Wei reads and writes

beng is cool, singlish a signal

2006-03-22T11:29:00.000Z

beng is cool, singlish a signal

Ever wondered why the English-proficient are its biggest backers?

Monday • March 20, 2006

Terence Chong

THE presence of Singlish in everyday life is undeniable. From HDB coffeeshops to corporate boardrooms, it is deeply entrenched in the psyche of Singaporeans from all walks of life.

It is thus no surprise that everyone has an opinion on Singlish. The Singlish debate so far has, however, been confined between those who wish to celebrate it as an icon of Singaporean-ness and those who believe it will only hinder our global connectivity.

But the Singlish dilemma is more deeply layered than that.

Singlish is, firstly, a marker of postcolonial identity. In promoting Singlish, we are in fact campaigning for English, a colonial heritage, to be accepted and understood on Singaporean terms. In this sense, Singlish is transformed into a source of national pride and identity because it alludes to the broader way Singaporeans have successfully adapted colonial apparatuses for our own needs.

Singlish becomes a potent symbol of who we are, how we think, and how we speak. This is especially so for many overseas Singaporeans who are able to instantly recognise fellow citizens with Singlish. It is thus no surprise that many want to celebrate it as an icon of local culture.

Singlish is, however, also a means of class differentiation. Although many argue that Singlish should be celebrated as part of national identity, in reality, this argument comes only from the English-proficient middle class.

We revel in its down-to-earth factor and wear it like a badge of honour to show how unashamedly Singaporean we are. Meanwhile, we overlook the many Singaporeans out there who cannot speak anything else but Singlish. In doing so, we erase the harsh realities of these Singlish-speakers such as economic marginalisation in our search for symbols of national identity.

Furthermore, being able to code-switch effortlessly between Singlish and grammatically-sound English, the English-proficient middle class demonstrates its cultural capital vis-à-vis Singlish-speaking heartlanders. This explains why the English-proficient middle class is, by large, the most vocal champion of Singlish.

Singlish is also appropriated by the English-proficient middle class for certain desirable characteristics. Take the Ah Beng culture, for example. The Ah Beng is a caricature of the local working class youth and personifies failure in Singapore's elitist and capitalist society.

Recently, however, local sociologists have observed that the local media's popularising of the Ah Beng in sitcoms and through fashion-sense has led some in the young English-speaking middle class to claim that they have a "little bit" of Beng in them.

It's gradually becoming cool to be Beng. Likewise, it becomes useful for us to slip into Singlish to sound "real" and "authentic". We throw in a lah or meh as a reaffirmation of our heartlander status, to avoid being perceived as rootless or un-Singaporean.

Hence, in professing affection for the Ah Beng and Singlish, the English-proficient middle class has co-opted the Ah Beng and Singlish for its own interests. We seek from Singlish and the Beng the imprimatur of heartlander authenticity to counter accusations of cosmopolitan pretensions, while we continue to look beyond our shores for cultural consumption.

Lastly, championing Singlish allows us to safely challenge the Government's economic rationale. The Government's stand on Singlish is clear — it is not a trait to be celebrated because we cannot be a first-world economy or go global with Singlish.

A Singlish-speaking population, the Government argues, would be an obstacle to the wooing of global capital and the transnational elite.

Meanwhile, the more "liberal" members of the English-educated middle class are generally less concerned with the potential economic consequences of Singlish, given their mastery of English and their globally applicable skills. In defending, celebrating and using Singlish, they carve out new discursive terrain on which to safely confront the state's ideology of economic pragmatism — that which would otherwise be difficult to challenge given the widening wage gap between the haves and the have nots.

Singlish, more than any other language, has created pathways across the borders of class and ethnicity. However, the ease with which we cross borders depends on our class, cultural capital and the specific nature of power distribution in society.

The ways and context in which we use Singlish is indicative of our class, education and cultural capital, as well as the cultural politics that play out in-between.

The writer is Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

This is a personal comment.

Transition economies essay 2000.

2006-01-10T03:46:00.000Z

'The performance of the world's transition economies has been a disappointment.' Is this assessment justified?

The fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s led many commentators to declare the beginning of a new age, where people all over the world would finally embrace the free market and together, perhaps match towards greater economic and prosperity.

Now, more than a decade later, the same commentators may regret their over-enthusiastic declarations. To many of them, the former communist states currently in transition have made little progress. In fact, the 'progress' seems to be in negative terms.

In terms of real GDP per capital, converted for purchasing power parity, the transition economies seem to be taking steps backward. They are not narrowing the gap between the West and themselves. The gap is actually becoming bigger. Russia's GDP figures has seen large declines.

The evil of inflation has cropped up. When prices were deregulated, the cost of living rose rapidly when good that used to be heavily subsidised more than quadrupled in prices. Works on seeing the price increases, demanded higher wages. This led to the endless price-wage spirals and hyperinflation, as well as the eventual devaluation of the rouble and other currencies of transition economies. The devaluation made things worse when imported goods became more expensive as well.

Serious unemployment came about. When the governments relaxed their control over the economy, and demand and supply forces were allowed to interact relatively freely, there was an immence upheaval of resources as producers rushed to attempt to produce what they perceived consumers to demand. Since labour was immobile, and did not have the skills to do anything except what the state had originally allocated them to do, they faced daunting structural unemployment.

On top of that, with the provision for private ownership, greater inequality emerged when aggressive businessmen and cronies of political powers took over state enterprises.

Given that the standard of living in so many different parts of the ex-Soviet bloc seemed to be going down, it's perhaps no wonder that many find the performance of transition economies to be disappointing.

There are however doubts that things are quite that bad. GDP per capita for many such nations may have fallen, but this is a poor indicator for the welfare of the people. As Rowe and Cobson commented, 'the economic hero (of the system) is a terminal cancer patient undergoing a costly divorce.' The best thing that could happen to boost GDP figures is a natural disaster. It would serve to boose national income, but in no way does this increase in national income really represent an improvement in welfare. The same principle works the other way. Just because GDP per capita is falling may not mean anything much. It may in fact be good if it involves less wastage or less expenditure on regrettables like defence or transport. Besides, figures for national income in command economics are likely not to be reliable, and are also more likely to be falsely high. Hence, transition economies may in truth in a better position than the command economies that they replaced.

Also, prices may have risen, but the price itself states nothing about the quality. In Poland, the price of haircuts may have risen, but they are accompanied by the availability of more hairstyles. The consumers may have traded off price for variety, and perhaps come out the better for it. Similarly, changes in quality of food, clothing and housing can also be observed. Perhaps the Consumer Price Index used in computing inflation overstates the true rise in costs of living and results in understatements of welfare improvements.

Structural unemployment is inevitable when so drastic a change in economic systems result. Workers need time to adjust to changes, to find new jobs that are suitable for them. In a sense, they need to be weaned off the government, and this takes time. Improvements in China have appeared to be promising. A recent feature in Newsweek was on how retrenched workers in China who have adjusted well to the changes. Some are in fact inspired to work harder to serve the consumers so that they 'will never be retrenched again'.

Investment in transition economies by the West has also picked up and alleviated the problems associated with the breaking down of traditional trade flows with other communist states. This investment has occurred mainly in the stable (socially and politically) transition economies, including Poland and the Czech Republic. Today, their performance can be said to be far from disappointing. Indeed, these nations are ranked higher than a couple of nations in the European Union and the so-called first world in the Human Development Index compiled by the United Nations.

How we view the performance of the world's transition economies depends on what expectations we had of them in the first place. Extreme enthusiasts with too high hopes are therefore opening themselves to disappointment, especially if they expect the free market to be the instant solution to every economic problem. Even so, they should not be disappointed by the progress (or lack of it) of all the transition economies. If claims that even Poland is not doing as well as it should, then one can perhaps be considered to be nit-picking. After all, the free market is not a panacea for all problems itself.

If the world's transition economies are to be successful, perhaps they need more time. A decade may be too short a time for these nations to adapt to a new system of doing things. Also, more aid in the form of foreign investments may help to relieve the trauma of broken down traditional trade flows. With more time and more aid, the performance of the world's transition economies may one day be satisfactory to all.

My books

2005-12-04T02:41:00.000Z

Fiction
Christie, A. Five complete Miss Marple novels.

Cunningham, M. Specimen Days. (signed copy)

Haddon, M. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Hollinghurst, A. The line of beauty.

Kerouac, J. On the road.

Knowles, J. A separate peace.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway.

Non-Fiction
Allwright, P. Basics of Buddhism.

Bohm, D. On creativity.

Fox, K. Watching the English: the hidden rules of English behaviour.

Galbraith, JK. The economics of innocent fraud.

Gladwell, M. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference.

Herrnstein, RJ & Murray, C. The bell curve: intelligence and class structure in American life.

Hickman, T. The call-up.

Le Rouchefoucauld. Maxims

Levitt, SD & Dubner, SJ. Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

Lewis, CS. Mere Christianity.

Morgan, KO. The Oxford history of Britain.

Sachs, J. The end of poverty: how we can make it happen in our lifetime.

Schwartz, B. The paradox of choice: why more is less; how the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.

Skidelsky, R. John Maynard Keynes: fighting for Britain.

Stiglitz, J. Globalisation and its discontents.

Wolf, M. Why globalisation works.

What's another word for elitist?

2005-11-29T02:19:00.000Z

What's another word for elitist?

Gifted students doing well, but they’re an island unto themselves

Today, www.todayonline.com

Tuesday • November 29, 2005

HE TEACHES students from the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) and observes at close hand what many have pointed out: They hang out only with each other. They become so comfortable with other GEPers (as they call themselves), that even outside the classroom they prefer each other’s company.

Even on overseas trips and co-curricular activities (CCAs), the teacher says that these students form a clique.

And so, more than 20 years after the programme kicked off in Singapore, the same problem remains. The programme, whose goals include producing the country’s future leaders, is struggling to get its gifted students to relate to the man-on-the-street.

The debate was reignited recently after this newspaper reported on a study that showed how GEPers found it difficult to cope with the programme’s diverse demands and were often ostracised by their peers.
Since then, dozens of GEPers, their parents and other students have written in, but while they differ on the labels, they agree on one point: Though they go to school with general students, the gifted ones are in a world — and a group — of their own.

Even they don’t deny it.

GEP student Gwyneth Teo, 15, wrote: “Ask yourselves if our so-called elitism is very much different from that of the girl-next-door who has a group of friends who hang out together.

“It’s genuine friendship and loyalty that bind us together, not status. Is that a crime?”

Michael Wee, another 15-year-old GEP student, said that the ostracism “does not affect GEP students in any way. What with existing close ties with other fellow GEP students, no one needs to bother about ostracism from those outside the programme”.

While such friendships help them cope, doesn’t this segregation defeat one of the main purposes of the programme?

Mr Johannis Auri Abdul Aziz, 25, a former GEP student, told Today that educators “have known all along that we have a problem relating to other people”. Said Mr Johannis: “We are given a booklet spelling out just how different we are from other people and how the programme would meet our needs.

“We have our own syllabus and our own after-school enrichment activities. We end up developing our own sub-culture that looks really weird from the outside … it is clear that more formal help is needed.”

He freely admits that many GEPers can be unskilled in social niceties and often can’t make small talk. “We have limited knowledge of what is appropriate and inappropriate in certain situations,” he said.

One problem is that “gifted” individuals are often “non-conformists” who have difficulties blending in, said Dr David Peat, a senior educational psychologist at the Institute of Mental Health.

“Gifted individuals are the ones who scan the environment and decide what is worth doing and what is not. It is unfair to call the GEP elitist. It is just another level of a highly-structured hierarchical education system,” said Dr Peat, who was also a consultant to the GEP in 2001.

But would they make good leaders?

“It depends on your point of view,” said Dr Peat. “I would hope that leaders are able to empathise with people who are different, and that they have strong social skills.”

On its part, the Ministry of Education (MOE) says it has programmes in place to develop GEP students’ specific talents, including that of leadership.

Programme participants are housed in regular schools to allow them to mix with mainstream students. Efforts are made to teach them the right values through civics and moral education lessons, while CCAs are supposed to help them blend and mix with others.

But the problem, according to the teacher who has observed GEPers for a long time, is that even during CCAs they tend to stick with each other. ” There should be room for more porous movement between the GEP and the other streams,” he said.

The MOE, which says it has been tracking 600 of the 4,000-odd students who have graduated from GEP, says it is otherwise satisfied with the results. A fifth of the tracked students joined the civil service while another fifth took up medicine. Law, engineering and teaching are their other professions of choice.

“We have evidence that the GEP’s objectives are met to a large extent,” said an MOE spokesperson.

She cited Dr Tracey Ho, 29, and Dr Wong Ting Hway, 32, as examples of GEP graduates who have helped put Singapore on the world map.

Dr Ho is a former national shooter, President’s Scholar and Lee Kuan Yew Scholar who was recently named one of the world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Wong was the first Singaporean contracted to work with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Nepal.

Even so, some still think it would help if other gifted students could share their gifts with their peers more easily.

MA References

2005-11-22T03:46:00.000Z

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[1] Also in Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No. 4.

MA Further discussion and recommendations

2005-11-22T03:45:00.000Z

Further discussion and recommendations

Thus far in this report, I have in Chapter 1 given a brief account of the market based reforms in England since 1988 and in Chapter 2 attempted to fit the case for school markets into Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes (MSRP) framework as well as identify the ‘anomalies’ that threaten the coherence of the ‘markets for schools’ SRP. Then in Chapter 3, the idea of countervailing power as an addition to the protective belt and a solution to the monopoly power ‘anomaly’ was described, and a typology with which to facilitate its identification was suggested.

To ascertain the effectiveness of countervailing power as a curb on monopoly power, suggesting the typology is hardly sufficient. Indeed, the discussion of countervailing power in this report has only been exploratory and is really a first step. There is therefore a need perhaps to not only exhaustively identify all possible forms of countervailing power, but also to examine the effectiveness of all these various forms.

Some studies, including Power & Clark (2000), Vincent & Martin (2000), and Ranson et al (2004) which were mentioned earlier, have been carried out on several of the phenomena that I have identified as sources of countervailing power. These are case studies and good work by sociologists with which to begin to understand this phenomenon and evaluate its efficacy. At first glance though, it appears that not one of the school adjudicator, the ‘storming parents’ or the Parent Teacher Association is wholly desirable: as discussed above, the use of the first is too restrictive, the second is too threatening in a civil society and the third, in particular circumstances, may be alienating. Hence, on the face of it, it seems not only that it is difficult to be as optimistic about monopoly power in the schools market as Galbraith was for the 1950s American economy, but also that countervailing power may not be such a useful addition to the protective belt of the SRP.

However, given that these are small-scale case studies, which are highly context specific, and possibly unrepresentative, their findings and conclusions are difficult to generalise and thus should only remain as a starting point to comprehend the mechanisms of countervailing power. What would be necessary to more fully measure the effectiveness of countervailing power could be the large scale, well-resourced, quantitative randomised experiment that has been used to evaluate the education maintenance allowance by Middleton et al (2004).

In this report, Lakatos’ MSRP framework has been a very useful tool with which to organise aspects of the drive towards markets in schools: the arguments for markets, the evidence, the counter-evidence, the strategies that proponents of markets use to put forth their case and to refute their opponents, etc. The MSRP framework has more commonly been used to compare divergent SRPs, as per Lakatos’ (1978a) own comparisons of the Newtonian and Einsteinian research programmes, or Blaug’s (1980) Keynesians versus the monetarists. It may also be intellectually stimulating and potentially fruitful to attempt a similar comparison in the field of education: to contrast the SRP of ‘markets for schools’ with that of the pro-comprehensive and anti-market socialists perhaps typified by members of the Socialist Workers’ Party and left wing academics so prevalent among sociologists working in education, such as Ranson, Gillborn and Vincent. As a central-right inclined student of economics, it would be useful, at least for myself, to attempt to identify the hard core of the latter SRP, in a bid to comprehend why meaningful dialogue between the two groups has thus far seemed so difficult to achieve.

Ma Chapter 3

2005-11-22T03:39:00.000Z

Chapter 3: The concept of countervailing power;
countervailing power in schools

Unrestrained economic power is … an enemy of the good society. I only urge that we have a full view of the processes by which it is restrained.’

Galbraith, J., (1954). ‘Countervailing power’, American Economic Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, Page 6

This chapter aims to briefly lay out Galbraith’s (1956) concept of countervailing power, before going on to survey critiques and applications of this concept. Then, an attempt to typify and identify manifestations of countervailing power will be made.

3.1: What is countervailing power?

In American Capitalism, Galbraith (1956) announced the arrival of new forces that restrained private economic power: that of countervailing power. Such forces were birthed and enhanced by the same processes of concentration which threatened competition. Such forces appeared ‘not on the same side of the market but on the opposite side, not with competitors but with customers or suppliers.’ The appearance of such forces meant that there was a second ‘autonomous regulator of economic activity’ and that there was an alternative to competition as the ‘only available regulatory mechanism apart from the state’. Like competition, countervailing power is also a ‘self-generating force’, because of a ‘tendency of power to be organised in response to a given response to a given position of power’. Since power on one end of the market tends to create ‘both the need for, and the prospect to, the exercise of countervailing power from the other side’, countervailing power may be relied upon as a curb on economic power. Galbraith (1956) identified the following as examples of the manifestations of countervailing power: the emergence of the United Steel Workers union to challenge the dominance and power of the steel industry in dictating employment of steel workers and the ‘rise of the food chains, the variety chains, the mail-order houses (now graduated into chain stores), the departmental-store chains, and the cooperative buying organisations of the surviving independent department and food stores’ to challenge monopoly suppliers of goods such as tyres. Together with competition and government regulation, countervailing power would keep the American economy going. There is a case for the government to continue its inadvertent support of countervailing power thus far, such as by granting minimum wage legislation to unorganised workers, and Galbraith (1956) argued that this support should be the ‘major domestic peacetime function of the federal government’.

Galbraith (1956) also asserted that ‘it is a wise economist who recognises the scope of his generalisations’ and that there are limits to the ability of countervailing power. Very strong monopoly positions might still prove impregnable against the manoeuvres of several buyers. Sources of countervailing power may also be identified by those in dominance, and successfully resisted, such as the American residential building industry, where the manufacturers of building materials reign supreme over the builders.

3.2: Recent manifestations of countervailing power

Recent evidence on the existence and usefulness of countervailing power appears to be mixed. Dobson & Waterson (1999) identified a trend within retailing towards increasing concentration, which is at least partially reinforced by the strategies of the retailers themselves, such as through the promotion of in-house brands. In British retail grocery for example, the market share of the top five firms has increased from 53% in 1988 to 64% in 1996 (Nielson, 1998). Such a trend is not isolated in Britain. Over the same time period, similar trends were observed in other European nations, where the market share rose from 27% to 42% in Germany, and from 42% to 52% in France (Nielson, 1998). Dobson and Waterson (1999) went on to suggest that the traditional Chicago school analysis of the retailing industry as perfectly competitive, because retailers face a small number of powerful suppliers with inordinately large market power, is outdated. Instead, they argue that retailing should be regarded as either monopolistic competition or an oligopoly with several key strategic players. Using a model where a single supplier negotiates with several differentiated oligopolistic retailers, they then attempted to investigate whether the increasing concentration may be regarded as a source of countervailing power to counteract that of the manufacturers (Dobson & Waterson, 1997). Though they acknowledge that higher retailer concentration would lead to a ‘fall in the supplier’s relative bargaining power’ and suggest that retailers do exhibit a countervailing power vis-a-vis their supplier, they conclude that ‘there is little to suggest that countervailing power is a reliable self-regulatory mechanism to protect consumers’. A similar conclusion was drawn using a separate model by Chen (2001), who argued that though an increase in countervailing power on the part of retailers may lead to a decline in retail prices for consumers, this decline is ‘not the result of a benevolent retailer acting on behalf of consumers but a self-interested supplier trying to offset the reduction in profits caused by the rise in countervailing power’. From Chen’s (2001) model, the supplier, in order to make up for a decline of profits, sells to fringe retailers at reduced prices to boost sales. Therefore, the lower retail price result is contingent upon a crucial assumption: the existence of ‘fringe competition’. Not only is lower prices not guaranteed, consumer choice may suffer from a reduction in product variety (Chen 2003). Therefore, countervailing power may be argued to be incapable of replacing competition as the economy’s regulatory mechanism.

