Obsessing about Finland

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| Leave a comment

Does the (success of) the Finnish education system have any relevance for Japan?

The degree to which some of my interlocutors in Japan obsess about Finland and see Finnish education as a panacea for all that is wrong (presumably, but see my argument for the central importance of perceptions) with Japanese education has puzzled me for some time. The somewhat less urgent interest in Singapore falls in the same category, I think.

Now, Keita Takayama who has been doing some terrific work on the place of Japanese education in a comparative and global context, makes the case that the reference nation status of Finland (and the lack of such status for E Asian education systems that perform equally well in PISA and similar comparisons) is due a) to the proximity of Finnish policies to OECD precepts, and b) to Finnish pre-PISA status as a “tabula rasa” among education systems that is not burdened by any of the preconceptions about E Asian education systems. Takayama makes this case in an Asia Pacific Memo on February 16, 2012.

Takayama makes his case very succinctly, but Finland’s status as a reference nation has come up in N American debates as well.

See for example:

If I were to start from the premise that there are things about Japanese education that could use reform, what countries would I look to? Or, what countries might I not look to?

I do think that education systems vary significantly by scale. According to Eurostat, the total number of primary and secondary students in Finland is about 1.2 mio. Japan’s comparable figure is 18 mio. This reflects the ratio of the two populations with about 5.3 mio Finns in 2010 and 127 mio Japanese. Clearly, an education system that is fifteen times as large in terms of the number of students enrolled involves different complexities than a smaller counterpart. That is not to say that there aren’t aspects of Finnish education that are worth examining in considering reforms for Japan, I’m just not convinced that Finland is the most relevant example in this regard.

Why not pick more proximate comparators? While South Korea is not even half as populous as Japan its education system operates on a scale that is much closer to Japan. Likewise France which would be an example of an education system that has some structural similarities (high degree of centralization, for example) and operates on a similar scale, though a comparison between Japan and France on comparative educational achievement would likely lead to a large-scale visitation movement from France to Japan, not the other way around.

What about Canada? Again, not quite on the population scale of Japan, but similar success to Japan…

I see the interest in Finland as primarily a faddish one will raise some questions that are wonderful raise about education elsewhere (including in all the countries mentioned in the above), but will not provide panacea.

 

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Posted in Education, Finland, Keita Takayama, PISA

Reflecting on Tohoku Trip

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| Leave a comment

If you follow me on twitter you know that I recently spent some days in Tohoku  with the intent of looking at post-disaster recovery from the perspective of juku as a small service-oriented business. I am now mulling over some of my observations from this trip in preparation for a March 15 presentation in a workshop organized by my colleague David Edgington at UBC.

During my visit, I was able to meet with 1o juku operators in the region, from Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures to Fukushima.

Here is a loose list of some of the things I will talk about:

  • in terms of the situation that juku find themselves in, the clearly most significant determinant of this situation is whether the operator has access to a teaching space, i.e. whether his/her home/teaching space had been destroyed
  • differences in the impact of the triple disaster by geographic zones:
    • coastal regions: tsunami impact severe, but it largely ends at where ever the water rose to
    • inland: some damage to buildings, but only sporadic
    • Fukushima: radiation impact pervasive
  • relatively few juku operators have abandoned the business
  • while economic opportunities were limited in the country-side pre-disaster, even rural Tohoku was not in as dire a situation (in terms of economic decline, out-migration) as I’ve seen in Shimane Prefecture, for example
  • while there were many casual throughout the region, the number of children who perished was limited and there are also many families who were not impacted materially to any great extent. This has meant that for many juku, business is down (in terms of the number of children taught), but not dramatically so
  • juku are eligible for reconstruction funds as small businesses and these public monies are appropriate to the reconstruction needs of a small service business
  • there is clearly a disaster bubble (震災バブル) in progress, evidence of which could be seen in the many (truck) traffic jams, busy eating establishments, and reflections by locals
  • while the physical clean-up continues apace and the situation for small business seems to be normalizing, there is massive human suffering in evidence all around
  • relief and support efforts are fraught with traps. Offer free tutoring for local students? You’re killing local business opportunities. Offer subsidies for local businesses, non-local chains, etc. will also be eligible.
  • some fascinating volunteer projects in place that are trying to make the best of a very difficult situation and are innovative in doing so
  • the operators of small juku overwhelmingly reported that their corporate cousins (大手塾) have abandoned the region

Some of these observations will come as no surprise to colleagues who have conducted research on post-disaster areas before and I am still trying to organize these thoughts in a more coherent fashion.

