Failing to fail

It is really worrying that Malaysian students' TIMSS scores have steadily deteriorated over time.

Nungsari Radhi, fz.com 

I WAS reading up on The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) recently. TIMSS was started in 1995 by the research arm of the US Department of Education to benchmark the performance of US students between the ages of 10 and 14 globally by measuring their understanding of mathematical and scientific concepts.

 

There have been five TIMSS studies since 1995. The most recent, in 2011, involved students from 60 countries. Malaysian students did not participate in the inaugural study in 1995, but took part in the last four.

 

Malaysia’s performance in 1999, when we first participated, was decent — some 70% of the students who sat for the test achieved intermediate benchmark scores. What is really worrying is how the scores have steadily deteriorated over time. 

 

In the most recent study, only 36% of the students reached the intermediate benchmark scores, which means Malaysia’s performance in 2011 is only half of what it was in 1999. The Malaysian scores are also below the average score of all 60 countries that participated in the study. 

 

In the mathematics portion for 14-year-olds, for example, Malaysian students averaged a score of 440 while the overall average was 500. This contrasts with the performance of students from South Korea and Singapore, whose average scores were 613 and 611 respectively.

 

The low score of Malaysian students and the steep decline in their performance over the years should set alarm bells ringing for the authorities.

 

All the national aspirations of productivity-driven growth, innovativeness and being knowledge-based ring hollow in the light of this rather dismal performance of our 14-year-olds in mathematics and science. There is something seriously wrong with our school system and we are running the real risk of seeing an economic decline in the near future.

 

All this prompted me to read the recently released Education Blueprint 2013-2025, but I was reading it with the TIMSS results in my head and some preconceived ideas already forming. I was looking for some radical solutions. The blueprint does contain some interesting ideas, with a few even being radical.

 

I agree with some of the basic principles underlying the recommendations, particularly those around decentralisation and empowerment of schools. Students come in different profiles, schools are located in different communities and there are geographical factors affecting the types of students and communities. Therefore, schools and district education offices should be empowered to customise the treatment of students in their schools. And most of all, parents and communities must be a major part of education.

 

Apart from an overly centralised school system, the other factor that is afflicting our school system, in my view, is the failure to fail. Let me elaborate.

 

To improve things, we have to address both failing and failures. The poor TIMSS scores are indications of failures. If the school system is such that it uses failing more effectively, we would address this failure. 

 

Failing is a big part of success. Without failing, we get more failures. Avoiding to fail at the individual level will get you more failures at the systemic level and I suspect that is what is fundamentally wrong with our education system generally. 

 

In baseball, players are largely measured by their batting average, the percentage at which they get a base hit each time they are at bat. Any player with a batting average of above 30%, or 0.300 in baseball convention, is considered a very good hitter. The highest career batting average in US Major League Baseball history is 0.366, held by Ty Cobb, who played in the first decades of the 20th century. So, the best hitter in baseball failed to hit the ball about two-thirds of the time. 

 

Striving for excellence and learning as a process are all about going through failure, repeatedly, with every step forward. Do not deprive students of this very important privilege of learning from failing. Do not be deluded into thinking that not failing is equivalent to helping; it is quite the opposite actually — it debilitates.

 

Failing is normal and there will be failures whenever there are standards. The challenge is to get students across the standards and to have teachers who are capable of motivating students to do so. 

 

There are also standards to becoming a teacher that should be upheld. We therefore need to fail more applicants who want to become teachers or fail more existing teachers who are being trained. They, in turn, should fail more students in the course of teaching them.

 

Of course, there should be teachers whose task is to elevate those who fail. That is part of education. The problem with our schools is not about curriculum, textbooks, computers, classrooms or even the language of instruction. It is about standards and a commitment to the ideals of education.

 

I was recently reading some of Winston Churchill’s war-time speeches and wondered: Would Churchill be the inspirational British prime minister he was during World War II if he had not failed miserably as First Lord of the Admiralty in the battle at Gallipoli during World War I? By the way, Churchill failed three times before passing the entrance examination to get into Standhurst Royal Military College. That is how you educate leaders and preserve the sanctity of educational institutions.

 

We have to get this right not because we want our TIMSS scores to improve. We have to get this right because we want to impart the right sort of values to our children and to build excellent educational institutions. 

 

That journey starts by adopting absolute standards and asking all those who do not make the standard to try again until they make it. Unlike many other things in life, in education, the standards are absolute.