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Lifting standards for all
Supply of engineers challenges atomic plan
China and the US can teach each other about education
Vivien Stewart and Heather Singmaster
Dec 13, 2010
The latest global school report card is out, with Shanghai and Hong Kong SAR coming top of the class. A new Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development survey of 15-year-old students around the world ranks the cities as number one and two. They also lead a growing list of Asian countries and places now reaping impressive benefits from dramatic reforms and deep investment in education.
It's a different story across the Pacific. The United States - a leader in education in the 20th century - is ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in mathematics, according to results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa). When all three scores are averaged out, America comes 26th out of 65 places.
What can the United States learn from the strong performance of Asia? And, is there anything Hong Kong and Shanghai can still learn from America, despite its disappointing results?
Hong Kong and Shanghai have significantly expanded their education systems over the past two decades and, around 2000, started major reforms in the structure of schools, curriculum, and assessment. While each took different paths, their systems share features that contribute to their high rankings:
Both have rigorous standards and a strong core curriculum, especially in mathematics and science, whereas in America, educational standards vary widely between states. Students are allowed to choose among many different levels of courses, and many opt out of more advanced, and tougher, courses.
Schools in Hong Kong and Shanghai enjoy considerable autonomy in educating their students to the standards. However, because they exist within a coherent centralised education system, they yield results.
In contrast in the United States, authority for education is diffused across multiple levels of governance, from state to state and district to district. Standards, resources, teacher preparation and assessment are often inconsistent and not aligned. This enormous variation in educational opportunity shows up in the Pisa results.
In China, a stronger emphasis is placed on recruiting and supporting high-quality teachers and principals. Teachers follow a tradition of close teamwork, meeting regularly to improve their classroom skills and curriculum. A higher proportion has degrees in mathematics and science than their US counterparts. Meanwhile, in the United States, teaching has become a less attractive occupation in recent years. There are severe shortages of mathematics, science and language teachers and high drop-out rates in the first five years of teaching. Many teachers feel isolated in their classrooms and find little help when they want to improve their work.
Students in Hong Kong and Shanghai work very hard in school and spend a lot of time outside school studying, compared to US students. While many parents believe their children spend too much time in exam preparation, the belief that effort and hard work pay off is, nevertheless, a powerful driver of student achievement.
Before Hong Kong and Shanghai carried out their education reforms, their policymakers studied education systems around the world, including America's, to gather the best ideas.
Traditionally, the Chinese education model emphasised knowledge transmission while American curriculum and instruction is stronger at teaching students how to question and think for themselves, solve problems, and apply ideas. These skills are likely to be in high demand in a modern knowledge and innovation economy. Recognising that not all students learn the same way, the United States also has many types of schools, and many second-chance opportunities for students, with less reliance on an examination funnel.
In many respects, Shanghai and Hong Kong, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, are mirror images of each other. Hong Kong and Shanghai have educational systems that deliver a fairly high level of education effectively on a broad scale, but the educational content and teacher methods need to be updated. The US has a great deal of innovation, research, and modern teaching methods but has not created a system that delivers high-quality education to all students.
There are also common challenges across the Asia-Pacific region: how to assess problem-solving and creativity, how to harness the power of technology to transform teaching and learning, how to continually raise the quality of teaching, and how to educate an increasingly diverse body of students, including migrants.
No country has a monopoly on educational excellence. As we face the task of preparing our students for success as workers and citizens in this increasingly interconnected world, we have much to learn from each other.
The Asia Society, an international organisation, with offices in the United States and around Asia, has long brought together education policy leaders, teachers, and students from the Asia-Pacific region to do just that. And, as US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said: "We have a great deal to learn from other nations that are out-educating us today."
As the United States seeks to revise its Elementary and Secondary Education Act with the goal of providing a world-class education for all its students, it will be looking across the Pacific and around the world to learn from the experiences of other countries.
Vivien Stewart is senior adviser for education, and Heather Singmaster is senior programme associate at Asia Society in New York, asiasociety.org
Supply of engineers challenges atomic plan
Safety not major worry for mainland's programme to expand nuclear power plants
Eric Ng
Dec 13, 2010
The availability of qualified engineers is the biggest challenge facing the mainland's ambitious programme to expand the number of nuclear power plants, rather than issues of safety, uranium supply, or public opposition, according to industry experts.