On the other hand, in the examination of the pricing of a monopolist in a thirty round experimental posted offer market with two buyers and another identical market but with four buyers, Engle-Warnick & Ruffle (2002) found that prices were well below the monopoly price when the buyers are diffuse, and that competitive levels of pricing, or even lower, could actually be achieved. They attribute this result to two hypotheses: the ‘buyer empowerment hypothesis’, whereby fewer buyers intuitively feel empowered when there are fewer of them and can withhold demand more effectively, forcing the monopoly to lower prices in successive periods, and the ‘cautious monopoly hypothesis’, where ‘the mere threat of increased costly withholding when there are fewer buyers causes the monopolist to price more cautiously’ (Engle-Warnick & Ruffle, 2002). Concentration in the buyer market therefore has been effective as a source of countervailing power to eliminate monopoly power. Other papers that identify bargaining strength as a source of countervailing power include: Snyder (1998) and Ellison & Snyder (2001). With the advent of the internet as a communicative tool, countervailing power may rise as a check on retailers and manufacturers, since consumers may potentially form networks and work together effectively in collective bargaining (Rha & Widdows, 2002).

In mental health care, advocacy efforts from mental health care professionals and consultants ‘with their deeply held principles and ideals regarding public sector service’ (Minkoff, 1997) were identified as a countervailing power response to the imposition of managed care ideologies onto the system. This response is not in the form of outright criticism of the new, but of an inclination to work within the new framework, while ensuring that the public service ethos ‘that they feel most strongly about are incorporated into the newly developed systems of care’ (Minkoff & Pollack, 1997). Though groups and legislative efforts have been organised to fight for safeguards, such as through the establishment of standards, against the ‘managed care bottom line of cost control’ (Scheid, 2000), they are not generally viewed to have sufficient political clout to match up with the lobbying power of the managed care industry. Also, broadly in medical services, doctors and institutions have been postulated to be opposing countervailing agents (Light, 1991). In the Hafferty and Light (1995) perspective, ‘one party (such as the state, a profession, corporate interests or consumers) may gain dominance by subordinating other parties who, in time, counter-mobilise to redress the imbalances produced by the dominance of one party’ (Hartley, 2002). Doctors could emerge as advocates for their patients and increase their services, against efficiency-driven institutions acting for society to control spending (Schlesinger, 1997). Consumers may band together as a countervailing force too, such as in an Oregon case, whereby past patients at a birth centre protested and demonstrated against the closure of this centre and the firing of the midwifery staff, and ultimately saved the clinic (Hartley, 2002).

3.3: Countervailing power in schools
Following the discussion on what countervailing power is, and where it has been argued to have manifested in other industries, I will now go on to attempt to identify and describe its various appearances in the English school market. Before that however, I will suggest a simple typology of countervailing power, as illustrated in the diagram below, with which it may be easy to sort out their various possible forms and identify others.

Diagram 1: the axes of countervailing power

Countervailing power, as I see it, may lie on two axes. On the X-axis, the spectrum ranges from the eponymous adversarial to collaborative, while on the y-axis, the range is from top down introduction to bottom up development.

The key form of countervailing power that has emerged would involve the set of ‘quasi-regulations’ that has been introduced by New Labour under the Schools Standards and Framework Act 1998, specifically This includes the appointment of adjudicators to resolve disputes over admission policies and practices and the formulation of national codes of practice which the adjudicators would strive to uphold and enforce. The Code of Practice issued in 1999 mandated the need for explicit and transparent admissions policies, clear explanation of oversubscription criteria, and the rules under which schools may legitimately select, e.g. specialist schools were allowed to select a portion of their intake through aptitude testing, though other schools were disallowed from introducing ability testing if they had not already started during so in 1997/8; church schools were also allowed to interview pupils, but only to ascertain religious denomination. This and revised editions of the Code of Practice tells parents their rights as far as school admissions are concerned, and if they feel that they have been unfairly treated, the Code of Practice may be used to back them up in appeals to the school adjudicator. As the set of ‘quasi-regulations’ has been ordered by the state, and the process involves bring forth cases from one set of parties, such as aggrieved parents and children, against another set, that of schools and admissions authorities for judgement by an independent referee, on the typology of countervailing power, I would consider the School Adjudicator to be in the top down introduction and adversarial category.

A chief and 14 subordinate adjudicators are appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, though their work is independent of the Department for Education and Skills, which was until June 2001, the Department of Education and Employment. They are not allowed to be actively interventionist, and can only act to investigate when a body that is legally entitled to do so has made a complaint. The system is therefore a reactive rather than a proactive one. Parents may complain, but there are restrictions in place, among which is that a minimum of 10 parents is needed to trigger a parental complaint themselves (West & Ingram, 2001). Otherwise, it appears that parents have to count on their LEAs to voice objections about schools which abuse their own admissions authority. Given such restrictions, the low number of complaints made per annum is perhaps unsurprising. According to the Office of the School Adjudicator (2004), there were only 171 objections (from 126 objectors) in the 2003/2004 academic year and 165 in the year before. This is in sharp contrast to a total of 91,430 parental appeals lodged against non-admission of their children in 2002/2003 in England. However, the school adjudicators seem to be doing with a good job with this small number of cases. Out of the 126 objectors in 2003/2004, approximately 90 percent of them have had their objections upheld (Office of the School Adjudicator, 2004). Also, in their user survey, 92 percent found the service excellent or good overall (Office of the School Adjudicator, 2004).

Another example of an adversarial form of countervailing power, though one that is of a bottom up development, could be what Ranson et al (2004) calls the phenomenon of ‘storming parents’. This phenomenon involves ‘unruly parents’, who ‘enter school inappropriately, angrily seek out the head or a teacher and abuse them verbally or even physically’ (Ranson et al, 2004). Such actions are forms of exercising Hirschmann’s (1970) voice, and are attempts to influence the provision of education in schools. Though perhaps extreme and even illegal in its manifestation, Ranson et al (2004) argue that ‘storming’ occasions were reactions to events in schools, that parents were reacting to address the neglect of their needs, and that the underlying desire of these parents was to seek mutual understanding. In this light, legislating and punishing aggressive parents, as the Secretary of State for Education has done or promised to do[1], may be unfairly recreating a deficit model of groups of parents and reviving the long tradition of teachers seeing parents as problems (Croll, 2001). Therefore, government policy should perhaps focus on promoting understanding and communication between parents and schools, such as through enhancing Parent Teacher Association (PTA) links.

Communication and deliberation between parents and teachers, for example during parents’ evenings or through the PTA would be a collaborative form of countervailing power, and probably one of bottom up development as well. There is a National Confederation of Parent Teacher Association (NCPTA), which is an umbrella organisation for over 12,500 PTAs and 6 million members in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (NCPTA, 2004). This organisation supports PTAs in generating partnerships and dialogue between parents and teachers, and provides parents with an avenue to voice their views with regards to the education of their children. It also produces position statements to articulate its members views on matter including ‘parental preference and school admissions’, as well as magazines and newsletters, with articles on school safety measures and school networking, etc., to member organisations. At the local level, PTAs may organise parents’ forums, i.e. group meetings of parents, tutors, the headteacher and management, though these are probably relatively rare compared to social and fundraising events. Vincent and Martin’s (2000) observations of such forums have revealed that even though regular participants tend to be supporters of the school and are willing to accept professional knowledge and understanding, given persistence and strong convictions, they have on occasion been used as an effective channel for expressing parental dissent and dissatisfaction. The more common formal consultative parents’ evening is the main opportunity through which parents get to both get feedback from and give feedback to teachers.

However, there is perhaps a need to ensure that communication is improved at parents’ evenings, for Power and Clark (2000) have in their case studies of four schools found that parents generally report that they were ‘frustrating and unproductive encounters’, especially if they turn out to be more of a one way dissemination of information in chaotic, free-for-all ‘rugby match’ environments.

Finally, an example of a collaborative and top down introduction form of countervailing power could be the development of online forums for parents. This mirrors Rha and Widdows’ (2002) prediction, earlier mentioned, that with rising availability and usage of the internet, consumers would be provided with an avenue to communicate and take action together effectively. Parents Centre, at www.parentscentre.gov.uk, formerly Parents Online, is a government initiative, working in conjunction with Directgov, the central government’s official online resource website, to not only provide parents with information on schooling and parenting, such as childcare, school life, choosing a school, dealing with bullying, etc., but also, through the set up of a message board, to allow concerned parents to post queries, anonymously if they desire, and obtain information and support from other parents and experts who use the forum. Though this particular initiative has been implemented by the government, it is foreseeable that if there is a demand, similar websites and online forums may be set up by parents themselves, thereby providing a more bottom up development version of this countervailing power.

[1] Estelle Morris, in interview on GMTV Sunday Programme, 14th July 2002, according to Ranson et al. (2004).

MA Chapter 2

2005-11-22T03:35:00.000Z

Chapter 2: Why introduce markets for schools?; marketisation of schools in a Lakatosian scientific research programme framework

2.1 The Lakatosian Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (MSRP) framework

In a radio broadcast on 30th June 1973, Imre Lakatos (1978a) succinctly introduced his methodology of scientific research programmes (MSRP) to the public. This methodology was to be a framework for the analysis of developments in science. He argued that scientific achievements should be viewed as sets of programmes rather than solitary theories and hypotheses. For example, Lakatos (1978a) argued that Newtonian science consists not only of the ‘hard core’ of the three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation, but also a ‘protective’ belt of auxiliary hypotheses that guards the ‘hard core’ against refutation. ‘Heuristics’, in either positive and negative forms, then guide scientists in the Newtonian SRP, to solve anomalies which threaten both the ‘protective belt’ or the ‘hard core’. At any stage in any research programme, Newtonian, Einsteinian, Marxism, or Copernican, etc., there are always unsolved anomalies and problems. Therefore, as Lakatos (1978a) asserted,’(a)ll theories, in this sense, are born refuted and die refuted’.

MSRP has since been used as a tool to analyse the history of economic thought and to examine the development of economic theories and programmes. For instance, Blaug (1980) argued that the neo-classical human capital model has the characteristics of the Lakatosian SRP and defined its ‘hard core’ to be “People spend on themselves in diverse ways not only for the sake of the present enjoyment but also for the sake of future benefits.” while the various human capital theories served as its ‘protective belt’. Elsewhere, Latsis (1972) and Simon (1978) described and compared competing research programmes related to the theory of the firm: the former dealt with ‘situational determinism’ versus ‘economic behaviorism’, while the latter juxtaposed the ‘substantive rationality’ of economics with the ‘procedural rationality’ of psychology.

‘Markets for schools’ can and will similarly be explored by scrutinising it under the microscope of the MSRP. Before going on to place the school marketisation programme into the SRP framework, it is necessary to define and explain the various elements of the SRP.

The heart of each SRP is its hard core. This hard core is a set of embedded assumptions that all workers in the SRP consider to be irrefutable, according to Lakatos (1978b). The hard core’s protective belt however is refutable, and is indeed expected to bear the brunt of any refutations. The protective belt is adaptable and continually changing, and modifies itself, such as the replacement of its composite theories, to explain away the refutations and account for any anomalies. Anomalies and refutations exist in each and every SRP. These are phenomena which have not been accounted for or explained.

As mentioned earlier, there are two types of ‘heuristics’: negative and positive. These are both methodological rules. Negative heuristics prescribe paths of research to avoid, and ‘involves the stipulation that the basic assumptions underlying the programme at the hard core must not be rejected or modified’ (Chalmer, 1983). Negative heuristics .forbid any questioning of the hard core and redirect any refutations to the protective belt. On the other hand, positive heuristics stipulate what paths to pursue and how the research programme should be developed. In Lakatos’ (1978b, page 49) words,

‘The positive heuristic consists of a partially articulated set of suggestions or hints on how to change, develop the “refutable variants” of the research programme, how to modify, sophisticate, the “refutable” protective belt.’

Also, the positive heuristic

‘(D)efines problems, outlines the construction of a belt of auxiliary hypotheses, foresees anomalies and turns them victoriously into examples… (and) (i)t is primarily the positive heuristic of (the scientist’s) programme … which dictates the choice of his problems ’ (Lakatos, 1978c, page 111)

SRPs may be progressive or degenerating. In progressive SRPs,

‘theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts. In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts’ (Lakatos, 1978a, page 5)

Competing and conflicting SRPs may co-exist simultaneously, and a scientific revolution then comes about when (the degenerating) one is abandoned for (the progressive) other. Refutations, given that they permeate all SRPs, are not responsible for the revolution. Instead,

‘(w)hat really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes’ (Lakatos, 1978a, page 6)
2.2: ‘Markets for schools’ as SRP

Having defined the components of the SRP, I will now suggest what they are in the programme of ‘markets for schools’. Clearly, as Leijonhufvud (1976) pointed out, the definition of any SRP is likely to be contestable, because different workers inside, as well as analysts outside the relevant field are likely to have different perspectives of it. For example, he raised the example of Milton Friedman, who opined that monetarists and neo-Keynesians share essentially the same theory, and that all their differences derived from disagreement over the magnitude of particular empirical parameters; other monetarists and neo-Keynesians would clearly feel that their differences are far more fundamental than that. Also, the economic liberal Jevons, coming from a different ideological perspective from the libertarian Friedman, would probably support school markets for different reasons, and see different school choice programmes as useful. What they see as the hard core, positive heuristics, etc. therefore may vary, at least in degree.

The hard core
Hard core preposition 1: Parents and pupils maximise their utility by maximising educational opportunity and outcomes; choice is inherently utility enhancing.
Hard core preposition 2: Agents, with access to sufficient knowledge, can and will make rational decisions.
Hard core proposition 3: Parents and pupils maximise their utility by choosing the school which will maximise the child’s educational opportunities and outcomes.
Hard core preposition 4: Teachers, headteachers and other educationalists working in schools maximise their utility by maximising their income (by maximising pupil number).
Hard core preposition 5: Education is a commodity that may be traded just like any other.
Hard core preposition 6: The market is a useful tool, with which social justice may be achieved in schools.

The first five of these prepositions are first principles, from which the sixth preposition may be derived. Liberal and libertarian economists may fervently believe that like hammers and nails, the market is a tool that may be used to achieve a given goal, not just as a matter of irrefutable logic, but also ideology.

Social justice, if defined according to Konow’s (2003) integrated justice theory, would include not only Need and Equity but also the principle of Efficiency.

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 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. People are assumed to be homo economicus, seeking to maximise 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.
The positive heuristic

These positive heuristics generate theories and ideas supportive of markets that go into the protective belt:

Positive heuristic 1: Explain how markets can be used to improve social justice.

Positive heuristic 2: Propose mechanisms with which markets may be used to improve social justice.

Positive heuristic 3: Explain why and how the state monopoly has failed to attain social justice.

Positive heuristic 4: Provide empirical evidence in support of the first three positive heuristics above.

The positive heuristic may be viewed as a ‘recipe’ or set of ‘recipes’, with which to concoct the protective belt ‘broth’.

The protective belt

Protective belt preposition 1: Markets give the working class the option of exit, which improves equity.

Proponents of markets have also claimed that contrary to intuition, there may not be the conventional economics efficiency-equity trade-off and equity may actually be increased instead of decreased in a school market system. Using Hirschmann’s (1970) concepts of ‘voice’ and ‘exit’, Tooley (1995) argued that markets reduce the power of the middle-class vis-à-vis the working class. In any organisation, customers may express their dissatisfaction with its performance either ‘exit’, i.e. by leaving and stopping their custom of the organisation’s products, or by ‘voice’, i.e. by ‘express(ing) their satisfaction directly to management or some other authority to which management is subordinate or through general protest to anyone who cares to listen’ (Hirschmann, 1970). In an educational setting, this means that parents or pupils may express their displeasure with a school either by leaving it for another school, or by complaining to the head teacher, government or to the press. Under a non-market, bureaucratic system, ‘voice’ tends to be the only available recourse, while in a market system, both ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ are viable options. In the former system, the middle class can be expected to dominate, since it is ‘politically influential, skilled and adroit, …organised, … more articulate… (and) endowed with cultural power’ (Seldon, 1990) and are more capable at manipulating ‘voice’. The denial of markets to the working classes means that ‘exit’ is not permitted to them, and they are stuck with only ‘voice’, in which they are seriously disadvantaged. Markets, by reducing bureaucratic procedures, such as LEA admissions rules, will enable them to make choices previously not available. Though Gewirtz et al. (1995) and Willms & Echols (1992) may argue that the middle class are relatively more adept at working the market, at least markets give the option of ‘exit’, where there was none before, to the working class, and allow them to ‘vote with their feet’ (Tiebout, 1956) and to leave poor schools for better ones.

Protective belt preposition 2: Government failure is pernicious.

Government failure, it has been argued, can be as pernicious, if not more so than market failure. According to Barr (2004), the public-choice literature points to two distortionary factors that may explain governments’ failure to maximise social welfare. Firstly, there is the distortionary response of government to coalition groups of voters and pressure groups, which may come about because, for example, the middle class has an inordinately strong electoral power as the median voter (Tullock, 1970), or governments may be elected with only a minority and therefore only need to pander to a small but allied coalition of voters. Secondly, bureaucrats themselves exert distortions, since they may run public agencies at least partly for their own benefit and with their own goals, and with considerable ‘organisational slack’. Also, bureaucracy has been closely linked, arguably not unfairly, to inflexibility in decision-making, un-necessary duplication, red tape, high internal transaction costs and inefficiency.

Protective belt preposition 3: Markets, competition, and choice improve the efficiency, effectiveness and standards in schools

Markets are believed by supporters such as Friedman & Friedman (1980) to be the key means to improve standards in education. They are thought to provide the right incentives: successful and therefore popular schools are rewarded with increased enrolment and funding, while unsuccessful schools are forced to change and improve or face closure. Increasing the range of types of schools and enhancing diversity may encourage education to break free, innovate and push for greater effectiveness. As Gorard (2003) pointed out, the desire for greater diversity stems from ‘the perceived failure of state-funded monopolies of schools, and the differential effectiveness of sectors and school types’. Markets are thought to be efficient, while state monopolies are bureaucratic, slothful and wasteful.

The anomalies

Anomaly 1: There has been little evidence that efficiency has indeed been improved since the introduction of markets in the English school system.

There appears to be very little clear-cut evidence that efficiency has indeed been improved as a result of the market based reforms. Instead, the autonomy and flexibility given to the grant-maintained schools has neither led to a significantly different pattern of resource allocation (Fitz et. al, 1993), which could indicate the presence of innovative behaviour, nor to significantly better educational outcomes (Levacic and Hardman, 1999). The relationship between schools’ quality of resource management and their educational outcomes has also been shown to be only weakly positive (Levacic and Glover, 1998).

DfEE (1998) statistics may show that the percentage of pupils getting 5 good passes at GCSE and its equivalent level has not only increased year-on-year since 1975 to 1998, but also that the increases have been larger since the late 1980s, i.e. the implementation of the ERA. But as Gorard (2001) argued, it is impossible to simply attribute this raw-score improvement to market forces per se, given that there were other policy changes happening at the same time. Any of these could have been equally plausible as the, or one of the, causes of GCSE improvements: replacement of the CSE and the GCE in the 1986/87 academic year with the arguably easier GCSE, and the abolition of strict norm-referencing which has previously served to keep results relatively constant (Foxman, 1997). Moreover, as efficiency refers to a relationship between inputs and outputs, it is insufficient to examine just the outputs of educations, but also the inputs. If educational output has increased as a result of a proportionate, or even more than proportionate increase in the usage of inputs, then efficiency may hardly be considered to have improved.

Anomaly 2: Economists and sociologists have identified many mechanisms through which social inequality has been argued to have been negatively impacted by the market.

A major concern among economists and sociologists is that of cream skimming (Glennerster, 1991). Since a school’s performance in the league tables is determined largely by socio-economic background and schools in greater demand can attract more pupils and hence more funds, a school may attract more funding by maximising the examination results of its pupils and it can do that at minimum cost by cream skimming students from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Evidence suggests that worries in England about cream skimming are real. Schools have been shown to seek out and select particular types of students, e.g. those from the middle class, or from South Asian backgrounds, based on their abilities to boost test scores, at the expense of the ‘less able’, such as children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) (Gewirtz et al, 1995), etc. A significant minority of schools, especially those with autonomy over admissions, i.e. voluntary-aided and foundation schools, had criteria which appear to cream skim, despite Labour government reform attempts since 1997, such as the Schools Standard and Framework Act 1998, and the introduction of the Code of Practice on School Admissions, to counter this phenomenon (West et al., 2004). More specifically, schools have been using interviews meant to establish the pupils’ religion to determine the presence or absence of other desirable characteristics, which might partially explain the different percentages of pupils eligible for free school meals in different types of schools: by religion, 11.4% for Church of England schools, 15.6% for Roman Catholic schools, 6.2% for Jewish schools and 6.5% for Sikh schools, compared with 16.1% for all other maintained secondary schools in England (House of Commons, 2001).

