EDUCATION FOUNDATION REPORT-WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN EDUCATION?

Education Foundation Report

Leading thinkers and practitioners give their visions for education

Comment

The Education Foundation claims to be the UK’s first independent, cross party, education think tank. It aims to, rather immodestly,   ‘lead, shape and deliver change and reform in the British education system ‘. It is headed by Andy Fordham and Ty Goddard and  has just published its first report.

Launched last summer with the endorsement of Joel Klein who drove through New York’s school reforms, before joining News International (great timing), the report consists of a number of essays from an eclectic mix of education reformers, thinkers   and practitioners. The preamble to the report says ‘Our first step as a solutions-focused education think tank was to gather a group of thirty-five leading thinkers: an inspiring, influential mix of teachers, policymakers and other practitioners. We asked them three simple but far reaching questions: what’s important?; what works?; and what next?’

Professor Simon Baron Cohen writes of the importance of empathy in education and its teaching as an extra layer to enrich our schools and relationships in and around them. Rachel de Souza focuses on the need for a flexible, progressive and forward-thinking education system, ever open to new ideas and better ways of working. Lord Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall sees harnessing the potential of parents in driving forward the education system. Professor James Tooley warns of the real limitations of the state in delivering education policy and practice. Dr Anthony Seldon wants our schools and universities to move from a factory model to a world class system. Dr Elizabeth Sidwell wants to create a seamless integrated system involving   schools, Further and Higher education.  Jan Hodges says learning by doing should be valued equally with academic learning and high quality technical, practical and vocational learning should be an integral and valued part of every young person’s education, and so on. There are some very interesting contributions here and it is well worth looking at.  Identifying a common thread though, to focus reform energies and efforts, and indeed the future work of the Foundation, which, at its launch, wanted to identify what schools are for in this century, will be something of a challenge. We seem to have lots of visions here, some over- lapping, others not. Still the overarching message that we need more  high quality evidence to inform   policy and practice is sound.

If we want  to  transform our  education system  its not just   about structures ,important though they may be.  We  have to  change  what happens at the sharp end  in the classroom, and  accept that education is so much more than passing tests and exams. For far too many that simple message has yet to get across.

The Journey to Education Reform

http://www.ednfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/EducationBritain.pdf

PROFESSOR E G WEST-NO FAN OF GOVERNMENTS ROLE IN EDUCATION

Professor EG West

Who was  he? Certainly no fan of Government interference in education

Comment

There is an EG West Centre at Newcastle University headed by Professor James Tooley, who will be known to most as a champion of the private sectors role in education, particularly in the developing world.

But who is EG West? Professor EG West died in 2001, having established a considerable reputation in his chosen area of education.  Professor West didn’t think much of Governments interfering in education. Most people now believe that the Government has a right to intervene in education. Not West. Or rather, he thought, they should have a very limited role. His main book ‘Education and the State’ explains why. The Sunday Times once described Education and the State as ‘perhaps the most important work written on the subject this century’ (20^th)

His main propositions were:

Historically, the educational needs of almost everyone, including the poor, were met without the state in England and Wales and the USA. West argued that, prior to the major state involvement in education in England & Wales in 1870, school attendance rates and literacy rates were well above 90 per cent. State intervention was not required to ensure almost universal attendance and literacy. When government got involved with education, it was ‘as if it jumped into the saddle of a horse that was already galloping’.

The demand for imposing state-education was made by elite opinion formers on very dubious grounds. State involvement crowded out all the private provision that was catering very well for the educational needs of the poor and in the process in effect  wrested control and responsibility away from parents.

Opinion formers thought they could use government to impose their educational ideas and ideals – but government intervention is not benign in the ways often supposed. West believed ‘‘benevolent government does not exist. The political machinery is …, in fact, largely … operated by interest groups, vote-maximising politicians and self-seeking bureaucracies’.  He believed that the needs of the children of a small minority of “irresponsible” parents may be met more efficiently if the paternalistic powers of government were concentrated on them, and not diffused over the wide areas where they are not needed.’ Universal compulsion, he argued, ‘will have indirect costs that are so severe as to outweigh the benefits’

