Education

Look at the first five minutes of this (thanks so much, JD) (for the impatient, from c. 3:30 on):

Mother told by her father to sacrifice everything for a good education for her children... 1944 Education Act... grammar school... competitive ethos... grant to go to University... free public access to museums and art galleries...

Sir Roy Strong - son of a commercial traveller... Sir Peter Hall - son of a railway station master...

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Infestation in the ivory tower

Education dons gather for pre-prandial sherry in the Senior Common Room

In the Mid-Western United States, we have species of cicadas, which are referred to ’17-year locusts’. Every 17 years, the grubs emerge from the tree trunks where they feed, grow wings and swarm, mating as they go. The mess and noise that result are impressive.

There is a species of middle manager with a similar life-cycle. These are the education reformers, who emerge from the darkness every decade with a plan and a promise to fix all problems in the system. They are a parasitic and destructive organism.

While not technically predatory, they will scavenge weaker and more timid creatures. For that reason, their preferred habitats are the fields of Mathematics and Science. There, they are able to clear great swathes of space and build large numbers of flimsy and unusable structures in short periods of time.

Just before the extent of the actual damage becomes known, they retreat safely into academia, full of grant funding, and rest until the next generation emerges.

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A child's-eye view of robofascism

The above clip is from a child's game called Raft Wars 2. As with the original, cute little characters (including a baby) bravely battle a series of teams of bad guys.

But one of the teams in version 2 interests me. The bad guys are in blue and labelled "Security" - and not our security, obviously. This team appears more than once in the game, and has a helicopter and several missile-launching drones.

Is it too much to treat this as a sign of the times? More in a moment...

IT'S BEEN 40 years since the William Tyndale School scandal began to brew- ooh lefty teachers and their progressive methods, good job they were smacked down.

Except that such methods were not unique to that school, but were generally accepted and enshrined in the Plowden report. Today even more than then, we are aware of the multiple differences between children in their mental and emotional makeup, not to mention the multifarious traumas that they carry with them because of modern widespread family dysfunction.

A not-terribly-well-written 2008 review of the affair by a retired head (how come so many teachers can't write?) got a riposte from Brian Haddow, the deputy head at the time. He maintains that what made it important to smack down Tyndale was that implicit in a more cooperative learning approach is the principle of active democracy.

Up to a point. Tyndale was a gift to reactionaries because of the intransigence of the leadership. If the latter had taken time to sell their ideas to all those involved, tweak their systems in the light of experience, and soothe those who were upset, the outcome might have been very different. But the British are just as uncompromisingly self-righteous as any other nation - quite possibly we can blame the revolutions and civil wars of the eighteenth century onward, on the pig-headed Puritans that Elizabeth I contained for so long during her reign. So it was "my way or the highway" - and the fragmentation began.

As I recall, the leaks and counter-briefing began with a member of staff who was not a teacher and who didn't feel her views had been valued (some teachers today may find that their TA can be a challenge as well as an asset).

At any rate, Parliament got into the control issue and we now have inspectorate squads of Fault-Finder Generals roaming the country in search of schools to pick apart and justify conversion to the Latest Great Thing: Academies! The business model rules - if by that you understand widening disparity in pay, increasingly high-handed (and venal) management, etc. We've seen it all before in tertiary education.

Returning to Brian Haddow's letter, one of the things he says points the way to the debate we should be having today:

"We are tightly regulated and policed because of social fragmentation and a breakdown of ideological consensus."

I'm not sure when we did have consensus, except in response to the dreadful threat of the Nazis and then the need to rebuild our country after 1945. But economic globalism is driving fat wedges into our population, as billionaire Jimmy Goldmsith warned so clearly in 1994 during the GATT talks (see the interview here). With overpriced assets (especially houses) powered by ridiculous levels of debt, we cannot possibly drop our wages to compete with the emerging economies. The playing field has been heavily tilted towards mobile capital and against much-less-mobile labour.

