Efficiency, social justice and educational voucher in Singapore

Economics of Education Policy
Autumn Term 2004-2005

Course Assignment

Weijie NG
MA Economics of Education


Part 1:
Critically assess the meaning of the concepts of efficiency and social justice and how they are applied in the analysis of education policy.

Part 2A:
Design a voucher or quasi-voucher for improving parental choice of school, ensuring that the money follows the pupil.

The voucher … should have specified efficiency and social justice objectives.

For … A … outline a research design for evaluating the success of the proposed scheme in achieving its objectives after it has been in operation for five years.

Guidelines for Part 2:
1) Outline your design, making clear what the scheme is and explaining what you intend to achieve by introducing this scheme. Evaluate your proposed scheme against the criteria of efficiency and social justice. For this evaluation, you should use economic theory and empirical evidence, drawing on Part 1 for evaluating your scheme in relation to efficiency and social justice.

2) Briefly outline a research design for a study that would evaluate the impact of your quasi voucher … scheme after it had been in operation for 5 years. Note that your research design outline will be assessed in relation to how well it is likely to produce valid evidence of the impact of the scheme.

The total word limit is 5000 words (excluding references) and must not exceed this by more than 10%. Please write the word length at the top of your assignment.


Part 1

Lord Lionel Robbins, in his influential An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, proposed a definition of Economics which is all encompassing and is still used to define the subject today - “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” He also asserted that ‘what men and women are depends partly upon what they bring into the world and partly on what has been added to it by education and experience’ and suggested that it is appropriate and deserving for economics to be concerned with the latter (Robbins, 1968). In the first of this two-part essay, therefore, two concepts at the core of economics – efficiency and social justice, as well as some applications within education policy, will be described and critically examined.

According to Lockheed & Hanushek (1994), the rationale behind efficiency concepts in economics is straightforward. Efficiency refers to a relationship between inputs and outputs, and is achieved by either a) maximising the value of outputs given the value of inputs or b) minimising the value of inputs given the value of output. When a situation is said to be inefficient, this means that the desired means could be attained with less inputs, or that the means utilised should be able to produce more of the desired ends. Generally, when there is more than one input and / or output, inputs and outputs are measured (or estimated) in monetary units because they can seldom be expressed in other terms meaningful for comparison. In education, examples of inputs, when broken down into factors of production (Lipsey 1989) would include:

Labour: Teachers
Capital: Computers

Outputs from the educational process are myriad and may be accruable to the individual student or spill over as externalities to others. Among benefits captured by students directly are a) direct financial returns, in the form of an increased stream of income flows, b) the financial option return, which refers to the option of acquiring additional and more financially enticing education, c) the hedging option, which involves an enhanced capability to manage change and d) non-market returns involving non-monetary benefits with subjective value, e.g. the intellectual appreciation of Homer’s Illiad (Weisbrod 1964).

External benefits may also be identified, and related to residence, employment and general society (Weisbrod 1964). Residence related benefits refer to those that accrue to the family (current and future), the neighbourhood, and to taxpayers, e.g. the childcare by-product of schooling. For example, the provision of schooling for school age children may be viewed as a form of day care, which frees parents to participate in the labour market. Employment related benefits are those in which the education of one worker results in the general improvement in other workers’ productivity. Benefits to society in general may be viewed as a residual category, as Weisbrod (1964) defines these to be benefits that ‘are distributed broadly either spatially or temporally, so that the nature of individual beneficiaries is obscure.’

Lockheed & Hanushek (1994) further distinguished between internal efficiency[1] and external efficiency. The former is concerned with maximising educational outputs given a set of educational inputs (or a budget constraint) and addresses the allocation of funds within the educational industry. This means that the sector is producing at the production possibility frontier. Internal efficiency may be improved by either reallocating resources to inputs that have larger positive effects on outputs from inputs that have smaller effects, or by reducing overall inputs while maintaining the existing level of outputs. The latter, external efficiency, requires an examination of the usefulness of funding to the education sector, comparing with public or private alternative uses. Should England spend a marginal one billion pounds from taxpayers on the education system or on the health sector? This examination would provide a guide in determining the optimal level of educational funding for a country, and could be useful in allocating appropriately across sub sectors such as higher education and workforce training.

Lockheed & Hanushek (1994) may be right in asserting that the reasoning behind efficiency concepts is straightforward, but the operationalisation of such concepts is hardly simple. How does one measure efficiency? Education has multiple inputs and outcomes, some of which are difficult to measure, or even identify. Calculations of returns to education are frequently used to investigate whether it would be efficient for one to undertake a marginal year of education, or an additional qualification. Such calculations tend to ignore some benefits of education, either because they cannot be measured, e.g. enhancements in social cohesion, or because they cannot be easily monetised, e.g. improvements in health or declines in petty crime rates. Critics may object that economists’ seemingly exclusive use of monetary valuations makes for an extremely narrow definition of efficiency. However, some measure of value has to be used for interpersonal comparison of utility, and monetary value has been argued to provide economists with a reasonably good common denominator (Heyne 2000).

Barr’s (2004) and Weisbrod’s (1969) conceptions of horizontal and vertical efficiency with respect to the targeting of benefits may also be useful in analysing applications of educational policy. The former is concerned with minimising gaps: if additional resources are to be allocated to children from the lowest socio-economic class on the basis on need, then all children in this grouping should be able to access these extra benefits. The latter is concerned with avoiding leakages. This means that only children belonging to the lowest socio-economic class should be able to access the additional resources.

The second core concept in economics to be discussed is that of social justice, which is a term often used interchangeably with equity. However, ‘justice’ seems to have acquired a broader meaning and has been used in an all-encompassing manner. Rawls (1972) described not only his own two basic principles, but also utilitarian principles as ‘theories of justice’. Political philosopher Pettit (1980) even added libertarian principles in his review of justice.

In a recent economic literature review, Konow (2003) proposed an integrated justice theory, a catch-all theory that with its Need, Equity and Efficiency principles, seems to include everything from egalitarianism to utilitarianism, from Marxism to desert theory, and everyone from Pareto to Kahneman and Nozick to Marx.

The Need principle is with reference to basic needs, and deems an allocation socially just if basic needs are provided for equally across individuals. In education, for instance, an allocation that allows for a socially and politically determined minimum level of literacy and skill sets across all individuals may be considered just according to this first principle. Included under this broad Need principle are ideas of egalitarianism and Marxism, as well as Rawls’ Liberty and Difference Principles.

The Equity principle, that an allocation is fair if individuals’ outcomes are proportionate only to inputs that they control, stems from Aristotle’s distributive justice theory and Locke’s desert theory (Konow 2003). Distributive justice is the doctrine that a decision is socially just if all parties receive what they need or deserve. It is often contrasted with procedural justice. The former concentrates on just outcomes, while the latter concentrates on just processes. Desert theories essentially identify factors that might be considered fair to use in the determination of economic distribution. For example, Buchanan (1986) distinguishes between luck, choice, effort and birth. He considered the distribution of economic outcomes according to effort as the least controversial and believed that conflicts with common notions of justice would only come about with inequalities that are caused by serendipities of birth. Therefore, for Buchanan, it would be socially just if educational outcomes were such that those consumers of education (i.e. pupils) who put in the most effort would derive more benefits, and it would be grossly unjust if certain consumers derive more benefits from the educational process merely as a consequence of social class, gender or colour. Linked to Buchanan’s desert theory are Musgrave’s (1959) concepts of horizontal and vertical equity. Horizontal equity refers to the equal treatment of equals, i.e. if individuals A and B are socially deemed to be identical in pertinent and essential characteristics, they should have the same access to the same educational opportunities, to attain the same educational outcomes. Vertical equity is the unequal treatment of unequals. Therefore, if individual A puts in less effort in his education (and gets lower GCSE grades for example), it is perhaps vertically equitable for A to receive a smaller financial option return (among other benefits captured by students directly) and have a relatively restricted access to higher education. Also, it might be considered socially just if children with special educational needs (SEN) receive more funding. Inequality, therefore, might be equitable.

Konow’s third principle, Efficiency, largely involves the concept of efficiency as laid out above in this essay. People are homo economicus, seeking to maximising surplus, or output over inputs, and this goal, that of achieving the greatest good for society, is deemed to be a form of fairness. In this sense, efficiency is in itself a component of justice, and not necessarily at odds with social justice as a whole. Therefore, an educational system which distributes an inordinately large proportion of the available inputs and outputs to the ‘gifted’ might be considered to be socially just if this option perhaps leads to the largest increase in the Gross Domestic Product of the country.

In including efficiency as a major social justice goal, at first glance, if social justice and equity are taken to be synonymous, the equity-efficiency tradeoff, as elucidated by economists including Okun in his 1975 eponymous Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade Off seems to be eliminated. The trade-off still exists, however, within the integrated system of Konow’s justice theory, since the three principles are in a sense substitutes for one another and are ‘interpreted, weighted and applied in a manner that depends on the context’ (Konow 2003).

The equity-efficiency trade-off may refer to a trade-off of values. The ideas behind the values trade-off were first elucidated by Barry (1965), who proposed that the objective of efficiency might be traded off with the objective of equity, and argued that it would be rational for individuals or society as a whole to be indifferent between an allocation of resources that was immensely inequitable, but massively efficient, and another allocation that was highly inefficient, but extremely equitable. This tradeoff may be expressed using Le Grand’s (1991) ‘objective possibility frontier’ diagram. On the X-axis is the objective of efficiency, while on the Y-axis is the objective of equity. Le Grand stated that ‘an allocation of resources is efficient if it is impossible to move towards the attainment of one social objective without moving away from another objective.’ With respect to diagram 1, all points on the objective possibility frontier are objectively efficient, points outside are unattainable, and points inside are objectively inefficient. Both allocations A and B are objectively efficient, and they are substitutes for each other. Likewise, society might be indifferent between formulating a system of educational policies that has efficiency aims at its core and another that focuses on equity goals. It should be noted that it is entirely possible that both systems may turn up to be identical, if for example, the educational sector develops such that everyone attains a similarly high level of educational outcomes and the total output proves to be of a higher total value than for any other allocation, given the same set of resources.

Thus far, in part one of this essay, an attempt has been made to describe and critically examine the concepts of efficiency and social justice, with their myriad meanings, in economic literature, with especial reference to educational policy. Even though efficiency may recently have been increasingly viewed as a subset of social justice, the age-old problem of the efficiency-equity trade-off will continue to plague economists. In part two, these concepts will be utilised in the formulation of a school voucher scheme and the two opposing social objectives of efficiency and equity may have to be weighed against each other in search of a balance.

Part 2

Part 1 of this essay involved a critical examination, with applications in educational policy, of the economic concepts of efficiency and social justice. This part of the essay would revolve around the design and evaluation of a quasi-voucher scheme, which we shall refer to as the ‘Singapore International Pre-University Scholarship’ (SIPS), and include sections: A) a discussion of the case for the implementation of school voucher schemes in general, B) details with regards to the rationale and features of SIPS, C) an armchair evaluation of the likely economic impacts of SIPS with reference to the efficiency and social justice concepts as elucidated in Part 1, as well as D) a research design for a empirical study to evaluate the impact of SIPS after it has been in operation for five years.

Section A

The idea that the introduction of vouchers, which are tax funded certificates by which parents are given the ability to pay for the schooling of their children at an educational institution of their choice, would improve educational outcomes was perhaps first suggested by Friedman (1955) and further articulated in Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. Since then, the concept of the voucher has been developed by and appealed to both conservatives and liberals, for reasons of efficiency, equity, choice and social justice (Levin, 2001), depending on the individual voucher scheme’s design. Designs may differ according to geographical coverage, scope of regulations, monetary value, etc.

