Creating Core Cultural Values for Building Excellent Schools: Current Situation and Solutions for Schools in Vietnam

Abstract

In the world, building excellent schools often relies on a certain school model. For example, models such as “Happy School”, “Amazing School”, “Cultural School”, “Brand School”, and “Student-Centered Schools” have been implemented quite successfully. The common purpose of these models is to create an excellent school; the core of these models is the core cultural values. Through studying the models, the article draws out the core cultural values to create an excellent school. Community culture, religious doctrines, laws, state management policies, and knowledge management are factors that influence school culture and are also mentioned. Based on that, a survey was conducted with 1,517 subjects including school managers, teachers, and parents of students at preschool, primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary levels representing four different regions of Vietnam. The results show that school managers can express very well the school's vision and mission but have a vague perception of the essence of school culture and the specific approach to building school culture. In management, school principals lack creative measures in both approaching general culture and in creating core cultural values for the school; the influence of the impacting factors has not been effectively utilized; therefore, the results of building excellent schools are very limited. Solutions to build excellent schools by creating core cultural values are proposed in the context of Vietnam and can be referenced for countries with similar conditions.