There are practical methods by which the education can be reclaimed from the state.  If education is reclaimed from the state, we should also decouple education and schooling. James Tooley says that ‘West’s position leads to some-thing even more radical than the educational voucher. His ideas imply the decoupling of the conflation that often occurs between ‘education’ and ‘schooling’ – for it is the former, not the latter, which is of greatest importance. Many people view the Victorian education system through the prism of Dickens writing. But West pointed out that this was a time of huge innovation and progress in education. There were of course some outstanding private schools with reformist Headmasters. But there were also ‘ the adult education movement, the mutual improvement societies, the literary and philosophical institutes, the mechanics’ institutes, … the Owenite halls of science’ and ‘freelance lecturers who travelled the towns and stimulated self-study among the poor’, as well as the Sunday schools.’  In short, there was a fluid, flexible, heterogeneous and competitive educational scenario of the pre-1870s’ is what we should be looking for in educational reform today

West undertook theoretical and practical research on a range of ‘Market Solutions in Education’. Significantly, as James Tooley has pointed  out, West shows how the idea for educational vouchers and tax credits can be traced back not just  to economists such as Milton Friedman, as is commonly argued, but to much earlier  social reformers  such as Thomas Paine, (The Rights of Man) who had such an influence on American Revolutionary thought.

West conducted research for the World Bank on vouchers, looking first at their theory, and then the practice from a variety of countries.  He outlined voucher policies that have been implemented in countries such as Bangladesh, Chile, Colombia and Lesotho, as well as the USA.  Did he upset other intellectuals and the prevailing intellectual climate? Is the Pope Catholic? A. H. (‘Chelly’) Halsey, of Nuffield College, Oxford, said: ‘Of all the verbal rubbish scattered about by the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘this book is so far the most pernicious.’

He certainly provoked debate. But  he also   challenged the  cosy  assumption that Government interventions in education  are   necessarily always a   good thing.  Politicians and their officials  usually with the best of motives    can,  and  rather too often do , get in  very wrong  . Taxpayers money is often wasted  in service of short term political agendas or producer interests.   And we  would do well to remember that .

THE RED TORIES AND BLUE LABOUR PHILOSOPHIES

THE RED TORIES  AND BLUE LABOUR PHILOSOPHIES

Similar but different too-must rethink the market and political model

Comment

A recent debate on Australia’s ABC Radio provided a good insight into the thinking behind  the Red Tories,  led by Philip Blond of ResPublica , and the Blue Labour thinkers    led   by Lord  Maurice Glasman, of London Metropolitan University  . Their thinking it transpires  is not  that different. Blond claims that  ‘social conservatism’ is the progressive agenda now. He says   “ we need to recapitalise the poor, re-moralise the market and re-localise the economy”.

Social conservatism is at the heart of this Red Tory agenda. It involves community engagement, ownership, mutualisation and mass ownership underpinned by new trust based relationships. Blond says we must tackle monopolies both state and private,   breaking open the market with small business able to compete and ultimately out compete the monopolies.  The Localism Bill is seen by Philip Blond as the most obvious manifestation of this Governments drive to put local communities back in charge -mass mutualisation  undermines statism and  the complete dominance of the market, and places power back with the people . They are both seeking  to re-shape the centre ground in the wake of perceived  market failures and particularly the City’s  collective failure . Blond believes that Thatchers weakness was in allowing the over concentration of ownership and power in the economy, allowing us to become a  ‘rentier ‘state. We have produced a huge array of private sector monopolies and we need to totally rethink market economics. Thatcher essentially abandoned large swathes of the country and failed, he says, to nurture half of the country and give them the opportunities to better themselves. (the legacy is still there today with little Tory support in the north, or Scotland and to some extent Wales) . The new Conservative critique is that the market is important but unless well regulated and managed can be hugely destructive and Blond frequently cites the failure of city institutions-monopolistic and with their rentier (favourite word) culture.  We should ensure that markets work for all of us he says .  Glasman, though, believes that the current Government   is essentially ,if you look at its economic policies, a neo-liberal Thatcherite Government which has done little to reform the markets in the wake of the financial  crisis and its austerity programme is pure Thatcher. Conservatism is too associated, he believes, with  the failed market to offer a real vision for the future . It about the self-organised interests of working people,  agreeing the pursuit of  common ends – this is  the heart of his vision  and  this is what will take on the vested ‘money’ interests. This is about new politics-discarding the destructive elements of both state and market power. A strong sense of community and the latent power of  family  and the  work ethic is at the core of Glasmans thinking (ie similar to Red Toryism).  Blue Labour thinkers argue that love of community and respect for institutions and settled ways of life is fundamental to the concerns of organised labour, which was originally represented by the Labour Party.   The Common good should, he says, be constituted in every institution in the land. Glasman has complete contempt, by the way, for Gordon  Brown  and his approach to Government  as he allowed  the absolute concentration of power in the few with no interest  whatever in empowering communities and the  localism  agenda. He says that the “Big Society hasn’t got a word to say about the market” and that “we might agree about ends but we definitely don’t agree on the means”.

