Following today's lunchtime discussion on education between me, Dan and Andy....
Bright pupils let down by state schools
Times
23/5/05
High-achievers do better when grouped together, study reveals
Following today's lunchtime discussion on education between me, Dan and Andy....
Bright pupils let down by state schools
Times
23/5/05
High-achievers do better when grouped together, study reveals
22 comments:
Well, as we said at lunch 'Duh-uh.' (Actually we conceded that in theory it needn't be the case though it inevitably was in practice - even in a mixed ability class you need some kind of streaming for the lesson to be effective.)
Anyway, there was some mulling over the old grammar school system and it was posited that while that was certainly imperfect it might have been easier to fix that than to salvage the current situation.
Any takers? I'm looking at you
Wembley and expecting to hear the voice of the Labour heartlands... :)
Bravo, sir. You're absolutely right about the misleading headline. I hadn't spotted that. But I'm not sure if I've understood your last point about 'pre-schooling ability'. Did you mean primary school? I thought the whole point was that kids that go to a selective school (on the basis of their ability at 11) and mix with other bright kids do better than those that get 'lost' in a school with kids of less ability.
Anyway, I'm sure I've misunderstood you so can you explain it for the hard of understanding?
Ok. But I'm not sure if he was using that second set of figures to give comps a kicking. I thought he was just demonstrating that comps did worse (statistically) and then going on to suggest that it wasn't just about selection - it was about bright kids in comps doing less well than their (equally bright)grammar/private counterparts IF there are very few other bright kids in the school. He's saying those high-achieving grammar kids wouldn't have done as well if they weren't surrounded by other bright kids. The selection argument assumes that they would have done just as well in any comp and are distorting the results in favour of grammars / privates by simply taking their intelligence out of the comp sphere.
BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/zfriday_20050603.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today5_education_20050603.ram
0843 Should the government enforce any one system of teaching, or allow teachers to adapt? Former Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, and former special adviser in the Department of Education, Stuart Sexton.
More education here:
http://impdec.blogspot.com/2005/06/grammar-schools.html
A Physics teacher has written a heart-felt open letter decrying what he views as the destruction of his subject in state schools.
He says the new national curriculum is 'a fiasco that is destroying physics'
Here are some quoted extracts but it is worth reading the text in full:
'The thing that attracts pupils to physics is its precision. Here, at last, is a discipline that gives real answers that apply to the physical world. But that precision is now gone. Calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE. Physics is a subject unpolluted by a torrent of malleable words, but now everything must be described in words.
In this course, pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power. Debate drives science, but pupils do not learn meaningful information about the topics they debate. Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins. But my pupils now discuss the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power plants, without any real understanding of how they work or what radiation is.
I want to teach my subject, to pass on my love of physics to those few who would appreciate it. But I can’t. There is nothing to love in the new course. I see no reason that anyone taking this new GCSE would want to pursue the subject. This is the death of physics.'
His specific complaints fall into four categories: the vague, the stupid, the political and the non-science.
Here is his complaint on the political:
'The number of questions that relate to global warming is appalling. I do not deny that pupils should know about the topic, nor do I deny its importance. However, it should not be the main focus of every topic. The pupils (and their teachers) are growing apathetic from overexposure.
A paper question asked: `Why must we develop renewable energy sources?’ This is a political question. Worse yet, a political statement. I’m not saying I disagree with it, just that it has no place on a physics GCSE paper.'
full text here.
Great find by Andy, go read the whole text!
I coincidentally wanted to post on a very similar topic, an article in the Telegraph covering many different, interconnected issues.
Most importantly, there's political correctness gone mad, highlighted by Civitas:
"The traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the Government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students," it says ... Teenagers studying for GCSEs are being asked to write about the September 11 atrocities using Arab media reports and speeches from Osama bin Laden as sources without balancing material from America, it reveals. In English, the drive for gender and race equality has led an exam board to produce a list of modern poems from around the world without a single poet from England or Wales being represented.
Then there's the teachers' own anti-test agenda, which I am not informed enough to have defined views about. However my own experience of teaching (10 years!) suggests that testing can be highly beneficial, but like anything else, can also be implemented so badly as to lose any positive effect. Since the teaching profession itself is to blame for much that's wrong with the state system I really don't know where my sympathies should lie here. Perhaps if they want to end testing, it's actually a good thing.
Then there is the highly interesting contention that to some extent at least pupils prefer to be taught in more traditional ways.
And lastly there's the usual "independent schools as last bastion of standards".
'Political meddling' ruining learning in schools
Telegraph
11/06/2007
The curriculum in state schools in England has been stripped of its content and corrupted by political interference, according to a damning report by an influential, independent think-tank.
It warns of the educational apartheid opening up between the experience of pupils in the state sector and those at independent schools, which have refused to reduce academic content to make way for fashionable causes.
No major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference, according to the report published by Civitas.
"The traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the Government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students," it says.
The report, The Corruption of the Curriculum, comes as the General Teaching Council, representing the teaching profession in England, calls for the scrapping of all national curriculum tests.
Testing at the ages of seven, 11 and 14 places stress on pupils, teachers and parents, says the council, which wants a return to the previous system under which children did not sit any national exams until the end of compulsory schooling at the age of 16.
Civitas casts doubt on the value of much of what children are now "taught". History has become so divorced from facts and chronology that pupils might learn the new "skills and perspectives" through a work of fiction, such as Lord of the Rings, it says.
Teenagers studying for GCSEs are being asked to write about the September 11 atrocities using Arab media reports and speeches from Osama bin Laden as sources without balancing material from America, it reveals.
In English, the drive for gender and race equality has led an exam board to produce a list of modern poems from around the world without a single poet from England or Wales being represented.
The new 21st-century science curriculum introduced last September substitutes debates on abortion, genetic engineering and the use of nuclear power for lab work and scientific inquiry, it says.
Designed to make science more popular, the results of a study show it has had the opposite effect, with pupils less interested in the subject and less keen to pursue it in the sixth form than they were under the previous, more fact-based lessons.
Future scientists will be even more likely to come from independent schools because the new GCSE courses will leave state pupils ill-quipped for further study, it says.
Most comprehensive schools are teaching the new science for examination next year but the vast majority of independent and grammar schools have seized the opportunity to continue to teach biology, chemistry and physics as separate subjects.