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Posted in Japan, Juku in Japan, Neighbourhoods and Social Setting, 東日本大震災

The センター試験 as the Linchpin of Educational Reform

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| 5 Comments

An edited and more concise version of this post appeared as an editorial in the Japan Times on Friday, February 3, 2012, entitled “Stocking up on useless facts to pass an exam“.

I have been studying 学習塾 for over six years and have visited more than 50 individually-operated throughout Japan. I have been thrilled by the dedication of charismatic educators, and dismayed by the relentless focus on standardized test results and by the lack of a diversity of offerings beyond the narrow confines of the curriculum in an era of hypereducation.

Recently, thousands of students sat for the central university entrance examination (センター試験, see National Center for University Entrance Examinations). For ambitious students, the exam is merely a requirement to check off on their way to the entrance examinations for specific fields of study that follow later. For others, the exam is a convenient way to avoid multiple examinations if they are not opting for entrance to university via the increasingly common recommendation route (推薦). The exam is one of the ultimate goals that supplementary education through primary and secondary schooling focuses on.

When I read the exam questions that were reprinted in newspapers last week, I felt great dismay and a concern for Japan’s future. Despite the tremendous resources that the state, students, and parents invest in education, the linchpin of the education system tests knowledge that I – as a university professor – am not looking for in my students and that is unlikely to serve the Japanese nation and Japanese businesses in the postindustrial era.

Yes, for a student who will go on to a doctorate in literature, it is important to know whether Erasmus wrote before or after Cervantes and Petrarch (Q9 in the World History B portion of this year’s test). But this knowledge is only relevant in rare circumstances and does not speak to any kind of skill. The very nature of the exam – short answers selected from a list of options – pushes the education system towards a pursuit of only variously useful factual knowledge that is rarely linked to any communication and analysis skills. It is one of the great strengths of juku that they seem to prepare students well for this kind of exam. This may also be at the root of the consistently high ranking of Japanese students in international comparisons of educational achievement like PISA.

To make education more relevant to the skills of the 21st century, the core of its content has to be reformed. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) should initiate an experiment with a limited essay format that requires students in social studies’ subjects, Japanese, and English to provide an analysis of a topic discussed in a short reading or through the presentation of specific data. This experiment should be announced ahead of its implementation initially without an impact on students’ results in the first two years.

During this period of experimentation, MEXT and the National Center for University Entrance Examinations might also consider various options to provide the labour to mark essays, a process that is highly labour intensive, even for a short essay. Given the number of out-of-work PhDs, perhaps there could be a system of fellowships at participating universities that required fellows to participate in the marking of the central examination. It should be noted that many universities already provide the labour to grade the university-specific entrance examinations that come after the central exam, and these often include essay formats.

After some tweaking of the essay format, this critical thinking skills portion of the exam could be gradually expanded to take its place alongside the current focus on knowledge acquisition. The English portion of the exam should be shifted from testing arcane grammatical knowledge (受験英語) to an emphasis on communication paralleling the introduction of an essay format. With a long-term plan in hand, current elementary students could be told that the central exam will have changed by the time they will sit for it and this will allow them, parents, teachers and even juku teachers to adjust their teaching methods accordingly.

Through such a gradual transition, the central exam as the linchpin of an exam-oriented Japanese educational system could be transformed from its current role as an enforcer of test-taking English, arcane knowledge, and cramming strategies into a meaningful test of relevant skills and knowledge.

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Posted in Education, Higher Education, Juku in Japan, Media Coverage, Press and Media

Asia Pacific Memo on Supplementary Education in Malaysia

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| Leave a comment

Today, on January 26, 2012, we published an Asia Pacific Memo on supplementary education in Malaysia by Husaina Kenayathulla who has recently completed her PhD at Indiana University.

For her PhD Husaina has analyzed extensive data on the participation in supplementary education in Malaysia (extensive), including on ethnic and regional differences in that participation. In the Memo she focuses on the regulation of supplementary education. While Korea is known to be the case of the strictest regulation of supplementary education in the context of hypereducation, the Korean government has been battling hagwon mainly out of a concern with inequality. This is a concern that is also frequently raised in other jurisdiction, i.e. access to supplementary education may lead to class reproduction. Another concern, more prevalent in developing countries generally, is with corruption. This corruption is rooted in low teacher salaries and often involves the withholding of class materials during school hours to use these as the basis of tutoring after hours.