It may be best to use two examples of theoretical voucher proposals to show how their designs might influence their impact. Friedman’s (1962) proposal allowed for unconstrained choice by both parents and schools. This means that parents could choose to ‘spend’ their voucher at any school, and that schools were free to choose their intake and organisation. Parental topping up of the vouchers when they do not fully cover school fees was also permitted. The value of each voucher was also fixed at either the average cost of schooling, or a proportion of this average cost. Jenck’s (1970) proposal was liberal and much more concerned with equity. When demand for places in a particular school exceeded the supply, at least half the seats must be allocated via ballot. This would reduce the likelihood of ‘cream-skimming’ of middle class students and discrimination against working class in school selection processes (West et. al, 2004). Topping up would not be permitted, and the value of Jenck’s vouchers would not be fixed at a single level, but would be dependent on income. Lower income families would receive larger vouchers, such that schools with more financially disadvantaged children will receive extra resources. This might be viewed as vertically equitable.

Vouchers now no longer just exist in theory, but have also been carried out in practice. In the UK, the ‘Assisted Places Scheme’ was implemented in 1981, and targeted selectively at able but poor students (West, 1996). The present school funding system in the UK, which allocates financial resources to schools based on enrolment and pertinent indicators of disadvantage, such as the number of pupils with ‘additional educational needs’ (BBC, 2004), is in effect a quasi-voucher scheme too. In the US, where vouchers were first popularised, experiments have been carried out and evaluated, such as in Milwaukee (Witte, 1998). Vouchers have not been limited to Anglo-Saxon countries, and may be found in nurseries in Spain (Granell, 2002) and schools in Chile and Columbia too (Carnoy & McEwan, 2001).


Section B

Presently, under the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) scholarship scheme, up to fifty applicants from each of the other countries in this multinational organisation are granted a full scholarship as well as allowances for living costs, return flights, etc, to study in a top government funded school in Singapore (MOE, 2004). The Singapore International Pre-University Scholarship will be an extension and a reconstitution of the existing ASEAN scholarships, and will commence in the academic year 200X. Since money is assigned to students, but sent directly to schools, SIPS will in essence be, just like Chubb & Moe’s (1990) scholarship plan, a quasi-voucher programme.

The case for SIPS is five-fold: i) to enhance educational opportunities and choice for bright young people from developing countries, ii) to boost internal efficiency by infusing foreign competition and positive peer group effects into local schools, iii) to boost the pool of talented labour supply available, iv) to promote equity by giving capable young people from poorer developing countries the benefits of a good quality education, and v) to generate social cohesion and goodwill with other developing nations, especially the rapidly growing India and China.

The features of the quasi-voucher system will be designed in line with the objectives above.

· SIPS will not be available to ASEAN nationals who will continue to qualify for the ASEAN scholarships. Instead, SIPS will target Sri Lanka, India, China, East Timor, Bangladesh and Pakistan. With the permission of these countries’ ministries of education, the Singapore government will directly advertise and promote SIPS in schools. Applicants would apply directly by mail or online to the local Singapore consulate and short-listed individuals would have to pass a benchmarked selection test and interview to ensure academic aptitude, especially proficiency in the English language, the language of instruction in Singapore schools. The target take-up rate per annum would be 500 (approximately one percent of the average Singapore schools year group size). Successful applicants will undergo the last four years in the pre-university education system and randomly placed in Singapore government funded schools. School fees and other school charges, including accommodation in student hostels will be fully waived. However, SIPs would not cover other living costs.

· Schools will not compete for these international students. Instead, Singapore’s schools will be randomly selected to host students who are also randomly allocated. The competition to be infused into the Singapore education system is not on a school level, but on a pupil level. Singaporean and international students will compete for scarce educational rewards and honour, e.g. places in prestigious extra-curricular programmes such as the Science Research Programme[2], pupil rankings within each school, tertiary education places, etc. In so doing, using Chua’s (2005) words, ‘foreign bright sparks (will) help kids here shine’.

· The annual value of the voucher would be 8,000 Singapore dollars in secondary school, and 13,000 Singapore dollars in junior college. These sums are approximately fifty percent higher than the annual recurrent expenditure[3], to take into account additional resources that schools may need to employ, such as in English language courses, etc. The voucher would be pegged to the retail price index to maintain its real value.

· Upon completion of pre-university schooling, there are no restrictions or bonds placed on the international students. They will be free to apply for Singapore universities, return to their home countries, use their Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ Level qualifications as a stepping stone in their applications for Australian, British, etc, tertiary institutions.


Section C

Having briefly introduced the concept of vouchers as well as the idea behind and features of SIPS, this Section will deal with the likely impacts of the proposed voucher system on Singapore: whether the stated aims are likely to be fulfilled and how efficiency and social justice elements as described in Part 1 are influenced.

The first aim of SIPS is to increase choice of educational schooling for bright young students from developing countries. Given that Singapore has a good reputation for schooling, with good results in international academic benchmark tests such as the Trends in Mathematics and Sciences Study 2003[4] (Gonzales et al., 2004), and that there is high and growing demand for education from countries such as India and China (Lim, 2003), it is very probable that the target of 500 voucher recipients would be easily reached. This would mean that SIPS is welcomed by the target recipients and that its financial aid allows for their preferences for Singaporean schooling to be met. In this sense, both the first and the fourth aims of SIPS may be simultaneously achieved.

However, other equity issues abound. For example, given the English language aptitude criterion and no explicit income criterion, one might expect that a likely correlation between wealth and proficiency in English would mean that poorer applicants would be at a relative disadvantage. The English language criterion should be deemed necessary to facilitate effective learning and to promote an efficient education. In this conflict between efficiency and equity, equity is traded away for efficiency. Furthermore, any perceived penalising of the richer to advantage the poorer goes against the grain of a society and educational system formally based on meritocracy[5] (MOE, 2004).

Whether competitive forces can or have improved efficiency in education has been extensively debated, but a broad survey of the literature seems to indicate that there are efficiency gains. For example, open enrolment has been associated with improvements in pupil attainment in the US (Clewell and Joy, 1990). Also, in England, the percentage of pupils with good GCSE grades has been increasing substantially since the introduction of market based reforms through the 1988 Education Reform Act (Bradley & Taylor, 2000). However, one should be mindful that correlation does not indicate causation, and the efficiency gains in England, as expressed in examination grades, might well be imaginary, since the replacement of the GCE and the CSE with an arguably easier, coursework based GCSE in 1986, and the abolishment of norm-referencing in 1987 (Gorard & Taylor, 2001) render grade inflation as a more plausible reason than the introduction of quasi-vouchers. Studies (Feinstein & Symons, 1999; Robertson & Symons, 2003) have found a strong causative link between peer groups and educational attainment as well. This suggests that the probability that the introduction of good foreign pupils, which may be represented as an injection of a peer group, will improve educational outcomes is very high. Therefore, aim two, that of improving internal efficiency in Singapore schools may be expected to be achieved too.

The impact on external efficiency and Barr’s (2004) vertical efficiency might well be different. Concerns about crowding out, i.e. that the Singaporean quasi-voucher displaces private expenditure on the part of international students, suggest that some of the financial resources expended on SIPS might be more efficiently used if channelled to alternative uses within the educational system or the wider economy. Vertical efficiency may be deemed to be conceded when SIPS quasi-vouchers leak to richer rather than poorer international students. To take income into account for these reasons during the selection process would compromise Singapore’s meritocratic principles. However, it is probable that the random allocation of recipients to schools would deter more well-off parents because they are perhaps risk averse and their ‘class strategies’ (Ball, 2003) to maximise educational outcomes for their children would probably be to pay for a guaranteed place in a top ranked school. As such, both external efficiency and vertical efficiency may not be seriously threatened.

Some voucher recipients may return to their home countries upon graduation, or go on to other countries for further studies. Those who stay, however, would add on to the pool of talented labour supply in Singapore, thereby fulfilling the third aim of SIPS.

Given that policy is multidimensional, that education policies interact with other policies in other fields and that policy implementation is never straightforward, policies like SIPS may well be expected to have intended as well as unintended results (Taylor et al, 1997). For example, the ideas and objectives behind favourable treatment of international talent may be sound, but the implementation may be such that these objectives themselves are not achieved and that pernicious effects abound (Young PAP), 2005).

For instance, the government has long been treating foreign students favourably by doling out generous scholarship packages and among some Singaporeans, this has been an issue of discontent, which has been acknowledged by the government (Young PAP, 2004). There are fears that foreigners are crowding out scarce places in tertiary education and the job market. Some are also concerned that international students are keeping to themselves socially, in which case mutual goodwill and social cohesion between Singaporeans and these foreigners might not be fostered. There are myriad reasons for this, and culture differences such as the prevalence of a localised English language, ‘Singlish’ infused with Chinese, Malay and Indian words and grammar (Rubdy, 2001), might play a part (Hoon, 2003). More grating to disgruntled members of the public though, is the existence of a few foreign students who ‘actually think that Singaporeans are generally stupid and that the foreigners are so badly needed that it is all right to display their attitudes and voice their displeasure with little gratitude to Singapore’ (Young PAP, 2005). Singapore to these foreigners is just a place to get the necessary qualifications as a stepping stone for freer and greener pastures in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

In the implementation of SIPS, public relations with recipient countries should also be managed well, to avert feelings and accusations that Singapore is poaching scarce high ability individuals and depriving them of a skilled workforce, much as many developing countries have charged Britain of unfairly taking their teachers, doctors and nurses (Hall, 2004). Otherwise, the goodwill and regional cohesion as desired in the fifth aim of SIPS would not be realised.


Section D

Section D will endeavour to design an economics-based empirical study to test primarily for desired potential outcomes, as outlined in Section B and C. The following issues will also be discussed: the choice of randomised experimental design over a non-randomised quasi-experiment design, as well as the case for a sociological review to augment the economics study.

Choosing between an experimental design and a quasi-experimental design is hardly uncontroversial. Each has its advantages and its disadvantages, and it is only after some deliberation that one is selected over the other. Key in this selection is the issue of causality. Establishing causal relationships is at the core of explanatory research design and it is not easy to establish that one event causes another mainly because it is difficult to observe an event actually causing change in another (Hage and Meeker, 1988). Correlation between two events is insufficient, and any assertion that correlation reflects a causal relationship must make sense at three levels: the time order, the capability of the dependent variable to change and the theoretical plausibility (de Vaus, 2001).

Randomisation, according to Baker (2000), generally makes experimental designs more robust. Given large enough sample sizes, the random assignment of the experimental intervention amongst eligible subjects creates comparable treatment and controls that are statistically equivalent to each other. Therefore, control groups, thus generated, serve as ‘perfect counterfactuals’ (Baker, 2000) and will be free of the selection bias problem permeating most evaluations. With these ‘perfect counterfactuals’, interpreting results becomes simple, since the impact of the intervention on outcomes can be measured directly by the difference between the means of the treatment and the control groups. However, despite the theoretical appeal of experimental designs, there are in practice a number of problems. Primary among them is the question of ethics. Randomisation may rightly be considered unethical when it denies otherwise eligible members of the population simply for the sake of academics’ ‘scientific credibility’. A hypothetical extreme example might be the denial of primary education in a Third World country, which could be a serious handicap to basic literacy, health and economic capabilities, perhaps in order to evaluate the returns of primary schooling. Other problems include the political difficulty in trying to provide the experimental intervention to some but not others, especially when it is deemed to be unfair as well as the administrative problem of ensuring randomization in practice. (Doolittle et al, 2001)

Quasi-experimental designs generate comparison groups that, at least in observed characteristics, resemble the treatment groups, by employing econometric tools such as instrumental variables (Baker, 2000). The core benefit of such designs is that they only need to draw upon existing data (after the programme undergoing research has been implemented), and are therefore usually quicker and cheaper to carry out. However, since the method is less robust statistically, the results derived from natural experiments are often less reliable. The econometric tools necessary to generate unbiased comparison groups also require hideously complicated statistics and mathematics, with no guarantee that the bias can be fully removed.

Upon weighing the pros and cons, an experimental design is chosen, for its statistical reliability and relative simplicity, over the quasi-experimental approach. Table 1 below outlines the study of efficiency.