Martin Stephen, the High Master of St Paul's, a leading boys' independent school in London, warned of the "terrifying absence of proper science" in the new courses and said his pupils would be taking the International GCSE in the three separate sciences.
Well over half of independent schools have switched to the IGCSE in at least one subject, usually maths or English, because of the more traditional content and absence of coursework. But the schools were punished in last year's league tables because it was not recognised by the Government for use in state schools and passes were counted as failures.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has now agreed to consider a request from the exam boards providing the IGCSE for it to be recognised after a survey found that 73 per cent of respondents, including head teachers, said they would use the qualification if it were made available to the state sector.
The Department for Education defended the curriculum changes and accused the Civitas report of being "based on a profound misunderstanding of the national curriculum and modern teaching methods".
"It is insulting to the hard work of pupils and teachers to claim that the education system is just a political football to promote political or social goals," said a spokesman.
The Tories said the Civitas report was "a devastating critique". "The anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual approach of many education reformers has had a deeply corrosive effect on standards of education in this country," said Nick Gibb, the shadow schools minister.
Peter Hitchens again, this time on falling standards in education, A level grade inflation and his favourite topic 'the useless Tories':
"What did the Tories say about this?
Some months ago, the distinguished academic Sir Peter Williams accepted that 'A' levels had grown easier. This is significant, because Sir Peter had just been chosen by Gordon Brown to take charge of overhauling maths exams in schools. Dr Robert Coe of Durham University has also produced convincing research that establishes the existence of grade inflation beyond doubt.
A good thing too, since the truth is blindingly obvious and it has been almost physically painful to endure the absurd declarations by ministers that all is well, and their greasy, shameless propaganda suggesting that critics of the exams were being nasty about the poor betrayed children who had taken them - an all-too-typical attempt at what I call emotional censorship.
Our education system is a national and international disgrace. Not a day seems to go by without new revelations about the poor results within schools, children unable to read and write properly (even according to the government's own dubious standards, set and tested by itself) after many years of formal teaching. We are also besieged by employers' complaints about recruits who can't read or write or count, and university teachers moaning that supposedly brilliant 'Straight A' entrants need remedial classes before they can study for their degrees.
The government may still feel obliged to lie about this matter, in pursuit of its nasty egalitarian project. But you would have thought it was fairly safe, then, for an opposition politician to say out loud that the exam system was being diluted (as it is) to conceal the grotesque fall in standards resulting from the introduction of comprehensive schools.
Can anyone find me any evidence of any such statement by my old friend Michael Gove, now Shadow Education Secretary (or whatever ridiculous title the job now has), and a man who most certainly knows the truth. How do I know? Well, he's a clever man. But in case any of you doubt that he understands what's happened to exams, here are some words he wrote, in 'The Times' back in 2002 (October 15th, page 22, in an attack on the then Education Secretary Estelle Morris, if you want to look it up). This was before the Cameroon cultists had hoicked him off the street and turned him into a loyal spokesman for the centre ground.
"Sir William Stubbs's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority was blamed by Ms Morris for the A-levels debacle when its only crime was loyalty. Government had decreed that A levels should be made more "inclusive" so that they could be passed by the 50 per cent of the population ministers wanted to go to university. The examination was rendered easier, with marks allocated for coursework that any well-coached pupil could pass and half the grade accounted for by the deliberately simplified AS level. Ministers hoped to take the credit both for improving exam results and wider participation in higher education by the simple expedient of having both results and university places devalued.
"When Sir William and his examiners realised that this crude attempt to fix outcomes was going to lead to such grotesque inflation that they would all be rumbled, then they simply acted in line with what they had learnt - they informed ministers the outcome would be undesirable and the results were refixed in even cruder fashion."
It seems to me that, in this dangerous and competitive world, the debauching of a nation's education system and the cheating of its young must be one of the most important and urgent issues for any opposition. Mr Gove knows perfectly well what the problem is. The evidence is now overwhelming. So why the silence? Or did I miss a big speech he made on the subject, because the BBC didn't report it?"
I include this item mostly because of the way the British Culture Secretary, our old college colleague Mr Andy Burnham, struggled with this on the Today Program. To be fair it was something of a hospital pass. It's also interesting because of the shock of agreeing with Simon Heffer (read the full article to see where he's going on this)
Gordon Brown proposes cultural Stalinisation
By Simon Heffer
13/02/2008
In a Stalinist Green Paper shortly to be published by the Government, Gordon Brown is to propose an initiative that he might represent as the extension of culture throughout society, but which in reality will be a wicked attempt to have the state interfere in every aspect of our artistic life. Topping the list - and this notion perhaps makes the point better than anything - is the bogus "right" for children to have five hours of culture a week.
Goering didn't say: "Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver": it was a 1930s playwright, Hanns Johst, who said: "Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning" (when I hear of culture, I take the safety-catch off my Browning). Perhaps the five-hour "cultural offer" could begin by explaining that to children, and also the effects of such an idea today. I am with Goering/Johst on this one, precisely because what Mr Brown and his half-educated, boorish acolytes define as culture is almost certainly not how I, or most of you, would deploy the term.
full article
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Today Program
BBC Radion 4
13/02/08
0810 The government has announced plans to give every school child five hours of "high quality culture" per week. We speak to the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham.
Listen | Permalink
Of particular interest to me as I grew up next to the school in question. And bloody awful it was too.
Still fighting for the wrong reasons
The Sunday Times
April 27, 2008
Head Steve Morrison tells of his 10-year battle against selfish union attitudes, which almost closed his school
The always-interesting Woodhead with a simple suggestion on how to limit teaching unions' power
The NUT was wrong to strike
Sunday Times
April 27, 2008
Chris Woodhead
An interesting article from American thinker Charles Murray on what he calls 'Educational Romanticism'. Don't agree with all of his conclusions, but found it a thought-provoking read nonetheless.
The age of educational romanticism
On requiring every child to be above average.
This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.
Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.
Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.
In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren’t smart enough.
The apotheosis of educational romanticism occurred on January 8, 2002, when a Republican president of the United States, surrounded by approving legislators from both parties, signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which had this as the Statement of Purpose for its key title:
The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.
