I’m unfortunately not in Hong Kong at the moment and cannot experience the outpouring of civil disobedience. Some of the images and stories are simply amazing. My favourite so far is a YouTube video made by a drone flying over the swarms of protesters:

I also find it refreshing to hear the University of Hong Kong strongly supporting the student-lead protests. Here’s an email I received this morning from Peter Mathieson, President and Vice-Chancellor of the university:

We are deeply concerned about our students and staff in these extraordinary times in Hong Kong and therefore the President, Provost, Registrar and Dean of Student Affairs held an emergency meeting with student and staff representatives at the university this evening.

The University of Hong Kong profoundly regrets the escalation of events in recent days. We condemn violence of any kind by any party. We cannot understand the use of tear gas yesterday: the police and the government are accountable for that decision.

Our institutional policy towards class boycotts and staff absences are as previously stated but we will be flexible and reasonable in understanding the actions of students and staff who wish to express their strongly-held views. We repeat our plea for all parties to express such views peacefully and constructively; to always protect their own safety and that of others; and to engage in constructive dialogue, not in conflict.

We will also be flexible in understanding practical difficulties that staff and students may face in reaching the campus during periods of transport disruption and we advise all staff and students to adopt a “safety first” attitude.

It’s amazing to witness from afar the peaceful protests. Free water and snacks are being handed out. Protesters are helping elderly people cross the crowded streets. The protesters have made their opening move: they will camp on the main thoroughfares, peacefully and politely; they will not fight or riot, despite the government’s initial response of firing tear gas.

With increased pressure from Beijing, however, the tension is mounting. Beijing has called the protests unlawful and supports the Hong Kong government’s attempt to quell the unrest. The next moves by the government will be watched very closely: too harsh a move could turn the civil disobedience into violent unrest. Too weak a move could trigger a negative reaction by Beijing. This is a delicate situation that could get a lot worse before it gets better.

The Development Research Forum of Cambodia recently held a conference entitled “Getting Education Right for Cambodia’s Changing Labour Market Needs: Reform and Policy Research Priorities” at the massive Hotel Cambodiana in Phnom Penh. During a Plenary Session entitled “Public-Private Partnerships for Quality Labour-Market Responsive Education in Cambodia – What needs to be done? What are the policy reform research implications?” a Labor Ministry spokesman Heng Sour, who is the director general of administration and finance, said:

I agree that the government must take responsibility to produce skilled workers…but it is also [in] the interest of the private sector to acknowledge that if they invest a dollar in a skilled worker or in productivity improvement, the return on their investment is higher.

So why does the government sector still need to stick to the classic principle that lets government alone do [this]?

Although Cambodia is a little late to the public-privte partnership party compared to other countries (for example, the Moroccan government was recently challenged over its privatisation efforts at a meeting of the UN committee on the Rights of the Child), it seems a shift is underway within the Royal government that will produce an increased level of, and reliance on, the private sector to provide educational services. This is relatively new because historically, at least since the early 1990s, privatisation was mainly informal—that is, various public school costs were passed to households in the form of fees, such as private tutoring costs paid directly to public schoolteachers in order to increase meagre salaries. Heng Sour is hinting at a totally different type of educational privatisation that is, at best, nascent: for-profit companies spending money on education. I suspect we’ll hear similar language in the near future and eventually see policy reforms that will allow for an increased role of private, for-profit companies in education.

Photo: General Commissariat of National Police’s Facebook Page

The 2014 Cambodian grade 12 examination concluded with only a few reported cases of cheating. Last year, an estimated half million US dollars was spent on various bribes and cheat-sheets by students, mainly funnelled to teaches in hopes of obtaining a passing grade. Whereas years previous saw huge lines of students at photocopy centres printing examination cheat sheets just prior to the school bell, this year saw long lines of students slowly entering testing centres as each student was individually frisked (see photo above).

The 11-month campaign by Education Minister Hang Chuon Naron to eliminate corruption seems to have paid off. Naron told Xinhua news at the conclusion of the two day examination:

During this year’s exam, there was no cheating because proctors have strictly frisked all candidates for cheat sheets before allowing them to seat for exams.

