Equity vs excellence : a preliminary exploration of Hong Kong's education reform

Although Hong Kong's education system has long been criticized as lacking in creativity and putting too much emphasis on rote learning, on the whole it has served Hong Kong well in the past in that it has bred outstanding business, academic and political leaders who maintained the competitive edge of Hong Kong. The traditional elite schools played a most important role in the process. The education reform, which is still on going, aims to overhaul the entire system by introducing the “through-road” model through changing the existing admission mechanism of Primary 1 and Secondary 1 students, combining different bandings and merging two public examinations into one. We argue that, the education reform may be well-intentioned in eliminating the differences between schools but the social consequence of the reform is the decline of academic excellence and a worsening of the brain-drain problem in Hong Kong.