Comparing high-performing education systems: understanding Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Despite the trendsetting of East Asian HPES, education policy commentary and literature on this region remains rather underdeveloped and predictable. In Comparing High-Performing Education Systems: Understanding Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Dr Charlene Tan moves scholarship on East Asian HPES in a new, sorely needed direction. This review essay of Comparing High-Performing Education Systems describes the guiding conceptual framework of the book and summarizes the book, chapter-by-chapter. This review essay also comments on two striking issues – the explanatory power of Confucian habitus, and the intersectionality of performativity, Confucianism, and neoliberalism. The aim in this review essay is to both celebrate the boldness of Comparing High Performing Systems and offer questions to further enrich the employment of Confucianism as a conceptual and analytical tool to examine education policies, processes, and outcomes in East Asian systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Education Reform
• High-performing education systems
• Accountability
• Confucian Heritage Cultures
• high-stakes testing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Priya Goel La Londe

Priya Goel La Londe is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong in the Faculty of Education. A former teacher and school leader, she holds cross-disciplinary training in sociology, early childhood education, and education leadership and policy. Dr. La Londe's research examines the relationships between school reform policies and professional culture. Currently, she is investigating how performance accountability policies shape the identities and practices of teachers and school leaders in the contexts of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Dr. La Londe's research is supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the China Confucius Institute, and she has assisted on projects funded by the Spencer and William T. Grant Foundations.

Antoni Verger

Antoni Verger is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a research fellow at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). With a cross-disciplinary training in sociology and education studies, his research examines the relationship between globalization, governance institutions and education policy - i.e. how education policies are internationally disseminated and enacted in different settings, and how this impacts education quality and equity. Since 2016, he analyzes school autonomy with accountability reforms in education from this perspective in the context of the ERC-funded project REFORMED (www.reformedproject.eu).