The Ministry of Education and Training has just issued an Action Program on strengthening discipline, building a culture of honesty, integrity and substance in educational activities.
One of the notable requirements of the program is that management officials are not assigned targets imposed on scores and the ratio of good and excellent students to teachers.
This is a correct and necessary policy to bring the spirit of "teaching truthfully, learning truthfully, testing truthfully, evaluating truthfully" into schools.
For a long time, in many educational institutions, teachers have been under pressure regarding the rate of good and excellent students, the rate of grade promotion or the rate of achieving a certain score.
In some places, these figures are also used as a basis for evaluating the level of task completion and evaluating teacher emulation.
When scores become a must-achievement target, the risk of developing a mentality of chasing achievements, distorting the assessment of students' abilities may occur.
Scoreboards can therefore be more beautiful, the proportion of good and excellent students is higher, but it does not accurately reflect the ability of learners.
However, removing the score target for teachers only solves part of the problem.
If management agencies still evaluate principals and schools mainly by the ratio of good and excellent students, the ratio of grade promotion or graduation, the pressure of achievement will still be passed down to teachers in other forms.
Therefore, along with not assigning target scores to teachers, the Education sector needs to change the way schools and management staff are evaluated.
The quality of education needs to be assessed from the actual progress of each student, the ability to support those who are still limited, and the level of safety and happiness in school.
Data on scores, the ratio of good and excellent is still necessary for management work.
However, these data must be used to identify problems, adjust teaching methods and allocate support resources, instead of becoming a tool of pressure or mechanical ranking.
A class with low input quality but students making clear progress is also commendable as a class with many excellent students because it has good quality right from the time of enrollment.
Notably, this program also links the remedy of achievement disease with the requirement to reduce records, meetings, contests, movements and non-professional tasks for teachers.
This is a reasonable approach, because it is not possible to require teachers to improve their quality if their time and energy are still heavily spent on non-professional tasks.
Not assigning target scores to teachers is a starting point. To limit achievement disease, it is necessary to continue to adjust the assessment method of schools and heads in the direction of emphasizing the quality of real education.