Both thinkers agree that we, as a country, are essentially broke not just in economic terms but in the way we approach politics. We need a radical rethink.  Whether one is from the left or right we have to rethink the way our markets operate and the role of state as they have largely failed and are monopolistic and are not  serving  ordinary peoples interests or meeting their expectations . Instead, we need  active engaged communities   which feel they have a real stake in the way forward. We must deliver a  new fair and popular form of  capitalism. Britain is ready to build a new political economy in the interests of the many, founded on local renewal which can deliver prosperity. Both the Red and the Blue corners are committed to family and community and the work ethic and understand the importance of relationship’s, harnessing and exploiting their power whether its within families, neighbourhoods or within the broader community.

It would be wrong though to see the ideas of both camps as new. They are simply drawing together ideas that have been around for a while recasting and rebranding them. This is the poetry of politics. The prose is turning ideas into an effective  programme of action , taking on vested interests, which is an altogether different challenge and one in which recent governments have a poor record.

http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/player_launch.pl

THE SPIRIT LEVEL-IS IT A DELUSION?

The Spirit Level sees unequal societies as the unhappiest

But Spirit level Delusion says its hypotheses  are just  plain wrong

Comment

The left have been animated for a while by the incredible popularity and ubiquity of The Spirit Level. This tract from  Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett   claims that more equal societies do better at  just about everything, backed by much data and graphs comparing variables between countries and drawing conclusions from them.  On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country’s level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable “low” end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable “high” end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between.  The authors  give themselves a huge challenge in making sense of so much data, which is impressive, although critics  such as Christopher  Snowden in The Spirit Level Delusion’ claim they have failed and  that the way they have used data produces many absurdities and false linkages. Nick Cohen of the Observer however   has said that Labour is energised by “The Spirit Level, a book which is turning into a cross between a manifesto and a call to arms. At one Left-wing meeting recently, a speaker wished everyone in the country could read its argument that societies more equal than Britain enjoy better physical and mental health, lower homicide rates, fewer drug problems, fewer teenage births, higher maths and literacy scores, higher standards of child wellbeing, lower obesity rates and fewer people in prison.( Although Wilkinson and Pickett concede that suicide rates are higher in more equal countries). If they could just grasp that, he said, then they would see that combating inequality was good for everyone.” His was not a lone voice. David Miliband and other senior Labour politicians have declared their admiration for its authors and their take on inequality.

One  possible problem with The Spirit Level is that you  can’t really, with much conviction, separate out all the variables when comparing statistics from different countries (just how reliable are these statistics anyway-are they collected and collated  to a uniform standard?). To demonstrate, the author of the Spirit Level Delusion, Christopher Snowdon, shows a scatter graph that proves recycling causes suicide. By fact-checking the book’s statistics and reviewing the scientific literature, Snowden argues that in fact there is no correlation between income inequality and a country’s health, happiness and well-being. In short, the hypothesis in The Spirit Level is, he says, based on selective evidence and flawed reasoning. A report from Policy Exchange  Beware False Prophets re-examines the empirical claims made in The Spirit Level and finds that of the 20 statistical claims made in it, 14 are spurious or invalid and in only one case (the association internationally between infant mortality and income inequality) does the evidence unambiguously support their hypothesis.

Given the fact that well- being and the pursuit of happiness appears to be  moving up the political agenda perhaps it is worth looking at both books before coming to your own conclusion.

IS SOCIAL MOBILITY IMPROVED BY MAKING IT EASIER TO GET INTO UNIVERSITY?