SIPS: Experimental Design To Evaluate Efficiency
Table 1 here

The experimental design would be used to determine whether internal efficiency has been improved with the introduction of SIPS. As expressed in Part 1, while efficiency concepts may be straightforward, operationalising them in education is not, primarily since inputs and outputs are typically difficult to measure or even identify. In this study, national examination results will be used as a proxy for educational outputs, but the limits of such an indicator such as that it arguably only measures narrowly defined academic outcomes, or that testing can be methodologically flawed (Mayo, 1959) must be acknowledged. Moreover, a proper measurement of efficiency should involve not just the outputs and benefits of education in isolation, but also the inputs and costs (Levin & McEwan, 2001). Therefore, the results of the study can only serve as a guide. Furthermore, the sample size is relatively small, but simple regression analysis could be brought in to further ensure that schools that are randomly chosen do not by chance share particular characteristics, such as being single-sex, which could bias the results.

The take-up rate of available places each year may serve as an, albeit admittedly crude, indicator, for the success or failure of SIPS to achieve its choice, labour supply and equity aims. They may be deemed to have been realised if all 500 places available are fully taken up each year. Revealed preference theory (Samuelson, 1938) might then suggest that education in Singapore is a desired opportunity and choice for bright young foreign talent, who might otherwise not be willing or able to afford it. 500 voucher recipients each year implies an annual potential increase of 500 per annum to Singapore’s labour supply. That financial benefits are going to recipients from poorer developing countries and who deserve it may be viewed as inherently equitable and socially just.

Studying the impact of SIPS from only a macro-scale economics perspective and using only experimental designs and fancy econometrics may not give a full picture. There is, perhaps rightly, a case for micro level sociological, ethnographic work, which rely primarily on exhaustive examination of individual cases. The core benefit of case studies is that contextual information is mined, which allows for greater understanding of causal processes (de Vaus, 2001). Studies, such as those by Gillborn and Youdell (2001), showing the emergence of what they call an ‘educational triage’[6] that compromises equity in order to boost ‘efficiency’, from the market based reforms of the 1988 Education Reform Act, also exposes phenomena and behaviour which are not easily captured at a macro level or by just looking at aggregated data. Furthermore, sociologists are arguably better placed than economists to study the impact on public goodwill and social cohesion, i.e. to determine whether the fifth aim, the target of enhancing relations with other developing countries has been reached, perhaps through the use of interviews and surveys to ascertain the attitudes that the recipients of SIPS and their parents develop towards Singapore and Singaporeans.

Upon conclusion of this study, policy-makers may use the results as an indicative tool to deliberate upon the future of the SIPS programme: whether it should be extended or contracted, how the features may be modified, etc, in order to further its existing and additional aims. Similar studies should be carried out on a regular basis to ensure the continued relevance of SIPS. Such future studies should attempt to refine and extend indicators of efficiency, equity and other impacts, desired and undesired, expected and otherwise, of SIPS.


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Levin, H. (2001). ‘Studying privatisation in education’ In Levin. H. (Ed) Privatising education: can the marketplace deliver choice, efficiency, equity and social cohesion?, Oxford: Westview Press

Levin, H. & McEwan, P. (2001). Cost-effectiveness analysis: methods and applications, London: SAGE

Lim, R. (2003). Speech by Mr Raymond Lim, Minister of State for Trade & Industry and Foreign Affairs, at the launch of Singapore Education International (SEI) on 16 October 2003, Ministry of Trade and Industry website http://www.mti.gov.sg/

Lipsey, R. (1989). An introduction to positive economics, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 7th edition.

Lockheed, M. & Hanushek, E. (1994). Concepts of educational efficiency and effectiveness, Human Resources Development and Operations Policy Working Papers.

Mayo, S. (1959). ‘Testing and the use of test results’, Review of Educational Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, 5-14

MOE, (2004). Desired outcomes of education, Singapore Ministry of Education website, http://www.moe.gov.sg/corporate/desired_outcomes3.htm

Musgrave, R. (1959). The theory of public finance, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Pettit, P. (1980). Judging justice: an introduction to contemporary political philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rawls, J. (1972). A theory of justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Robbins, L. (1968). The theory of economic development in the history of economic thought, London: Maxmillan.

Robbins, L. (1935). An essay on the nature and significance of economic science, London: Macmillan.

Robertson, D. & Symons, J. (2003). ‘Do peer groups matter? Peer group versus schooling effects on academic achievement’, Economica, Vol. 70, Issue 277 31-53.

Rubdy, R. (2001). ‘Creative destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement’, World Englishes, Vol. 20, No. 3 341-355

Samuelson, P. (1938). A note on the pure theory of consumer’s behaviour, Economica, Vol. 5.

Taylor, S. Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. and Henry, M. (1997). Educational policy and the politics of change, London: Routledge.

de Vaus, D. (2001). Research design in social research, London: Sage.

Weisbrod, B. (1962). External Benefits of Public Education: An Economic Analysis, New Jersey: Princeton University Press

Weisbrod, B. (1969). ‘Collective action and the distribution of income: a conceptual approach’. In Joint Economic Committee (Ed), The analysis and evaluation of public expenditures, Washington: US Government Printing Office.

West, E., (1996). Education vouchers in practice and principle: a world survey, Human Capital Development and Operations Policy Working Paper

West, A., Hind, A. & Pennell, H., (2004). ‘School admissions and "selection" in comprehensive schools: policy and practice’, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 30, No. 3 347-369.

Witte, J., (1998). ‘The Milwaukee voucher experiment’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 20, No. 4 229-251

Young People’s Action Party (PAP), (2004). Youth dialogue with Minister Tharman, http://www.youngpap.org.sg/

Young PAP, (2005). Ready for the world?, http://www.youngpap.org.sg/


Appendix 1: Singapore Education System: Stylised Facts and Figures

Singapore:
The total population of Singapore is 4.2 million, of which 3.5 million are Singapore residents (citizens or permanent residents).
Land area is 700 square kilometres, and population density is 6000 per square km.
The four major racial groups in Singapore are Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others: 76 percent of Singapore residents are Chinese; 14 percent are Malay; 8 percent are Indian; 2 percent are Others.
The official languages in Singapore are: English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay. The language of instruction in schools is English. For historical and regional political reasons, the national language is Malay.
The five major religions in Singapore, in descending order are: Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam and Hinduism.
Approximately 85 percent of Singapore residents stay in government built Housing Development Board (HDB) flats.
The median and mode of household income is in the 3000 and 3999 Singapore dollars per month bracket. (1000 to 1330 British pounds)
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2002 was 112.4 billion US Dollars at purchasing power parity.
GDP in 2002 was 27,000 US Dollars at purchasing power parity. (In comparison, Britain’s GDP in 2002 was 26,500 US Dollars at purchasing power parity.)
Government consumption in 2002 was 11.9 percent of GDP. (In comparison, Britain’s was 20.1 percent.)

Structural Aspects of Schools:

Typically, Singaporean students go for 6 years of primary school, 4 years of secondary school and then, 2 years of junior college.
Approximately 50,000 students enter primary schools every year.
Approximately 50,000 students enter secondary schools every year.
Approximately 12,000 students go on from secondary schools to junior colleges every year.
In 2003, there were 162 secondary schools and 16 junior colleges.
A child in Singapore undergoes at least 10 years of education, of which 6 are compulsory and spent in primary school, and the other 4 is spent in secondary school.
Students take the Cambridge-Singapore GCE ‘O’ Levels at the end of secondary school, and the ‘A’ Levels at the end of junior college.
The school year starts on the 2nd of January, and consists of 4 terms of 10 weeks each.
Ability based streaming takes place at the ages of 9 (selection for the Gifted Education Stream), 10 (into three different language streams), and 12 (at the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) for separation into the Special, Express and Normal streams).
Subject based streaming takes place at the ages of 14 and 16, for the Science and the Arts streams.
Students apply for secondary schools and junior colleges through a centralised administrative applications process, and allocation is based almost entirely on the PSLE and ‘O’ Level results at the end of primary school and secondary school respectively: the higher one’s scores, the more likely one is to get into the school of one’s choice.
Most students in secondary schools go to the Express stream.
There are four types of schools: Government, Government-Aided, Autonomous and Independent, in increasing levels of autonomy with respect to school administration, curriculum, staff deployment and fee setting.
In 2003, 65 percent of secondary school students went to Government schools.
In 2003, 13 percent of secondary school students went to Government Aided schools
In 2003, 16 percent of secondary school students went to Autonomous schools.
In 2003, 6 percent of secondary school students went to Independent schools.
In 2002, the racial composition of those eligible to enter secondary school was: Malay (18 percent), Chinese (73 percent), Indian (8 percent) and Others (1 percent).
New educational programmes are being instituted in Singapore, at both top schools and new specialist schools, e.g. the Singapore Sports School (opened Jan 2004) and the National University of Singapore High School of Mathematics and Science (modelled on the New York Bronx High School and opened Jan 2005). However, these programmes tend to be only accessible to the top students in each cohort.
League tables exist, and from 2004, the new School Achievement Tables not only bands schools together based on academic achievement (instead of exact academic scores), but also highlights value-addedness in academic outcomes, as well as non-academic domains, such as physical health and staff well-being.
To allow for informed choice on the part of parents and students, the following will be made publicly available: revised league tables (as above), web-based interactive system to generate school lists based on parameters chosen by parents / prospective students, school websites, honour rolls of school achievements, etc.
Top schools are encouraged by the Ministry of Education to attract academic high achievers from neighbouring countries in ASEAN, as well as from India and China, so that ties of friendship may be built, leading to ‘mutually beneficial networks’ (Mathi, 1996).

Finance:

The annual budget of Ministry of Education is about 6 billion Singapore dollars (2 billion British pounds), which represents about 4 percent of GDP.
In 2003, annual expenditure per student in secondary school was about 6500 Singapore dollars (2200 British pounds), while annual expenditure per student in junior college was about 11200 dollars (3700 pounds).
In 2003, annual recurrent expenditure per student in secondary school was about 5200 Singapore dollars (1700 British pounds), while annual recurrent expenditure per student in junior college was about 8500 Singapore dollars (2800 pounds).
Students at primary level do not pay school fees, but have to pay small sums of ‘miscellaneous’ fees to cover equipment and special programmes beneficial for students.
Students at secondary level and junior college pay heavily subsidised schools fees, as well as ‘miscellaneous’ fees.
All schools, whether Government, Government-Aided, Autonomous or Independent, are largely tax funded by the state.

Figure 1: Overview of Singapore Education Structure here
Figure 2: Desired Outcomes of Education here
Figure 3: Desired Intermediate Outcomes of Education here

Sources:
Economist Intelligence Unit, (2003). Singapore Country Profile, http://www.economist.com/countries/Singapore
Economist Intelligence Unit, (2004). Britain Country Profile, http://www.economist.com/countries/Britain
Mathi, B., (1996). ‘Top schools should take in bright foreign students, says Lee Yock Suan’, Straits Times, Singapore: SPH.
Ministry of Education, (2003). Shaping tomorrow today, Singapore: Ministry of Education
Ministry of Education, (2003). Education in Singapore, Singapore: Ministry of Education
Ministry of Education, (2003). Education statistics digest, Singapore: Ministry of Education
Ministry of Education, (2004). A Broader Picture of Schools' Performance in Academic and Non-Academic Domains, Singapore: Ministry of Education
Shanmugaratnam, T. et al., (2002). Report of the junior college / upper secondary education review committee, Singapore: Junior College / Upper Secondary Education Review Committee.
Statistics Singapore, (2004). Yearbook of Statistics Singapore, Singapore: Statistics Singapore
Statistics Singapore, (2000). Singapore Population, Singapore: Statistics Singapore.
Tan, J. (1998). ‘The marketisation of schools in Singapore: policies and implications’, International Review of Education, 44-1


Appendix 2: ASEAN Scholarships

Aim:
è To provide opportunities to the young people of ASEAN to develop their potential and equip them with skills that will enable them to confidently step into the new millennium.

On offer to:
è Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) nationals of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, The Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam

Tenable for:
è ASEAN Secondary Three Scholarships tenable for four years, leading the award of the Singapore-Cambridge ‘O’ Levels after two years, and the ‘A’ Levels at the end of the 4 years.
è In selected secondary schools and junior colleges
è Renewal of scholarship annually, subject to satisfactory performance by the scholar

Stylised Applications Processes:
Procedure A
è For nationals of the following countries: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam
è Students are nominated / endorsed for the scholarship by the Ministry of Education in their home nation.
è Short-listed applicants undergo an interview and a selection test for aptitude, especially proficiency in the English language.

