Tuesday, February 03, 2009
The new Bastardstone’sI’ve got to admit that I’m shopaphobic, when it comes to national ‘No Shopping Day’ it doesn’t really affect me, on most days of the year I try to practise the creed anyway. ‘I shop therefore I am’? That just isn’t me.
Visiting the new ‘shopping experience’ Liverpool One I wasn’t arriving with any great expectations, so to find a concrete ‘n’ glass, bleak, austere, clone town, crammed full of the usual suspects that completely failed to lift the human soul, wasn’t exactly a surprise.
Whilst it’s true that nineteenth century Victorian cities were crammed with slums they also managed to create parks, art galleries, museums, libraries and neo-classical town halls. What do we build? Shopping malls. The defining buildings of the age are Bluewater, Meadowhall and the Trafford Centre.
Liverpool One also contains a brand new branch of Waterstone’s. Bookshops are struggling to compete with the Internet and supermarkets, so what has been the response of the chains? Dumb down and stock less books. The new Liverpool Waterstone’s has acres of floor space, but not many… books. There’s piles of ‘3 for 2’ offers, celebrity cook books, ghosted football memoirs and chick-lit.
One of the joys of going into a bookshop is the chance to browse, that journey of discovery, finding that nugget or rare jewel, that old forgotten novel, or obscure esoteric book by a wayward undiscovered author. So why bother going to a bookshop where the stock is so limited? I looked at the education section, it was thin, positively anorexic, there was the usual collection of ‘Getting the Buggers To…’ behavioural manuals and that was about it.
If you treat the customers as fools they will respond accordingly, almost as matter of principle I declined to buy anything. Waterstone’s has joined the race to the bottom by trying to compete with Asda and Tesco’s for the ‘Top 100’ titles, it’s a race they are destined to lose. Thankfully independent booksellers, who do stock a wide range of books, are still surviving. Meanwhile there is that cultural desert that is Waterstone’s.
Labels: Books
Monday, July 02, 2007
‘Education by Numbers’ by Warwick MansellThe tipping point for Warwick Mansell, the moment when he asked himself the question, ‘Is it me, or is this not absolutely outrageous?’ came in mid-November 2005 at a £200 per head seminar for French GCSE teachers, organised by one of the examining boards. Over the course of five hours, teachers were given a demonstration of how to cheat their way through coursework, to ‘script’ oral exams and advised not to teach much grammar (there are only a few marks for it). Throughout the day there were references to ‘grim kids’, this from a senior examiner.
‘Education by Numbers’ is a detailed and meticulous demolition job on the ‘exam industry’, which has blighted education in England – schools currently spend £610 million a year on them. The most dispiriting sight in bookshops are the shelves groaning with the revision booklets, as though knowledge can be distilled into that one volume.
Where has high stakes testing led us? Imagine you are an eleven year-old girl called Michelle and you are taking your exams in Maths, English and Science, on your results depend the future of your teacher, headteacher, local authority chief education officer, directors of the various national strategies and ultimately the Education Secretary. No pressure there then!
Chapter by chapter Mansell examines the grisly evidence-
· The narrowing of the curriculum – according to a study by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in 2003 primary schools were spending on average over ten hours a week from Christmas to May cramming children to pass tests in English, Maths and Science (equivalent to almost half of curriculum time).
· Frequent testing reinforces failure for lower ability children, as the London Institute of Education noted, it gave them ‘constant evidence of their low achievement.’
· Grade inflation – a study by David Jesson found that 1 in 6, equivalent to 100,000 children, had higher-level results at Key Stage 2 tests than their teachers believed they deserved.
· Concentration on ‘borderline’ children - close to Level 4 at Key Stage 2 or Grade C at GCSE. Mansell believes there is a good case to answer under Human Rights legislation for other children who don’t receive the same intensive support.
· Use of GNVQs (worth four GCSEs) to inflate results, no one can answer the question why a GNVQ is worth four times more.
