Will Brehm 3:36
Jonathan London, welcome to FreshEd.

Jonathan London 3:38
Thank you.

Will Brehm 3:39
So, Vietnam was called a “star performer” in the 2016 PISA test. Can you briefly explain why Vietnam is considered sort of an outlier in the education results from the OECD?

Jonathan London 3:52
Well, there’s two answers to that question, and they’re both interesting. One can be answered in that Vietnam has performed much better than all other countries in its income group. So, it’s gotten education results that simply far outperform other middle-income countries and low-income countries. And no other country in the world has achieved such strong, measured learning outcomes at those levels of income. In fact, Vietnam’s results in the assessment are higher in some areas than countries such as the United States or the UK. But the other more interesting question or equally interesting question, which is exactly what this paper that I’ve written is about, is indeed how did Vietnam achieve these results? What did Vietnam do? And so, you know, on the one hand, the backdrop of this paper is Vietnam’s very impressive results in these international assessments of learning, but then the real question of interest is, well, what’s going on here?

Will Brehm 5:07
So, what is going on? In what ways is Vietnam special to become an outlier and become unique when it comes to learning outcomes?

Jonathan London 5:19
Well, Vietnam is special in a lot of ways. And I think we can agree that all countries are special, and all countries are unique. And so precisely, the challenge is just to sort of understand what features of Vietnam as a country, what features of its politics, of its system of public governance, even of its culture, can explain these learning outcomes? And then the other question, of course, is, what, if anything, states and other stakeholders in other countries can learn from Vietnam’s experience?

Will Brehm 6:00
So, let’s take the first question and think about some of these features, right? What sort of features can you point to that might be part of the explanation as to why Vietnam did so well?

Jonathan London 6:10
Well, I think there’s a lot going on, and those familiar with comparative education, one of the perhaps first things that people might say is, “Well, look at where Vietnam is. Vietnam is in East Asia. And you have these countries with histories of venerating education, and you have relatively strong public bureaucracies.” And indeed, if you look, for example, for previous outliers, that is countries that did particularly well -say, for example, you know, Korea, which is an exceptional performer in education- there are some shared cultural attributes. But that doesn’t particularly help us to explain why, for example, Vietnam is doing better today than it was in the past, or a host of other aspects of Vietnam’s performance. So, one of the things that I try to do is, while not dismissing the significance of culture, per se, is to consider other factors. And I’m particularly interested in exploring features of Vietnam’s political system because this, as I’ll say more about, is a very striking feature of social life in Vietnam.

Will Brehm 7:34
So, for listeners who don’t necessarily know too much about the Vietnamese political system, how would you describe it?

Jonathan London 7:40
Well, of course, Vietnam is ruled by the Communist Party. And the Communist Party of Vietnam has been around almost a century. But it was in 1954 that it achieved its ultimate defeat of French attempts to regain its colonial domination. Vietnam declared independence, of course, in 1945, after a lengthy anti-colonial struggle, and the Communist Party tried to build a state socialist sort of society, in the north of the country between 1954 and 1975 while waging, of course, a major war. And then, after 1975, tried to extend that system. So, since 1975, Vietnam has been under the unified rule of the Communist Party. And the Communist Party is quite simply a dominant organization that shapes all aspects of social life and interpenetrates the bureaucracy at all levels, and has a membership of 4 to 5 million party members who are very active not only in places of work and in the government, but also in communities and of course, throughout the education system.

Will Brehm 8:52
So, how does it fit into the education system?

Jonathan London 8:55
Well, I’ll say a bit more about that. But what I can say is something that’s commonly observed with respect to countries such as Vietnam, and China, and other countries with strongly authoritarian political systems is that you know, in all countries, education systems, of course, play a vitally important socialization role transmitting dominant values and norms and things of this nature. But this is especially pronounced in countries, such as Vietnam and China, where promoting culture of political conformity is such a vitally important aspect of the education system’s mission. And so, part of what’s happening in all education systems everywhere, are there dominant forces in society are transmitting norms and things of this nature. But in countries like China and Vietnam, for example, this is an especially salient feature and a really important impetus for expanding the education system. So, I’ll have much more to say about Vietnam’s politics, but it’s important to recognize that although the Communist party doesn’t explain everything about Vietnam, it is a central feature of social life. And indeed, of the education system.

Will Brehm 10:21
For an everyday student, for instance, what would it mean to go to school and be embedded within this sort of larger Communist organization that is impacting all features of life? And how might political conformity be experienced by children going to school?

