In 1990, Vietnam was the Poorest Country in the World. Now, its Students are Out-Scoring America. What's Going On?
They say it's not even close -- that the poorest 10% of students in Vietnam score better than the average American on the PISA...
Intro
Vietnam’s crazy-good handling of COVID-19 drove me to learn more about the place. After all, how could a country with a per capita GDP under $4,000 dollars compete with Taiwan and South Korea for the spot of best coronavirus pandemic response in the world? Not only that, but it has also racked up impressive GDP growth numbers recently, although poverty is still far from eradicated in the country. Somehow even more interesting, however, are the PISA scores for the country. When it comes to students, the poorest 10% of the country outperform the average American student. As with all education assessments, this dazzling result comes with a proviso, which I will discuss after a brief introduction to Vietnam’s past.
Historical and Economic Background
It terms of modern history, the country has not fared well. It was literally exploited1 by French colonists for many years, who set up the “Hanoi Hilton” to torture and kill those who dared to speak up against colonialism. Then, there was an incredibly destabilizing civil war war between North and South (plus the U.S. Army). Gabriel García Márquez describes the aftermath as follows:
The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculous and more than a million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to rehabilitate into a new society. Ten percent of the population of Ho Chi Minh City was suffering from serious venereal diseases when the war ended, and there were 4 million illiterates throughout the South.
The effects were profound and long lasting — as late as 1990 it was the poorest country on the planet, with a per capita GDP that was .4% of America’s GDP per capita. Additional, Agent Orange from the Vietnam War caused a health crisis of enormous proportions.
How Well Does Vietnam Do on the PISA?
Here’s a sample of Vietnam’s impressive output — in science, Vietnam's strongest subject in 2018, it is outscoring every one of the 79 countries included in the PISA, except for three: China, Singapore, and Macau. It should be noted that two of those countries are city-states, and that China is notorious among PISA test-takers for limiting scores to certain high-performing areas. As a result, this accomplishment is even more impressive than it seems. So impressive, in fact, that you might start to doubt whether or not it’s legitimate…
Hmm, Wait a Minute…Is This Real?!
You might be growing a little suspicious at this point in time. A country where the average monthly wage is 148 dollars has its bottom economic decile of students performing better than the average US student? It sounds just a little too outside of the margins to be true…
And it kind of isn’t. It turns out, only about half of Vietnam’s students are getting tested for the PISA. And because of rigorous requirements, such as needing to pass an exam to advance from the 9th to the 10th grade, then Vietnam’s results are skewed to the right.2 Oops, it looks like the claim I put in the sub-header about the bottom decile scoring better than the average American might need some tweaking. The truth is less impressive than I made it seem — after coverage index adjustment, Vietnam’s margin of victory against the U.S. in math goes from 511 vs. 481 to 543 vs. 542.3 So wait, if there’s some serious data warping going on, where does that leave us?
Well, actually, even after this is taken into account, Vietnam is still a huge outlier. In terms of level of wealth vs. student outcome, it has no parallels. Here are two graphs from Glewwe et al., before and after adjusting for Vietnam’s low coverage index4:
(Also, if you’re having trouble locating Vietnam on the first graph [as I embarrassingly did], look around the number 500 on the y-axis).
Not convinced that Vietnam’s performance after adjustment is still wild enough to merit a closer look? Well, don’t take my unqualified word for it, IZA has a paper on Vietnam’s anomalous performance which specifically references the Glewwe piece and comes to the same conclusion5:
What do these findings tell us about Vietnam’s success in PISA? One strand of the literature scrutinizes the representativeness of the PISA sample for Vietnam (e.g. better socioeconomic status of participating children) as a source of its surprising performance in international education assessments (Glewwe, 2016). However, adjusting the educational production model in our cross-country analysis by controlling for participation rate in school did not wash out the Vietnam advantage. This is also consistent with our student-level analysis which finds that socio-economic and family background related differences of children do not explain the performance gap vis-à-vis economically advanced HPES countries such as Singapore and South Korea.
