David Cameron’s oddly hybrid liberal-conservative government may be the last place on might look for progressive ideas on education. It is there that Education secretary Michael Gove is asserting what people who enter classrooms on a daily basis realize: centralization doesn’t work.
Just when Massachusetts turns over its constitutional competences to vague inter-state groups working on shared standardized tests, suborning its achievements to a dumbed-down national curriculum, Michael Gove advocates for the opposite:
While each of these exemplars has their own unique and individual approach to aspects of education, their successful systems all share certain common features. Many have put in place comprehensive plans for school improvement which involve improving teacher quality, granting greater autonomy to the front line, modernising curricula, making schools more accountable to their communities, harnessing detailed performance data and encouraging professional collaboration. It is only through such whole-system reform that education can be transformed to make a nation one of the world’s top performers.
Compare this to Obama’s current drive (with Deval’s complicity) to take autonomy from the front line, divorce them from their communities and tie them to the state, and poisoning professional collaboration by throwing funding in as a prize of competition rather like the Apple of Discord.
Just reading this White Paper is enough to make any American teacher look at visa requirements. Here are some choice lines:
“We envisage schools and teachers taking greater control over what is taught in schools, innovating in how they teach and developing new approaches to learning”
“The guidance on the National Curriculum is weighing teachers down and squeezing out room for innovation, creativity, deep learning and intellectual exploration.”
“Government cannot determine the priorities of every school, and the attempt to secure compliance with its priorities reduces the capacity of the system to improve itself.”
“Reform initial teacher training so that more training is on the job.”
There are some baffling name-checks on the most destructive practices in America in this document, which contradict pretty much everything else contained therein. However, combined with a McKinsey international study that demonstrates the direct relationship between international achievement and school/teacher autonomy due for release tomorrow, it is clear in which direction the UK is moving.
The same direction prescribed in Germany (PDF) Japan, or South Korea. The same direction embraced by the industrialized world — except for the United States.
I would bet the architects of testing would admit under truth serum that they never intended for testing to be widespread, they wanted to use it to bust the teachers union’s hold on bad schools. Testing has arguably led to a step up for the terrible schools and a big distraction for schools that worked well before.
what can we learn from within (in addition to learning from any other country with success)? Yes, we have been bombarded forever with how bad the schools are, the dummying down of America, blah blah blah… But, how true is it?
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p>If you believed everything you heard/read, you would think we have a nation full of morons graduating every year. And while I do agree that we have our fair share of these morons, we also have a large number of exceptional students graduate every year. Sometimes they are small minorities within school systems and other times they are majorities of certain school systems.
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p>So… how is this happening? Why can’t we study within our own system to see what works and what doesn’t?
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p>I think the harder problem is our culture/society and not the school system.
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p>Sorry to repeat myself… My “guess” is if you take the worst performing school system in the state and magically bidirectionally transpose the physical building, the textbooks, the testing, the lunch programs and the teachers from the best performing school system, the students from the worst system would continue to do poorly while the students from the best system would continue to overperform. This is important in any problem solving or as my orthopedic Doctor tells me when strategically injecting cortisone shots into my shoulder, “I gotta put the water exactly on the fire otherwise it does no good”.
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p>I want our schools to do better in the worst way and I on the boards in town NPOs for the schools. The students who do well have involved parents, the students who don’t do well do not have involved parents. Last year we put a Homework program together, not for the students but to help the parents of students “guide” their kids to get their homework done (without doing the homework FOR their kids). We need help getting parents involved in their children’s education.
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p>Different books, programs, lessons and testing/no-testing does not put water on that fire!
Based on test results, MA public schools produce, far-and-away, the best results in the US:
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p>e.g., from: http://www.massteacher.org/arc…
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p>And very nearly the best in the world:
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p>e.g., from http://www.boston.com/news/edu…
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p>If Arne Duncan and his boss were interested in things like “evidence” and “reality”, they’d be studying what makes our commonwealth’s results so astonishingly good, rather than concocting untested schemes (that happen to bust teacher unions).
Somewhere between despairing and comic is the fact that no matter what excuses and rationalizations used by Arne & Co. — private-school products all — they’re doing it the wrong way. Even if one accepts their misinterpretation of data, misuse of data, conflation of excellent school systems (MA and NY) with others — if one accepts all that…they’re still doing it wrong.
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p>It’s almost as if they’ve decided on the solution before defining the problem. Huh.
And I do love love love your tagline. Wish he would, don’t think he will unless you know something……………..
Story
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p>Rather than American students getting stupid, I believe the “middle class” student’s academic performance is following the middle class’s financial performance. We keep hearing this adage…
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p>I think the above is true but I would add that “more” people are getting richer and “many more” people are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing.
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p>And I would parallel this with education and say…
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p>Disclosure… I have no facts to back any of this up and it is only my opinion.
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p>Ok, one factoid… The number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more — excluding wealth derived from a primary residence — grew 16 percent last year, according to a new report by the Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based consulting firm. After a 27 percent decline in the number of millionaire households in 2008, the ranks of U.S. millionaires swelled to 7.8 million last year.
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p>And it was an even better year to be an “Ultra High Net Worth Individual,” defined as someone with a net worth of $5 million or more. That population grew 17 percent in 2009 to 980,000.
…that the school dropout rate went up when the MCAS became a graduation requirement.
It’s not the only answer, but it gets ignored as a cause.
of the arrogance conservatives sometimes attribute to liberals. It’s an overweening arrogance that assumes they can impose solutions through their superior intellects. Rightly or wrongly, I can’t help but associate this arrogance with the ruling class backgrounds that come, not from often humble beginnings (ex. Clinton), but Ivy League (usually Harvard) educations (Obama, Duncan, etc.).
