Western schoolchildren are up to three years behind those in China’s Shanghai and success in Asian education is not just the product of pushy “tiger” parents, an Australian report released yesterday said.
The study by independent think tank The Grattan Institute said East Asia was the center of high performance in schools, with four of the world’s top systems in the region — Hong Kong, South Korea, Shanghai and Singapore.
“In Shanghai, the average 15-year-old mathematics student is performing at a level two to three years above his or her counterpart in Australia, the USA and Europe,” Grattan’s school education program director Ben Jensen said. “That has profound consequences. As economic power is shifting from West to East, high performance in education is too.”
Students in South Korea were a year ahead of those in the US and EU in reading and seven months ahead of Australian pupils, the report said, using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
The PISA has become a standard tool for benchmarking international standards in education.
The study said that while many OECD countries had substantially increased funding for schools in recent years, this had often produced disappointing results and success was not always the result of spending more money.
Australian schools have enjoyed a large increase in expenditure in recent years, yet student performance has fallen, while South Korea, which spends less per student than the OECD average, had shot up, it said.
“Nor is success culturally determined, a product of Confucianism, rote learning or ‘tiger mothers,’” the report said, the latter a reference to ethnic Chinese parents who push hard for their children to succeed.
It said Hong Kong and Singapore had made major improvements in reading literacy in the past decade, while the tests by which the students were ranked was not conducive to rote learning because they required problem solving.
The report said the best systems focused on a relentless, practical focus on learning and teacher education, mentoring and professional development, rather than greater spending.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard stressed the need for Australia to perform well, given its place in the most economically dynamic part of the world.
“Four of the five highest-performing school systems in the world are in countries in our region, so we’ve got to make sure we not only keep up, but we win that education race,” she said.
Education expert Kevin Donnelly, director of the Melbourne-based think tank Education Standards Institute, agreed that spending money by itself was not enough to lift performance.
“America, for example, spends the most compared to the other OECD countries in terms of education, but only gets very average results,” he said. “[South] Korea spends a lot less, but they achieve at the top of the table.”
However, Donnelly said cultural factors did play a role.
“In a lot of the Asian countries, there is a Confucian ethic — they respect authority, they respect their parents ... they are motivated to work hard,” he said.
“Some of the greatest problems in Australian classrooms, when teachers are surveyed, relate to misbehavior and poor discipline. That’s the elephant in the room in terms of Australian education,” Donnelly said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese