In the News - Articles and Opinions

This selection of articles includes pieces from a range of education commentators.  You will notice that once again Christopher Pearson make the list.  Bbecause one of the focus topics for our equity research projects sponsored by the ACE foundation is the whole area of human rights and its implications for equity in education policy, research and practice we have looked for articles  about these topics.  One such article is by Denise Ryan who won the Victorian Branch ACE Media Award with this year. 

Articles relating to the latest Ben Jensen article are in a separate article

Similarly articles relating to My School, national Curriculum and the latest PISA findings haven separated out to allow for a more detailed examination of media positions.

On children's rights, teaching human rights and homophobia and schools

'An Australian children's commissioner' Australian Policy Online, 14 November 2010

Many children in Australia are able to fully enjoy their human rights. However, the rights of some children are vulnerable.

An independent national Children's Commissioner with the power and mandate to listen to, understand and advocate for children could play an important role in promoting and protecting the rights of all children in Australia, particularly of those who are most at-risk.

In particular, a national Children's Commissioner could operate as a national advocate for children's rights; ensure that government decision making processes and outcomes are consistent with the best interests of children; develop mechanisms to secure the participation of children in decisions that affect them; and provide a coordinated national approach to children's rights.

Human rights provide a clear framework for promoting, and for ensuring accountability in respect of, child wellbeing. By establishing the office of a national Children's Commissioner, the Australian Government would take an important step towards meeting its international obligations to protect and promote the rights of children in Australia.

To read the full text click here

 

'AG calls for human rights education' Lawyers Weekly, 4 November 2010

Attorney-General Robert McClelland has called for the development of a human rights culture.

At the opening of this week's International Human Rights Education Conference, Educating for Human Rights, Peace and Intercultural Dialogue, McClelland discussed the need for human rights education and the development of a human rights culture. 

"Today, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights remains a living, breathing document that affirms our shared human dignity and is the foundation for the standards of human rights and fundamental freedoms," McClelland said.

"I would agree with Eleanor Roosevelt that 'documents expressing ideals carry no weight unless people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived'."

McClelland continued by noting that human rights education provides the bridge between the shared ideals contained in international instruments, including the Declaration, and the realisation of human rights in practice.

"Human rights education must be something that the whole community participates in, not just politicians, lawyers and academics," he said.

To read more click here

 

 Denise Ryan, 'Optimism in face of homophobic abuse findings', The Age, 22 November 2010

This article focuses on the findings of a La Trobe university survey of more than 3000 teenagers that homophobic abuse and violence has increased since this landmark study began in 1998.

However Associate Professor Hillier, a research fellow at La Trobe's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, argues that this increase is in part influenced by the higher levels of confidence young people have about reporting what is happening. Nevertheless the findings are disturbing.

"This national survey is a world first, and on face value it seems abuse is escalating, with 61 per cent of teenagers surveyed reporting verbal abuse (up from about 50 per cent in 2004) because of their sexuality and 18 per cent experiencing physical assault.

Those who defined themselves as gender questioning - not identifying as male or female - reported higher levels of homophobia and abuse.

The Writing Them-selves In report found strong links between being abused and self-harm, including cutting and excessive drug use.

Parental rejection, a religious background or attending a religious school and living in a rural area were all risk factors for self-harm and attempted suicide.

"Young people who have been physically assaulted are several times more likely to attempt suicide than those who have suffered no abuse," Professor Hillier says.

Professor Hillier also found that changes in wider society can have a significant impact on how young people cope with their sexual identity.  On the one hand she reported that 10 per cent of  (non heterosexual) girls aged 15 to 18 had become pregnant - twice the heterosexual rate -  presumably engaging  in unprotected heterosexual sex to appear "normal" to their peers.

However  on the other hand  she has identified that there are some changes that have made a positive difference such as

• TV shows that normalise same-sex attraction (Glee ansd Ellen De Generes),

• teachers who are better trained to understand issues facing students around sexuality

• the reform bill passed by Federal Parliament in 2008, which altered 58 federal laws to provide equity for same-sex couples, has also helped.

The message for educators is that what schools do does make a significant difference.  Where students attended schools with supportive policies and process that dealt explicitly with homophobia, gay, lesbian and transgender students were less likely to have mental health issues.

However more needs to be done

"The level of violence hasn't altered, which is a real worry given how much work has occurred in the education department in terms of policies and learning materials," she says. "Schools are the last to catch on and it is often because they fear a backlash from a vocal minority."

Ten per cent of respondents said there was no sex education at their school and only 14 per cent described their school as supportive. More than 1000 teenagers described their school as homophobic.

By law, state schools are required to have a policy on homophobic bullying that offers well-publicised protection, and teachers are required to take action.

To read more click here

Reframing the education debate and/or engaging with the education debate on: equity issues; vouchers;  judging teacher performance; naming and shaming schools; charter schools and the choice agenda.

Pedro Noguera, 'Reframing the Education Debate', The Nation, 2 December 2010

After two years, it has become clear that the education policies pursued by the Obama administration too closely resemble those of the Bush administration. They are leading us in the wrong direction and not producing the changes we need.

Pedro Noguera, a professor of sociology at New York University, is the author of City Schools and the American Dream.  In this article he writes about what he sees as the disconnect between the realities of public schools and the policy prescriptions coming from the White House is the crux of the problem in education.

He argues that one reason for Obama's "drubbing" in the mid term elections is the fauilure of the democratic party to see that the majority of parents and teachers who rely on or work in public schools are their natural consistency and that on the whole they do not embrace the policy framework of  high-stakes testing and market-oriented reform strategies such as performance pay for teachers, charter schools, Principals as CEOs and so on.

Instead of waiting for this administration to recognize that it should head in a new direction, those of us who know the importance of public education must initiate a campaign to defend and improve it. We need to organize parents, teachers unions, school board members and others around a reform agenda that calls for protecting public education while also calling for its renewal.

For more than two years, a group of educators, policy advocates and scholars have called for a "broader and bolder approach to education" (boldapproach.org). The campaign advocates universal child access to healthcare and early childhood education and extending learning opportunities into the summer. Similarly, several civil rights organizations and advocacy groups have embraced an "opportunity to learn" agenda, focused on reducing inequities in funding among schools and helping schools create conditions conducive to learning and healthy child development. Others, such as the Forum for Education and Democracy, Educators for Social Justice and Parents for Public Schools, have advocated a shift in focus away from test preparation and toward an expansion of learning opportunities that foster self-motivation and higher-order thinking.

He notes that the republicans are divided on the issue of education policy and that this might create the kind of lacuna needed to launch a a serious discussion about reframing education policy.  To make the most of such an opportunity, educators, parents and equity focused stakeholders need to be organised and to agree to come together around a negotiated and broad consensus about the future education policy and finding priorities.

But to make the most of this opportunity, those who support public education must be organized enough to present a clear alternative and savvy enough to avoid the pitfalls of the polarizing issues that often divide us. Parents and educators must recognize their mutual interest in a well-rounded, balanced education that includes academic rigor in science and math but also has room for art, music and physical education. Most people want an education that cultivates critical thinking and all children's natural curiosity. They also want practical schools that prepare students for college and work. Our schools should offer both.

He proposes some of the key element of a new education vision

• politicians accountable for fair school funding, adequate facilities and reasonable class size.

• An end to polarizing campaigns around charter schools, teacher tenure and linking teacher pay to student test scores and an open engagement on these matters to allow for the possibility of compromise and finetuning

A campaign for support and change in public education can be successful, but it will take work to bring a progressive vision from the margins to the center of political discourse. Powerful private foundations support the administration's policies, and they have been behind efforts to privatize schools in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and Washington. Still, there is good reason to believe that they can be successfully opposed.

Forcing a change in education policy and in our flawed but indispensable public schools, the only institutions that serve all children regardless of background, will be difficult and complicated-but it can be done. It will require the broad but disorganized popular base, which understands the importance of public education, to organize. The need for such an effort is clear. What is not clear is whether those who have the most at stake can muster the will to make it happen.

It would be interesting to see whether a similarly broad coming together of  education organisations, academics, researchers, teachers, parents, equity minded stakeholders and others would be possible in Australia or whether we will continue with random acts of policy contestation and ad hoc approaches to policy engagement where political differences on less fundamental matters, competition for the Commonwealth dollar and the media  byte and organizational cultures continues to weaken our ability to come together and  to reframe the education debate in Australia.

To read the article click here

The next three articles in this section articles are in response to the article on Housing Policy is School Policy.  We published an summary of this paper in the last issue of Notebook

Meredith Ely, 'Blaming Teachers or Finding Solutions?', Huffington Post, 21 October 2010

Education pundits are championing the creed, "education is the civil rights issue of our generation," to bring a sense of urgency to a broken public education system. Individuals that propose bold restructuring of schools, like Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and a myriad of other reform-minded leaders, are calling the public to rethink longstanding norms in education. Common themes have risen from this progressive dialogue; holding teachers highly accountable for student achievement, using data to drive instruction and assessment, reworking or weakening tenure laws, and providing economic incentives for positive academic results seem to be priorities as we look at changing how schools function.

