Category Archives: Country-Specific Posts

Report on Shadow Education in Europe Released

Posted on May 31, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A new report on participation in supplementary education in Europe has just been released.

More than 50% of school pupils receive private tuition in some EU countries, according to a new report published by the European Commission. The report, which is the first to look at the issue across the EU, shows that parents are spending several billion euros a year to supplement their children’s education. Tutoring is widespread in southern European countries such as Greece (spending estimated at more than €950 million per year, which is equivalent to 20% of government expenditure on primary and secondary education), Spain (€450 million), Italy (€420 million) and Cyprus (€111 million), but much less popular in northern Member States such as Sweden and Finland, where schools appear to largely satisfy expectations. The scale of tutoring has increased in France (€2.2 billion per year and growing at an estimated 10% a year), Germany (up to €1.5 billion), and Austria (€126 million). There are also indications of significant increases in the UK and Belgium. The decline in the purchasing power of teachers’ salaries has been a major factor in driving the expansion of private tutoring in Eastern European countries. Spending in Romania, for example, is estimated at €300 million per annum.Demand for private tutoring principally comes from high-achievers and is fuelled by pressure on youngsters to do well in exams and by ‘social competition’. The report points out that private tutoring reflects – and exacerbates – social inequalities. Private tutoring is much less about pupils who are in real need of support and much more about maintaining the competitive advantages of the already successful and privileged, it says. Financial cutbacks have also reduced the extent to which educational institutions can provide individual learning support within school. The report suggests that private tuition can restrict children’s leisure time in a way that is psychologically and educationally undesirable. The report, which was prepared for the Commission by the Network of Experts in Social Sciences of Education and Training, is available as a PDF

My comments and observations will come once I’ve had a chance to look at the report.

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Posted in Europe, Mark Bray

NYT Article on Kumon

Posted on May 26, 2011 by | 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article by Kate Zernike on Kumon students in New York. [Thanks to Kenn Cukier for pointing me in the direction of the article.]

The main thrust of the argument in the article is that perceived competition for educational achievement is being pushed to lower-and-lower grades. For some reasons, three-year-olds memorizing numbers is always a favourite topic for journalists as this is meant to be shocking. Without endorsing Kumon worksheets as the path to enlightenment, I do think that some children get a lot of joy and some benefits out of such tutoring and the puzzle-aspects of these kinds of worksheets.

The broader point in the article is, however, that it is imagined/perceived competition and peer pressure that is driving the push of tutoring companies (Kumon and Sylvan are explicitly mentioned) into offer pre-school classes.

The article quotes a prominent Cal psychologist, Alison Gopnik, with a great analogy to the “escalation of supplemental education”: “Irish elk competing to see which had the biggest antlers. ‘The result is that they go around tottering, unable to walk, under the enormous weight of these antlers they’ve developed,'” (Kate Zernike, New York Times, May 15, 2011, ST1, “Fast-Tracking to Kindergarten?”).

Indicators of the “escalation of supplemental education” mentioned in the article include Kumon’s 250,000 students in the U.S. and describes Kumon in New York as “colonizing storefronts like so many Starbucks”.

Costs mentioned here at US$200-300 for preschoolers which is higher than what most Kumon parents would be paying in Japan, I think.

The article refers several times to the tension between ‘progressive’ preschools and the kind of tutoring that is offered by Kumon and the like. Parents seem to be caught in the middle between idealized progressive education and the perceived reality of competition in education that seems so powerful in NY city in particular.

Interesting that the article also describes economic/managerial pressures on Kumon that seem quite similar to the Japanese metropolitan context:

“Most Kumon centers are franchises. But recognizing the prohibitive costs of rent in New York City, the parent company began opening centers itself in New York City a little over three years ago. It now has 36 in the five boroughs — 13 in Manhattan — with 14 more expected to open this year.“

The article does reinforce the sense that supplementary education is limited to the island of Manhattan in the United States. This is, of course, far from the truth. Instead, extreme situations (preschools prepping for tests) always seem to be of greater interest to journalists, whether that is in the U.S. or in Japan.

There are two versions of supplementary education that are subject to current and past research: a) SAT prep, and b) the tutoring services authorized under the “No Child Left Behind” Act.

