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

Transparency with Maximum Sexual Appeal

Here’s how to maximize the sexual appeal of anything related to the functioning of the government. Do most Malaysians care about functions of the government?

Observing the comments on the Prime Minister’s 1Malaysia blog, there’s a good indication that we care most about those which directly impact us personally. If we go to any magazine stand, there’s almost nothing offered that’s related to the workings of the government. At any display, most of the glossy magazines offer maximum sexual appeal. That’s what people people are attracted to and perhaps care about.

How can maximum sexual appeal be given to MACC’s report that 60% of government allocations for vital infrastructure projects in Sarawak have been misappropriated and diverted elsewhere? The fact that billions of ringgits of taxpayer money have been siphoned off has no appeal, except perhaps to anti-establishment species.

Do we care about why the Minister in-charge, Dr. George Chan, have not owned up and resigned? Do we ask why the minister needs to investigate the MACC report and to find out who is responsible when obviously he is the only one responsible? Many would care if the report was about how many young girls from China the minister is keeping, given that Sarawak is now a haven for China girls.

But it does not have to be sexual to be appealing. The sexual appeal of things related to the functions of the government can be maximized by using augmented reality. A company called Sunlight Labs, has done this by opening up the US government. The US government provides a portal, www.recovery.gov, for anyone to track where government money is being spent, who receives how much. The portal allows for reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

Sunlight Labs published the marked-up recovery.gov contract data and the results are fascinatingly appealing. You can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients to where you are. Some are surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in their neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road.

This is a great and sexy example of how government functions can be presented to improve transparency.

The Government’s official data set is published on the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Layar, is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the cinema you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.

This is the kind of sexual appeal, similar to recovery.gov, that the new Sarawak state government must adapt. But while the recovery.gov website is beautifully designed, it does not provide raw or bulk data that would allow for open-ended analysis by the community at large. Until a government opens up access to the bulk data for other people to analyze, reporting its own data on its own websites does not equate to transparency.

Source:
Sunlight Labs
The Star

Hot Agnes Monica at Bidayuh Gawai Festival?

How Bidayuhs Measure Up Today

If Agnes Monica's hot statistics are to reveal anything, it would be that many rural Bidayuhs also do not have enough clothing to cover their bodies. But Agnes Monica's exposure is nothing compared to UNDP statistics that reveal communities living in rural areas of Sarawak are among the worse off when compared to the rest of the country, and often face considerable hardships including securing land rights and other basic rights to development.

Many of the state’s communities such as the Bidayuh have, relatively low human capital, lack ready access to basic amenities and facilities, and because the physical infrastructure is underdeveloped in the areas where they live, they remain poorly connected to markets.

We know that for a strong Sarawak, we need quality human capital across races including minority groups such as the Bidayuh. However, our education system today is failing us. Quality health care fail to reach the majority of Sarawakians who are in the rural areas. GDP growth is concentrated only in major towns, not in the rural areas where most Sarawakians are.

The Bidayuh and other Dayak people have seen escalating erosion to their land tenure held under Sarawak Native Customary Rights (NCR), from first massive logging, and then giant plantations and dam building have robbed many Dayak communities of their land. Without land, the physical survival and the survival of their cultural traditions and ethnic identity are threatened.

Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation (AIPP) secretary-general Joan Carling urged Malaysia to take up the recommendation by other countries such as Mexico, which raised the issue of poor human rights record with regards to indigenous communities during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) hearing in Geneva last year.

She said indigenous groups in Malaysia had long been fighting for their right to their native territories, and these struggles continue today. Although Malaysia adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in September 2007, there has been no real change on the ground to address the land-grab issue affecting many indigenous people, such as the Bidayuh.

Bidayuhs are a minority indigenous group in Sarawak. There are about 169,000 Bidayuhs, who constitute some 8% of the state’s population. Most of them live in Kuching, Padawan, Serian, Bau and Lundu areas in the 1st Division.

Bidayuh today remain one of the marginalized indigenous minority groups in Malaysia and represent a population of those living below poverty line. Like the other Dayaks, living mostly in the vast rural areas of Sarawak, many still live without basic amenities such as roads, jetties, clinics, treated drinking water, and electricity. Time for them has stood still since independence in 1963.

Issues of the Bidayuh Today
While the rest of the majority races in Malaysia progress in terms of socio-economic and education, the Bidayuh remain in the fringes of development and some Bidayuh communities live in poverty. Critical and urgent issues facing Bidayuh include:

1. Land are not titled and unaware of their rights under common law. Native Customary Rights land has been taken over by the state government for sale and development at any time. As Bidayuh are still dependent on subsistence farming, titled land is necessary to progress to modern farming.
2. Bidayuh participation in both the traditional and modern businesses are poor. This is hampered by limited business opportunity, highly dependent on public spending and government projects and poor networking. Some small sized firms made some inroads in small-scale construction sectors. However, none appears to be able to sustain their business due to easy entry and hence are very competitive.
3. Bidayuh form a large portion of the hardcore poor in Sarawak, living in poor housing with insufficient food supply and lack of access to quality health care, communication and transportation.
4. As most Bidayuh live in the rural areas, they are receiving the poorer quality of education than what people in the urban schools are getting. While good early childhood education is critical to the development of children, rural children are not getting pre-school development that urban children are getting. This leaves Bidayuh children to continue to lag behind others in education.
5. The high number of Bidayuh children not getting entrance into public institutions of higher learning, give rise to more Bidayuh children being left behind in the knowledge economy.

