I have begun a new project that examines how parents are experiencing recent changes to how students are evaluated in Singaporean primary schools. These changes are aimed at reducing the education system's emphasis on academic grades, and include a reduction in exams and rankings, as well as a greater focus on student well-being and non-academic areas of development. What kinds of feedback are parents actually getting from teachers and schools, how do they feel about it, and what do they do with it? Accordingly, what does the shift towards holistic evaluation mean for social mobility and educational inequality?

I am in the process of conducting pilot interviews with parents for this project. If you are keen on being interviewed or are just interested in the topic, please reach out - I'd love to chat.

My dissertation asks whether “unranking”—the adoption of broader measures of quality—has the potential to level status hierarchies. While scholars have shown that rankings can exacerbate competition and inequality, there is little research on whether unranking can undo these effects. I examine how middle-class parents choose primary schools in Singapore, where there have been active policy efforts, popularly known by the slogan “Every School a Good School,” to broaden measures of school quality beyond academic grades. I argue that unranking is an insufficient solution to the stratifying effect of school choice, and offer a cultural perspective on how parents form “preferences” and what sustains school status hierarchies.

Drawing on 41 interviews with Singaporean youth, this paper asks why disadvantaged individuals might believe their system is meritocratic. Work on stratification beliefs expects disadvantaged individuals to be skeptical of meritocracy, framing them as irrational otherwise. In contrast to the rational-actor perspectives that dominate the literature, I draw on narrative identity theory to offer a cultural account of belief formation. In the absence of other resources, disadvantaged youth draw on meritocratic narratives to construct agentic selves, imagining a future in which they rely on themselves to succeed. In doing so, they tell agentic stories that serve as lenses through which they interpret inequality, sustaining their belief in meritocracy.