Will getting more pupils into university improve social mobility

Professor Peter Saunders and some myths about social mobility

Comment

The benefits of the rapid expansion of higher  education were supposed to be obvious and  particularly the assumption that if you get more pupils into university they will get higher level qualifications which in turn will give them access to good jobs in the professions  and social mobility will increase . So far so virtuous. Yet despite the rapid expansion in university places over the last generation and many more graduates in the job market, report after report suggests that social mobility has actually stalled.   The evidence on social mobility is complex and sometimes contradictory. But as the Social Mobility report released a couple of  weeks ago  says ‘the broad picture is fairly clear. We currently have relatively low levels of social mobility, both by international standards and compared with the ‘baby boomer’ generation  born in the immediate post-war period’. Evidence actually suggests  that it is early  interventions that have the most effect on social mobility, and the earlier the better. If you try to engineer mobility at the university level you are basically too late.

Professor Peter Saunders  pointed out in the 2010  Civitas publication ‘Social Mobility Myths’  that educational qualifications have become what economists call ‘positional goods’. A ‘positional good’ is one whose utility declines, the more people gain access to it. When only 5 per cent of the population had university degrees, for example, a degree was a powerful passport to career success. But when almost half of the population goes to university, a degree becomes commonplace. You may be disadvantaged if you do not have one, but the advantages of being a graduate are severely dissipated. (which may go some way to explaining why 20% of new graduates are unemployed) .– ‘Simply increasing the number of graduates, or the number of people passing A‐levels, or the number of 16 year‐olds staying on at school, or the number of training places on vocational courses, will therefore achieve little in the way of increasing people’s chances of getting a high income or a middle class job. All it will do is devalue the qualifications and trigger a diploma race as people chase ever‐higher qualifications in order to distinguish themselves from the mass of other potential applicants’.  So Ministers might argue that making it easier for disadvantaged pupils to access university is a good in itself but can they argue that it will improve social mobility given that the expansion of HE appears not to have affected social mobility ? Professor Saunders is clear on this “The average educational standard of the population may or may not have improved as a result of all this expansion, but what seems certain, is that there has been no significant impact on relative social mobility’

Professor Saunders specifically attacks:

the preoccupation with expanding entry into higher education, even at the expense of academic standards;

the ‘grade inflation’ unleashed by pushing ever-increasing numbers of pupils through GCSEs and A-levels;

the attempt by government to create more middle class jobs (mainly by expanding the size of the public sector);

moves towards ‘positive discrimination’ in university selection designed to make it harder for bright, middle class applicants to get accepted;

the fallacious belief that flattening the income distribution through higher taxes and more generous welfare benefits will promote mobility.

One of the biggest myths he claims is that governments can increase mobility by top-down engineering of the education system and forcing more income redistribution.

Saunders also argues, by the way, that social mobility is much better than we let on and evidence strongly suggests  bright working class pupils, whatever the perceived obstacles,  tend to be  socially mobile.

http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/SocialMobilityJUNE2010.pdf

BLUE LABOUR-AFTER THE RED TORIES WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT?

BLUE LABOUR

After the red Tories-what would you expect?

Miliband and Glasman-sketch out a new direction?

