Education

It’s starting to look as if the government is going to compromise on the Education White Paper (explained here), though it’s not clear what form the compromise will take. The debate’s been exciting, if a bit frustrating. As one friend said to me, what has come out pretty clearly is that a lot of people are remarkably satisfied with the state schools their children attend, or else it would be impossible to get so many people so excited about what is, in fact, not a very threatening white paper. That’s good. The critics are right, as I’ll explain later, to focus on admissions, not because the government is proposing any kind of retrograde step (it isn’t, as far as I can see, and I have, unlike lots of people who write about this, actually taken the trouble to read the white paper), but because the position the government has always had and continues to have is wrong and its about time that it gets changed.

But I’m surprised the government hasn’t put the case for the more controversial aspects of the white paper more forcefully, or at least gotten its friends to do so. Although I tend to side with the critics I’ve more sympathy with the government than most, and see this (as I, perhaps wrongly, didn’t see the debate about the 2001 White Paper) as a reasonable disagreement. The core of the case, as we’ll see, rests on the pervasive finding of school effectiveness research that successful schools have high quality managers. So the government is determined to improve the quality of management of schools, and this priority crowds out concerns with fairness etc when they conflict. This is neither venal nor stupid, even if you disagree with the priorities (as I think I do…)

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Max Hastings had an interesting piece in the Guardian during the break attacking the comments on History teaching in the recent QCA report. I haven’t read the report, so can’t evaluate his critique, but I can say that he gets one thing exactly right.

He singles out the ‘alarm call’ about the

perceived “lack of relevance” of history to pupils’ future working lives. This echoes the notorious remarks of Charles Clarke, when education secretary, dismissing medieval and classical studies.

and rightly knocks on the head the idea that everything in the school curriculum should be relevant to our working lives:

At the weekend, I glanced at some of my old school essays. The questions seem interesting: “Should one think of Henry II as a lawless and arbitrary monarch, or as the founder of an orderly legal and administrative system?”; “Why did Edward I succeed in Wales and fail in Scotland?”; “Can anything be said in favour of James I’s foreign policy?”
Even in 1961, one could scarcely argue that familiarity with such themes contributed much to employability. They were no more “relevant” to middle-class white teenagers then than to schoolchildren of West Indian or Muslim origins now. We addressed them, first, because education is properly about learning to think, and objectively to assess evidence; second, so that we knew something about a broad sweep of the history of the society to which, whether by birth or migration, we belonged.

He’s right to attack the utilitarian approach he identifies to the curriculum.

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The BBC are reporting an interesting speech by David Cameron in which the leader of the Conservative party describes the rough shape the British education system might take if he were to be elected as Prime Minister.

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It’s that time of the year again: the “King William College General Knowledge Paper”:http://www.kwc.sch.im/gkp.html has arrived. It’s the kind of quiz that exists at a point just (or far) beyond the production possibility frontier of a space defined by your fondness for crossword-puzzles and your stock of cultural capital. If previous years are anything to go by it’s designed to be google-proof, but you’re in with a shot if you can guess the theme that unites all the questions in each section. Have at it. (The Great Miracle, incidentally, is scoring more than, say, 20 points.)

The Christmas issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement carries a piece by Steve Fuller defending Intelligent Design, though in a very roundabout way, and a piece by me which is very unkind about Intelligent Design but not about faith schools. (Both free content, accessible without registration). If anyone gets the paper edition, by the way, I’m curious how the photos turned out — I went through 2 45-minute photoshoots, which convinced me not to make a career change to become a model.

Last week’s New Yorker (Dec.5, 2005) had a very good article on the trial concerning “intelligent design” in the high school of Dover, PA. (It’s not online, but a Q&A with the author, Margaret Talbot, is.) It included lots of interesting original reporting, including the following:

The night after the board approved the evolution disclaimer, Brad Neal, a social-studies teacher at the high school, had an e-mail exchange with [assistant superintendent Mike] Baksa. “In light of last night’s apparent change from a ‘standards-driven’ school district to the ‘living-word-driven’ school district … I would like some direction in how to adapt our judicial-branch unit,” Neal wrote. “It is apparent that the Supreme Court of the United States has it all wrong. Is there some supplemental text that we can use to set our students straight as to the ‘real’ law of the land? We will be entering this unit within the next month and are concerned that we would be polluting our students’ minds if we continue to use our curriculum as currently written in accordance with [state] standards.”

Neal’s message was sarcastic, but Baksa’s reply was not. “Brad, all kidding aside, be careful what you ask for,” he wrote back. I’ve been given a copy of ‘The Myth of Separation,’ by David Barton, to review from board members. Social studies curriculum is next year. Feel free to borrow my copy to get an idea where the board is coming from.”

Fortunately, those are now ex-board members.

Here’s an interesting story about the UW system. The student government at UW-Eau Claire has voted to charge students a fee which would pay directly for pay raises for factulty and other instructional staff. The article is pretty good; the students who support the raise are clearly worried about their degrees being worth less as a result of the defection of professors who can get paid more elsewhere; the opponents see the move (rightly) as creeping privatization, in an environment in which there are moves among a significant group of legislators to cap both tuition and spending. Does anyone know if this is happening elsewhere?

