An Education System Worthy of Malaysia #13
Chapter 2: It’s More Than Just Education (Cont’d)
Socioeconomic Factors Affecting Education
While it is important that we focus on schools to make sure that they are adequately funded, well equipped, and have trained teachers, we should not be blind to the social factors that can have a major impact on students’ performance. Access to schools, even when they are made free and readily available, can be blocked by seemingly innocuous factors like the need for school uniforms and transportation. We should also be mindful that what many would regard as opportunities, to the disadvantaged they may well be looked upon as obstacles.
There are many factors outside of education, in particular the social environment and culture, which affect educational attainment. We ignore them at our own peril. In a landmark 1966 study, the American sociologist James S. Coleman showed that the most important factor influencing school performance is the family, not the type of school or the amount of funding it receives. Parental involvement in the school is the best predictor of academic performance. Or as an old English saying would have it, one father is more effective than a hundred schoolmasters.
California publishes an annual evaluation of its schools, the Academic Performance Index (API), based on such indicators as test scores and graduation rates. What is remarkable is that the API correlates very well with the socio-economic status of the parents, leading many to dub it as the Affluent Parents Index.
US News publishes an annual report on the best American high schools. Invariably the top ones are the elite private prep schools. But I am not impressed with them; with their high fees and rigorous selection process they would pick only the best. Those students would have done well even if they had attended the local high school. Occasionally the list comes up with some regular public schools, those are the ones that truly impress me because they and their teachers have truly added value to their students.
One such school was Garfield High, a public inner city school in East Los Angeles with predominantly poor minority students. Their teacher, Jaime Escalante, successfully challenged them to take rigorous mathematic classes including advanced calculus. His students did so well on the College Board examinations that it thought that they had cheated, and under some pretext so as not to arouse suspicion, asked them to re-sit the test. Again they scored well. When word spread about the truth for the re-examination, the students were at first furious and then on reflection, they felt truly proud of their achievement.
Their teacher became a celebrity, later portrayed in the 1988 movie, Stand and Deliver. His was not an easy task; he had to spend years upgrading the math classes at the lower levels first.
Singapore, with its obsession of aping everything American, has a similar ranking exercise of its schools, except that the paternal government does it. The same schools come on top every year. Again that does not impress me. Had the rankings been based on the educational achievements and socio-economic status of the parents, the list would be identical. Sorry, no kudos for the teachers at its top schools.
This is true of schools as well as universities. It is well known that graduates of elite universities consistently earn more than those of less selective ones, leading many to credit those august institutions. This makes intuitive sense too. But a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research put things in their proper perspective. Instead of simplistically comparing the earnings of graduates of top universities to those attending other institutions, they studied the subgroup of students who were admitted to elite institutions but instead chose for a variety of reasons to attend less well-known universities. It turns out both groups do equally well. Essentially if you are smart and hardworking it does not matter whether you attend Harvard or Podunk State University, you will do well.
American prep schools actively diversify their student body by granting scholarships to talented minority students. These schools also have special coaching classes to scout for promising candidates. The ABC (A Better Choice) is one such successful program. The socioeconomic trap can be broken with imaginative policies. Even here there are pitfalls and failures. To a few, being selected for Groton and Exeter is not an opportunity rather a severe culture shock.
The importance of parental involvement in education may be self evident, but we need to look further and ask the even more basic question: Why are poor parents not involved in their children’s education?
While we seek answers to that, we must also explore the exceptions, that is, where poor parents are deeply involved with their children’s education to the point of willingly sacrificing everything.
In America, private Catholic schools in the inner cities do a much better job than public schools despite being less generously funded.
One reason is that when parents send their children to these schools, they believe in the system. The schools reinforce the parents’ traditional values; that in turn encourages even more parental involvement. This does not happen only with Catholic schools. Later I will describe the experience of Deborah Meier with her small school in East Harlem where over 90 percent of her students go on to college, a rate nearly twice the national average and certainly way ahead of other inner city public schools. Her secret? Getting the parents involved by respecting them, and by having high expectations of their children.
