Local school teacher and mother: Singapore education system is a failure

[makapaaa]

[h=1]LOCAL SCHOOL TEACHER AND MOTHER: SINGAPORE EDUCATION SYSTEM IS A FAILURE[/h]<style>.node-article .field-name-ad-box-in-article {float: left;margin: 15px 15px 10px 0;}.node-article .field-tags{clear: both;}</style>
Post date:
22 Jun 2014 - 8:50pm









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Dear The Real Singapore,

Being a school teacher, I can tell you our education system is a failure.

Most of the school teachers are bogged down with too many students and too much non-teaching workload. When I was a trainee teacher years ago, this problem was already surfaced. MOE and NIE's response was that if we only want to teach then we should resign and go be private tutors. Teachers are expected to do a lot more than just teach knowledge and basic moral values.
If our schools are only thought to be focusing on teaching academics, then our schools are already failures. As parents, how many of your kids, especially in secondary school and junior college, flunked half their subjects in their recent midyear exams? Are you aware that over half the students failed at least one subject such as English, Humanities or Maths? It is probably a lot worse for those in the Normal Academic and Normal Technical Stream? Those of you with children in secondary schools and junior colleges can attest to this.

School teachers are all too busy with their admin work and CCAs or handling disciplinary issues from students with bad attitude. School leaders solution is to quietly nudge parents to find private tuition. Newspapers strategically interview students who are good and can cope on their own, ignoring the vast majority of students who either get tuition or are doing so badly that they need tuition.
My husband and I work long hours in different schools, but the rotten culture in both schools are the same. School leaders focus more on non-teaching aspects to drive their own promotions and performance bonus, while those who can teach well and want to focus on teaching well continue to be penalised and placed at the bottom of the ranking.

Our younger son is of average ability in secondary three. He failed Additional Math in his midyear exams. So did his elder brother. It turned out that 3/4 of their cohort failed it too at the midyear exam. We also are teachers. We don't want to blame their teachers because we know how busy we all are. We are stretched in all directions, and teaching well is not a key priority for career success even though touted so. We sent our son for tuition, and we are shocked to find that many students from the top independent schools and band-one schools also need tuition for their Math. I talked to some of them and their parents at the tuition class. They said that if they didn't have tuition, they probably would have failed or done a lot worse for their midyear exams.

That seems to be the state of our education system. Even as an exam-crazy system, our system is not able to function well on its own without parents pumping in external money in the form of tuition. Even groups like Mendaki and Sinda also offer free tuition to the students under their care. Why would they do so, if the education system was sufficient enough?

All we ask is that MOE leave us alone from their nonsense. We are not interested in promotion or wanting to go up the corporate ladder. Not everyone is that crazy about the promotion like some of my HODs and school leaders. We just ask to be left in peace, so that we can do focus on doing our job well in imparting knowledge and basic moral values. While MOE wants to boast to the world how good our system is, our own students don't trust it enough to rely on it alone. They need tuition not for the extra edge, but just to pass their exams and get a decent result.

Given that so many of our students have failed their midyear exams or in need of tuition, we are no longer even getting their basics right. You really have no idea of what is happening in the school. Every time some big shot comes to our school, we put on an act and ask scripted questions. We even spent hours to prepare students how to give model answers to the external evaluators who come to audit our school practices over a year ago.

Our school system is just a jack-of-all-trades, master of nothing. We do everything, and we are bad at it. We are only good at acting. Right now, many schools are still not able to complete the exam syllabus for the secondary and JC students. Schools are calling back students during the March and June holidays to complete the syllabus. My husband and I go back to school often during the June holidays for extra lessons to help a lot of the weaker students or to continue the syllabus. We had to get a tutor to help our elder son complete the exam syllabus for his Physics, Chemistry and Additional Math during the June holidays, even before the school calls back the students for a crash course to cover the last few chapters. This is happening for the schools my husband and I teach in, and for the school our older son is studying in, which are all different schools. So, it turns out that even in basic time-table planning and curriculum planning, MOE doesn't have a good idea of how much time students need to complete syllabus, and students need to either get their own tutor, or hope they can follow the speed of the June holiday crash courses to complete the syllabus.