Jonathan London 10:41
Well, first thing that child will do on a daily basis is put on their red scarf, which is, you don’t want to call it a color, but you know, a red scarf, and it’s, of course, a powerful political symbol. And so, you are entering into that kind of organizational setting. But you’ll be attending a school, and the vast majority of schools at primary and secondary education are, of course, run -in fact, all primary schools are run by the state. Most principals will be members of the party, as will many teachers as well. So, you know, schools are educational institutions, but they are also part of a larger political institution. And as we’ll see, this actually brings certain advantages. So, there are, of course, these strange aspects about political indoctrination and things of this nature. But on the other hand, and without romanticizing how integrated the system is, it is nonetheless the case that Vietnam’s education system is thoroughly integrated, and in a sense, hardwired, with this perpetual political process, which is the Communist Party of Vietnam, which is always an active organization. It’s in motion. And as I’ll talk more about a bit later, this does have quite practical implications. And indeed, confers the education system in Vietnam with certain capabilities and certain elements that are absent in a lot of other countries with similar income levels. So, the fact that Vietnam is a society that has a history of veneration for education, the fact that it is a country that struggled for its independence against a brutal and very exclusionary variety of French colonialism that did not make education available, the fact that the Communist Party has always put at the center of its platform, expanding education for all people. These are vitally important aspects of Vietnam’s history, of Vietnam’s political culture, and even Vietnam’s education culture. Now, there are a lot of questions to be asked about the content of education. But what I will tell you straight away is that these aspects of Vietnam give the country’s education system a sort of patriotic zeal that I think is probably pretty remarkable in world terms.

Will Brehm 13:20
And how then does these different features -you know, so it creates a patriotic zeal- but how does that translate into sort of quality, right? Increasing the quality of education? And then potentially, that quality is being measured in terms of learning outcomes, and those have an increased, perhaps, to a greater extent than other comparable countries? So, how does it actually play out then?

Jonathan London 13:44
Well, I think there’s a few things going on here. One of the thing that is going on is that the Communist Party has made a real ideological commitment, and indeed a political commitment -it’s not simply rhetoric- to expanding education. And so, over the last 20 or 30 years, there’s been quite a lot of progress in expanding education. This is reflected in Vietnam’s very high levels of net enrollment. Even at the primary level, it’s nearly universal. Lower secondary education there has been a lot of gains in expanding enrollment. And the Communist Party also devotes about 20% of its annual budget to education. Now, there are really important questions such as, where does that money go? And there are not readily available answers to those questions. So, there are some issues there. But Vietnam does spend a higher share of its GDP, even compared to other countries in Southeast Asia, on its education system. With respect to quality, it’s one thing to get kids into school and another thing to actually get them learning. And the whole impetus for this global RISE program (Research on Improving Systems of Education), which I am presently involved working on Vietnam, is precisely this gap between, on the one hand, great gains and getting more kids into school, and on the other hand, in most countries not really seeing a lot of improvement in learning. And so, Vietnam is unusual in that it has both expanded access to education and also has these very impressive learning outcomes. So, part of what’s going on is that not only is the government gotten more kids into school, but the quality of education that is being offered, comparatively speaking, compared to other countries at Vietnam’s income level, is impressive. Now, there are a whole bunch of quality issues in Vietnam. And there are questions about which student’s learning is being assessed. And there are also variation in the quality of education across regions, across urban and rural, even within localities, and even within public schools. And I’ll say a bit more about that later, as well, is that these quality concerns -which, of course, are concerns in all countries- are complex in the Vietnam context. But in general, the education system does comparatively better than most in the world at that income level in getting kids to school and getting them to learn. And part of it is not only the rhetorical political commitment but the political will that has been exhibited in Vietnam over two or three decades.

Will Brehm 16:28
In your new working paper for RISE, you bring up this idea of, in Vietnam, there are a very high level of decentralization in the school system, which is perhaps on the surface a bit strange given the centralization of the Communist Party. So, how does decentralization and issues of accountability fit into this picture of trying to understand the quality of education that the Vietnam system has been able to produce in the last few years?