What Bidayuh Need to Achieve Equal Progress
There is widespread resentment among Bidayuh that they continue to be marginalized and continue to be left on the fringes of development. To achieve equal progress with other races, equal opportunities and privileges must be given to Bidayuh. The following are critical for the state government to provide the Bidayuh in order to achieve progress:

1. Immediate halt to indiscriminate acquisition of untitled native land by the state government.

2. Expedite the issuing of titles to all native land.

3. Allocate native land that have been designated as state land to Bidayuh families as temporary occupation for a minimum of 60 years for the purpose of modern farming. Land not developed within 3 years are to be taken back and allocated to other families.

4. Establish a well-funded and appropriately staffed Farming Program for Bidayuh that will among other things, do the following:

• Provide financial aid to Bidayuh families to develop their land for modern farming. Access to the aid must be easy and mechanism for repayment must also be easy.
• In addition to providing financial aid, the government must also provide quality professional assistance to upgrade the knowledge and skills of Bidayuh families on modern farming.
• Encourage Young People to Become Farmers: The Farming Program will establish a new program to identify and train the next generation of farmers. The program will also provide incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm.
• Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and will also promote regional food systems.
• Strong Safety Net for Family Farmers: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide family farmers with stability and predictability and strengthen producer protections to ensure family farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.
• Support Small Business Development: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide capital for family farmers to create value-added enterprises, like cooperative marketing initiatives and farmer-owned processing plants. They also will establish a small business and micro-enterprise initiative for rural Bidayuh kampongs.
• Improve Rural Education for Bidayuh: From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is their teacher. To improve the quality of education that Bidayuh children are receiving, the state government must provide incentives for talented individuals to enter the teaching profession, including increased pay for teachers who work in rural areas.

The government must create a Rural Revitalization Program to attract and retain young people to rural Bidayuh kampongs. More quality community colleges should be created and increase research and educational funding for community colleges in Bidayuh areas. Early childhood development centres must be established in Bidayuh kampongs and staffed by only trained and qualified professionals. The government must ensure all rural Bidayuh children have access to pre-school; provide affordable and high-quality child care that will promote child development and ease the burden on working families.

The government must ensure competent, effective teachers in rural schools that are organized for success. The government should provide service scholarships to recruit and prepare teachers who commit to working in underserved Bidayuh dominated districts. To support teachers, the government must foster ongoing improvements in teacher education, provide mentoring for beginning teachers, create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers. To retain teachers, the government must support career pathways that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise. An initiative must be taken to help eliminate teacher shortages in hard-to-staff areas and subjects, improve teacher retention rates, strengthen teacher preparation programs, improve professional development, and better utilize and reward accomplished teachers.

6. Increase the number of seats for Bidayuh students in public institutions of higher learning: In order for the Bidayuh community to come to equal progress in education with other races, more places should be allocated for the Bidayuh students in local public colleges and universities.

7. Improve Health Care for Bidayuh Communities: Rural health care providers are often less experienced and do not have access to the latest medical and healthcare practices in order to deliver the best clinical outcome. Rural folks have to come to Kuching city to get better medical treatment and that is often when illness become more serious. The government must increase rural access to quality care by promoting health information technologies like telemedicine and staff rural clinics and hospitals with more experienced and better trained physicians and nurses. A Nurse-Family Partnership should be established to all Bidayuh, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to Bidayuh expectant mothers and their families in Bidayuh kampongs.

8. Establish a Bidayuh Business Development Assistance Program: As Bidayuh community lags far behind in participation in business and entrepreneurship, the Bidayuh need specific business development assistance. The assistance program will include allocation of government infrastructure projects to Bidayuh community, allocation of business premises in strategic locations and access to financial aid and grants. Rural infrastructure projects must be allocated to local Bidayuh contractors.

9. Expand Access to Jobs: The government must invest in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Bidayuh succeed in the workforce. The government must also create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in job opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in important high-growth career field.

10. Establish At Least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs: The government must create at least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs in areas that have high levels of poverty and low levels of student academic achievement in Bidayuh dominated districts. The Promise Bidayuh Kampongs have a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth development efforts and after-school activities, to an entire kampong from birth to college.

The government should work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every one of the 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs. The government will provide additional resources to address community needs.

The government, by implementing all of the above with full commitment on a sustainable basis, can help bring the Bidayuh community on equal progress with other races. As Bidayuh progress, Sarawak and the nation thrives. The nation will be strengthened for further prosperity.