Social inequity may also be negatively influenced because privileged middle class parents, with their cultural capital and educational knowledge, are better than their working class counterparts at discriminating between schools, evaluating teachers, and interpreting league tables and Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) reports and therefore come up trumps in the schooling markets (Ball et al., 1996). In England, the government, under New Labour’s ‘Fair Funding’ for example, does provide higher per capita funding for schools with a higher proportion of socially disadvantaged pupils, but it is difficult to tell, especially given the complexity and opaqueness of the formula used, how much this additional funding constitutes, and whether it is sufficient to compensate for the working class’ relative disadvantage.

Yet another concern is that with the development of markets in education, schools may become increasingly pressured to restructure teaching, such as by introducing setting, in order to attract white middle class school children, who are viewed as ‘valuable commodities’ (Reay, 1998). Research has shown that there are negative consequences for pupils allocated to bottom sets since, for example, teachers for bottom sets tend to be less experienced and junior staff (Ball, 1981). Because pupils in bottom sets are predominantly black or white working class, and those in top sets may be ‘uniformly white’ (Gillborn and Gipps, 1996), this suggests that social inequalities based on race and social class are being exacerbated here. Indeed, when schools are ranked according to their percent of pupils achieving A-C grades, Gillborn and Youdell (2001) have observed an ‘educational triage’ syndrome, whereby schools ration their time and effort, and focus on pupils on the borderline between the D and C grades, at ‘the cost of judging some pupils (disproportionately Black and working class young people) as without hope’. Schools do not deliberately set out to further disadvantage the disadvantaged. Instead, to keep their place in the pecking order, schools have to maximise their measured output from limited resources, and therefore have no choice but to decide where best to concentrate their efforts upon. This decision is based on judgements on ‘ability’, which unfortunately, like IQism, is a ‘loaded, fallacious and highly dangerous concept … (that) … offers a supposedly fair means of condemning some children to second class educations’ (Gillborn and Youdell, 2001). Since pupils who are black, or who receive free school meals, for example, are considerably more likely, and possibly more unfairly to be judged as lacking in ‘ability’, they are also arguably more likely to be consigned to lower sets and lower tiers. If this postulation bears true, then it may well be expected that under a market setting, the educational divide can only widen with what some sociologists consider to be a misplaced belief in ‘ability’. These sociologists (and many others) are almost definitely against educational markets on an ideological basis, and are therefore not working within the ‘markets for schools’ SRP. However, their (and similar) findings with respect to equity would still certainly come to the attention of economists who are working within the SRP as ‘anomalies’, and who would then try to defend the SRP, perhaps by discrediting the sociologists’ methodology or questioning their partiality.

The negative heuristics

Negative heuristic 1: Blame failures of the market on perversions of the market.

For example, Tooley (1995) has asserted that the full potential of markets in education cannot be accurately assessed from studies of quasi-markets, or what he called ‘so-called market(s)’. The state educational marketplace, as it exists in England, is not a free market, since there is no price mechanism in operation, there is heavy regulation from the state in form of the National Curriculum and league tables, etc., and while the demand side has been liberated through per capita funding, the supply side, i.e. the provision of education, has hardly been freed from state control. As such, he dismissed criticisms of markets in education by writers such as Ranson (1993), whom he feels mistakenly uses arguments against the Conservatives’ ‘so-called market’ against markets in general. Just because the schools quasi-market as it is today is inequitable does not mean that education markets in general are inequitable.

Negative heuristic 2: Strike at the method of the work of opponents.

According to Blaug (1980), Becker poured ‘scorn on the “considerable ad hocery” that is required in the conventional approach …’, including the forms of utility functions. This attack on the methods of his opponents may be viewed as an attempt to simultaneously promote and defend his own research programme.

Similarly, in the school choice debate, where empirical work has been involved to ascertain the impact of the ERA, especially with respect to equity, there has been much disagreement over method. There are many different methods that can and have been used to measure educational equity in different contexts: the Gini coefficient, the inter-quartile range, the desegregation index, etc. Gorard and Fitz (2000) used the desegregation index and data on the percentage of pupils with free school meals in every school in England in Wales, to show that socio-economic desegregation between English and Welsh schools in term of student intake has actually decreased significantly since 1989. This may arguably be taken as key evidence that equity has improved.

However, opponents of school markets have produced work with contrary conclusions. For example, multilevel modelling (Goldstein and Noden, 2002) and the isolation index (Noden, 2000) have been used to show that schools have become more socially segregated.

Gorard’s (2003) response to these findings has been to question the approach and method. Gorard (2003) maintained that Noden committed a ‘terrible mistake’ in using invalid arithmetic, asserted that ‘whatever it is that (Goldstein) & (Noden) believed they were doing they were not, in fact, measuring segregation at all.’ and concluded that ‘the approach proposed by Goldstein and Noden (2003) is retrograde, erroneous, and of no clear practical value.’

2.3 Monopoly power as refutation and ‘anomaly’

Economists and sociologists both have recognised that the English schooling market is not a free market, and that schools are not the perfectly competitive agents of neo-classical theory. The acknowledgement may be implicit, including when their work revolves around different levels of competition, such as Bradley et al.’s (2001) and Levacic’s (2004) examination of the impact of competition on efficiency. Stating that different school markets have different levels of competition or that schools have different degrees of market power is akin to stating the fullness or emptiness of one’s glass. School market A has a moderate level of competition: the glass is half full. School Alpha in market A has a moderate level of monopoly power: the glass is half empty.

There is not just the continued intervention by the state, but also the non-fulfilment of the necessary assumptions and conditions for a free market, such as perfect information, freedom of entry and exit, etc., as would be outlined in any basic university economics textbook. More appropriate as an economic model for the schools market, especially at a local level, could therefore be one of imperfect competition, oligopoly or even monopoly, depending on the local context: the number of schools, the types and quality of schools, the selection procedure of the schools, etc. Consider village X in rural Shropshire, with only one school in miles; consider town Y in Kent with one selective Roman Catholic girls’ college, and one mixed comprehensive; consider London Borough Z, which has seven foundation schools, some of which have different specialisms. The local school market in X, Y and Z may rightfully be considered to be a monopoly, an oligopoly and a monopolistic competition respectively. To a degree, the selective Roman Catholic girls’ college may also be viewed as a monopoly to parents who strongly desire their children to go to their nearest single-sex school, since this is the only school in the vicinity with such characteristics.

It follows that these hypothetical schools have market power, and that with the ERA, instead of empowering parents with real choice, economic power and control might simply have passed from the LEA to schools. Furthermore, as suggested by Adnett and Davies (2002), schools may actively strategise to seek to increase their market or monopoly power by further differentiating themselves from their rivals, for example by acquiring beacon school or specialist school status. An irony is that the introduction of all the myriad new types of schools under both the Tories and New Labour is meant to increase competition and choice, but because they differentiate the schools, the market power of particular schools may actually have gone up and competition may paradoxically be stymied.

Market power in the hands of schools may be undesirable, crucially because schools may abuse their monopoly power to do well under the pressures of the market system, and also because the management of schools that are de facto local monopolies could well be as inefficient and inflexible as the bureaucratic LEAs that they were meant to replace. This abuse is manifested, I argue, in schools’ admissions polices, and in schools participating in cream-skimming as a key strategy to maximise school performance. When schools have monopoly power, school choice, I argue, will ironically indeed be school choice, in that schools instead of parents will be in a position to choose which pupils they want. Such schools will be oversubscribed and indeed, a clear indicator that a school might have a degree of monopoly power would be when there is chronic over-subscription year-on-year. Then, admissions policies, whether set up by the LEA or the school’s own governing body, can and have been used to select in and select out pupils.

Efficiency arguments for the market in schools tend to rely on the presence of competition as an impetus for continual improvement, innovation and dynamic efficiency. The incidence of schools with monopoly power would mean that there could be insufficient competition in particular school markets. Then, if headteachers and educational professionals are motivated solely by self-interest, the lack of competition would result in X-inefficiency (Levacic, 2004).

Therefore, the case for school marketisation could be weakened on the grounds of both equity and efficiency. In the framework of the Lakatosian MSRP, monopoly power would be an ‘anomaly’, a problem that school market enthusiasts would have to solve.

2.4: Introducing countervailing power into the protective belt to negate monopoly power

The existence and pervasiveness of monopoly power held by schools may arguably pose a serious challenge to proponents of school marketisation. Monopoly power would emerge for reasons discussed in the earlier section, as a phenomenon that occurs naturally in markets, and therefore, writers like Tooley would hardly be able to blame state intervention for its emergence[1].

Pointing fingers in blame is hardly productive, and if monopoly power in schools as an anomaly and refutation is to be dealt with in a satisfactory manner, it may best to look again at economic theory, to rediscover rationalisations that may perhaps argue either the good of monopolies or that monopolies may be restrained by a system of checks and balances. Certainly, Baumol et al’s (1982) contestable market theory is one that springs to mind, whereby monopolies are driven to behave like perfectly competitive firms, not because there is competition, but because there is a real threat of competition. Unfortunately, schools may have high setup costs[2], and the necessary freedom of exit and entry is perhaps not easily attained for schooling institutions in England. Therefore, contestable market theory may have little to offer as a solution here.

On the other hand, countervailing power, as a concept developed by Galbraith (1956), led him to remain optimistic despite the growth of huge corporations, American Capitalism and corporate monopolies. There is good reason to believe that instances of countervailing power may also be in the English school market, both when parents are choosing schools for their children and when their children are already students in their schools, and therefore provide concerned policy-makers with a tool with which to ensure social justice in its myriad conceptions. In the framework of the Lakatosian MSRP, countervailing power will lie in the protective belt, as a proposition to negate the anomaly of monopoly.

[1] Please see Tooley’s (1995) claims in the negative heuristics section, page 20.
[2] Of course, set up costs for schools vary. It may be prohibitively expensive for schools to be constructed or even expanded in densely built up urban areas, while it may be very cheap to do so in rural areas of particular developing countries, where space, cheap labour and raw materials are very much in abundance.

MA Chapter 1

2005-11-22T03:30:00.000Z

Chapter 1: Marketisation in the English school system in 1988 and after

On 16th October, 1976, the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, firmly called out for discussion by all parties, ‘parents, teachers, learned and professional bodies, representatives of higher education and both sides of industry, together with the Government’ (Callaghan, 1976) to address problems in the English educational system. He expressed unease with standards in schools and dubious new informal methods of teaching, among other things. In essence, his speech was an appeal for reform.

The Conservatives’ answer was the Education Reform Act of 1988, which promised that market forces would inject a new vitality into the system. Its aims were to:

raise standards, extend choice and produce a better educated Britain … by giving consumers of education a central part in decision making … (, by) freeing schools and colleges to deliver the standards that parents and employers want … (, by) encouraging the consumer to expect and demand that all educational bodies do the best job possible.

(Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker
2nd reading of 1987 bill in formulation for 1988 ERA
Hansard, 1 December 1987)

It would be useful to draw out various pertinent strands of the Act. First of all, the Local Management of Schools (LMS) scheme was a measure designed to enhance the independence of schools by diminishing Local Education Authority (LEA) control of schools. LEAs were seen to be overly bureaucratic, overly centralised and therefore inefficient. Under LMS, school governors were allowed to decide how to spend the delegated budget, which was newly introduced, and were responsible for the appointment, management and dismissal of staff. The whole point of LMS was ‘to decentralise decision making (from the LEAs) to school level’ (Levacic, 1995). Chubb and Moe (1990) would argue that such self autonomy is essential for school improvement and for schools to be most effective.

The main idea behind marketisation and the increase of competition is that schools will, given a mix of incentives, endeavour to raise educational standards in order to attract pupils and hence funding. To increase competition between schools, the ERA also prescribed open enrolment: it was made compulsory for schools to admit pupils up to their full capacity and LEAs could no longer restrict intakes of popular schools in order to protect falling rolls in less popular schools. Funding also became based on a formula strongly linked to student enrolment, and at least 75 percent of the Aggregated Schools Budget, i.e. the money delegated by the LEA to its schools, had to be allocated according to the number and the ages of pupils. Open enrolment and formula funding together meant that a quasi-voucher system was in place. Competition was also to be enhanced by the creation of grant-maintained schools and City Technology Colleges[1] (CTCs). Grant maintained (GM) schools were educational institutions with considerable autonomous powers separate from the LEAs, for example in the formulation and application of ‘their own selection procedures for a significant proportion of their intake’ (Gorard et al., 2003), as well as independence in asset and income management. These schools obtained their status as GM schools after a process of ‘opting out’ from their local LEA, which included an application to the secretary of state as well as a clear positive result from parental ballots. Successful schools would then receive their funding directly from central government instead of via the LEA. City Technology Colleges, built with the prime purpose of providing a good secondary school education for poor inner-city pupils, were to be financed partly with private resources, and were also to have similar autonomous powers as the GM schools. Such independence, it was hoped, would allow English schools the freedom from the bureaucratic, inefficient ‘visible hand’ of the LEAs to innovate and maximise educational quality.

It is important to note that the reforms of the ERA led not to an education free market, but to an education quasi-market, for which the distinguishing characteristics are ‘the separation of purchaser from provider and an element of user choice between providers’ as well as usually a high degree of government intervention (Levacic, 1995). In England and Wales, the government introduced a National Curriculum, which dictates the content of the curriculum in compulsory education, and testing on a grand scale, in order to inform parents and teachers what a child knows and understands, to indicate the achievements of schools generally, and to ensure the quality of the educational system. To ensure competition, leagues tables were to be compiled and published based on test grades obtained by pupils. Though such a mix of centralisation and decentralisation might at first glance appear to be purely the product of muddled thinking, it is in fact the result of struggle, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation over short and long term strategies and goals between the neo-liberals and neo-conservative elements within the New Right dominant during Margaret Thatcher’s years in power (Whitty, 1990). Also, it can be viewed, as Levacic (1993) suggested, as a clearly thought out introduction and application of the multidivisional ‘M’-form organisational model from business into education and the schools landscape, on the basis that the more flexible ‘M’ form would lead to a higher propensity for innovation, an important dynamic advantage over the ‘U’ form (Qian et al., 2003) that was pre-existing in the system.

After Thatcher, John Major in his six-and-a-half-year stint at 10 Downing Street showed a similar enthusiasm towards markets and competition in the school system. Major (1992) condemned orthodoxy around the pre-1988 comprehensive system for its ‘hostility to competition between schools and between pupils, and even in sport; hostility to all forms of testing; hostility to genuine parental choice … by some questionable dogmas that fly in the face of common sense’. In the White Paper Choice and diversity: a new framework for schools (DfE, 1992), and the 1993 Education Act therefore, it should perhaps be of no surprise that all secondary schools were eventually to be freed, upon successful application, to specialise in one or more curriculum areas such as technology and modern languages, or that LEAs would have an even more severely diminished and limited role in the new education system.

After the sound defeat of the Conservatives in 1997, the move towards more marketisation was not reversed and in fact seems to have hardly relented under New Labour. There has been, for example, an expansion of the specialist schools framework (Power & Whitty, 1999), such that successful applicants may now specialise in not just the original science, music, arts and technology, but also agricultural sciences, engineering and sports (Specialist Schools Trust, 2005). There are no more grant-maintained schools, because these have essentially been reinvented and renamed ‘foundation’ schools under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Also, the mechanisms with which schools may select pupils are now being ‘quasi-regulated’ with the introduction of new admissions and appeals rules as well as the appointment of school adjudicators (West & Ingram, 2001). State schools still continue to be funded largely on a pupil number basis, e.g. under New Labour’s ‘Fair Funding’ initiative in 1999. Recently, the educational marketplace has been expanding even at home, with the increasing emphasis on home learning by New Labour in what McNamara et al (2000) called ‘the Blairite project of Total Schooling’. The value of homework has been repeatedly emphasised, and funding has been poured into activities such as homework clubs, which extend the reach of schooling into the leisure time of children (Scanlon & Buckingham, 2004). Parents are also increasingly pressured to ‘invest’ more in educational resources, such as home computers, study guides, early learning materials and private home tutoring, for their children.

[1] The DFES on its website (http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/academies/ctcs/?version=1, accessed 21st August 2005) maintains that the Education Reform Act of 1988 provided the legislative framework for the City Technology programme, which involved the establishment of 14 CTCs and one college for the technology of arts from 1988 to 1993. However, plans for the development of CTCs may be traced back to 1986, when Kenneth Baker called for their pilot launch in urban areas (Baker, 2005), and when Solihull Local Education Authority agreed to support the establishment of the first CTC at Kingshurst (www.kingshurst.ac.uk/pages/backgrnd.htm, accessed 1st August 2005).

MA Introduction

2005-11-22T03:28:00.000Z

Introduction
In the discourse of school choice supporters, schools have often been idealistically portrayed as agents in the perfectly competitive markets of theory. However, this theory does not seem to be reflected in reality. It may be argued that like conventional firms in goods and services markets, many schools have degrees and forms of monopoly power. To ignore this and to pretend that reality is the same as theory would be a form of ‘innocent fraud’ (Galbraith, 2004).

Taking the marketisation of school systems as a form of Lakatosian Scientific Research Programme (SRP), the reality of monopoly power may be thought of as an ‘anomaly’ which threatens the viability of school choice arguments. However, the concept of countervailing power, a force that has the potential to counter monopoly power, could be a useful addition to the ‘protective belt’ and defend the ‘hard core’ of the marketisation SRP.

This report will firstly briefly introduce the market based reforms enacted in England through the Education Reform Act of 1988 (Chapter 1). It will also be shown how the economics of school markets may be seen and analysed as a Lakatosian SRP (Chapter 2). Then it will be argued that in reality, monopoly power has emerged and has proved to be pernicious, perhaps especially so towards equity. However, it will also be argued that as a response to the rise of monopoly power among schools, countervailing power has or will come forth to restrain the excesses of monopolies (Chapter 3).

MA Acknowledgements

2005-11-22T03:24:00.000Z

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Rosalind Levačić for her vital advice, thoughtful suggestions, interesting perspectives and hard work.

I would also like to thank Jonathan Stockbridge for his constant support.

Thanks too to Shane Dillon, David R., Huang Zhongwen & Christine Chuah for proof-reading and commenting on various segments of my report.

Managing Civil Disobedience

2005-10-10T04:05:00.000+01:00

By Cherian George, Straits Times, 10th October 2005

THE ‘white elephants’ affair has resulted in a ’stern warning’ to its unnamed perpetrator. After this case, people will be more careful to check that they do not accidentally flout the law, as the unfortunate Mahout of Buangkok appears to have done.

However, this is unlikely to be the last such case. The stern warning will not deter opposition activists who believe in deliberately breaking the law to make a political point. Their attempt to inject civil disobedience into Singapore’s body politic represents an intriguing challenge to the People’s Action Party’s ideological hold. It calls for deft handling. While thwarting a protest is easy for the authorities, the question is how much political capital they will have to spend in the process.

This is the real power of such campaigns. By deliberately but non-violently flouting laws that they deem unjust, opponents put the authorities in a fix.

The state could choose to close one eye, but this would diminish its authority and probably invite follow-up breaches until these are too large or too flagrant to be ignored. If the state responds with force against a peaceful protest, the activists can still try to claim the moral victory. They may succeed in convincing the wider public that the law in question - and the state’s power in general - is neither just nor moral, but instead backed by sheer force.

Thus, campaigns of civil disobedience test a state’s moral legitimacy, revealing whether its rule is based mainly on consent or on coercion.

Dr Chee Soon Juan has been dabbling with this strategy for some years, at least since 1998, when he spoke in public without a permit and landed up in prison. His new book, The Power Of Courage, promotes non-violent civil disobedience as an opposition strategy in Singapore.

The Government has responded that the rule of law must be respected. Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng said that wilful law-breaking ‘regardless of whether you think it is a silly law or not…does violence to the rule of law’, even if the actions are peaceful.

While the principle of zero tolerance for law-breaking is straightforward, applying it will be a challenge. Civil disobedience will test a key element of PAP governance: its acumen in calibrating its use of force against political challengers, such that opponents are neutralised with minimum collateral damage.

This is not to deny the other - and much better-understood - sources of the PAP’s strength, namely its outstanding record in delivering the goods, its internal discipline and its ability to win genuine freely-given loyalty from the majority of Singaporeans.

But every state, by definition, also comprises instruments of force. And the intelligent use of force is no less a dimension of good governance than, say, an efficient bureaucracy or long-term urban planning.

Its calibrated approach to coercion may be one of the least appreciated of the PAP’s many skills. Indeed, stating it this way will probably provoke some incredulity. After all, even some of the PAP’s most ardent supporters think it is guilty of occasional overkill. PAP leaders themselves are not coy about their macho side. Mr Lee Kuan Yew talks of knuckledusters and nation-building with equal aplomb. If the PAP were to develop and market a computer game, it would be a cross between SimCity and Street Fighter.

Self-restraint
IMAGE aside, however, the facts show a government increasingly aware of the need to exercise self-restraint in its use of force. Yes, it has an array of repressive tools within easy reach. But, compared with other states that possess similar tools and are controlled by similarly strong-willed leaders, Singapore’s Government has been relatively judicious and sophisticated in their use.