I added the italics. All means exactly that: everybody, right down to the bottom level of ability. The language of the 2002 law made no provision for any exclusions. The Act requires that this goal be met “not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001–2002 school year.”
We are not talking about a political speech or a campaign promise. The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.
Read the whole article.
Teddy Dalrymple at his caustic best!
Theodore Dalrymple
Grading on a Curse
British students get marks for obscenity.
11 July 2008
'The head examiner of a British school-examination board, Peter Buckroyd, whose examinations are taken by 780,000 children, recently explained to teachers why a pupil who answered the question, “Describe the room you’re in,” with “Fuck off”—an actual case, apparently—should receive a grade of 7.5 percent rather than a grade of zero. Indeed, Buckroyd went so far as to say that “it would be wicked to give it zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for.”
First, the candidate had spelled the two words correctly, said the chief examiner, which showed some grasp of English orthography; and second, he had strung two words together correctly, which showed some grasp of grammatical structure and an ability to convey meaning. Had the words come with an exclamation mark, moreover, the candidate should have received a grade of 11 percent, because he would have shown some grasp of punctuation.
“We’re looking for positives,” explained another examiner, who was presumably desperate to avoid provoking low self-esteem among his examinees. Buckroyd added that, after all, the candidate was “better than someone who doesn’t write anything at all.”
Had the pupil written “Fuck off, you bastard!” he would presumably have received 22 percent, which these days is almost certainly a passing grade with distinction. Unfortunately, my knowledge of English expletives is not sufficiently extensive to compose a sentence that would have attracted marks of 100 percent, and such a sentence, in any case, would not be publishable here.'
Brilliant magazine, this Standpoint. Found one on a plane, had never heard of it.
We Can't All Make the Grade
Charles Murray
Standpoint Magazine
October 2008
Andrew Adonis, the Schools Minister, did not even try to hide his irritation. Writing in The Times on August 21, the day the GCSE results were released, he lashed out at those who would claim that the exams were being dumbed down instead of celebrating the increasing numbers of students getting A and A* grades.
"It is the class-based elitism that instinctively wants to ration success and cap the aspirations of the less advantaged," he wrote. "The underlying premise is that there is a fixed pool of talent in society." And then came this breathtaking assertion: "There is no genetic or moral reason why the whole of society should not succeed to the degree that the children of the professional classes do today, virtually all getting five or more good GCSEs and staying on in education beyond 16."
Why breathtaking? Isn't that pretty much what both Labour and Tory politicians say? It is part of the received wisdom among politicians whenever they talk about education: except for a few children with severe handicaps, they assert, all children can succeed on the academic track if the schools do their job. Politicians argue only about which policies will achieve this obviously attainable result.
Adonis's statement was breathtaking nonetheless because, scientifically, it is not true. His belief that nearly all children can be proficient at academic skills is educational romanticism. Many children are just not gifted enough to learn to read and write at more than a rudimentary level, far short of the level required by a GCSE, and the schools can only tweak their performance at the margins. An educational system that serves all the children must begin by recognising that truth.
The phrase "many children are just not gifted enough..." would be completely uncontroversial if it described any ability but intellectual. A quarter of a century ago, Howard Gardner, the American educational scholar, famously sought to topple the word intelligence from its pedestal by arguing that there are seven different intelligences: kinesthetic (roughly, athletic), musical, visual-spatial, interpersonal, intra-personal, linguistic and logical-mathematical. Let's accept his classification and apply the concept of "just not gifted enough" to the first five of them. Imagine that each sentence begins with "No matter how much training I get..."
"I am just not gifted enough to do a somersault with a half twist off the pommel horse" (kinesthetic).
"I am just not gifted enough to understand why someone would choose to compose a piece in B major rather than C major" (musical).
"I am just not gifted enough to see a chessboard in my mind and move pieces on it" (visual-spatial).
"I am just not gifted enough to be a first-rate teacher" (inter-personal).
"I am just not gifted enough to stick with a no-sweets diet" (intra-personal).
None of these tasks is especially difficult for someone who is well above average in the ability in question. All of them are extremely difficult for people who are around the average. All of them are impossible for people who are well below average - not just difficult, but impossible. To be below average in any ability is to be quite limited in the things one can do. And when children show up at the school room door, 50 per cent of them are below average in every single one of those abilities.
Now apply the same test to the last two of Gardner's seven intelligences:
"I am just not gifted enough to understand text with big words and complicated syntax" (linguistic).
"I am just not gifted enough to factor an equation" (logical-mathematical).
Fifty per cent of children are below average in linguistic and logical-mathematical ability. Being below average means that they are limited in the things they can do in reading and maths. It is no more remarkable than being limited in the things one can do in sport or music.
And yet to say such things in public is to invite shock and ridicule. The educational romantics will pummel you with four objections: 1) When children are below average, we can raise their ability; 2) the schools are so bad that children at all levels of ability can learn much more than they are learning now; 3) the rising test scores of the past decade prove that major improvements are possible; and 4) there's no reason why the high educational achievement of children of the professional classes of ability cannot be achieved by all classes.
First, a bit of housekeeping. When talking about ability to succeed in the academic track, two of Gardner's abilities, linguistic and logical-mathematical - the two abilities that dominate IQ scores - are crucial. Rather than referring to them separately, from now on I will refer to the combination of the two as academic ability. This is not to say that those two are the only abilities relevant to success in school. Intra-personal ability in the form of self-discipline and perseverance is also important. But all the self-discipline and perseverance in the world won't help if enough underlying academic ability isn't there.
Think of the relationship of academic ability to academic success as you think of the relationship of height to success as a centre in a professional basketball team. Height isn't the most important factor - for people who are at least 6ft 10in (just over 2 metres) to begin with.
Now to the first issue: do we know how to raise academic ability through interventions? Since the most intensive experimental efforts to raise academic ability have been undertaken in the United States, and by now we have accumulated 40 years of evaluations of their success, I will use American data for the answer: the best we can do is nudge academic ability by a small increment, and even that much is difficult and uncertain.
The attempts to raise academic ability have focused on the pre-school years, on the plausible assumption that this is the period when the brain and personality are most malleable. During the height of the optimism about the potential effects of social programmes during the second half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, many intensive experimental pre-school programmes were mounted. Most of the programmes were haphazardly or tendentiously evaluated, but enough good studies came out of this period to enable an academic group called the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies to conduct a comparative analysis of 11 of the best pre-school interventions.