Can we allocate resources to get our basics right, instead of spending on projects to impress our superiors and the public for whatever personal career agenda that we want to push?

Teacher and mother of two
TRS reader

 

[johnny333]

Even LKY knows this. His grandson is/was studying at the American School. Unfortunately if you are "a lesser mortal" you wont get permission to study in one of the foreign schools in Spore.

 

[garlic]

This is what happens when trying to squeeze six years of Secondary Education into four years. In US and other advanced countries, students have more time to develop their interests and moral and be more complete person, whereas education in SG is considered "no-frills" and purely academics. Sports, music, literature, arts and anything non textbook related are considered secondary and you have robotic students who do not know anything beyond textbooks and no interests developed and whose morals are simply built on money and financial gains.

Why squeeze to four years, you say? Boys need to server N.S., therefore something's gotta give...

 

[Timerty]

The school teaches how to wayang as a subject, very good. In future can go act in mediacorp or be a PAP candidate.

 

[silver]

from school to ns to 'good paying govt jobs' all our kids learn to do is wayang and kiss ass.

people believe that here the only agent that works is money. throw enough money at it and i will work.

 

[tonychat]

Once again, sinkies are losers.. the whole fucking sinkie system is a total loser.

 

[eatshitndie]

proof is in the pudding. nuff said.

 

[laksaboy]

Wow! I went to a neighbourhood primary school myself and had obtained a higher PSLE score. Nobody put up any banners or posters in my honour to commemorate my feat.

 

[scroobal]

One solid article by the teacher. Kudos to the teacher.

I know a family where the parents attended their first parents teachers meeting. The teacher actually walked them thru the syllabus and clearly was hinting that they should prepare the child so it will be easy for him and not her. The etcher was also acting vice principle. That particular primary 1 had a cabinet ministers' son and a son of senior civil servant who is now a perm sec. The parents were shocked by her attitude and that she was an acting vice principle and clearly in the leadership team.

The next year the family migrated just on the education system. I am happy to say they kids in the family have done very well both academically as well personally. The eldest boy outscored old man's grandson in IB.

if we continue to use the schools to carry out the political agenda where they forced to do things like languages and go down the path of rote learning, the Indians and PRC mainlanders will take over.

 

[laksaboy]

The Singapore MOE education system's main objective is to produce obedient, acquiescent workers. Unthinking automatons who do as they are told.

To exacerbate the situation you have overworked teachers whose morale is made even lower as their hands are shackled when it comes to dishing out discipline and being forced to deal with obnoxious parents. Consequently, many of those who become teachers did not do so as a profession of choice, but rather as mercenaries. 'Serve and fuck off' attitude towards their MOE employment contract.

 

[scroobal]

Henry Park, Opera Estate are in the midst of private housing estate. Even if the kids are dumb, the parents can afford to pay for tuition. The home environment where both parents are professionals make a whole lot of difference.

They should minus bonus for teachers from these schools and double the bonus for those in Toh Tuck when they achieve good results.

proof is in the pudding. nuff said.

 

[eatshitndie]

Wow! I went to a neighbourhood primary school myself and had obtained a higher PSLE score. Nobody put up any banners or posters in my honour to commemorate my feat.

note "opera estate primary school" in the banner. it's a very proud school with kids from many ft families living around the area. ft kids are great for the neighborhood and excellent for the school. otherwise, sinkie kids there will just be a bunch of frogs in the well, oops sorry joe..., toads in well, without exposure to an international environment. in sg, it pays to be an elite. :p

 

[eatshitndie]

Henry Park, Opera Estate are in the midst of private housing estate. Even if the kids are dumb, the parents can afford to pay for tuition. The home environment where both parents are professionals make a whole lot of difference.