Procedure B:
è For nationals of the following countries: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.
è Interested students apply for the scholarship with the Singapore Ministry of Education.
è Short-listed applicants undergo an interview and a selection test for aptitude, especially proficiency in the English language.

Scholarship Awards:
è Living allowance
è Settling-in allowance
è Economy class flight allowance to Singapore, and back to home country at the end of 4 years
è Waiver of school and examination fees
è Subsidised medical benefits and accident insurance cover
è No bond attached to scholarship


Source:
Ministry of Education, (2004). ASEAN Scholarships, http://www.moe.edu.gov.sg/
[1] Otherwise known as ‘allocative efficiency’ (Levin 1976), (Barr 2004)
[2] The Science Research Programme is jointly organised by the National University of Singapore and the Ministry of Education and is to allow top students in junior colleges the opportunity to experience science research first hand. Guided by professional scientists and engineers, participants undertake a six-month project, which they present at the Singapore Youth Science Congress. Particularly successful projects have also been presented at prestigious international conferences and published in top international journals. http://www.science.nus.edu.sg/schools/srp/ for more information.
[3] Please see Appendix 1
[4] Singapore had top results in both mathematics and science, at both 4th grade and 8th grade in 2003.
[5] Advancement in society is primarily based on individual ability or achievement, disregarding wealth or social position
[6] The ‘educational triage’ acts ‘systematically to neglect certain pupils while directing additional resources to those deemed most likely to benefit’ in terms of the externally judged standards. For example, pupils at the ‘borderline’ between a C and a D grade get additional attention, because such emphasis ensures the greatest impact on the schools’ league table position.

UEP Exam: Impact of Quasi-market Reforms in Education

“Ten years ago 95 percent of pupils in Country A attended public schools to which they were allocated according to their place of residence. The government enacted educational reforms, which enabled parents to choose any state school for their child. Schools became funded mainly on a per pupil basis and were required to manage their own budgets. Schools were permitted to borrow from financial institutions. National tests were introduced and schools’ results published.

Explain (using theoretical arguments and empirical evidence) what you would expect to have been the impact of these reforms on the efficiency and equity of the school system after 10 years.”

In 1988, the monolithic Education Reform Act (ERA) was passed in England with the grand aims of raising standards, extending choice and producing a better educated Britain (Baker, 1987). Through this act, market based reforms remarkably similar to those in Country A as stated above were instituted, in the hope that market forces would inject a new vitality into the system. In this essay, the economic concepts of efficiency and equity will first be briefly explained, before going on to explain theoretically, and with empirical evidence from the ERA how the reforms above might be expected to influence the efficiency and equity of the school system.

First of all, efficiency refers to a relationship between inputs and outputs, and is achieved by either a) maximising the level of outputs given inputs, or b) minimising the level of inputs given outputs. When a situation is said to be inefficient, this means that the desired outputs could be obtained with less inputs, or that the means utilised should be able to produce more of the desired ends.

Equity is concerned with fairness, and considers a situation fair if individuals’ outcomes are proportionate only to inputs that they control (Konow, 2003). A distinction may be made between horizontal equity and vertical equity (Musgrave 1959). The former refers to the equal treatment of equals, i.e. if Pupil A and Pupil B are equally able, then they should both have the same chances of going to the same school and getting similar educational attainments, regardless of gender, race and socio-economic class, etc. The latter refers to the unequal treatment of unequals. It may be considered vertically equitable for a pupil with special educational needs to be allocated more funding for his education.

As mentioned earlier, the reforms in Country A have been remarkably similar to that of the English ERA. In 1988, approximately 95 % of English pupils went to state schools. Open enrolment allowed parents to choose, within limits, schools for their children. Formula funding meant that schools were to be funded primarily based on age-weighted pupil numbers. Local management of schools gave schools the autonomy to manage a large proportion of a delegated budget. A national curriculum was introduced, along with assessment tests, the results of which were to be published and made available to parents. All these reforms served to form a schooling quasi-market in England, and would have formed a quasi-market in Country A as well.

Theoretically, the quasi-market in Country A may be hypothesized to boost both allocative and productive efficiency. Greater parental choice may increase allocative efficiency by allowing for parents to send their children to the ‘right school’, in so doing maximising satisfaction for each consumer (Bradley & Taylor, 2002). Delegated funding and local management of schools allow for local managers to make use of local knowledge, cut costs and maximise outputs given inputs, in so doing increasing productive efficiency. Indeed, Bradley and Taylor (2002), using data from the Schools Census and School Performance Tables, found strong evidence that the quasi-market has led to a substantial improvement in both allocative and productive efficiency, as measured by a school’s exam performance, and staff productivity (exam successes per full time employed staff) respectively. Gorard and Taylor (2002) concluded that greater improvements in GCSE results in the state sector as compared to the private sector are attributable to the market reforms of 1988. Also, headteachers have reported that, in resource management, efficiency has been encouraged by its delegation to school level (Levacic, 1995).

However, can some of these numbers be taken at face value? Firstly, are the improvements in test scores genuine, or are teachers and pupils simply getting better at taking tests? If politicians and bureaucrats are able to massage unemployment figures, are they not also able to manipulate and influence the grading of examination scripts? Also, there is the issue of causality. Are the market reforms of the ERA really responsible for improving grades? One might opine that the following are more plausible causes: the replacement of the GCE examination with an arguably easier GCSE 2 years before ERA or the abolition of norm referencing just one year before ERA. All these uncertainties make it less clear whether the empirical evidence really supports the hypothesis that efficiency would be improved. Also, measures of efficiency in most studies have been only output-based, and there is a clear need to further consider the impact of the quasi-market on costs. Otherwise, findings on efficiency should be regarded as only preliminary and partial.

Critics of marketisation in educational systems point out that there would be a trade-off between efficiency and equity, and a detrimental effect on educational equality. They predict that markets and competition would lead to greater social polarisation between and within schools: middle class children will be concentrated in ‘popular’ effective schools, while working class parents will be in declining ‘sink’ schools. One of the major ways that equity might be threatened is the phenomena of cream-skimming. Student performance in national testing has been shown to be largely dependent on socio-economic background (Willms 1986; Coleman 1966) and a school may be tempted to maximise its league table position, demand for its places and therefore its level of funding by maximising the examination results of its students at minimum costs by cream skimming students from higher socio-economic class (Glennerster, 1991). Fears about cream-skimming in England have been real. Schools have been shown to seek out and select particular types of pupils, e.g. those from the middle class, based on their abilities to boost average test scores, at the expense of the ‘less able’, such as children with Special Educational Needs (Gewirtz et al., 1995; West et al., 2004).

Equity might be threatened because of the pressure on schools to restructure teaching in order to attract ‘desirable’ school children. Such a restructuring would include ‘setting’, which is popular with middle class parents, but has been shown to negatively impact other groups. Ball (1981) found that teachers for bottom sets tend to be less experienced and junior, and pupils in bottom sets are predominantly black and white working class, while those in top sets may be ‘uniformly white’ (Gillborn & Gipps, 1996). Equity might also be threatened if parents are differentially capable in navigating the educational marketplace. Ball et al (1996) suggest that ‘privileged’ choosers, such as middle class parents, have the cultural capital and educational knowledge to come up trumps in the local schooling market, at the expense of working class ‘disconnected’ or ‘semi-skilled’ choosers.

Most studies on the equity effects of the ERA, including those mentioned above, are qualitative and based on a limited number of case studies. Because of their small sample size and lack of consistent and longitudinal quantitative measures of social polarisation or equity, their results cannot be easily generalised or extrapolated to Country A without taking into account the differing contexts.

Rather surprisingly, when Gorard and Fitz (1998) used data on the eligibility for free schools meals as an indicator of poverty to examine the spread of eligible pupils across English secondary schools, reported an initial increase in segregation in the first few years after the introduction of the ERA, but falls in segregation thereafter. The net result after 10 years has been less polarisation and greater social equality, which contradicts the findings of many sociologists such as Ball, Reay and Gewirtz. Perhaps Tooley (1995) is right then, that markets in giving working class parents the option of ‘exit’, allow them to vote with their feet, to leave poorer schools and to make their way to better schools.

To sum up, theory and evidence seem to suggest that with the introduction of the quasi market through the assortment of reforms set in place in Country A, efficiency may be expected to be improved at the expense of equity, though this is by no means certain, as there are credible theories and evidence to the contrary as well as nagging doubts over causality. Work has to be done in Country A itself, instead of simply deducing the effects of the reforms from theory or extrapolating from studies done elsewhere.

UEP Exam: Contrasts and Continuity in English Education Policy

“What contrasts and continuities do you observe between the education policies of New Labour governments in the UK and those of the preceding Conservative administrations?”

In 1997, New Labour, with ‘Education, education, education’ as its top priorities, won an unexpected landslide victory, which brought an end to 18 years of Tory government. Since then, Labour has been in power for 8 years and from recent opinion polls, looks set for another four years. In this essay, the New Labour ideology of the post-Thatcherite ‘Third Way’ will firstly be explained, and compared with the New Right under the Thatcher and Major administrations, as well as with the Old Left ideals. Then, continuities, as highlighted by Chitty (2004) between New Labour education policies and those under the preceding Tory government will be detailed. It will be considered whether the Third Way in education is largely mere rhetoric and little different from Thatcherism in substance. As such, if it is unclear whom New Labour actually represents, and what New Labour really believes in, then as Driver and Martell (1998) question, ‘why should voters choose it rather than the Tories except on the grounds of leadership and good management?[1]’

On coming to power, New Labour promised neither the ‘ruthless free-for-all’ approach of the neo-liberals, nor the ‘stifling statism’ of Old Labour, but a pragmatic ‘third way’, whereby policies are put forward on a ‘what works’ basis rather than being driven by any one ideological approach. The ‘third way’ is the middle way between alternatives: capitalism and socialism, market and state, old left and new right (Gamble and Kelly, 1998). According to Giddens, key characteristics of the Old Left philosophy include collectivism, strong egalitarianism, pervasive state involvement in social and economic life, comprehensive welfare, confined role for markets, etc, while that of the New Right include market fundamentalism, traditional nationalism and acceptance of inequality. The ‘third way’ is not to be solely part of either one philosophy, and one would expect that a ‘third way’ package of reforms would encompass previously competing strategies from opposite ends of the political spectrum. If indeed New Labour has taken up the ‘third way’, then it would well be expected that it would continue with and further those Tory policies that it considers to be pragmatic and desirable, while initiating Old Left reforms that work.

Indeed, in many ways, New Labour has chosen to continue with Conservative policy, with much talk of choice and diversity, ladders and escalators (Chitty, 2004) and commitment to many Tory education policies, including those pushing forth for marketisation, and greater accountability.

A strand common to both Tory and New Labour educational policy is that of marketisation. Through the 1988 Education Reform Act, the Tories sought to erect or reinforce a hierarchical system subject both to market forces and control from the Centre. Choice and diversity was to be enhanced by the creation of new types of schools: city technology colleges and grant-maintained schools. The 1988 legislation introduced Local Management of Schools, whereby schools were empowered to manage their own finances and their day-to-day administration. Schools were also to be funded on a formula basis: largely according to the pupil number and then particular pupil characteristics / needs. All these reforms meant that a quasi market and quasi vouchers were being introduced into the state education sector. New Labour did not reverse the marketisation process. The quasi-market set up by the Tories has survived 8 years of Labour government. Schools are still funded today according to a formula based primarily on pupil numbers. Budgets are delegated directly to the schools. Schools have autonomy in their management of staff. Indeed, it may be argued to have carried marketisation further, for example via increasing the types of schools, and pupil numbers who go to such new schools (Chitty, 2004). When the second Secretary of State for education resigned in 2002, she left behind an incredibly diverse landscape of schools: independent schools, city academies, specialist schools in art, music, sports, enterprise and technology, beacon schools, etc.

