I just did a long piece for here, and then realised it would also do for Samizdata. And since Samizdata is Clapham Junction to this place's Piddlebury Halt, I stuck it there, and then found myself adding a rant about how the government should get right out of higher education, the way you do. The top two thirds is about a rather interesting out-of-the-usual-boxes article by Mo Mowlam in yesterday's Independent.
Something similar happened with that stuff about that poor schoolboy who committed suicide. Only that time, I'd done the piece here before realising that Samizdata should be told about the story too.
The specialist blog feeds the generalist blog.
I did a posting about the interface between transport and sport (bear with me), provoked by Patrick Crozier giving a talk about Formula One motor racing earlier this evening, at my home.
And a commenter linked to this.
This story from the New York Daily News illustrates the dilemmas of the worldwide debate about exam standards very nicely:
An independent panel appointed to look into why an alarming number of high school kids bombed out on the June Math A Regents Exam has found the statewide test was too hard.So the scores will be bumped up so that many of those who failed will get passing grades.
"In short, students in June 2003 were held to a higher standard than their counterparts a year earlier," the commission of math experts said in its report.
But the panel, appointed by state Education Commissioner Richard Mills, also found that teachers messed up by trying to anticipate subject matter.
"The teachers were teaching to the test," said Assemblyman Steve Sanders (D-Manhattan), chairman of the Education Committee. "The problem was, they guessed wrong."
The panel found that teachers, believing the test would be heavy on trigonometry, drilled students on their sines and cosines. But the test didn't have a single trig problem, the report said.
I'm starting to have heretical thoughts about exams, which can be summarised by me saying that I think this "panel" may well have done the right thing.
After all, the purpose of exams is to arrange people in order of merit. It must make distinctions. If they all get A*, which is apparently what is happening with children in England doing their A levels just now, the result is that the Universities don't know who's the best, so they interview them all, and go by how eloquently they talk or how politely they suck up to the interviewers. (I read that point made better by someone else recently, but I've lost the link. Sorry.) And if they all get F– you get the same kind of effect. So the logical thing might very well be to do what these people have in effect done, which is: first mark all the papers, and then decide which numbers get you into which grade.
The obvious objection to this procedure is that it fails to make any distinction between this year and last year and next year, or this decade and last decade and next decade. If the standards lurch around from year to year, who is to say whether this fifteen year old is any brighter than that seventeen year old?
Okay, cards on the table, I don't know the answer any more (I suggest) than you do. I don't see how you can have an exam system which separates the smartness of the examinees from the skill with which they were prepared for their exams by the teachers. After all, presumably, some teachers guessed right about what was going to be in these particular exams, and as a result, their pupils will presumably get a higher grade than they "deserve". Or, more simply, some pupils were relatively lucky in having teachers who did not "teach to the test" (to quote Assemblyman Sanders' words). They too presumably did rather better than rivals who actually "deserved" to do as well as they did.
On the other hand, pupils who have been better taught, are pupils you'd rather have at your university, regardless of how much worse they might have done with worse teaching, or how much better other pupils might have done with better teaching.
Okay I give up. I've failed. Micklethwait: F–.
UPDATE: According to the bit at the end of this I think it must have been GCSEs rather than A Levels where they got all those A*s. F––.
FURTHER UPDATE: ... and what is being said about A levels is that too many people are getting A, so could they please introduce A*s for those also. See this.
Catherine Maskell writes in the latest Spectator about cleaning up after Warwick University students. It is not nice. Concluding paragraph:
Having two brothers, and an ex-boyfriend whose sick I was more familiar with than he was himself, I must admit that it wasn’t a complete surprise to see how utterly and conveniently useless the average British male under 25 is. The posh and privately educated ones are just exaggerated, more offensive versions of their lower-class counterparts. What they want, more than anything else, is a mother-servant. Someone they can whinge to even as they clear up after them. And nobody, not even his mother, knows this better than the average British cleaner.
I'm sure I was exactly this terrible. Although I don't remember combining being a Marxist with maltreating any cleaners, the way some of Ms. Maskell's tormentors do, apparently.
The Labour government is right. The least they could do is pay for some of this coddling. And the Conservatives are wrong. That's because it's their children and the children of their voters who ought to be doing the paying.
The foreigners, who do pay, behave far better, she says.
The following article (headline: "Children of few words") appeared in today's Daily Telegraph, but only in paper form. Its author, Jennifer Chew, is a leading contributor to the work of the Reading Reform Foundation and a vigorous promoter of the Synthetic Phonics method for teaching literacy. I have simply scanned in this article, which is quite short, in its entirety. I hope no one objects.
The results of this year's reading test for seven-year-olds should be of interest to anyone concerned, about education.