And then there is identity. I find it really hard to understand why political leaders don't appreciate how much identity matters to people. Yorks v Lancs, Scots v sassenachs, one football team v another - surely it must be obvious that these reflect fundamental instincts that need to be handled very carefully. Yet the EU's insistence on totally unrestricted freedom of movement creates just the sort of strains that its starry-eyed Ode To Joy brotherhood theme was meant to deal with. There is no such thing as a unihuman.

Now since globalism won't work*, it must be made to work, and the hammer to drive the square peg into the round hole is: security.

The "conservatives" (they aren't) with their money-obsession, and the Left with its amorphous goodbuddy dreams are combining to create the conditions for fascism.

Do we really want a world full of robospies and ubiquitous buzzy drones? Do we have to make nervous old ladies check for beardies under the bed? Couldn't we just have national sovereignty and the Rule of Law?
______________

*(Of course, it does work - most for those who matter most - otherwise it wouldn't be allowed.)


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Education: Grade Inflation Wastes Lives, Destroys Talent

By Paddington

Where others see conspiracy theories, I see badly thought-out plans. The Law of Unintended Consequences is, after all, a modern restatement of the old proverb, “The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.

This is especially applicable to US Education policy.

About a decade ago, the powers that be finally realized that their comfortable lives relied on technology, which in turn relied on a large contingent of well-educated people to create and maintain it. It also became clear that we were not training enough of those individuals, and had imported those brains for decades. They decided that we should produce more, and like Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise, said, “Make it so”.

Departments of Education throughout the country increased the number of Mathematics and Science courses which students had to pass to graduate from high school. People became aware that there was a lot of scholarship money in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines, and also that those majors got productive jobs, while the Liberal Arts majors all too often moved back home after graduation. The diligent middle-class parents forced their children to take even more material, and do better at it, just like the armies of tots forced into gymnastics after each Olympics.

In turn, this meant that teachers in public and private education were faced with legions of students with neither talent nor motivation. Yet, they were expected to succeed in teaching them. The result could have been easily predicted. There was massive grade inflation and a lowering of standards, plus extra punitive measures against teachers.

We in higher education in those STEM disciplines are now faced with two large groups of ‘problem’ students.

The first have been told that they have mastered material which they have not, and deeply resent us for dropping them into lower-level courses. They then spend years repeating courses, until they run out of student loans, or finally pass.

The second have a great deal of talent, but have not been stretched to their capacity. They were the success stories, who expect A’s on everything. It is really sad, but many cannot emotionally handle their first failure (or even a C). We see eating disorders, suicides, and too many drop-outs from this group. The knee-jerk reaction in the popular media is that these students are too stressed from the expectations placed on them. I claim that it is because they have been given unrealistic feedback, and this is strongly supported by international studies on such things.

Of course, some universities and colleges have lowered their standards, and Mathematics and Science departments in those which have not are now being referred to as ‘roadblocks’. Any guesses as to what will happen next?

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Does management justify its own costs?

Throughout history, the university systems of the world have evolved from a monastic model, through the industrial model as a driver of social mobility, to the latest, which is the ‘business’ model.

Like all models, this one has assumptions. In this case, the underlying but usually unstated one is that the faculty who teach and research, and the people who maintain the buildings, are not working hard enough.

The proposed solution is to add layers of middle managers, whose only contribution is to ‘motivate’ and generate policies to make everything ‘more efficient’.

The sad reality is that no amount of increased efficiency or hard work on the producers of the system can make up for the cost of this increased administration.

A cynic might argue that the only purpose of these changes is to provide jobs for those who can’t do anything productive.

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Education: 30 years of wasting teachers' time

(Giles' famous schoolteacher, Chalky White)

"Teachers must stop “reinventing the wheel” by drawing up special lesson plans for children and revert to traditional teaching from text books, the schools minister says today.

"Liz Truss said that teachers in English schools spend too much of their time preparing new lessons, worksheets and other materials and not enough on the basic task of teaching children from standard texts.
 