The same phenomenon is also seen among Malays. Malay children attending religious schools have low rates of absenteeism and dropouts. The schools reinforce the parents’ traditional values, and the parents in turn feel involved with and are connected to the schools. Parents do not fear that the school is imparting an alien value system. Their teachers too are committed, believing that they are doing Allah’s work. We should capitalize on this affinity and use Islam as a powerful motivator to keep children in school, and their parents involved. As Malays are attracted to Islamic schools, all the more that we must make sure that these schools provide the education these children need to face the modern age.
The success of Catholic schools in America and Islamic schools in Malaysia may be attributed to what is called the Rosenthal effect. Robert Rosenthal is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA who discovered that experimenters’ expectations and teachers’ biases often influence the results of an experiment or class. That is, expectations are self-fulfilling. This is also termed the Pygmalion effect, after George Bernard Shaw’s play made famous by the Broadway show, My Fair Lady. The sheer confidence of the lead character, Professor Higgins, in transforming a lowly Cockney lass into a refined lady made it happen.
A major portion of my reform addresses specifically this important issue of the Rosenthal phenomenon. The frequent harping on the poor performance of Malays in science and mathematics may have the perverse effect of perpetuating it. When this assumption gets ingrained, it affects everyone: teachers, students, and policy makers. The teacher would, through his or her manner of speech, voice, body language, and facial expressions, communicate this message to the students. The students in turn would quickly pick up on them. And policy makers would purposely dumb down the standards. Thus expectations become reality.
April 6th, 2006 at 3:40 am
“….A major portion of my reform addresses specifically this important issue of the Rosenthal phenomenon. The frequent harping on the poor performance of Malays in science and mathematics may have the perverse effect of perpetuating it….”
You got that right…. even my father and mother said the Malays are… ******* well… I won’t say it here… may be sensitive to some…….
But how exactly do one uplift the motivation of the Malays and how can the negative assumptions be reversed?
April 6th, 2006 at 5:48 am
Amit, positive reinforcement is the answer. Keep sharpening until the blade is sharp. Build one another up instead of pulling each other down.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Dr. Bakri:
“Parental involvement in the school is the best predictor of academic performance”
I agree with you on that but the major problem in Malaysia has been the parents concern that the National schools have lost their character and quality as “national” schools and now prefer sending the children to vernacular schools. Ideally, national schools should be their first choice but many parents lament that national schools act more like religious schools these days.
During my time, teachers and tutors were seen to be very fair and the question of what race the teachers were would not feature. The quality and capability of our teachers is lacking. I am not just trying to find faults but I am truly concerned as to how we are going to shape the minds of our children.
A few years ago, our govt, through the human resources ministry, set up the human resource developent fund (or something to that effect) and lo and behold many “fly-by-night” training centres sprung up. It came to my knowledge that these training centres “pakat” with the officers who get a cut, the trainee is paid a token sum and ususally end-up buying a motor-bike and, of course, the training centre gets to keep the lion’s share of the cake without ever the trainee attending the course. And Pak Lah can tell that people are complaining without basis of their muted response to what the govt has to say. How naive he can be. What was supposed to have been a skills training programme to help young and newly qualified graduates to prepare them for the job market seem to have gone down the drains.
Pak Lah recently lamented that he cannot go after people for the sake of it but what he choses to ignore and has been ignoring or is being oblivious of what is happening right in front of his eyes is that rampant corruption has become a way of life. Or am I naive to assume that the govt does not know about all this or everyone in the corridors of power and the elite are dashing to the finishing point to carve themselves an unending supply of “resources” - The 9MP has landed.
April 8th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
Fair Malaysian,
We have to wait and see, if the man AAB called “the Imam of Islam Hadhari” who thinks that he is the “reincarnated” Tun Haji Abdul Razak Bin Hussein, can innovate and reconfigure the way Government awards and implements and coordinates its projects. If he adopts his “business as usual” approach with his head buried in the sand, there is not much hope for our country.
Imitating the late second Prime Minister by wandering around is a nice way of touring the country and of boosting his sagging self confidence while campaigning for the 2007 UMNO Elections and the General Elections in 2008(?). Tun Razak was of a different time. Unlike Badawi, the late Tun walked the talk and enjoyed the confidence and support of outstanding civil servants. Civil servants today think Badawi is a bad joke, probably.But then Badawi thinks he is another Sultan who enjoys having his left hand kissed by his supporters who depend on his handouts.
