Western pupils lag Asians
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 Friday said.
The study by independent think-tank The Grattan Institute said East
Asia was the centre 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 programme
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 European Union in reading
and seven months ahead of Australian pupils, said the report, using data
from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment.
The PISA, pioneered by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development, 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.
AFP |