New group seeks to centralize education institutions dialogue

Education scholar Carlos Vasconcelos-Lopes has established a new organization that seeks to stimulate discussion on the MSAR’s education institutions and methods.
“Eyeonschool” seeks to develop the discussion about Macau’s education institutions, ranging from pre-primary to tertiary education, by serving as a research platform to study MSAR-specific challenges, and eventually become the central reference point for students and parents.
According to the organization’s website, it intends to “hold Macau schools more accountable for ensuring that government subsidies are used appropriately and that each and every one of [their] students is on the path toward knowledge and achievement.”
Eyeonschool.com published its first post this week, titled “Adding a window to a dark room”. The article highlights parents’ perspectives of school quality, which, according to the post written by Vasconcelos-Lopes, “tends to naturally dwell [on] what is visible to the eye” and disregards more fundamental factors.
Vasconcelos-Lopes, who is a senior lecturer at USJ’s Faculty of Psychology and Education, writes that Macau’s prevalence of “market-based mechanisms of regulating education” has limited parents and students’ access to accurate information “with which to judge the merits of the educational offer of each school.”
“Parents and students, in face of the high level of [opaqueness] of local educational circumstances, can do no better than contribute to maintain the highly stratified educational system that [is inherited] from the past, with schools segregated by student socioeconomic status and academic ability,” he told the Times.
This market-regulated educational system is not something that will change anytime soon, the USJ lecturer added.
However, Vasconcelos-Lopes explained to the Times that he regards the organization as an “interest group” and cautioned that it “has no political affiliation and does not even seek to influence public educational policy.”
“The immediate aim is to grow [the organization in terms of] the number of people involved [but] it will not be easy to massively engage people, students and parents, in filling out surveys,” said Vasconcelos-Lopes.
“It will take time and, for sure, money. Of critical importance will also be our ability to engage the Chinese within Macau society,” he added.
The organization’s website is available in English, Portuguese and Chinese, with articles and posts translated into each language.
Carlos Vasconcelos-Lopes was born in colonial Mozambique, where he lived for the first 15 years of his life, before moving to Europe and later China. His academic research focuses on the effectiveness of teaching practices, the relationship between meaning and learning, and school management. Daniel Beitler

School re-sit policy

When asked about the prevalence of a policy in Macau whereby students are forced to re-sit an academic year when they do not attain the predetermined minimum grades, Carlos Vasconcelos-Lopes told the Times that research in other parts of the world suggests that the trend  appears to be a reactive strategy of ‘cropping off’.
Referring to studies conducted in the United States, Chile and New Zealand, Vasconcelos-Lopes says that in some cases it can be “[a] useful [mechanism] for offloading students with learning difficulties who are difficult to teach (expensive) and [who] get poor results.”
“Another trend of the same sort also observed, which paradoxically nobody is writing or broadcasting about  in Macau, and which indeed can be seen as the other side of ‘cropping off’ strategy, is the ‘cream skimming’ strategy,” he added.
This means the maximum rejection of applicants “who are not higher ability students – who are not the students who gain the best results and are easy to teach (cost less).”
However, he also warned that studies in these areas in Macau are not very conclusive, possibly because contrary evidence is also observable. DB