· The sheer predictability of tests with the same type of basic questions reoccurring and exam boards colluding with schools to ease pupils’ route to success.
· The scandal of ‘coursework’ where students are spoon-fed information by teachers desperate to keep their department’s scores up to scratch.
· Reliability of results as test scores vary widely between certain exam boards.
Mansell details how it isn’t just the teacher unions that want a change to high-stakes testing, the QCA want modifications, even Ofsted, and the GTC (which has spent years proving there is death after life) has belatedly added its voice to the call for an end to league tables. When he asks the Department for Education what independent evidence there is that ‘standards have risen’ they can’t supply it, they are reduced to the tautology that ‘standards have risen because results have improved and the rise in results show that standards are improving.’
In one chapter Mansell interviews Blairite ideologue Julian Le Grand who advances the notion of ‘producer capture’ to justify accountability and that public servants can be divided into ‘knaves’ and ‘knights’. This chapter is at the end of the book and is a significant weakness. What under pinned the high stakes testing regime that emerged from the 1980s and 1990s?
In this era the myth of ‘falling standards’, the ‘failure’ of comprehensives, professional incompetence and lack of ‘basic skills’ was used to undermine public confidence in education. In its place the proponents of ‘school effectiveness’ promised a technical fix with value for money and ‘accountability’. In education there was the creation of a market with parental ‘choice’, Local Management of Schools, privatisation and the destruction of Local Education Authorities. The audit culture erected common standards (the National Curriculum) targets, performance indicators and gradings for schools. Teachers were now functionaries judged solely by common results and de-skilled and deprofessionalised. The final part of the jigsaw was the creation of Ofsted, with its notion of a ‘zero defect’ guarantee, taken from ‘Total Quality Control’ in private enterprise.
The 1980s and the 1990s ushered in the decline of welfarism and social justice. Both Blair and Clinton extended and widened the attack on public education, the trite slogans ‘Zero tolerance of failure’ and ‘Poverty is not an excuse’ became the campaign catchphrases. Everything was reduced to simple measurable ‘outputs’ that could be mapped on a graph – just read Michael Barber’s account of his time in the Department for Education.
The evidence shows that the Emperor is not just stark naked, he has no moral credibility and has been exposed as a liar, cheat and fraud. Faced with this conclusion Mansell retreats somewhat calling for longer Ofsted inspections and for the retention of the dire National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies for Key Stage 3. The book doesn’t explore how teachers could stop testing, there is no mention of the NUT ballot in 2003 when 86% voted for a boycott, but the turnout was only 34% and it had to be over 50% before action could be sanctioned by the union.
Despite the theoretical limitations ‘Education by Numbers’ chips away brick by brick at the tottering edifice that is high-stakes testing and brings it crashing to the ground. There is an old cliché in education book reviews that ‘every teacher should read this book’. Every teacher should read this book and ask himself or herself the question – How the hell did we let it happen?
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Ramparts of ResistanceDuring the 1970s two miners strikes rocked the Conservative government, in 1972 when they tried to jail five dockers for secondary picketing they were released, as even the TUC was forced to threaten a general strike. In 1974 some sections of the military actually discussed organising a military coup to ‘deal with’ the unions. In 1979 during the ‘Winter of Discontent’, a record 29 million days were lost in strikes.
Sheila Cohen’s book ‘Ramparts of Resistance’ is a very thorough and thoughtful comparative study of how trade union power was eclipsed in Britain and America during the 1980s and 1990s. She documents the upsurge in trade union activity in America during 1968 to 1974, partly due to returning Vietnam veterans and the rank and file ‘reform’ organisations that sprouted up in the Teamsters and Union of Auto Workers (UAW).
The election of Reagan in 1981 marked a decisive turning point and there was the replacement of the air traffic controllers (PATCO) by management and ex-military. This tactic was used by bosses in a host of other strikes, all defeated usually with police and National Guard protecting strikebreakers and attacking pickets.