One of the most popular criticisms of this reform movement is that we are blaming teachers for the downfall of a huge national system. Parents and school staff are speaking out, demanding that we refocus on issues like overcrowded classrooms, budget cuts, and standardized testing instead of making rash decisions to eradicate tenure or close low-performing schools.

In a discussion of a new study, "Housing Policy Is School Policy," Richard D. Kahlenberg of Education Week parses out the results, which indicate that affluent school setting, not emergency recovery efforts in schools for low-income children, is more closely linked to academic achievement. Students living under the poverty line who were selected to attend schools in affluent suburbs, outperformed students who remained in low-income schools, even though these schools were provided with extra resources. Supporting research like the San Diego School District's 2003 study on achievement determinants, "Housing Policy Is School Policy" shows that boosting funding does not boost learning as much as Kahlenberg thinks "positive peer role models, active parental communities, and strong teachers" might.

Coupled with my own teaching experience in urban Chicago, the results of these studies show that while we should not blame great teachers for the system's failures, we should realize that the lack of outstanding teachers in socio-economically disadvantaged schools is a major issue. Progressive reformers who want higher measures of accountability in schools are not speaking to the teachers who are already leading their students to academic gains. They are working to help children currently in schools who cannot count on extra funding or smaller class size in the near future. These children need great teachers now.

I felt the impact of budget cuts and understaffing on a daily basis. We were merging classrooms constantly due to understaffing, using taped-up books, completing a dozen redundant reports for various funding sources, and receiving meager paychecks in comparison to the effort we exerted -- all problems that seem almost cliché at this point. Half of my students, representative of other low-income districts, entered my classroom below grade level. Considering I taught preschool, these numbers are frighteningly indicative of the achievement gap.

Despite the challenges I faced, I knew that I was directly responsible for my students' growth and learning. Not once was I observed or critiqued by my supervisor, and the performance reviews that we were to discuss with the site director were generally completed casually, months after they were "due." Whereas I held myself to high standards, feeling the exigency of my students' needs, I watched some staff members take advantage of the lax accountability. I gained insight from wonderful veteran teachers, but I also saw some people in the classroom that were uneducated and unprepared. Some should never have been teachers. Others should have been released after showing no development or desire to be better educators.

The rise in educational thought leaders challenging the status quo, and calling on schools and districts to review teacher effectiveness, is a pivotal step toward bringing low-income schools the teachers they need. We still need our teacher and parent heroes that fight to reduce class sizes and to increase funding, but we also need to realize that this problem is bigger than a money game.

By focusing on teacher quality for children, and by working fervently to shift policies so that class sizes can be smaller and schools better financed, we can make measurable quality improvements and provide motivation for teachers to pursue results in the face of adversity

Junai Yearwood, "Failure to educate" 8 November 2010

This heart-felt protest from a long time teacher in a high needs school is a timely reminder to us in Australia of the issues at stake in the worst forms of high stakes testing and the importance of the profession remaining committed to high standards of teaching and learning

I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education - a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people's children.

I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.

However, they were all college bound - the ultimate goal of our school's vision statement - clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.

They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul - the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words - oral and written - independently, with relative ease and confidence.

For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.

We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to "pass.'' Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test - but remained illiterate.

I also bear witness to my students' ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A's and B's were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.

In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the "walk across the stage'' frenzy is at its peak.

When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs - a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to "testing accommodations''; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.

Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students - the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list - and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.

At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people's children.

Jared Joiner, "The Matthew Effect,  Plinko, and the achievement gap", Washington Post 20 November 2010

This article is a response by a master student to research that was profiled in last month's Notepad about the impact of a long term integrated housing policy in Montgomery County on the performance outcomes for low income students.  It is interesting because the writer was himself a product of the Montgomery Country integrated schools and he suggests that the issues are much more complex.

The argument for integration of low-income students into more affluent schools is that it offers an opportunity to level the playing field and provide high expectations to students who are not traditionally held to the same schooling standards as the white upper and middle class.

However, as a Black male who attended Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) for high school, I am not convinced that a culture of high expectations extends beyond honors, AP, and IB classrooms.