So, Vietnam is punching above its weight in a major way. If its educational system was an NBA player, it’d be Isaiah Thomas. So what exactly is going on?
Potential Cause: The Vietnamese School System Games the Test
According to Wikipedia, there is a definite phenomenon of “teaching the test” in Vietnamese schools, so we might include that as a potential reason as to why Vietnam’s scores are so good:
The higher education system has been criticised by Vietnam's diaspora, such as outdated curricula, a lecturer-centered method of teaching and learning, a lack of linkage between teaching and research activities, and a large discord between theory and practical training that leads to a large number of graduates being unable to find a job, while skills shortages drive inflation to double-digit levels. Vietnamese students perceive themselves to have a lack of knowledge despite being taught a lot due to the fact that the main purpose of studying was to pass exams or to achieve high test scores without real-life implementation.
But, there is some evidence to the contrary (that is to say, evidence that Vietnamese students are genuinely learning more than the rest of the world). For instance, the Vietnamese economy is growing like a young Dirk Nowitzki, and according to the World Economic Forum, this is due in part to “large public investments in primary education.” The Diplomat further bolsters the claim that there is genuine learning going on:
Independent assessments of learning outcomes inside Vietnamese classrooms confirm that the country’s PISA rank does not simply reflect test-taking skills or an education system that is only good on paper. According to the findings of the Young Lives project, student performance in Vietnam is truly exceptional. Around 19 out of every 20 10-year-olds can add four-digit numbers; 85 percent can subtract fractions. When compared to student performance in India, a country with similar per capita GDP, 47 percent of Indian grade 5 pupils were unable to subtract even two-digit numbers.
So I’m not sure that in the end this is a big potential cause.
Potential Cause: Strategic Use of Limited Financial Resources
Vietnam’s investment in education made me do a double-take — 21% of the gov. budget is spent on it, which is incredibly high. However, as a percentage of GDP, Vietnam is actually spending less money than America is: 6.3% vs. 7.2%. Because of the low per capita GDP in Vietnam, then despite the large educational expenditure, the average salary for Vietnamese teachers is below 100 dollars, which is very depressing to learn about.
Even though America is spending more than Vietnam on education, it might be that we are under-performing because we aren’t strategic enough with our financial resources. For example, a lot of American school districts are very corrupt — take, for example, this quip from an article about Baltimore:
The city of Baltimore’s schools are badly failing, despite spending more per capita than almost anywhere in the country. To understand why, one needs only to look where the money is going: into the pockets of crooked public education administrators.
The piece goes on to talk about the heating is broken in these schools and the students lack food (!!!). There are a lot of school districts in America, and I have no clue which ones are more corrupt than others (although I’ve heard only good things about NYC). So, instead of systematic research, I instead randomly googled big cities until I found another corruption case: 6 in San Francisco Charged with Stealing 15 Million Dollars in School Funds. How mortifying.
If you know of any other school districts that are rotten, please comment below, because I’m far from an expert in this. Altogether, though, I would not be surprised if school corruption is a significant reason why America is being far-outperformed in results-per-dollar by Vietnam.
Potential Cause: A Cultural, Rather than Financial, Investment in Teachers and Students
How Teachers are Treated
According to the guy who runs OECD Education, teachers are treated quite well in Vietnam:
Teaching is viewed as a highly respectable profession in Vietnam and math teachers, particularly those working in underprivileged schools, are exposed to more professional development than the average in OECD countries. Vietnamese teachers are able to build a positive learning environment, fostering positive attitudes towards learning among students and maintaining good discipline in the classroom.
Compare this to America, where we say things like “Those who can't do, teach!” Teaching is not very respected here, and I think we all know a couple of people who were originally passionate about being a teacher in the States but then soon realized that teachers here are treated by students the same way retail workers are treated by Karens.