The spectrum of coercive tools available to an authoritarian regime today ranges from political murders and disappearances, and torture and imprisonment without trial, to criminal prosecution, civil action, the banning of organisations, sabotaging opponents’ means of earning a living and character attacks through state-controlled media.

The most extreme of these tools have never been used in Singapore. And it is noteworthy that detention without trial, under the Internal Security Act, was used frequently in the 1960s and 1970s but has not been applied to non-violent political opponents in almost two decades.

As for criminal prosecutions, most of these have not involved jail terms. Dr Chee went to prison because he would not pay a fine. The state’s weapon of choice - defamation civil suits - similarly does not involve incarceration, though it can be devastating financially.

Some may argue that these distinctions are academic, as the PAP’s calibrated coercion is still coercive enough to neutralise the opposition. On the one hand, that is precisely the point being argued here: The PAP has developed into an art form the ability to suppress challenges with a fraction of the brutality employed by the most ruthless dictatorships, but with an effectiveness that more than matches them.

Still, the difference between physical torture and a lawsuit is hardly insignificant. To claim otherwise - to say that Singapore is like the Soviet Union of the past, or like Zimbabwe today - is to trivialise the suffering of dissidents in some of the most inhumane regimes of the modern era.

Furthermore, different tools have different secondary effects. That is why calibrated coercion is not only more ethical than unbridled repression, but also the smarter option for any regime interested in long-term consolidation rather than short-term plunder.

States that overplay their hand often find the excessive violence backfiring on them. It unleashes a moral outrage that opponents can harness to mobilise a hitherto-inert public behind their cause.

Tipping points
IN THE Philippines, the sight of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr, gunned down in cold blood on the tarmac of Manila International Airport in 1983, was the beginning of the end of the Ferdinand Marcos regime.

Indonesia, May 1998: The shooting of four student protesters was the tipping point that turned the Reformasi campaign against then-president Suharto into a full-blown revolution.

Malaysia’s Reformasi got a fillip from sensational images of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim being snatched away under the Internal Security Act and then emerging from custody with a black eye, courtesy of the country’s police chief.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew would later comment that the Mahathir government erred tactically in using the ISA instead of a straightforward criminal charge - a rare hint that the calibration of coercion is a conscious policy, even if never enunciated.

One of the few political theorists to have analysed the cost of a state’s violence to the state itself was political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

In her pithy treatise On Violence, she rejected Mao Zedong’s oft-quoted dictum by arguing that while violence can flow from the barrel of a gun, power cannot.
Power corresponds to the human ability to act in concert; it belongs to a group and exists only as long as the group coheres.

‘Single men without others to support them never have enough power to use violence successfully,’ she wrote.

‘Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis - the secret police and its net of informers…Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use…Everything depends on the power behind the violence.’

Power is sustained by legitimacy, and legitimacy is what’s lost when violence is misapplied. ‘To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power,’ she said.

Therefore, even though violence, power and authority often appear together, they are not the same. Indeed, she added: ‘Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears when power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.’

Arendt thus zoomed in on the counter-intuitive truth that run-of-the-mill dictators have failed to understand. As in so many other areas, the PAP belongs in a different league. It may have wielded mallets to smash assorted flies in the 1960s and 1970s, but since the mid-1980s it has been relatively self-restrained in the use of force.

This is why the Catherine Lim Affair was able to create such a stir in the mid-1990s, and is still talked about 10 years later, despite the fact that she was not arrested, exiled or ‘fixed’. Her books were still published and used as literature texts in government schools, so she was not even punished professionally.

Three decades ago, these less-calibrated means of coercion were more routine. A Singaporean from that period, transported through time to the present day, would be dumbfounded by the notion that the Catherine Lim Affair - which never got nastier than a verbal lashing - could be iconic of PAP intolerance towards dissent. He would have concluded, correctly, that the PAP had changed.

Our time-traveller would be wrong, however, if he assumed that the PAP had undergone a fundamental philosophical conversion towards liberal ideals. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong emphasised at his talk at the Foreign Correspondents Association last Thursday, it has not - and will not.

The change is instead at the level of methodology. By systematically shifting political controls behind the scenes - through legislation covering trade unions, universities, the press, religious groups and the legal profession - the PAP has pre-empted ugly confrontations with institutions that could challenge its authority.

Mixed blessing
THE contemporary scene of calibrated coercion is a mixed blessing for Singaporeans who want more freedom. There is certainly less cause for fear today than in the old days when coercion was more blunt. On the other hand, the PAP’s self-restraint gives its opponents less moral ammunition.

Controls are so seamlessly integrated into the system and coercion is so well calibrated that the average Singaporean can go through much of life without bumping into the hard edges of PAP authoritarianism. This is bad news for pro-democracy activists, who consequently have a tough time reminding Singaporeans that they should care about political liberalisation.

That is where Dr Chee’s strategy of civil disobedience comes in. It is a predictable response to the PAP’s success at calibrated coercion. It involves seeking out laws that may not enjoy great public support, and deliberately flouting them to provoke a forceful response. The use of force will ensure victory to the PAP, but the price of victory, to borrow Arendt’s words, will be ‘paid by the victor in terms of his own power’. The strategy turns the state’s monopoly of force against itself.

Other states have fallen into the trap when those at the top miscalculate, or when their functionaries - especially the police or army - get trigger-happy when putting down peaceful protests. There is little risk of the latter in Singapore, where uniformed services are highly disciplined and under firm civilian direction. The former scenario - political miscalculation - also seems unlikely.

However, it should be noted that a new and less experienced generation of ministers and permanent secretaries is taking charge. For them, there may be an urge to deal with challengers of any sort in the most expeditious manner, and the temptation to get their way through actual or threatened force may be irresistible. The alternative - the use of reason and debate - may seem too slow, too weak, especially when more decisive tools are at one’s fingertips.

The situation, in short, is dynamic. The Government can narrow the opportunities for effective civil disobedience by pro-actively amending regulations that are over-broad and difficult to defend intellectually to the ordinary Singaporean. Until then, the Chees of Singapore will continue to pressure those points in the law. The authorities will not give in; they will say no. But they will have to calibrate carefully how they say no.

The writer is an assistant professor at the School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where he researches media and politics. This article is based on an academic paper on calibrated coercion, published in the Asia Research Institute’s working paper series, at www.ari.nus.edu.sg .

Time: The Battle Over Gay Teens

2005-10-06T00:15:00.000+01:00

The Battle Over Gay Teens (John Cloud, TIME USA, Oct 2005)

In May, David Steward, a former president of TV Guide, and his partner Pierre Friedrichs, a caterer, hosted an uncomfortably crowded cocktail party at their Manhattan apartment. It was a typical gay fund raiser--there were lemony vodka drinks with mint sprigs; there were gift bags with Calvin Klein sunglasses; Friedrichs prepared little blackened-tuna-with-mango-chutney hors d'oeuvres that were served by uniformed waiters. Billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. was there; David Mixner, a gay activist and longtime friend of Bill Clinton's, was holding court with Jason Moore, director of the musical Avenue Q.

But the odd thing was that the gay (and gay-friendly) Ã©lite had gathered to raise money not for one of its established charities--the Human Rights Campaign, say, or the Democratic National Committee--but for an obscure organization that has quietly become one of the fastest-growing gay groups in the nation, the Point Foundation. Launched in 2001, Point gives lavish (often full-ride) scholarships to gay students. It is one of the few national groups conceived explicitly to help gay kids, and it is a leading example of how the gay movement is responding to the emergence this decade of hundreds of thousands of openly gay youths.

Kids are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity--and they are doing so much younger. The average gay person now comes out just before or after graduating high school, according to The New Gay Teenager, a book Harvard University Press published this summer. The book quotes a Penn State study of 350 young people from 59 gay groups that found that the mean age at which lesbians first have sexual contact with other girls is 16; it's just 14 for gay boys. In 1997 there were approximately 100 gay-straight alliances (GSAs)--clubs for gay and gay-friendly kids--on U.S. high school campuses. Today there are at least 3,000 GSAs--nearly 1 in 10 high schools has one--according to the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN, say "glisten"), which registers and advises GSAs. In the 2004-05 academic year, GSAs were established at U.S. schools at the rate of three per day.

The appearance of so many gay adolescents has, predictably, worried social conservatives, but it has also surprised gay activists, who for years did little to help the few teenagers who were coming out. Both sides sense high stakes. "Same-sex marriage--that's out there. But something going on in a more fierce and insidious way, under the radar, is what's happening in our schools," says Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, an influential conservative litigation group that earlier this year won a court order blocking a Montgomery County, Md., teachers' guide that disparaged Evangelicals for their views on gays. "They"--gay activists--"know if they make enough inroads into [schools], the same-sex-marriage battle will be moot."

Most gay activists would rather swallow glass than say Mat Staver was right about something, but they know that last year's big UCLA survey of college freshmen found that 57% favor same-sex marriage (only about 36% of all adults do). Even as adult activists bicker in court, young Americans--including many young conservatives--are becoming thoroughly, even nonchalantly, gay- positive. From young ages, straight kids are growing up with more openly bisexual, gay and sexually uncertain classmates. In the 1960s, gay men recalled first desiring other males at an average age of 14; it was 17 for lesbians. By the '90s, the average had dropped to 10 for gays and 12 for lesbians, according to more than a dozen studies reviewed by the author of The New Gay Teenager, Ritch Savin-Williams, who chairs Cornell's human-development department.

Children who become aware of their homosexual attractions no longer need endure the baleful combination of loneliness and longing that characterized the childhoods of so many gay adults. Gay kids can now watch fictional and real teens who are out on shows like Desperate Housewives, the dating show Next on MTV and Degrassi (a high school drama on the N network whose wild popularity among adolescents is assured by the fact that few adults watch it). Publishers like Arthur A. Levine Books (of Harry Potter fame) and the children's division at Simon & Schuster have released something like a dozen novels about gay adolescents in the past two years. New, achingly earnest books like Rainbow Road (Simon & Schuster), in which three gay teens take a road trip, are coming this month. Gay kids can subscribe to the 10-month-old glossy YGA Magazine (YGA stands for "young gay America") and meet thousands of other little gays via young gay america com or outproud.org Gay boys can chat, vote for the Lord of the Rings character they would most like to date--Legolas is leading--learn how to have safe oral sex and ogle pictures of young men in their underwear on the ruttish chadzboyz.com Not that you have to search so far into the Web: when University of Pittsburgh freshman Aaron Arnold, 18, decided to reveal his homosexuality at 15, he just Googled "coming out," which led to myriad advice pages.

While the phrase "That's so gay" seems to have permanently entered the (straight) teen vernacular, at many schools it is now profoundly uncool to be seen as anti-gay. Straight kids meet and gossip and find hookups on websites like facebook.com where a routine question is whether they like guys or girls or both. When Savin-Williams surveyed 180 young men ages 14 to 25 for an earlier book, "... And Then I Became Gay," he found that nearly all had received positive, sometimes enthusiastic, responses when they first came out. (Many others are received with neutrality, even boredom: University of Washington senior Aaron Schwitters, who was not interviewed by Savin-Williams, says when he came out to his fellow College Republicans at a club meeting last year, "there was five seconds of awkward silence, someone said 'O.K.,' and we moved on.") That doesn't mean young lesbians and gays will never get shoved in the hallway, and multiple studies have shown that gay kids are at higher risk for suicide than their straight peers are. But the preponderance of Savin-Williams' 20 years of research indicates that most gay kids today face an environment that's more uncertain than unwelcoming. In a 2002 study he quotes in the new book, gay adolescents at a Berkeley, Calif., school said just 5% of their classmates had responded negatively to their sexuality.

O.K., that's Berkeley, but the trend is clear: according to Kevin Jennings, who in 1990 founded a gay-teacher group that later morphed into GLSEN, many of the kids who start GSAs identify themselves as straight. Some will later come out, of course, but Jennings believes a majority of GSA members are heterosexuals who find anti-gay rhetoric as offensive as racism. "We're gonna win," says Jennings, speaking expansively of the gay movement, "because of what's happening in high schools right now ... This is the generation that gets it."

Jennings is a spruce, fit, deeply ideological 42-year-old who wants government to spend money to combat anti-gay bias in schools. He often asserts that "4 out of 5" students have been harassed because of their sexual orientation. (He doesn't mention that GLSEN's last big survey, in 2003, found "a significant decline" since 2001 in the use of epithets like fag. Or that about the same proportion of kids--three-quarters--hears fag as hears sexist remarks.) Regardless, the pro-gay government programs he favors seem highly unlikely in this political environment. That's in part because of the growing influence on the right of another gay force: gays who don't want to be gay, who are sometimes called, contentiously, "ex-gays." On talk radio, on the Internet and in churches, social conservatives' canniest strategy for combatting the emergence of gay youth is to highlight the existence of people who battle--and, some claim, overcome-- their homosexual attractions. Because kids often see their sexuality as riverine and murky--multiple studies have found most teens with same-sex attractions have had sex with both boys and girls--conservatives hope their "ex-gay" message will keep some of those kids from embracing a gay identity. And they aren't aiming the message just at teens. On one of its websites, the Christian group Focus on the Family has warned that boys as young as 5 may show signs of "gender confusion" and require "professional help."

It's important to note that nearlyÂ all mental-health professionals agree that trying to reject one's homosexual impulses will usually be fruitless and depressing--and can lead to suicide, according to Dr. Jack Drescher of the American Psychiatric Association, who has studied programs that attempt to alter sexuality. Last month Tennessee officials charged that one of the longest-running evangelical ministries for gays, Love in Action of Memphis, Tenn., was operating unlicensed mental-health facilities. The state said Love in Action must close two residential homes--which include beds for teenagers--or apply for a license. (The ministry's attorney, Nate Kellum, said in an e-mail that the licensure requirement "is intended for facilities that treat mental illness" and not for a "faith-based institution like Love in Action.")

Few young gays actually want to change: six surveys in The New Gay Teenager found that an average of just 13% of young people with same-sex attractions would prefer to be straight. Nonetheless, gay kids trying to change can find unprecedented resources. As recently as the late '90s, Exodus International, the premier organization for Christians battling same-sex attractions, had no youth program. Today, according to president Alan Chambers, the group spends a quarter of its $1 million budget on Exodus Youth; about 80 of Exodus' 125 North American ministries offer help to adolescents. More than 1,000 youths have visited an Exodus-affiliated website called live hope org to post messages and read articles like "Homosexual Myths" (No. 2: People are born gay). The website, which started as a modest Texas chat board in the late '90s, now gets referrals from scores of churches in 45 countries. "Twenty years ago, most churches wouldn't even let Exodus in the door," says Scott Davis, director of Exodus Youth. "Now there are open doors all across the country."

Davis and I met in July at Exodus' first ever Youth Day, held at a Baptist convention center outside Asheville, N.C. About 100 people ages 15 to 25 were there to worship, sway their arms to Christian rock, listen to advice about how to stop masturbating ("Replace thoughts that aren't worthy of God with thoughts that are," Davis said) and hear the testimony of adults who say they now live heterosexual lives.

An attractive, married 27-year-old, Davis says he was never drawn sexually to men. Rather, he represents a new group of young, straight Christians who are criticizing older Evangelicals for long denouncing gays without offering them what Davis calls "healing." Davis looks nothing like a stereotypical Fundamentalist; he wears spiky hair, Fauvist T shirts, an easy smile. He first noticed the wave of young people coming out when he was pastor of a student church at Virginia Tech. I asked how his group could succeed when homosexuality has been so depathologized among kids. "GLSEN has 3,000 GSAs, but who knows how many student ministries there are, how many Bible clubs in schools?" he answered. "And my hope is they will be the ones who care for these kids."

In a jarring bit of rhetorical mimicry, many Christians who work with gay kids have adopted the same p.c. tributes to "tolerance" and "diversity" employed by groups like GLSEN. One of the savviest new efforts is called Inqueery (slogan: "Think for yourself"). Founded by a shaggy-haired 26-year-old named Chad Thompson, inqueery.com looks at first like a site designed to bolster proudly gay teens. Pink borders surround pictures of stylish kids, and bold text reads, "Addressing LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered] Issues on High School & College Campuses." Thompson, who realized in fourth grade that he was attracted to boys, remembers hurtful anti-gay jokes, and he is convincing when he denounces such bias. "The Christian church has a sordid history--a history of the televangelists from the '80s who would malign homosexuals and say they're all perverts and pedophiles and going to hell--but didn't actually offer you redemption," he says.

Still, Thompson never accepted a gay identity--"Heterosexuality is God's design," he says--and today he is a leading spokesman for young Christians rejecting homosexuality. Thompson says a new kind of bigotry has emerged--among gays. "Those of us who have chosen not to embrace this orientation are often misunderstood and sometimes even ridiculed," he writes in a pamphlet he distributes at campus speaking engagements. Thompson, who has written a book with the near parodic title Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would, hasn't been completely successful in rejecting his gay desires. He admits he still notices handsome men and says, as though he had an internal Geiger counter, "My attractions are probably about 1% of what they used to be." But the idea that liberals and gay activists are attacking Christian strugglers like Thompson has inspirited and unified social conservatives. The Rev. Jerry Falwell spoke at this year's Exodus conference for the first time, and others have begun to agitate for "equal access" for ex-gays in schools.

Earlier this year, a conservative nonprofit called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX, whose website says it supports "families touched by homosexuality") approached the PTA about exhibiting at the association's conference. The PTA said no: "From what we saw in the application, it seemed more of an agenda than just a resource for parents," says a PTA official. But the association did allow the liberal group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays to present an anti-bullying workshop. When I spoke with PFOX executive director Regina Griggs about the PTA'S rebuff, she projected a sense of crepitating resentment: "How can you be more diverse than an organization that says if you're happy being a homosexual ... that's your right? But if you have unwanted feelings or are a questioning youth, why can't you make those decisions? I guess diversity stops if you are a former homosexual."

So the Christian right has found its strategy--inclusion, prayer, the promise of change--and the gay movement has found one--GSAs, scholarships, the promise of acceptance. But what of the kids themselves? In July, I met 30 way-out-and-proud LGBT youths at a Michigan retreat arranged by the Point Foundation; these high-achieving Point scholars are getting from $4,000 to $30,000 a year to pay for their educations and are considered by some gays to be the movement's future leaders. A few days later at Exodus' Youth Day in North Carolina, I interviewed 13 of the kids fighting their attractions. Few at either conclave seemed interested in the roles their movements had set for them. Instead they were gay or Christian (or both) in startlingly complex ways.

Take Point scholar Maya Marcel-Keyes of Chicago, for instance. The 20-year-old daughter of conservative activist and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, Marcel-Keyes has a girlfriend but has dated two boys; identifies herself as queer (not lesbian), pro-life and "anarchist"; and attends Mass whenever she can spare the time from her menagerie. (When Marcel-Keyes and I spoke recently, she and her girlfriend had a rabbit, a ferret, a cockatiel, two rats and two salamanders.) For their part, several of the young Exodus Christians seemed more stereotypically gay--"I love that Prada bag!" a 16-year-old boy at the Youth Day squealed several times--than some of the Point scholars who had been out for years. Others had gone to Exodus with no intention of going straight. Corey Clark, 18, belongs to his GSA at Governor Mifflin Senior High in Shillington, Pa., and says he sees nothing wrong with being gay. He attended Youth Day because he wanted to better understand his evangelical church and friends who say gays should change. "Actually," he says, "I've heard so many good things about gay pride"--in the media and at school--"but I hadn't heard directly about the downside."

It's remarkable that a boy like Clark could grow up in a small town and hear more good than bad about gays. But he still waited until he was 17 to come out. You don't have to be a right-wing ideologue to ask whether it's always a good idea for a child to claim a gay identity at 13 or 14. Cornell's Savin-Williams, who is generally sunny about gay kids' prospects, notes that those who come out early tend to have a harder time at school, at home and with their friends than those who don't.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the straight world isn't always ready to accept a gay kid. But the gay world doesn't seem ready either.

On the first day of the Point Foundation's retreat, which was held in a town on Little Traverse Bay called Harbor Springs, Mich., the 38 students who made the trip were given gift bags that contained, among other items:

==> ½-oz. jar of American Spoon Sour Cherry Preserves

==> A Fujifilm QuickSnap Flash camera

==> A small tin of Trendy Mints from Henri Bendel, New York City

==> A DVD of the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in which a teenage boy is masturbated by an adult

==> The Harbor Springs Visitors Guide

==> The Aug. 16 issue of the gay magazine the Advocate, whose cover featured a shirtless man and blared, SUMMER SEX ISSUE.

