Equity and Educational Change in Estonia and Vietnam

• In Event: Equity and Educational Transformation in a Cross-National Perspective

Abstract

Purposes:
This paper seeks to foster a better understanding of the ways in which equity is enacted in educational improvement efforts through a comparison of school improvement initiatives in Estonia and Vietnam. Estonia and Vietnam have both emerged as relatively high-performing education systems on international tests; they had or have communist political systems but both place on emphasis on entrepreneurship; and both are shifting their education systems to a focus on competencies.

Perspectives:
This paper draws from ongoing studies of school improvement efforts that highlights a particular challenge for efforts to create more equitable educational opportunities and outcomes: “improvements” that are most likely to take hold are also likely to be those that are incremental and that reinforce many of the aspects of conventional education systems that produce and perpetuate inequity (Author, 2021; Tyack & Cuban, 1993; Cohen & Mehta, 2017).

Methods & Data Sources
This paper compares approaches to equity reflected in ongoing system improvement efforts in Estonia and Vietnam by asking:
• What issues of equity are a focus of the educational system improvement policies in Estonia and Vietnam?
• What groups are and are not a focus of these policies?
• What are the theories of action (Author, 1998) reflected in these strategies?
• What are the current challenges related to equity that each system will need to address?
The analysis draws on literature reviews and a series of interviews with policymakers, researchers and educators in each context as well as fieldwork in ethnic minority areas in Vietnam. Our analysis looks at equity in each system in terms of three interrelated concepts: recognition, redistribution, and representation (Fraser, 2003).

Findings & Significance
The similarities and differences in these contexts illustrate the variety of approaches to equity that systems can take at the same time that they highlight the many aspects of equity that are overlooked and obscured in efforts to promote educational change.

Estonia has embraced and encouraged entrepreneurship as a basis for system improvement by fostering the development of a series of innovative upper secondary schools that they hope will provide models for development for other schools in the country. That effort, however, has not focused particularly on addressing issues of equity. It has largely been up to the schools themselves to take into consideration such issues as whether and how students with learning differences or Russian-speaking students have access to these schools.

Vietnam has explicitly focused on supporting the development of schools and schooling in the areas where 54 different ethnic minority groups reside, and has established a policy recognizing that all children a right to be educated in their home language. At the same time, Vietnam is also supporting the development of a series of gifted and talented schools, primarily in the urban areas, that are likely to attract and support the existing elites and wealthy students. In the process, both systems seem to have adopted a belief that creating “peaks of excellence” and innovative school models can also secure the rights to quality and equitable education for all.

Authors

• Thomas C. Hatch, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Phuong Lương Minh, Vietnam National University