An Australian education news website withdrew an article it published that carried comments about Singapore's education system after it was unable to obtain evidence of those comments being made.

The article, titled "The PISA fallacy in Singapore: insights from the NIE", was purportedly a report from a May 31 conference that took place at the National Institute of Education, by a contributor named Walter Barbieri, who attended the event.

https://twitter.com/BarbieriMr/status/869717982204747776

In a subsequent report he wrote for the Australian Teacher Magazine's August 2017 edition, Barbieri mistakenly attributed a series of comments that were critical of Singapore's education system to Singapore's Minister of Education for Schools Ng Chee Meng.

The online version of his article was later on revised to attribute the comments to MOE's Director-General of Education, Wong Siew Hoong.

But this turned out to be wrong as well. The Ministry of Education highlighted this initially in a comment on a Mothership article that reported off EducationHQ's reported comments, and followed up with a video clip of Wong's speech, as well as a transcript of the comments he made.

At no point did Wong make mention of PISA, or of anything remotely resembling the comments that were reported in the EducationHQ article.

Here is the correction it is now carrying:

"Editor's note: Regarding the review previously posted here of the National Institute of Education's 2017 conference, the Department of Education Singapore completely refutes quotes attributed by the author to Director-General of Education, Mr Wong Siew Hoong. Below in our comments section is a Ministry of Education-provided link to video footage of Mr Wong's presentation and a full transcript of the presentation. In light of the evidence presented, and in the absence of alternative evidence to support the author at this stage, EducationHQ has withdrawn the story and apologises without reservation for any offence caused.

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Top photo: screenshot via Education HQ Australia