Weak students will widen economic gap in Malaysia, say parent-teacher groups
(TMI) – Malaysia is sitting on a powder keg as a significant group of young Malaysians are struggling in school and look set to join the underprivileged and low-income class while teachers obsess over top scorers, say parent-teacher groups.
They said this group would leave the education system and would have little hope of social mobility and contribute to the growing chasm between the have and have-nots in the country.
“The government must correct this socio-economic imbalance because that is what it is,” National Council of Parent-Teacher Associations chairman Associate Professor Datuk Muhammad Ali Hassan told The Malaysian Insider.
Ali said weak students often came from low-income families who could not afford to send their kids to extra tuition classes and even provide enough nutritious meals for their growing children.
“We must not just invest in the brightest but also in the poorest and weakest. They cannot be ignored because they, too, have the potential to contribute to society,” he said.
He was responding to The Malaysian Insider’s report yesterday which showed that low-performing students were on average between two and three years behind their peers who were in top-scoring classes.
Education groups such as Teach for Malaysia (TFM) and Teach for the Needs (TFTN) said that a majority of these students come from low-income families, where the importance of doing well in school was not drummed into them.
At the same time, the bureaucracy in the national school system foists too much administrative work on teachers to the point that it decreases the amount of time they can allocate for students in classrooms.
Coupled with pressures to complete subject syllabuses by the end of the school term, teachers often do not have the time to focus on making sure that slower students understand class material, said TFM and TFTN officers.
Ali suggested that the government create residential schools in urban and rural areas specifically for children from poor families much like residential schools have been created for high-performing students.
Together with teachers trained in counselling and motivation, these schools could provide a supportive environment for poor students to learn and grow compared with their home living conditions, he said.
Parents Action Group for Education (PAGE) said some schools pushed away concerned parents who could help plug the gaps in student performance.
“In some schools, parents can only get access once a year during report card day. If a parent is in the parent-teacher association, we only get to meet the teachers during the annual general assembly.
“But this is not enough. There should be a two-way partnership,” PAGE chairman Datin Noor Azimah Rahim told The Malaysian Insider.