They should minus bonus for teachers from these schools and double the bonus for those in Toh Tuck when they achieve good results.

spot on! parents drop their kids off on fidelio street in their mercs, bmw, porche, audis, and range rovers. some kids walk to school, but are accompanied by maids. many ang mo kids walk to school alone. sinkie kids are truly pampered and protected. by the way, the jaga remembers me as i walk by the gate daily and take photos when the banner is up. somehow i know the banner will be good for posting and creating buzz. :p

 

[frenchbriefs]

psle is a joke....who gives a fuck about pass rate?it doesnt even take a genius to get an A,i believe i didnt score below an A for anything except maybe for Higher chinese which i got a merit or something....but look at me today,a failure whose never done anything other than minimum wage jobs.....anyway singapore education system is a joke,these fucking sinkie parents dont understand,who cares if ur child flunks a maths or chemistry or social studies?when ur child goes into the working world hes going to be a dog,his boss will be fts,his colleaques will be fts,and ur office doesnt needs u,u are just the token sinkie that gets in their way and they dont give a fuck if u scored perfect As in ur Psle or o levels.u might as well be a fool in their eyes.u can be a sinkie wearing a suit,tie and driving a toyota altis and some dark skinned scum from mudlaysia who wash dishes in some restaurant somewhere will step over you.

 

[KNNBGCB]

Wow! I went to a neighbourhood primary school myself and had obtained a higher PSLE score. Nobody put up any banners or posters in my honour to commemorate my feat.

I also got the highest amongst the KNNB family. 169 points.

 

[Ash007]

The question isn't that our education system has failed, but that sending your kids to "institution" to be "educated" is false, Read Ivan Illich's Deschooling society about how schools are essentially factories producing "workers". Below is a good video with excerpts from it.

[video=youtube;ZUoYAj7Nosg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUoYAj7Nosg[/video]

 

[krafty]

many of my friends who were once teachers are now operating their own tuition centres...

 

[Leongsam]

The rest of the world does not share that teacher's opinion. She obviously has an axe to grind because she wasn't promoted or she had been taken to task for unsatisfactory performance on her part.

---

<h1>Why is Singapore's school system so successful, and is it a model for the West? </h1>

<p><span>By <a href="http://theconversation.com/profiles/david-hogan-114754">David Hogan</a></span></p>

<p>For more than a decade, Singapore, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Finland, has been <a href="http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/asian-countries-top-oecd-s-latest-pisa-survey-on-state-of-global-education.htm">at or near the top of international leagues tables</a> that measure children’s ability in reading, maths and science. This has led to a considerable sense of achievement in Finland and East Asia and endless hand-wringing and head-scratching in the West.</p>

<p>What then do Singaporean teachers do in classrooms that is so special, bearing in mind that there are substantial differences in classroom practices between – as well as within – the top-performing countries? What are the particular strengths of Singapore’s instructional regime that helps it perform so well? What are its limits and constraints?</p>

<p>Is it the right model for countries seeking to prepare students properly for the complex demands of 21st century knowledge economies and institutional environments more generally? Is Singapore’s teaching system transferable to other countries? Or is its success so dependent on very specific institutional and cultural factors unique to Singapore that it is folly to imagine that it might be reproduced elsewhere?</p>

<h2>Singapore’s instructional regime</h2>

<p>In general, classroom instruction in Singapore is highly-scripted and uniform across all levels and subjects. Teaching is coherent, fit-for-purpose and pragmatic, drawing on a range of pedagogical traditions, both Eastern and Western.</p>

<p>As such, teaching in Singapore primarily focuses on coverage of the curriculum, the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge, and preparing students for end-of-semester and national high stakes examinations.</p>

<p>And because they do, teachers rely heavily on textbooks, worksheets, worked examples and lots of drill and practice. They also strongly emphasise mastery of specific procedures and the ability to represent problems clearly, especially in mathematics. Classroom talk is teacher-dominated and generally avoids extended discussion.</p>

<p>Intriguingly, Singaporean teachers only make limited use of “high leverage” or unusually effective teaching practices that contemporary educational research (at least in the West) regards as critical to the development of conceptual understanding and “learning how to learn”.</p>

<p>For example, 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.</p>

<p>So Singapore’s teaching regime is one primarily focused on the transmission of conventional curriculum knowledge and examination performance. And clearly it is highly-effective, helping to generate outstanding results in international assessments <a href="http://timss.bc.edu/">Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)</a> and the OECD’s <a href="http://www.oecd.org/pisa/">Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)</a>.</p>

