April, 2007

EDUCATION REFORM
Runaway Reforms Retard Education in Hong Kong

Ho Yuk-fan

(The author is a well-respected biology teacher in a local secondary school and holds a doctoral degree in education from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.)

'Achievements' of the Education Reforms
In the election debate in March 2007, Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen boldly described the government's education reforms as "successful." Tsang's words echoed those of the secretary for education and manpower, Arthur Li Kwok-cheung, who stated that the achievements of the educational reforms are evident through increasingly positive comments made by local employers towards employees, prizes won by local students in international competitions and their high rankings in various standardised tests. Former Permanent Secretary for Education and Manpower Fanny Law Fan Chiu-fun added to the list "improvement in the climate of professional development and qualifications of teachers." However, these claims seem unconvincing and even disappointing when one considers the struggles and grievances accumulated in the education sector throughout the last decade.

It is noteworthy that the series of educational reforms in recent years are not isolated and independent policies. Instead, educational reforms are a consequence of the transformation of our contemporary culture, economy and politics. The impact of this ideology fuels educational reforms with a deep affinity towards competitiveness and employability in a globalised economy. The "learning-to-learn" rhetoric best exemplifies this impact. In the "new economy," or knowledge-based economy, knowledge is a key resource. To become competitive, individuals are required to acquire or develop such generic skills as languages, information technologies, analytical and critical thinking and other abilities that are useful in research and corporate team-working. The agent of imposing change and transformation onto the next generation has been the school system, and teachers are thus expected to transform themselves as well.

The economic downturn since 1998 and the inherent deficiency in democratic legitimacy of the government has further intensified the tension between policymakers and professional practitioners. To fuel the education reform rhetoric, schools and teachers have been blamed as the source of educational and even economic problems, like the low employability of the work force. The consequence is a corrosion of trust among government and front-line educators.

Broken Promises of Education Reforms
The Promise of Quality Education and the New Fabricating Culture
The last decade denotes an era when Hong Kong society has been pushed by a neoliberal ideology towards a society submerged under the logic of economic rationalism. Rather than given a higher level of educational governance through decentralisation, schools have been trapped in a dilemma of "centralised decentralisation," or "regulated self-regulation," in a heightened audit culture that emphasises quality, authoritative communication and managerial scrutiny.

The Education Commission Report No. 7, Quality School Education, issued in 1996 is the milestone of the arrival of neoliberal ideology in the local education system. The "quality" of school education has been defined according to the input-process-output model of accountability with standards of measurement used as the medium to represent school effectiveness. The model encompasses every dimension of school education that can be audited.

A decade after the release of this Education Commission report local educators have witnessed how the majority of policy recommendations have been implemented in the local education system. Compulsory school-based management has been adopted in all government-funded schools. Schools have been given guidelines on how the administration should reflect the spirit of the new mode of management. The External School Review (ESR) has replaced the Quality Assurance Inspection Scheme (QAI) that aims at evaluating school effectiveness and performance by an auditing procedure for the public interest. To increase schools' accountability, schools have to work intensively on a number of documents as proof of their education process and output, including an annual school plan, school development plan and school report that provide evidence or proof of the school's effectiveness. In time, when there is a high risk of public scrutiny made possible by uploading all ESR and QAI reports onto web sites, school administrators have been tempted to fabricate their school's performance and thus ruin the good intention of cultivating an authentic culture of reflection. Added to this pressure are judgments made by external sources, including the inspection unit and mass media, that have raised the stakes when the fear of school closures increases.

Measures of school-based management, when distorted, signify the emergence of the "terror of performativity," which designates a guiding ideology of policy in a context of globalisation. The price to be paid in the education system is the surge of fabricated representations and evaluations, which are produced as depthless and free-floating signifiers of school output. "Good" schools and teachers and "bad" schools and teachers are differentiated by "objective," measurable and thus comparable figures, like banding, the admission rate to universities, public examination results and even indexes on students' affective domains (e.g., their self-concept, attitude towards schools) and even Body Mass Index. Schools and teachers seem to become "totally accountable" for every aspect of their students' outcomes but with a very limited hope of success because it is unrealistic. Thus, education outcomes have been distorted as fabricated figures reluctantly, but sometimes intentionally, prepared by schools and teachers to meet the expectations of an unrealistic system of total control.

The Promise of the Learning-to-Learn Rhetoric and the Missing Links
Formulation of the curriculum reform documents Learning to Learn: The Way Forward in Curriculum Development and Learning for Life, Learning through Life: Reform Proposals for the Education System in Hong Kong spell out the rhetoric to develop students as all-around and lifelong learners in a knowledge-based economy. The curriculum reforms respond to the needs of a knowledge-based economy and a knowledge-oriented society through an emphasis on flexibility and problem-solving abilities that contribute to the employability of individual graduates and the competitiveness of Hong Kong's economy as a whole.