America has been defined by ‘business unionism’ where the union officials acted as the broker for labour with the employer. During the 1980s, despite the attempts by union officials to negotiate ‘give backs’ and concessions, many employers decided to dispense with unions altogether. Union density is now down to only 12.5% in America and a shocking 8% in the private sector.
Cohen describes the successful UPS strike by the Teamsters in 1997 against casual and part time working. In 2000 there was also the brief unity between environmentalists and trade unionists in the Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organisation. Despite falling membership in 2005 the AFL-CIO suffered a debilitating split between rival factions of the bureaucracy. A far cry from the CIO split in 1935 that was in support of industrial unionism and led to the organising of rubber, steel and auto workers.
There are several weaknesses in the book, Cohen doesn’t examine other forms of union traditions, i.e., Social Democratic – a close tie between unions and a ‘party of labour’; Corporatist – tripartite agreements between unions, government and employers, Ireland and Holland and Syndicalist – low union membership different union centres, France and Italy. An interesting issue to discuss would have been the strength of the French unions and their ability to call workers out on general strikes, with popular support, to halt attacks by government.
There isn’t any real analysis of the changing patterns of employment, which have also lead to the fall in union members, in particular the decline of manufacturing industry. There is of course a note of caution about ‘the new knowledge economy’, there has been a growth in the service sector and in computing. But what stands out is the creation of an ‘hour glass economy’, the professions like teaching squeezed in the middle and new low paid unskilled jobs in health, education and services alongside long-established work like sales assistants, receptionists and security guards. Fifty per cent of people earn under £21,000 a year.
The weakest point of the book is that Cohen doesn’t mention the ideological repercussions from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Stalinism, possibly it didn’t have the same effect in America, the Communist Party was strong in the CIO during the 1930s and 1940s but a negligible influence thereafter. The ‘alternative ideology’ for a large section of trade union officials and shop stewards was removed, this came as a triple whammy after the miners defeat and the legal attacks.
Losing their political bearings, whole sections of the former left moved effortlessly over to Blairism and beyond. Tom Sawyer - radical NUPE steward, union Deputy General Secretary, Labour Party General Secretary, House of Lords and now advisor to companies who want to privatise public services, personified this. The ‘moderate’ group that controls the NUT has a high proportion of ex-Communist Part members in its leadership. Rank and file activist to union bureaucrat or MP is a well-trod path, during the 1980s and 1990s the tracks became a little rutted.
Cohen notes how American rank and file movements haven’t just been electoral organisations. By contrast she cites the example of the Barnsley Miners’ Forum, which was very effective in the 1972 and 1974 strikes, but once Arthur Scargill and the left won the official positions it ceased to meet.
In Britain union mergers rather than recruitment has been the dominant concern of the leadership. No real attempt has been made to organise groups like call centre workers. When I was on a course one of the students worked in one and he horrified us with accounts of the way every second of their time was monitored. Why don’t they join? Because they believe that unions are ineffectual.
From an Anglo-centric standpoint it’s a pretty bleak scenario, but Cohen’s perspective is ‘optimistic but not unrealistic. It starts with the continuing, unassailable reality of working-class struggle…’
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Sell ‘em cheap‘The Guardian’ carried an extract from Francis Beckett’s new book ‘The Great City Academy Fraud’. Labour’s city academies are basically a warmed up version of the Tories failed City Technology Colleges. What do they have in common? Both schemes failed to attract ‘blue-chip’ companies so they were forced to rely on second-hand car dealers, evangelical Christians and egotistical millionaires.
However, their interests are reflected in the fact that of the first 46 academies seven had business as a specialism and another nineteen included it as one of their second or third specialisms. Three secondary schools in Barrow (one deemed by Ofsted to be ‘outstanding’) are being replaced by an academy sponsored by the armaments firm BAE – notorious for bribing the Saudi royal family in order to win fighter plane contracts. Prosecuting BAE was deemed to be ‘not in the national interest’ so the Crown Prosecution Service was ordered to desist from any legal action. Wonder how the new ‘BAE Academy’ will teach ethics?