There was only one Point scholar at the retreat under 18--Zachery Zyskowski, 17, who is in his second year at UCLA. Zyskowski came out at 13, helped start the GSA at his school and graduated valedictorian; he is far too precocious to be scandalized by a magazine or DVD. (He has watched Hedwig twice. Point executive director Vance Lancaster says the film, a cult musical about the relationship between a drag queen and a young singer, was already a favorite for many scholars. He also says it "reflects reality": "I don't see the negative repercussions to our students, who are very intelligent, thoughtful and mature.")

But when I opened my gift bag, it occurred to me that gay adults are still figuring out how to deal with gay kids. The gay subculture, after all, had been an almost exclusively adult preserve until the relatively recent phenomena of gay adoption and out teens. Point scholar and Emory College junior Bryan Olsen, who turned 21 in August and has been out since he was 15, told me during the retreat, "It probably sounds anti-gay, but I think there are very few age-appropriate gay activities for a 14-, 15-year-old. There's no roller skating, bowling or any of that kind of thing ... It's Internet, gay porn, gay chats."

Olsen believes Point is an exception, and despite the gift bags, he's right. The weekend retreat was packed with anodyne activities such as a boat ride to twee Mackinac Island. Lancaster spends an inordinate amount of energy pairing each scholar with a career-appropriate mentor. The mentors are accomplished and tend to be wealthy--a hedge-fund manager, a university president, movie people--and all undergo background checks.

Point was the brainchild of Bruce Lindstrom, 60, who in 1976 helped Sol Price launch the warehouse retail industry with the first Price Club, in San Diego. Lindstrom had grown up in an evangelical family in Riverside, Calif., and says when his parents and two brothers learned he was gay, they stopped talking to him. His nephew Nathan Lindstrom, 29, says whenever Bruce sent gifts home, the kids were told, "This is from Uncle Bruce, the sodomite."

For years afterward, Lindstrom tried to find a gay organization that was helping kids "not to go through what I went through." He discovered that few gay groups did much for young people. Many gay activists didn't want to fuel the troglodyte notion that they were recruiting boys and girls. GLSEN'S Jennings recalls that when he first started raising money more than a decade ago, "the attitude was either 'Isn't it cute that you're working with kids?' or 'Why are you working with kids? What are you, f______ crazy?'"

By the late '90s, Lindstrom was talking about the idea of a scholarship program with his boyfriend Carl Strickland (who is 29 years younger) and with his old friend John Pence, a San Francisco gallery owner and former social aide to Lyndon Johnson. One night in 2001 at Lindstrom and Strickland's home--which they call the Point because it sits on a promontory on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe--the three christened the Point Foundation. Since then, some 5,000 young gays have applied, and 47 Point scholars have been named.

Lindstrom sees the United Negro College Fund and the Rhodes scholarships as his models, and in order to win, Point candidates must prove both academic success and commitment to gay causes. Not surprisingly, many also have biographies resembling Lindstrom's--they come from conservative families that haven't immediately accepted them. Candidates must write an essay on "how you feel you have been marginalized because of your sexual orientation." When scholars were called upon to introduce themselves at the retreat, many offered heartbreaking stories of family repudiation. It was routine to hear sniffling during these presentations, especially from adults.

But when you talk to Point scholars when they aren't performing for donors, you meet kids who are doing a lot better than those plaints suggest. Some remain cut off from their families, but many have repaired relationships with even the most conservative parents. If you read the online Point bio for Matthew Vail, 19, for instance, it says he "sits alone" at family events, "not allowed to have even a gay friend participate in his family life." But in the months since Vail provided the information for that bio, his parents, who live in Gresham, Ore., have softened considerably, and his boyfriend, Jordaan, was actually staying with Vail's father while Vail was at the retreat. Several other scholars also said their online bios dwelled on old wounds and omitted evidence of resilience.

Even those point scholars with the darkest stories of adversity, like Emory's Bryan Olsen, seem more buoyant than Point lets on. I heard Olsen speak to Point donors twice, once in New York City and again in Michigan. Both times he said that after his Mormon family learned he was gay when he was 15, he was sent to a boot camp for wayward teens in Ensenada, Mexico. Olsen says the facility, Casa by the Sea, required residents to wear shoes without backs so they couldn't run. He says that as punishment for a three-meal hunger strike, he was forced to sit in a stress position--cross-legged, with his nose touching a wall--for two hours. Olsen's small face, which is framed by a pop-star haircut that makes him look as though he's still 15, scrunches with tears when he gets to the next part: "I could only come home when I wrote my parents and promised to be straight and Mormon." There were gasps in the room the first time I heard him tell that story.

But much has changed since Olsen returned from Mexico in 2000. He and his parents haven't completely reconciled, and they aren't paying for his education. Olsen says they told him he had to choose between their financial help and "this lifestyle." But Olsen and his partner, Kyle Ogiela--they met in 2002--are welcomed at the family table every Sunday. Ogiela, 26, even works for Randy Olsen, Bryan's father, as the office manager of the family pest-control firm in Woodstock, Ga. As a Mormon, says Randy, 53, "I don't believe that men should be together. I never will. But I love him as my son. And he and his partner are good boys." Randy says his first reaction to Bryan's teen homosexuality was, "I'm going to find him the best hooker I can." But he says he and his wife sent Bryan to Casa not because he was gay but because he was a "totally unruly kid" who was "just so mean ... To go get that scholarship, I understand he had to be the poor little victim. But for three years, my wife and I were the victims." Seconds later, though, Randy yields again: "It's like God put a pair of new glasses on me ... I thought I could talk him out of [being gay]. But it's not something you can talk someone out of."

(As for Casa, Mexican authorities closed it a year ago. The local health minister charged, among other infractions, that Casa was "not equipped with responsible staff to run a pharmacy." James Wall, spokesman for the Utah-based World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, which ran Casa, says Bryan Olsen once publicly berated the facility's director during school and that he "is probably exaggerating" his stories of abuse. "I wonder if he's ever been [to Casa]," replies Olsen.)

Olsen deeply appreciates what he calls the Point Foundation's "unconditional support." But one night at the retreat, he also said, "I know they sort of want you to focus on the negative when you're telling your story." At the next fund raiser, Olsen resolves, he will tell the donors that he recently went with his mother, one of his sisters and Kyle to Los Angeles to appear on The Price Is Right. And Kyle won a new Buick LeSabre.

The point here is not that gay kids don't have to cope with bigotry and bleakness. A Point scholar who asked not to be identified told me he swallowed 17 Tylenols one summer night just before ninth grade--and when that didn't kill him, 30 more the following night. (He merely felt sick the next day; today he is a thriving college student.) He attempted suicide for various reasons--he says his parents ridiculed his desire to pursue acting instead of football--but being gay didn't help. And while Marcel-Keyes says many of her problems have "nothing to do with my sexuality," she has struggled with self-mutilation--at the retreat, her arms bore scars from shoulder to wrist.

Yet, according to Savin-Williams, most gay kids are fairly ordinary. "Perhaps surprising to researchers who emphasize the suicidality, depression, victimization, prostitution, and substance abuse of gay youth, gay teenagers generally feel good about their same-sex sexuality," he writes. A 56-year-old gay man with a slightly elfish mien, Savin-Williams has interviewed some 350 kids with same-sex attractions, and he concludes that they "are more diverse than they are similar and more resilient than suicidal ... They're adapting quite well, thank you."

Such statements have puzzled other researchers. "Ritch has never really acknowledged the fact that the average kid who is gay is facing enormous problems," says Dr. Gary Remafedi, director of the Youth and AIDS Projects at the University of Minnesota. "Most of his subjects have been Cornell students, who are among the highest-functioning students of all." Savin-Williams, who has included many low-income and non-Cornell kids in his work, responds that Remafedi and other clinicians have a warped view because they based early research on gay teens from crisis centers. "Are you only listening to hustlers?" he asks.

Savin-Williams opposes programs designed to change sexuality, but he has won admiration from some ex-gay proponents by writing that "sexuality develops gradually over the course of childhood." Gay identities also develop slowly. Even kids who publicly reveal same-sex attractions can be uncomfortable calling themselves gay; instead they say they are "polysexual" or "just attracted to the right person." Those vague labels sound like adolescent peregrinations that will eventually come around to "Yep, I'm gay." But Savin-Williams says many of the tomboys and flouncy guys we assume to be gay are in reality bisexual, incipiently transsexual or just experimenting.

Because he routinely sees young gays on MTV or even at school, a 14-year-old may now feel comfortable telling friends that he likes other boys, but that doesn't mean he is ready to enfold himself in a gay identity. "Today so many kids who are gay, they don't like Cher. They aren't part of the whole subculture," says Michael Glatze, 30, editor in chief of YGA Magazine. "They feel like they belong in their faith, in their families."

"Increasingly, these kids are like straight kids," says Savin-Williams. "Straight kids don't define themselves by sexuality, even though sexuality is a huge part of who they are. Of course they want to have sex, but they don't say, 'It is what I am.'" He believes young gays are moving toward a "postgay" identity. "Just because they're gay, they don't have to march in a parade. Part of it is political. Part is personal, developmental."

The political part is what worries Glatze. "I don't think the gay movement understands the extent to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The people who are getting that are the Christian right," he says. Indeed, several of those I met at the Exodus event had come not because they thought it would make them straight or even because they are particularly fervent Christians. Instead, they were there because they find something empty about gay culture--a feeling that Exodus exploits with frequent declamations about gays' supposed promiscuity and intemperance. "I'm just not attracted to the gay lifestyle, toward gay people--I've never felt a kinship with them," says Manuel Lopez, a lapsed Catholic and University of Chicago grad student who went to the Exodus meeting. "There's a certain superficiality in gay attachments--musicals, fashion ... I do think it's a happier life being straight."

Lopez has only an exiguous notion of what real gay life is like, but such misapprehensions are not uncommon among young people with same-sex attractions. Savin-Williams recalls counseling a kid who, after the third session, referred to his "partner." "And I said, 'Oh, you're gay.' And he said, 'No. I only fall in love with guys, but I'm not "gay." It doesn't have anything to do with me.' He saw being gay as leftist, radical." At Exodus' Youth Day, I met several young gays who spoke of the need to "walk out of" homosexuality because, as a 25-year-old from Boston put it, "I'm not happy going to the clubs anymore," as if being gay were mostly about partying. Frank Carrasco, a 20-year-old from Miami, told me his Exodus counseling had helped cure his porn addiction; Carrasco says that during high school, when he was Bible-club president, he routinely looked at gay Internet porn until sunrise. But he has never had a boyfriend or anything approaching a typical gay life. Carrasco says Exodus has helped him develop some heterosexual attractions, but I met very few at the conference who claimed to be completely straight. (At least two of the young men--one 21, the other 18--hooked up that week and still keep in touch.)

A common refrain from Exodus pulpits is that gays don't form lasting, healthy relationships, but those Exodus youths who seemed most successful in defying homosexual feelings were the ones more interested in exploring themselves than in criticizing gays. "I know gay couples who are in their 40s and 50s who have sex parties and use crystal meth, and I know gay couples who have been in committed, monogamous relationships for 15, 20 years," says Michael Wilson, 22, who lives outside Grand Rapids, Mich. "So people need the facts before they say stuff like that." But while he says he still has gay friends--among them, one of his three ex-boyfriends--Wilson believes God doesn't want him to have relationships with men anymore. He often speaks of his "identity in Christ," and to him that trumps his identity as a gay man. A lot of Exodus youths seemed captives of their Christianity, caught in a hermetic loop of lust and gay sex (or masturbation), followed by confession and grim determination. Wilson is different--calmer, more convincing when he says he communes with God. He doesn't deny that he is still sometimes attracted to men, but he doesn't seem to be struggling. "I don't think God would give you a struggle," he says. "I think he brings freedom."

Until recently, growing up gay meant awaiting a lifetime of secrecy--furtive encounters, darkened bar windows, crushing deracination. That has changed with shocking speed. "Dorothy resonates so much with older gay people--the idea of Oz, someplace you can finally be accepted," says Glatze of YGA. "The city of Oz is now everywhere. It's in every high school." That's not quite true, but the emergence of gay kids is already changing the politics of homosexuality. When their kids come out, many conservatives--just ask the Vice President--start to seem uncomfortable with traditionalist, rigid views on gays. But what happens when your child comes out not at 23 but at 13? At least in the short term, it's likely that more gay kids means more backlash.

"It kind of reminds me of the issue of driver's licenses for kids," says the University of Minnesota's Remafedi. "Yeah, it's great they can get around. But there's also a greater chance you can have an accident ... In my own life and generation, we separated ourselves from the straight community. We lived in gay ghettos, and we saw the larger culture as being a culture of repression. Hopefully, some of those walls between cultures have come down. But walking between those worlds takes a lot of skill."

Efficiency, social justice and educational voucher in Singapore

2005-09-13T16:21:00.000+01:00

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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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

2005-09-06T18:27:00.000+01:00

“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

2005-09-06T18:24:00.000+01:00

“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)

2005-09-06T18:10:00.000+01:00

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

2005-09-06T13:07:00.000+01:00

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.

References:

Bell, D (2000). East meets West: human rights and democracy in East Asia, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bottommore, TB (1967). Elites and society, England: Penguin

Bullock, A (1988). Fontana dictionary of modern thought, London: Fontana

Chua, BH and Yeo, WW (2003). ‘Singapore cinema: Eric Khoo and Jack Neo – critique from the margins and the mainstream’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol 4, No. 1, 117-125

Confucius (1995). Analects: translated by WE Soothill, England: Dover

Ginsberg, A, Leinwand, S, Anstrom, T., Pollock, E. & Witt, E (2005). What the United States can learn from Singapore’s world-class Mathematics system (and what Singapore can learn from the United States): an exploratory study, Washington, D.C.: American Institutes for Research.

Goh, CK (2000). National Day Rally address, Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts

Goldthorpe, JH (1997). ‘Problems of ‘meritocracy’’ In Halsey, AH, Lauder, H, Brown, P & Wells, AS (Editors) Education: culture, economy and society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Green, A (1999). East Asian skill formation systems and the challenge of globalisation, Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 12, No. 3, 253-279

Hayek, F (1976). Law, legislation and liberty, London: Routledge

Huichieh (2005). Just who are the beneficiaries of academic meritocracy, http://fromasingaporeangle.blogspot.com/ Weblog June 27th 2005, Accessed 16th July 2005

Konow, J (2003). Which is the fairest one of all? A positive analysis of justice theories, Journal of Economic Literature, (Dec) pages 1188-1239.

Kuo, ECY (1996). ‘Confucianism as political discourse in Singapore: the case of an incomplete revitalisation movement’ In Tu, W (Editor) Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity: moral education and economic culture in Japan and the four mini-dragons, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Lee, HS (2005). The Singapore elite, Singapore: Government Press Release

Lee, HS (2000). ‘Scholarships remain way to noble ends’, Straits Times, 23 Jul 2000

Lee, KY (1971). Summary of speech by the Prime Minister at the 2nd International Alumni Night held at Shangri-la hotel on 11th September 1971, Singapore: Ministry of Culture.

Lee, KY (1966). Transcript of a speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, at the University of Singapore on 1st July 1966, when he officially opened the Science Tower, Singapore: Singapore Government

Ministry of Education (1998). Desired outcomes of education, Singapore: Ministry of Education.

Ministry of Education (2004a). Education in Singapore, Singapore: Ministry of Education.

Ministry of Education (2004b). 20 years of Gifted Education: from promise to flow, Singapore: Ministry of Education

Ministry of Education (2004c). Singapore tops the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003, Singapore: Ministry of Education Press Release

Ministry of Education (2005). Joint Admissions Exercise: advice for candidates, Singapore: Ministry of education.

Mosca, G (1939). The ruling class, London: McGraw-Hill

Newland, TE (1976). The gifted in socioeducational context, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall

Pareto, V (1935). The mind and society: a treatise on general sociology, London: Cape.

Prystay, C and Bernstein, E (2004). ‘On Raffles and its “super-student” producing machine’, Wall Street Journal, 6th May 2004.

Public Service Commission, (2005). Public Service Commission Scholarships Centre, Public Service Commission website accessed 12th July 2005 http://www.psc.gov.sg/scholarships/flash/index.html

Seah, CN (2004). ‘Shaping elitist mindset’, Sunday Star, 15th Feb

Sen, A (2000). ‘Merit and justice’ In Arrow, K, Bowles, S and Durlauf (Editors) Meritocracy and economic inequality, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shanmugaratnam, T, Chan, SS, Abdul Ghani, AK, Wee, HT, Chong, CT, Low, TS, Liu, E, Gopinathan, Neo, BS, Beh, P, Lum, O, Ong, PT, Tan, KY, Khoo, CH, Chan, YK, Phoon, LC, and Tang TW (2002). Report of the Junior College / Upper Secondary Review Committee, Singapore: Singapore Government

Soon, TW (1988). Singapore’s New Education System, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Soon, TM (2001). Is moral obligation an economically justifiable sanction for overseas Singapore government scholars who breach their contractual service obligations?, Final paper written for Stanford in Washington Programme Economics and Law class.

Soon, TM (2005). ‘Help ensure social mobility for bottom 20 percent’, Straits Times, June 28th

Tan, R (1998). Time-scale modification algorithm for audio & speech signal applications, Audio Engineering Society of Singapore website http://www.aes-singapore.org/may_8_1998.htm

Talkingcock.com (2001). A gifted student, June 4th, http://www.talkingcock.com/, Accessed 13th July 2005

Teo, B (2003). ‘Remaking Singapore: the Economic Review Committee and its recommendations’, Development Bank of Japan Report, Singapore: DBJ

Veblen, T (1924). The theory of the leisure classes: an economic study of institutions, London: Allen & Unwin.

Wong, A., Wang, KY, Gan, CH, Daipi, H, Lee, J, Lee, LY, Liew, ML, Ravindran, R, Seng, HT, Ali, S., Tan, CY, Wee, HT, Wijeysingha, E, Yeoh, CY & Phoon, LC (2000). Report of the Committee on Compulsory Education, Singapore: Ministry of Education

Yeo, G (2001). A global marketplace for sensational news, Singapore: Government Press Release.

Young, M (1958). The rise of meritocracy, 1870 – 2033, London: Thames and Hudson.

Young, M (2001). ‘Down with meritocracy’, Guardian, June 29th

[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

Reviewing Toh & Wong (1999)

2005-09-06T12:53:00.000+01:00

Economic Value of Education
Spring Term

Course Assignment 1

‘Write a review of a paper reporting a study of the rate of return to education.’

Paper reviewed: Toh, M. & Wong, S. (1999). ‘Rates of return to education in Singapore’, Education Economics Vol 7, No. 3, 235-252.

Weijie Ng
MA Economics of Education

Section A: Introduction

The allocation of scarce resources between competing ends is the basic economic problem that any government faces. ‘Resources’ refer to inputs and notions of factors of production, such as Mill’s (1994) ‘three requisites of production … labour, capital and land’ while among the ‘competing ends’ are goods and services that one consumes for immediate satisfaction of needs and wants or that one invests in to create the capacity for future production of goods and services. Governments need to weigh competing ends against each other in order to decide where to spend scarce resources: in education, health, defence, etc. This is where studies to measure the rate of return to education come in useful, in that they may serve to inform policy-makers on the efficacy of investing in the education system and whether resources are being directed into educational stages and processes that are yielding a good return on the investments being made. The higher the relative social rate of returns to education, the more justifiable and efficient government expenditure on education would be. Toh & Wong’s (1999) article is one such paper that attempts to measure the rate of return to education, using a cost-benefit method. More specifically, it aims to compute both social and private rates of return to education in Singapore from 1980 – 1994, the results of which are claimed to justify shifting the burden of financing tertiary education to students and graduates who enjoy substantial private benefits.

In Section B, the study by Toh & Wong (1999) (henceforth referred to as T&W99) will be briefly described, with respect to their data, method, results and conclusions. Then, in Section C, their study will be evaluated, and its distinctiveness as compared to others in the field will also be explained. Section D will conclude this essay by outlining the probable impact of the weaknesses in the study on the rates of return calculated.

Section B: Brief description of T&W99

Data Sources:

As outlined in T&W99, there were four main reports from which data on incomes were drawn to estimate the financial benefits of education. These reports were:

a) the Census of Population of 1980, Singapore ( Khoo, 1981)
b) the annually published Report on the Labour Force of Singapore (Singapore MOL, 1981-1994)
c) the Report on the Survey of Employment of Graduates, 1980 (Singapore IRD, 1981)
d) the Report on Wages in Singapore, 1994 (Singapore MOL, 1994)

Adjustments to the data selected for use were needed, so as to include Central Provident Fund[1] pension contributions from employers and because different statistical measures of averages like the median and the mean were applied in the different reports.

Data sources for the private and social costs of education, as well as ability measures, which were presumably used for computations throughout the paper, were not stated in T&W99. Readers were instead referred to an unpublished paper by Wong (1996) for these.