The consortium found that they produced an average short-term gain of about 17 percentile points relative to a control group (for example, an increase from the 20th percentile of all students to the 37th percentile of all students). However, this gain fell off to about 7 percentile points after three years, leaving a trivial net change. The consortium's bottom line was that "the effect of early education on intelligence test scores was not permanent".
Since then there have been other attempts using intensive pre-school enrichment, notably the Abecedarian Project and the Infant Health & Development Programme. They shared a common fate - large gains in the first follow-up, leading to widespread publicity and claims of success, then fadeout to insignificance as the children reached adolescence. The bottom line: at best, we can move children from far below average intellectually to somewhat less below average. No one claims that any project anywhere has proved anything more than that.
Never mind, say the educational romantics. The schools are so bad that even low-ability students can learn a lot more than they do now. Judging from newspaper accounts, there is some truth to that position.
British stories about political correctness gone mad, classrooms where the teachers have given up trying to keep the children under control and schools where nothing is taught and nothing is learned resemble the stories about the worst-of-the-worst inner-city schools of the United States.
Insofar as such schools exist in England, of course the schools can do much better. But in the United States those schools enrol a few per cent of all students. Ordinary government schools in the US have decent facilities, orderly and nurturing classrooms and teachers who range from bad to excellent, with most clustered in the category of competent. Reading and maths are taught energetically and with substance. The main problem with ordinary schools in the US is that history, science and the arts have been stripped of their content in much the same way that reports say they have been stripped in England.
I will assume that most English schools outside the worst neighbourhoods are roughly comparable to my description of an ordinary American school. How much can an ordinary English school do to raise the academic performance of its students? If the question is framed in terms of teaching them bodies of factual material about history, politics and citizenship, science and the arts, the increases in learning across the board could be dramatic. But if the question is reading and maths, the answer is that the quality of the school makes surprisingly little difference.
This counterintuitive result was first exposed in the United States in 1966 with the publication of the Coleman Report. Named after the sociologist who led it, the magnitude of its effort remains unmatched by anything done since. The sample for the study included 645,000 students nationwide. Before Coleman's team began its work, everyone (including Coleman) thought that the study would document a relationship between the quality of schools and the academic achievement of the students in those schools. Any other result seemed impossible.
To everyone's shock, the Coleman Report instead found that the quality of schools explained almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Measures such as the credentials of the teachers, the extensiveness and newness of physical facilities, money spent per student - none of the things that people assumed to be important in explaining educational achievement were important in fact. Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining student achievement.
The Coleman Report came under intense fire, but reanalyses of the Coleman data and the collection of new data over many years continue to support the core finding that the quality of schools just doesn't make much difference in mean student test scores. Move away from the awful inner-city schools to the schools that are ordinary or better, and much of the slack has been taken out of the room for improvement in academic achievement for the average student.
The educational romantics have an answer for that one too: such results merely show how terrible all the schools are by comparison with what they could be. To fix the problem, the Left advocates innovative teaching techniques and curricula. The Right (in America at any rate) advocates greater use of vouchers and other methods of privatising the schools. Once again, the United States has the most voluminous data for assessing the success of both strategies.
For decades, the US government has given grants for what are now called Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) demonstration programmes. Using the grant, the recipient school implements one of a wide range of teaching and curriculum models. In 2003, a comprehensive meta-analysis of the 29 most widely implemented models was published. The average effect size - the difference between performance of students in the experimental group and students in the control group, weighted by the standard deviation - was +0.15. It is an effect even smaller than the one observed in the studies of pre-school interventions cited earlier. An effect size of +0.15 means, for example, that a child at the 25th percentile goes to the 30th percentile.
To put it another way, no model of school reform that has been tried in the United States has demonstrated, with evidence that withstands scientific scrutiny, the kind of dramatic impact on academic performance that the educational romantics say is possible. I have been unable to find rigorous examinations of experimental learning models in England. I hope this article will unearth empirical evidence of dramatic success that I might have missed - which I look forward to examining with a fine-tooth comb.
American advocates of school privatisation (I am one) fare no better than the advocates of government-sponsored reforms. Vouchers and tax credit experiments have been successful in many ways - providing safer and more nurturing school environments, freeing able students from peer pressure not to perform and installing more substantial curricula. But the reading and maths scores of students in these schools compare favourably with students in government schools only when the comparison is with the worst inner-city schools. When the comparison is with ordinary government schools, the differences have been trivial.
Does the English experience of the past decade refute me? When it came to power in 1997, the Labour Government set out to achieve ambitious increases in test scores, and it succeeded. English Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3 and GCSE scores all bear witness to this achievement.
I haven't the space to present the technical evidence that teaching to the test and dumbing down of test content explain these increases. I refer you to the websites of the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre (CEM) at Durham University and the think tank Civitas for an impressive array of such evidence. Put those two issues aside and consider just the results whenever English students have been tested by people who are not connected with the government.
In reading, the CEM has conducted independent studies using its Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) examination and found a meaningless one-point increase in reading scores between 1997 and 2002, the same five years when the Government's Key Stage 2 showed a large increase in the percentage of primary school students reaching Level 4 or above. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), a sophisticated and rigorous testing survey covering large samples from 40 countries, showed a statistically significant decline in reading scores among English nine-year-olds (Year 4) from 2001 to 2006, years when the Key Stage 2 continued to show improvement.
In maths, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), conducted by the same organisation that administers Pirls, tested English 13-year-olds (Year 8) in 1995, 1999 and 2000. During that period the Government's Key Stage 3 test shows the percentage of students scoring at Level 5 or above as rising impressively from 58 to 71 per cent. The TIMSS results? The scores for 1995 and 2003 were identical (498, on a test with a mean of 500). In 1999, the score had dipped trivially to 496.
To sum up, I have been unable to find an independent assessment of the achievement of students leaving secondary school that shows the increases in test scores since 1997 that the government figures show. Once again, I hope this article will unearth evidence to the contrary that we can all examine carefully.
