 billion. According to the U.S. government, the total capital stock of Singapore is in the range of U.S. $1 trillion. The Singapore dollar is worth roughly $0.79.
The Heritage Report on Singapore is a veritable parody of libertarian economics. Read it over at http://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore
Singapore is far more interesting for the fact that there is no part of the city where it would be unsafe for a young woman to walk at night, alone. It demonstrates, as does London in 1900, that crime in developed countries is a solved problem; that no American city can claim the same should be viewed as the result of shocking institutional failure, not a shrug and a “well, that’s just how it is.”
Walking through a cycling route snaking through a Singaporean industrial estate at 2am at night, I was once jumped by one of those dark-skinned guest workers we’ve heard so much about.
He frantically pointed out the snake I was about to step on, nearly unseen in the dim street light.
But anecdotes aside, I doubt the claim that London in 1900 was particularly safe. Homicide data suggest ~1 per 100k in 1900 in England. About ~1 per 100k in 2011/2012, too, so if you think that contemporary England is unsafe, then it was no better back then. If you wanted safe, it actually bottomed out in the 1960s according to homicide data (and avoid Scotland, it’s still 1.7~ there).
Two notes:
1. The majority of criminal woundings that would have become murders in 1900 are now just aggravated assaults:
http://people.umass.edu/zguo/iraqi%20war%20/murder%20and%20medicine.pdf
“this success [medical progress] has ironically masked the perception that America continues to face extraordinarily high levels of criminal violence. Compared to 1960, the year our analysis begins, we estimate that without these developments in medical technology there would have been between 45,000 and 70,000 homicides annually the past 5 years instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000.”
2. We invest a ridiculous amount more in security – not only by locking up a large fraction of our population, at great expense, but also by all the positional investment in real estate far away from violent areas. Both gated communities and the high price of a suburban house “in a good school district” are essentially security fees we pay – and perversely all this shows up as increased GDP!
American crime is mostly perpetrated by African Americans. Singapore doesn’t have any similarly violent minorities, hence the low crime. Its mostly East Asian makeup is what it shares with other extremely low-crime countries like Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
The developed world cannot ‘solve’ its violent crime problem. Most Western countries have imported too many violent people and given them citizenship.
The only way for America to ‘solve’ its violent crime problem would be to deport all its blacks to Africa and all its mestizos back to South America, then you’d just have a country of peaceful white folk and even more peaceful Asians.
What was the racial composition of the Wild West & how did that do on crime?
There was a study of a mining boomtown in the 19th Century West over a number of years. Lots of young men died of shooting each other, often in duels. The only crime against a woman was a popular prostitute was badly harmed and the man was immediately lynched. Non-prostitute women (e.g., schoolmarms, etc.) were never victimized during the years of the study.
Wait, if the white folk are peaceful but the Asians more peaceful, can I move all the whites out, too?
That would leave a very empty country.
Of course, I wasn’t actually proposing a policy, simply pointing out the futility of Western countries ‘solving’ crime the way the Asian Tigers have managed to.
Then we can just bring over a bunch of Asians and we’ll be totally peaceful. Plenty of them in Asia, they can spare them.
Inn other words they use the exact system Europeans used from the classical era to the first 80% of the modern era. Considering what Europe achieved in that timeframe i’d say Singapore could do a lot worse.
Don’t forget much of America until the Dewey crowd.
This isn’t proof that the Singaporean education system works.
This is proof that any education system will work if you fill it with Singaporeans.
Or to be more specific, fill it with Chinese.
I expect as Singapore becomes more and more Malay its educational attainment will decrease.
Shorter version:
Being a single mother sucks in Singapore. The school will fail little Johnny, in a heartbeat.
Spouses, parents and students respond accordingly.
That is why East Asian civilization was a dead end and supplanted by European civilization. Upward mobility is a hallmark of European civilization. Whenever these “East Asia is great at educating” articles pop up online you never see comments about how East Asians vote with their feet and go to Western colleges to mooch off those resources. If East Asians were as great as these articles claim then you would have East Asians going to East Asia like a suction. East Asia is dependent on Western influence for continued innovation, knowledge and prosperity not the other way around.
According to Gregory Clark, it was actually downward mobility in England that flooded the lower classes with bourgeois values that set the preconditions for the industrial revolution.
His latest work on mobility suggests that western Europe also had a lack of upward mobility.
This is from Gregory Clark’s abstract from his 2010 paper: “This paper reports on a preliminary investigation of surname distributions as a measure long run social mobility. In England this suggests two surprising claims. First, England, all the way from the heart of the Middle Ages in 1200 to 2009, is a society without persistent social classes, at least among the descendants of the medieval population. It was a world of complete social mobility, with no permanent over-class and under-class, a world of complete equal opportunity.”
From what I understand, the Chinese students that study in Europe, America and Australia are mostly the middling ones. The brightest students get into the elite schools in China.
This would explain why they work so hard. They are competing against their peers in China, and so aren’t as content to coast as the native students are.
Where is the evidence for that? “Only middling East Asian students go overseas” is the standard line we hear when the topic of East Asians flooding Western institutions is brought up. There is birth tourism where East Asian parents birth their children in the US to get citizenship to later attend school in the US. Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea, along with his siblings were sent to Switzerland for education by their father former leader Kim Jong Il. Apparently, the future leader of North Korea was middling. Kim Jong Il also got an education in Europe. There are countless other examples of East Asian political leaders, entertainers, business people etc. going to school in the West or their children being sent over. China’s President Xi Jinping’s daughter is attending Harvard. There is also the historical example from the 1850s to 1980s of East Asians attending Western institutions to go back home and implement that knowledge.
How do East Asian kids get over represented at western universities to do all that mooching? If western kids are closest to this fount of knowledge and prosperity, as you say, surely the Asian students should be at a disadvantage under represented.
Or perhaps we are discussing the unfolding of a process that will see Asia – pursuing the values of stable families and strong work ethic that the west is abandoning – inexorably gain wealth and power.
Stable families and a strong work ethic are symptoms of their innate high intelligence. Even if they all got divorced, their brains aren’t going to shrink any time soon.
As someone who taught in a Singaporean public school, I am really not sold on high-stakes testing. In fact many of my fellow teachers would chuckle at me when I explain part of the reason I came was to see their successful education system first-hand and explain that they were looking towards America’s best schools for improvement.
I did a blog entry about my experience with Singapore’s education system here: http://andrewlinford.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/singapores-education-a-look/
“Students are generally compliant and classrooms orderly.”
And school is primarily about education, sport is secondary/extra-curricular.
Families generally have two parents, and the mom (usually) is always after the kids to study and do their homework.
Pretty simple, really.
”I really like to improve in each match,” Berdych said. “Our goalkeeper kept us in the game and we scored late, when it is hard for anybody to come back into it. It’s a great end to an important run of fixtures.” Jose Fonte scored the only goal as Southampton improved their prospects of securing European football by winning a tight encounter against Hull at the KC Stadium.
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