Comment

Politicians are constantly on the look- out for new themes and ways of thinking that will unlock voter apathy and which will define them in relation to their opponents. Politics has moved to the centre ground and it’s just a bit crowded there, so new ideas are needed, and often, to help differentiate political parties and to give them a reason to exist beyond being technocratic  electioneering machines.  They are after all not just a bunch of mainly middle class Oxbridge graduates from privileged backgrounds. They are men and women ( still not many of the latter in the higher echelons it has to said)  of vision, marking out a new political  landscape fit for the twenty first century, which  voters  can buy into, or not, as the case may be. Blair had the Third Way, which never quite caught the imagination of the electorate –it’s not socialism, it’s not capitalism- it’s the third way (remember Professor Giddens?).  The Tories or rather a group of Tories warmed to the themes articulated  by Phiilp Blond ‘the Red Tory’, until quite recently a little known academic, who is now one  of the major thinkers behind the Big Society and leads the progressive think tank Respublica. Now Ed Miliband, (sorry he is now to be called Edward) who doesn’t seem that different in the eyes of some electors to Cameron or Clegg, is busy articulating the Blue Labour agenda. At the heart of it is a growing realisation that the leadership might just have lost touch with the core Labour voter and the issues that get them animated   (remember Gordon Brown on the campaign trail and what he referred to as that ‘bigoted’ woman up north). The idea is informed by the proposition that New Labour was more a methodology than a political philosophy and it was unable to build a genuinely different conception of society than the one that’s been on offer for the last thirty years.  Blue Labour is the creation of an academic named Maurice (Lord) Glasman.  He is social activist who was ennobled by Ed Miliband in the New Year’s Honours List. And Mr Miliband used some of Lord Glasman’s ideas in an important speech to the Fabian Society in January, as it happens.  Essentially what Miliband said was that things could not go back to how they were before the Great Crash where Britain had been in thrall to an economic ideology that put money ahead of pretty much everything (including presumably Brown and his sidekick Ed  Balls) The result was damage to “the values, institutions and relationships that people cherish the most”. The attraction of Glasman is that he thinks that the haemorrhaging of Labour support   can be stopped.  His research interests focus on the relationship between citizenship and faith and the limits of the market .As founder and director of an enterprise called ‘ the Faith and Citizenship Programme’  Glasman, a Jew, has been trying to help establish, among other things,  a civic practice of interfaith scriptural reasoning, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims explain their holy books to each other. So, he doesn’t lack ambition  Glasman has  been trying to nudge the Labour Party back toward its historic roots as a social movement based on a genuinely communitarian (and not exclusively statist) form of politics.  The Guardian reported in  late 2010  ‘The Labour party was born out of civil society groups organising against power, and he thinks Labour needs to return to that, weaning itself off a reliance on the state as the sole organising force of leftwing politics. Through his work with London Citizens, Glasman used those techniques to help organise people into persuading Ken Livingstone to agree a living wage when he was the capital’s mayor.’

The term Blue is not referring, of course, to  Thatcherism or implying that the right have won the ideological argument. It is  about conservative socialism, about the primacy of democracy over capital, society over the market and human relationships over commercial transactions but rooted in the past. It seeks to protect and revitalize social cohesion, solidarity, a moral order, and the “mediating structures” of social life. In talking about mediating structures there is something here too of the Big Society.

What really matters in people’s lives doesn’t often correspond with what is preoccupying the media and the  Westminster village and the expenses scandal has merely reinforced the sense of alienation of voters and the feeling that no party or political leader understands them or is currently truly representing their views and   interests and what actually matters most to them  . This Blue Labour shift is about reconnecting and reengagement, rather easier said than done in these straitened times when electors are less trusting of politicians generally blaming them not unreasonably, it has to be said, for the mess they find themselves in . Watch how Blue Labour thinking develops over the next few months and how the Red Tories respond.  The big question is whether this will capture the public imagination and that remains to be seen.

FREE SCHOOLS-SHORT CHANGED?

FREE SCHOOLS-SHORT CHANGED?

Money is the big problem

Comment

There has always been a paradox at the heart  of  Education Secretary Michael Goves  invocation of  the Swedish  education  model as an inspiration for the  Free schools reforms  here-in Sweden  groups were and are allowed  to profit from Free schools,  here  providers are not. Anders Hutlin, one of the architects of the Swedish reforms, now with Pearson Education,  has  long stressed how important the profit motive was in getting Swedish reforms off the ground, and has criticised the Government for not allowing providers to profit from managing state schools here . Around three quarters of Swedens  Free schools are run for profit. At a time when state funds are in short supply failing to incentivise the private sector to get involved in backing and  running Free schools looks to  have been  a big mistake. He and his team of advisers cant say they were not warned though. Both  the   Policy Exchange (which Gove helped establish) and Reform think tanks ,  supported profit making in state schools when Goves team were drawing up their plans for Free schools .

Indeed Rachel Wolf ,who is the Director of the New Schools Network, which helps parents to set up Free schools, co-authored a report for Policy Exchange in 2010 which said:

‘At present academy sponsors are barred from making a profit. There is no legislative reason why profit should not be allowed (these schools are simply classified as independent schools). When Tony Blair introduced academies, officials and the most radical ministers (including Lord Adonis and John Hutton) knew that allowing profit would provide a significant boost to the market, but considered the politics unworkable. There is no doubt that the politics are not easy. However, if we seek a large number of chains to drive expansion in the schools sector then this is one nettle that will need to be grasped – at least by allowing management fees between schools and private companies. Barring profit reduces the pool of organisations which want to set up several schools, and means those that do exist do not have a direct incentive to expand.’ (Blocking the Best; Obstacles to new, independent state schools; Anna Fazackerley, Rachel Wolf and Alex Massey-Policy Exchange 2010)

 

The Financial Times in a Leader in January  agreed that for the Free schools initiative to thrive it needed capital from the private sector. It opined ‘ To assemble the necessary capital, one must engage with the private sector and allow sponsors to run state-funded schools for profit. This ought not to be a problem for Mr Gove. One of the models he frequently cites is the Swedish system, which allows private entities to do just that.’