Jonathan London 16:55
It’s a really interesting mix of phenomena that we observe in Vietnam, because on the one hand -and I think this is a really important point to make and indeed does reflect certain socialist aspects of Vietnam’s politics- is that the country is ruled by a state with a commitment to redistributive fiscal policy to spreading the wealth. And so, there’s only about 10 of 63 provinces in Vietnam that have significant surpluses. And some of them, such as Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, the Hanoi area, these are massive contributors to the central budget, and that those resources are redistributed across provinces. So, that’s been a very significant element in the Communist Party’s ability to expand education across provinces. At the same time, particularly over the last 20 years or so, there has been a movement toward decentralization, as we see in so many countries. And you know, on the one hand, this is driven, at least, for those who are sort of “romantic economists,” by the idea that local actors have a better sense of what’s needed and can therefore more efficiently allocate resources. But as we observe, in a lot of countries very frequently, it’s about political expediency. And it’s about politicians at the central level winning political support by conferring greater authority and discretion to local folks. Of course, having local people make decisions can generate a lot of benefits. I don’t want to categorically dismiss the possibility that decentralization can be helpful, but in the Vietnam context, what this has done is given provinces more discretion over how they allocate resources for education. And what we have observed in Vietnam, on the one hand, is the presence of central budgeting norms so that provinces are expected to allocate 20% or whatever on education. But then beyond that, what we see is strikingly absent norms regarding what provinces -not even how they’re supposed to allocate resources- but what they can and cannot do. And so, things begin to be quite interesting here because there are a set of political resolutions at the level of the central Communist Party about what the party wants to try to achieve. But then provinces have a lot of leeway in deciding how they’re going to allocate their resources. And so, one of the things that we’re exploring when looking at Vietnam is not simply, “Oh, Vietnam does well, isn’t that great?” But actually, and this is perhaps something that will be surprising to outside observers, for most Vietnamese folks, the education system is not performing well. It’s performing poorly. And this is another striking aspect, most Vietnamese people acknowledged that the country does pretty well in getting kids to school and there’s pride in the country’s education system, but there is agreement across many diverse sort of brands of Vietnam’s society that the education system could be performing better still. And so, to bring this back to decentralization, the idea is that if provinces can figure out how to allocate their resources in a way to better address problems in the education system, then the country could perhaps do still better than it has with respect to getting good education outcomes.

Will Brehm 20:30
Is there any inequality across the provinces in any ways in terms of the amount of funding, in terms of sort of the quality -in whatever way it’s measured- quality of education?

Jonathan London 20:40
Yeah, I mean, there are certainly regions of the country, in particular, the Northwest, which is a mountainous area, the Central Highlands, which of course, is mountainous, and then surprisingly, even the Mekong Delta, which in income terms does better, but in education not so good. And so, there are some interesting -you know, on the one hand, you have these areas of the country that have problems with poverty, but on the other hand, a little-known secret of Vietnam’s fiscal system is that actually the Mekong Delta and the southeast get relatively less in per capita terms of central transfers from the state budget than do other regions of the country.

Will Brehm 21:19
Is there a reason for that?

Jonathan London 21:20
Well, I mean, it’s a fascinating question, and I’m really eager to dive into this. But you know, the traditional heartland of the Communist Party is in the Red River Delta and Northeast region. So, it raises interesting hypotheses, but I need to dig into that a bit further.

Will Brehm 21:41
If people in Vietnam -often it sounds like want their education system to perform better. They’re not as sort of awestruck as perhaps some foreigners are, like us. How have the PISA results themselves been received in Vietnam? Do you know?

Jonathan London 21:58
Yeah, basically, it’s a mix of pride and skepticism. It’s sort of like the Janus-faced state, right? On the one hand, you’re looking out to the rest of the world and saying, “Hey, look at this, this is pretty good.” And there’s a lot of praise heaped on Vietnam. It went from backwater to international poster child for export economy, and now achievements in education. And the important thing is to make the step of, “Hey, this is impressive!”. I mean, it is kind of impressive that this country was able to do this. There’s no doubt about it. And at the same time, what’s going on with the measurements? That’s one question. There have been these controversies about how the assessment was administered. But then also what features of the education system produce good outcomes on assessments. And so, one of the critiques of the education system is that it essentially is geared toward helping kids to perform well on tests but less so with respect to critical thinking skills, for example, or teamwork skills. And so, there have been various efforts to try to address those deficient aspects of the education system. But back to the question within Vietnam, and even for example within the party, there is this sort of mix of, “Hey, look, we’re doing something good.” And even the party can look to its domestic population, saying, “Look, we’re doing great. Let’s be proud of our achievements as a country and see what the party can do for you and has done for Vietnam.” But then on the other hand, again, even people within the education system saying, “Hold on a second, what’s actually being measured here?”. So, you have this sort of mix of viewpoints. Now, the last thing I’ll say on this is that the education system, as it is experienced by tens of millions of Vietnamese young people and their families, is a full-on experience of getting in the doors of the education system, getting your kids through the school is a lot of shadow education in Vietnam, extra classes and extra teaching that takes place, there’s quite a lot of pressure on children, it can be financially burdensome for families because of some features of the way in which the education system is financed, which we’ll talk more about soon. And so, participation in the education system is a high stakes affair because Vietnamese families rightly see the success of their children and the education system as portending some sort of future for their families. And so, what we observe is, on the one hand, you have this very large and impressive bureaucracy that have these political aspects that delivers the goods in some tangible ways, but on the other hand, an education system whose everyday features can be quite daunting for families and for students because of the pressure that’s involved in the education system. And because some of the non-transparent features of the education system, which we will again talk more about that make getting through the education system significantly more difficult for children from lower-income backgrounds.