"The failure to use “strong core material” like standard texts is hampering children’s ability to master basic lessons and skills, she said, suggesting many teachers are effectively wasting time on unfulfilling and unnecessary work.
 

"The minister’s comments, in a Telegraph article, come after an international study showed that teachers in England spend less time teaching from textbooks than those anywhere else in the developed world.
 

"The study, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, found that teachers are spending many hours every week devising new lesson plans, photocopying worksheets and preparing other materials instead of simply teaching."

Read the full thing here.

Now tell Ofsted and all the other bozos.

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Negative leader

(pic source)

Leaders are not necessarily good for the group, or even clever.

I once taught a class where I felt a boy had followers, but his negative attitude to learning was dragging them down with him. A colleague told me about sociograms:

"Hand out a slip of paper to each child, marked so that you can identify them. They have to write the answer to two questions: if you could sit next to anyone in the class you wanted to, who would it be? And if you could vote for a form captain (boys for a boy, girls for a girl) who would it be? Then draw the diagram."

Sure enough, there was a cluster of boys who had given both their votes to the same lad.

I then wrote in the academic grades for each child. The ones closest to this individual had the lowest grades.

On this basis, we moved the negative leader, not down to a lower set, where he could have the same effect or worse, but up to a higher set, where the other children were success-oriented and he had the choice of shaping up or curdling in unsplendid isolation.

Somehow this experience resonates.

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I should be redundant

There are some children who would have special needs even if they had two loving parents at home; but they're in a minority.

We once had a boy whose behaviour was really - well, the mealy-mouthed modern term is "challenging". He was taken from home and put in foster care. He was also put in with a much younger group of children at the educational centre, so he could take on the responsibility of being a good role model. The transformation was dramatic.

As a Looked After Child, his case was reviewed every few months. Part of the process is to get the views of the child, so I asked his teacher to help. We passed her an A4 sheet with the outline of a head on it; the boy had to sketch his face and write a few things about himself around the drawing.

In the top corner he wrote, "I am loved."


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The future of education: £1-an-hour schoolteachers, billionaire directors

A Daily Kos article currently circulating on Facebook compares American schoolteachers and childminders and calculates that teachers are far cheaper, at $1.42 per child per hour.

How about British teachers?

The main scale annual pay for classroom teachers runs from £21,804 to £37,124 (if you break through into the upper pay scale) and the statutory minimum hours (not counting marking, preparation and voluntary self-development) are 1,265 per year. Given a class of 30 pupils, that works out at 57p - 98p per child per hour (in London, 72p - £1.20.)

Nationally, the pupil-teacher ratio is lower, because some classes are smaller (e.g. with "A"-level groups) and there are teaching roles outside the classroom. On the other hand, teachers actually work much more than the statutory hours (ask anyone who's married to one), so if the pupil-teacher ratio is a third less but teachers work 50% extra hours, the rate remains unchanged.

By way of comparison, the Daycare Trust reckons toddlercare costs average £4.26 per hour.

But we're not comparing like for like: day nurseries have overheads, and so do schools. Overall, including additional amounts for some special needs provision, "core funding" across primary and secondary schools is around £4,000 per head. Even that is an under-estimate. It doesn't take into account higher levels of special needs, or other educational expediture. Three years ago, the average spend per pupil in England was £6,199 per year.

Also, if we're using the consumer model, we need to look at children's hours, not teachers'; but they're not fixed. The old law provided for at least two hours of secular instruction in the morning and two in the afternoon (as to subjects, only religious education was compulsory); today, in England and Wales, there are no minimum school hours, only a requirement for schools to be open for 380 sessions per year. However, a child's entitlement is generally taken as 25 hours a week, which multiplied by 38 weeks equals 950 hours a year.

That suggests a cost per child (in England in 2010) of £6,199 / 950 = £6.53 per hour.

Then you have to add on the cost of capital expenditure programs. At a guess, if it were run as a business, the compulsory education system would probably have to charge something like £10 an hour.

