Asians top in Australia’s high school entrance test
By IANSSaturday, July 3, 2010
MELBOURNE - Children of Asian migrants outperform their English-speaking counterparts in the entrance test of selective top high schools in Australia.
Analysis shows that 42 percent of children from non-English speaking backgrounds who sat for the annual selective high school entrance test in 2009 won a place in the elite system, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
The percentage of successful students from English-speaking families were less than 23 percent.
The success rate of students from migrant families in the selective system has risen dramatically from 29 percent in 1995 to 62 percent in 2008. The figure is sharply skewed towards children from Asian-origin families.
Students whose families speak other languages comprise a little more than one-quarter of the total public school population, the paper said.
Many of the successful students are graduates of the burgeoning network of private coaching institutions which offer special “opportunity class” and courses for selective exams. Such institutions are dominated by children of recent migrants.
According to the Department of Education, these classes are designed to provide “intellectual stimulation and an educationally enriched environment for academically gifted and talented children”.
“Anglo families have a different sense of what a child’s life should look like and they are really concerned about narrowing a child’s life down to passing the selective school entrance test,” says Craig Campbell, a Sydney University academic and co-author of School Choice, a book on how parents negotiate the school market. “But they’re having to change because of the competition.”
High school principals, worried about losing students and prestige, are said to be pushing hard to establish selective streams in their schools, Campbell said.
The selective system was expanded this year with 600 more places created through the establishment of 14 partially selective high schools, where a high-achieving stream has been added to a comprehensive high school.