Even Rong Chhun, the president of Cambodian Independent Teachers’ Association and no friend of the ruling party, lauded the examination:

This year’s exam was much better than those in previous years and is acceptable.

The reforms to the examination system under Naron included: (1) limiting the creation of the examination to only a small group of “trusted” people in order to eliminate leakage; (2) checking all students before entering school, so no phones or cheat sheets were brought in; (3) allowing the anti-corruption unit to monitor inside the classrooms in all 150+ test centres and giving monitors the power to eject students/proctors accordingly; (4) allowing independent monitors to stand outside of all classrooms to watch the monitors for any irregularities; and (5) using an awareness campaign that threatened jail time for any one caught cheating—student or teacher alike. One student captured the draconian environment created by these reforms as such:

It’s damn strict this year. 

Overall, it’s an incredible feat for an examination that has long (long) experienced some level of cheating. Moreover, that the ministry of education admitted cheating was a problem and decided to address it is a huge change of rhetoric and action. In 2007, for instance, then education minister Kol Pleng said, 

We cannot make comment before we have a meeting, but [these allegations] are nothing new. The allegation of cheating on exams happens every year, but in reality there is none.

This 2007 comment is interesting because in 2002 there was another attempt at eliminating cheating. The 2002 reform efforts included the use of computers to score examinations (and thus eliminating the possibility of lenient grading by human teachers) and orienting questions towards university admission (and thus making the actual test harder). These reforms worked: Whereas in 1998, UNESCO reported that 79 percent of students passed the grade 12 examination, after the reforms in 2002, over 60 percent of students failed. Of those lucky students who did pass, most scored D or E grades, which are at the lower end of the passing grade spectrum. Indeed, only three students got A’s, 28 got B’s, and 435 got C’s.

Past education minister Kol Pleng either forgot the 2002 episode of examination reforms entirely, or clearly remembered them as something not to be repeated. In 2007, under his watch, the passing rate reached nearly 73 percent. Since then, the rate has climbed above 80 percent, almost double the 2002 rate. Cheating, even if unacknowledged by the ministry, returned to normal. 2002 was an outlier.

Although this year’s results aren’t due out until the end of August, I suspect we will see a repeat of 2002. The passing rate will plummet, and, as a consequence, 2014 higher education admission rates will decline (students must pass the grade 12 examination to gain entry to higher education). This will only leave students and families disappointed. As one parent put it:

I just want him to get a good grade and be allowed to go to college.

If this does happen, what will the minister of education do? Will cheating return in order to give parents and students hope of finding higher paid employment by going to university like it did post-2002? Will the passing rate be lowered like it was for the 9th grade examination in order to allow more students to pass, thus keeping the anti-cheating reforms in place? Will the focus shift to education provision to increase quality? History shows the likely status quo is for a return to cheating as normal, but social change is always possible. Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of a totally new examination structure. Only time will tell.

That’s the latest from the Phnom Penh Post, which has a lively education beat worth following. In its articles on what I’m calling the “protests over private tutoring“, the Post implies that students who didn’t pass the second semester exam where the ones who didn’t attend private tutoring:

Hun Sen Taing Kork High School’s 52 failing students petitioned the ministry this week to allow them to retake their exams on the grounds their teachers unfairly rewarded students who could pay for extra tutoring.

Is the connection between passing and tutoring so straight forward? How many students had to attend private tutoring in order to pass? That’s a question unlikely to be definitively answered because of the secrecy involved in the business.

Nevertheless, there is some data we can use to understand the phenomenon. A 2012 report found that 94.3 percent of surveyed students had attended extra classes before the national high school exit examination.  Although the second semester test is different than the national exit examination and correlation doesn’t mean causation, the data is revealing. At the very least, that nearly all students attended extra classes suggests these classes are perceived to be necessary for the education of grade 12 students.