Which brings us to the question of privatisation. As with other formerly publicly-owned assets, there is a potential bonanza in education. The trick will be to get the State to pump in resources first, then transfer them into private hands at an unrealistically low price, together with a ready-made workforce for which the new business hasn't had to pay the costs of training and recruitment.

It would accelerate the process if nominally independent inspectors ran round the country denigrating schools which have a more challenging intake, putting them into "special measures" in preparation for rebirth as semi-autonomous "Academies" and eventually, privately-run outfits.

Oh, the money to be made! For you can squash down the salaries of the teachers, cut corners in all sorts of ways, boost administrators' remuneration and maybe even organise a massive debt-funded sellout-and-run, as Southern Cross Healthcare did with old people's homes.

A fantasy? No, look to the USA, where we started this piece, and see what's happening with "charter schools", educational publishers and testers, and the banks: Yes! Magazine's infographic here is very disturbing.


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Oh, what a surprise!

When things go wrong, the modern meme is to blame the “Law of Unintended Consequences”, which is the modern way of saying “it’s just God’s will”. However, in all too many instances, the “unintended” consequences could be easily predicted.

 Case 1: Most stocks are now owned by mutual funds. The fund managers are interested in fees, which means waiting for price increases, and selling the stocks. Their sole interest is short-term price gains. The CEO’s are hired with bonuses for price increases, and the only oversight is the Board of Directors (consisting of CEO’s of other companies), and the annual stockholder meeting (dominated by the fund managers). Then there is general surprise that many companies are managed for short-term stock price increases, and not for long-term performance!

 Case 2: Most US school systems have curricula which are dominated by methods courses, and very light on the content that they will teach. We put those ill-educated teachers into the field, and give them the message that any failure of a student means that the teacher is incompetent (I was told this by an education professor recently). We then test students and blame the teachers for every bad result. Why are we surprised at grade inflation and cheating on tests?

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US education: another turn of the wheel

To get the full feel of US culture, it helps to know a few things. One is Churchill’s correct observation that, “Americans do the right thing, once they have tried everything else.” Another is the cultural preference to make everything a matter of black and white, “If you’re not a winner, you’re a loser.”

This refusal to acknowledge shades of grey means an awful lot of cognitive dissonance, and bending of the rules. It also means massive and regular policy shifts. Progress is more a matter of stumbling onto new ideas in a Drunkard’s Walk than a gradual set of small improvements.

Nowhere are these false dichotomies more obvious than in Education. For example, when studies indicated that there might be too much rote learning in the standard curriculum, it was replaced by “discovery” or “inquiry-based learning”, with absolutely no memorization at all. For another, the famous No Child Left Behind initiative of President G.W.Bush requires by law that every single student in the country perform above benchmarks by 2014. Not surprisingly, this has led to massive cheating, and very low benchmarks.

On the surface, the US education system looks free and democratically-driven. Each state has its own Board of Education, which sets the statewide standards and basic curriculum, from which each school district generates its own requirements. That is, unless you live in Ohio, Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, or several other states, where the process has been hijacked by a vocal religious minority, who wish to ignore centuries of scientific advancement.

When new studies showed that not enough students were “ready for higher education”, a group of states signed on to the Common Core, an agreed-upon set of material that every high school graduate should know. With Teutonic efficiency, school administrators have leapt upon the idea that this minimum should be the maximum. Not only that, but the results of the students’ tests will be used to measure teachers, and “eliminate the failing ones.” This appeals to US conservatives, who rail against public education, and to corporations such as Pearson publishing, now poised to make billions. One of their income streams is to provide scripts to teachers, from which they are not permitted to deviate. Another is to generate the aforementioned assessments.

 As I get ready for retirement. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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Book-burning in postwar Britain

Zere goes "Ze Art of Englisch"... !

"Textbooks are dying out in classrooms because teachers see them as 'regimented and old-fashioned', Elizabeth Truss said yesterday.