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p>Arne Duncan is so ignorant of education’s complexity, he would be embarrassed if he had any humility. The man has no idea of what he doesn’t know, yet he’s so sure of “what is right,” that he can rejoice in the mass firings of teachers in Great Falls, RI.
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p>Our friend JohnD has a better idea of what’s going on in schools than Duncan. I congratulate JohnD. Once you start to realize that family and thus culture have a huge impact on student learning, you are on the path to understanding the complexity of education.
Great post Mark but think how hard the problem becomes when it’s family/society. When we have discrete problems like “old schools”, “bad teachers”, “outdated textbooks”… then the solution is write a check. Nice and clean, write a check and go fix this problem, everybody is happy, teachers make more money, builders building schools, politicians getting their names on new schools… but for the most part these efforts fall down. But how do you make a parent spend an hour with their kids after dinner doing homework? How can you help him/he with algebra if you can’t add/subtract/read? How do you instill a “can do” spirit in a child when your life has no “can do” left in it?
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p>No, we’ve taken the easy way and blamed the problem on the simple things. I respect the efforts of Charter schools for their results. But I support things like Charter Schools more because they are at least trying something new. Maybe Arne Duncan in cooperation with HHS…, can put it out there for Educators to submit 100 new ideas for systemic changes and let’s put 100 pilot projects together that try to address the root causes of our educational underperformance and stop with the window dressing fixes.
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p>Erm… Obama, Clinton, and Clinton all had relatively similar backgrounds — fairly middle class, both Obama and W Clinton lived with grandparents and other “non-nuclear” family arrangements, and all three attended graduate school at an Ivy… and WJC also went to Oxford. Duncan’s backgrounds aren’t so easy to determine, but it does seem that he grew up middle class, since his father was a professor and his mom ran a small non-profit. Like H Clinton, he grew up in a nuclear family. Yeah, he went to an Ivy too.
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p>So really, you’ve plucked four people who have rather similar backgrounds, and then used their backgrounds to explain who knows what.
I’m sure I can defend too much. It may be a prejudice, more than the identification of a certain type. I certainly can’t back up my feeling very well.
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p>Arne Duncan is indeed from a privileged background. Hyde Park in Chicago is a privileged neighborhood. The University Lab school, which founded by John Dewey, is now a private school (not a prep school), that offers subsidized tuition for the kids of U of C employees. Kind of privileged. Then, of course, he went to Harvard before joining the the class of “educational entrepreneurs.” Did any of this make Arne Duncan the arrogant, horse’s ass that he is? A lot of conservatives would say so, which makes me question what I said.
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p>We can all point out examples of conservative arrogance. It usually appears with the offenders not giving a crap whether you like what they want or not. But I’m disturbed by Arne Duncan’s attitude–his certainty that he knows what needs to be done in education and can do it. He implies, “I know what’s best for you, even if you don’t.”
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p>My real question, is Duncan a certain type of liberal?
And Arne & Co. seem determined to “solve” it by handcuffing teachers to the tests and national standards until all but the automatons flee for their lives.
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p>Meanwhile, the oft-lauded and high-achieving Finland, for example, does the opposite, investing in training and development for teachers and then giving them levels of autonomy our teachers can only dream of.
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p>Which would you folks rather your children have as a teacher? A robotic, remote-controlled teacher who sticks to the script, regardless of whether anyone in the class is keeping up or, god forbid, interested in what’s going on? Or a well-educated, experienced, creative teacher with enough freedom to take a discussion in an interesting direction that deviates from the script of the day? I’ll take the latter. With national standards and testing, the control gets more remote every day, with consequences that I find disturbing to contemplate.
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p>Lisa Guisbond
Citizens for Public Schools
Is to make teachers akin to bank tellers — people who work with something high value, but whose job is so closely regimented, refereed, and pre-determined that one can attempt to get away with hired indifferently educated, unevenly skilled people to do the job.
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p>Once anybody can become a teacher, there’s less need to listen or respect them.
Ever see the British study that concluded some of the lowest wage jobs, like child care and cleaning, provide orders of magnitude more value than the highest wage jobs, like financial management, which actually destroy rather than create value? The study by the New Economics Foundation concluded that “Childcare workers create £7 for each £1 they are paid, while bankers destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn.”
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p>Is this why hedge fund managers are so fond of charter schools, many of which squeeze the most possible value out of young, inexperienced, nonunion teachers, i.e., longer school days, weeks and years without additional compensation? Young teachers are also less likely to push for great autonomy, I expect.
debate over education is less about what’s best for our kids than trying to validate neo-liberal ideas about the free market of education and the history of employee management in 20th century.
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p>Our current testing regime, which was conceived back in the 1950s, tries to create an educational economy with test scores as a form of wealth. Like the neo-classical economic model it’s based on, producing success is a matter of providing the proper incentives. Schools and districts are supposed to excel because there are incentives sanctions if they fail to achieve.
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p>Back in the 1990s, education paid lip service to de-centralization. There was talk of Deming’s total quality management and site-based decision-making. We’ve taken a hard right, however, and doubled down on a top-down management model. The problem is that the people at the top often don’t know much about education. That’s not to say that the people on the bottom–the teachers who actually do the important part–know everything. But we don’t really have a voice in the matter.
McKinsey’s study speaks volumes on the need for decentralization…I’m plowing through it now.
are you talking about?
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p>Mb
I summarize it over at my maybe-coming back blog:
http://qontheshore.blogspot.co…
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p>The page on the study is here (PDF):
http://ssomckinsey.darbyfilms….