Building the plants is not a difficult task, they say, but manning them with engineers with sufficient operating experience will be the ultimate test of whether growth targets can be reached.
Lloyds Register's nuclear business director Jerzy Grynblat said in an interview with the South China Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) that to qualify as "experienced", nuclear-plant operators required eight to 10 years of on-the-job practice, compared with the five-year construction period for a plant.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Nuclear Energy Asia conference organised by the International Quality & Productivity Centre in Hong Kong last week, Grynblat said this staffing requirement posed the greatest challenge to the country's nuclear-power expansion plans.
Lloyds Register provides independent safety audits and risk-management services. Its risk-analysis software is used in about half of the world's nuclear power plants.
Zhao Chengkun, vice-chairman of the China Nuclear Energy Association, said the human-resource challenge came in the form of availability of high-level management and technical specialists. He would not give an estimate of a personnel shortfall, saying this would depend on the number and pace of new project approvals.
Zhao said a nuclear plant with two 1,000-megawatt reactors would require 700 to 1,000 engineering staff to support its operation and regular maintenance, although not all of them were required to be nuclear specialists.
China is expected to build 60 nuclear reactors in the next two decades, meaning it could require up to 30,000 engineers.
According to the Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute, the number of undergraduates enrolled in nuclear engineering in China surged to 3,900 last year from 2,300 in 2008 and 1,946 in 2007.
Grynblat said any human-resource shortfall would have to be filled domestically, as importing foreign talent was not an option, given shortages in developed nations, where public adversity to nuclear power has stifled plant expansion and training of new engineers.
"The situation is like a camel's double humps, where qualified engineers are mostly either over 55 years old or between 25 and 30 years of age, with a big gap in the middle," he said.
The central government will unveil in March the National People's Congress' updated target for installed nuclear power-generation capacity in 2020, but the industry widely expects it to be about 70 gigawatts, up from 10GW currently. It also envisages 30GW of new plants to be under construction by then.
In 2005, Beijing was planning for a 2020 installed capacity of 40GW and 18GW being built. "Now, it looks like this target will be reached by 2015," Zhao said.
China has nearly 20 years of experience operating nuclear power plants since the Qinshan Phase 1 plant was commissioned in Zhejiang province in 1991, and has since introduced technology from Russia, France, Canada and the United States. It has absorbed foreign technology and successfully developed the capability of building plants completely on its own.
Not only is it ready to mass-produce nuclear reactors using mature and well-proven technologies, it is also expected to become a major exporter of reactors in the future.
The sheer size of China's plan to scale up the industry's capacity means it will be in a cost-leadership position alongside India, which also plans to expand the number of its reactors by several-fold in the next decade, said NERA Economic Consulting vice-president Edward Kee.
Despite concerns that the low quality of China's uranium ore will threaten security of the supply of nuclear fuel, supply should be sufficient until at least 2020, Zhao said.
Nor is safety a big concern, even though it is always the No1 priority for the industry anywhere in the world. "China has a very good nuclear-safety record and ranks above world average," said Grynblat. "It also has a very young fleet of plants."
He said the mainland's nuclear industry was well aware of the human-resource challenge, and had been keeping more engineers than required at its current fleet of nuclear power plants to prepare for the sharp rise in demand for qualified people.
Zhao said the government had in recent years put more resources into academic and on-the-job training, with the number of universities offering nuclear science and engineering degrees rising to more than 10 from four a few years ago. Beijing's Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xian Polytechnic University and Harbin Engineering University were the earliest to offer such courses.
State-owned nuclear-plant developers China National Nuclear Corp, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp and China Power (SEHK: 2380) Investment Corp have also set up their own professional training units, Zhao added.
Xu Mi, the China Institute of Atomic Energy's chief engineer, played down concerns of a looming engineer shortage.
"As long as we have countermeasures, I'm not worried," he said. "For example, my institute is providing two-year professional training courses for university graduates with non-nuclear engineering degrees to fill the gap."
However, industry executives said one other challenge was the promotion of public acceptance of nuclear power, especially given that more plants will be built in inland lake or riverside locations that are relatively close to population centres.
Grynblat said that as long as transport safety regulation is maintained, and promotion of safety records to the public is done properly, he was not too worried.
"Experience in other nations has shown that people living closer to nuclear power plants actually have more positive opinions of them, since they are more informed about them," he said. "For example, in Britain, local people are more worried about job losses and the impact on the local economy when plants are decommissioned rather than safety."