"The Education Minister said rampant ideology in schools that teaching should be 'unstructured and free-flow' meant just one in ten ten-year-olds are issued with them now."

- Andrew Levy, Daily Mail, today.

There are three reasons why teachers have abandoned textbooks and now labour till all hours of the night to lay the track on which their train will run the next day:

1. Revolutionaries. As I have said before, at the large comprehensive where I used to teach the head of English told me that the last act of the previous incumbent was to put all the English coursebooks into a skip in the playground and set fire to them, thus ensuring that the wicked old way of teaching from that sort of book would be gone for ever. This was in the mid-70s, and when I told this to others I found out that the same thing had happened in at least two other schools, at about the same time. I will bet my pension that, like the man who campaigned for the end of corporal punishment, the people who did this did not stay in the classroom, or possibly even in teaching.

2. Constant curricular change. How is it possible to write a textbook when the course content alters frequently? Every education secretary jerks the tiller in a different direction: grammar exercises, no grammar exercises, phonics, no phonics, Shakespeare, no Shakespeare.

3. Ofsted. Inspectors and advisers - some of whom may have been like those in (1) above, or taught or sponsored by them - not only don't want to see textbooks, they even frown on worksheets. We are expecting an inspection soon and we are told that our lessons will be classed as failing if they are text-based rather than activity-based.

Teacher is a fool. Education is a stupid job for clever people - you have to be clever to do it, you have to be stupid to take it on. Only periodic deep economic recessions and the institutional ageism in the British workplace keep the "profession" supplied, sucking in young idealists and middle-aged bankrupts and keeping them so busy that they fail to escape again.

And goodness know how much (colour, laser) photocopiers cost annually, compared with the wear-and-tear cost of replacing texts in the old days - the days when, as in modern-day China, South Korea etc children were set work to do and did it.

Still, we now get better, technicolour paper airplanes and higher-quality scrap in the recycling bins.

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Chekhov on teaching

How can we undertake to bring up the young? In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic. 

The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick book.

Anton Chekhov – Home (short story published in 1887)

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The destitute professor: how America treats professionals in education

Buckle down, study hard, get qualifications, work hard and you'll get... nothing.


(CNN) -- "She was a professor?"

That's what an astonished caseworker at Adult Protective Services asked about Margaret Mary Vojtko when informed of the 83-year-old woman's destitute situation, according to an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Vojtko died September 1 of a massive heart attack.

Yes, she was a professor. An adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University. Until she was not renewed this year, with neither due process nor severance pay.

She taught students for 25 years, with no health benefits, no retirement benefits, and low wages.

 

 

Read the rest here.

(htp: Paddington.)

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Fashion and shame in education

The problem with teachers is not that they are rebellious; on the contrary, they are conservative and conformist. As I said a few days ago ("Teacher is a fool", 22 September), the path to becoming a teacher selects for people who work for pats on the head.

This makes them perfect victims for lunatic dictators. When the National Socialists took over in Germany, all the teachers at my mother's school joined the Party (not to do so would screw your career) and obediently - for Germans are law-abiding to a fault, as Jerome K. Jerome noted in his pre-WWI book"Three Men on the Bummel" - they encouraged the children to do the same, and browbeat the reluctant. Grandfather, perhaps because he was a gentleman farmer, perhaps because he recognised the Nazis for the rabble they were - forbade Mother to join.

It only takes a small, active minority to promote each other into positions of authority, and they can make education the instrument of their revolution. It doesn't matter if it's book-burning Lefties (and we had some in the 70s), or business-serving privatisers, as now; the few will make their careers by change, and the many will sway in the breeze, first one way, then another.

For example, take something as simple (and, you would think, culturally unloaded) as learning your times tables.

When I was a child, we learned them by rote, chanting "four fours are six-teen, five fours are twen-ty" and so on. Silver star if you could recite your eleven times table, gold star for twelves.

Then, sometime later, rote learning was abolished. It was boring (I hadn't noticed). We should be learning by exploration. Anyhow, calculators could do all that stuff, couldn't they?