Pushing for greater accountability is another feature of both the Conservative administration of 1979-1997 and the New Labour government. Under the Tory ERA, accountability was to be ensured with the introduction of the national curriculum, implementation of national testing and publication of league tables. New Labour has actually increased the emphasis on accountability. According to the Secondary Heads Association (2003) headteachers are presently accountable to as many as 21 different bodies, which include parents, governing bodies, Ofsted, Children Protection Officers, etc. Also, greater accountability may be argued to have taken the form of an obsession with targets and performance indicators (Bell, 2003).

Blunkett as shadow education secretary at the 1995 Labour Party conference promised ‘no selection’, which would be a sharp break with Tory policy. However, this promise was to be watered down to be ‘no further selection’ in 1997, which had radically different meanings and implications. For example, where the former would signify an end to grammar schools, the latter guaranteed their continued existence. Even the promise of ‘no further selection’ itself does not appear to be kept. In the first education White Paper produced by the New Labour government just 67 days after being voted in, the Tory policy of ‘selection by specialisation’ (Chitty, 2004), was given support and extended. Legislation was laid in place to allow schools to select pupils by aptitude in the subjects that particular schools specialise in. This was despite vast evidence showing that with the exception of music and art, testing in most subjects can only reveal a general ability to learn, which has a strong relationship with class characteristics. ‘Selection by specialisation’ therefore suggested that working class children were in danger of being ‘selected-out’ of specialist schools, and that educational disparities would widen.

Admittedly, there have been outright reversals of Tory policy, such as the abolition of the Assisted Places Scheme and nursery vouchers, and the phasing out of grant-maintained schools operating outside LEA control. However, these were few, and proved to be early exceptions to the rule. In terms of the balance between the Old Left and the New Right, there can be little doubt that the ‘middle way’ is heavily skewed to the right. As Docking (2000) argues, both Tory philosophy and Tory measures survived virtually intact, and for all the rhetoric, the Blair administration’s policies for education have fundamentally been those of the Conservatives under Thatcher and Major.

However, such an imbalance between the Old Left and the New Right in the ‘third way’ does not necessarily mean that New Labour is simply Thatcherism II, nor as depicted in a cartoon on the cover of Chitty and Dunford (1999), that Blair is Thatcher’s best student. Instead, it could arguably mean that New Labour deems that the New Right policies largely are what works, and that the Old Left policies are outdated and not pragmatic. On the other hand, Power in 1999 pointed out that it is difficult to identify the evidence on which New Labour’s pragmatism is based, and it might be tempting to agree with her suggestion that New Labour’s programme is based on a combination of ‘what is popular’ and ‘what is easy’ rather than ‘what works’, if one forgets that since then New Labour has taken the decidedly difficult and unpopular decisions to go into Iraq, go ahead with top up fees as well as the foundation hospital reforms.

To sum up, it appears that the education policies of New Labour have been largely similar to and an extension of those of the preceding Major and Thatcher administrations. As such, it is not quite clear whether a new ‘third way’ has been manifested in education. If New Labour is indeed Thatcherism in disguise and Tory at heart, then perhaps voters might have to look to other political parties such as the Lib Democrats for an alternative to the New Right.

[1] Given that recent opinion polls have also shown that Blair has lost the confidence and respect of the electorate, if New Labour loses the up-coming election, it would be on Blair’s account.

Educational Equity in Peru (& Colombia)

Economic Value of Education

Course Assignment 2

Select a country that you wish to study for this assignment.
1. Set out the criteria that you would advocate should be used to assess the equity of the educational system of your country and justify your selection of criteria.
2. Collect and present data on some of the equity criteria you have selected in Part 1. Assess what the evidence indicates about the equity of the education system and how adequate this evidence is.

Country Selected: Peru (& Colombia)

Weijie Ng
MA Economics of Education

“Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity.”
(Selden, J 1847)

In Section A, equity, with distinctions made between different conceptions of equity, will first be broadly discussed. Subsequently, several types of dispersal measures will be introduced in Section B and, it will be argued that among them, the Gini coefficient is most appropriate as a measure of educational equity. Then, in Section C, the Gini coefficient will be used to analyse the equity of the Peruvian school system. It will also be used to calculate equity in a comparator nation, Colombia, in order to give a level of perspective to the Peruvian results. Section D will sum up the results of the analyses, and outline how equity might still be inadequately measured.

Section A: The meaning of equity

Equity, in economics, has two broad meanings. One refers to the capital of firms while the other, of which we are concerned with in this paper, is related to fairness and justice: fairness in dividing the economic pie, justice in accruing both benefits and costs to individuals, etc.

A distinction between horizontal and vertical equity has been made (Musgrave 1959). Horizontal equity means that equals should be treated equally. For example, in education, if all students, regardless of socio-economic background, gender, etc. are deemed to be equal, then horizontal equity might require identical treatment of all of them. Vertical equity means that it may be fair for ‘unequals’ to be treated unequally. Monk (1990) suggested that the division, in modern education, of students into academic and vocational pathways, on the basis of differing needs and aptitudes, can be viewed as one example of vertical equity. Both the equal treatment of equals and the unequal treatment of ‘unequals’ may rightfully be fair, but not the unequal treatment of equals nor the equal treatment of unequals (Musgrave 1959). Avoiding the latter two or indeed, the identification of inequity, is unfortunately hardly simple. A major problem lies in the definitions of ‘equals’ and ‘unequals’. In Monk’s (1990) example, students with different needs and ability are deemed to be unequal, and therefore, differential and unequal treatment is justifiable. However, others may deem that ALL students, regardless of any background factors such as need and ability, are equal. Accordingly, unequal treatment of equal students would neither be horizontally nor vertically equitable.

There is also a difference between ideas of procedural and distributional equity. Procedural equity[1] may be defined as the correct and uniform adherence to and application of rules in such a way that shows consistency and even-handedness (Barry, 1990). These rules may be formal or informal, explicit or implicit, and the processes involved in their application may be covert or overt. Procedural equity is linked to ‘equality of educational opportunity’, which ‘exists when a child’s opportunity does not depend upon either his parents’ economic circumstances or his location within the state’ (Wise, 1967). The processes of cream-skimming for more able pupils through the clandestine use of religious interviews (West & Hind, 2003) at the expense of the ‘less able’ working class, and the institutional racism inherent in ‘tiering’ which discriminate against black students (Gillborn 2001) reduces the opportunities available to some groups relative to others are examples of procedural inequity. On the other hand, distributional equity refers to the distribution of both inputs / costs, such as teacher-hours (labour input), expenditure, etc. and outputs / benefits, which in education would include pecuniary benefits from education as well as external benefits (Wolfe, 1995) that are difficult to measure or accrue to education.


Section B: Measuring equity: the methods

Given that there are problems with the identification of equals and ‘unequals’, that inequitable practices may be covert, and that measurement and accrual of expenditures on and benefits of education are difficult, it will perhaps be of no surprise that the measurement of equity is hardly a simple thing. There are plenty of measures that have been used to analyse educational equity, ranging from Gini coefficients to bar chart comparisons and interquartile ranges to desegregation indices, each with a different method of computation and set of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’. When different measures are used and different computations are made, one may expect to arrive at different verdicts. For example, different studies of the English school system after the Education Reform Act of 1988 for example have given different pictures: Gorard & Fitz’s (1998) desegregation index suggested an overall improvement in equity while Noden’s (2000) isolation index showed a consistent decline over the same period.

In this section, a number of equity measures will be critically explored, with the understanding that no one single measure (or perhaps even set of measures) is sufficient in itself as a comprehensive measure of equity. However, the best among them may still serve as an indicator and a rough guide. Later, this indicator will be used in the following Section C to analyse equity in the Peruvian school system.

Where only univariate data, i.e. data for only a single variable such as national test scores, is available, a few statistical measures are useable as an indicator of dispersion and inequality. Range is one of them, and is perhaps the simplest: it involves merely the subtraction of the smallest value from the biggest value. The larger the range, the larger is the disparity and therefore the larger is the inequality. Its simplicity can be a boon because it is very quick and easy to compute. However, since only the two extreme values are taken into account, the range as a measure of dispersion may be skewed easily. Moreover, the range gives little information about the variability between the two extremes.

A more useful measure for univariate date would be the inter-quartile range, which has been used in the OECD Education At A Glance 2004 report. Essentially, to find the inter-quartile range of a sample group, the individuals in the sample have to be first ranked in ascending (or descending) order and divided into four equal groups, each called a quartile. The group with the lowest values is the first quartile, while that of the highest group is the fourth quartile. Then:

Equation here

Just like the range, the larger the inter-quartile range, the larger is the disparity and therefore the larger is the inequality. Because the inter-quartile range does not take into account of the highest and lowest values in the whole sample in its computation, it is less easily influenced by outliers and is therefore arguably more stable and credible as a measure of inequality. Yet, it still does not take into account the variability of values in the middle nor at the extremes (Blalock, 1979).

Yet another measure that can be used for univariate data, and has also been used in Education At A Glance 2003 (OECD, 2003) is that of variance. Variance is ‘a measure of spread in the distribution of a random variable’ (Wooldridge, 2003), and a larger variance indicates less equality. Mathematically, where n refers to the number of samples observed, variance may be expressed as the following:

Equation here


Its core advantage over the first two measures is that it takes into account every single value in the whole sample. Unfortunately, variance is not only influenced by differences in the sample values, but also the scale of the values, which violates the criterion of scale invariance, one of the four criteria that James & Taubber (1985) argued to be required of a good measure of inequality and segregation. For example, a reconfiguration of the unit of measurement that doubles the numerical value of every sample quadruples the variance. Also, variance is still influenced by the presence of outlying values.

When data is richer, and includes information on individual background socio-economic characteristics, multi-group and multivariate measures may be applied. Amongst them is the popular Gini co-efficient[2], which has been used extensively to examine inequalities in income, but not quite so much in education (Thomas et al. 2000). The educational Gini coefficient may be understood using Figure 1. The Lorenz curve shows, for the bottom x% of households, the percentage y% of the educational rewards which they have. The percentage of households is plotted on the x-axis, the percentage of educational rewards on the y-axis. The line of equality shows the position of the Lorenz curve when each household is allocated an equal quantity of educational rewards. Then, the Gini coefficient is the area between the line of perfect equality and the Lorenz curve (Area A), as a percentage of the area under the line of perfect equality (Areas A+B). If the Gini coeefficient is zero, then educational rewards are distributed equally. As the Gini coefficient increases, there is greater inequality. If equality is deemed to be equitable, then there is greater inequity as well.

Figure 1: Illustration of Lorenz curve here


There are other methods of calculating the Gini coefficient, and Thomas et al. (2000) have devised algebraic formula such as the following:

Equation here

(Thomas et al. 2000, page 9)

The Gini coefficient has an edge over other measures of equality, such as variance and relative mean deviation, because it is scale invariant (James & Taubber, 1985) and fulfils Dalton’s (1920) principle of transfers. This principle suggests that measures of inequality should increase whenever educational rewards are transferred from a relatively deprived household to another wealthier one, and therefore has substantial intuitive appeal. However, the Gini coefficient is not without problems. For example, when Lorenz curves cross, the Gini coefficient gives ambiguous results that cannot be easily compared. Also, as Barr (2004) would argue, the Gini coefficient is really a weighted sum of household’s educational rewards, with the weights determined solely, & rather arbitrarily, to be the household’s rank order in the distribution.

There are many other measures of inequality, dispersion and segregation that may be used to analyse educational equity, such as the Theil index (1972), desegregation index (Gorard, 1998), etc. Choice between different measures of inequality can make a difference, even when using the same data. Atkinson (1970) showed that rank ordering of countries by income inequality can differ substantially using different inequality measures. This is not only because the choice between the different measures is a choice between alternative methods of measuring the same thing, but also can be, as Allison (1978) argued, ‘a choice among alternative definitions of inequality’.

It is not the remit of this report to comprehensively detail all available measures of equity, but to set out criteria for the assessment of a national educational system’s equity. Thus far, several measures have been discussed, of which arguably the Gini coefficient has emerged to be the most robust methodologically and is yet still reasonably simple to calculate. Even though it does have its cons, the Gini coefficient may still give a good first approximation of educational equity. Therefore, this will be the measure with which to attain a preliminary analysis of the fairness of the Peruvian education system in Section C.