For the former, see a recent article by Claudia Buchmann and her collaborators, for example:

Claudia Buchmann, Dennis Condron, and Vincent Roscigno. 2010. “Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment“. Social Forces, 89 (2): 435-461.

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Posted in Press and Media, United States

Asia Pacific Memo on Hyper-Education as the Way of the Future

Posted on May 23, 2011 by | 1 comment

In an Asia Pacific Memo last year, I asked: “Is South Korea’s Hyper-Education System the Future?” (APM #2, July 13, 2010)

A recent workshop at the University of Waterloo concluded that hyper-education will spread globally in the future. Currently, South Korea’s education system seems to be the most extreme. It is increasingly structured around tutoring in “hagwon” (supplemental education institutions). Korea has taken on even more extreme forms of examination “hell” than Japan.

In Korea, there are reports of students sleeping less than 4 hours per night to prepare for entrance exams to special high schools. An education system embodied in high-stakes standardized exams resulted in this pressure-cooker environment. In a rigidly hierarchal higher education sector, knowledge is emphasized over understanding. The government’s ongoing efforts to combat supplementary education and its excesses are not effective.

The Japanese supplementary education system originated in the early 1970s during the “juku-boom” (when many small supplementary education institutions, or ‘jukus’, were founded). In Japan, a hierarchal education system caused examination “hell” in the context of expanding household income and declining birth rates.

Japan now appears to be following in Korea’s footsteps. In Korea, ‘mom n’ pop’ “hagwon” have been replaced by corporate behemoths of 50,000 students or more. Similarly in Japan, this development began in the 1990s and continues as operators of small, independent “juku” retire without successors. In Japan’s future, declining birth rates may lead to a decline in competition for higher education. However, in the immediate coming years, there will be further economic concentration of businesses active in the supplementary education industry.

On the other hand, China presents the “perfect storm” of conditions for an education system even more extreme than Korea. Single children are far removed from their extended families and are raised by ambitious and increasingly affluent parents. It is becoming a capitalist pressure-cooker as competition for entry into an expanding higher education system increases.

Links:

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Posted in Academic Publication, China, South Korea

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CIES Presentation Langager et al.: Balancing CJK and English Literacy Objectives

Posted on May 4, 2011 by | 2 comments

With thanks to Mark Langager for sharing their abstract.

Wednesday May 4: Session 424, 13:45-15:15h, Floor C – Saint Laurent

Mark Langager, Hui Xu, and Jadong Kim, International Christian University

“Balancing CJK and English Literacy Objectives: A Case Study of East Asian Supplementary Schools in the Seattle Area”

Abstract

Biliteracy has been broadly seen as being acquired by learners on a number of continua (Hornberger, 1989) between sets of two poles, including L1 versus L2 dominance, textual versus oral skills, communicative versus academic language and so forth. Until the recent work of Kondo-Brown and others (2006), however, most of the biliteracy literature has focused on that which occurs between languages with Latinate orthographies. Moreover, outcomes typically view language minorities as immigrants and thus favor analyses, findings, and conclusions based on skills in L2, generally the language of the host country and often the researcher (Langager, 2010).

Staking a more neutral spot on the continuum between ultimate L1 versus L2 literacy objectives, the current study uses interview and observation data to examine educational objectives of Chinese, Japanese and Korean communities providing L1 Saturday instruction at supplementary schools in the Seattle area. Students’ US residence ranges from short-term to long-term and thus literacy goals favor a range of priorities between L1 and L2. Initial findings suggest the three language communities all differ systematically in their literacy acquisition goals, albeit all three hold fast to both L1 and L2 objectives. Differences are identified among the three communities in the quality of governmental overseas assistance, circumstances bringing families to the US, educational career paths, and the place of entrance exams in the homeland. Accordingly, while children’s education varies considerably among individuals, separate patterns can be traced for the three communities.

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Posted in CIES 2011, United States

Supplementary Education Stepping Out of the Shadow Part II: Comments and Observations

Posted on May 2, 2011 by | Leave a comment

All comments based on presentations rather than papers (for now, perhaps).