Turned out they couldn't. Because if you have no idea what the answer should look like even roughly, you don't notice when you've messed up on the calculator. And you're so easy to cheat in the shops when you buy three ice creams - I've seen that happen. And on a market stall. And in the duty-free shop of a cross-Channel ferry.

Well, they brought it back. But remember the Golden Rule of educational innovation: NEVER ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG. So when you restore something that should never have been thrown away, you have to do it differently - even if it's ten times worse.

So chanting has come back, with a difference. Ask a child what seven fours are and instead of zapping straight to the answer from memory, he'll begin to clamber up a long, wobbly ladder: "Four, eight, twelve, sixteen..." while you watch paint dry with more interest. And at some point, more often than not, you'll see he's switched to adding four to the previous number, because at age ten he still doesn't know this painfully slow sequence by heart. Which also means that if he gets one rung wrong ("twelve... fifteen... nineteen... twenty-two, no, twenty-three...") it all goes horribly skewiff.

If (sadist!) you ask him seven nines he'll fall silent, after a brief struggle.

Now I try to put this right, but when someone has laid down a foundation of horse manure it's hard to build a stable platform on top. At nine or ten, a youngster who is playing Grand Theft Auto 5 till two in the morning is just too cool to do sing-song chants. This should have been done when he was four or five, for rhythm and a singing tone is the natural language of infancy, and they thrive on repetition (God knows how many times I had to watch "Ewoks 4" with my niece). Now, too late.

Yes, good try, Kyle.

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Teacher is a fool

Not personally, but collectively.

Put yourself in the animal slippers of the girl below this Sunday morning:

From the Daily Mail (print edition), !9 September 2013

Now put yourself in the shoes of her partner.

Teachers' working hours have, very carefully, never been decided. Unlike social workers':

You'd think the divorce rate among teachers would be high, but although it's more than some it's less than others - about 1 in 8 marriages in the US. One reason is that in the UK, they tend to hook up during teacher training and after that have virtually no social life except on holiday, when they are either working to catch up on all the stuff they told their managers they'd already done, or crawling into GP surgeries to cash in all the health "brown points" they've accumulated during term time, or letting their hair down on some 18-30 jaunt like pit ponies brought up from the mine for their annual gallop round a green field. The divorced ones fantasise openly about meeting a rich man.

Teachers, said a landlord of mine when he went on the pull, are gullible. But think of the career path: before compulsory 16 - 18 education/training, they were the ones who had gone through their school careers working for pats on the head and gold stars; for symbolic and often deferred approval. The system has selected for obedience, diligence and emotional vulnerability; and now that women are the majority of workers not only in the primary but also in the secondary phase, anyone who joins the "profession" enters into a competition with manipulable workaholics. Merely hint that her display is not quite as vivid as her colleague's, or that her lessons could be just a tad more interesting, and she'll burn the midnight oil down to the desktop. With their abject fear of failure, they're fantastically easy to bully.

And the definition of success is not to be one. So if blessed with some nous and a benevolent line manager, the path is out and up: pastoral care, curriculum management, senior management, headship, adviser, Ofsted inspector.

Or, of course, to start a family and then come back part-time, or not at all. Or even to take one horrified look at what they've done and switch, fast: a fellow trainee went and joined the BBC straight after the post-grad teacher training course, a colleague did a couple of years and then left to be a rep for a chemical company, others became computer engineers, estate agents or bulk-sold for a plastic bag manufacturer, and so on.

Teachers are almost completely incapable of hard negotiation. Ignore the odd noisy activist you'll see on news clips of NUT conferences: the union path is another one out of the classroom. They're so bad at it that they wait for decades for someone else to do something for them. In 1974, the Houghton committee turned its attention to teachers' remuneration (as an afterthought: the original focus was nurses) and considered the demands and skills of the job in relation to similarly responsible work in the private sector. This was to sort out the perennial cyclical recruitment crisis, once and for all.