Labour have used every ruse to try and attract business, the initial investment of £2 million was changed to “up to £2 million”, then to “in cash or in kind”, even with tax relief taking the bill down to £1.2 million there wasn’t a queue knocking on Tony Blair’s door. In desperation in April 2005 they made the notorious “buy two get one free” offer.
In May 2006 ‘The Guardian’ revealed that four academies had not received a single penny from their sponsors and of the 27 up and running only £26 million had been paid. The latest government advice is that “endowments” will be offered over the years.
Academies are just another example of how New Labour are totally in thrall to big business, asked to justify the programme Ruth Kelly said, “business doesn’t tolerate failure”.
The murky side to it all is the connections between Lord Levy as Labour Party fundraiser, his position as president of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (handily housed together in Millbank Tower) and the cash for honours scandal. There’s also the “grubby circle” where former Labour ministers like Lord Filkin and Charles Clarke find work with firms involved in privatising education – Serco and LJ Group.
The academies really are fraud on a grand scale.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
‘Freakonomics’ and Colin HuntWhat do estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan have in common? Why do drug dealers live with their mothers? ‘Freakonomics’ by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (published by Penguin) sets out to make economics more interesting by writing from the following fundamentals –
· Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life
· The conventional wisdom is often wrong
· Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes
· “Experts” use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda
· Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so
Of most interest to teachers will be the piece on high stakes testing, which was introduced in the Chicago Public School system in 1996. To move up a grade children needed a minimum score, teachers who produced low-test results could be censured, passed over for promotion or fired.
Teachers under pressure for results told children the answers, gave them extra time, taught to test and it was suspected in some cases, filled in the answers. Using data from 1993 to 2000 Levitt and Dubner analysed over 100 million answers and looked for unusual patterns i.e., correct answers to difficult questions by poor students in classes that scored better in one year compared to the next.
They found the same six consecutive answers to harder questions from below average students where the previous answers were uncorrelated or contained blanks. They discovered cheating in 200 classrooms (5% of the total) which they felt was a conservative estimate as the algorithm only identified obvious cheating. After retesting classes, with a control group for a comparison, cheating was confirmed and over a dozen teachers were subsequently sacked.
‘Freakonomics’ has been hyped to death and is the type of geeky book that the ‘Fast Show’s’ office joker Colin Hunt would memorise, inwardly digest and bore you to death with at every available opportunity with ‘startling’ facts about esoteric subjects like sumo wrestling. It contains some interesting, amusing and quirky writing, but it won’t change your life and as the authors admit is written with the typical detachment of statisticians. Instead of finding teachers who cheat, scrap high stakes testing.
Cheating in Texas
Labels: Books
Monday, February 26, 2007
What Alondra LearnedIn ‘Final Test – the Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools’ (published by The New Press) Peter Schrag outlines the legislative battles fought during the 1990s to calculate just exactly what ‘adequate’ meant when it came to children’s education.
Alondra Jones was a student at a crumbling Los Angles school there was a succession of substitute teachers, the toilets had ‘scene of crime’ tape plastered everywhere, the gyms were covered with mice and bird droppings and the laboratories were never used. Alondra sued the state of California to win a better deal.
In 1978 California passed ‘Proposition 13’ which cut state taxes and led to what was euphemistically called ‘deferred maintenance’ in schools. By the late 1990s California was spending an average of $6,000 per pupil compared to $9,000 in New Jersey.
This situation was mirrored in other parts of the country, during the Reagan era, as the federal government cut money allocated to states. The situation became so serious that coalitions of councillors, teachers and parents began to take out court cases to demand an ‘adequate’ education. In Kentucky the driving force was the local business community who were appalled at the competence of their prospective employees.