Cambodia:

Brehm and Silova characterized the fact that shadow education may be supplanting conventional schools in importance as a “uniqueness of the Cambodian context”. As the subsequent discussion also showed, this is not unique to Cambodia at all and may in fact be part of a broader trend described by the title of this post, i.e. that shadow education is stepping out of the shadow. In the Cambodian context this stepping out of the shadow is occurring (as the presentation showed) through the role of conventional schools as an entry point to tutoring. Since it is teachers themselves who are offering tutoring (this is one of the common characteristics of shadow education in developing countries where it is mainly linked to low salaries for teachers), classes in conventional schools (already curtailed by the infrastructure need to double cohorts in school facilities creating a short school day) are a funnel into gradations of tutoring, “extra study” and “extra special study” in local parlance.

Hong Kong:

The pop start character of some tutors obviously distinguishes HK and is something that is not at all widely visible in Japan. While there are certain juku and yobiko instructors in Japan who have a bit of a start following, the large billboards of teams of prominent tutors that can be found in Hong Kong make for a celebrity status that seems somewhat outlandish in most other places. A couple of years ago CNN ran a report on one such celebrity tutor that Mark Bray also referred to as part of his presentation.

Malaysia:

I did not know anything about shadow education prior to this presentation, so it was great to learn more, even though it was not surprising to hear that supplementary education is a substantial sector in Malaysia as well.

In contrast to Hong Kong, Cambodia, Japan and elsewhere, “private tuition” in Malaysia does seem to remain in the shadow in that Kenayathulla responded to a question that there is no sense of “the real learning is happening in shadow education”.

Another very interesting aspect of shadow education in Malaysia is the different use of tutors by ethnic groups linked to language needs and preferences.

Now some themes that I saw in these papers and which I talked about briefly at the session in my role as discussant.

1. The interaction between conventional schools and shadow education seems to be shifting in many jurisdictions. When I first began with my research on juku about six years ago, juku in Japan seemed very separate from schools, public or private. Recently, we’ve seen some occasions/spaces/programs in Japan where that separation is being watered down, for example through so-called 校内塾 (kônaijuku), that is juku within schools, that are offering juku services, aka classes, on school grounds in the afternoons/evenings or on weekends. This is primarily occurring in within the 23 wards of Tokyo to my knowledge though may also be spreading.

That’s one version of shadow education leaving the shadow. The other version is the anecdotal reports (including on Cambodia and Hong Kong in the presentations and Q&A) that students increasingly (over time? cross-regionally? what ages?) hold the view that their “real learning” is occurring in juku and that they sleep in conventional school to preserve their energy for juku classes, or because they studied until late into the evening in juku and are thus tired.

Shadow education thus seems to be increasingly (primarily over time) exerting an influence on conventional schools. Mark Bray spoke of “backwash” to the school system in this context, or of a “blending” of schools and shadow education.

This blending was also a theme, by the way, in the discussions at a workshop on “The Worldwide Growth of Supplementary Education” that I co-organized with Janice Aurini (U of Waterloo) and Scott Davies (McMaster U) last June at Waterloo.

2. Parents’ and students’ choices are increasingly driven by widely held perceptions of the quality (or, generally, lack thereof) of conventional schools. In the discussion and Q&A Mark Bray used the metaphor of shadow education as a “virus” infecting school systems. In this metaphor, popular perceptions are clearly the factor that are significantly weakening school systems’ immune systems and making them susceptible to this virus. The fact that the spread of this virus is not at all based on any established facts or, God forbid, research on the efficacy of tutoring, doesn’t surprise Bray at all, since educational policy has rarely been based on real data and evidence in other areas either.

3. While shadow education in developing countries (say, Cambodia), industrializing countries (Malaysia, perhaps), and developed countries (HK) may be increasingly similar in the breadth of its impact on conventional schools, one of the main distinguishing features that remains is the organizational form. In Japan, across East Asia, but also with some of the cross-border M&A activities in Europe by growing concerns like Acadomia (based in France) or Studienkreis (based in Germany), shadow education in developed countries is increasingly taking on the characteristics of highly institutionalized industrial sectors or organizational fields. In developing countries, tutoring continues to be a more personalistic affair.

