Why Singaporean education works and Australia's doesn't

"How do you Australians assess if a teacher is under performing?"

The four Australian directors (comprising a stockbroker, entrepreneur, fund manager and a venture capitalist) turned to the Head and repeated the question in unison.

The Head's reply was that teachers were assessed by the NSW Inspectors, department teacher feed back and the Head herself attending classes as an observer.

"But that's too subjective." replied the Singaporeans.

"Well how do you do it in Singapore?" asked the Head.

The answer was most revealing. Supposedly students in Singapore are assessed with national tests every two years. Concurrently a teacher is assigned a class every two years. While some students will always come and go there will be a cohort of students who do not change over the two years. The normed average grades of those two years can then be measured and the percentage improvement (or decline) noted. Working on the famous Greek principle that victory has many generals but defeat is an orphan, the relative movement in the class average is deemed to be reflective of the quality of teaching the students have received. Not only that but the relative improvement can then be assessed against similar results for all the peers of the teacher for that year. Supposedly the top ten per cent of the Singaporean teachers are given substantial performance bonuses and earmarked for future promotion while the bottom ten percent are counselled and effectively told that if similar results occur again that they should look to another career besides teaching.

The silence of the Australians was by now deafening.

The Singaporeans then went on to point that before this system was introduced the best teachers would always try and get the best students because they could then brag about how many students they had in top 1000 performers etc. Now the best teachers would try and get the worst performing classes so they could get the greatest improvement. Thus the worst classes would get the best teachers and in that way the whole country's education system was lifted.

I compiled the following statistics from the NSW Department of Education (DOE) Annual Reports and found them quite revealing.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, in his book Straight from the Gut, stated that a major key to his success was to ensure that everyone in his organisation was measured on some objective performance indicator and each year replace the bottom ten per cent. Jack Welch obviously is a history buff and knows the literal meaning of decimation. While there would be constraints on the DOE adopting such a policy, intuitively something must be amiss in a system that defines only 0.05% as under-performance. (And note under-performance includes sexual misconduct and assault.)

Yet again we have had another education report saying we should throw more billions at the system. That is not the answer. The answer is to set up a system that objectively measures the performance of teachers and then removes the poor performers.

Why institutional equity fund managers are paid 10 - 20 times the salaries of public sector teachers?

• First, there are many teachers to one buyer - the Department of Education. By contrast there are around 100 buyers of fund managers in Australia but the pool of managers is limited.
• There is no measure of how good a teacher is except by hearsay. By contrast there are at least three actuarial firms measuring the performance of fund managers. The buyers know who the best performers are and exactly what they have achieved in the past.
• Standardisation of the curriculum means the switching costs between teachers is low and the buyer is indifferent to the quality. On the other hand good fund managers can and generally do take their clients with them so, to the employing institution, the switching costs, in terms of lost revenue, can be very high.

All these factors explain why fund managers are highly paid while teachers are poorly paid. What is interesting is that the teacher's union is ensuring that status quo remains.