In many states there was a further complication because taxation for school districts was based on local property values, so in 1999-2000 Illinois spent on average $7,460 on pupils in districts with the lowest child poverty rates and $5,400 where child poverty was the highest; in New York the comparable figures were $8,598 and $6,445; Pennsylvania $7,285 and $6,037 – in its wealthiest areas Pennsylvania was spending $10,000 per pupil.
Some of the legal battles lasted for years and California spent $20 million trying to fend off an ‘adequacy’ case. The book does get too involved with the minutiae of the courtroom but it is a stunning indictment of America’s education system. This isn’t a dry academic book the first chapter ‘What Alondra Learned’ relates the human side of the story very effectively.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Education Reader‘Education Reader – Leading Educators Speak Out’ (published by The New Press) is a collection of articles by ‘progressive’ American writers.
The most interesting articles are about race in American education, with the historical background of segregation, new immigration and affirmative action it is far more complicated than Britain.
Michele Foster in ‘Black Teachers on Teaching’ outlines the history of segregated (“separate but equal”) education which was altered by the seminal 1954 court case Brown .v. The Board of Education.
However, the black writer and academic WEB du Bois warned with incredible prescience in 1935, “A mixed school with poor unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of the truth concerning black folk is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, and poor salaries is equally bad.” He went on to argue that on balance a mixed school would be better because it could give a broader education, allow wider contacts, give greater self-confidence and suppress the inferiority complex.
When desegregation was implemented many black schools closed and between 1954 and 1965, in the 17 southern states, 30,000 black teachers lost their jobs. The 1990 census revealed that only 8% of teachers were black.
Some black educators (albeit a minority) have called for resegregation. The Pennsylvania Association of Teachers of Coloured Children argued that black children were being harmed in mixed schools because they had lost their racial pride.
‘We Make Each Other Racial’ describes the complicated and shifting racial alliances within ‘Madison High School’ – the Latins, ESLers (English as a Second Language), Blacks, Asians and Whites and the dynamics between the sub-groups – white skaters, band kids, “normals” and “housers”.
My main complaint with the book is that most of the articles are ten years out of date, so it doesn’t really deal with Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind Act’, the testing regime or the impact of the cuts made by California in bilingual education.
It is a powerful insight into the complexities of race. David Mura recounts how his Japanese American father was interned in the Deep South during the Second World War, but when he was released for day trips was treated as an ‘honorary white’ and was allowed to sit at the front of the bus and in the best seats at the cinema.
TES Review
Labels: Books
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Frank ChalkWhat raises a cynical smile from staff room sceptics? Those ‘Come into Teaching’ adverts featuring well-scrubbed, keen, enthusiastic children hanging on every word uttered by fresh-faced inspiring teachers, or the patronising Teachers’ Awards where workaholic geeks from selective schools are slavered over by Z-list celebs.
Frank Chalk’s book ‘It’s Your Time You’re Wasting’ is the antidote to all that. It’s a no-holds barred, warts-and-all account of a year spent teaching dangerously at ‘St Jude’s’, a highly unselective school in a northern town. It doesn’t so much scrape a hole below the water line, it’s more a well-aimed Exocet missile that leaves a gaping hole in the good ship ‘education, education, education’.
Teachers will identify with one of the central themes, management in denial – the generals miles away from the front line whilst the Poor Bloody Infantry suffer in the mud-filled trenches dodging the bullets and incoming artillery shells. There’s no chink of light in this book, maybe it’s not so much a view from the trenches more peering from the stygian gloom at the bottom of an abyss.
Frank Chalk has moved from the maths department to supply teacher and there are some hilarious episodes as he tries to cope with Science, French and English. As he admits supply teachers are often fair game and concedes that Mr Blunt and Mr Green manage to keep control of their classes by engaging with their pupils and making the lessons interesting.
Why do we have schools like St Jude’s that condemn some of their brighter children to such academic misery? Well it’s all the fault of the comprehensive system. Frank Chalk’s solution? Send the brightest 20% to ‘Academic’ schools and the rest will be consigned to ‘Practical’ and ‘Mixed’ schools.
