How To Revitalize - From Dysfunctional to Soulful Fullfilment

Education reform is a top agenda of the new Sarawak state government. We have seen that despite massive

spending by the Federal government and ambitious attempts at reforms, the performance of our education system has barely improved in decades. In fact, compared to school systems in the region, ours has seen a decline.

The Malaysian Smart Schools System - developed by a consortium led by Telekom Malaysia, and a flagship application of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) initiated by the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir in 1997, has failed to bear fruit despite the billions of ringgits being spent. The Federal government’s 2009 National Key Results Area (NKRA) for education has not produced any report card to convince us that the NKRA initiatives are delivering results.

Children in Sarawak cannot be allowed to fall victim to Malaysia’s failing education system. It is a priority of the new Sarawak government to immediately and quickly establish a new education system that works to raise Sarawak children to a level as those in Korea, Finland and Singapore – countries that have that world’s best performing education systems.

The Sarawak Community Action Network (SCAN) has undertaken a year-long study to understand how to develop a high performing education system for Sarawak. The result of the study is to be used by the new Sarawak state government to establish an education system that truly works for children of Sarawak. The new government cannot afford to have a single child fail and that is what today’s adult Sarawakians owe to the coming generations of Sarawakians.

The study involved an analysis of selected education systems from different countries that have improved significantly, analysis of education systems that have been maintaining top positions, interviews with some thought leaders in those education systems and an analysis of the annual OECD PISA results from 2003 to 2009. During the course of the study, elements that are specific to the individual system and those that are of universal relevance were explored in order to help Sarawak’s new educational leaders replicate the success of high performing education systems.

This paper presents a summary of the findings of SCAN’s study.

The study began with these key questions: Why do some education syste

ms always perform better and improve at a faster rate than others? Why do some schools consistently succeed where others do not? What do successful school systems have in common? What methods and tools do they employ to improve learning outcomes of students?

The SCAN study found three most important universal elements that work:

1. Selective hiring of the right people to be teachers,
2. Develop them into highly effective instructors, and
3. Ensure that the system is capable of delivering only the best instruction for each student.

The successful systems demonstrate that significant improvement in desired results can be achieved in a short time – 3 to 6 years. The systems also show that by applying these practices, significant improvements is achievable in failing school systems and that the practices are applicable to any system, irrespective of culture and geography.The following commonly used approaches to improve education systems in many countries, including the US and the UK, have been shown to be least effective, in that they do not contribute significantly to student outcomes as measured by scores in mathematics, science and reading:

1. Increase in public spending per student,
2. Improvements in student-to-teacher ratio,
3. Decrease in class size,
4. Decrease in school size,
5. Structural reforms in the governance of schools, such as autonomy of schools governed by elected boards and decentralization of powers to local school districts,
6. Reforms in curriculum standards,
7. Changes in assessments and testings,
8. Funding of schools,
9. Inspection of quality, and
10. Reforming relationship of schools to communities.

The SCAN study shows unquestionable evidence: student learning cannot be improved without improving quality of instruction. It is also noted that almost every education system have undertaken the process of reducing class size. For example, most countries in OECD over the past 7 years have increased the teacher-student ratio. However, evidence shows that this effort does not significantly result in better student outcomes, except at the very early grades. More teachers translate to less money per teacher and systems cannot be selective about who could be teachers.

Evidence from the SCAN study suggests that the new Sarawak educational leaders must focus on quality of teachers as this is the main driver of the variation in student learning. The quality of any education system cannot be higher than the quality of its teachers.

For example, a seminal research in one education system shows that if 2 average 8-year-old children were taught by different teachers – one a high performing teacher and the other a low performer, the learning outcomes of the students diverge by more than 50 percentile points within 3 years. Reducing class size from 30 to 15 students improves an average student’s performance by, at most, 8 percentile points. In a study of another system, evidence shows that students in earlier years of schooling, when placed with low-performing teachers for several years consecutively, suffer from irreversible educational loss. In some systems, students who score in the top 20% on literacy and numeracy at age 7, are twice as likely to obtain a university degree as children in the bottom 20%.

Sarawak’s new education leaders now have evidence suggesting that even in good education systems, children who do not make good progress in their early school years because they are not taught by teachers of sufficient skills and competencies, have very small chance of recovering the lost years. All top performing education systems depend ultimately on the quality of its teachers.

All top performing systems from Dallas to Seoul and from Singapore to Helsinki, dispel the common belief that it is impossible to make teaching a preferred profession for good number of high-performers and that attracting better people requires the government to pay higher salaries. These systems have shown that making teaching the career of choice does not depend on high pay, but more on small, simple policy choices such as: designing and establishing robust hiring and training processes, giving attractive starting pay, and managing the status of the profession more carefully. For Sarawak’s new educational leaders, it means legislating an entirely new policy on education so that a new education system can be implemented rapidly.