4. There are some areas where public/state education policy is preserving its influence very strongly.

  • curriculum: almost all academic shadow education continues to focus on the content defined by public curricula and courses of study, even if this content is often mediated by (entrance) examinations of various kinds and thus not set in its specificity by public policy makers.
  • transitions: the progression from one level of education to another (primary to secondary, secondary to vocational, etc.) is still governed by the structure of the education system as it is determined by public actors
  • policy makers are experimenting with regulations of shadow education. The longest-standing example is the South Korean state’s battle against shadow education in the name of (in)equality, but the no more than 45 students per classroom policy in Hong Kong, or voucher systems in Malaysia, are clear examples of more widespread (albeit ineffectual for the most part) experimentation with the regulation of shadow education.

5. Inequality, inequality, inequality. All kinds of inequalities seem to be exacerbated by shadow education: economic, rural/urban, ethnic, etc. Inequality in access to shadow education is also believed to lead to inequality in education outcomes, though that is conditional on the unproven efficacy of shadow education.

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Posted in Cambodia, CIES 2011, Conferences, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mark Bray, South Korea, Supplementary Education, Supplementary Education Researchers

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Supplementary Education Stepping Out of the Shadow

Posted on May 2, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Wonderful session at CIES this morning:

Markets, shadows, and schools: The impact and implications of private tutoring in Asia
Chair and Organizer: Mark Bray, Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong

“The hidden privatization of public education in Cambodia: Quality and equity implications of private tutoring” William C Brehm, This Life Cambodia; Iveta Silova, Lehigh University, USA

“The evolving shadow: Supplementary private tutoring in Hong Kong” Mark Bray

“Tuition syndrome: Determinants of private tutoring in Malaysia” Husaina Kenayathulla, Indiana University, USA

First, some quick summaries/observations of the presentations/panel. Then, some broader comments inspired by the panel discussions.

Brehm/Silova on Cambodia:

They argue that private tutoring is a conduit by which traditional social relations (primarily hierarchical) are reproduced in education even though the public education system is committed to the provision of free education to Cambodian students.

Data come from fieldwork in Cambodia that include interviews with teachers and students and focus on the costs and organizational structure associated with private tutoring. Through this fieldwork Brehm/Silova are able to offer summary data on the cost of tutoring in different categories, i.e. by level of education and rural/urban location. These costs range from 200 Riel/hr (approx. C¢5) to 16,000 Riel/hr (C$3.75).

The presentation highlighted the fact that students are classified into different achievement groups in public schools and that this classification may well have come to be based on students’/parents’ willingness/ability to pay their school teachers for tutoring.

This intertwining of classroom practices, teachers’ salaries and private tutoring is increasingly turning public schools into a mere ‘façade’ on an entry point to private tutoring.

Bray on Hong Kong:

Bray relied on visuals to provide a striking impression of the current context of private tutoring in Hong Kong. From videos focused on celebrity tutors and their students, to photographs of the splashy advertising that the tutoring industry decorates Hong Kong with, this industry clearly has become a very visible part of schooling in Hong Kong.

As an anecdotal aside Bray mentioned that classroom size is limited to <45 students (by regulation), but that celebrity tutors circumvent this by having glass divisions between classrooms staffed with “dummy tutors”.

Kenayathulla on Malaysia:

Kenayathulla presented her models of the likelhood of spending on private tutoring and the amount spent.

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Posted in Cambodia, CIES 2011, Conferences, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mark Bray, Supplementary Education, Supplementary Education Researchers

CIES Presentation Park: Comparing the Impact of Private Tutoring in South Korea and the United States

Posted on April 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I’m grateful to EJ Park for sharing her abstract.

Sunday, May 1: Session 57, 13:45-15:15h, Queen Elizabeth Hotel Floor C – Saint Laurent

Abstract

The growing demand for private tutoring around the world is often regarded as a policy problem reflecting a weakness in public school programs.  Private tutoring poses potentially adverse impacts on the educational environment, because it is sometimes viewed as worsening social inequalities. In South Korea, for example, data show that expenditures on private tutoring by the wealthiest 10 percent were twelve times the amount spent by the poorest 10 percent of households. In contrast, private tutoring in the United States is used primarily for remedial purposes, and thus it occurs primarily for lower income students. The goal of this research is to test whether the use of private tutoring differs between the Korea and the United States, and whether private tutoring is associated with student achievement outcomes.  Our conceptual framework is an input-output model, where student achievement scores comprise the outputs and school resources/programs and student family background make up the inputs.  The data used for this research is the 2006 PISA Survey (Programme for International Student Assessment).  Our analytic approach will have two parts: (1) tabular comparisons and analysis of variance to compare tutoring patterns between South Korea and the U.S., and (2) OLS regression and hierarchical linear modeling to test the effect of private tutoring on students’ achievement outcomes, controlling for socioeconomic and school factors.   Although results are preliminary, there is a significant relationship between private tutoring and achievement in both countries, but the association is positive in South Korea and negative in the United States.