The truth is that in most of our towns and cities we don’t have a comprehensive system, once the faith and selective schools have winnowed out the wheat from Frank Chalk’s chavs we end up with schools like St Jude’s. Margaret Maden carried out research for Keele University and concluded: “When you get a concentration of children – disturbed or disadvantaged – there is a critical mass of children who will wreck any school. I will defy any teacher to teach when you have got more than 30% of kids like that in the school… Beyond a certain point, children will not succeed if they are concentrated in a school where the majority of children need to be persuaded that education matters.”
Ten years ago one of the most spectacular school failures was the Ridings in Halifax. It failed its Ofsted inspection with accounts of out of control pupils the media duly arrived and filmed the chaos. Peter Clarke was parachuted in as the headteacher to ‘turn the school around’. In his book ‘Back From the Brink’ he describes how the two faith schools and two grammar schools had succeeded in capturing most children with academic ability, 75% of pupils at Ridings had below average reading levels with 40% of Year 7 to 9 children three years behind their chronological age.
‘It’s Your Time You’re Wasting’ mines that seam of politically incorrect abuse that has replaced cogent analysis, the chavs, council estate scum and the great unwashed have got what they deserve (this is also reflected and made acceptable with characters like Vicky Pollard in ‘Little Britain’ – funny but vastly over-rated). In case you think I’m exaggerating here is Frank Chalk’s take on the dystopia that is St Jude’s and the Cherry Tree Estate; “I would say that at least 50 per cent of our parents are dreadful people for whom I have nothing but contempt.”
Apart from the toffs, society is divided in Frank Chalk’s view into the middle class who work and the underclass who don’t. Another way of looking at it is that we have a society where city financial traders earn £9 billion in annual bonuses and on the other side we consign 20% of the population to sink estates where people subsist on welfare benefits or low wages. As Richard Wilkinson pointed out in his book ‘The Impact of Inequality’ this type of wealth divide leads to a fractured, disjointed and crime-ridden society.
So far so bad, but when we come to Frank Chalk’s ‘solutions’ that’s when I really part company. How do we tackle bad behaviour in the class? Simple, pass a law in parliament and stick it up in every class. How would it be enforced? “…what we really need in charge of discipline is someone like Genghis Khan with powers to match…or a School Bouncer with the necessary legal backing.”
Predictably we get the ‘Daily Mail’ rant that, “Standards both written and spoken are unbelievably poor. Years ago people left school at the age of twelve able to read and write to a standard that would be about the average in a 16 year old today.” Ah yes, the Good Old Days… Is that why there are so many people over 50 who are illiterate and innumerate? The Good Old Days… when half children left school without any qualifications. The Good Old Days… when 1 in 8 children from grammar schools got to university but only 1 in 22,000 from secondary moderns.
How did it all happen? “The rot set in many years ago, thanks to the hordes of politically-correct educationalists and right-on teachers whose trendy theories and finger-in-the-air experimentation with what was once the finest education system in the world have conspired to smash the hopes and dreams of millions of young Britons…”
Once you get beyond the funny stories, amusing anecdotes and mad teachers this is a thoroughly depressing book, it’s just Jeremy Clarkson –lite, the Sun’s ‘White Van Man’ the regressive, reactionary, simplistic solutions of the pub bore. Simple ‘innit? Bring back the cane, reintroduce grammar schools and throw all the chavs in special schools with Genghis Khan in charge.
Maybe someone will write a humorous warts-and-all account of life in secondary schools that celebrates those teachers who under the most difficult circumstances stay and try to enthuse children with a love for learning. Frank Chalk has left the building and maybe some of those teachers who view this as some kind of ‘manifesto’ ought to follow him out of the door. Frank Chalk’s one saving grace is that he had the honesty to admit that he just couldn’t hack it.
Labels: Books