As it is, his spinners are now talking about weaknesses in the implementation and execution of the Plan becoming “the Achilles’ heel that will undo all good intentions”. Kamal Khalid in the Prime Minister’s office, and a close associate of the Prime Minister’s infamous Khairy Jamaluddin, is preparing the ground in case Civil Servants left the country down.
My own view is that RMK9 needs the quality of leadership which the Imam cannot provide. Nice guys usually up last and drag the country down with them in the process. But corrupt politicians and their cronies are always blameless. Please see Kamal Khalid’s article in today’s (April 9, 2006) the New Sunday Times.
I welcome your astute comments on Kamal Khalid’s piece. I also anxiously await Dr. Bakri’s contrarian views on the RMK9. Prof Din Merican too has yet to make his comments known on this blog.
April 8th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
ExMU:
Yes, I share your sentiments. While the Malays are fighting tooth and nail to get what they call their share of 30%, the Chinese are not talking such numbers. While the Malays are looking to the govt which, incidentally, is a govt of the people, to attain this 30%, the Chinese are going about their business as usual. Isn’t this a shame that with all the multitude of handouts, the Malays are still lagging, I mean very far behind. The Indians are no better. A friend of mine recently joked that Indians have become the major crime menace including gangsterism because they have a leader who behaves like a thug himself. A classic example of leadership by example.
If the attitude is going to be one of “receiving” rather than “earning” then not for another hundred years or even thousand years can the Malays ever stand on their own feet. It is not that the Malays have not received. When they get preferential dues and get handouts through IPOs, all they think is to sell them and make some quick bucks. Having said that, the disparity among the Malays, and quite obviously the Indians, between the haves and have-nots has grown very wide that it is causing alarm among the ruling elite and the commonly coined term “umnoputras”.
If we are talking about Malays being successful in business, then they need not have to go to Oxford or Harvard because the ropes they have to learn are closer to home. If only they shed-off their self-inflicted pride and prejudice and “become a Chinese” in their thoughts and mind, almost half the battle would have been won. When I studied the fault lines, it glaringly showed that the cultural and religious inhibition of Malays/Muslims seem to stand in their way to success. Of course, if they are still bent on looking forward to handouts, then by all means carry on with what they are doing, just gleefully spent and waste the money away. For most Malays in Malaysia who seem to “show-off” their so-called proud achievements of standing tall in profession or business, I have every reason to cast doubt whether they would have become what they are without govt help. If these views are honestly analysed and understood, then the Malays would openly and confidently say “NO” to handouts. The days of gloom and doom are not far-off as other stronger economies are emerging to pose a threat to our standard of living. I can henceforth, and very confidently too, say that Pak Lah will definitely fail in his mission as he is certainly going in the wrong direction. He is taking the direction of a politician, as many UMNO stalwarts are doing or had done, but that would mean displacing honesty and sincerity with convenient half-baked measures.
Yesterday, five of us (three Chinese, two Malays and one Indian) went through almost the entire spectrum of the 9MP and not quite surprisingly we agreed unanimously that while it enshrines a bold and colossal blue-print, there is no such a delivery and control system that will ensure its success. We drew up a simulated delivery and control system and found that about 90% (quite large isn’t it) of the roads have to be gated. That does not bode well. So, it is again nothing more than a piece of paper. Almost everyone entrusted with the implementation are vultures. The talk has to change. The style has to change. The methodology in its entirety has to change, otherwise there is no hope. If Pak Lah is going to change them by asking them to wear badges and the like, well, anyone would know what the end result would be.
The vultures have already started building their nests larger to accomodate their ill-gotten gains. Let us watch the fun.
April 8th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
Fair Malaysian,
I am not going to watch the fun. It is no fun to see this country blessed with abundant natural resources, diverse yet underutilised or marginalized talent, and great climate go down the tubes because of poor and weak leadership, and the NEP/NNA/New Mission mentality.