The impact of the policy documents on the education system is long-term and encompassing because it is a reform of the paradigm of the classroom teaching process as a whole, from the formulation of the means and ends of learning and teaching to the microprocess of classroom activities. Despite the fact that various themes of the curriculum reforms cater to the challenges of a knowledge-oriented society, the intensity and scope of them have gone beyond the capacity of the education system. Crucial factors that lay a solid foundation for success have been missing-empirical inputs from the local academic sector, adequate resources and professional support for teachers' development and revitalisation and consideration of a gradual introduction of the reforms given the tension created by various education reform measures.

In addition, the new paradigm of learning and teaching that emphasises the acquisition of generic skills (communication skills, critical thinking skills, etc.) and the middle-class learning model (exemplified in project-based learning) may further put students from a lower socioeconomic status into a disadvantaged position. Throughout the policy documents on curriculum reforms, there has been no reference made to this problem of inequality. The deficiency here is not about the content of reform but the neglect of students' needs from a wide spectrum of academic, cultural and social competence.

With the continuous absence of the missing links required for curriculum reforms, there is little hope of realising the promise of "learning to learn." Moreover, the situation becomes worse when the issue of medium of instruction is taken into account, for secondary schools in Hong Kong since 1998 have been segregated, obviously but unintendedly, into two tiers: those using Chinese as the medium of instruction and one quarter of the total that use English as the medium of instruction. The policy has received extensive criticism. A positive labelling effect on English-medium schools reinforces the perception that English per se is a more prestigious language. The policy demonstrates the bow of education to market forces as English is regarded as the most useful language worldwide. In this environment, the learning effectiveness of students in English-medium schools may be sacrificed, and Chinese-medium students, irrespective of their learning achievements, have to face the problem of reduced competitiveness in terms of English competence.

The Promise of Professional Development and the Demise of Craftsmanship
In the new discourse on good education or good teachers, values like love, care and civil education-the core of teachers' craftsmanship-no longer have a significant place because they are not quantifiable. If they are to be incorporated, they need to be confined, distorted and even fabricated as something readily measurable by a questionnaire or psychometric instrument. Teachers have both their self-identity and role identity being put at risk in a context where humanistic values and beliefs held strongly by them have been marginalised.

Professional identity is built upon a sustainable narrativity of the heritage. The significance of the heritage is not to ensure that every practitioner in the professional realm performs with the same set of values and practices but to allow the development of a professional frame of reference. This frame of professional reference comprises the core missions and beliefs to be pursued by practitioners and also the frame for evaluative judgment. It is through the narrativity of the professional heritage that the professionalism of teaching is built.

The heritage and pilgrimage are now endangered in today's globalised society that is dominated by neoliberal, managerial and performativity discourse. The corrosion of professional and collective identity results in transformation of the profession into a collective of entrepreneurial technicians surviving in a new form of community. It is a community that stresses superficial teamwork to meet targets, standards and quotas.

Within the foreseeable future, the meaning of professionalism in the teaching realm will be further transformed to align with the performativity discourse. Hints of the expected transformation can be found in the formulation of the "generic teacher competencies framework"(TCF) found in the consultation paper prepared by the Advisory Committee on Teacher Education and Qualification (ACTEQ) in 2003. The TCF is regarded as a road map for assessing and informing schools and teachers about their "stage" of development regarding the professional quality of teachers in various domains. To a certain extent, the TCF can be considered as an evaluative framework designed for surveillance at the individual level. The terror of TCF is its attempt to decode professional teaching experience as a set of exhaustive, describable and comparable standards but neglecting the basic fact that in a people-oriented profession like teaching there are elements in the guiding core values and ethical considerations that can never be completely transcribed into codes. The dilemma is, once there is a map of reference, the professional values, and thus practices, will be confined and restrained within that boundary while at the same time ruling out the space for argument and debate on what professional experience should be.

Do We Still Have Hope?
Education reforms, irrespective of the "achievements" so claimed, are leading to a systemic distortion rather than being a hopeful revolution to put education back on track. This view does not mean that all reforms are worthless, loaded with evil intentions to exploit schools and teachers, for it is acknowledged that the traditional discourse and practices of local schools do have flaws and problems that hinder students' learning.

However, there is no hope of bringing authentic improvements to our education system that will benefit our younger generation if the present situation does not change. The disintegration of trust between policymakers, school administers and teachers has created a downward spiral. Reform policies, wrapped with a hegemonic discourse, are being introduced swiftly with new ones added continuously in a top-down manner. Rebuilding trust between policymakers and educators and development of a democratic, participative culture of policy formulation should be two priorities that deserve the persistent pursuit of anyone who is concerned about the future of education and the youth of Hong Kong.