Method:

A cost-benefit approach was used instead of a Mincerian one. Please see Section C for details.

Results:

Results from both cross-sectional and time series analyses were presented in a few subsections in T&W99. Below is a selection of T&W99’s findings:

From cross-sectional data (1980/1981 versus 1994):

Finding 1: Private rates of return were higher than social rates of return.

Finding 2: Rates of return to education when adjusted for ability were lower than that without adjustment.

Finding 3: Private and social rates of return for all educational levels and types in 1994 were lower than that in 1980.

Finding 4: Private and social rates of return to ‘primary’ education were the lowest, followed by ‘secondary, post-secondary and polytechnic’ education, and then ‘university’ education.

Finding 5: When ‘secondary, post-secondary and polytechnic’ education in 1995 was disaggregated, the vocation-based polytechnic education had the highest social and private rates of return.

Finding 6: Returns to professional university courses were higher than that to non-professional courses.

From time-series data (1981 – 1994):

Finding 7: Both social and private rates of return to university education declined over the period, while the rates of return to primary and secondary education has been relatively stable.

Finding 8: Income differentials between university graduates and secondary graduates declined over the period, while that between secondary graduates and primary graduates has remained relatively stable.

Comparing across countries:

Finding 9: Social rate of returns in 1994 resembled that of South Korea in the 1980s while that in 1980 resembled Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1970s.

Conclusion:

Because the private rates of return have been higher than social rates, and also higher than the market rate of interest, there is a strong efficiency case to shift the burden of financing higher education to students and graduates.

Section C: Evaluation of T&W99

Section C will attempt to evaluate T&W99 by addressing these issues in the following order: a) the choice of the cost benefit analysis method versus the Mincerian approach, b) the assumptions embedded that education has a causal link with earning differentials c) the measurements of the inputs (costs) and outputs (benefits) of education and d) the distinctiveness in the results of the study in its similarity with Carnoy’s (1972) work rather than that of Psacharopoulos’ (1991; 1994).

As mentioned in Section B and elsewhere, the method used in T&W99 was that of cost-benefit analysis rather than the Mincerian approach. The rationale given was the limited public availability of data. Indeed, the Mincerian approach, which involves the formulation of a wage equation and uses regression analysis to fit this function to individual data on earnings, years of schooling, educational attainment, gender, race, etc (Carnoy, 1995), requires a lot of data. If such disaggregated and rich data does not exist, then researchers have to either start from scratch and do their own surveys to obtain the required information, or do the cost benefit approach. Unfortunately, the cost benefit approach is also problematic, since it uses aggregated data, which means that individuals and their characteristics are grouped together in amorphous lumps, losing in the process individualised ‘special knowledge’ (Hayek, 1945), and renders the differing impact of education on separate individuals unclear.

In the footnotes of T&W99, it was stated that while education was assumed to be the ‘major determinant of earning differentials’[2], non-educational and inter-correlated factors were also integral. Denison (1964) had studied gross earnings differentials between college and high school graduates, and accrued 66 percent of such differentials to education alone, while 3, 6, and 7 percent of the remaining 33 were accrued to IQ, rank in high school class and father’s occupation respectively. This 66 percent has then been taken to be the alpha factor, ‘that coefficient which expresses the proportion of the observed differentials which can be directly attributable to extra education’ (Vaizey, 1973), and used to adjust observed differentials in seminal works such as Morris and Ziderman (1971), as well as in T&W99[3]. There are a few problems with T&W99’s use of the alpha factor. Firstly, it is by no means clear how the alpha factor of 0.66 has been applied in T&W99, as no calculations were shown or even explained in the main text. T&W99’s Table 1 presented columns for social and private rates that were ‘unadjusted for ability’ and ‘adjusted for ability’. One might presume that one could multiply the unadjusted rate by 66 percent to get the adjusted rate, but this appears not to be the case. Also, if the alpha factor has indeed been used to derive the ‘adjusted for ability’ results, this ‘adjusted for ability’ tag is a confusing misnomer since the alpha factor is really an adjustment for background factors rather than for ability solely. There is moreover no good reason for the alpha factor of 66 percent to be directly transplantable to Singapore, a country in which the stock of education, contexts of social divisions and various other social, economic and political forces are so different. It is also extremely unlikely for it to be the same between each stage of education, e.g. between a secondary education and a university education, etc, or to be the same from year to year. A proper measurement and comparison of rates of returns to education, whether over time or cross-sectional would need alpha factors to be measured for each instance. If resources are not available for such an extensive measurement, then the alpha factor would probably have to be induced, specifically considering Singapore’s arguably unique context. A final criticism is that it is tautological to claim that ‘(a)s expected, the rates of return to education adjusted to ability are lower than that without adjustment’[4], if the adjustments that T&W99 were actually doing was to multiply the unadjusted figures by a factor less than 1.

The assumption that education is the major determinant of earnings differentials is itself questionable. According to the screening hypothesis as expounded by Spence (1973), while education may identify productive capacities, it does not necessarily create or enhance them. Formal education may just confer credentials that employers can use to select better workers and to determine relative wages. If the screening hypothesis is true, then earning differentials are not a result of differing educational attainments per se, but underlying innate differences in ability that are brought to light by having or not having the appropriate credentials. Given that screening does manifest itself in the jobs market in some form and to some degree, all rate of return studies, including T&W99, which do not take into account screening effects, are likely to over-estimate the rates of return to education and schooling.

The lack of methodological clarity in T&W99 is not isolated to the use of the alpha factor. More serious is the inexplicable omission of measurements of costs. Despite claiming to measure social and private rates of return, nowhere did T&W99 explain what they have taken to constitute social and private costs, and how they have measured them. Instead, readers are referred in no more than a footnote to an obscure and inaccessible unpublished academic exercise[5] by Wong (1996). From OECD (2002) and similar studies of private and social rates of return to education, one presumes that in T&W99, for the private costs of education, transport costs, school fees, a measure of opportunity cost, including income forgone during education, and other costs accrued to the individual were summed up, while social costs also included government subsidies to education.

On the benefits side of the cost-benefit analysis, T&W99 had focused on earnings, while acknowledging that to do so would be to treat education as purely an investment good and disregarding its consumption benefits, i.e. the positive utility that one derives from consuming education for its own sake (Vaizey, 1973). This neglect of education as also a consumption good would necessarily understate the private rate of return to the individual. Furthermore, because of the omission of external and non-pecuniary benefits to education, such as its positive impact on law and order (Feinstein, 2002), social cohesion (Bowles & Gintis, 1976), both the health of oneself and others (Feldman et al., 1989), etc, both private and social rates of return would tend to be underestimated, especially since negative externalities to education were unlikely to be large. In T&W99’s words, this ‘suggests that the return on education calculated from earnings is a ‘minimum return’, the lower bound of a true return.’[6] Therefore, even if the return to educational programmes calculated from earnings is very low, it does not necessarily mean that individuals and the state should halt their consumption and investment in them. For example, in a country with massive chronic rates of unemployment, a primary school education might not yield a higher future income to an individual, but the basic knowledge of basic hygiene, basic linguistic and mathematical literacy, etc. that he derives from his primary schooling are of great external and non-pecuniary benefit and arguably well worth the cost.

Moving on to the findings of the article, T&W99 outlined two diverging patterns of results from rates of return studies: the first characterised by Psacharopoulos (1991) and the other by Carnoy (1972). Essentially, the former postulated and showed that across all regions, the rates of return to education are higher for lower levels of education (Psacharopoulos, 1994), i.e. primary education has a higher rate of return than secondary education, which is in turn higher than that for tertiary education. This is due to the law of diminishing returns: the returns to initial investments in education, e.g. in primary schooling, would be very high but returns decline with each subsequent level of investment, such as in the form of lower rates of return to degrees (Psacharopoulos, 1994). The latter predicted that levels of economic development have an integral role in determining the rates of return to each stage of education. As Mingat & Tan (1996) asserted and proved, in low income countries, because productive processes and economic transactions are relatively simple, primary education provides sufficient skills for most jobs and therefore has a high rate of return. There is at the same time a low demand for labour with secondary level schooling, meaning that these workers would only have a small, if at all, wage premium, over their primary school educated counterparts, and therefore the rates of return to secondary education is lower. In middle income countries, the greatest demand is for workers with secondary level education and skills, and therefore the rates of return to secondary education is highest. Then, in high income nations, the returns are highest for tertiary education. T&W99 claimed that ‘(t)he experience of Singapore is more in agreement with the view of Carnoy’[7], on the basis that in Singapore, the returns to tertiary education is higher than that to primary education. Since independence in 1965, Singapore has undergone rapid industrialisation and trade liberalisation in a bid for economic survival as a nation-state (Huff, 1994), which suggests that there has been a huge demand for tertiary educated engineers and other professionals since then, and which supports the predictions of Carnoy (1972).

Section D: Conclusion

In reviewing T&W99, one concludes that it is a weakly written paper. This is in part because of the lack of good publicly available data, and largely because of the authors’ own lack of clarity in explaining their methods. Because consumption benefits as well as external and non-monetary effects of education have been omitted, the rate of returns as calculated in T&W99 is very likely to be lower than the true value. It is probable that the rates of return to different stages and type of education would be mis-estimated to different degrees. For example, arguably the health benefits from basic hygiene awareness inculcated through primary education is far higher than other marginal health benefits from tertiary education. Therefore, if external benefits to primary education has been under-estimated to a larger degree than that of tertiary education, the predictions of Carnoy (1972) and Mingat & Tan (1996) may well be undermined, rendering Psacharapoulos’s (1991) results more plausible.

Further work needs to be done in order to ascertain the true rate of return to education in Singapore. More data, including on gender, family background, prior ability, has to be collected on a regular basis to facilitate the calculation of the alpha factor or the use of the Mincerian approach, and to allow for more robust time series comparisons.

References:
Asher, M. & Newman, D. (2001). ‘Hong Kong and Singapore: Two Approaches to the Provision of Pensions in Asia’, Journal of Pension Management, Vol 7, No. 2.

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: educational reform and the contradictions of economic life, New York: Basic Books

Carnoy, M. (1972). ‘The rate of return to schooling and increase in human resources in Puerto Rico’, Comparative Economic Review, Vol. 16, 68-86

Carnoy, M. (1995). ‘Rates of return to education’. In Carnoy, M. (Ed.) International Encyclopedia of Economics of Education, Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Denison, E. (1964). Measuring the contribution of education (and the residual) to economic growth, Paris: OECD

Feinstein, L. (2002). The quantitative estimates of the social benefits of learning 1 (Crime), London: Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning.

Feldman, J., Makuc, D., Kleinman, J., Cornoni-Huntley, J. (1989). ‘National trends in educational differentials in mortality’, American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol 129.

Hayek, F. (1945). ‘The use of knowledge in society’, American Economic Review, Vol 19, No. 4, 519-530.

Khoo, C (1981). Census of population of 1980, Singapore, Singapore: Department of Statistics

Mill, J. S. (1994). Principles of political economy and chapters on socialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mingat, A. & Tan, J. (1996). The full social returns to education: estimates based on countries’ economic growth performance, World Bank

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[1] Also social security and mandatory savings scheme (Asher & Newman, 2001)
[2] Footnote 10 in T&W99, page 250
[3] As stated in Footnote 10 in T&W99, page 250
[4] T&W99 page 238
[5] I have attempted to obtain the article via email correspondence with the author, to no avail.
[6] T&W99, Page 238
[7] T&W99, Page 237

Educational markets and social inequality

2005-09-06T12:35:00.000+01:00

Sociology of Education
Autumn Term 2004 / 2005

What are the relationships between educational markets and social inequality?

Weijie NG
MA Economics of Education

Section A: Introduction

A remarkable parallel may be drawn between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) in England. The former announced the defeat of Communism and central planning, and the latter oversaw the end of the state as a monopoly provider of education. Both were followed by an assortment of liberalisation, decentralisation, and privatisation processes, all in the name of inducing competition amidst the blaring trumpets saluting the imminence of marketisation and capitalism. And both could be said to have led to disappointing consequences. The promised manna of improved efficiency has not been delivered: many transition economies almost uniformly saw their Gross Domestic Product plunge post 1989 (Blanchard, 1997); 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 marketisation for rising grades in GCSEs. At the same time, market reforms have been decried for leading to worsening social inequality. Indeed, it is very obvious in Russia, where oil barons such as Abramovich emerge with the financial clout to buy the whole English Premier League if he so wanted, while 35 percent of the population live under the subsistence minimum (Shorrocks & Kolenikov, 2001). At the same time, in the UK, numerous critics (Reay, 1998; Ranson, 1993), etc) have attributed widening educational disparities between the middle class and the working class to market reforms. However, the relationship between educational markets and social inequalities may not be quite so clear-cut. The arguments that markets would improve opportunities and outcomes for all, by writers such as Tooley (1995), are perhaps equally plausible, and the evidence on changes in the level of inequality is mixed. In this essay, the links between marketisation and social inequality will be explored, primarily by delving into the impact of the ERA and dipping into a couple of subsequent reforms as well as others elsewhere.

In Section B, what we mean by an educational market, with examples of market reforms in different contexts and of different characteristics, and aspects of social inequality, will be discussed. The market based reforms of the 1988 Education Reform Act, and subsequent related reforms, will be laid out in Section C, before using an examination of the impact of the market-based reforms of the ERA in England as a starting point to examine the links between educational markets and social inequality in Section D. Also, in Section D, the effects of marketisation in other contexts will be discussed. It will be concluded, in Section E, from both theory and evidence, that it is unclear how educational markets and social inequality are related to each other, and that the impact of marketisation could depend largely on the mechanisms of the market set in place, as well as the context in which markets are introduced. Also, there is a need to look at the bigger picture: whether the educational system can be expected to eliminate inequality in society, and the role of schools in a rapidly changing world.

Section B: What do we mean by markets and social inequalities?

In essence, a market may be defined as an area over which buyers and sellers negotiate the exchange of a good or service. An educational market, therefore, would be one where parents and their children are buyers and where schools are sellers, and both parents / children and schools negotiate the exchange of commoditised education.

Key to moving an educational system from the central planner to the market might include allowing for alternative systems of funding (Tooley et al, 2003). Alternative funding includes the use of education vouchers, which are tax funded certificates by which all parents are given the ability to pay for the schooling of their children at an educational institution of their choice, and school fees. A universal education voucher exists in Sweden, whereby all state and private schools are funded by municipalities to the amount of 85 percent of the calculated average cost per student (Tooley et al., 2003). Targeted vouchers, such as on the poor, or on low-income girls, are more common and have been used in places as diverse as Milwaukee, Colombia, Spain and Bangladesh.

Two more major manifestations of the marketisation phenomenon are possibly the fostering of greater school autonomy and the stress on competition between schools. In Singapore, the former started off with a form of privatisation, whereby top schools were allowed to become independent and were granted some control over staff deployment, finance, management and the curriculum, while the latter involved the endorsement of public ranking of schools, and the designation of more schools as autonomous schools (these have more autonomy than government schools but less than independent schools) to compete with the independent schools (Tan, 1998).

Now, what do we mean by social inequality? Liberals have two dominant notions of distributive social justice: equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. The former may be summarised: ‘Unequal results are justified if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed’ (Lynch, 1995). The existence of equality of opportunity depends on the presence of equal formal rights, equal access and equal participation (Gewirtz, 2001). The latter is more radical, and insists on pursuing equal results for different groups in society, and justifies direct intervention, including affirmative action programme, as a means to prevent disadvantage (Gewirtz, 2001). Lynch (1995) further proposes another ‘equality objective’, that of ‘equality of condition’, which ‘involve(s) the development of an egalitarian society which would be committed to the living conditions if all members of society, taking full account of their heterogeneity be it arising from gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, age, sexual orientation or any other attribute.’ It involves the equalisation of power and privilege. In an educational system, it could mean having equality in schooling conditions, equality in satisfaction with the educational process and an equality in the development of the potential of every member in society. Using these notions of social justice, social inequality would mean that the equalities of opportunity, outcomes and/or condition are not fulfilled in society. In this essay, social equality within education will be taken to encompass all three notions, although the focus would be on the former two, and social inequality would refer to non-achievement of these equality objectives.

Section C: A brief account of marketisation in England

On 16th October, 1976, the then Prime Minister James Callaghan in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, firmly called out for discussion by all parties, ‘parents, teachers, learned and professional bodies, representatives of higher education and both sides of industry, together with the Government’ (Callaghan, 1976) to address problems in the English educational system. He expressed unease with standards in schools and dubious new informal methods of teaching, among other things. In effect, his speech was an appeal for reform.

The Conservatives’ answer was the Education Reform Act, which promised that market forces would inject a new vitality into the system. Its aims were to:

raise standards, extend choice and produce a better educated Britain … by giving consumers of education a central part in decision making … (, by) freeing schools and colleges to deliver the standards that parents and employers want … (, by) encouraging the consumer to expect and demand that all educational bodies do the best job possible.

(Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker
2nd reading of 1987 bill in formulation for 1988 ERA
Hansard, 1 December 1987)

Before going on to survey the effects of marketisation on social inequality in England, it would be useful to draw out various pertinent strands of the act. First of all, the Local Management of Schools (LMS) scheme was a measure designed to enhance the independence of schools by diminishing LEA control of schools. Under LMS, school governors were allowed to decide how to spend the delegated budget, and were responsible for the appointment, management and dismissal of staff. The whole point of LMS was ‘to decentralise decision making (from the LEAs) to school level’ (Levacic, 1995).

To increase competition between schools, the ERA also prescribed open enrolment. Funding also became based on a formula linked to student enrolment, and at least 75 percent of the Aggregated Schools Budget, i.e. the money delegated by the LEA to its schools, must be allocated according to the pupil number and their ages. Open enrolment and formula funding together meant that a quasi-voucher system is in place. The schools landscape was made more diverse and competition was also enhanced with the creation of grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges. The idea behind the increase of competition is that schools will endeavour to raise educational standards in order to attract pupils and hence funding.

It is important to note that the reforms of the ERA led not to an education free market, but to an education quasi-market, for which the distinguishing characteristics are ‘the separation of purchaser from provider and an element of user choice between providers’ as well as usually a high degree of government intervention (Levacic, 1995). In the UK, the government introduced a National Curriculum, which dictates the content of the curriculum in compulsory education, and testing on a grand scale, in order to inform parents and teachers what a child knows and understands, to indicate the achievements of schools generally, and to ensure the quality of the educational system. To ensure competition, leagues tables were to be compiled and published based on test grades obtained by pupils. Though such a mix of centralisation and decentralisation might at first glance appear to be purely the product of muddled thinking, it is the result of struggle, negotiation, compromise and reconciliation over short and long term strategies and goals between the neo-liberals and neo-conservative elements within the New Right dominant during the Thatcher’s years in power (Whitty, 1990).

Marketisation did not stop with the ERA, nor with the fall from power of the Conservatives. Under New Labour, market based reforms included an experimentation with nursery vouchers and an expansion of the specialist schools framework (Power & Whitty, 1999). Recently, the educational marketplace has been expanding even at home, with the increasing emphasis on home learning by New Labour in what McNamara et al (2000) called ‘the Blairite project of Total Schooling’. The value of homework has been repeatedly emphasised, and funding has been poured into activities such as homework clubs, which extend the reach of schooling into the leisure time of children (Scanlon & Buckingham, 2004). Parents are also increasingly pressured to ‘invest’ more in educational resources, such as home computers, study guides, early learning materials and private home tutoring, for their children.

Section D: What is happening to social inequality?

In a quasi-market system, there are many different threats to social justice, and a major concern among them is that of cream skimming (Glennerster, 1991). Since a school’s performance in the league tables is determined largely by socio-economic background and schools in greater demand can attract more pupils and hence more funds, a school may attract more funding by maximising the examination results of its pupils and it can do that at minimum cost by cream skimming students from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Evidence suggests that worries in England about cream skimming are real. Schools have been shown to seek out and select particular types of students, e.g. those from the middle class, or from South Asian backgrounds, based on their abilities to boost test scores, at the expense of the ‘less able’, children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) (Gewirtz et al, 1995), etc. A significant minority of schools, especially those with autonomy over admissions, i.e. voluntary-aided and foundation schools, had criteria which appear to cream skim, despite Labour government reform attempts since 1997, such as the introduction of the Code of Practice on School Admissions in 1999, to counter this phenomenon (West et al., 2004). More specifically, schools have been using interviews meant to establish the pupils’ religion to determine the presence or absence of other desirable characteristics, which might partially explain the different percentages of pupils eligible for free school meals in different types of schools: by religion, 11.4% for Church of England schools, 15.6% for Roman Catholic schools, 6.2% for Jewish schools and 6.5% for Sikh schools, compared with 16.1% for all other maintained secondary schools in England (House of Commons, 2001).

