March 12, 2019

Associate Professor Irene Ng and Ms Nursila Senin from the NUS Department of Social Work and the NUS Social Service Research Centre (SSR) discuss the removal of streaming in The Straits Times. According to A/P Ng and Ms Nursila, research has shown that streaming leads to greater inequality in student performance and is related to lower inter-generational mobility. However, while ending the practice is a key first step to addressing such inequities, it is ultimately not streaming per se that leads to inequality, but the differentiation of students into categories and less spending on low-socioeconomic status (SES) students.

A/P Ng summarises these effects as differential labels, differential resources, and differential networks. Firstly, differentiation of schools and programmes creates differential labels of prestige and stigma, resulting in the self-fulfilling prophecy of students behaving and performing according to the expectations of their labels. Secondly, differential resource allocation results in more resources for preferred schools and fewer ones for stigmatised schools and programmes. Thirdly, as desirable schools or programmes attract students from more well-to-do families and the stigmatised schools or programmes are avoided, differentiated networks lead to differential access to connections and resources. Thus, beyond streaming, if schools continue to be differentiated in this manner, the negative effects associated with streaming could still rear their ugly heads.

In this light, the authors stress that we need to counter human tendencies to differentiate and label – we could go a step further by institutionalising progressive spending for schools with higher proportions of low-SES students. At the same time, we could also decrease competition and increase collaborations between schools. The strategies by Uplift (Uplifting Pupils in Life and Inspiring Families Taskforce) will also be instrumental in addressing these educational inequalities.

Read the full article here.