Neither inequality nor corruption are driving regulation in Malaysia, Husaina argues, instead it is a concern with the quality of education.

 

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Posted in Country-Specific Posts, Husaina Kenayathulla, Malaysia, Social Media

Abacus Instruction in Vancouver

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| Leave a comment

Following my recent post on abacus education in Japan, I feel like I have to report on my daughters’ (6 and 9 years old) encounter with the abacus here in Vancouver. They have been attending an abacus school here since September, going once a week. A very good friend of ours mentioned that her daughters were going to abacus and given my past experience with abacus schools in Japan, we were eager to try this out for our girls, especially the older one who is very keen on math.

They’ve taken to it like fish to water and go with great anticipation.

When I told my good friend in Japan who is quite involved in abacus education that the girls were going, he sent two “one-touch” abacus for the girls so that they’re all equipped now.

The school that they attend was recently at the centre of a story in the Globe & Mail.

Some of the things that I find fascinating largely based on my research on juku in Japan:

  • most of the students at the location that our girls attend are Japanese or Japanese-Canadian
  • they range in age from 4 to their teens with a concentration in the early primary grades (just as in Japan)
  • the classroom  works just like juku classrooms that I’ve seen so often by now: There’s a head teacher who circulates and is assisted by a couple of younger teachers. One of the main activities that they undertake is まるつけ, i.e. the circling of correct answers, usually in red. When students missed a problem, they do it over until it is circled in red. This circling/correction is sometimes an occasion for instruction or explanation.
  • Instruction is always one-on-one (either by the main teacher or one of the assistants) allowing for a mixed classroom of beginners and more advanced students.
  • students progress on the basis of worksheets that require increasingly more difficult calculations, beginning with plus and minus, first single-digit numbers, then moving on to larger and more numbers to calculate.
  • some of the socialization roles that juku take on in Japan are also an element in the abacus juku. For example, some of the Japanese parents will remind their children to greet the teacher properly, to thank her and say good bye at the end of the lesson.

Interestingly, our teacher is the daughter of an abacus teacher. When I was doing research on juku in post-disaster Tohoku last week and mentioned that my girls were in abacus juku, some questions led to the observation that my interlocutor knows (of) our abacus teacher’s father. Small world.

An abacus juku that I visited in Sendai was a reminder of how astonishing abacus skills can be. Students there were doing something called “フラッシュ穴算”, i.e. flash calculations in their head. This is computer based and the program is pre-set to different levels of difficulty in the computations. A student will sit down and the program will flash a succession of numbers on the screen that the student adds, subtracts, multiplies or divides. For the younger students a series of four single-digit numbers might flash for a second each, while older students will be shown series of 10 3-digit numbers  over a short time span. Amazing!

In her abacus article for the Globe and Mail, education reporter Kate Hammer picked up quite nicely on the amazing calculations, but also on the almost physical learning that the manipulation of beads seems to foster. I have found this a fascinating aspect of instruction in juku for some time and it is something that the correspondent for The Economist also picked up on in describing the rhythmic chanting of chemical elements at a juku he visited.

 

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Posted in Abacus, Vancouver

Juku: It’s All About Perceptions

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| 2 Comments

One of the most frequent question that is posed to me when I present my research on juku is: does supplementary education work? My two answers are: we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter for educational policy.

No Evidence of Efficacy of Supplementary Education

As to the first answer, we simply do not know whether various forms of supplementary education have any impact at all. There has been no careful and sustained research on this question that employs a credible scheme at controlling selection effects and we thus literally do not have an empirical clue.

Supplementary education advocates, especially if they are of the mind-set that the market and the introduction of market mechanisms “fix everything”, will respond that for-profit, fee-based supplementary education would not exist/continue to operate if it didn’t work.

That is not true, of course, and we might simply point to the large number of  herbal and pharmaceutical remedies that lead a happy and profitable existence in the market place without any credible hints at their efficacy.

Just like health remedies, measurements of supplementary education generally only come after the fact. In the case of accelerated instruction, supplementary education is only tested at its very end point, often the sitting of a standardized examination. At that point in time, however, it is impossible to consider not having participated in supplementary education.