But did all teachers who conduct extra lessons give away answers or prepare students in unfair ways? That’s much harder to answer because generalisations can’t be made across the diversity of teachers and their practices. My firsthand experiences are mixed. On the one hand, teachers I’ve interviewed say they don’t give away answers to the test during extra lessons and if they do prepare students before the examination,they do so only by using past examinations that are public. That doesn’t seem unfair to me—aside from the inherent inequality of putting up a fee to attend extra classes—but maybe it’s just the teachers protecting themselves from self-incrimination. On the other hand, I’ve known students who had to pay $100 to their teachers to obtain a passing grade on the national exit exam. When I enquired where this money goes, the student told me the teachers the majority of it to the principal who then pays the majority of it the ministry officials. Money flows upwards, each person taking a small cut as it passes through their hands. The point being, the corruption isn’t teachers alone but actually part of a larger system based on patron-client relations.

What we do know for sure is that more research is needed in this shadowy businesses of extra classes and examinations.

The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) just published a “rigorous literature review” on the political economy of education systems in developing countries. In it, the authors cite work I collaborated on with Iveta Silova in 2012/13 (see page 23). The cited work concerns teachers in Southeast/Central Europe and Southeast Asia who conduct private tutoring as a way to teach material not approved by the national government. The authors of the report place this work in the section entitled “rent seeking and patronage politics.” Private tutoring for the report’s authors is an example of patronage politics in education.

Iveta and my larger point in the cited piece was that although private tutoring can be conceptualised as a neoliberal space of education (i.e., it’s fee-based, based on choice, and necessary because government’s have reduced education spending), some teachers who actively use (and therefore create) these spaces nevertheless do so politically to undermine neoliberal reforms in education (i.e., pedagogical methods like student centred learning and curriculum standards). We called it the “double entendre” of private tutoring. You can read the full piece here.

A group of some 50 Cambodian grade 12 students are protesting their second semester exam results in Kampong Thom province. Failing the exam makes these students ineligible to sit the national high school exit exam in August, which is the sole factor for public university placement.

The reason for failing? That’s disputed.

The principal claims it’s because the students didn’t try hard enough. That may be true in some cases, but unlikely overall for two reasons. First, the bar to pass the exam is set very low. Students must correctly answer half of the questions on the exam in order to pass. That means a score of 50 percent—a failing grade by most standards—counts as passing on the semester exam. Second, the total number of students who failed equal one-third of the grade 12 population. It is unlikely such a large number of students failed when the bar to pass is so low.

The students claim they failed because of the structural inequality built into the system of education. Most of the students who failed couldn’t afford private tutoring classes, which are held by their mainstream schoolteachers. From my experience, these classes are necessary because teachers are underpaid and the school day is too short to adequately teach the curriculum. Without the extra classes, the students were unlikely to have mastered the material on the examination.

But some of the students’ claims are more sinister than short school days or an overloaded curriculum. They point to revenge-like behaviour by the teachers. Since teachers tutor their own students and also grade the monthly and semesterly exams, they have undue power over students’ scores. If a student doesn’t go to and pay for private tutoring classes, then the teacher, who lost out on some amount of money, could use her or his grading power to punish the students with failing grades.

The real story probably will never be known. Grading practices, tutoring classes, and their overlap aren’t transparent processes. Nevertheless, I tend to shy away from individualising the problem either as a student’s failure to comprehend material (as the principal suggests) or as system-wide teacher corruption (as the Phnom Penh Post suggests). Instead, I would focus on the structural issues that necessarily exclude some students who do not go to private tutoring classes because of cost barriers or non-school related time commitments. There are surely cases of students who didn’t study enough and teachers who took advantage of their situation, but it isn’t likely to explain the entire effect.

That’s Hun Sen’s during the opening of the newly built, Japanese funded Aeon Mall in Phnom Penh. He continued:

Please, all youths, try to work hard for the success of the mall. If Aeon does not make profits, the mall bosses will not increase your salaries…There is no need to protest to destroy the mall … don’t become good at protesting or create any protests that will make Aeon shut down.