<h2>The logic of teaching in Singapore</h2>

<p>Singapore’s education system is the product of a distinctive, even unique, set of historical, institutional and cultural influences. These factors go a long way to help explain why the educational system is especially effective in the current assessment environment, but it also limits how transferable it is to other countries.</p>

<p>Over time, Singapore has developed a powerful set of institutional arrangements that shape its instructional regime. Singapore has developed an education system which is centralised (despite significant decentralisation of authority in recent years), integrated, coherent and well-funded. It is also relatively flexible and expert-led.</p>

<p>In addition, Singapore’s institutional arrangements is characterised by a prescribed national curriculum. National high stakes examinations at the end of primary and secondary schooling stream students according to their exam performance and, crucially, prompt teachers to emphasise coverage of the curriculum and teaching to the test. The alignment of curriculum, assessment and instruction is exceptionally strong.</p>


<p>Beyond this, the institutional environment incorporates top-down forms of teacher accountability based on student performance (although this is changing), that reinforces curriculum coverage and teaching to the test. Major government commitments to educational research (£109m between 2003-2017) and knowledge management are designed to support evidence-based policy making. Finally, Singapore is strongly committed to capacity building at all levels of the system, especially the selection, training and professional development of principals and teachers.</p>

<p>Singapore’s instructional regime and institutional arrangements are also supported by a range of cultural orientations that underwrites, sanctions and reproduces the instructional regime. At the most general level, these include a broad commitment to a nation-building narrative of meritocratic achievement and social stratification, ethnic pluralism, collective values and social cohesion, a strong, activist state and economic growth.</p>

<p>In addition, parents, students, teachers and policy makers share a highly positive but rigorously instrumentalist view of the value of education at the individual level. Students are generally compliant and classrooms orderly.</p>

<p>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”.</p>

<p>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. But there is much that other jurisdictions can learn about the limits and possibilities of their own systems from an extended interrogation of the Singapore model.</p>

<p>At the same time it is also important to recognise that the Singapore model is not without its limits. It generates a range of substantial opportunity costs, and it constrains (without preventing) the capacity of the system for substantial and sustainable reform. Other systems, contemplating borrowing from Singapore, would do well to keep these in mind.</p>

<h2>Reforming the Singapore model</h2>

<p>The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s challenged policy makers to take a long hard look at the educational system that they developed, and ever since they have been acutely aware that the pedagogical model that had propelled Singapore to the top of international leagues table is not appropriately designed to prepare young people for the complex demands of globalisation and 21st knowledge economies.</p>

<p>By 2004-5, Singapore’s government had more or less identified the kind of pedagogical framework it wanted to work towards, and called it <a href="https://www.nie.edu.sg/newsroom/media-coverage/2012/teach-less-learn-more-have-we-achieved-it">Teach Less, Learn More</a>. This framework urged teachers to focus on the “quality” of learning and the incorporation of technology into classrooms and not just the “quantity” of learning and exam preparation.</p>

<p>While substantial progress has been made, the government has found rolling-out and implementing these reforms something of a challenge. In particular, instructional practices proved well entrenched and difficult to change in a substantial and sustainable way.</p>

<p>This was in part because the institutional rules that govern classroom pedagogy were not altered in ways that would support the proposed changes to classroom teaching. As a consequence, well-established institutional rules have continued to drive teachers to teach in ways that prioritise coverage of the curriculum, knowledge transmission and teaching to the test over “the quality” of learning, or to adopt high-leverage instructional practices.</p>

<p>Indeed, teachers do so for good reason, since statistical modelling of the relationship between instructional practices and student learning indicates that traditional and direct instructional techniques are much better at predicting student achievement than high leverage instructional practices, given the nature of the tasks students are assessed on.</p>

<p>Not the least of the lessons of these findings is that teachers in Singapore are unlikely to cease teaching to the test until and unless a range of conditions are met. These include that the nature of the assessment tasks will need to change in ways that encourages teachers to teacher differently. Above all, new kinds of assessment tasks that focus on the quality of student understanding are likely to encourage teachers to design instructional tasks. These can provide rich opportunities to learn and encourage high-quality knowledge work.</p>