All the same arguments apply for specific tools, teaching aids, and pedagogies. While many of these are intuitively plausible (e.g., yes, I suspect that an engaged student learns more and faster, and retains more of the learned knowledge/skills), there is very limited research that employs control groups or proxies thereof in formal education research either.

Beyond the ethical questions of interventions in children’s education based on a randomized trial, the greatest hurdle would be that we consider so many different factors important in shaping education outcomes, that we would need very large samples that would be subject to very specific and well-defined supplementary education interventions to establish the beginning of a causal relationship.

Whether or Not Supplementary Education ‘Works’, Policy-Makers Should Take it Into Account

But whether or not supplementary education “works”, the fact of its global growth is based on a wide-spread belief in its efficacy. Japanese parents do not seem to go through much trouble in informing themselves about a particular juku beyond word-of-mouth and trial lessons, as far as I can tell from my interviews with juku operators. Word-of-mouth and trial lessons obviously only provide an indication of efficacy, but no real measure thereof. Nevertheless, parents and their children are clearly willing to take a leap of faith and believe that these kinds of tutoring “work”, or more plausible, they are simply too insecure and nervous to question the perceived efficacy when they see all their neighbours believe in efficacy claims and do not want little Takeshi or Yumiko to fall behind.

The large-scale participation of students in supplementary education clearly has an impact on the education system. Whether this impact is primarily in skewing access to education, a distortion in classroom dynamics, or an introduction of quasi-streaming, the impact is very real in many countries that have entered into an era of hypereducation. For policy-makers who are concerned about the impact that supplementary education is having (and concern can obviously range from outrage to encouragement) the fact that supplementary education may or may not “work” is therefore irrelevant.

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Posted in Efficacy, General, Hypereducation, Juku in Japan, Supplementary Education

New Entrant in Vancouver Supplementary Education Field

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| Leave a comment

A Facebook ad – of all things – recently pointed me toward the website of a seemingly new juku in Vancouver. It’s difficult to reproduce elements of the website without identifying the site itself, but the opening paragraph of the website’s “An Introduction” reads as follows:

Research has shown that life and work have changed, not just technologically, but also in the way we do things. It is no longer enough to have expertise in one skill area; rather, companies expect employees to be knowledgeable and capable in a variety of skills and subject matters. Current educational methods do not meet the needs of either the economy or the children they serve. Children leave school and university lacking the skills they need to be successful and contribute to the growth of Canada’s economy.

This is certainly one of the nicest-looking and most extensive websites for Canadian juku. Pretty, clear design, extensive content including a moderately active blog.

Interestingly, the content and methodology offered is somewhat original – a rarity in the supplementary education field in my experience. The claim at least is that this juku is integrating various subjects around specific themes and offering collaborative learning that parallels BC schools, but focuses on specific themes. It’s not clear at first glance whether this is meant to be remedial, supplementary or accelerated instruction. However, the frequent claim at newness and 21st-century-ness suggests that it is something between supplementary and accelerated instruction.

Unusually for a Vancouver juku, this seems to be neither a tutoring broker, nor is catering specifically to an ESL or immigrant audience. The location is close to Kitsilano Secondary in a neighbourhood that is less dense in juku than many other neighbourhoods.

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Posted in Vancouver

Further Life of Economist Article

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Julian Dierkes| Leave a comment

Some of the arguments in the article “Japan’s cramming schools – A controversial institution has some surprising merits” in The Economist are being picked up elsewhere.

Liz Dwyer, education editor for GOOD, in her post asks, “Could ‘Cram Schools’ Be on Their Way to America?” and refers directly back to the article in The Economist.

I posted a reply:

Yes, juku-style “cram schools” are appearing in the U.S. Never mind SAT prep outfits like Kaplan, etc., but NCLB provides funding for tutoring services for students in schools that consistently underperform. It’s too early to tell whether these tutoring services will emerge as large juku corporations (local and state-specific registration seems to prevent this).

Note that supplementary education is not just booming in places where it is long-established (like Japan, but also Brazil, Egypt, Greece, Turkey for non-Asian examples), but in settings like France and Germany where it may be less associated with “cramming”. For now, this boom is focused on remedial tutoring, rather than accelerated instruction.

Note also that reliance on supplementary education is migrating with families.

[Note that I've added small parts of my reply that I had to cut to comply with the <1,000 chars req on their website]

I would add that I’ve previously posted about the curious fascination with juku-like institutions in Manhattan and elsewhere in the U.S.

