Empowered Educators in Singapore: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality

Part of a series, with a main volume by Linda Darling-Hammond and Dion Burns: EMPOWERED EDUCATORS: HOW HIGH-PERFORMING SYSTEMS SHAPE TEACHING QUALITY AROUND THE WORLD.

Singapore has only recently become synonymous with educational excellence, and this excellence is the consequence of a strategic and concerted nationwide effort to improve education. This is the story of how a tiny city-state, affectionately called “the red dot” by its citizens—because that is how the country appears on world maps—has reached impressive heights of both educational and economic success in the absence of natural resources of any kind. More specifically, this case study of Singapore illuminates what it means or how it looks to engage in systemic, long term and ongoing, consistent, and deliberative reform of schools and schooling, in the midst of nation building and post-colonial independence, with a particular focus on quality teachers as the key to educational excellence.