Section C: Educational equity in Peru (& Colombia)

For the purposes of measuring and comparing equity in the school systems of Peru (and Colombia), Edstats, the database developed and maintained by the Education Group of the Human Development Network (HDNED) of the World Bank[3], has been utilised. Equivalent measurements for Colombia will be in brackets next to those for Peru.

Assuming that each year of formal schooling is worth the same, no matter how old the recipients were when they received the education, or the level of formal schooling, etc., and using a notional formal school years (FSH) as a unit of educational rewards, the following table and Lorenz curve may be derived for adults aged 15-24 in Peru in 1996:

Table 1: Distribution of FSH in relation to households by income [Peru, 1996, 15-24 year-olds] here

Figure 2: Lorenz curve for distribution of FSH in relation to households by income, [Peru, 1996, 15 – 24 year olds] here


To calculate the Gini coefficient, G for this distribution, perhaps the easiest way is to use Figure 2 as a starting point, and calculate the area of the various trapezoids in the diagram:


Area under the line of equality:
½ X Base X Height: ½ X 100 X 100 = 5000

Area under the Lorenz curve:
½ X (Sum of Heights of Triangle & Trapezoids) X Base
= ½ X [100 + 2 (12.72 + 30.28 + 51.65 +75.06)] X 20
= ½ X 439.44 X 20
= 4394.4

G = Area A / (Area A + Area B)
= (5000 – 4394.4) / 5000
= 0.121


From the above calculations, the Gini coefficient for the distribution of formal schooling hours in relation to households by income, for Peruvian (Colombian) 15 – 24 year olds in 1996 is: 0.121 (0.158).

Using similar calculations, the corresponding Gini coefficient for Peruvian (Colombian) above 25 year olds in the same year is: 0.231 (0.248).

Given that primary schooling has been shown to have both higher social and private rates of return to education (Psacharopoulos, 1985), suppose that the value of primary formal schooling hours[4] are adjusted to be 1.5[5] times of any further education thereafter, the distribution of adjusted formal schooling hours will be as follows:

Table 2: Distribution of adjusted FSH in relation to households by income [Peru, 1996, 15–24 year-olds] here

The corresponding Gini coefficient for the distribution of adjusted formal schooling hours in relation to households by income, for Peruvian (Colombian) 15 – 24 year olds in 1996 is: 0.096 (0.128).

Using similar calculations, the corresponding Gini coefficient for adjusted Peruvian (Colombian) above 25 year olds in the same year is: 0.202 (0.220).


Section D: Summing up: Where is there more equity? Really?

From the results in Section C, the Gini coefficients are all closer to 0 than to 1, and one might therefore postulate that the distribution of educational resources is more equal than unequal in both Peru and Colombia. Colombian G values have also been calculated for comparison purposes, and since G is lower in Peru than in Colombia, this implies that the Peruvian school system is more equal across socio-economic class than that of the Colombia, and arguably more equitable. Even when formal schooling hours were re-weighted to take into account a probable higher benefit to primary schooling than post-primary schooling, similar results and conclusions were derived.

Going back to the discussion on equity in Section A, the Gini coefficient is an indicator of horizontal equity, when society deems that it is fair and just for everyone, regardless of family income, to undergo the same number of years of formal schooling, but it actually says little about vertical equity. G may be used to measure whether equals are treated equally but not whether unequals are treated unequally. Also, clearly, the Gini coefficient can only be used to examine what can be observed and evaluate distributional equity, but not procedural equity, which can be both covert and overt, and is moreover difficult to quantify. To examine procedural equity, there is a strong case for micro level sociological, ethnographic work, which relies primarily on exhaustive study of individual cases. The core benefit of case studies is that contextual information is mined, which allows for greater understanding of causal processes (De Vaus, 2001).

More reservations need to be made about the G findings above. Firstly, as Behrman and Birdsall (1983) argue, quantity alone is not enough and quality must be taken into consideration. G probably understates inequalities in both Peru and Colombia, as it is to be expected that the quality of schooling for the richer would be better than that for the poorer. Also, thus far, the trustworthiness of the data has been implicitly relied upon. If politicians and bureaucrats are capable of massaging unemployment figures, why not also educational data?

References:
Allison, PD (1978). ‘Measures of inequality’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, 865-880

Atkinson, AB (1970). ‘On the measurement of inequality’, Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 2, 244-263

Barr, N (2004). Economics of the welfare state 4th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barro, R and Lee, JW (1996). ‘International measures of schooling years and schooling quality’, American Economic Review, Vol. 86 (2), 218-223

Barry, B (1990). Political argument, London: Harvester.

Behrman, J and Birdsall, N (1983). ‘The quality of education. Quantity alone is misleading.’, American Economic Review, Vol. 73, No. 5, 928-946.

Blalock, HM Jnr (1979). Social statistics, Singapore: McGraw-Hill

Dalton, H (1920). ‘The measurement of the inequality of incomes’, Economic Journal, Vol 30, 348-361

Gillborn, D (2001). ‘Racism and Social Justice. 'Raising standards' or rationing education? Racism and social justice in policy and practice’, Support for Learning, Vol. 16, No. 3.

Gorard, S. & Fitz, J. (1998) The more things change ... the missing impact of marketisation, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 19, pp. 365-376.

James, DR and Tauber, KE (1985). ‘Measures of segregation’, Sociological Methodology, Vol 14, 1-32.

Monk, D (1990). Educational finance: an economic approach, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Musgrave, RA (1959). The theory of public finance, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Noden, P (2000). ‘Rediscovering the impact of marketisation: dimensions of social segregation in England’s secondary schools, 1994-99,’ British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(3): 371-390.

OECD (2003). Education at a glance 2003, Paris: OECD

OECD (2004). Education at a glance 2004, Paris: OECD

Psacharopoulos, G (1985). ‘Returns to education: a further international update and implications’, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 20, No 4, 583 - 604

Selden, J (1847). The Table-Talk of John Selden, Esq., London: William Pickering

Theil, H (1972). Statistical decomposition analysis, Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Thomas, V, Wang, Y & Fan, X (2000). Measuring educational inequality: Gini coefficients of education, World Bank Institute paper.

West, A & Hind, A (2003). Secondary schools in London: exploring the extent of covert and overt selection, Research and Information on State Education (RISE) – London School of Economics Report

Wise, AE (1967). Rich schools poor schools: the promise of equal educational opportunity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolfe, BL (1995). ‘External benefits of education’. In Carnoy, M. (Ed) International Encyclopedia of Economics of Education, Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Wooldridge, JM (2003). Introductory econometrics: a modern approach, Thomson South-Western: Ohio
[1]‘Procedural fairness’ in Barry, (1990)
[2] The Gini coefficient may be and has also been used for uni-variate data, such as that of incomes.
[3] Available online at http://devdata.worldbank.org/edstats/td16.asp
[4] 6 primary school years in Peru (and Colombia).
[5] Arbitrarily chosen

Singapore Educational Elitism

The elite, the gifted, and the scholar-bureaucrats of Singapore: the hows and whys of this educational elitism

Weijie Ng
MA Economics of Education


Aug 2005
Education and Development in Asia (MMACOM_25)
Tutor: Dr. Ed Vickers

“Students should … believe in our principles of multiracialism and meritocracy, appreciate the national constraints but see the opportunities.”

MOE, (1998). Desired outcomes of education.


“…elite in Singapore who speak English, who read many different newspapers and watch foreign news.”

Yeo, Minister for Trade and Industry in speech at
News World Asia Conference, 11 May 2001


“We are continuing to groom a new group (of elites), as able as previous generations, but more diverse. … In turn, (the broad elite’s) key responsibility is to continue to uphold the values of openness and inclusiveness, and dedication to community and nation.”

Lee, Prime Minister in speech at
The NUS Society Lecture, 19 Mar 2005


Section A: Introduction

According to observers both on the outside (e.g. Green 1999) and the inside (including Khoo and Neo[1] as argued in Chua & Yeo, 2003), Singapore has an elitist education system. Educational pathways are stratified according to ability and aptitude, and this stratification may be deemed to be highly hierarchical. Arguably, right at the top of the educational ladder and thereby occupying the status of ‘elite’ and crème de la crème (de la crème[2]), are pupils in the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) and sponsored scholars that are recruited by the government and government linked companies (GLCs) as civil servants, administrators and researchers. This essay will examine the hows and whys of this educational elitism, and focus on the analysis of both the GEP, and various scholarship programmes that can also be seen to be a tool of manpower planning with which to ensure that the civil service is continually and effectively refreshed by infusions of talent (Teo, 2003). It will not be the remit of this essay to analyse other aspects of the education system which may also be regarded as elitist, such as the divide between academic and vocational education, etc.

Section B will be a broad but brief exposition of the Singapore education system. It will include the history of educational streaming, and will discuss the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) as well as the scholarship programmes used for recruitment into the civil service. Then, Section C will deal with the whys: the rationale behind streaming, the GEP, scholarship programmes and elitism, and especially with the government’s conviction in meritocracy. Section D will follow up by questioning Singapore’s educational elitism, e.g. with respect to conceptions of meritocracy. Finally, evidence and perspectives will be weighed against each other in Section E while summing up.

Section B: The Singapore education system


MOE (2004a). Education in Singapore.

This diagram above succinctly summarises the educational landscape in Singapore in 2004 and remains largely as it is today[3].

Typically, pupils in Singapore go through six years of primary education, which are compulsory since 1st January 2003 with the enactment of the Compulsory Education Act passed in 2000. In the first four years, ‘all pupils follow a common curriculum that provides them with a firm foundation in English Language, their Mother Tongue and Mathematics’ (MOE, 2004). Then, at the end of the 4th academic year, formal academic streaming examinations have been used to test pupils’ aptitude, especially that in language, and to sort them accordingly into EM1, EM2 and EM3[4][5]. The majority attend EM2 while more able pupils go to EM1, and essentially study both the English and Mother Tongue languages as first languages. EM3 students are ‘those who are less able to cope with Languages and Mathematics’ (MOE, 2004) and their syllabus would be that of a lower level set of Foundation English, Foundation Mathematics and Basic Mathematics. Furthermore, unlike their EM1 and EM2 counterparts, they will not be examined in Science, although they will still study it in class. Educational streaming in Singaporean primary schools has existed as an official Ministry of Education directive, at least from the late 1970s, with the implementation of the New Education System (Soon, 1988). There were also three language ability based streams as well at the time: the Normal Bilingual, the Extended Bilingual and the Monolingual courses. The first two were academic, while the latter was non-academic and was to ensure basic linguistic and mathematical literacy for the less academically inclined (Soon, 1988).

In the transition from primary to secondary schooling, the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) at the age of 12 is used to further sort pupils, into the Normal (Technical), Normal (Academic), Express and Special streams. Though MOE (2004a) states that ‘students have the choice’ between these streams, in reality, ‘choice’, not only of stream, but also of schools is dictated by their PSLE scores. The higher his score, the more likely a student is of entering a prestigious ‘specialised independent school’ or Integrated Programme School (IPS), such as the Chinese High and Raffles Institution, and the more likely he is of entering a stream preparing for the more recognised Cambridge GCE ‘Ordinary’ Level examination than the lower status ‘Normal’ Level one.

After secondary school, pupils go on to junior colleges (, polytechnics and Institutes of Technical Education), where entry is based on a points system calculated from their results at ‘O’ Level and administered centrally by the MOE (MOE, 2005). Once again, there is streaming, but this time, it is primarily subject-based and pupils are split into faculties. The top and elite junior colleges include Raffles Junior College (RJC), the ‘“super-student” producing machine’ which is the ‘peak of a government-controlled pyramid-style school structure that unabashedly pushes the cream to the top’ (Prystay & Bernstein, 2004) and is fond of comparing itself to the elitist Eton and Harrow public schools of England, while other junior colleges (JC), such as Jurong JC (JJC), are not dissimilar to state 6th-form colleges in the UK. Entry to RJC’s science stream in recent years[6] usually requires the right combination of 6 A1[7]s at ‘O’ Level, while that into JJC is achievable with a string of A2s and Bs[8].