Reading is the foundation for all later educational attainment, and a good start in infant school is vital. Reading attainment at seven has been shown to be one of the best predictors of GCSE performance.
Unfortunately, the results are not published in a form that makes their significance easy to grasp. The "expected level" is Level 2, subdivided into 2A, 2B and 2C.
This year, 84 per cent of seven-year-olds reached Level 2C or above – not bad, one might think. What is often not realised, however, is that only Level 2B and above represents an adequate standard. Those who reach only Level 2C have little chance of reaching Level 4 – the expected level – at 11 years old, or of performing adequately at GCSE.
This year, only 69 per cent reached Level 2B or above, which means that nearly a third of seven-year-olds – almost 200,000 children – will probably not read well enough at 11 to cope with the secondary- school curriculum.
The reading test is a comprehension test based on fiction and non-fiction. passages. Children must read each piece of text and answer questions about it.
About half of the 30 questions are multiple choice and the rest require an answer in the form of a word, phrase or sentence. Comprehension involves reading the words accurately and making sense of them. So we need to know whether the problem is with word-reading or making sense of them or both.
However, the test does not make this distinction and so does not tell us what teachers should focus on to get more children to Level 2B. Other tests, though, show that it is often word-reading that is weak in Level 2C children. Their comprehension is poor because they cannot read enough of the words accurately.
If these children were genuinely incapable of better word-reading, we would be stuck with the current stagnant standards. But there is a type of teaching – true Phonics – that can greatly improve word-reading and so remove this barrier to comprehension.
With this method, some infant schools are already getting 88 per cent or more of their children to Level 2B. The children are not super-intelligent, but are taught letter-sound correspondences at a much faster pace than is prescribed by the national literacy strategy.
They are taught to use this knowledge to read all words, apart from a few less regular ones that are explicitly taught.
In spite of claims to the contrary, the national literacy strategy does not present letter-sound knowledge as the first strategy children should be taught to use in word-reading. Rather, letter-sound knowledge comes into play after words have been identified: the teacher identifies words and the children then break them down and build them up again, or the children attempt to identify words by sight or from contextual and pictorial clues and then check a letter or two (usually not all letters) to see if they are right. Research and common sense suggest that this is less effective than true phonics.
In one school, the first children to be started off with true phonics, six years ago, have just taken the tests for 11-year-olds. Eighty-nine per cent of them reached the expected Level 4 in English as against the national figure of 74 per cent.
Most worrying of all is the 18 per cent of seven-year-olds who fail to reach even Level 2C. After nearly three years in school, these children are virtually unable to read, making up the "long tail of underachievement" that is a. recurring feature of British performance in international comparisons.
In schools that teach true phonics, the proportion failing to reach 2C is seldom more than three per cent. If all infant schools used this approach, the "long tail" would all but disappear. So, too, would the underachievement of boys, which currently causes concern: boys perform at least as well as girls when using true phonics.
Better infant-school teaching could largely solve literacy problems – and many wider education problems – throughout the school system. The evidence has been repeatedly presented to the policy-makers, but little changes.
And, as if to make my point for me, again, about how some schools are, for some children, an absolute joy, here's another Samizdata commenter, "Monsyne Dragon":
From my experiences as a kid, I know EXACTLY how this poor kid felt. I also was very mature for my age, from day one. My parents called me the "35-year old midget" . (U.S.) Public school was hell. Utter hell. I ALSO had the good fortune of going to a private school for two years. It was a school specifically for very talented and/or very high IQ kids. About 80% of the students there were "over-mature" There were NO troubles with socialization there. The kids weren't isolated, and there was none of the unending harassment of the public schools. The kids there weren't trying to be over-adult in compensation for anything, they were just being themselves, and when put together with others of the same level of maturity, they were FINE. Kids who had been doing HORRIBLY grade-wise (including me) got top grades. Some of the kids there had been getting violent out of frustration at public school previously. There was none of that at the private school.The public schools' political agenda simply won't let them recognize several basic facts:
1) People mature at different rates, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
2) For kids, being in a large group consisting of exclusively the same physical age as themselves is UNNATURAL, and not very good for their development (my private school divided kids into groups by broad age-ranges. kids 4-5 years apart were in the same group)
"Modern" public schools foster a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere that does harm to many and may lead some to violence, either against themselves, as in this case, or against others.
Every now and again, when you ramble on about education, you say something or talk about something which yanks the argument away from the arid vacuities of national statistics to the inescapable truths of individual experience. This Guardian piece, and my various links and reactions to it, have had this effect, although mostly at Samizdata rather than here.
