SINGAPORE : Household income from work fell in real terms across all income groups in Singapore last year.  This is according to figures released by the Department of Statistics on ‘Key Household Income Trends, 2009′.  Findings indicate that Singapore’s bottom 10 per cent was the hardest hit.  2009 was a rough year for all. Each member of the poorest group of households got a monthly income of S$334, down from S$340 in 2008.

Source: CNA

The fall across the various income groups is accounted for by the weak labour market conditions last year, which saw higher unemployment rates and lower wages. This also led to an increase in the number of persons not working in a household.  

Singaporeans are still recovering from a tough year, made tougher by fee hikes in ITE and Poly fees kicking in on 1 April.  Tuition fees were last raised in 2006.  Republic Polytechnic principal Yeo Li Pheow said: ‘The Government decided to keep fees at the status quo last year because of the economic recession but this year, as the economy turns, it is timely to raise the fees.

Clearly, the government continues to be slow to lower but quick to raise fees.  I wonder what is the proportion of ITE students that come from lower income families.  While the hikes are lower compared to PRs, it’s still a burden for our less well-off families.  Such is the compassion of the PAP government.  Or lack thereof.

 

SINGAPOREANS are holding their own against foreigners when it comes to studies.  Although recent examination results have put the spotlight on the achievements of foreigners, principals and others contacted said that Singaporeans are still at the top of the tree in this regard.  Checks by The Straits Times also show that Singaporeans are outperforming their foreign counterparts.

Source: ST

Given that the Straits Times is really the State Times, it’s a habit for most of us to look beneath the iceberg to discern the underlying state propaganda.  Quite a few of my friends agree that this report was to ’sayang’ the population after the rebuke by our founding father (see ‘National Geographic Interviews a Dinosaur’).

The government is playing a delicate balancing act.  While showing off the results of its foreign talent attraction policies, it also has to assuage the fears of locals who think they may be falling behind.  Singaporeans are, by nature, kiasi and kiasu, all thanks to the education system as many would say.  In this case, should parents be worried that a foreigner topped her cohort?  I think not.  Most will worry over their own children’s results and whether they make it to the schools of their choice.  I believe the marking system is fair and without favour - parents know this and understand that anyone else could be the top student.

What the State Times have done is to fan the flames of locals vs foreigners by overcompensating for what they, or the government actually, think are Singaporeans’ concerns that locals are falling behind (exacerbated by Lee Kuan Yew’s lack of ‘empathy’ – “If native Singaporeans are falling behind because “the spurs are not stuck into the hide,” that is their problem“).  Singaporeans will worry if foreigners are taking away slots in schools and of course our jobs.  We aren’t sore losers who worry when a talent out-scores our children.

SINGAPORE: At half time in June, the Education Ministry has already surpassed its annual target of recruiting 3,000 teachers this year.  Speaking at the National Institute of Education’s teachers’ investiture on Monday, Education Minister Ng Eng Hen assured that although the ministry has stepped up hiring, it has also continued to be rigorous in selecting teachers and educators.   He said this is to ensure that only those with passion, aptitude and commitment towards teaching are selected.

Source:  CNA

In this economically-trying time, I assume many will suddenly decide to be teachers.  And soaking up these unemployed graduates helps stem the rise of our  unemployment rate (unemployment rose to 2.3 per cent in the second quarter this year), perhaps a secondary objective for the government in this recruitment exercise.  I hope the MOE is really able to sieve out ‘only those with passion, aptitude and commitment towards teaching’.

SINGAPORE : The Ministry of Education (MOE) has decided to suspend the engagement of external vendors running sexuality programmes in schools, until it completes the vetting of their content. The move came after it investigated feedback received on the school sexuality education programme conducted by women’s advocacy group AWARE, and other lesson materials not by AWARE.

Source:  CNA

For the past few years, schools have been allowed to engage external vendors to supplement their sexuality education programmes.  The ministry said it has reviewed schools’ internal processes for selecting and monitoring vendors, and found that it can be ‘improved’.  It said it will put in place more stringent processes to ensure that training materials and programmes delivered in schools are in line with MOE’s framework on sexuality education. 

Typical, isn’t it?  In the first place, such processes ought to be in place, we’re talking about young minds here and there is no room for misjudgement, negligence and incompetence.  Second, if systems are found wanting, why can’t the MOE just admit it so?  The lack of moral courage can be so sickening. And the one time that the government admits a mistake, the top man says “what to do?  it has happened“  Yes, what can we do but just to sigh and wait for the next general elections.

Since we’re on this topic, I do hope Mas Selamat will be tried in open court.  By escaping from detention, I’m sure he has broken laws none-too-sensitive that warrants the judicial due process.

NUS and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) said they do indeed send acceptance letters to applicants before the closing dates.  NTU’s deadline is the same as NUS.  The closing date for applications to Singapore Management University (SMU) is 8 Apr, but SMU said it does not send out early acceptance letters.  Some applicants think that what NUS and NTU are doing is unfair. Miss Kwek Yi Lin, 19, had applied to NTU’s accountancy course during the week that applications closed, and has yet to hear from the university. She has one A and three Bs.  ‘I think it’s fair for the straight-A students to get early offers, since it’s likely they’d get accepted sooner or later anyway,’ she said.  