By the way he is speaking, Hun Sen seems to believe his biggest challenge to power is the growing generational divide. On one side of the divide, there are the older Cambodians who suffered through the Khmer Rouge and want nothing other than stability, even if it is provided in an authoritarian manner. On the other side are the (mainly urban) youth who grew up influenced by global capitalism—as symbolised by the Aeon mall—and international flows of people and ideas through tourism, global civil society, and the proliferation of the media/internet. The concept of change to the latter group is no threat and in some cases actually cherished. It appears Hun Sen’s strategy to deal with this divide is to latch on to a consumer culture as a way to depoliticise youth.

But will it work? As I pointed out in an earlier post, the diversity of people I witnessed protesting suggests the problem may be larger than a generational divide. Three years ago, in a small village in north east Cambodia, an elderly woman handed me a flier promoting Sam Rainsy, who at that time was in self-exile in France. She said in hushed tones so as not to be heard by others, “He’s going to come back to Cambodia and save our country.” When I asked if her neighbours would be upset hearing her say this, she replied that everyone in the village thinks this. It’s just that no one feels comfortable saying these things because someone from the ruling party may overhear and inflict punishment. Three years later, many people from that same village are joining the protests against the ruling party.

Political movements don’t happen in an instant. It is small incremental changes to the situated lives of local people that collectively propel political movements forward. This  history slowly produces an environment where a “flash point”—like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up a seat to a white woman—could galvanise enough of the country to forego the purchasing of goods at Aeon Mall and embrace instability in the prospect of profound societal change.

It’s no surprise that many Cambodians in the country’s north east illegally migrate to Thailand for work. Simply put: There’s more work in Thailand than in Cambodia. Illegal migration, of course, has some serious consequences, especially for the worker:

But informal work in Thailand remains risky. While Cambodians are lured by relatively high wages, they represent a way for Thai managers to cut costs by paying them less. Because employees have no papers and representation, they must work at the whim of the boss.

At best, this translates to sub-standard living conditions and low pay. Often, too, it has resulted in unsafe or abusive working conditions, indentured servitude, or outright theft. At the extreme end, the situation has allowed for enslavement and trafficking, with Cambodians who arrive intending to work on construction sites or farms being sold as virtual slaves on Thai fishing trawlers.

In 2015, the Association of South East Asian Nations will form an economic community. This is a free trade zone across the ten member nations. With the legal mobility of people across the ASEAN region as a result of the economic integration, will such brutality of migrant workers be reduced? I suspect the the “whim of the boss” will simply morph into new forms of worker oppression. After all, that’s the history of capital vs the worker.

Two pieces I co-wrote have recently been published. The first is a book chapter co-written with Colin Webster on the discursive politics of global citizenship within international schools located in Central and Eastern Europe. It appears in Daphne Hobson and Iveta Silova’s new book  Globalizing Minds: Rhetoric & Realities in International Schools. You can read the full chapter here (pdf).

The second piece is a short commentary on the 2013/14 Education For All Global Monitoring Report. My colleague D. Brent Edwards, Jr. and I commented on the need to expand our conceptualisation of the spaces of schooling. We argue that education can’t be artificially separated  into “public” and “private” spaces because many of these spaces are hybrid and overlap. The piece was published in Norrag News and can be downloaded here (pdf).

Leave it to Hun Sen to turn every event into a political opportunity. Amid rumours that he suffered a stroke on Sunday, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen held a press conference on Tuesday to clear the air. He said he had a meeting with the King on Friday and then played golf over the weekend. For those who were surprised to hear he may have flown to Singapore for medical treatment, he responded in the third-person, “Don’t expect to see Hun Sen’s death.” His non-answer to the outstanding question surrounding a possible stroke was later politicised: “If I really die,” Hun Sen warned, “you must pack your bags and run away or you may die of any incidents because no one can control the armed forces.” This comment was clearly targeted at the opposition party. Hun Sen wants the public to understand: “I’m the only person who can order all types of armed forces.” In other words, if Hun Sen looses power even in the event of death, then the armed forces—both the Royal Armed Forces and his personal militia—will take power over the country, presumably like Thailand. It is only Hun Sen—and not the opposition party—who is able to tame the military.