There is some good news in the TIMSS maths scores: English nine-year-olds showed a large and statistically significant increase. And therein lies a story that has also bedevilled attempts to raise maths scores in the United States. Maths in the early years is based on simple concepts (how many sides to a triangle) and on arithmetic - rudimentary skills that almost all children should be able to learn. When the schools begin to put more emphasis on drill in arithmetic, and make sure that the curriculum does indeed teach children about the shape of triangles, test scores can show large improvements. But when mathematics moves beyond the simplest concepts and arithmetic to the abstractions of algebra and the logic of geometry, large numbers of children fall by the wayside - they are just not clever enough in logical-mathematical intelligence to keep up. That's the reason why a test at the age of nine (Year 4) can show improvement while a test at 13 (Year 8) does not.
It is a gradient that, given fine-grained tests, will be found to apply from Year 1 to university. In Year 1, it is indeed true that almost all children can learn everything that Year 1 teaches. Some will learn it faster than others, but almost everyone can learn to read and do maths at Year 1 level. But every year the number who cannot keep up increases. By the time children reach their teens, some large proportion - a third at least, arguably more - should not be on a continuing academic track. By the end of secondary school, that proportion is around 80 per cent or 90 per cent.
The last refuge of the educational romantics is the extremely high proportion of children of the professional classes who do well in school. Surely that must be explained by affluence and access to the best schools. Or as Adonis put it: "There is no genetic or moral reason why the whole of society should not succeed to the degree that the children of the professional classes do today." Actually, there are both genetic and moral reasons, along with environmental ones.
The genetic reason arises from two politically unfashionable but empirically irrefutable truths.
The first is that IQ, which is nearly coincident with academic ability as I defined it, is somewhere around 40 per cent to 60 per cent heritable. The evidence for the substantial heritability of IQ has become so overwhelming that it is no longer a subject of serious debate, except over the exact figure. The second is that people in the professional classes are, on average, far above the rest of the population in IQ.
Presenting evidence for the high IQ of professionals is superfluous for successful physicians, engineers, barristers, scientists or university lecturers. Possession of an IQ in at least the top 10 per cent is virtually guaranteed by the nature of the academic filters required to finish the professional training. But such evidence is plentiful even when we move to occupations such as business executive. There are many thick people working in business, but studies of the relationship of tested IQ to career success indicates that the overwhelming majority of successful executives are somewhere in the top 10 per cent of IQ.
And so it comes to pass that when a man and woman in the professional classes set out to have a baby, it is extremely likely that at least one gene contributor has a high IQ. In today's society, it is ever more likely that both contributors will be in that category. Think of all the couples you know who consist of two professionals, or ones in which perhaps only one works outside the home but the other has an advanced academic degree. Given this kind of genetic background and a heritability of 40 to 60 per cent for IQ, the children of the professional classes have a meaningful academic advantage at the moment of birth (as a group - individual exceptions abound).
When we turn to the 40 to 60 per cent of IQ that is environmental, children of the professional classes also have an advantage, but little of it has to do with money. Talking to infants and reading bedtime stories to toddlers every night do not cost money - but such behaviour goes from "almost universal" to "rare" as social class goes from top to bottom. To refrain from smoking, alcohol and drugs during pregnancy costs no money. But such restraint is once again correlated with social class, and children of the professional class are the beneficiaries. How are school reforms to compensate for these environmental advantages of the professional classes?
Another environmental factor brings me to the moral reason that stands in the way of equalising the educational success of those in the professional classes and those towards the bottom - moral, at least, for those of us who think that whether a baby has a father as well as a mother is a moral issue. One more empirical finding that is no longer in dispute in the United States among scholars of child development is that children do best when they are raised by married biological parents.
Children raised by a divorced mother do next best (whether she remarries doesn't make much difference). Children raised by an unmarried mother do worst of all. Let me emphasise that these results are found after controlling for a host of socio-economic background variables. Poor and rich children alike benefit from growing up with both biological parents and suffer from being born to a lone mother. In the United States, even the scholars who used to believe otherwise have changed their minds on this one.
The advantages of growing up with married biological parents do not include higher academic ability. But they do include all sorts of other advantages that affect success in school. Children raised by both biological parents are more likely to grow up psychologically healthy, accustomed to a regular routine and self-disciplined than children who grow up with unmarried mothers (again, even after controlling for socio-economic variables). They are more likely to have someone watching over their homework and noticing if there are problems at school.
If the incidence of marriage and lone parenthood were evenly distributed throughout the social classes, the advantages of marriage would not benefit the children of the professional classes. But lone parenthood is concentrated in the lowest socio-economic levels of English society. Consider the examples of Wokingham and Southwark, local authorities that epitomise the socio-economic top and bottom. As of the 2001 census, 13 per cent of Wokingham households with dependent children had a lone parent. In Southwark that figure was 45 per cent.
The example of Wokingham and Southwark applies generally, and has done for many years. I once used the 1991 census data to compile the percentage of extramarital births from all of England's local authorities. Just knowing the percentage of people in the lowest social class in the local authority area statistically explained about half of all variation in extramarital births. When that kind of disparity exists between marriage in the top and the bottom social classes, all sorts of disparities in outcomes for their children are guaranteed.
No one wants to be the person who says "Bah, humbug" to attempts to improve the education of children who have got the short end of the stick through no fault of their own. The impulse to romanticism is overwhelming. But it has led us to treat children who are not suited for the academic track in ways that are not in their best interests. It is time to recognise that even the best schools under the best conditions cannot overcome the limits on achievement set by limits on academic ability.
This is not a counsel of despair. The implication is not to stop trying to help but to remove the ideological blinkers and stop pretending that all children can or should pursue the academic track. There is a healthier and attainable goal of education: to bring children to adulthood having discovered things they enjoy doing and having learned how to do them well. The goal applies equally to every child, across the entire range of every ability.
The schools can achieve that goal, if they pay more attention to their students' diverse talents and give them diverse opportunities to develop those talents. The way is open for dramatic improvement in education in both our countries - once we get a grip on reality.
Is anyone surprised by this?
Pass rates soar after headteacher suspends 478 pupils in a year
A head teacher who suspended the equivalent of a quarter her pupils in one year has seen exam pass rates increase by 65 per cent.