<p>The national high stakes assessment system should also incorporate a moderated, school-based component that allows teachers to design tasks that encourage deeper learning rather than just “exam learning”.</p>

<p>The national curriculum should allow substantial levels of teacher mediation at the school and classroom level. This needs to have clearly specified priorities and principles, backed up by substantial commitments to authentic, in-situ, forms of professional development that provide rich opportunities for modelling, mentoring and coaching.</p>

<p>Finally, the teacher evaluation system needs to rely far more substantially on accountability systems that acknowledge the importance of peer judgement, and a broader range of teacher capacities and valuable student outcomes than the current assessment regime currently does.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, teachers will continue to bear the existential burden of managing an ongoing tension between what, professionally speaking, many of them consider good teaching, and what, institutionally speaking, they recognise is responsible teaching.</p>

<p>One of the central challenges confronting the Ministry of Education in Singapore is to reconcile good and responsible teaching. But the ministry is clearly determined to bed-down a pedagogy capable of meeting the demands of 21st century institutional environments, particularly developing student capacity to engage in complex knowledge work within and across subject domains.</p>

<p>The technical, cultural, institutional and political challenges of doing so are daunting. However, given the quality of leadership across all levels of the system, and Singapore’s willingess to grant considerable pedagogical authority to teachers while providing clear guidance as to priorities, I have no doubt it will succeed. But it will do so on its own terms and in ways that achieve a sustainable balance of knowledge transmission and knowledge-building pedagogies that doesn’t seriously compromise the overall performativity of the system.</p>

<p>It is already clear that the government is willing to tweak once sacred cows, including the national high stakes exams and streaming systems. However, it has yet to tackle the perverse effects of streaming on classroom composition and student achievement that continues to overwhelm instructional effects in statistical modelling of student achievement.</p>

<h2>Towards a knowledge building pedagogy</h2>

<p>Singapore’s experience and its current efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning do have important, if ironic, implications for systems that hope to emulate its success.</p>

<p>This is especially true of those jurisdictions – I have in mind <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-goves-curriculum-15890">England</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/national-curriculum-the-latest-target-of-coalitions-culture-wars-21910">Australia</a> especially – where conservative governments have embarked on ideologically driven crusades to demand more direct instruction of (Western) canonical knowledge, demanding more testing and high stakes assessments of students, and imposing more intensive top-down performance regimes on teachers.</p>

<p>In my view, this is profoundly and deeply mistaken. It is also more than a little ironic given the reform direction Singapore has mapped out for itself over the past decade. The essential challenge facing Western jurisdictions is not so much to mimic East Asian instructional regimes, but to develop a more balanced pedagogy that focuses not just on knowledge transmission and exam performance, but on teaching that requires students to engage in subject-specific knowledge building.</p>

<p>Knowledge building pedagogies recognise the value of established knowledge, but also insist that students need to be able to <em>do</em> knowledge work as well as learning <em>about</em> established knowledge. Above all, this means students should acquire the ability to recognise, generate, represent, communicate, deliberate, interrogate, validate and apply knowledge claims in light of established norms in key subject domains.</p>

<p>In the long run, this will do far more for individual and national well-being, including supporting development of a vibrant and successful knowledge economy, than a regressive quest for top billing in international assessments or indulging in witless “culture wars” against modernity and emergent, not to mention long-established, liberal democratic values.</p><img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/22917/count.gif" width="1" />

<p><em>David Hogan received funding from the National Institute of Education in Singapore to conduct the research on which this article draws .</em></p><p>This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a>.
Read the <a href="http://theconversation.com/why-is-singapores-school-system-so-successful-and-is-it-a-model-for-the-west-22917">original article</a>.
</p>

 

[frenchbriefs]

i feel sad when singapore schools plaster the results all over like as though its the 4d or toto results....even companies are not so shameless to do that.....

this shows all singapore schools are all cookie cutter templates,there aint no difference from one another,they are merely factories with quotas and output to meet

unlike ang moh schools, they will talk about their hundred year old school traditions,how their culture is different and why ur experience will be different as they strive to give u the best years of ur life.

 

[lianbeng]

Teacher and mother of two
TRS reader

lianbeng replies: teacher, u can quit liao!