Another concern is that with the development of markets in education, schools may become increasingly pressured to restructure teaching, such as by introducing setting, in order to attract white middle class school children, who are viewed as ‘valuable commodities’ (Reay, 1998). Research has shown that there are negative consequences for pupils allocated to bottom sets since, for example, teachers for bottom sets tend to be less experienced and junior staff (Ball, 1981). Because pupils in bottom sets are predominantly black or white working class, and those in top sets may be ‘uniformly white’ (Gillborn and Gipps, 1996), this suggests that social inequalities based on race and social class are being exacerbated here. Indeed, when schools are ranked according to their percent of pupils achieving A-C grades, Gillborn and Youdell (2001) have observed an ‘educational triage’ syndrome, whereby schools ration their time and effort, and focus on pupils on the borderline between the D and C grades, at ‘the cost of judging some pupils (disproportionately Black and working class young people) as without hope’. Schools do not deliberately set out to further disadvantage the disadvantaged. Instead, to keep their place in the pecking order, schools have to maximise their measured output from limited resources, and therefore have no choice but to decide where best to concentrate their efforts upon. This decision is based on judgements on ‘ability’, which unfortunately, like IQism, is a ‘loaded, fallacious and highly dangerous concept … (that) … offers a supposedly fair means of condemning some children to second class educations’ (Gillborn and Youdell, 2001). Since pupils who are black, or who receive free school meals are considerably more likely, and more unfairly to be judged as lacking in ‘ability’, they are consigned to lower sets and lower tiers. It is to be expected that the educational divide can only widen with the continued misplaced belief in ‘ability’.

Sometimes, segregation of social class and ethnicity, it has been argued, is a result of privileged parents being more active or better in choosing desired schools (Tomlinson, 1997). Privileged ‘choosers’ are better at discriminating between schools, evaluating teachers, and interpreting league tables and Ofsted reports, because they have the necessary cultural capital and educational knowledge, and therefore come up trumps in the local schooling market. Such privileged ‘choosers’ are largely white and middle class (Ball et al., 1996). Working class parents tend to be either ‘disconnected choosers’ (Gewirtz et al., 1995) or ‘semi-skilled choosers’ (Ball et al., 1996). The former refers to those who lack car ownership, and are therefore geographically bound to their vicinity, and would settle for the local comprehensive. The latter refers to those who want to engage with the market, but who are likely to have poorer educational experiences themselves, do not have the knowledge or the skills to go about maximising their children’s educational opportunities and outcomes.

Segregation, it is feared, would lead to a hierarchy of schools forming, with high achieving middle-class white pupils in league table top ranked schools, and disadvantaged working class, ethnic minorities in inferior or ‘sink’ schools (Miliband, 1991). The Coleman (1979) report has emphasized the pre-eminence of peer group effects on educational attainment. One might expect a positive peer group to affect achievement directly, e.g. by helping each other with class work, or by studying together for the examinations, and to affect achievement via values, e.g. a propensity to be hardworking, etc. If the high achieving middle class children leave the local schools, it may be argued that a positive peer group effect is being taken away, and the remaining children would suffer and do less well. This is another way how social inequality, particular that in outcomes, might increase when there is an education marketplace.

It has been suggested, however, that it is not marketisation that has led to the inequalities prevalent in educational systems today. Tooley (1996) pointed out that there has been widespread concern over educational inequality, and seminal works on the issue were published thirty years ago, such as the Coleman et al. (1966) in the US, and Rutter et al., (1979) in the UK, long before any market based reforms were even on the agenda. At the time under state control, as now, parents have always been able to buy into better school districts and reinforce social inequality (Massey & Denton, 1988). With regards to Miliband’s (1991) concerns over sink schools, Tooley (1992) pointed out that accusations of schools as ‘sink’ and failing are not new and existed pre-ERA. It may be considered that, as yet, no school has really had to close down due to falling pupil numbers in the market system. As Hargreaves (1996) said, ‘Bad schools do not … die of their own accord through market forces: bad schools have to be murdered’. Uneven distribution of tax-payers funds was also already evident decades ago, with state educational spending on a child of a family in the highest socio-economic class about 50 percent more than that of his counterpart in the lowest socio-economic group (Le Grand, 1982). Moreover, inequalities in achievement have largely remained unchanged in the decidedly non-market comprehensive system which lasted for decades (Halsey et al., 1980). It is perhaps no wonder then that the welfare state has been condemned as a ‘middle-class racket’ (Gray, 1993).

Moreover, Tooley (1995) has asserted that the full potential of markets in education cannot be accurately assessed from studies of quasi-markets, or what he called ‘so-called market(s)’. The state educational marketplace, as it exists in England, is not a free market, since there is no price mechanism in operation, there is heavy regulation from the state in form of the National Curriculum and league tables, etc., and while the demand side has been liberated through per capita funding, the supply side, i.e. the provision of education, has hardly been freed from state control. As such, he dismisses criticisms of markets in education by writers such as Ranson (1993), whom he feels mistakenly uses arguments against the Conservatives’ ‘so-called market’ against markets in general. Just because the schools quasi-market as it is today is inequitable does not mean that education markets in general are inequitable.

Also, just because vouchers and quasi-vouchers have not reduced inequality does not mean that they cannot. Vouchers, much like hammers and nails, are tools, and their impact would depend on how they are used and what they are being used for. The primary focus of the classic Friedman (1962) voucher was to boost educational efficiency. Friedman’s 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. Topping up of the vouchers by parents, when they do not fully cover school fees was also permitted. Quite clearly, cream skimming could be a serious problem and topping up essentially meant that the taxpayer would be subsidising the education of the rich who are attending expensive private schools. Other voucher schemes, such as the liberal Jencks (1970) proposal, were much more concerned with equity. Topping up was allowed, places in schools were to be allocated by ballot and the value of vouchers was to be means-tested, i.e. larger vouchers would be tied to pupils from lower income families. It is true that the quasi-vouchers under the ERA did allow for additional funding based on quantitative measures of pupils’ special educational needs or social advantage (Levacic, 1992), but it is arguable whether this compensatory funding is sufficient. For equity reasons, as Glennerster (2002) put it, ‘(ideally), a school should be indifferent between accepting a child with lower potential or greater problems compared with another pupil.’ If the school were to receive sufficient rewards for taking disadvantaged and more difficult students, incentives to cream skim would be diminished and could be eliminated. Not only that, if vouchers such as Fernandez & Rogerson’s (2003) ‘means-equalising voucher’ are to be used, educational expenditures on children may also be equalised, if that is what society desires.

Using Hirshmann’s (1970) concepts of ‘voice’ and ‘exit’, Tooley (1995) goes on to argue that markets reduce the power of the middle-class vis-à-vis the working class. In any organisation, customers may express their dissatisfaction with its performance either ‘exit’, i.e. by leaving and stopping their custom of the organisation’s products, or by ‘voice’, i.e. by ‘express(ing) their satisfaction directly to management or some other authority to which management is subordinate or through general protest to anyone who cares to listen’ (Hirshmann, 1970). In an educational setting, this means that parents or pupils may express their displeasure with a school either by leaving it for another school, or by complaining to the head teacher, government or to the press. Under a non-market, bureaucratic system, ‘voice’ tends to be the only available recourse, while in a market system, both ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ are viable options. In the former system, the middle class can be expected to dominate, since it is ‘politically influential, skilled and adroit, …organised, … more articulate… (and) endowed with cultural power’ (Seldon, 1990) and are more capable at manipulating ‘voice’. The denial of markets to the working classes means that ‘exit’ is not permitted to them, and they are stuck with only ‘voice’, in which they are seriously disadvantaged. Though Gewirtz et al. (1995) and Willms & Echols (1992_ may argue that the middle class are relatively more adept at working the market, at least markets give the option of ‘exit’, where there was none before, to the working class, and allow them to ‘vote with their feet’ (Tiebout, 1956), to leave poor schools for better ones. Markets, then, could be the way forward, if social inequality is to be reduced.

The Blairite extension of the reach of the educational policy into the home, as laid out in Section A, may be expected to exacerbate educational inequalities, both in opportunities and in outcomes Given the difference in the level of economic resources between parents, children from middle class backgrounds may well be expected to surge ahead of their working class counterparts in the ‘digital divide’ (BECTA, 2001), and be further privileged through the ‘invisible’ purchase of home tutoring (Russell, 2002).

Econometric evidence on the level of equality of access to English schools has also been mixed. Gorard and Fitz (1998), using data on the eligibility for free school meals (FSM) as an indicator of poverty and examining the spread of eligible pupils across English secondary schools, calculated a ‘Gorard index’ and reported an initial increase in segregation in the first few years after the introduction of the 1988 market reforms, which was then followed by years of desegregation. They hypothesized that this was a result of a ‘starting gun’ effect, whereby more alert, perhaps middle-class, families responded rapidly and were quick to make use of increased opportunities to choose schools. However, other families soon learned their rights as well in the new educational landscape, and subsequently, the net result since has been less social segregation in schools, meaning that the system tends towards equality rather than inequality. Noden (2000), on the other hand, using the ‘isolation index’ instead, which measures the probability that a schoolmate, of a pupil eligible for free school meals, will also be eligible for free school meals, and the same data sets as in the Gorard and Fitz (1998) study, found that schools have actually become increasingly segregated from 1994 to 1999. It should be noted that both these econometric measures are flawed, in different ways. For example, the ‘Gorard index’ does not take into account ‘where the unevenness’ of the spread of FSM pupils is located (Noden, 2000), while the Noden index would increase, implying greater segregation, alongside general increases in the level of eligibility for FSM across the country as a whole, which suggests that the increase in the Noden index after 1994 could well be a result of worsening conditions in the local economy rather than in the education system. Such flaws remind us that these indices can only be indicators, and that they are not, and cannot be able to represent the level of segregation and inequality as a single number. Such limitations of statistics may have led Boyle (2001) to make this a simple but telling comment: ‘We take our collective pulse 24 hours a day with the use of statistics. We understand life that way, though somehow the more figures we use, the more the great truths seem to slip through our fingers. Despite all that numerical control, we feel as ignorant of the answers to the big questions as ever.’

If vouchers are thought of as harmful to equality, then school fees, intuitively, would probably be worse. They have in fact conversely helped to bridge the gap in some contexts. In many developing nations, even though education is publicly provided, the number of school places is low because governments are faced with financial constraints. School fees, when introduced in Malawi, actually helped to mobilise more resources for education, and allowed for a sizable expansion of education (Mingat & Tan, 1986). Moreover, the implementation of fees gave Malawian school much needed financial resources with which to offer means-tested bursaries to students from poorer backgrounds. This in effect means that school fees can be a tool with which to allow for those who can afford schooling to subsidise those who cannot, and thereby help to break down educational inequalities stemming from background financial disparities.

Section E: Strategy & context matter

It may be remarkably clear that the link between markets and social inequality in education is nebulous. There are convincing arguments why and how marketisation in the form of the ERA has widened the inequalities, but there are also equally persuasive assertions that it has not. Indeed, academics cannot even agree as to whether further inequalities have actually emerged post 1988. Looking beyond England, there are surprisingly positive consequences of the extension of Adam Smith’s invisible hand into education.

There is no one single way of marketisation and different countries have done it differently. The USA diversified the schools landscape by creating charter schools (Kane & Lauricella, 2001); Both Chile and Bangladesh used vouchers, but the former made vouchers universal, while Bangladesh only offered vouchers to disadvantaged girls (Tooley et al, 2003); Malawi introduced school fees while simultaneously offering bursaries to lower income pupils (Mingat & Tan, 1986), etc. The effects of different strategies, one may observe or postulate, are probably different. For example, if over-subscribed schools were not permitted to select, and legislation laid out that pupils were to be allocated to schools randomly out of a hat, the cream skimming problem might just disappear. It is therefore perhaps not markets, per se, but using Halpin and Troyna’s (1994) words, ‘the fine-grain detail of their implementation’, that impacts upon social equality in educational systems. This suggests that context matters very much. Ball (1994) proposed a ‘policy cycle’ framework of five contexts of policy-making with which to, among other things, analyse responses to and impact of policies: contexts of influence, policy text formulation, practice, outcomes and political strategy. Each of these contexts may affect the outcomes of market reform policies. Such policies do not exist alone and other policies and texts are in circulation at the same time. ‘The enactment of one (policy) may inhibit or contradict or influence the possibility of enactment of others’ (Ball, 1994). If setting did not exist as an option for schools to employ as a response to market reforms, the educational triage might not operate. With contexts being so important in the intentions embedded in, responses to and effects of marketisation policy, using Ball’s (2003) words, there is probably ‘no clear-cut class story of stark oppression and determinism’, and one’s attention should be focused on ‘subtleties and nuances’ rather than ‘stark and distinct patterns and relationships’.

The world today is increasingly becoming a global marketplace, and the market pervades all aspects of our lives in ways that many of us may find difficult to identify or understand. Somehow, the wines in fashion are made in Chile, our computers are manufactured in Taiwan, property prices in east London will probably depend on horse-trading between Olympics officials in Singapore next year and the price of air fuel can be cheaper than that of car petrol. Gone are the days of Communism and central planning, and societies today will not accept their return. If as Bernstein (1970) stated, ‘education cannot compensate for society’, it is unlikely that education can counteract or resist the flow towards a more marketised world. Therefore, perhaps education should embrace markets instead. It is all very well to envisage schools as a safe haven from the atomistic self-interested world of capitalism. However, the denial of markets in education might mean that young people leave school unprepared for the harsh real world. A balance needs to be found, and a balance that is acceptable.

Education has to be a mixture of haven and challenge. Reassurance, of course. Stability. But also incentive. At the very least you offer the kids support. You care for them. You offer them security. You give them an environment where they feel they can grow. But also make bloody sure you challenge them. You make sure they realise learning is hard. Because if you don’t, if you only make it a safe haven, if it’s all clap-happy, and ‘everything the kids do is great’, then what are you creating? Emotional toffees, who’ve actually learnt nothing, but who then have to go back and face the real world … Find that balance, it stretches you, it stretches you as far as you’ll go.

‘Skylight’, David Hare, playwright, 1998

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"You see me no up": Is Singlish a problem?

2005-08-05T11:00:00.000+01:00

“You see me no up”
Language Problems & Language Planning 27:1 (2003), 45–62.

Is Singlish a problem?

Chng Huang Hoon
National University of Singapore

Singlish, Singapore’s brand of colloquial English, is accepted by some as an essential marker of Singaporean identity but deplored by others as a variety of English that puts Singapore and Singaporeans at a disadvantage because of its lack of international intelligibility. For this reason, it has been argued that Singaporeans cannot afford to maintain Singlish as a viable linguistic resource. A campaign known as the “Speak Good English Movement” was established in 2000 to counter the ill effects of Singlish through the promotion of Standard English. This paper addresses the Singlish-Standard (Singaporean) English debate in terms of discourse resources and the politics of language planning in Singapore. It may be true that Singlish is not the most internationally intelligible of Englishes, but what is more interesting is the considerable disparity between the official concern over international intelligibility and the reality of life in Singapore, especially for the Singlish speaker. Such a disparity suggests differing notions of what constitutes an important linguistic resource for the nation as a whole and for specific speech communities. On another level, it provides insights into the politics of language management in Singapore. The Singlish-Standard English debate also provides clear evidence of struggles over the determination of the choice of a preferred variety of English and the control over linguistic resources. Through an examination of media reports, official statements, and letters to local newspapers, the author considers the implications of this debate for Singaporeans (especially Singlish speakers) and their participation within the society. In the process, the author also examines the power relations that are intertwined in this debate for determining the ideal Singaporean society.

“Quick, quick. Late already. You eat yourself, we eat ourself.”1 This is an example of English as spoken by Phua Chu Kang, the lead character in Singapore’s most popular English-language television sitcom. Singlish, Singapore’s local brand of colloquial English, is recognized as the quintessential mark of Singaporean-ness; but it has also been identified (especially in official circles) as English “corrupted by Singaporeans” (SGEM 2001). As Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew sees it, Singaporeans “are learning English so that we can understand the world and the world can understand us.”2 Singlish is, he continues, “a handicap wemust not wish on Singaporeans.” Singapore’s Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in his 1999 National Day Rally Speech echoed Lee’s position when he said, “We cannot be a first-world economy or go global with Singlish” (Goh 1999). In other words, using Singlish hampers international communication, and since Singapore’s survival as a viable economy on the world stage is accepted by Singaporeans as a top priority, it has been argued that Singaporeans cannot afford to maintain Singlish as a dominant linguistic resource. To counter the ill effects of Singlish, a campaign known as the “Speak Good EnglishMovement” (SGEM 2001), joins the already long list of national campaigns launched in Singapore.

This paper explores the tensions between Singlish and Standard (Singaporean) English in terms of discourse resources, and the politics of language planning in Singapore.While it is accepted that indeed Singlish is not the most internationally intelligible of Englishes, there is the more important question of the considerable disparity between the official concern over international intelligibility and the reality of life in Singapore, especially for the Singlish speaker. This disparity suggests different notions of what is considered an important linguistic resource for the nation as a whole and what constitutes such a resource for specific speech communities. On a more macro level, it gives insights into the politics of language management in Singapore. As one looks closely at this language debate, there is clear evidence of a struggle over the determination of the choice of a preferred variety of English and the control over linguistic resources.

Competing discourses: Singlish vs Standard Singaporean English

In the past few years, the Singlish-SGEM (Speak Good English Movement) debate has been played out in various forums. First introduced as an issue worthy of national attention by local politicians in official speeches, the debate was subsequently elaborated in editorials and letters in all English daily newspapers in Singapore including the leading English paper, The Straits Times. In 2001, a committee to guide SGEM activities was formed. Through such constant articulations, the problems of Singlish and the corresponding need for Standard Singaporean English have become gradually solidified in the general consciousness. This section unravels the rhetoric employed to dismiss Singlish as a corrupted form not worthy of promotion, and the subsequent emphasis laid on Standard Singaporean English. But first, what is Singlish? Singlish has been defined as a colloquial form of Singaporean English, characterized by a mixture of local expressions (such as catch no ball = failed to understand), code mixing/switching (e.g. My English very chor = My English is very crude/vulgar), discourse particles (the most famous being lah), reduplication (e.g. Don’t pray pray = be serious) and direct translations from languages such asHokkien andMalay (e.g. You see me no up, fromMandarin ni kan wo bu qi, meaning You look down on me) (Kang 1992/1993). One study has found that Singaporeans are generally favourably disposed towards Singlish especially if Singlish is restricted to informal domains of talk, but when used in more formal contexts, Singlish is only acceptable for the less educated population (Kang 1992/1993: viii).3

Though most Singaporeans think of Singlish primarily as a spoken language, Singlish has become so popular that it is increasingly exploited in written genres such as local plays and poems, and in the process Singlish is made even more popular with the success of such works.4 Phua Chu Kang, one of the most watched Singaporean sitcoms in recent television history, has further added to the popularity of Singlish. In fact, the manner in which the lead character of this sitcom speaks Singlish each week on local TV has been widely imitated, especially by the younger section of the population, which is why the question of Singlish has become an overt concern for local politicians. To be sure, the concern over the use of Singlish was already expressed a decade before in the media. For example, readers have said that Singlish should not be too widely used because it is ”merely a poor imitation of English.”5 More recently, at a community-level National Day Celebration on 14 August 1999, Senior Minister Lee laid the groundwork for his dismissal of Singlish when he identified Singlish as a problem: Each family can create its own coded language; nothing wrong with that except that no one outside the family can understand you.We are learning English so that we can understand the world and the world can understand us. It is therefore important to speak and write standard English. The more the media makes Singlish socially acceptable, by popularizing it in TV shows, the more we make people believe that they can get by with Singlish. This will be a disadvantage to the less educated half of the population…. (Lee Kuan Yew 1999)

This group, he said, “will suffer economically and socially” especially if Singlish is the only linguistic resource they have in their possession. He then related how he went about successfully setting a standard of Mandarin for Singapore (by introducing the Taiwanese standard for media and education), and how this same approach may be adopted to get Singaporeans to adopt Standard English. If this approach is followed, Lee believes that “[w]e will see a difference in another one generation.” The intention and the power of policy makers to manipulate and shape a specific linguistic reality in Singapore is clearly evident in this statement.

Picking up on this theme a week later, in his National Day Rally Speech (22 August 1999), Prime Minister Goh added a pragmatic reason for learning English in Singapore: “to communicate with the world” so that we gain “a big advantage over our competitors.” He warned against the limited reach of Singlish and said that “if we carry on using Singlish, the logical final outcome is that we too will develop our own type of pidgin English, spoken only by 3 million Singaporeans, which the rest of the world will find quaint but incomprehensible.”

