Tiger school: successes and challenges of the Vietnamese education system

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Following stellar PISA results in 2012 and 2015, the Vietnamese education system has received much attention, not unlike the attention Finland received some years earlier. What is quite different, however, is the level of resources Vietnam can devote to education – the country’s GDP per capita is twenty times lower than that of Finland. Existing evidence indicates that Vietnam excels both in outcomes and efficiency in basic education (World Bank 2014; Rolleston & Krutikova 2014; Asadullah & Perera 2015; OECD 2016). Nonetheless, significant challenges remain, among which the large gaps in progression and outcomes between ethnic majority (Kinh) and ethnic minority pupils is arguably the most urgent.

The high performance of Vietnam on PISA poses a ‘puzzle’ for researchers concerned to explain it, and for policy-makers elsewhere who might draw lessons from the Vietnamese system. This panel focuses on three key areas of contemporary debate in and around Vietnamese education, (i) understanding and explaining high levels of educational performance (ii) identifying the policies that may have contributed to the successes of the Vietnamese system and the lessons that may be contained in the ‘stories’ of these policies and (ii) the challenge of extending success to marginalised pupils and especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds. These complex questions demand approaches which draw on several disciplinary perspectives and which combine analyses of data which represent both depth and breadth of insight.

The papers in this panel offer a mixed-methods and inter-disciplinary approach to examining these key areas of debate. We draw on theoretical framing and methodological approaches from the fields of political economy analysis (including in historical perspective) alongside statistical and econometric modelling rooted in the ‘education production function’ framework. The first paper draws on historical policy analysis, a quantitative survey of parental views and qualitative interviews and focus groups with a range of education stakeholders to understand the design and implementation of education policy and the functioning of the school system in four provinces. The second and third papers in this panel employ longitudinal school and household data from the Young Lives study of childhood poverty, which has been conducted in Vietnam since 2002. These papers present quantitative analyses using large-scale data which is broadly (although not statistically) representative of the Vietnamese context, offering some scope for generalisability of findings with respect to the phenomena of interest, which include descriptive patterns of educational attainment and school effectiveness, including in international and comparative perspective. They provide interpretation of these patterns and phenomena and discuss potential causal explanations. The second paper analyses school survey data from 52 schools and 9000 Grade 10 students to examine issues of quality and equity for ethnic minority students in Vietnam, and draws on data from a qualitative study to explore a case of ‘positive deviance’ in an ethnic minority boarding school in Lao Cai province. This paper adopts a mixed methods approach to ‘deepening’ understanding of patterns established on the basis of large-scale data using a sequential approach to mixed-methods methodology (Greene et al 1989). The final paper presents a cross-country perspective on educational outcomes in Vietnam, by employing longitudinal household data from 8,000 ‘Young Lives’ children in Ethiopia, India, Vietnam and Peru, collected between the ages of 1 and 15.

Together, the three papers in this panel present and debate a number of ‘pieces’ in the Vietnam education puzzle. Understanding Vietnam’s trajectory towards high levels of educational attainment in a resource-constrained context is of tremendous importance for low and middle-income countries globally, and in the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals to which educational quality is central. While pathways to educational change at the systems-level are significantly context-dependent, lessons can be drawn across contexts. This panel serves to stimulate thinking around the transferable lessons from Vietnam and to identify further areas for research on the successes and challenges of the Vietnamese system.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Joan DeJaeghere, University of Minnesota

Individual Presentations

• Vietnam’s approach to educational improvement: an analysis of national policy and perspectives from four provinces - Tony McAleavy, Education Development Trust; Thai Ha Tran, Vietnam Institute for Educational Sciences; Rachael Fitzpatrick, Education Development Trust

• Effectiveness and equity? Ethnic minority experiences of upper secondary education in Lao Cai, Vietnam - Padmini Iyer, University of Cambridge; Caine Rolleston, Ucl; Huong Thi Thanh Vu, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences

• What Explains Vietnam's High Levels of Student Learning? An Investigation of the Young Lives Data - Paul Glewwe, University of Minnesota; Jongwook Lee, University of Minnesota; Khoa Vu, University of Minnesota

Discussant

• Rachel Outhred, Oxford University, Senior Education Researcher