Reward Structure of Vietnamese Education

Reward structure of Vietnamese education

Have you ever wondered why some international Asian students do exceptionally well in math or science subjects and some just so struggle in school? The answer is that the education system in Asia creates only a small portion of outstanding students. Many factions affect the education; however, the reward structure of these countries causes the most critical impact on teaching quality. Particularly, in Vietnam, the Ministry of Education and Training has established a reward system that causes set-back in teaching quality, while in fact tries to encourage teaching effort.

To understand the situation, we have to take a closer look at what cause the teachers to shrink their inputs. In Vietnamese schooling system, the standard salary for a teacher is 35 US dollars each month. After every three years, the standard wage rate will increase by one level. If the teacher works for 30 years, his or her salary can reach approximately to 200 dollars per month. The Vietnam GDP per capita is 3,400 US Dollars. Therefore, Vietnamese teacher’s salary is not high. However, no matter how many years the instructor has been teaching, he or she can earn bonus each month by either having certain percentage of outstanding students or having a good class standard. The outstanding students are not only evaluated base on their grade, but also have to meet many criteria such as good behavior, punctuality, and attendance. In contrast, if a student appears to have problem with absenteeism or tardiness, his or her teacher will bear negative effect. Any absenteeism or tardiness that has been recorded, no matter what the reason is (sickness, family issue, city traffic problem), will cause cutback in teacher’s salary. Therefore, the primary goal is not teaching; the goal is chasing after achievement. The teachers will do any mean to keep the class at good standard. Although the teacher sometime has to reluctantly grant day-off for sick student, he or she will either encourage or intimidate to make that student to go to school. Furthermore, teacher will not grant any absenteeism for a student with the reason of personal affair such as close family death since being generous of allowing student to have day-off or to be late is the same meaning of sacrifice bonus money each month. In teaching, the teachers usually design the course to contain high advance material. Since the teachers only need small amount of outstanding students to earn some bonus, they can be careless about the rest of the class and only focus on those excellent students. If these exceptional good students win any subject competition, the bonus will become even bigger. We can clearly see that the bonus reward system has unintentionally reward the A behavior of chasing achievement while trying to stimulate B behavior: teaching. Realizing the problem, I propose an alternative