Source:  TNP

Apparently this is the first year that both universities are issuing early offers. Professor Lalit Goel, NTU’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, said the university does it to attract exemplary students who ‘may otherwise go to top universities overseas to pursue their tertiary education’.  He pointed out that many overseas universities make early offers to woo academically bright students.

At first read, I thought to myself, “another reason why our society is so kia si and kia su“.  After all, the system seems to be urging young Singaporeans to send in their applications early as vacancies are falling by the day even before the closing date.  Having read the Universities’ explanations, I do think they have valid concerns. 

However, I wonder if it could have been done better.  For instance, they could set aside a fixed number of vacancies meant for these straight A students that they do not want to lose to external universities, and separate this system from the usual mainstream one where all applications received before the closing dates are evaluated together based on merit.  This could be more palatable to the public.

Singapore’s academic community has become increasingly concerned about a succession of deaths at the Nanyang Technology University campus, with at least two apparent student suicides in one week, one of them linked to the murder of an academic, as well as a fatal car accident – all in the space of three weeks and all from the same faculty. Combined with the financial pressures of funding their studies, along with the pressures to do well, this could result in a lethal mix of stressors.

Source: University World News

The Nanyang campus does have a student counselling programme for international students, as well as a crisis help line and advice on self-help for mental health problems and stress self-management support.  But the deaths last month raise questions about whether university administrations and student services need to review their crisis support resources in the context of the global financial crisis. 

In fact, employers should also be on the look out for employees exhibiting signs of stress and have on hand suitable counseling resources.  Last week there was a foreign talent arrested for trying to jump off the MOM Building.  I do not know what were the circumstances but I guess it’s financial or work related (Asiaone reported that Preliminary investigations by MOM show that the worker had approached MOM on five occasions on 30 Mar 2009 on various employment issues). 

Let’s not wait till more lives are lost before employers (and the government) start doing something.  Even 1 lost is 1 too many.

During my younger days, I have always treated our first generation leaders’ defeat of “communist rebels” as gospel truth. Even the late Dr Albert Winsemius made a remark about communism being a bogeyman to the further economic development of Singapore. Fast forward a few years down the road, I began to realize that the “facts” I was fed through my textbooks and history lessons were merely human perspectives after all.
The so-called communist threat came at a time when Singapore was under the British rule. The PAP-led government of Singapore considered the perpetrators a threat to their rule. During that period, communism was synonymous with anti-colonialism. Communist movements in our neighbors have been heavily involved in subverting colonial rule. This made it all the more easy to stick the communist tag on any anti-colonialist. Prior to the arrest of the “communists”, there were communications going on behind the scenes involving Singapore’s government officials and the British. These series of communications were to be recorded down, declassified in the intervening years and opened to the public at the Public Records Office of London.
… the question that arises is – will the emergence of these documents trigger a rethink of our history syllabus, which hopefully see students studying their contents, thereby giving them an alternative view of Singapore’s history?”
These declassified documents are essential historical records because they provide a context behind the landmarks events that have taken place. And these documents were anti-theses to the “established” facts regarding the “communism” of the perpetrators especially Mr Lim Chin Siong, when there has been no established evidence to link the latter to communism to begin with. Even the records have indicated that Chin Siong wasn’t responsible for the 1956 riots which have led to the latter’s arrest.

Source: Kent Ridge Common

Beware of the saying: If you have done something bad in the past, the s*** will always come back to you.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/175894

Picked up from http://forums.delphiforums.com/sunkopitiam/messages/?msg=16970.1

Reform School

An Obama education advisor thinks U.S. schools could take a lesson from Finland and Singapore.
Sarah Garland
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Add up the scores on the recent international tests in math and science released last week by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and it’s clear the United States isn’t making the grade. Even with an upward tick in math scores, American students were still left in the dust of high-achieving Asian countries, while stagnant science scores were even more disappointing. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to return the United States to the top of the class, and earlier this week he selected Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan to lead the effort as his education secretary. But the controversial Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond has been the brains behind Obama’s education policy over the past year as a lead education advisor on the campaign and during the transition. Her calls for better tests under No Child Left Behind and better teacher training have made it to the top of Obama’s education priorities. Darling-Hammond spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Sarah Garland about what America’s schools could learn from Finland and Singapore. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK : In the past you’ve used examples from other countries to suggest ways of reforming No Child Left Behind in the United States. Which countries would you rank the highest in terms of education?
Darling Hammond: Finland ranks the highest generally across the board. The Netherlands, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland are all highly ranked across content areas. In some measures the United Kingdom is catching up a little. Sweden is another one, and a lot of the highly ranked countries are in Asia and Oceana—New Zealand and Australia.