The result was a big bump in pay, and staff car parks filled up with new models to replace the bangers. But teachers, having been warned at the time not to let this slip, lost out almost immediately to the roaring inflation of the mid-70s, and very soon slid down the comparative pay ladder to their natural, humble and inoffensive niche.

The years rolled by and in came a Labour administration keen to show that it was succeeding in education; so pay got more generous and the exam grades got inflated. Now we have austerity, and exams are being changed, teachers' pay has been frozen for a couple of years, the retirement age has been put back by 5 years, and their conditions of service have just been officially weakened (all a bad manager needs is more power). Ofsted are going into schools in areas of social deprivation with an agenda to find them failing and so trigger "special measures" intervention and ultimately conversion to "academy" status. Schools are privatising, others are starting up as "free schools" using education budget money and venues in all sorts of weird places.

There have always been more votes among parents than teachers, so that determines political angle and media coverage. First hint of industrial action and Superwimp dashes into a phone booth and becomes Uncaring Teacher in the blink of an eye.

Similarly, the attitude to teachers' social contribution is bipolar: by turns they are either unable to teach a cat to drink cream, or commanded to teach manners, ICT, social skills for business, political correctness, ecological salvation and the virtues of the allegedly democratic system that governs us.

Not that the whole institution is necessarily about teaching. Its other role is to keep children off the streets, and Ed Miliband's lovely new idea is to turn schools into 8am - 6pm nurseries for 4 - 11 year olds. And the implications for the educational workforce? Socialism can only go so far, don't you know.

Nor has the examination system ever received a consistent, definitive brief. Half the time it's about meeting some minimum standard for all, the rest of the time it's an egghead-sorting machine to decide who has a small, medium, large or chickenbanger brain. In any case, the winners tend to be the organic free-range children from percheries in rural areas, market towns and treelined suburbs, who constitute the real middle class and supply most of the green benches in Westminster.

Fools. Clever, well-qualified, hard-working fools. Only teachers and horses.

Meanwhile...

Why teach dozens of young children when you could teach millions?
Pic source: Daily Mail

 

Being played till all hours by 10-year-olds I know this week.
Curriculum links: PSHE, SMSC, ICT
(Pic source)

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Education: where does the money really go?

"Paddington", a maths professor, writes to a local newspaper in Ohio:

Public higher education is under attack from all sides. Conservatives criticize the concept of spending money on it, and appear not to recognize that it is an investment in our future. Liberals decry the rising costs to the students. The reforms which are proposed all focus on ‘increasing efficiency’ by trying to cut the expense of teaching, apparently under the impression that this is the largest part of the budget.

How does this belief compare with the facts?

Locally, we have a recent news item which states that the full-time faculty at The University of Akron will be awarded a 2% raise pool, amounting to $1.3 million. This means that the salaries of full-time faculty total about $65 million per year, with perhaps another $15 million for fringe benefits, and $10 million for part-time faculty. That sounds like a lot, until one considers that the total University budget is $360 to $450 million.

In short, the people who do the teaching and research (which are the reasons for the existence of the institution) have direct costs which are at most 25% of the budget. Compare this to a typical local school district, where teaching salaries and benefits are at least 60% of the total.

It sounds quite efficient, doesn’t it?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Andrew Neather: social experimentation and education

Correction: when I said New Labour encouraged immigration specifically to spite their political opposition and alter British social identity, the word "specifically" may be inappropriate, if by that you understand it to be the only, or principal, reason.

Certainly Andrew Neather is using the Guardian to deny that it was the main aim. And I don't see the Labour Government as a sort of Doctor Evil, cackling over their latest scheme to ruin the country. It's not that simple, that cartoony.

But Neather has already admitted that:

• Mass migration to the UK was a "deliberate policy"
• It "especially" suited "middle-class Londoners"
• "A driving political purpose" was the fostering of multiculturalism
• He (Neather) had "a clear sense that the policy was intended... to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date", even though he himself thought that was going too far.