I remember that when I enrolled in ninth grade, my guidance counselor dissuaded me from enrolling in honors classes. Had my mother (an MCPS teacher) not understood the system, I probably would have avoided the rigorous content and high expectations that year, and I ultimately might have been ill-prepared to successfully complete the IB program.

Frankly, it seems impossible to close the achievement gap without breaking down the barriers that reinforce differences in social capital among students.

Despite the achievement benefits documented by the Century Foundation's study, closing the achievement gap will not occur simply from forcing socioeconomic integration in every school.

Regretfully, there is no "magic bullet" that will solve the country's education problems. Rather, the problems in American education are the result of more pervasive problems that weave through every layer of society.

The challenge of adequately serving all students is best demonstrated in literacy research. Until we address the contexts that breed the achievement gap, it will remain difficult to reverse what Keith Stanovich calls "the Matthew Effect" (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer), whereby students who struggle in school early on fall further and further behind as time goes on.

The importance of early exposure to print and school-readiness skills in the primary years was established, nearly 30 years ago, in Shirley Brice Heath's (1983), Ways with Words. Heath shows that learning does not begin in school, but rather is determined by events prior to school. The differences in toddlers' and infants' language and literacy environments contribute to their incredibly varied school experiences and performance.

The struggling that the children in the study did in school did not reflect a lack of innate ability, but instead that their home environments cultivated a different set of skills that were not compatible with learning practices in the primary grades. While these skills were potentially applicable to higher-order academic tasks in the later grades, many of these students would already be designated as needing special education services; an illustrative case of the Matthew Effect at work.

He believes that the debate on education reform and equity  needs to stop defining that barriers to equity in terms of socioeconomic status  and stop treating teacher quality as a monolithic category.

Obviously, the quality of a teacher will affect student learning. However, if a student brings the requisite culturally derived "ways of 'saying-writing-doing-being-valuing-believing'" (Delpit, 1992) necessary for success in school, a teacher's job is decidedly easier.

Similarly, we cannot use poverty as an excuse to limit students' potential (Jean Anyon provides harrowing examples of this in schools), but we do know that students who experience a mismatch between the culture of school and culturally appropriate practices outside of school may require individualized pedagogy. Such pedagogy must be more responsive to, and support the success of, all students.

So, it's not that socioeconomic status determines school performance. Rather, it's a complicated interaction between contextual student characteristics, like non-mainstream language and literacy exposure, and the pedagogy implemented by teachers that determine scholastic achievement.

What then does this suggest for equity policy? 

"...the implementation of early-childhood interventions coupled with more economic heterogeneity and a culturally responsive pedagogy in schools, might do wonders towards closing the achievement gap."

 

Simon Marginson, 'The Tyranny of Competitive Learning', The Australian, 1 December 2010

Simon Marginson is a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne. This is an edited extract from a speech at the University of Virginia in the US on November 14.

In the article Marginson reminds us that if universities are just there to provide a private competitively based positional good,  it may be time to question theiron going existence and legitimacy.

EVERY so often nation-states and societies discover they can live without the institutions they have inherited. Institutions that stand for nothing deep or collective, no greater public good than the aggregation of self-interest, are vulnerable.

After all, self-interest can be channelled in a thousand other ways. The institutions disappear and their functions become picked up elsewhere.

Think about the Tudor monasteries in England under Henry VIII. They were very strong until the day they were dissolved.

Universities give your head a new coat of paint and send you into the job market clutching a piece of paper. Or so it seems. But other agencies can issue certificates for work, for a fee. Research can be run from corporate or government labs. Scholars and humanists can be sent back to private life to finance their activities themselves. Young people who want real knowledge can buy ebooks. New ideas can be sourced from civil society, the business world and the communicative space, as they were in 17th and 18th-century Europe, and as they are from the internet today.

Higher education institutions need a larger purpose than just producing private benefits for a minority. A purpose that underpins their existence. A purpose more than a marketing slogan. A purpose that is something more than the survival of the university, or knowledge, or learning, for its own sake.

So where does the public good, created in higher education sit within the other ways of understanding higher education.  Margisson identifies three "established ways of imagining and practising higher education".

The first is the idea of higher education as an economic market: education and research as products, higher education as national economic competition, universities as business firms, a one-world free trade zone in degrees and intellectual property. Global capitalism provides the dominant modernising imaginary of the past two centuries. This imaginary is strong in higher education in West and East, and everywhere dominates state blueprints for higher education reform.