Some of you will already be aware of this story. I thought at the time that it was just a storm in a teacup — a group of teachers devise a spectacularly inappropriate assignment, some parents complain (I was shown some of the emails; they were annoyed but good-humoured), and the principal and District act promptly to stop the assignment. The local press make a meal of it because…well, its suddenly turned cold and there’s not a lot going on. The spokesperson for the teachers comes off as naïve, but not ill-willed. Ann Althouse, oddly, uses the case as a reason to suspect that the District does not have its act together — an odd conclusion to draw from a single instance in which it does the right thing effectively and immediately.

But then, yesterday, the local left-of-center paper published an extraordinary editorial defending the assignment. IF you read the NBC and Cap Times stories carefully you’ll see that their descriptions of the assignment differ. The NBC reporter showed me the assignment, and I have to admit that I did not take notes, but I definitely drew the implication that immediate withdrawal was demanded: the letter certainly said that if peace had not been achieved within 12 days the letter would be sent again.

The Cap Times editorial is wrong in so many ways I don’t know where to begin.

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Ted Wragg is dead, aged 67. Guardian obituary is here. I never met Ted, only once spying him across the table at a long meeting, but I read his columns in the TES from my early teens, and was always struck by the nice combination of ironic humour and passionate concern. He was prolific and energetic, funny (he sometimes contributed jokes for Bremner, and the News Huddlines) and always ready to puncture the presumptions of the powerful. The obit says that an email address has been set up for messages of condolence at education@exeter.ac.uk
I know one should not speak ill of the dead, but I suspect he is one of the culprits (along with others I shan’t mention) for the tendency of education policymakers and even academics in the UK to indulge in excessive football analogies. A very sad loss.

The “Kansas Board of Education”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/11/08/evolution.debate.ap/index.html has approved new standards that mandate the teaching of “Intelligent Design” (which I’ve always thought should be called “Paleyontology”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley) in science classrooms. According to CNN, in addition to mandating that students be told that some basic Darwinian ideas “have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology,” the board also decided to help themselves to a bit more, too:

bq. In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

Priceless. Unfortunately they didn’t adopt my suggestion that science be further redefined to include sitting at home drinking a beer and watching the game on TV. This would have greatly enhanced my weekend contributions to science.

I’m looking for ideas of high quality documentaries and musicals (and, if you know any, musical documentaries) to show to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. They are socio-economically disadvantaged (about 75% free or reduced school lunch) and about half are white, and half African-American. They’ll watch the films in grade-level-specific groups. Well?

If you live in the US and receive public television you might want to watch Making Schools Work tonight (9-11, 8-10 Central). If you do watch it, and want to use the comments below to comment about it, please go ahead.

Update: Well, I’ll get the ball rolling, if possible (though see comment 1 below, which predates this update).

I was at once impressed by the show and irritated by it. Impressed, because the makers seemed to have gone to real trouble to understand the character of the reforms they were describing, and to present the lived experience of going through those reform. I knew a good deal of what was presented, but by no means all, and learned a lot more than is possible from the kind of study I do.

But irritated for two reasons.

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When I first started arguing for lotteries in admissions to oversubscribed schools, I was ridiculed on 2 grounds — that it was wrong and that it was politically unfeasible — ridiculous, in fact. I disagreed that it was wrong, but thought it worth having the argument. I agreed that it was politically unfeasible, but saw it as worth arguing for, on the grounds that making the argument helped to show up the ways in which other methods for allocating children to oversubscribed schools did not give choice to parents but to school (or LEA) officials. Apparently I was wrong:

Ministers have given their support to the allocation of places at over-subscribed schools by lottery. An academy in south London is one of a number of schools now allocating some of its places to children in the area on a random basis. The arrangements are seen as a way of breaking social segregation, particularly where better-off families buy up homes near popular schools.

As a result of the evacuation from New Orleans, thousands of displaced students around the country will be absorbed into elementary, middle, and high schools which are not ready for them. If the experience of my own city (Madison, WI) is anything to go by, these students are largely disadvantaged, and are being placed in neighborhoods which are also disadvantaged; and will hence attend schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students. Department of Education officials are figuring out what to do — according to Education Week there is talk of relaxing unspecified provisions of No Child Left Behind; there is some pressure to relax or waive adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements for schools that take in refugees, and also to relax or waive the ‘Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom’ requirements.

I want to recommend that D of E officials would do well to resist some of this pressure. They should try to get their hands on some of the relief money, and use it to give schools both the incentive and the ability to meet the requirements. (If they do give into the pressure, they should, do this anyway). Specifically:

* Give schools which take evacuees totaling 2-5% of their previous student population funds which they can use to retain and attract qualified teachers (with incentive payments)

* Reward schools in this group which have increased their percentage of qualified teachers by February 2006 with flexible funds (which the schools could use, for example, for supplies, residential field trips, bonus payments to the teachers most affected, etc).

* Establish a program to incentivize qualified teachers who have left teaching to return to the classroom (in refugee-qualifying schools). The Department of Education could request current employers of such returning teachers to hold their jobs open for them for 24 months, and could pay the returning teacher the difference between her teachers’ salary and her non-teaching salary (again for 24 months).

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