The Government is shutting off  a vital source of capital, investment , management expertise  and innovation at a time of public retrenchment. The Liberal Democrats,  before the election ,had proposed  a  model in which private providers would  be required to meet their own capital costs, but then be  allowed to recoup them through the recurrent funding  they receive from the state. This is essentially a diluted  version of the Swedish model, which also requires private  providers to put up their own capital funding, but which  allows them to make a profit as part of the deal

Now Julian Astle, of Centre Forum, the think tank closest to the Liberal Democrats ,  believes that the apparent lack of momentum in the Free schools initiative-just 30 have so far been approved – is not due to a lack of interest, but to a lack of capital. He writes in the FT (23 Feb) ‘ Parents and community groups don’t have the money to set up a school, yet only £50m has so far been made available for start ups – compared with the £25m average cost of each Academy opened under Labour.’

Astle  adds that the obvious solution is to draw more private capital into the system and as  most people putting their own money on the line expect a return- so, he asks, why not let state-funded schools run for a profit?

Astle flags up the political difficulties of allowing for profit state schools but  claims that simply relying on charities and  ‘indefatigable parents’ will not deliver the reforms the Government wants. He suggests  that ‘  At the very least the coalition  must allow those providers who cover start-up costs to recover them by retaining revenue, even if full for-profit status is a longer-term aspiration’

Toby Young, while accepting that the profit issue is sensitive , sees no reason why the Department couldn’t make it easier for free schools to pay management fees to private education providers. The Department should put a procurement framework in place that would enable free school Academy Trusts to enter into contracts with private companies without exposing themselves to an increased risk of legal challenge. Young believes that  would enable more free schools to be established.

Of course allowing profitmaking  would present big political challenges, but on the other hand, a failure to deliver on the Free schools reforms , and allowing this initiative to run into the sand,  will provide an even greater challenge  and, indeed, a threat  for the coalition government. Free schools reform  is a flagship policy and therefore one on which the Government will  very much be judged when it comes to the next election.

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=180

ED HIRSCH-BIG INFLUENCE ON TRADITIONALISTS

ED HIRSCH

Key influencer-against formalism and naturalism

In favour of  the acquisition of core knowledge

Comment

The coalition Government is intent on reforming the curriculum so that, at the heart of our system, is a core curriculum, shaped along traditional lines.

Nick Gibb has made no secret of his admiration for the work of the American academic ED Hirsch which have clearly helped inform his views. So what does Hirsch believe in?  He believes that the basic goal of education in a human community is ‘acculturation’ – in other words the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the adults of the group or community. So knowing key objective facts and  possessing a sound general knowledge  are at the heart  of a good education.

Hirsch has promoted the idea of the importance of cultural literacy—the necessary information that students must have to understand what they read. After arguing, in Cultural Literacy (1988), that young people are not becoming good readers because they lack cultural literacy, Hirsch set out to remedy the problem by “spelling out, grade by grade, in detail, what students must know in a variety of fields if they are to be competent and understanding readers.”  In addition to this Core Knowledge curriculum, Hirsch launched a system of Core Knowledge schools to teach it along with a Core Knowledge Foundation to support them. Indeed his Core Knowledge curriculum, created in 1986, is now used in more than 1,000 schools and preschools in 47 States.  So teaching a core knowledge is essential. And it must detail specific information for students to learn. It is a “lasting body of knowledge, which includes such topics as the basic principles of constitutional government, mathematics and language skills, important events in world history, and acknowledged masterpieces of art, music and literature”  Hirsch asserts that “the principal aim of schooling is to promote literacy as an enabling competence”. Crucially general knowledge should be a goal of education because it “makes people competent regardless of race, class or ethnicity while also making people more competent in the tasks of life.” This general knowledge includes knowing a range of objective facts. Hirsch says that highly skilled intellectual competence only comes after one knows a lot of facts.