Effectively, yet another stream exists in the Singaporean educational system, though it does not seem to be officially called a ‘stream’. Instead, it is a ‘programme’: the Gifted Education Programme. Its history dates from 1983, when the ‘Gifted Project’ Concept Paper was approved by the Ministry of Education, and it was first implemented in two primary schools and two secondary schools in 1984. GEP students would attend classes specially prepared for them on a tailored curriculum, separately from other pupils in the same school. Its mission is to ‘provide leadership in the education of the intellectually gifted’ and to ‘(nurture) gifted individuals to their full potential for the fulfilment of self and the betterment of society’ (MOE, 2004b). Selection for the GEP was based on a nation wide intensive battery of IQ based selection tests to identify the top 1 percent of pupils[9], at the age of 9 for the primary school programme and at the age of 12 for the secondary school programme. The curriculum is enriched and the teachers are specially trained (MOE, 2004b) as might be expected in a programme for pupils deemed to be gifted. What the GEP is known for is perhaps its broad array of special programmes designed and run in collaboration with local (and sometimes international) universities, polytechnics and other research institutions. Key examples would include the Science Mentorship Programme (SMP), whereby selected GEP pupils are provided ‘with the opportunity for scientific investigations in research laboratories and interaction with scientists from institutions of higher learning’ (MOE, 2004b) and the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Programme, which is the social science counterpart of the SMO. These pupils typically undertake a project under the supervision of a mentor involved in university level research work and publish a paper for a youth conference. Topics have included: Ion emission studies in plasma focus device[10] and The unbearable lightness of being: an analysis of the individual in society[11]. Particularly successful participants have published in international journals and presented at international conferences, such as at the Audio Engineering Society 104th Convention in Amsterdam (Tan, 1998).

The GEP has been continually reviewed, and today, the selection test at the age of 12 has since been discontinued, The Integrated Programme has largely taken its place at the secondary level since the beginning of 2004. In essence, the Integrated Programme (IP) may be viewed as an extension and expansion of the GEP to include all pupils who have qualified for places in 5 of the top ranked secondary schools in Singapore. As the IP is very new, and is still in the initial stages of development, it will not be further elaborated upon in this essay, other than it is likely to take up many of the recommendations made in the Report of the Junior College / Upper Secondary Education Review Committee (Shanmugaratnam et al., 2002), such as allowing for more flexible or alternative curriculum and qualifications, etc.

Elitist elements may arguably also be found in the Singapore government’s scholarship policies. Every year, based on merit indicated not just by academic performance in the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘Advanced’ & ‘Special’ Level examinations or the American Scholastic Achievement Tests (SAT) I and II, but also non-academic and character-related criteria such as leadership ability and commitment to community service (Lee, 2000), the ministries through the Public Service Commission, statutory boards including the Singapore Tourism Board, and government linked companies such as Singapore Airlines offer hundreds of college bound Singaporean students scholarships, both at local universities and institutions abroad in China, Japan, Germany, UK, USA, etc. These scholarships are similar to the United States (US) Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) college scholarships, in that recipients of the scholarships have their tuition fees paid for, and receive allowances such as for living expenses, in return for a ‘bond’ that requires the scholar to work for the sponsoring body for a number of years, depending on the country in which the scholarship is tenable (Soon, 2001).

Scholars are groomed not just to be bureaucrats, but to be leaders, the leaders of Singapore, for the civil service, the military, the corporate world, politics and society, through development programmes before, during and after their years in university.[12] Some prominent leaders of Singapore who were recruited through scholarship programmes include the former Prime Minister & present Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, Rear Admiral Teo Chee Hean, Mayor Heng Chee How of Central Singapore CDC, and CEO Benedict Cheong of the National Council of Social Services (NCSS) (PSC, 2005).

The history of scholarships in Singapore may be traced back to the 1880s, when British colonial authorities awarded top pupils in the Straits Settlement of Singapore Higher Scholarships, later renamed Queen’s Scholarships, to study at selected English universities, in order to reap ‘the benefits of educating a select group of elite who could serve in the ranks of the public service’ (PSC, 2005). Later, with changes in Singapore’s governance and sovereignty, the Queen’s Scholarship was replaced successively by the Colombo Plan awards in 1959[13], the Singapore State Scholarship in 1959[14], the Yang di-Pertuan Negara in 1964[15] and the President’s Scholarship in 1965[16]. Since Singapore’s independence, scholarship schemes have multiplied and developed into a huge recruiting exercise pitched at 17 – 18 year olds in junior college (JC), with such a bewildering plethora of options and opportunities that guidebooks and newspaper pullouts[17] are published every year to advise JC pupils. Among these scholarships, there is a certain hierarchy that may be perceived by Singaporeans, with particular scholarships such as the President’s Scholarship, the Government Investment Corporation Scholarship and the National Science and Talent Search Scholarship perhaps deemed by many to be more prestigious and desirable than those awarded by the Ministry of Education or Sembcorp[18].


Section C: Why this educational elitism?

There appear to be at least two main streams of thought that is brought in support of Singapore’s educational elitism: a) that meritocracy is desirable, b) that the emergence of elites is perhaps inevitable, but an elite, with proper characteristics, is beneficial to society.

C.1: Meritocracy as desired element in Singapore

Broadly, meritocracy refers to ‘government by those regarded as possessing merit’ (Bullock, 1988), and is a creed that lies at the bedrock of Singapore’s educational system. Indeed, it is even cited as a desired outcome of education (MOE, 2004a) in Singapore:

Students should … believe in our principles of multiracialism and meritocracy, appreciate the national constraints but see the opportunities.

The term ‘meritocracy’ was first coined by Michael Young (1958) in his influential and thought-provoking satirical novel The Rise of Meritocracy, 1870 – 2033, set in a future where one’s place in society is determined solely by one’s IQ and effort. According to Young (2001), his book was intended as a warning of what might happen to Britain if the British placed gaining formal educational qualifications over all other considerations.[19] Young (1958) seems to suggest in his satire that this would lead to the permanent and unfair rejection of anybody who was unable to jump through the hoops in the education based meritocracy, including many otherwise able working-class people, and therefore would result in the rise of a new exclusive social class as discriminatory as the older ones.

Despite its negative origin, meritocracy as both a word and a concept has been used favourably in the United States and also in the discourse of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government (Young, 2001). Meritocracy as a desired principle, has been extolled again and again, in over a hundred key speeches by leading Singaporean politicians as well, from the then Prime Minister Goh’s National Day Rally Address in 2000, where he asserted his belief that with meritocracy, ‘(one) can get ahead in life if (one) work(s) hard … regardless of … background’ to the then Prime Minister Lee’s 1971 speech at a university alumni meeting, where he argued that meritocracy is a key factor to leading Singaporeans to ‘climb up the cliffs to higher levels of achievement’. Therefore, Singaporeans should continue to be rewarded for their merit. Of course, in Singapore, meritocracy is more likely to be traced, not to Young’s (1958) pejorative usage, but rather to ‘Asian values’ (Bell, 2000) and the analects of Confucius (1995), who asserted that nobility lies in virtue and not in blood. After all, it has been suggested that Singaporean society is not only Confucian in its value orientation, but also latently so in its hierarchical structure (Kuo, 1996).

Many successes in the Singapore educational system have been attributed to meritocracy. For example, Prystay & Bernstein (2004) wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the afore-mentioned Raffles Junior College,

‘… established in 1982, has its roots in Raffles Institution, a secondary school for boys established in 1823 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the colonial Briton who founded the city-state of Singapore. Raffles Institution, which still exists, built its reputation as a bastion of meritocracy, accepting gifted children from all socioeconomic classes and producing dozens of leaders over the years -- among them, Lee Kuan Yew, the patriarch of modern Singapore.’

Also, both Singaporeans (Wong et al., 2000) and outsiders (Ginsberg et al., 2005) have ascribed at least part of the sterling performance of Singapore’s pupils in the recent comparative, benchmarking Trends in the International Mathematics and Science Stud(ies) to Singapore’s cornerstone principle of meritocracy, which can be deemed to have contributed to students’ high educational aspirations and attitudes, and good school climate (MOE, 2004c).

Additionally, meritocracy may also be seen as socially just, because in such a system, educational opportunities and rewards would be allocated on the basis of ‘demonstrated competence rather than through nepotism, patronage, bribery, purchase’, according to ‘what (individuals) have shown that they can do, rather than their social provenance’ (Goldthorpe, 1997). Furthermore, in matching educational opportunity to ability and merit, it may be argued that those who are most likely to benefit from such opportunities will receive them, and in so doing, also serving to maximise efficiency. If efficiency is a component of social justice, as according to Konow’s (2000) integrated social justice theory[20], then a more efficient system of distributing educational opportunities is also a more socially just one.

C.2: Positive official discourse of the Singaporean elite

‘Elite’ in the 17th century was used to describe goods and commodities of exquisite excellence, and its usage has since then, by 1823[21], been extended to refer to superior social groupings, such as higher ranks of the aristocracy and crack military troops (Bottommore, 1967). The term, though, only became widely used in and after the sociological works of Pareto (1935) and Mosca (1939), whereby they both argued that the formation of an elite class and the rule of the few over the many were inevitable in all societies. In particular, Pareto (1935) asserted that forceful and coercive ‘lions’, and cunning, stealthy and persuasive ‘foxes’ would make up the elites that govern the inarticulate and apathetic masses. With such elitist sentiments so inimical to ideals of both socialism and democracy, it perhaps is of no surprise that Pareto later went on to join Mussolini’s Fascist government.

Lee’s (2005) recent speech The Singapore elite, in which he persuasively argued that an elite is not only benign, but if carefully cultivated, may be good for society, is a good example of official discourse that clearly shows the elitist beliefs behind the Singapore government. In this speech, he referred to ‘the core group of people who occupy key positions of power and influence, and set the direction for the whole society and country’ as the elite. Drawing from the experiences of Britain, China and the US, he then attempted to show that ‘every society will have an elite’, even if they aim to be classless, and that elite groups have a tendency to ‘entrench themselves over time, and become more closed and exclusive’, through the ‘development of social norms, behaviour or codes’. He also argued that the elite of Singapore, i.e. his and his father’s generation of leaders, have done well for Singapore. The key message of his speech was that education is crucial in shaping the elite, and that Singapore’s future depends on ensuring, through education, that the elite benefits society.

The education system, according to Lee (2005), has to be firstly kept open and inclusive, and demonstrate that one can make it to the top if ‘one works hard and do(es) well’. Then,

‘(a)n open and inclusive elite is thus a reflection of our system of meritocracy, as well as an essential part of it.’

(Lee, 2005)

For this open and inclusive elite, a high quality education system would be needed: all schools must be good schools with high standards. No student should be deprived of a good education for lack of financial means. To ensure that social barriers do not grow, education must furthermore discourage ‘ostentation in lifestyles, dress or social norms’ (Lee, 2005). The political elite would set the tone,

‘We dress down; we do not wear expensive designer suits; and we have meals in hawker centres. We must maintain this informal tone, in order to keep this an egalitarian society.’

(Lee, 2005)

Guaranteeing that Singaporeans have a shared purpose is another necessary goal for the education system (Lee, 2005). For Singapore to continue to do well, everyone, perhaps especially the elite, would need a sense of obligation to give back to society, as well as strong patriotism.

From such official discourse, it may be seen that the ‘elite’ has been conceptualised to be a good thing and indeed necessary, provided that it possesses the necessary characteristics of open-ness, inclusiveness, common identity and purpose. Elitism, in this respect, is therefore also seen to be benign.

C.3 Other arguments

Soon (2001) has also outlined a plausible economic rationale for the use of scholarships as a necessary tool for manpower planning. As he argued, the government may be maximizing the economic welfare of the country by offering bonded government scholarships to not only attract but also lock in talented Singaporeans into the public sector for a stipulated period of time, in an attempt to ensure the sustained growth of Singapore's economy. In a sense, according to Soon (2001), a government sponsored scholarship to the US for a period of four years is implicitly equivalent to a wage premium of around US$1500 per month discounted over a typical bond period of 6 years. This pecuniary edge, coupled with the prestige associated with working in the civil service, has undoubtedly aided recruitment and retention efforts in an increasingly globalised labour market. Brain drain cannot be tolerated by a nation that has been aware since its inception that it not only has little or no natural resources, but also has among the smallest populations and pools of human resources in Asia (Lee, 1966).