I really recommend these Samizdata comments. Monsyne Dragon isn't the only one showing a few of his educational wounds to illustrate more general things. There are others, all with important points to make that are worth attending to, including the point that I probably (at Samizdata) went way over the top in blaming the wretched mother as much as I did. It's hard not to blame somebody in situations like this. But, as "Eric Blair" says (I'm guessing that inverted commas are once again in order):
I'm not sure I'd blame the mother too much. I know what it was like to be bullied, and the 'rents were the last ones I would have told.I do blame the teachers. They knew I was being bullied, and did nothing about it. Worse, they tried to tell me I was the problem. Stupid shits. I can't believe how angry this is making me thinking about it after 30 years.
God, what an ugly thing it is.
Amelia asked this:
Where was the Dad during all this?
Indeed. It all rather reminds me of this movie, in which Hugh Grant filled in for Dad.
I'm guessing Monsyne Dragon had a Dad paying attention to his circumstances, if only to pay for the nice school. Yes, it would seem so. He says "my parents".
After doing the piece below on the Thomas Thompson case, I rehashed it for Samizdata, because I thought it deserved … to be rehashed for Samizdata. The comments are now beginning to accumulate there, one of them from Rob Fisher, who says:
I'm reminded of an essay by Paul Graham about school society. It's ostensibly about why smarter than average kids are unpopular at school, but it touches upon some deeper truths about what school is really like. I hope I'm not quoting too much, but it seems relevant.
It does indeed. Below I reproduce the bits that Rob picked out:
They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.
Notice that Graham doesn't say that "in the abstract people in poorer countries are monstrously cruel to one another". He merely notes that cruelty happens, without claiming that the people being cruel are cruel by their inherent nature. Yet he makes that exact claim about children. I think he's flat wrong, and that children, like adults, are nice or nasty depending on the pressures they face. A few are truly evil, even in a nice world. A few are saints, even in a nasty world. Most children, like most adults, go either way, depending.
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
That's certainly true. But then comes this:
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids all locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
I bloody well do have a "problem with this". I think that prisons are inherently savage places. I think the way to handle the disasters of kids "running around loose" would be to deal with each disaster case by case, as adult "disasters" are dealt with, rather than by imprisoning all children, even if they can quite see the point of not being allowed to run around loose. Besides which: what happens during the school holidays. Some adults have their work cut out, but not all.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.
But if you tell children quite clearly that they are in prison, some of them are going to be all the keener to escape, and if you stop them, then where does that leave any plan for a kinder, gentler prison?
It seems to me that any curriculum, no matter what combination of activities it contains, will be meaningless and stultifying to many children. The idea that you can solve the problem of a compulsory curriculum by having a different compulsory curriculum is to concentrate on tinkering with the wrong half of that phrase. (The trouble with "progressive" education is that it grants the child every freedom imaginable, except the freedom to go somewhere else if the child thinks it's horrible or a waste of time. Freedom must include the freedom to leave.)
To make a more general point, many regular readers of this blog may be puzzled by the way I oscillate between arguing for children's liberation, as in this post, and quite polite discussions of this or that school or teaching method, often of a highly disciplined and "structured" sort, for example as done in the British Army, or as might be involved in them being sent away to a school in Romania. The reason is simple. I believe in freedom for children. And I believe in good teaching, which can most definitely involve highly structured teaching. Freedom means you can leave. It doesn't mean that you can tyrannise your teacher in his classroom. Some kids sent to Romania might be imprisoned there, if they want out but aren't allowed out. But the lucky ones would only go, and then go back, back if they liked it and felt they were getting good things from it, despite the inevitable downsides of one sort or another.
Practically any half-decent teacher is welcomed by some children, and is simultaneously experienced as a tyrant by other children who are forced to submit to that teacher against their will. In other words, there is actually, now, quite a lot of freedom for many children. Many children are living pretty much the life they want, given the choices they now have, which explains why quite a lot of officially compulsory schools are actually quite nice places, instead of being run by the nastiest psychos in them. (In particular, many children would surely be horrified if obliged to stay at home and be mucked about by their parents. Freedom and home schooling are absolutely not the same thing, however large the overlap may often be.) Hence (a) my unswerving belief in freedom for children, combined with (b) my eagerness to discuss sympathetically the work of many apparently "compulsory" teachers and teaching systems now. It may seem a contradiction, but from where I sit, it's not.
Graham, it seems to me, is honest enough to see what many schools really are and what many schools really do, but he draws back from the conclusion that, it seems to me, ought to follow. They are (for many children) prisons. And they ought not to be (for any children).
This is a fascinating and thoroughly depressing article, about a boy who killed himself because he was so dreadfully unhappy at school.