Telegraph
11 Nov 2008
Caroline Haynes, 49, adopted a zero tolerance disciplinary approach to her secondary school pupils, convinced that by allowing disruptive students to remain in class was jeopardising the chances of others.
She has handed out 478 suspensions in one year at a school with 1,880 pupils and seen GCSE pass rates shoot up.
Mrs Hayes criticised the Government's policy of encouraging schools to reduce exclusions, which then reflects better on their Ofsted rating. She said: "Statistics paint a false picture. The Government pledge to reduce them is nonsense. "It stands to reason a lax policy on discipline will result in increased bad behaviour. Because we refuse to buckle to the pressure we had to work very, very hard to convince Ofsted inspectors that pupil behaviour is good, despite the figures. I could reduce exclusion rates tomorrow simply but not suspending pupils but it would have a detrimental effect on the quality of teaching and unruly behaviour."
Mrs Haynes joined Tendring Technology College, in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, in 2004 when 48 per cent of GCSE pupils were achieving grades A*-C at GCSE. She immediately set about cracking down on discipline and in 2007/08, when the 478 suspensions took place, the pass rate reached 74 per cent.
On average, she now excludes two or more pupils every day for bad behaviour. Any pupil who swears at a teacher is sent home for five days and anyone who disrupts a class twice in the same day gets a one-day suspension. For minor disruptive behaviour pupils are given extra work, detention and other sanctions before being suspended if it carries on. For more serious offences they are suspended, or excluded, immediately.
She said central to her policy is letting pupils know when they have crossed the line. But she is keen to give them a second chance, and only made two permanent exclusions last year. She said: "Pupils come to school to learn. We will not tolerate anything that disrupts the learning process. Our pupils learn to deal with the consequences of their actions and our teachers are allowed to concentrate on their job rather than battle bad behaviour. Our policy immediately bore fruit. Exam results have soared. I'm very proud."
Suspended pupils are set work to complete at home and cannot return until it is completed. They and their parents then have to attend a meeting with Mrs Haynes to discuss how they intend to improve their behaviour.
Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, praised the policy. He said: "She should not have to apologise for high exclusion figures when her policy of zero tolerance is plainly highly effective. "Schools should think of the majority of their well-behaved children, not pander to a handful of troublemakers."
Mrs Haynes' suspensions account for five per cent of the 9,200 fixed-period exclusions in Essex's 79 grant-maintained secondary schools. She said she would immediately permanently expel any student caught in possession of any quantity of drugs, or a knife.
A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesperson, said: "Teachers are using the powers we have given them to provide short, sharp shocks to control discipline. Head teachers have our full support to permanently exclude pupils where their behaviour warrants it, and we trust their judgement to decide what sanctions will work best for the individuals and the school."
* Wembley must know something about sports psychology, I wonder what he makes of this?
* The answer to the very last point of the article is, of course, that nobody gets 3rds any more
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Children must learn to be tough to succeed, says academic
The Times
June 23, 2008
“Happiness lessons” that are used in many schools to teach children to be sensitive, empathetic and caring are under threat from a new hardline approach that advocates mental toughness. Academics say that instilling a robust attitude among pupils can improve their exam performance, behaviour and aspirations dramatically.
Mentally tough children are less likely to regard themselves as victims of bullying and will not be deterred by initial failure. Having this outlook can be learnt, according to Peter Clough, head of psychology at the University of Hull. Along with AQR, a psychometric-testing company, he is conducting a long-term study of children and evaluating their mental toughness.
His ideas — based on sports psychology — have been used in industry. Dr Clough claims that a simple test and follow-up techniques can transform performance.
He said: “We know that students with higher levels of mental toughness perform better in exams. They are also less likely to perceive themselves as being bullied and are more likely to behave more positively. We also know that by using a variety of techniques — many of them very simple — we can increase an individual's level of mental toughness.”
Dr Clough is working with 181 pupils aged 11 and 12 at All Saints Catholic High School in Knowsley, Merseyside. He will help to make them mentally tough and hopes this will “open doors of opportunities that they would not previously have considered”. Parents and teachers are also being shown the intervention techniques.
Dr Clough said: “There is no point in working with pupils who then go into a classroom environment where nobody understands the process, and home to parents who have no interest. Showing the teachers how the techniques work means that the benefits that pupils are getting from this study can be repeated year after year.”
Dr Clough and his team measured the levels of resilience and emotional sensitivity of pupils using a questionnaire. They then picked almost 40 pupils with low scores. They are now using techniques to improve their rating, such as visualisation, anxiety control and relaxation, improving their attention span and setting goals.
It comes a week after two academics said the emphasis on Seal (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) was “infantilising” students.
Dennis Hayes and Kathryn Ecclestone, of Oxford Brookes University, said that teenagers were encouraged to talk about their emotions at the expense of acquiring knowledge. This left them unable to cope on their own. They pointed to the increased presence of parents on campus, and of counsellors and support officers, saying that “everyone was looking for a disability to declare”.
Dr Clough said that he helped children to set realistic goals and used techniques that worked rapidly. These include imagining scenarios and random-number tests that forced them to concentrate.
He said: “Really concentrating is a skill a lot of them have never had. We try to get them to realise they are in control of their lives and need to stick a foot in the door when they get the opportunity. No one else is going to make that decision. They don't recognise that people who are successful sometimes have less ability but more drive. They are drawn to a 'shortcut culture' of instant success and dream of winning The X Factor, but don't see that you need to practise before auditions.”
Of happiness lessons, which aim to boost self-esteem, Dr Clough said: “All the positive thinking in the world isn't going to make a third look like a 2:1.”
Dr Clough is right. Mental toughness is integral to performance in any and all environments.
Caroline Haynes is clearly on to something. Zero tolerance, coupled with clear bondaries and - important, too - the possibility of reform and rehabilitation (only two permanently excluded) are demonstrably effective.
Both contribute to the refutation of Charles Murray. Murray seems to be saying that, in effect, education can't help you unless your smart.
Murray, indeed, is the epitome of all that is reprehensible in Conservatism. The notion that intelligence is immutable, and that social structures reflect an innate ability, not a self-replicating sociocultural structure.
The denial of the possibility of improvement is integral to the worse excesses of reactionary thought.