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Posted in CIES 2011, Conferences, South Korea, Supplementary Education, Supplementary Education Researchers, United States

CIES Presentaton Mori: Determinants of Supplementary Tutoring in Japan, Korea, and the Unites States

Posted on April 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Sunday, May 1. Session 57. 13:45-15:15h, Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Floor C – Saint Laurent

Thanks to Izumi Mori for sending me her abstract.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine individual and school characteristics that are associated with students’ participation in out-of-school-time lessons in mathematics in three countries. Previous studies on supplementary tutoring have revealed confounding factors that determine students’ use of out-of-school tutoring as follows: 1) students’ academic performance, 2) deficiencies in formal schooling in terms of instruction and resources, 3) family’s socio-economic backgrounds, and 4) parental involvement. Using the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data for 15-year-olds, I conducted multilevel logistic regression for each country and found the following results. In Japan, SES except for family wealth has positive influence on student participation in tutoring. School resources and ability grouping have positive effect at the school level. In Korea, all SES measures but parents’ occupation have positive association with tutoring. Private school students are more likely to be tutored after controlling for other characteristics. In the United States, SES including parental education and occupation are not significant predictors after controlling for students’ test score. Public school students tend to participate more in tutoring, and higher student-teacher ratio and teacher shortage are associated with more participation in tutoring. The effect of test score varies in three countries: neutral in Japan, positive in Korea, and negative in the U.S. In all three countries, home educational resources (e.g, desk, place to study, books to help schoolwork, dictionary) are strong predictors of supplementary tutoring even after controlling for SES and school characteristics. These similarities and differences suggest the importance of examining supplementary tutoring at the cross-national level.

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Posted in CIES 2011, Conferences, South Korea, Supplementary Education, Supplementary Education Researchers, United States

CIES Presentation Brehm-Silova: The hidden privatization of public education in Cambodia

Posted on April 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

William Brehm and Iveta Silova have kindly sent me the abstract for their presentation.

Monday, May 2: Session 99. 8:30-10h, Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Floor C – Saguenay

Abstract

The contemporary practice of private tutoring in Cambodia is a complex phenomenon. Since government school lasts only four hours/day and primary teachers earn about $44/month, it is impossible for students to receive the full national curriculum (longer than the actual school day) and for teachers to earn a livable wage without conducting private tutoring. What results is a system where teachers charge students to learn the remaining curriculum after school hours, often times inside government school buildings. In addition, students can hire a teacher for individual tutoring (called “extra special tutoring”), which takes place in the student’s house, or students can attend private tutoring lessons offered in another government school.

Although Cambodian private tutoring has recently been linked explicitly to educational inequity (Bray, 2005) and teacher corruption (Dawson, 2009), the system is far more complex and historically rooted than observers are likely to recognize at first glance. Notwithstanding the cost barriers or lack of governance, private tutoring functions in a Foucauldian sense to order society along traditional hierarchical lines as a mechanism to cope with the five decades of rapid and often conflicting geopolitical transitions (see Silova, 2009 for examples of private tutoring as a mechanism of coping for rapid transition in Central Asia). In this presentation, we will argue that the modernity project in Cambodia (with all of its rhetoric of education access and equity) has been no more than a carefully appropriated façade, concealing the real system of education that rests on notions of hierarchy, inequality, and absolutism—ideas traditionally associated with Cambodia since the rule of God-King Jayavarman II (Mannikka, 1996)—ordering society into the people who have (neak mean) and people who do not (neak kro). The aim of this presentation is therefore to situate the emergence of the system of private tutoring within the Cambodian context and then to explore how it, together with the modern institution of education, (re)orders society along traditional lines of power and hierarchy.

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Posted in Cambodia, CIES 2011, Conferences, Supplementary Education, Supplementary Education Researchers