Vietnam’s education system: how coherent is it for learning?

London, J.D.

doi:doi:10.35489/BSG-RISE-WP_2023/131

The disappointing performance of education systems in developing countries in improving learning outcomes has spurred research aimed at establishing what features of education systems determine their effectiveness or failure in improving learning outcomes. There has been special interest in the challenge of making education systems more coherent for learning, i.e., developing systems in which accountability relations among stakeholders across key elements of education policy design support and sustain strong learning outcomes. In the emergent literature on the political economy of education, a great deal of attention has been directed at Vietnam, a lower-middle income country whose results on assessments of learning have been vastly higher than all other countries in its income group and have even surpassed learning assessment results of many OECD countries. This has led to a raft of research papers asking, “how did Vietnam do it?” Addressing this question, this paper explores...Show moreThe disappointing performance of education systems in developing countries in improving learning outcomes has spurred research aimed at establishing what features of education systems determine their effectiveness or failure in improving learning outcomes. There has been special interest in the challenge of making education systems more coherent for learning, i.e., developing systems in which accountability relations among stakeholders across key elements of education policy design support and sustain strong learning outcomes. In the emergent literature on the political economy of education, a great deal of attention has been directed at Vietnam, a lower-middle income country whose results on assessments of learning have been vastly higher than all other countries in its income group and have even surpassed learning assessment results of many OECD countries. This has led to a raft of research papers asking, “how did Vietnam do it?” Addressing this question, this paper explores Vietnam’s education system’s coherence for learning through an analysis of accountability relations across three key elements of education policy design — delegation, finance, and information. Our aim is to ascertain how features of these policy elements’ practice may variously support or undermine the Communist Party of Vietnam’s objective of promoting quality education and improved learning outcomes for all. The potentially surprising answer to the “how coherent” question posed in the title is, not really that much. Analysis finds that Vietnam’s education system remains weakly "coherent around learning" and is best understood as a “formal process compliant” system that, despite its many strengths, is nonetheless underperforming relative to its potential. The implications of this for efforts to enhance the system’s performance around learning are explored in brief.
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Vietnam’s education system: how coherent is it for learning?