Literacy rates improve with teaching. Mathematical competence improves with teaching. There may be a ceiling to the maximum achievable abilities of each and every individual, but that limiting capacity is a damn sight higher than GCSE level, IHMO.
Murray creates some straw men. He lists various activities in differing modes of learning, and then argues,
‘None of these tasks is especially difficult for someone who is well above average in the ability in question. All of them are extremely difficult for people who are around the average. All of them are impossible for people who are well below average - not just difficult, but impossible. To be below average in any ability is to be quite limited in the things one can do. And when children show up at the school room door, 50 per cent of them are below average in every single one of those abilities.
There are so many holes in this logic. First, to say ‘50% are below average’ depends, of course, on what kind of average you use, mean, median or mode. That, too, depends upon how you draw your bell-curve. I’d suggest first that almost everyone is average, if you take average to be a grouping around the median…. Not many are geniuses of Einsteinian proportions, and nor are many suffering from what we’d now call ‘learning difficulties’. Almost everyone falls somewhere into that middle drift.
Second, there is no real engagement with the measurements that Murray uses to determine ‘average’. He talks of IQ – a deeply problematic concept, given the cultural bias lode into any form of IQ test or measurement. His suggestion is that IQ is immutable… but he’s also talking about a temporal change, raising educational and academic performance over time. So, even if IQ were to be accepted as a constant and natural measure of intelligence, that has no bearing on the relative improvements that developing educational systems may create in their students unless and until all students are working at the peak of their intellectual capability.
Murray dismisses pre-school projects thus;
The consortium found that they produced an average short-term gain of about 17 percentile points relative to a control group (for example, an increase from the 20th percentile of all students to the 37th percentile of all students). However, this gain fell off to about 7 percentile points after three years, leaving a trivial net change. The consortium's bottom line was that "the effect of early education on intelligence test scores was not permanent".
But this makes comparisons across a single peer group, and NOT over time against an objective measure. Moving up and down the percentiles in one’s own peer group doesn’t mean that you are below the average as it would have been 20,50,100 years ago. It doesn’t mean that those in the past fulfilled their intellectual capability, or even that those in education are doing so now. Moving around the percentiles is presented as if it supports the argument, but in fact it makes no contribution to it whatsoever.
I have my own generational example, which doesn’t contradict Murray’s assertions about IQ being inherited, but does rather point to the hole in his argument. My maternal Grandmother left school at 11 to work in a cotton mill. My mother left school at 16, went to a 6th form college but the family couldn’t afford university, though she eventually did an OU degree. I went from the local comp right through to aged 18, and from there onto Cambridge University. Now, I don’t believe that I was ‘cleverer’ than my mother or grandmother, but I damn well had better educational opportunities than my equally-bright forebears.
If you’d followed my grandmother’s academic level against the grade curve, it would have been markedly improved while she was in school, but would have dropped off dramatically relative to those who stayed in education past age 11… just as the kids given special attention in their early years improved, but then fell back once that particular attention was removed. Hey, maybe those kids had something in their social environment which prohibited their achieving their own capabilities unless they had special attentions lavished upon them. Their improvement when in the headstart programmes, in fact, proves the case against Murray, than educational focus CAN improve performance.
Now, Murray cites the Coleman Report as having reached the shocking conclusion that Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining student achievement.. Quite so, and another argument which presents serious problems for those who criticise ‘declining standards’ in examination.
Consider all of these factors. Socio-economic conditions have dramatically improved over time. Absolute poverty, hunger and depravity are all but vanished in England. There are very few manual tasks which keep parents at work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, now. There are far more whitecollar workers doing whitecollar jobs. There are very few kids sharing bedrooms with siblings, let alone with parents. Hot and cold running water, inside loos, heating are all pretty standard. Kids get vaccinated, get regular health checks, have access to extensive medical support if its needed. Damn straight family background is important in academic performance. Go back to my maternal lineage.
Grandparents, the children of miners; parent, the child of a steelworker turned teacher, and cotton mill worker turned self-employed hairdresser. Me, the child of a teacher and a senior librarian. Grandparents grew up in a tied workers terrace with half a dozen siblings. Parent grew up in a 4-bed owned end-terrace with 3 siblings. I grew up in a variety of 3 to 6 bedroomed houses, all owned by my parents, and all with internal bathrooms, hot and cold running water and central heating. Damn straight familial circumstance is important in academic performance.
Grandparents had no formal education post 11, but grandfather did emergency training as a teacher during the war, and became a primary school head. Parents did A levels, went to library school, and eventually did an OU Degree. I went through the school system straight to Uni. Each generation has the experience of the last one to build upon as a starting point, both to expectation and to the tangible assistance that can be given in negotiation of the educational system. Damn straight the family experience has a great influence on the child’s academic aspiration and performance.
In all three areas, one can expect to see a progressive improvement in academic performance and achievement, even against an unchanging ‘hereditary’ IQ. That course of progress through academia should be true at all levels, either side of the ‘average’.
Finally, there’s no real attempt to discuss what an ‘average’ intellect might be capable of. Murray never really engages with this, stating simply that ‘many children are just not gifted enough to learn to read and write at more than a rudimentary level, far short of the level required by a GCSE’. There’s no evidence presented for this, though, it’s merely assertion. I happen to think its bollocks, too. Partly I feel this because I’ve seen, very occasionally, what great teaching can do... in my mixed-ability French class of 27, 20 scored C and above, and all passed GCSE. For a good number of those students, the C in French was their highest mark by a grade or two. Partly I feel this from my role as a sports coach, where people with all manner of different levels of ability can STILL be taught complex and demanding physical tasks.
Murray says of the previous tasks he mentions that they are difficult for people around the average, but impossible for those well below average. Again, I think this is bollocks. Let’s take the first: "I am just not gifted enough to do a somersault with a half twist off the pommel horse" (kinesthetic).
Now, anyone aside from me remember when tv shows like ‘Game for a Laugh’ used to take someone from the audience and teach them to tightrope walk in a week? Ever see anyone fail at a task like that?? Doing a somersault with a half-twist might seem impossibly difficult to those of us who have never done it, but who’s to say with a little education that it might, in fact, prove to be a simple task. It’s a sociocultural question of exposure to certain tasks, teaching in certain skills, allowing a certain level of attainment.
