Despite the massive amount of government expenditure on education, Malaysia’s primary and secondary education system still lagging behind on international rankings.
An economist has urged the government to re-evaluate the national education system as Malaysia’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores remained low in spite of the large amounts spent annually.
Malaysia was excluded from the 2015 PISA rankings as the sample size of schools for the assessment was much too small. The response rate among schools was only at 51%, when PISA required a standard rate of about 85%.
In PISA’s 2012 sample of 65 countries, Malaysia ranked in the bottom 25% – coming in 52nd for mathematics, 53rd for science and 59th for reading. This was comparable with the rankings for Thailand (50, 49, 48), Chile (51, 47, 48) and Mexico (53, 55, 51).
However, Malaysia’s government expenditure on education in 2011 was almost double of the other three countries.
“Among developing countries, Malaysia is a leader when it comes to spending on education but we are not getting enough value for the money,” Woo Wing Thye, economist at Jeffrey Cheah Institute told Free Malaysia Today. “When you look at countries with similar PISA scores, you can see that they spend much less.”
“Because other countries don’t spend as much as we do but can get similar scores, there appears to be great inefficiencies in our education system.”
Last month, prime minister Najib Razak announced plans for an overhaul of the education to help students develop relevant skill sets for the future.