By continuing the education system of the Federal government in Sarawak, we will only fail Sarawak’s future generation.

http://tinyurl.com/edsys2012

PLKN - Icon of Malaysia's Failed Education System

The Malaysian Nation Service Camp or PLKN is a symbolic icon of our failed education system. The main objectives of the program are to instill patriotism among the younger generation, enhance unity and national integrity and to develop participant's character. These are the same objectives of our schools, but how is that 11 years of schooling cannot achieve what a 3-month camp intends to achieve?

Our nation continue to have racial polarization and our crime and corruption rates continue to increase. All these while the BN government continues spend good money on the wrong things. The costs of our mistakes and abuses today will become even more costly for our future generations to correct.

As the government continues to spend enormous amount of taxpayer money to try to rectify what our schools fail to do, owners of the PLKN camps continue amass wealth from the PLKN contracts. It is obvious that this is a scheme of wealth distribution to enrich cronies of political party leaders and eventually fund the political machinery. Guess who are the owners of the national service camps all over the country.

Now we are degenerating into a worst of situation with the government making failure to attend the camp an offence.

In the process of making the failure to attend National Service Training an offence, the amendments to replace imprisonment and fine with community service does not make an unfair law morally justified.

Although the amendments to replace the existing penalties for a person who is absent without leave from national service training from imprisonment or a fine to community service is welcomed, the main complaint is that failure to attend remains an offence.

According to the Hansard, Najib Abdul Razak as the Defence Minister in tabling the Act on June 25 2003 said that the objectives of the Act is to enhance the patriotic spirit of the younger generation, to improve unity among the races, improve national integration and help in character building.

The Defence Minister made it clear that the programme is ala Malaysia and is not military training. Therefore, not attending a three-month camp does not harm any person and is not a threat to the nation. There is thus no justification for making it an offence.

The Defence Minister in moving the Act said that in order to ensure the success of the programme it is necessary to make it compulsory for those selected to attend and to provide for penalties to enforce the attendance.

This is where the government and Parliament fell into error. It has caused the Act to become an instrument of oppression and injustice.

An example of this injustice is the case of Ahmad Hafizal Amad Faudzi. He admitted guilty to the charge of committing an offence under section 18(1) of the Act for not attending the National Service Training Programme.

No moral and legal justification

He was 18 years old. He had stopped schooling after Form Two to help support his mother and brothers when his father divorced his mother. He was the sole bread winner of the family. He would like to attend the training but he needed to feed his family.

Ahmad Hafizal Ahmad Faudzi was fined RM600.00 in default imprisonment for 14 days. He chose imprisonment because he did not have the money to pay the fine.

What is the moral and legal justification for putting this boy in prison? What has he done that society deems to be improper. No right thinking member of a civilised society would condemn a child who prefers to support his family and not go to camp as improper conduct.

Ahmad Hafizal Ahmad Faudzi did not do any wrong. It is the government and the Members of Parliament who approved the Act and made it an offence that committed a wrong.

Ahmad Hafizal is not the only person who is charged under the Act. According to the Auditor-General’s report, as at December 2007, three persons have been charged, 3,856 cases are under investigation and 751 cases have been referred to the Deputy Public Prosecutor for charges to be preferred.

It is a recognised right of a person to life. This is enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and also the Federal Constitution. This is also embodied in the Penal Code as the right of self defence. No person can be forced to risk his life and injury.

In the five years that this National Service Training Program has been implemented we have received reports of the following:

1) 17 trainees have been killed.

2) On Feb 28, 2004, a 17-year-old female trainee was raped by an instructor.

3) Hundreds of trainees have suffered sickness ranging from food poisoning to various diseases.

4) Trainees have been bullied and beaten up.

Instructors are not qualified

The Auditor-General in his 2007 Report stated as follows:

1) Instructors are not qualified. There are instructors who do not have the necessary experience and expertise.

2) The locations of the training camps are unsuitable and the facilities inadequate. There is a camp that does not have running water and is dependent on the river for its water supply. The Beringin Beach Resort Langkawi is flooded when the tide comes in.

3) Trainees’ uniforms do not meet specifications and quality. And many other problems.

There are thus undisputable facts that the National Service Training Programme is not only unsatisfactory but poses a risk to lives and limbs of the trainees.

Although the government spent billions of ringgit each year, the problems and risks have not been eliminated. They are real and they are deadly. The parents of the trainees have therefore justifiably lost confidence in the programme.

Jane Lim is another example where the Act has become an instrument of injustice. Her parents requested for her to be exempted from National Service Training on the ground that her brother, Ricky, had been killed nine days after attending the National Service Training Programme.

This was rejected. Her parents have not been able to come to terms with the loss of their son and are not prepared to risk their only surviving child in the programme.

Under the Act, Jane Lim and her parents commit an offence. What is the legal and moral justification for parents carrying out their duties of protecting their children to become an offence?

The Act has failed

A law that requires parents to be in default of their responsibilities to protect the lives and limbsof their children cannot be legal and moral.

