- Reuters
American parents looking to send their children to the world’s best schools might want to start looking East.
And we don’t mean the East Coast.
East Asia is now home to the world’s best primary and secondary schools, producing students who are able to outperform their counterparts in the Western world, according to a recent report from the Grattan Institute, a think tank based in Australia.
The average 15-year old in Shanghai is performing math at levels that are two or three years ahead of students in the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Europe, according to the report, which was based on data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment.
Hong Kong students are at least one year ahead in reading and math when compared to U.S. and European children, the report said.
Results of the study underscore a global shift that is occurring both economically and now, according to Grattan, academically. East Asian primary and secondary schools are better at addressing their own weaknesses and know how to improve the classroom through policy, the study said. In 2006, Hong Kong raised the reading levels of its students to No. 2 in international assessments, up from 17th just five years earlier. Singapore has cut courses for teachers that don’t result in higher performance for their students.
Educational institutions in East Asia are also doing more with less, the study says. South Korea spends around half of what the U.S. spends on its primary school students, yet South Korean pupils outperform their U.S. counterparts in reading, math and science.
President Barack Obama recently pledged to earmark $80 million for math and science education, believing it will improve the economy, according to a recent report in the Associated Press.
The study also comes as the U.S. questions its educational standards and as figures such as the “Tiger Mother” — – a Yale Law School professor who has preached tough discipline for kids — have caused American parents to rethink their own roles in learning and to ask themselves whether Asian mothers are superior.
The U.S. has already taken notice of the East Asian educational prowess. Earlier this month, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Singapore and the U.S., building on an earlier agreement in 2002 that focused on the teaching and learning of math and science. The new MOU continues to prioritize the two subjects as key areas of collaboration in the two countries – with Singapore having some of the best math and science high school scores in the world, and the U.S. some of the worst.
Back in 2009, a delegation from Singapore’s Ministry of Education was sent to Washington DC, to share the “Singapore model method” for learning mathematics. In the same year, President Obama gave a speech to the National Academy of Sciences, devoting an entire part of it to the importance of math and science education. In his comparison of math scores between US and foreign countries, the first country he mentioned was Singapore.
“Our students are outperformed in math and science by their peers in Singapore, Japan, England, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Korea, among others. Another assessment shows American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science when compared to nations around the world,” Mr. Obama said.
At least in China, such rankings are not necessarily cause for celebration. Many Chinese see the country’s education system, in particular its failure to foster innovation, as one weakness preventing it moving further along the path to superpower status. The country’s students have increasingly flocked to the West for college, and even high school, in an effort to escape the rote memorization prevalent in Chinese schools and cultivate the sort of creativity seen as producing figures like late Apple founder Steve Jobs.
– Laurie Burkitt and Shibani Mahtani
澳洲教育落后东亚 上海学生领先澳生3年
滴答网讯 一份最新报告称，澳大利亚的学校体系落后于东亚，上海的学生有时甚至领先澳洲学生3年。
由格拉顿研究所(Grattan Institute)将在周五发布的报告显示，虽然在2000至2008年之间经济合作与发展组织(OECD)的国家大幅增加了学校基金，但是它们在学习表现方面依然落后于东亚体系。
格拉顿研究所学校教育项目负责人Ben Jensen周五在声明中称：“在上海，一名普通15岁学生的数学水平超出澳洲、美国和欧洲的同龄人两至三年。这有着深远的影响。随着经济力量从西方转向东方，教育方面的高表现也一样。”
这份报告基于一系列测试，列出了最高表现学校体系的前四名，分别是香港、韩国、新加坡和上海。
此外，费尔法克斯（Fairfax）报道称，报告还发现澳洲的学生要落后香港、新加坡和韩国学生两年。不过，在科学、数学和阅读方面，澳洲学生依然领先于美国、英国和欧洲国家的学生。
报告发现，提高学生表现三大要素中的其中一个是要改善对教师的支持和培训。Jensen说：“这四大体系之所以能够名列前茅不是由孔子学说、机械学习、应试教育或者虎妈等文化因素决定。”相反，他认为这其中值得效仿的是对于高效学习的不懈实际关注、教师教育强势文化的创造、协同、指导、反馈和持续的专业发展。
Jensen告诉《澳大利亚人报》：“我们将钱用在了错误的地方。我们从亚洲学到的是，提高学生学习效果的唯一方法是改善教学。改革教学关乎行为和文化转变，这意味着要改变老师的做法，日复一日地进行，落实到每一间学校。”
