What is there to be shocked about?? (PISA/TIMMS horror!)

Our dear menteri of education is surprised at how badly our students have done in the most recent PISA/TIMMS tests.

What is there to be surprised?? Eventhough 20% of the budget is spent on education, all the money is used to come up with ridiculous online systems, where you make teachers sit in front of the computer to fill up rubbish forms, most of them repetitive until they have to stay up past midnight. To make things worse, your servers are not even well maintained frequently resulting in downtimes. Then you try to follow the education system of those countries which do well albeit in a copy paste style without looking at the pragmatism of such systems in our country when there are up to 50 students in a class and some students in form 5 can't even read and write! Eventhough you try to be less exam oriented, the way the new programmmes are carried out seem to make them more exam oriented, and teachers just force students to memorize answers because the school heads do no want to be questioned by those higher up as to why the school is doing poorly. 

You know what, the solution to all this is just leave the teachers alone la, and let them teach, things might get better. I say might because there are other factors beyond our control that are also to blame for this disaster, like the general laziness amongst students to study since they have things easy in life, their lack of discipline due to various reasons etc. But at least if you let the teachers do their jobs i.e. teach and not obssess over targets or e-alltherubbish, things will improve insya Allah.
Let me say that I don't care too much for PISA or TIMMS. I think they're over rated, and the world doesn't revolve around knowing science and maths. But the factors which cause our students to do poorly in these tests affect the whole of the education system.

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2015/03/13/DPM-Malaysian-students-below-par/