Knowledge, according to Hirsch, is “intellectual capital” – that is “the knowledge and skill a person possesses at a given moment.”  He also said  that the more knowledge and skill a person has, the more they can acquire. “Learning builds on learning” he argues. So, the more a person knows, believes Hirsch, the more a person can learn in a multiplier effect. He calls existing knowledge “mental Velcro”, which allows for additional knowledge to become attached to it.
Hirsch argues that the beliefs of formalism and naturalism are deeply flawed. He explains formalism as “the belief that the particular content which is learned in school (the content which he calls intellectual capital) is far less important than acquiring the formal tools which will enable a person to learn future content.” When referring to naturalism, Hirsch states that he means “the belief that education is a natural process with its own inherent forms and rhythms, which may vary with each child, and is most effective when it is connected with natural, real-life goals and settings”

Hirsch believes in the anthropological notion that “all human communities are founded upon specific shared information, and furthermore, he says the modern world requires a literate culture. Effective communication among a human group, in his opinion, requires the accumulation of shared symbols and the information that those symbols represent Children in American schools must master the English language. A failure to do so in the use of speech and writing drastically limits one’s potential for opportunity, freedom and income.  According to Hirsch, natural talent will only get a person so far in life. In order to succeed, one must accept the idea of hard work and be fully committed to the task at hand.  Hirsch emphasizes that all learning requires effort. The effort of attention is needed as well as repetition. He argues that “no matter how much innate math ability a child has, he or she will not learn the multiplication table effectively by osmosis” Thus, drill and practice are necessary for learning. Furthermore, unless efforts are “directed and monitored, a primary responsibility of the teacher, secure learning will not occur”

Does Hirsch have any detractors?

You bet. His views are ridiculed by quite a number of academics, not least because they are fairly easy to caricature and when placed out of their full context, they can look reactionary. Some see him as an Orwellian Minister of Truth, drilling his own distinctive view of what it is to be a good American into the gullible minds of youth.  His worst sin though, as far as   progressive educators are concerned, is to attack the progressive child centred thinking of Dewey which Hirsch blames for leaving American teenage test scores way behind those most of the developed world.  But in a sense Hirsch has won the battle with Dewey in that most of the highest performing public schools in the USA are using Hirsch’s curriculum, or something pretty similar. Dewey’s ideas are much more thinly spread throughout the system.

LITERACY AND PRIMARY SCHOOLS

LITERACY AND PRIMARY SCHOOLS

New think tank report champions  synthetic phonics but not more centrally driven interventions

Comment

A  Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet out this week, commissioned by London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson , ‘ So Why Can’t They Read?, insists that traditional, structured methods such as synthetic phonics – in which children learn to “decode” words by combining individual letters and sounds – are the most effective, and attacks teachers for refusing to adopt them, despite government attempts to encourage their use. According to the report over a third of all children who leave London’s state primary schools at the age of 11 still have difficulties with reading (even though they have passed national tests) and about 5% can hardly read at all. About 20% of pupils leave secondary schools without being able to read or write with confidence. Nick Gibb, the schools Minister has been an  almost evangelical  supporter of the teaching of synthetic phonics in schools. Although the Literacy Strategy due to end at the beginning of next year   incorporates elements of phonics teaching Gibb believes that it doesn’t focus sufficiently on synthetic phonics.   The reports author  Miriam Gross says child illiteracy is made worse because many teachers have a weak grasp of spelling and syntax, and argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the large number of immigrant pupils in city schools.

“There is in fact a great deal of evidence … to show that it is white working-class children who have the most intractable reading difficulties,” she writes. “Unlike most immigrant parents, who are very keen on their children receiving a good education even if they themselves speak very little English, white working-class parents often seem to be indifferent to their children’s education.” Gross, said schools were not repeating phonics “over and over again” but allowing a child-led approach to hold sway. She also suggests that Primary school teachers are breeding illiteracy among children by letting them speak “street” in the classroom. In  other European states, ‘slang is not allowed in the classroom’ Misplaced fear of interfering with self-expression has led to a damaging failure to correct pupils who communicate in an argot mixing linguistic influences from Cockney to Indian,  Boris Johnson writing in the Daily Telegraph on 19 July says  Miriam ‘takes aim at some familiar targets of conservative wrath: child-centred learning, by which children are invited to “discover” the meaning of the printed page before them, rather than being taught; the hostility to academic selection that has bedevilled the teaching establishment; the lack of discipline in some schools; the time wasted in considering the “emotional well-being” of the child, rather than good old instruction in reading and writing.’  He endorses the synthetic phonics method. And rejects the view, espoused by some educationalist, who argue that phonics is  too dogmatic, too authoritarian and too demoralising for children who couldn’t spell out every word in their heads. They hold the  view that ‘Perhaps they should be encouraged just to recognise the words – and so was born the system of “whole word recognition”, intended partly to bolster those who found phonics a strain.’ An approach which, according to Johnson ,explains ‘why literacy has declined in the past 50 years, they claim, and that is why we face a skills shortage caused very largely by the inability of one million working Londoners to read and write.’