Plans will remain plans, but the RMK9 is not even a plan; it is just waffle, an attempt to do everything including going back to agriculture purportedly with biotechnology and ICT. Without focus, there is no way we can win. Say goodbye to rm220 billion. For UMNOputras, RMK9 is Godsend!!!
Just ask Minister Dato Dr. Jamaluddin Jarjis what he did with nearly rm400 million in public funds for research and innovation in biotechnology and herbal science. Why was he not held to account for giving away taxpayers’ money to his friends and political cronies?
That is why I have said time and time again that Badawi has no courage to deal with his Cabinet ministers and civil servants. They can ignore him with impunity. What this kind of a leader in charge, we will be left behind even by the likes of Indonesia and Vietnam in the next half a decade. By then our man would have retired, or is kicked out by his UMNO party or the voters in 2008. We all have to live with his follies.
Why does not he just step down and our grateful nation will honour him with a Tunship and give him a very handsome gratuity and a great pension? It is a cheaper option for us. He can then live like a Sultan. Right now, it is painful to see him grapple with matters above his head. He just ain’t got it, man.
Only someone like our blogger Amit thinks that Badawi is great. Let us hear what Amit has to say about the RMK9 and the way we do things in Malaysia.
Thanks.
April 9th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Hi ExMu:
Many would agree that Pak Lah is not cut for the job simply because, despite getting the largest ever mandate from the rakyat ostensibly on the “wipe-out corruption” ticket, he just screwed it up and even had the cheek to recently declare that he had honoured his election promises.
The next question is, who else would be the right person to assume the post? His deputy is not any shade better. If what I heard is true (I could be wrong) his wife has a grip on the t-shirt contract given to our national service trainees. Why should the leaders of this country be so corrupt that I feel like vomiting and have only contempt for them? These people will strip this country of everything and our children and grandchildren will only see a skeleton and curse us for these misdeeds.
Well, why should I care, most probably I would be in heaven on the right side of god.
April 9th, 2006 at 3:21 am
That scheming Najib’s wife has her hands on everything including the contract for the construction of Mindef’s drains. But she can smile and put up a front even the coolest of crooks can’t emulate.
So, these are the leaders, and their conniving spouses, whom we have so adaciously elected into office to execute RMK9 and the RM220 billion alloted for its implementation.
Whom shall we blame?
April 9th, 2006 at 3:25 am
Sorry, it’s “audaciously”.
April 9th, 2006 at 9:30 am
“The next question is, who else would be the right person to assume the post? His deputy is not any shade better. If what I heard is true (I could be wrong) his wife has a grip…”
I can tell you Rosmah used to have a good grip (on things and ‘other things’) when I was with her in the same Residential College in the late 60s.
Now she has Najib in her grips - and that has been a while. Could she have lost her grip on things?
April 9th, 2006 at 9:31 am
Yes, I’ve been with her.
April 9th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Yes, I remember. She was with that biker whom she married - and then divorced years later to marry Najib. These two were inseparable. But I managed to have a moment or two with her. We made out in the back seat of my old Morris Minor at the Medical Faculty car pack those days.
April 9th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Hi Guys,
Very interesting comments. Congrats, Second Collegian. Any regrets?
Have you read pieces in the NST on 9MP written by Khairy Jamaluddin, Johan Jaafar, Kamal Khalid and Dato Prof. Dr AB Shamsul (see NST today, April 10, 2006 page 24)?
Dato’ AB Sam, the IKON and ATMA Director at UKM, titles his piece “Not Just a Mechanic But A Good Social Engineer”. He heaped surreal praises on the man he called “a political inclusivist par excellence”. For that alone, Vice Chancellorship at one of the many public universities will be the reward for this well known social anthropologist. Finally, I must say the man, whose writings I used to respect, has learned the art of getting on with people in power.
Thanks.
April 11th, 2006 at 5:08 am
Titles and rewards cloud men’s (or women’s) idealisms…
Ohhhh… I better be careful of supporting this or that person…. yes… when that person is not in the elite circle… he or she would be critical… but once inside that circle…. well… what can I say……
Better be neutral than be dissapointed…..