Another place that the article is being commented on is by Roger Soder (apparently) on the “Education and Community” blog. This post takes the original article to task for its – supposedly – too rosy outlook on aspects of juku. While I would generally share the view that The Economist takes too positive a view of for-profit initiatives and the market (no surprise at this assessment and my agreement, I presume), in this case, I believe that this rosiness is due to the brevity of the article not necessarily an editorial stance.

I do always like to stress that juku should not be rejected as mere “cram schools”, but that there are many aspects of teaching in juku that are very attractive (some of the charismatic educators that run some of the smaller juku, for example), while other aspects are much less attractive.

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Posted in Country-Specific Posts, Juku in Japan, Press and Media, Social Media, United States

Most-Read Blog Posts of 2011

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Julian Dierkes| 1 Comment

Of my 80+ posts in the first year of the existence of the Jukupedia, here are the five most-read individual posts (excluding posts in the “diversions” category):

  1. Matsushita Sekei Juku
  2. Abacus Education
  3. Single Sex Education Caveats
  4. Shanghai PISA Results
  5. “Enduring Contexts”: Nomi

Thanks for reading my posts and I hope that many of you will return to reading more in the coming 2012!

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Posted in Social Media

The Economist on Supplementary Education

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Julian Dierkes| 4 Comments

The week, The Economist’s Kenneth Cukier published an article entitled “Japan’s cramming schools - Testing times: A controversial institution has some surprising merits”. I was thrilled, of course, that he quoted me in the article as a “rare expert on juku”.

Great to see the 塾 character in the accompanying cartoon as well.

As is almost always the case with press and media accounts, the article is relatively short and thus has to gloss over some of the complexities of the phenomenon of supplementary education in Japan and elsewhere. I’ve been struggling with this myself all along in that there are some relatively simple (and thus short) messages I like to offer as conclusions from my research on 塾, but even these are necessarily simplifications (see the categories on the right to explore some of my research on hypereducation in Japan). The Economist’s Japan correspondent also picked up on some of these message, for example by referring to the variety of different juku that exist. While this is not the kind of variety that proponents of the privatization or liberalization often expect (i.e. a flowering of pedagogies and pedagogical innovations), some of the “immobilist politics” in Japanese educational policy (Len Shoppa of the Univ of Virginia used this term in a book on Nakasone educational reforms) is being unsettled by innovations in the supplementary education industry.

The scene Kenn recalls from Seiran Gakuin in his article is one that I have witnessed in many of the almost 50 juku that I’ve visited in Japan. Seiran Gakuin happens to be one of my favourites and is led by  林 政夫 who is one of the great examples of charismatic educators in the juku world.

When Kenn refers to surveys in Japan that attribute juku attendance to shortcomings in education systems (an element of the article that has been picked up by some Twitter reactions to it already), I would offer a qualification – an important qualification, I think – that it is perceptions of shortcomings in Japanese education that seem to be driving parents and students to juku. Whether such shortcomings exist in an empirically demonstrable way is much less clear, and it is always interesting to note that it is not only perceived shortcomings in public education, but in private schools as well. Private school students in Japan also attend juku in large numbers after all.

The Economist on hagwon

Note that The Economist ran an article about supplementary education in Korea in its Christmas special. I have previously written about South Korea as the paragon of hypereducation.

Much of what this article writes about Korea is also true of Japan, of course.

Japan is also a “one-shot” society in that there are few alternative educational or career transition tracks other than graduate from high school, sit entrance examinations, repeat with intensive preparatory study if necessary, graduate from university, apply for jobs during recruitment season, live happily ever after.

While the school-to-work transition is not as smooth as it was in high-flying economic times (I’m currently reading Mary Brinton’s “Lost in Transition” on just this topic), there still are very few re-entry students or alternative routes to higher education in Japan.

The discussion about the costs of the university entrance exam focus in Korea are mirrored more or less in Japan, though the concern with equity via for-profit supplementary education (hagwon) has historically been much greater in South Korea. Unlike the article on Japan (which ends with a note about broken government systems), the article on Korea ends on a more hopeful note focusing on young Koreans as a generation that might bring about/force change. There is little of such a dynamic visible in Japan…

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Posted in Diversity of Offerings, Hypereducation, Inequality, Intensity, Juku in Japan, Media Coverage, Press and Media, South Korea, Supplementary Education