Will Brehm 25:32
So, how is education financed? I mean, it’s quite interesting that, on the one hand, you’re saying that the central government spends quite a large amount of money on education and has a system to redistribute it to different provinces. But at the same time, you’re saying that households seem to have to burden quite a large share of education costs for things like shadow education. So, how is the sort of structures of educational financing? What do they look like?

Jonathan London 25:58
I suppose the best way to begin to answer it is by saying that there’s just a lot of money that is sloshing around in the system. And I think this is a vitally important feature, also of Vietnam’s experience that we need to bear in mind. Vietnam has a growing economy. One of the most rapidly growing in the world. A lot of the things that have occurred in Vietnam have benefited from this growth. Economic growth has permitted a lot of money to go into the education system. So, as one of my colleagues who studies South Africa has pointed out, in some countries and areas in particular where there’s been less growth, you don’t see a similar dynamic. The promise of a job, for example, after your child gets through the education system, that raises fairly salient incentive to invest in education that we might not observe in an area where maybe there’s not such a promise of a job, and you don’t have the rising incomes that can be drawn upon to feed into the education system. So, there is a lot of money that goes into the education system. But a really interesting thing happened on Vietnam’s way to a market-based economy. And that is that at the end of the 1980s, the country’s state socialist economy, the planned economy kind of collapsed, and there was an acute fiscal crisis, and the education system came very close to collapse. Teachers left their posts, you had declines of enrollment. For example, upper secondary education of 40% in some areas. Students left the system, quality was affected. And this went on for a few years. And just to go back to my fieldwork in Quang Nam province in central Vietnam, in 1999, I was interviewing teachers, and they were recalling their experiences in the early 1990s, they didn’t get paid for months. They were doing subsistence agriculture, but they were staying in their posts. Not all teachers did. But many stayed. They had the spirit. In the meantime, Vietnam had to figure out well, how are we going to do this? And so, around 1989, the government started permitting schools to collect fees. Now, socialist purists would say, “Oh, this is an abomination. This is capitalism. What kind of fake socialism is this?” And it’s gone on and on, and the amount of money that households are paying out of pocket has increased. And in 1992, or 1993, the Communist Party recognized that this is vitally important, how do we get resources because, of course, the revenue mobilizing capacities of the state is still limited, right in the early 1990s. So, they came up with this brilliant terminology that Vietnam didn’t explicitly copy China’s model, but the term that they used was societalization. Not socialization, even though everybody in Vietnam, including English-speaking people who study it, use the term socialization as I used to, but the appropriate term societalization is nice and vague. What does that mean? That means that the party and society together help bring resources into the education system. And they did. And it really has worked out so well that there’s just been this massive influx of money into the education system. And so, it’s wildly estimated, although no concrete figures are available, that 40 to 50% of all spending in education system is out of pocket private spending.

Will Brehm 29:20
Wow, wow. It’s an interesting combination of both sort of the growth of the public sector but also this sort of privatization as well, where they grew simultaneously.

Jonathan London 29:32
That’s right. And so effectively, Vietnam has a system of co-payments. And the good thing is there’s resources, and teachers can make a living, not as they used to have to sell pho outside the school gates at 7 am and then go in and teach. There’s none of that anymore. They can actually make a living as Vietnam has become wealthier. But on the other hand, it’s opaque. It has, at times, been corrupt. And you get what you pay for. And that is an interesting feature of life in Vietnam because you have the copresence of an avowedly socialist state, that does in fact, redistribute resources across provinces. And you also have an increasingly commercialized education system in which even within a public school, you can get into different classrooms, some called high- quality classrooms with different kinds of bells and whistles based on the amount of money that you pay.