From what I've seen, read and heard, the political parties do relish giving each other one in the eye; perhaps that's why they can't clearly see the other consequences of their actions. And we need to be aware that driving motives are often not disclosed, even if they may have appeared in "earlier drafts". Indeed, the unstated motivation is often more important than the overt.

Education has always been a pit for these cockerels to fight in. In the nineteenth century, it was the Board Schools competing with, and seeking to supplant, the Church schools (and abolishing school prayers and hymns within my teaching career); in the twentieth, it was comprehensive versus grammar (since no-one dared go so far as to destroy the private schools). And, like Mao's Red Guard ripping up the bourgeois turf of parks, and Mao's peasants obediently exterminating the crop-eating birds (only to see the crop-eating insect population explode, disastrously), they bring in the reign of destructive ignorance and irrational hatred.

It is especially destructive in teaching, where individuals and society live with the consequences for generations.

When I came to Birmingham to train as a teacher, my first 3-week placement was at the George Dixon Grammar School. The boys' and girls' grammars had just amalgamated, and in the staffroom the women teachers still had their tea expensively served to them, whereas the male staff ran a separate, cheaper tea swindle. Two boys who gave another student teacher a mildly tough time (by the standards of that time) were instantly taken off the entry for English O-level as a punishment.

These decent, hard-working people could not have foreseen that within a few years, the Labour-controlled City Council would first build a new comprehensive smack on their cricket pitch (one of the finest in the Midlands), then amalgamate the grammar school with it, and then generally mismanage it with all sorts of fashionable political initiatives until it went into what is known as "special measures". An old-fashioned grammar-school-and-Cambridge-educated toughie, Robert Dowling (now Sir Robert) was brought in and the climb back began. I was interviewed by him shortly after he took over: the place was all echoes and empty rooms. 200 years of accumulated effort, expertise, tradition and dedication had come to this; for no good reason, and some bad ones.

I'm sure Andrew Neather is a decent chap - but both he and those he has worked with need to recognise that good intentions aren't enough. More and more, I see this government (and some before it) as resembling Homer Simpson, pushing a button on the nuclear generator console just to see what happens, and rewarded by the sight of people suddenly fleeing a wall of flame in the corridor.

You need, not just a good heart, but humility and caution.

How much does education matter?

Greg Mankiw thinks that correlating SATS scores and subsequent earned income misses the point that inherited intelligence are a factor in both. This appears to be supported by the graph in Alex Tabarrok's blog that shows "higher parental income predicts higher child income but only for biological children and not for adoptees."

David Davis points out that the £45,000 true cost of a university education is not always recouped by graduate earnings. (See also Charles Hugh Smith's piece, "Is Higher Education Worth a Lifetime of Debt?")

I have read that there is a positive correlation between shoe size and IQ. Public policy is to buy big shoes for everybody so they get smarter.

Freedom and healthcare

I've just watched Daniel Hannan's address to Americans on the dangers of a nationalised healthcare system. I, too, want America to carry on holding up the torch of freedom and democracy that is being doused here in the UK, so that one day we'll be able to re-light ours from theirs.

But it seems to me that if you want private solutions for problems which all have (or will have), but not all can afford, then you must address the question of inequality of resources.

Peter Rogers, co-creator and producer of the Carry On film comedies, once remarked he would 'do anything for my actors except pay them.' Similarly, so much is done for us in the UK, perhaps so badly, in the way of health and education (to name but two functions), when it might work so much better if we had the money personally and could make our own decisions.

We are witnessing a concentration into ever fewer hands on both sides the Atlantic, not only of power but of economic wealth. Every dollar and pound is a vote in the daily election of goods and services. To use the terms of the French national motto, if we wish for liberty but mistrust fraternity, then perhaps we should contemplate some redistribution of wealth to restore a greater degree of equality.

For example, how about some form of credit card (funded from general taxation and directed to individual accounts) that can only be spent on defined areas of need, but the holder to determine how to use his/her budget to best effect? Something like the educational voucher idea, but radically extended?