What’s the key to their success? What are they doing that the United States is not?
First, they have many fewer children in poverty and a much bigger safety net. We have 22 percent of our kids in poverty—the highest proportion of any industrialized country. Our schools have to make up for all of that, including the large achievement gap that kids have when they come to school from low-income families and haven’t had preschool education.

Second, they spend their money equally on schools, sometimes with additional money to the schools serving high-need students. We take kids who have the least access to educational opportunities at home and we typically give them the least access to educational opportunities at school as well. We have the most unequal spread of achievement of any industrialized country except for Germany.

Then in Finland or Sweden or Hong Kong or Singapore, teachers get a completely free preparation, with a salary or a stipend while they’re training. In Singapore, beginning teachers make more than beginning doctors. Our teachers teach 1,100 hours a year on average. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average is 650 hours.

How do the examples of these countries support your view of testing?
I have been a longtime advocate for standards. In other countries, that’s what you see: you see assessments that are high quality, at least in the high-achieving countries. I sometimes get characterized as anti-testing, which is inaccurate. I am in favor of high-quality assessments and using them for improving teaching and learning, high-quality curriculum and teacher development. I think that in other countries that’s what they do.

What is the role of teachers’ unions in successful countries?
Other countries put a lot of energy into recruiting the best and the brightest into teaching, training them very intensely, making sure they have professional training. They undoubtedly have ways to get rid of incompetent teachers, but they put a lot of effort on how to be sure that the teachers are competent in the first place. In this country, I’ve been advocating for a long time, how do we get teachers that are highly competent in the first place. If we’re thinking about what we need to do to be competitive with other nations, we need to be thinking about building a supply of great teachers and continually improving their skills, rather than only focusing on the bad teachers when we haven’t helped them learn how to be good.

So which countries are going to be the models for the Obama administration?
Certainly we have a different context both politically and in how our education system is organized, but I will say that if you look at some of the highest-achieving states in the United States, we do have this wide variability. Although we rank low on the international assessments, our most high-achieving states and our most high-achieving students are getting an education that has features you would see in other countries. States like Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey—those are states that have attacked standards-based reform, with a focus on developing more thoughtful assessments, tying those to teacher development. They put in place very strong literacy-development programs in the elementary schools, and literacy coaches. You see the same kind of standards-based literacy work in countries that have had strong improvements in their performance. We can learn some things from other countries, but we can also learn some things from within our country by looking at places that are succeeding.

Obama’s proposals require money—the funding for prekindergarten, the army of new teachers. How will that happen during the credit crisis?
You have to think about education as an investment. This is me speaking, not the administration speaking, but we’re talking about a $700 billion recovery package. The total education investment represented in President-elect Obama’s education plan was $29 billion, and that’s tiny. For every dollar you spend to make sure that kids get high-quality preschool, you’re going to gain anywhere from $3 to $10 back to the economy in reduced failure in school, reduced special-education costs, reduced dropout rates and higher wages and taxes. These kinds of investments actually reap us benefits in the long run.

The results for the latest science and math tests just came out, are you surprised at the U.S. performance?
They were up in math, but not in science. We’re not even teaching science in a lot of elementary schools, much less the kind of science that other countries are teaching. When I went to Singapore, at every grade level in every classroom in every school I visited, kids were coming up to show the experiments they’d designed and conducted. High-achieving countries are making sure their kids can be the inventors and engineers of the future. We have to really redouble our efforts.

Will we have moved up within four years?
I would expect so. It takes time to build and rebuild a system, and the financial crisis is really going to be a problem, but I think we will certainly see a turning of the corner if the kind of investments that have been proposed are indeed made. And in eight years, you will see a substantial difference in where the United States is positioned.

We help ourselves. Don’t expect others to help

Tom Wright painted a bleak picture of Singapore’s property sector going forward at The Wall Street Journal. His article ended with the following:
“I’m yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel [for Singapore],” says Mr. Tan, the high-end broker.
We would expect people to continue to dig the dirt and tell it to [...]



Our skin isn’t as thick as it should be

The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) organised a seminar on March 4 to discuss Singapore’s political blogosphere.  Tan Tarn How, Senior Research Fellow and Research Assistant Tan Simin presented their paper on trends observed in the blogosphere.  As reported in the TOC, the researchers identified the following limitations:

The online-offline firewall, while somewhat alleviated by offline [...]



Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew – The answer to the African problem?

Recently, I followed a thread “Democracy and Economic Growth” which started in PoliticsForum.org.   Apparently, members there often question the role of democracy in a developing nation. “During the wave of democratization in Africa during the 90s, many people had renewed hope for the continent, immediately equating newly established democracies to economic growth. Are these democracies [...]



Tell Singapore government: Ask them a question or give a suggestion

We informed people about the “Tell Singapore Government” subsite and have received some interesting reaction at some forums.
See: 3in1 Kopitiam, Sam’s Alfresco Coffee, Singapore Kopitiam, SgForums
Our responses to some of the comments are listed below. If we are not answering some other specific questions, that is because we do not know how.
 

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Our Singapore

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To observe, analyse, present our position, and call for action. Read our articles, give your views, and learn together with us.