How Vietnamese Schools Treat Students
It seems that the Vietnamese students are also treated a bit differently. According to the OECD (pg. 3), Vietnam has a higher “percentage of students who are in schools whose principal agrees or strongly agrees that there is a consensus among mathematics teachers that the social and emotional development of students is as important as students’ acquisition of mathematical skills and knowledge in class.” In other words, American students were more likely to be at a school where the principal didn’t think his teachers cared about the emotions and and social abilities of students (as much as their academic performances).
How Vietnamese Culture Treats Education
According to the IZA (Asadullah/Perera/Xiao), the broader culture of Vietnam could play a role in the success of its students, due to it being a CHC (Confucian Heritage Culture), such that the country succeeds due to “positive attitudes among students towards studying especially that towards mathematics and spending more time on learning and attending extra class after school. Chinese students see learning as a long process rather than as a rapid insightful process.” Apparently a lot of modern Vietnamese culture is traditional Vietnamese culture syncretized with Chinese Confucian culture, due to the Bắc thuộc.
The evidence that Confucian culture plays a significant role in Vietnam’s high score is further delineated by IZA:
Regional variation within East Asia in cultural attitudes could be an explanation for less satisfactory performance of non-CHC countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand in PISA. Existing evidence confirms a higher level of anxiety and stress in learning mathematics, and low level of mathematics self-efficacy among the Malaysian, Indonesian and Thai students have been confirmed as a reason for their underperformance in PISA (Thien and Ong, 2015).
Lastly, IZA talks about parental pressure, in relation to CHC:
Vietnam ranks 8th in terms of the level of parental pressure, reflecting the high level of commitment and parental aspiration for their children’s education, which may be owing to their Confucian heritage.
Is it possible to make American Schools “More Vietnamese?”
Parallels to Sports
Maybe importing Confucian culture to America is not as difficult as it seems. After all, the idea of meritocracy came to Europe via Voltaire via Confucius. And American culture is not so different after all — we even have our own Confucian academic analog, in the form of student sports. Instead of Tiger Moms, we have Soccer Moms. At least at my school, who got cut from tryouts was publicly available and a pretty potent source of embarrassment (much like how academic results are publicly available in Confucian countries). The highest paid public officials in many states are college coaches (!!!). There is a negative concept of being an academic “try-hard” in America, but absolutely no corresponding taboo in student sports. For students, disrespecting your coaches at the very least appears to be far less acceptable when compared to the acceptability of disrespecting your teachers. If American parents can be so obsessed about football that they push their kids to train from a young age, risking permanent brain damage, then surely there could be a big cultural push to get them to care about education more. Maybe making America “more Vietnamese,” in terms of education, is as simple as shifting cultural energies from sports to academia.
TL;DR
It’s insane that Vietnam, which was the poorest country in the world 31 years ago, is now kicking America’s ass at COVID responses and education. It has overcome brutal colonization and a civil war to get where it has gotten today.
Policy Solutions for the US:
Cut Down on Corruption in American Schools
Respect Teachers More
Make American Parents and Students Think About Education the Same Way they Think About Sports
Maybe some American politicians can visit Vietnam to learn how to implement these strategies:
I’m not being liberal with my usage of literal — it was called a “colonie d'exploitation” in official terms.
Glewwe, P., Lee, J., Vu, K., & Dang, H. A. (2017, June). What Explains Vietnam’s Exceptional Performance in Education Relative to Other Countries? Analysis of the 2012 PISA Data. In RISE Annual Conference, Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, June (pp. 15-16).
2021 PISA, in math
I guess another thing to note from these graphs is that Qatar has some sort of serious issue with its educational system, in terms of wealth vs. outcome.
Asadullah, Mohammad Niaz and Perera, Liyanage and Xiao, Saizi, Vietnam's Extraordinary Performance in the PISA Assessment: A Cultural Explanation of an Education Paradox. IZA Discussion Paper No. 13066, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3562856