The Act has failed. The programme has become an instrument of injustice. The proposed amendments do not resolve the problems of the National Service Training Programme.

Instead of building a patriotic spirit it has created disharmony, suffering and grief. The government must realise that not all programmes must be enforced by the use of force.

The carrot and stick approach cannot be used all the time and this programme is one of them. Sometimes, programmes such as this can be carried out successfully other than by using the stick.

It is better to be carried out by providing incentives such as scholarships or grants. In moving the amendments, the Barisan Nasional government has missed a golden opportunity to correct the mistakes of the National Service Training Programme.

Malaysian parents and the children unfortunate enough to be selected by the computer shall have to continue to suffer grief and sorrow until the unjust law is abolished or if the government is changed.

Source: Lina Soo http://linasoo.com/blog/?p=1212

The Hottest Stimuli For Sarawak's Economy

What's more stimulating than revealing, eye-catching sizes? To citizens of nations today, nothing is more stimulating than the revelation & size of economic stimulus being formulated by their governments to minimize the impact of global recession.

But like the stimulus of revealing sizes, short-term economic stimulus cannot sustain the feel-good moments.

The 12 new dams to be built in Sarawak under SCORE could well be the erectile dysfunction of a 12 inch possession. Sarawakians concerned with the well-being of the future generations to come must seriously think about what is really needed.

I am recommending that the hottest stimuli for Sarawak's future prosperity is investment in innovation, not in another dam. Failure to do so, future Sarawakians will be beggars in their own land despite the wealth of natural resources today. Because besides Korea, Japan and Taiwan, China & India will be important centers of innovation in the coming decades, leaving Sarawakians to live on scraps in the region.

Not only are both China & India producing a rising share of key technological innovations, but they are also pioneering innovations in business models that allow their companies to prosper in low-income markets. These new models tend to be capital light while heavily leveraging technology. The companies employing them produce goods and services at surprisingly low cost and use the vast scale of home markets to create new technology standards. These are practices that companies in neighboring nations will need to watch closely as they attempt to grow their competitiveness and as they meet new competitors from both countries in global markets.

Education levels are rising in both countries. China and India have world-class technical universities and produce a steady flow of talent at the top of the world’s academic pyramid. In addition, both cultures reward entrepreneurial risk taking. Innovators in China and India possess immense drive and desire to succeed. Their commitment and focus on business execution make them notable entrepreneurs on the global stage. It helps that both China and India allow successful people to retain much of the wealth they create, though both governments expect contributions back to broader society from those who become millionaires or even billionaires.

What is the situation in Sarawak? Firstly, our education system is failing us, educating us out of our inherent creativity. As the government builds infrastructure in the rural areas, GDP growth remains in the urban. Indigenous technologies is unheard of, not even in the farming or timber sectors which are the main economic activities in the state. In Sarawak, revenues from natural resources can be allocated to the benefit of seeding innovations rather than being pocketed by a few individuals.

India's flexible local entrepreneurs are creating new models that bake in low-income levels. ICICI Bank is a good example. Making intensive use of technology, it has created a banking model with capital outlays that are one-tenth those of banks in the developed world. ICICI reaches deeply into India’s rural areas using mobile ATMs and simplified Internet banking. It runs a booming and profitable business in remittances at fee levels that undercut Western Union by 70 percent. Health Management Research Institute (HMRI), meanwhile, uses technology to revolutionize medical services. Paramedics rove through rural areas in vans coordinated by GPS. Routine ailments can be efficiently diagnosed with the help of algorithms; more difficult diagnoses can be provided by remote medical experts via a video kiosk in each van. HMRI can already serve over 50 million patients.

China selects and invests in what it believes are next-generation sectors—biotechnology, electric vehicles, and clean energy. These are markets where China’s domestic demand could lead the world. The government’s goal is to accelerate the market’s development and nurture national champions. In telecom, where the Chinese market is already one of the world’s largest, the government is encouraging national standards that it hopes will eventually define the global industry.

Can Sarawak build & sustain China's & India's innovation pace and eventually move to the next level of technological innovation? Absolutely. The talent is there, as are capital and effective new government that encourages it. With stronger protection and rewards for intellectual property — a likely development as international companies begin to license technology from Sarawakian entrepreneurs — the stage will be set for the next step forward.

Sarawak must wake up to the realization that investing in innovation is more critical than the 12 dams. The most innovative countries — which will also be the highest earning in the future — will be those that embrace a model of “innovation economics,” which places technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the center of economic policymaking. Successful nations will not be content to wait for innovation to happen or expect it to occur as a byproduct of other activities, such as rural development or dam building.

On the contrary: the new leaders will search out innovation and actively create an environment that nurtures it. That is the job description of Sarawak's new leaders when Pakatan Rakyat takes over from BN.

Sources: Alessi, IDEO, NASSCOM, ADB, Global Institute for Human Capital Development