May 31, 2019

On 5 March 2019, Minister for Education Ong Ye Kung announced the new Ministry of Education (MOE) move to remove streaming of students by academic ability in secondary schools by 2024, in a bid to encourage greater social equality among secondary school students. Dr Kelvin Seah Kah Cheng (NUS Department of Economics) in his commentary discusses the benefits and drawbacks of MOE’s decision to replace the streaming system with a subject-based banding approach, noting that it may backfire in terms of creating greater social inequality instead of alleviating it. He elaborates on sorting systems that current schools have attempted, such as sorting students into classes by CCA or mixing  those from different academic streams into the same class.

Although these new methods of sorting students have their merits, Dr Seah cautions against their limitations. For example, grouping students by CCA may not necessarily achieve greater equality in terms of social stratification due to certain CCAs being pre-disposed to students of a specific socioeconomic class. Such CCAs include tennis, fencing, and horse riding, where it is necessary for parents to be financially capable of supporting their children should they venture into them.

In contrast, Dr Seah suggests that using a random assignment system to sort students into classes would create a more equal mix of students in each class, ensuring that no single class would be unfairly skewed towards students with greater or lower academic ability. It would also make each class more proportionally representative of the student cohort of the entire school.

Dr Seah concludes saying the support of parents is instrumental, as if schools were to introduce such an approach, parents who do not want their children associating with students from a lower socioeconomic background or with lower academic ability would shy away from enrolling their children in such schools, thus paradoxically creating more inter-school social inequality despite having greater intra-school social equality.

Read the full article here.