I’ve read much on the Zulu army in the 1870s, who could run 20 or 30 miles in a day and fight a battle at the end of it. I couldn’t do that myself, and nor could the British soldiers facing them, but I dare say that we all had the potential to achieve that, had we only been educated into that culture at that time. Equally, I doubt if many of those Zulus had GCSE English, but I’ll warrant if they’d had a sociocultural background identical to mine, it would have been well within their intellectual capacity.
Society has changed dramatically, even in my lifetime, in ways that I am reminded of by my own kid. Aged 5, I was walking to and from school on my own, but had little or no knowledge of anything resembling ‘technology’… didn’t have and don’t remember knowing how to use a telly, a radio or an oven. We got our first 1k computer when I was 12. My boy, aged 5, is walked to and from school every day – indeed, school won’t et him leave until his ‘grown up’ is there. But he can turn on a PC, fire up Internet Explorer, log onto the Cartoon Network website, and complete all the levels of the Ben-10 game he likes. The next generation will be different, subtly, so ours. I’ve seen ‘below average’ teens holding 20+ conversations on Messenger without batting an eyelid. But then, when I was 8, I was in the park playing cricket and football with all the other local kids, and ne’er an adult in sight.
The new generation’s ability to achieve their potential will be influenced by their school, and their experience of the educational system, but it may well be that family background is the major determining factor in academic performance. In which case, expect the next generation to outstrip ours in anything technical and multimedia-based, including simultaneous communication in multi-level environments, and hand-eye co-ordination… but to be less personally independent and peraps less good at sports. On average.
One last thought. Those great geniuses of the past… the artists, the scientists, the literary giants, the orators and politicians. Darwin, Dickens, Gladstone, Disraeli, John Snow, Joseph Lister, Humphrey Davy… etc etc. All drawn from a teeny-tiny educated class… very small as a percentage of a very small population (at least by today’s standards). Now, we’re not just standing on the shoulders of giants, but we’re standing there in a vast inverse pyramid. All those descendants of the illiterate working and agricultural class have joined the literate, numerate, educated class, and can pass on as base knowledge all that they took 20-odd years to learn. No wonder we’re all getting smarter…. Something with Murray, like all reactionary conservatives, is terrified of… because by implication, it turns out he’s not as special as he’d like to think.
More on Labour's education policies. FWIW I reckon I'd happily send any kid of mine to a school if Chris Woodhead were the headmaster.
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Chris Woodhead: Missing the target
From The Sunday Times
November 22, 2009
I must declare an interest. If they were to be implemented, the proposals to improve state education in last week’s Queen’s speech would put me out of business as a Sunday Times columnist. Parents anxious about their child’s education would no longer need to write to me for advice. Instead they would be able to pick up the telephone, complain to the local government ombudsman and initiate legal proceedings against their children’s school for its failure to deliver the government’s 38 new “guarantees” to children and parents.
The truth, however, is that the vacuous assurances in this bill will not make any difference to anybody — to children, to parents, to schools or, last and least, to me.
Among the guarantees outlined, for instance, is one giving pupils the “opportunity to have their say” about standards of behaviour in their schools. What does this mean? That the out-of-control thug must be allowed to state his considered opinion about the provocation he received from the teacher who told him to shut up? This is a guarantee that is ludicrous in principle and unworkable in practice.
Here is another of the guarantees. Parents of gifted and talented pupils will have a right to a written statement of the extra work that is to be given to their children. The ministers responsible clearly have no idea about the real problems in schools. They should read my postbag. The parents who write to me do not want a piece of paper detailing the additional teaching their gifted child is entitled to receive. They want the school to offer some actual teaching that will stretch their gifted child — something far too many schools are still failing to do.
Do children need five hours of PE a week — yet another of the guarantees? No, they do not. Can five hours of PE be provided without time being taken from other subjects? No, it cannot.
Should “high quality cultural activities” be offered to every child — another guarantee? Yes, of course, but I know that there is no chance of delivering such a programme. Should failing schools be shut? Of course. But ministers were banging this drum when I resigned as chief inspector in 2000 and almost nothing has happened since.
It gets worse. This is a government that has done everything in its power to undermine the place of traditional subjects such as geography and history in the timetable. Now ministers are at it again. Included in the Queen’s speech is a proposal to introduce a primary curriculum in which subjects are merged into themes such as “the study of chocolate” which allow children to appreciate the “seamless web of knowledge”.
more
Very interesting & frank discussion between Michael Gove (poss next Education Minister) and Chris Woodhead. Note: we may get an interesting rebuttal from Wembley of my Woodhead post above, if collective technical acts can be got together.
Will the Tories Give us the Schools We Deserve?
Standpoint Mag
January/February 2010
Peter Hitchens on why he hopes Free Schools fail:
"If the English middle class will not fight for the return of grammar schools, then they should be given fully comprehensive schooling, hot and strong and unavoidable.
Two years of that, and they’ll all be whimpering for grammar schools.
For far too long, a clever minority of smart left-wing parents have found loopholes in the horrible egalitarian state school system, while preaching its virtues to others. The last thing we need is any more such escape hatches or safety valves. After a long mental drought when the thinking classes would drone that ‘you can’t turn the clock back’ or ‘grammar schools can’t be restored’ or ‘we couldn’t have the eleven-plus again’, the country is turning.
There is a great weight of opinion which now favours new grammar schools in large numbers – and those who say it cannot be done need only look at the former East Germany, where dozens of new grammar schools have been successfully established since Communism (which was fully comprehensive, of course) collapsed. Germany, in all its states, also tells us that you can have selection by agreement, and late switches between schools. with no need for a rigid exam at age 11." Full article here
Without having read the article yet, East German education was nothing like an English slum comprehensive. You got your 3 R's taught by the Commies for damn sure.
Same in other parts of E.Europe with which I am familiar.
Hitchens would absolutely agree with you JP.
Here's what Hitchens says about Marxism and Education:
'Marxist are all for deconstructing educational order in the societies they wish to undermine, and all for rigour, authority and so forth in the societies they have taken over. Many of our educational problems result from the fact that this country has been in a permanent cultural upheaval, heavily influenced by Gramscian ideas of cultural hegemony, for half a century.'
Eastern Europe would clearly be an example of a society that Marxism had taken over.
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