Then there is higher education as a field of competition for social rank: universities as makers of graduate status; universities as bearers of institutional status; the higher education hierarchy regulated by word of mouth and national and global rankings. Here the bottom line of the university is not money but its own prestige.

The third practice of higher education is the networked and more egalitarian university world of messaging and data transfer, collegiality, linkages, partnerships and global consortiums. This was always part of higher education, but has gained ground in the past 20 years amid global communications.

Margisson also looks at how politics shapes the production of public and private good

While the political process is essential to public good, it is an imperfect instrument for realising it. It does not always recognise the collective benefits created in higher education, such as the dissemination of advanced scientific literacy. When such benefits are not embedded in active constituencies they remain invisible, undefended and underfunded.

Moreover, in public political debate there is much confusion about the nature of public good and the line between public and private goods is blurred. An example is the politics of access.

Data on social group inequality in participation measure higher education's contribution to equitable opportunity. This function is broadly, though not universally, agreed to be a public good mission. But what drives the intense focus on social access, selection and affirmative action is not primarily the common interest in equitable opportunity. What gets most people excited is that selection and access shape the distribution of private goods: scarce places in sought-after universities.

Margisson draws on the work of Amartya Sen who identifies two distinct approaches to social justice - social justice as fairness and social justice as inclusion.  He argues that prescriptions based on fairness generate a different student mix to prescriptions based on inclusion.

Under some circumstances the two objectives are compatible. During a period of rapid growth in student numbers both are readily advanced, as it becomes unnecessary to displace the already included.

This is because "competitive systems always favour people from socio-economic groups with the best resources with which to compete. The fair allocation of private goods in higher education is a chimera, a fiction, unachievable, unless, as often happens, fairness is watered down so as to judge as fair whatever unequal result is thrown up by competition".

Competition is always better at creating private goods than public good. Advocates of equity in higher education spend too much energy trying to create fair competition, which is impossible. It is the competitive order itself that should be tackled, particularly the way status differentials in higher education feed continuous jousting, undermine the commons. The neighbourhood becomes fairer when the main game is not winner take all, but shared benefit.

To read the article click here

 

Christopher Pearson, 'Vouchers are just the ticket for a better education', The Australian, 6-7 November 2010

In this article Pearson claims that  vouchers should be seen as an innovation  with the capacity  to command broad support from the electorate and across the political classes  and also that the Gillard Government needs to adopt a voucher policy to prove that it is serious about  'prioritising the needs of the individual child and respecting parent choice'

He claims that the biggest barrier to the adoption of a vouchers policy is the power of teacher unions. 

 "The unions have always been more concerned with preserving their members quasi monopoly as service providers than with the quality of the service itself and the needs of the students"

It's not hard to see why the education unions have been so hostile to any form of vouchers. They promised to increase parental choice, which made them popular. They also threatened to improve the viability of low-fee independent schools, the fastest growing sector of the education market, especially in outer suburbs.

Beyond those immediate threats, there was always the possibility that the underlying principle that vouchers represented might gain ground.

What a radical shift it would be if every child were entitled to an annual educational credit - with appropriate adjustment upward for disability and disadvantage - and that credit could be spent at any school, state or private, or on supplementary tuition for home-schoolers.

In fact there are many others who oppose vouchers and for reasons he has not even tried to represent here. 

I wonder if Pearson has noticed that this is not how it works in health.  In fact governments have been quite explicit in pushing people into private health care in order to reduce the impost of hospital costs on the public purse. 

Vouchers may sound sensible. Afterall how much fairer can it be than a system that ensures governments are paying the same amount to every child regardless of the school they go to.  This would mean that whatever a child who goes to a public school attracts in Government costs, a similar needs child going to a high end school would get the same but the school would be free to spend every additional dollar from fees in bettering that base offering.

He goes on

From that starting point, it's not a great leap to decide that the credit should be somewhere around two-thirds of the average cost of educating a pupil in a state primary or secondary school. Such an arrangement would spell the end of a lot of substandard state schools, especially in poorer suburbs, and make some form of private schooling available to every parent who aspires to it.

I presume they would fold because they find it impossible to run on 100% of the total costs of running a Government school let alone 66% of that amount.  I wonder how the new school that opens will cover that funding gap?

It could also free students from the tyranny of catchment areas, which in the public system constrains parents as to what schools their children can attend. In extreme cases, most notably in Melbourne, it also leads to parents selling the family home to move to another suburb that gives the children access to better schools. This is a concession to the service-providers lobby, which is impossible to justify on educational grounds, let alone in terms of social justice. (Just as an aside, it will be interesting to see whether either of the main parties at the Victorian elections has the wit to promise a selective secondary school for Melbourne's under-resourced western suburbs.)