The solution, he said, is to discourage Singlish, or at least not to encourage it; and instead encourage the use of “proper” English. He then suggested, in jest, that the lead character Phua Chu Kang could be sent to remedial English classes. The television station however, took PM Goh’s remarks seriously and subsequent episodes saw the miraculous, if gradual transformation of Phua Chu Kang into a “better” English speaker, who makes occasional Singlish “mistakes” in his speech.6 This is but one clear example of how the media respond swiftly and often in consonance with official views on a matter already cast in terms of national survival. In April 2001, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong urged Singaporeans to “speak English everyone understands” and said that though the mother tongues (read: ethnic languages) gave Singaporeans a sense of identity, Standard English is “a rational trade-off” for Singaporeans who want to be a part of the global economy (Straits Times Interactive 2001). DPM Lee also noted that Singlish is not the only way to strengthen Singaporean identity and that there are other ways to do so. Thus, he implied, it is not necessary to insist on the maintenance of Singlish.

Such official statements about Singlish and Standard English were soon enthusiastically taken up for discussion in the local papers. As early as 1988, and perhaps even earlier, it was observed that “Singlish is the spontaneous and delightful way that Singaporeans express themselves in English…. Singlish is the common dialect of the people of Singapore” (New Paper 1988). Though officials today would not endorse this “delightful way that Singaporeans express themselves,” this comment revealed that the average Singaporean understands that Singlish is a form of “street talk” and for this reason, even though Singlish may be “the common dialect of the people of Singapore,” no one should worry that Singaporeans will indiscriminately use this form of English when engaged in the global economy. However, a sentiment often heard in Singapore involves the ambivalent attitude towards Singlish, or, more accurately, the unattractive Singaporean traits (mostly having to do with “uncultured” behaviour) that Singlish encapsulates, unsure whether to take pride in it, or to be ashamed of it. The recent entry of the term“kiasu” in theMacquarie English dictionary (Koh 1995) provoked mixed feelings among Singaporeans, with some dismayed that a not exactly attractive national trait was being publicized and possibly perpetuated in the language, but others were pleased that a Singapore termhad become significant enough to merit inclusion in a dictionary.7

Shortly after key politicians had voiced their sentiments about Singlish, their views were echoed by media reports on the subject. An August 1999 report for example, quoted various people whose views are consonant with the official view. Gurmit Singh, the actor who plays the lead character, Phua Chu Kang (otherwise known as PCK), had this to say to his young fans: “This is Singlish; it’s for fun, it’s a sitcom. Just watch it to see Uncle Gurmit having fun,” thus making a clear distinction between enjoying the show and actually adopting Singlish as a discourse option in real life (Srilal 1999). The report also cited the assistant vice-president of the local TV station who is most directly responsible for creating this hit comedy as saying that it is a great idea to have “PCK sound like PCK without resorting to Singlish” and she promises that PCK “will still be recognizable after his linguistic make-over.” The report ended with this unambiguous endorsement of the official line by The Straits Times: Singaporeans are well-equipped for the knowledge-based economy of the new millennium. But [Singapore] will not be able to do business with the rest of the world with Phua Chu Kang’s Singlish. The government is right to recognize the problem and deal with it now because, ultimately, Singlish will be a handicap.

The result of a May 2000 survey of 500 people to determine the standard of spoken English in Singapore was reported in The Straits Times: 49% felt that the standard of English in Singapore is “good”, 89% felt “it is very important to speak good English”, and 94% said they will try and speak good English” (Straits Times 2000b). Such results should reassure the authorities that in spite of their worry over the trendiness of Singlish, Singaporeans are heeding the government’s message about the stakes invested in using and maintaining “proper” English. Furthermore, in spite of frequently heard sentiments such as “people are emotionally attached to Singlish” and “Singlish is an important unifying force in Singapore,” since the SGEM launch the British Council has received many calls from Singaporeans who are “eager to sign up for classes” (McNulty 2000). Books attempting to boost the use of Standard English have been rapidly produced. One series, called Grammar Matters, was jointly produced by the Southeast AsianMinisters of Education Organisation Regional Language Centre (SEAMEO RELC) and theMinistry of Education, and focused on “areas of grammar that many Singaporeans seem to have problems with” (Lim 2000). In short, the encouragement given to Singaporeans to learn
“proper” English is a visibly public affair, and though the abandonment of Singlish is not spoken of in so many words, in much of the effort to overtly promote Standard English usage, Singlish is understood as the sacrificial lamb.8 Singapore is so well known as a campaign city that the fatigue among Singaporeans at the suggestion of yet another campaign sufficed to get the Speak Good English campaign called a “movement” instead. So when Colonel David Wong was entrusted with the awesome task of steering Singaporeans away from Singlish, the new campaign was named the “Speak Good English Movement” or SGEM. Nevertheless, a campaign by any other name is still recognizably a campaign, and so the machinery for a national effort began, with the setup of a full committee made up of members including local academic Lionel Wee, local entertainerKohChiengMun, Director Eric Khoo, StraitsTimes English Language Specialist Helen Tan and so on. SGEM’s mission is to promote “good” (read: standard) English usage among Singaporeans and in the process decrease the reliance on Singlish (SGEM 2001). A website (http://www.sgem.org.sg) was set up, and language activities were planned. Wong was soon interviewed and featured in the local paper (M. Nirmala 2000a). According toWong, We are trying to build a sense of pride, that as Singaporeans, we can speak good English as opposed to pride that we can speak Singlish.We are trying to check a trend in which younger Singaporeans are beginning to feel that it is perhaps a way of identifying themselves as Singaporeans if they speak Singlish. (Nirmala 2000a)

The overt attempt to remake Singaporeans and the Singaporean identity linguistically is clear from this formulation of a newly defined “sense of pride.” A visit to the SGEM website shows the following topic links: “Calendar of Events,” “Let’s Learn Good English Online,” “Let’s Have Fun With Good “You see me no up” English,” “Courses and Seminars,” and so on. A booklet entitled SpeakWell, BeUnderstood has also been produced by SGEM (SGEM 2000b). In the preface, Singlish is again problematized: This book has a simple aim: to sensitize Singaporeans to features of Singlish so that they will make the effort to speak good English. The use of Singlish can be a problem because it gives the impression that the speaker is unprofessional or poorly educated.

The following example drawn fromthe SGEM booklet illustrates a typical entry: A section entitled “Interacting with Foreigners” depicts a Singaporean going to the airport to meet a foreigner who has just arrived. The Singaporean asks: “Would you likeme to send you to the hotel now?” There follows an explanatory text that clarifies the use of send/fetch/bring/take in Singlish and in Standard English. An alternative (good English) version is then provided: “Would you like me to give you a lift to the hotel now?” It is hoped that through these focused lessons directing attention to the “problems” of Singlish, and educating Singlish speakers about the standard forms, Singaporeans will come to speak a brand of English that will be acceptable and intelligible to the world.

The SGEM launch in April 2000 saw PM Goh reiterating his views about the harmfulness of Singlish, and urging everyone to discourage the younger generation from continuing with Singlish. In his words, the younger generation “should not take the attitude that Singlish is cool or feel that speaking Singlish makes them more Singaporean. If they speak Singlish when they can speak good English, they are doing a disservice to Singapore” (M. Nirmala 2000b). In these words, PM Goh framed the adoption of Standard English and the abandonment of Singlish as a matter of national duty. A new English syllabus has since been introduced in schools to combat this “erosion of standards”, and parents, teachers and members of the community are exhorted to set the correct standard for speaking good English. Phua Chu Kang even received an encouraging pat on the back from the PM at the SGEM launch as Phua’s English is now
portrayed as having visibly improved after receiving remedial English training. The SGEM website (SGEM 2000a) carries an unambiguous endorsement of the PM’s definition of Singlish as “English corrupted by Singaporeans.” This is taken as the point of departure for all SGEM-related activities. In 2001, a weeklong event called the “SGEM Festival 2001” (see www.sgem.org.sg) organized more than 100 activities involving community centres, schools, and other groups in Singapore. Some highlights include plays by theatre groups that incorporated English lessons targeted at young schoolchildren at public libraries and other appropriate venues, articles on good English featured in the SGEM official paper The New Paper, and phone-in lessons provided by the British Council for specific periods of time. Through these kinds of intensive and goaldirected bombardment, it is apparently hoped that Standard English will take root, and that Singlish will recede into the background and will either die a natural death, or will at least be overtaken by “proper” English.

A Straits Times editorial dated 2 May 2000 fully endorsed the need for a movement like SGEM, calling it “a necessity.” The editorial predicted ready success for SGEM because, as it noted, Happily, Singaporeans buy into a rational economic argument readily. The political leadership has equated correct spoken English with the country’s continued economic viability. This alone can boost the campaign. (The Straits Times 2000a) However, the editorial continued to caution that a “linguistic balance”must be struck. Surprisingly, the balance to be struck is not between good English and Singlish, but between good English and other local languages, and even foreign languages:

Singaporeans can achieve a global presence if sizeable numbers of them are fluent in other foreign languages. There is room for Japanese, French and German. More should study these to a professional level, not just recreationally. Malay is crucial to deepen cultural sensitivity in dealings with the two most important neighbours. Few Chinese are learningMalay. Spanish can next be pushed by the Education Ministry in expectation of an economic opening to South America. Only then can Singapore have global pretensions.
It is dismaying that in an editorial note about linguistic balance in Singapore, no consideration is given to a formof English like Singlish that more than some Singaporeans count unhesitatingly as a crucial part of their identity, and yet much is said about equipping Singaporeans with various foreign languages. To give a taste of how some Singaporeans view the Singlish-Good English debate, here is a sample of letters and opinion pieces taken fromThe Straits Times. There are probably as many Singaporeans on each side of the debate, some singing the praises of Singlish, and others lamenting the falling standard of English in Singapore. For example, in one such letter to the Editor, one Singaporean noted: It is indeed worrying that the standard of English used in Singapore has been dwindling steadily…. I certainly hope that Singaporeans will embrace the coming years with the common, fervent endeavour to speak and write proper
English, as far as possible. (Chan 2000)

Another letter entitled “How long more can we go on speaking Singlish?” expresses a similar lament: Indulging a hybrid [Singlish] is easy but what requires no effort is a cop-out and a luxury no struggling learner can afford.We must dissociate English from Singlish, its insidious enemy. (Lee, A.M.Y. 1998a)

This letter provoked at least two responses. One letter writer, a Singaporean student in the UK, said she was furious when she suddenly realized that her English was incomprehensible to an Englishman who could only “smile politely and pretend to understand” what she herself took to be good (Singaporean) English (Ang 1998). She subsequently had to “re-learn English from [her] English friends” and she asked, as SM Lee asked, “Did we learn English to communicate among ourselves, or with the rest of the world?” The second response came from a Singaporean student who wrote from the USA: Singlish is a mark of how we have evolved as a nation and should surely have a place in our culture. Embracing Singlish as part of our heritage is not selfdeception… but the educated and wise will know when to use Singlish: use it among Singaporeans and close friends. Do not use it at job interviews or when making public announcements. (Lee, M. 1998) Some other letters that have made their way to the Editor on the issue included the following: “Forget Singlish, speak English” (Law 1998), “Let’s speak up for Singlish” (Sng 1998), “Using Singlish has a high opportunity cost” (Lee 1998b), and “Singaporean English is fine” (Tan 1998).

A recent reaction to SGEM’s effort focused on the prejudices that are reinforced in this debate between “good” and “bad” English. In one text that is meant to teach “good” English, the local paper featured two interlocutors, Simon (a speaker of “good” English) and Gary (a Singlish or “bad” English speaker) in an exchange. Readers were supposed to learn from the mistakes made in Gary’s speech. However, the letter writer notes, …it soon becomes clear to the reader that Gary is made to be more than just a speaker of bad English. He is childish and irresponsible. He asks to drive Simon’s car without being properly insured… Furthermore, there is the suggestion that the bad English speaker is less well-off than the good English speaker…. On the other hand, Simon’s English is not only grammatical, but also forceful: his speech does not merely reveal linguistic proficiency, but a personality that is steady and mature. The writer concludes: This text is therefore a good example of the entire galaxy of prejudices people have in their estimation of those who do not speak the same type of English as them. These prejudices produce an image of deficient speakers as vulgar and stupid, lacking the refinement and culture of the speaker of good English. Texts that reflect prejudices stigmatise less able speakers as not only linguistically deficient, but also culturally and intellectually deficient. Using such a strategy to compel people to learn a language is, quite simply, hitting below
the belt. (Sim 2002)

It is easy to discern from these sample headlines and letters alone the wide range of public opinion and the competing discourses surrounding the issue of Singlish versus Standard Singaporean English. The gap between the official agenda to have every Singaporean speak internationally intelligible English and the opposing desires of the average Singaporean to maintain Singlish as a discourse option results in an ideological conflict over what makes Singapore work and what makes its inhabitants Singaporean. Discourse resources, language management, and the sociolinguistics of access Let us begin our discussion situating the Singlish-SGEM debate in wider theoretical issues by pointing out that the true-blue Singlish speakers in Singapore do not have a voice in the debate at all. The discourses promoting Standard Singaporean English and opposing Singlish come predominantly from people who have access not only to Standard English, but also often to Singlish itself. From this standpoint, it is clear that there is already an unequal access to discourse resources and a differential access to power networks.

Like the Ebonics controversy of December 1996 in Oakland, California, Singlish is identified as the language of disempowerment.9 Like the Ebonics debates, commentators have cast the issue of Singlish-Good English as “a natural dichotomy of power”: Standard English is seen as naturally empowering, and Singlish, like Ebonics, is but a “language of social marginals,” a “handicap,” and therefore a language that will mark the Singlish speaker in positions of inferiority (Collins 1999: 212). No one in Singapore, including the present author, is recommending that we use Singlish in the Singaporean classroom. Supporters of Singlish however, are of the view that Singlish is a crucial part of Singaporean identity, and unlike the view expressed by DPM Lee, “You see me no up” who obviously recognized the emotional value of Singlish, a trade-off is perhaps not necessary, at least not for speakers who have access to multiple discourse resources, and even perhaps for those who have no direct need to engage in the global economy. But what about the group of Singaporeans whose dominant discourse resource is Singlish? Are we doing them a disfavour by advocating Singlish, as SM Lee believes?

In her work on the Speak Mandarin Campaign in Singapore,10 Wendy Bokhorst-Heng (1999: 255) has argued that “the use of a national campaign for the promotion of Mandarin created two key paradoxes”: One has to do with the slippage between nation and community created by the use of a national campaign for community purposes. The second has to do with the slippage between public and private created by the use of the public genre of the national campaign to makeMandarin a mother-tongue, an issue located in the private domain of the home. Similarly, the issue of the falling standard of English among Singaporeans is cast as a national concern that is translated into a rationale for weeding out Singlish, the language of a marginalized community or what has been called (Straits Times 1999) a “linguistic working class,” and thus blurring again, as in the Speak Mandarin Campaign, the boundaries between nation and community.

The local leadership needs to recognize that what is economically sound for the nation may not always be equally desirable for specific speech communities, especially a community that has to directly absorb the impact of a national policy. Of course, the local leadership has taken pains to argue that Singlish is a handicap, ignoring the fact that Singlish actually serves the daily needs of Singlish speakers quite well. Furthermore, quite apart from the economic benefits that are promised by the command of Standard English, there is another equally important, if not more important, concern — the emotional benefits Singlish brings to a community. The promotion of Standard English in the public domain has a direct impact on a private domain issue, whether it is articulated or not: in this debate whose motivating force is an effort to phase Singlish out, the identity of Singlish speakers is at stake. The fact that Singlish is not a language of a particular racial/ethnic group does not make it less damning to suppress it. The blurring of public and private domains is reminiscent of what has been undertaken in the Speak Mandarin Campaign; but in the Speak Mandarin Campaign, the voices of resistance are voices of racial minorities in Singapore, and that seems to have made the resistance more seriously noted and also subsequently more carefully managed. There is no reason why Singlish cannot be kept as a private domain resource, operating freely in the private domain, serving the diglossic L function in Singaporean society.Many Singaporeans know well when Singlish is or is not appropriate: allowing Singlish in informal situations poses no real threat for public domain (read: global) needs.

The official rhetoric assumes that Singlish is the main or direct reason why some Singaporeans speak less-than-comprehensible English. But to date, no evidence has been provided to show that Singlish is indeed such an obstacle to learning good English. Just as the presence of the Chinese dialects was taken as the stumbling block preventing Singaporeans from acquiring Mandarin, Singlish is now argued to be in the way of “proper” Singaporean English. The Singaporean authorities have often adopted the stance that in land-scarce and resource-scarce Singapore, such binary choices have to be made on most issues. But something can be said for allowing Singlish its own space, to co-exist with other varieties in the local context, including Standard English, without necessarily having to take Singlish away from this context. Writing on the Ebonics controversy, Salikoko Mufwene (2001: 260) argues: It is true that socioeconomic stratification has imposed a system in which command of either standard or White middle-class English has become a requirement for success in the professional world. However, developing proficiency in these norms need not be at the cost of abandoning one’s vernacular for all communicative functions. Vernaculars have their own social identity functions; and many speakers are not ready, and certainly not eager, to renounce that social-indexical role of their vernacular. Similarly, a sound command of Standard English in Singapore may be needed for professional success, but this does not preclude a place for Singlish as a marker of social identity.

Furthermore, in the extreme situation, in discouraging Singlish by overtly stigmatizing discourse we can arrive at a point where Singlish, like the Chinese dialects, will become a thing of the past.11 Denigrating Singlish usage can also result in linguistic insecurity among Singlish speakers, thus strengthening the negative stereotypes associated with these speakers, and at the same time reinforcing the naïve assumption that too many co-existing language varieties are somehow uneconomical and thus detrimental to effective language learning. Instead, it can be argued that to allow Singlish to co-exist with Standard English is to increase the discourse options for many Singaporeans, and possibly to provide an additional educational resource for acquiring Standard English (cf.
the arguments in the Ebonics debate). Such official discouragement of Singlish “You see me no up” 57 also means that an available or existing resource has been or will be left to
waste. As a result, Singaporeans may actually be worse off as speakers of English because they become less confident in English, and more reluctant to use the language creatively in all the enriching variation allowed by the local variety.12 In Kachru’s three-circle model of description (1982), Singapore is considered a norm-developing outer circle country. If SGEM succeeds in weeding out Singlish, Singapore will regress from being norm-developing to being norm dependent.

In linguistic terms, then, the drive for national progress (i.e. international intelligibility) to make Singapore a viable player in the global network actually may result in its increased dependency on external norms. This is surely not what the local government has in mind in developing the nation.13
Conclusion

The disparity between the official goal of achieving international intelligibility with Standard (Singaporean) English and the reality of life for the average Singaporean, especially those who have been described as belonging to the linguistic working class, is significant. In the official drive towards language management in Singapore, the government has usually been keenly aware of the need to tread carefully, as language issues are not just political issues: they are also increasingly recognized as identity issues. An ideological conflict lies in the fact that there are differing notions about what makes a Singaporean and what constitutes a valuable linguistic resource. The latter question opens up a further conflict because the idea of “valuable resource” is defined in economic terms for some and in personal terms for others, and in Singapore economic priorities often do not match personal desires. In such conflicts, power often comes into play as the determining factor. But, as is recognized elsewhere, in today’s terms power has to come in the formof manufactured consent, rather than coercion, and this requires much rhetorical work on the government’s part to build consensus and work towards productive resolution of the conflict. However, it is clear that even when the conflictmay one day be said to have been resolved, the reality is that control over specific linguistic resources lies in the hands of decision makers, especially in a nation that readily buys into an economic argument. The immediate implication for the average Singaporean is that he/she will gradually come to accept a new status quo, avoiding the use of Singlish even while preaching its value, and perhaps gradually letting go of a language that he/she feels emotionally attached to even while embracing Standard English as an important investment in a brighter future. Until a renewed confidence and pride in the way in which Singaporeans speak their own particular brand of English is found, what Rubdy has termed “creative destruction” with respect to the replacement of Singlish by Standard English will indeed take its place in Singapore’s linguistic landscape.

This said, however, it is true that as long as there exist Singaporeans who feel genuine attachment to Singlish, it will not fade away without a good struggle for some time to come, in spite of all official efforts to make the economic argument override all other arguments. One writer of a letter to the editor of The Straits Times perhaps said it best when she tried to pinpoint the im[ortance of Singlish to the Singaporean identity: My American husband understands me perfectly when I say, “Are you ready already?”, and when the day comes that he can put the “lah” in the right place, I’ll know we’re truly married! (Lee, M. 1998)

Such attachment to Singlish testifies to the uniqueness and emotional value of Singlish to some, if not all, Singaporeans. In the pursuit of that magic element that will unite all Singaporeans in the creation of a Singaporean identity, Singlish is very much a part of that formulation, and should therefore be allowed to thrive in Singapore.