But, significantly  what Gross does not recommend ,and it is something that Gibb has been leaning towards, is centrally driven intervention. She suggests, instead,  an annual contest among primary schools to prove that phonics produces more literate children than whole-word recognition, in which pupils memorise words by looking at their shapes and sizes alongside pictures. “The teaching methods of the successful schools – as well as the conduct and enthusiasm of children – would be analysed, so that teachers and parents alike can see which approach works best … It could be sponsored by one of the large corporations which have been so vehement in complaining about the poor skills of school leavers.”  Significantly,  Johnson  concedes that  he has met London children  on Reading Recovery programmes who are obviously benefiting hugely from a mixture of phonics and word recognition and  forms up behind the idea of  a competition.  What many experts seem not to understand  is how the jargon used in this debate just doesn’t help bring the debate to a wider audience. The word ‘synthetic’ and the word ‘phonics’ are both off-putting. They make what is in fact a  simple and straightforward way of learning to read  sound very complicated, when it really  isn’t.

http://www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/why%20can’t%20they%20read.pdf

PROFESSOR DYLAN WILIAM-ITS THE QUALITY OF TEACHING THAT MATTERS

Teaching reforms fail because they fail to address the  quality of teaching

Comment

If you want to liven up  a conference ,with  much counterintuitive provocations call on Professor Dylan Wiliam of the Institute of Education. He set the ball rolling at a recent Reform think tank  education  conference  by claiming that  central interventions are basically a waste of time and money  because they don’t address the  dominant variable in the education system. Teacher Quality. The previous Government spent £1billion on the National Strategies which he claims have resulted in approximately just one  extra child  per primary schools reaching level 4 in KS 2 tests. Worse a similar amount is being spent each year on classroom assistants-who actually manage to lower the performance of pupils they are trying to help. Specialist schools may get better results he says  than other schools (ie the 10% rump which are not Specialist)  but this is down to the fact that they get more money, not because of  the quality of their  teaching or alleged Specialism. (Professor Smithers would agree) And Academies perform no better than similarly low performing schools that have not converted to Academy status, he claims. Dylan is also sceptical about the effects on  pupil performance of free schools.  He thinks that part  of the solution is in getting better entrants into the profession but this will take a long time to reveal its effects. And it is very hard to identify good teachers until they actually start to teach.  It is worth noting in this respect   that there are some academics and researchers  who believe that the selection procedures for teachers should be tightened up as it is possible using tests currently available  to identify individuals most likely to  succeed in the profession and to teach effectively. Given the number of teachers who complete training but either never take up teaching or leave within a year or so, this must be worth further investigation.

Dylan however is a robust advocate for improving the performance of teachers already working in schools. High quality continuing professional development is the key, he believes  but it must be throughout a teachers professional life. And this in turn will improve outcomes much more than heavy handed expensive government interventions.  Good teachers also tend to improve the performance of  the less good ones.  Dylan has also noted that poor teaching has a significant depressive  effect on outcomes too. But it is clear that  little attention is paid to ridding the system of incompetent teachers, although Dylan  worries about focusing  too much on incompetent teachers,  as this distracts us from the main task of raising the performance of all teachers, and designing strategies to achieve this. Maybe, just maybe,  the lack of focus on the quality of teaching   goes some way to explaining why it has been so hard to improve outcomes across the system.  And why indeed   the  most disadvantaged have such a raw deal, as evidence suggests they get the worst teachers.

Dylans rather weak response on getting rid of poor teachers is that they might be replaced by even worse ones-somewhat at odds with claims made by just about everyone that new entrants into the profession are better now than they have ever been.