Will Brehm 30:31
So, a lot of the unique features of the Vietnam case we focused on, but I guess the final question is about, are there things from Vietnam that we could learn and sort of generalize more broadly to other contexts?

Jonathan London 30:48
The answer is yes and no. And let me just try to summarize some of the observations that we can explore. And that I’ve indeed set up for myself to explore further. And I basically have three, I wouldn’t call them, I guess, propositions, or conjectures, really, that I’m interested in pursuing. And the first is the presence of the Communist Party of Vietnam. What does it mean to have this perpetual political process in the schools, okay? It’s not just about mind control. Actually, Vietnam’s teaching workforce is very professional, teachers show up, absenteeism is very low, they show up, they work with each other, they evaluate each other, they are held to account in ways that we don’t see in other country. So, one question is, or one indeed conjecture is that the presence of the Communist Party of Vietnam through its party cells and its activities represents effectively a kind of countervailing force against education sector mediocrity. It gets teachers and principals, and other folks to raise their game. The second is the system of co-payments, without romanticizing it, because it generates a lot of inequality, and it’s really something to be concerned about. Nonetheless, the fact that families are paying out of pocket, I conjecture, introduces a certain level of accountability. So, without romanticizing it, you get what you pay for. That means millions of kids who can’t pay for it are left out. And that’s just brutal and totally contradicts the laudable socialist ideals that the party identifies itself with. But at the same time, it probably also induces a certain amount of accountability in the education system that is absent in other countries. So, again, I’m not romanticizing the market mechanism. But what I am suggesting is the fact that parents are paying out of pocket gets teachers paying more attention, not universally by any stretch, but that’s an element that I’m interested in. And then finally, and this is something that I haven’t mentioned yet, but it’s also really important for people understand, Vietnam has had one of the most spectacularly sharp uptakes of internet activity -it’s been sharp everywhere, the world has gone online, everywhere. But in Vietnam, people are really engaged, and there is almost a kind of public sphere, just in the education sector, because it’s not a country where you can have a widely broadcast opinion about everything. But there’s a lot of engagement in the education sector, there are lots of magazines, journals, newspapers, webpages, and there are scandals because people are paying money. So, the population is really plugged into the education system in a surprising way. So, another aspect that I am along with my colleague Duong Bich-Hang at University of Minnesota postdoc is how public engagement in the education system may indeed also help accountability. So, what I’m suggesting here, and this is part of the broader argument, and indeed, this connects back with the whole RISE program’s focus is that features of Vietnam’s politics, its public governance, and other features of social life in Vietnam, in a sense, enhance the accountability of the education system around learning. And so, the question is, well, how can we do it? I think you know what the answer is, perhaps something to think about at least, is how education systems around the world can think about encouraging elements within the education bureaucracy, within schools, within society, and the way it is engaged with education, within teachers relationships and parents that have the functional effect of getting people to pay more attention to learning outcomes. And again, there’s no sense or much value in romanticizing the situation of Vietnam. But what you do have is a country that has experienced a lot of economic growth, a political leadership that is committed to expanding access to education for a variety of reasons, very good learning outcomes. I want to note Vietnam does very poorly in higher education, which can be the subject of another program. But all in all, these features have combined to produce an education system that is performing well across a variety of measures. And I think the central challenge for Vietnam going forward probably is to try to improve the quality of education for all Vietnamese children. And I think part of the answer to that challenge will be improving the accountability of provinces and Vietnam’s decentralized system in a very specific way to education sector priorities. And the last thing I’ll say is just last week, I had a fascinating discussion over Zoom with somebody in the Ministry of Education in charge of management information systems, and ten years ago, they were trying to collect a lot of information, but they didn’t know what to do. Now, they have 31 million unique ID numbers for students, all sorts of information on every student, including their effects. They don’t know what to do with the information yet, but they have it, and it’s just impressive. So, there’s a lot of opportunities. And I think I’m very much, of course, excited about the research that we’re doing on Vietnam. But I think there are things to learn from Vietnam, even if perhaps you don’t want to have a single party-political system.

Will Brehm 37:06
Well, Jonathan, London, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk today.

Jonathan London 37:11
Well, it’s my pleasure, and I look forward to seeing you again.

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