Educating all children in multicultural, multilingual Singapore: The quest for equity amidst diversity

Abstract

Purposes and Perspectives: In five short decades post-independence, Singapore has moved from an unknown, tiny urban city-state, to being “one of Asia’s great success stories” (OECD, 2010, p. 159). Her achievements are remarkable given the absence of natural resources other than her people—a diverse mix of racial groups/cultures, languages, and origins. Our study examines how Singapore, an urban city-state—and urban school system—employs educational policy and programs to successfully enhance social cohesion and advance social mobility among its multicultural citizenry. Definitions of “urban” include a geographic location “inside a principal city with population of 250,000 or more” (NCES, n.d.)—densely populated, “within a relatively small spatial area…[and]…a multiplicity of…institutions packed closely together” (Dyson, 2003, p. 1). However, [i]ncreasingly, the term urban is less likely to be employed as a geographic concept used to define and describe physical locations than as a social or cultural construct used to describe certain people and places… the term has attained specific socioeconomic and racial connotations. (Noguera, 2003, p. 43) In the U.S., “urban” has become code for people of color, high levels of poverty, crime, overcrowding, housing shortages, and chronic unemployment (Scherer, 2005; Watson, 2011). Urban schools are similarly defined as deficient: low achieving, dangerous, with high numbers of dropouts, truants, and unqualified teachers (Ahram, Stembridge, Fergus, & Noguera, n.d.). We challenge these pathological perspectives of “urban,” using Singapore as an instructive case. We examine how Singapore has used strategic policy-making to evolve from a newly independent country that evidenced all the pathologies associated with prevailing conceptions of “urban,” to a modern nation that is achieving the universally subscribed, but often rhetorical goal to “educate all children.” Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources: This inquiry stems from a larger study titled the International Teacher Policy Study, which employed a multi-method, multiple case study design in order to investigate the policies and practices that support teaching quality within education systems across five countries. The research was conducted in several phases, specifically:  analyses of international and national data sources (e.g., assessment and survey data);  reviews of relevant scholarly literature;  extensive document analysis (education policy documents, k-12 and university curriculum, etc);  interviews with education practitioners;  observations in schools (interviews and observations were audio- or video-recorded and transcribed for analysis). For the purposes of this paper, we focus specifically on two issues: equitable language policies; and quality teachers for educational (e)quality. Conclusion and Significance: Singapore’s story illuminates how large urban systems can achieve educational excellence and equity for and through diversity, not despite of it. However, the significance of the study lies not in what Singapore has achieved, but how—i.e., by addressing basic needs through the deliberate coordination of housing, employment, and education policies, stemming from a national commitment to “level up” (Lee, Low, & Lee, 2014) across all facets of society, that ensures resource disbursement in response to identified gaps and shortfalls.