Sandra Thompson was used to her son's weekend rhythm - the immediate relaxation and laughter of Friday afternoons, the dark mood that descended every Sunday as another week loomed. "With the first mention of school, Thomas must have had the same thoughts - are they going to be at the bus stop, are they going to get me today, do I have enough money on me to cover what they take?
Simply, he should have got out of that place at once, and pursued his very definite interests in living a more adult life, and done it in the adult way to which he was clearly suited.
There were reasons for that singling out, numerous and at the same time insufficient. Thomas was a highly articulate child, well-spoken, and without the usual local slur. He was overweight. He was easier with adults than children, and more confident around girls than lads. He preferred the Human League to Eminem. And because of this he was bullied, relentlessly. And because of that, on the afternoon of July 2, he took an overdose of painkillers and died later that day. He was 11 years old.
It's seldom you come across a story where the contrast between what a child was doing and what that child ought to have been doing is so screamingly obvious.
I would like to think that this article reflects a deeper disenchantment with the whole demented idea of compulsory education itself, among the Guardian-article-writing classes.
Please go and read the whole thing.
Rootling around at the education section of the Telegraph, I came across this, which is a database of facts, experiences, opinions, and I dare say, also fictions about Britain's universities.
I went to Aberdeen, because it is top of the list, then went to comments, because that sounded like it might actually tell us something, and then chose this comment, because it sounded juicy, submitted by that prolific fellow "anonymous":
my brother did psychology at aberdeen (starting in 2001) and hated it so much he left after a year. tho ppl were great and he made some great friends the course was v bad. he's quite a good student but no nerd at all and loves going out but he was really complaining about lack of work and assignments and lack of quality. his girlfriend started psychology at marburg uni (in Germany) at the same time, and what she did was way ahead of his course. i guess if u like the town, can cope with weather and the weird accent and dont happen to have applied for psychology u should go there. apart from that ...
I wonder if anonymous's brother learned about capital letters during his year at Aberdeen? Maybe he also had a (psychological?) problem with them?
Anyway, my point is, if you're choosing a university, or helping someone else to choose one, and if you are the sort who likes biased gossip to get the feel of a place (I definitely am), as well as broader and more statistical and respectable stuff, this looks like a very useful resource.
I wish I'd been able to wander around something like this when I was at school.
Here is a story which illustrates the difference.
The first private company to take over the running of an entire education authority is to be fined yet again for failing to meet its targets for improving GCSE and national test results.CEA@Islington will lose half of the £908,480 fee that it was due to receive for overseeing Islington Council's schools this year, despite achieving its best ever GCSE grades.
Provisional GCSE results released by the north London borough yesterday show that 37.5 per cent of its pupils achieved at least five top A* to C grades, compared to 32.9 per cent last year. However, it failed to reach the target of 39 per cent, the figure agreed when the company won the Islington contract three years ago. The figures compare with a national average of 51.6 per cent last summer. The latest fine means that the company has been penalised three years running.
Both the council and CEA@Islington welcomed the rise in results, but recognised that more needed to be done.
CEA@Islington may in some sense be a private sector enterprise, but it is not operating in the private sector. It has one customer: the local authority. And it would appear that it has only one definition of results, namely exam success. In the private sector it would have lots of customers, and they would decided, individually, in accordance with their many and various ideas of what educational quality consisted of, whether they thought CEA@Islington was doing a good job for them. The aggregate of those decisions would determine CEA@Islingon's income.
This, on the other hand, is just an operation in churning the public sector up, and getting the people who work in it to accept payment by "results", instead of just salaries for showing up, which may be a good idea, but which may not (see above). In this story shows, the process of arguing that the contract between CEA@Islington and Islington Council should not be stuck to in the future has already begun. ("… despite achieving its best ever GCSE grades"). When the time comes for contract renewal, there will be a lapse back to public sector business as usual. Potential rivals will be wary of plunging into such a difficult and hazardous "market". This time the "contractor" will have a far better idea of what it can expect to achieve, and thus what to demand in its wage negotiations. Because wage negotiations is what it will be, with the company's management merely replacing the union as the negotiator. Very soon the company will become a mere part of the problem it was originally hired to solve.
When an apparently dramatic change is made in the public sector, the initial results as often quite good, but then they lapse back towards mediocrity again, when the underlying interests of the parties involved assert themselves.
In contrast, a move towards a genuinely free market often starts with chaos, only gradually followed by real and continuing improvement.
Which is just one more reason why privatising things, for real, can be so very difficult. After all, chaos can erupt in the public sector for all kinds of reasons, and how do you know that this chaos is good chaos, chaos with a future, or just chaos chaos?
Have a nice week.