Section D: Questioning this educational elitism

D.1 Gifted programmes as negatively elitist?

Some laymen and educationalists contend that the establishment of intellectual elitism through the provision of special educational programmes for the gifted and the effective creation of a non-elite class of pupils and citizens is inimical to a socially just education, primarily on the basis of three arguments: that a) gifted education programmes play up intellectual snobbishness, that b) gifted children in being deprived from interacting with non-gifted children would grow up socially maladjusted and that c) non-gifted children would not be able to learn from or be stimulated by the gifted (Newland, 1976). Newland (1976), sceptical of these views, argued that these arguments might only have some degree of validity if the gifted are actually educated in separate schools, or spend all, if not most of their time separately from those deemed to be non-gifted. This is precisely the case in Singapore. Students in the GEP in Singapore do attend separate classes from pupils in other streams. With the recent introduction of the Integrated Programme, more of the educational elites will actually be taught in separate schools.

Last year, a full-blown internet debate that highlights the divisiveness and elitism in Singapore schools started after a Raffles JC school-boy advised boys from ‘neighbourhood’ schools to ‘quit trying to climb the social ladder by dating students from top schools’ (Seah, 2004). The debate, stretched over four months, included more elitist comments:

"The one weaker in academics will not be able to provide nourishment for the mind and cannot engage in intelligent discussion on politics, for example. … And the more intelligent one will probably have to lower his / her standards and eventually will degenerate to the same level. … We are afraid of genetic dilution."
(Seah, 2004)

‘Leave the RGS[22] girl alone-lah! Leave her to other high-flying guys. It's good to know one's limits once in a while.’
(Seah, 2004)

In Figure 1, another account, steeped in Singaporean satirical humour, of a GEP student is extreme, but may uncomfortably bear a tad of truth:

Columns: A Gifted StudentPosted on Monday, June 04, 2001Topic: We,The Citizens
HAO XUESHENG, gifted student at Stamford Institution Independent Secondary School
Woke up this morning at 6.00 am, and as usual, was filled with the urge to study.So like I do every day, I propped my science textbook up against the bathroom cabinet as I brushed my teeth.Occurred to me that because of this, I haven't seen my face in the past two years.Intend to write a letter to the Ministry of Education urging them to print pictures of students in the margins of all textbooks so that this doesn't happen to future generations.It's great to be a gifted kid, because you think of innovative solutions like this.Ahmad drove me to school again today.Reflected on the multi-racial society in which we live, and the progress of Malays in our society.Isn't our country wonderful, that Ahmad gets to drive a luxury car everyday?Clearly, we are a prosperous nation.School was typical: Got top marks in Maths again. Most GEP kids are great in maths.It's because we're intellectually gifted, you see. The maths problems are just so easy to us.I wonder why other kids find it tough? Well, they have only themselves to blame! It's all so easy to become intellectually gifted at maths!Just hire tuition teachers.They must be cheap, because Daddy got me one for every subject.Sometimes I think we're gifted because we have tuition teachers.After all, despite what the school teaches us or says they want to teach us, we're ultimately graded on the basis of standardised tests, and it's the tuition teachers who drill us for that.I think we should replace all the regular teachers with tuition teachers. I mean, why waste time? Let's just focus on what counts!They say the GEP was set up so we faster kids don't get held back.But I must admit, I feel held back even with the GEP. I guess I'm really light years ahead.Maybe to slow things down, I'll ask my tuition teachers not to teach me so far ahead of my school, and also to ease up on the drilling a bit.As it is, I can pass the 'O' Levels, but Dad said I should do it next year instead.He said, "What's the rush? Enjoy your childhood. Anyway, you're already taking your SATs."When Ahmad drove me back from school, I saw some kids running around in a field, kicking a spherical object.It saddened me to think that even though they appeared to be my age, they were indulging in such primitive hobbies.I mean, why aren't they splitting atoms like we GEP kids?Surely their parents can afford particle accelerators too!But I guess this is why we're gifted and they're not.Sad, but true.
Figure 1
(TalkingCock.com, 2001)

Therefore, the three arguments may bear true, and to many, are perhaps ‘common sense’. However, as Newland (1976) pointed out, aside from anecdotes, there is still little research evidence to support them, and certainly there hasn’t been any convincing evidence in the Singapore context. ‘Common sense’ is not robust, and is definitely insufficient to prove that in a heterogeneous, non stratified educational system, the ‘gifted’, i.e. those that would have qualified for a special programme for the gifted, would be less snobbish and better socialised, and the non-gifted would be more motivated and do better. Moreover, when a closer look is taken at the results of the 2003 TIMSS, Singapore’s top ranking in the study was arguably not because its top students brought the overall average up. On the contrary, top students from countries like the US and Japan were far more brilliant. Instead, Singapore’s average score was high because the vast majority of Singaporean students attained the intermediate benchmarks and high benchmarks: 91 percent and 77 percent in Grade 8 mathematics, significantly better than the 49 percent and 23 percent international averages (MOE, 2004c). This would suggest that Singaporean students, on the whole, are doing better than their international counterparts either despite of or because of the educational elitism.

D.2 Debating conceptions of meritocracy and the elite

In a challenge to widely held views of meritocracy, Sen (2000) pointed out that merit has typically been under-defined, or if appropriately defined, is necessarily a normative concept, based on subjective opinions of what a good society is. Given that there are alternative views of what is good or right, inevitably there would be different views regarding the ‘precise content of merit’ (Sen, 2000), or what merit constitutes. He (2000) then argued that there are at least two competing ways of thinking about merit and merit systems: incentives and action propriety. The former means that actions should be rewarded for the good that they do, i.e. for the result, while the latter judges actions by their propriety, independent of the result. In education, the incentive conception might mean that educational rewards would be disbursed according to examination results, while the action propriety conception might mean that effort alone is used in judgement.

The Singaporean approach to meritocracy appears to be based more on the incentives approach. Entry to the Gifted Education is based on the IQ selection test. Streaming is based on streaming examination results. As discussed above, admission, or at least the preliminary procedure for admission, to the civil service through scholarship programmes, is also based on a mixture of academic and non-academic indicators of merit.

In Singapore, there is little public debate over what constitutes meritocracy, except perhaps on the blogosphere, where Huichieh[23], a Singaporean graduate student in Toronto, has been vocal. With respect to scholarships, Huichieh (2005) outlined two different systems that may each be deemed to be meritocratic: the first is a ‘money tree’ (摇钱树) system, whereby only scholarship recipients themselves benefit; the second is a ‘freakanomical’ model, in which everyone benefits, because awarding the scholarship to those who merit it is part of the means by which everyone benefits. In the latter perspective, the scholarship system and its attendant prestige and promise of social advancement act as a powerful incentive to draw out the efforts of the talented, and channel this effort to benefit society as a whole. Paraphrasing Adam Smith (Huichieh, 2005):

"It is not from the benevolence (or altruism or social consciousness)[24] of the talented that we expect our economic development, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." Of the two systems, the ‘freakanomical’ model is socially preferred.

Huichieh (2005) was writing in response to a forum article in the Singapore Straits Times, in which Soon (2005) pointed out that the main beneficiaries of meritocracy in Singapore appeared to be the rich, because they have had the privilege of ‘access to tuition, enrichment classes and a better studying environment’, which unfairly puts them ahead of their poorer classmates in the race for academic attainment and prizes. According to Soon (2005), for example, a majority of Singaporean students sponsored by the government to study at Stanford University came disproportionately from those of higher socio-economic background. This could mean that educational rewards and opportunities are de facto distributed according to family income and wealth rather than pure merit. In this light, Singapore may not really be a meritocracy, or be as meritocratic as both government officials and some observers like to think.

Section E: Summing up

‘Come visit Singapore, not just to visit me of course. Visit Singapore because it is clean and green … but only on the outside.’

(Paraphrasing Kumar[25], 11th March 2005,
in drag comic performance,
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London)

It appears that there is no question that the Singapore education system is elitist. After all, even the government has argued forcefully not only that the formation of an elite group in Singapore is inevitable, but also, if open, inclusive and sharing common goals and beliefs, e.g. in meritocracy, be necessary for both survival and development of the nation. The Singapore government’s brand of elitism is not so much one of the conceit of the leisure classes in Veblen (1924), but one based more on pragmatism. It is therefore perhaps a relatively benign form that does not wholly deserve its negative connotations.

However, it may not be an easy task to achieve the government’s goal of moulding its ideal elite. Education based divides, exclusiveness and social barriers are already in place, as evident from the school-boy dating internet debacle and the satirical account of the GEP student above. Furthermore, younger Singaporeans these days are arguably more cynical of the government’s attempts to inculcate patriotic fervour through National Education initiatives and public campaigns.

Meritocracy, seen as socially just and common sense, has been a key justification for the structure and hierarchies present in the education system. However, as argued above, meritocracy is not a concept without flaws or contestations, and is also therefore not a banner that one should blindly swear allegiance to.

Perhaps, as Goldthorpe (1997) observed, meritocracy is a necessary myth. Since the idea of merit as the basis of reward has a wide appeal, to question meritocracy’s desirability might appear to be not only perverse in most modern societies, but also ‘leave the way open to all manner of discriminatory practices in education’ (Goldthorpe, 1997) and everyday life. In fact, according to Hayek (1974), it might be necessary, in order to sustain the operation of societies, perhaps including that of Singapore, to encourage through ‘education and governing opinion’ a belief in meritocracy, such that individuals believe that their own merit and decisions determine their own welfare.

In this light, some may allege that an arguably fox-like government is using ‘meritocracy’ as a shroud to pacify the ignorant masses. However, this claim probably goes too far, and I am disinclined to think that it holds much credibility, for it smacks rather too much of conspiracy theory, and paternalism in asserting that the well educated and articulate Singaporean masses are indeed ignorant sheep.

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[1] Khoo, Eric and Neo, Jack are two popular local media celebrities and film directors
[2] As GEP teachers seem to be fond of stressing
[3] There have been various changes since the end of 2004.
[4] Fellow Singaporeans and I have little idea what the acronym EM officially stands for. Maybe English & Mother Tongue?
[5] As mentioned in Footnote 1, there have been changes since 2004. From the end of 2004, the Ministry level distinction between EM1 and EM2 has been abolished but schools have been given the discretion to continue banding if it is deemed to be educationally valuable.
[6] 1998 - 2003
[7] A1 is the top grades at ‘O’ Levels. It is followed by the A2 grade, and then the B and C grades.
[8] Equivalent to 6 English GCSE A*s and a string of As and Bs respectively.
[9] Top 0.5 percent in earlier years
[10] Project title and abstract available on National Institute of Education researcher Dr. RS Rawat’s website: http://rsrawat.myplace.nie.edu.sg/Research/School%20Attachment/SMP%202003.htm, Accessed 11th July 2005
[11] Project title cited from staff profile of National University of Singapore Assistant Professor AL Rappa http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/home/staff_profile_details.php3?ID=polar, Accessed 11th July 2005
[12] For examples, the PSC has outlined some development programmes in its 2004 annual report, accessible at http://www.psc.gov.sg/ar2004.pdf Accessed 12th July 2005
[13] Until 1988
[14] Constitutional change in Singapore’s status from colony to self-governing state
[15] Merger with Malaya
[16] Separation from Malaysia
[17] For example, Scholars’ Choice in the Straits Times. Sample article available at http://www.dsta.gov.sg/home/DisplayPage/ContentPage10.asp?id=1497, Accessed 12th July 2005
[18] Government linked industrial firm
[19] In the novel, the masses revolt against the meritocracy in the year 2033.
[20] In Konow (2000), Need, Equity and Efficiency are the three components of social justice
[21] In the Oxford English Dictionary
[22] Raffles Girls’ School, sister school of Raffles Institution and Raffles Junior College
[23] Pseudonym
[24] Huichieh’s own brackets
[25] One of Singapore’s foremost drag queens and comedians