Despite dire prognostications to the contrary, a voucher to the value of two-thirds of the cost of state schooling per pupil wouldn't mean the end of public education as we know it. Good state schools would thrive, as they always have, because there is a market for what they provide. Fair to average schools would have market incentives to improve and to specialise. What is likely to happen, though, is that some schools would want to change their internal organisation along the lines of charter schools, where the principal and the parents have a lot more say in terms of policy and staff selection. Groups of like-minded teachers from the state system also could hire premises and start schools of their own.

To read more click here

 

Press release, 'Naming and shaming schools works',  Bristol University, 2 November 2010

I am still waiting for commentary on this article because it goes against all the other research  readily available and the growing popular wisdom that says the public release of school level test data  does not drive improvements in student outcomes/.  In the meantime here it is ...

The publication of league tables raises average school performance, according to new research from the University of Bristol, which found significant improvements in academic ratings after the policy was introduced.

Researchers from Bristol's Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) compared the educational outcomes in England, where league tables of secondary schools are published, and Wales, where they have been abolished.

Their findings revealed that the average effect of abolishing league tables is substantial, a fall of almost two GCSE grades per pupil per year. This decline in performance was found to be important for the lowest performing 75% of schools, but not for the top quarter of schools.

Publishing school league tables was therefore shown to both raise average school performance and reduce educational inequalities.

Co-author and CMPO director Professor Simon Burgess said: "School accountability policies such as league tables seem to be a cost-effective way of raising school performance, particularly for students in disadvantaged schools and neighbourhoods."

The research exploits the 'natural experiment' created by the abolition of secondary school league tables in Wales in 2001, and compares educational outcomes in England and Wales before and after the policy change, enabling an analysis that isolates the impact of removing league tables from two otherwise near-identical education systems.

This affects all schools except the top 25% performing schools. And the impact is strongest among schools with the most students eligible for free school meals: the poorest 25% of Welsh schools, for example, show a fall of three GCSE grades per pupil per year.

 

Dana Goldstein Questioning 'what works' Teacher College Record, November 2010

This article reports on a lecture given by Geoff Whitty, who would be well known to many ACE members.  It compares the reform efforts across the Atlantic around school choice and accountability.

Extracts

Education officials in England and the United States should step up their sharing of research and policy reform ideas across the Atlantic-especially in the areas of school choice and accountability.

Both countries are embroiled in well-publicized debates about education reform as they have fallen sharply in global rankings of education quality and performance. If they are to regain their status as world leaders in economic growth, both will need to address the inequities in their education systems,.

The two countries have exchanged education policy reform ideas and efforts at least since the early 1990s. England's grant-maintained schools influenced the early charter school movement in the United States, and its use of national standards and high-stakes testing preceded the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind education bill and national curriculum efforts here.

In turn, England currently is eyeing U.S. charter schools (the Harlem Children's Zone and KIPP schools, in particular) as models for free schools and academies in England. Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, addressed the U.K.'s Conservative Party annual conference last month; and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education in the U.S., visited a London school with Gove earlier this month. England is also increasingly interested in American teacher training models (Teach for America here inspired Teach First in England).

In fact, education policy has been so frequently shared across the Atlantic, ... that sometimes champions of particular measures forget where their proposed reforms originated and how they played out in the past.

The result is that too often, education policy on both sides of the Atlantic is justified by anecdotal evidence and "quasi-research carried out by think tanks and advocacy groups" that have a particular political point of view ...instead of by the rigorous, careful research of academic institutions ...

Education researchers can help in challenging [the prevailing] narrative and changing the terms of the debate by reinforcing messages, not just about what works, but also about what doesn't work and why it doesn't work,"

And on equity in education

The panelists at the forum were uniformly gloomy about progress toward overcoming inequity in educational outcomes and opportunity. Noting that "British schools no longer have to report what they're doing to enhance social cohesion," Whitty said that "to remove the notion that there should be any requirement to think about those issues is highly dangerous."

Daly lamented that "when we talk about equity, we're not talking about what we want for our kids, but what we're willing to guarantee kids." He was sharply critical of his hometown, Chicago, for having "the shortest school year in the country" despite "abysmal academic performance," but said there had not been a serious discussion among city leaders about changing it.  

Fuhrman said that one obstacle to improve on this and on other fronts is that "we don't have good ways to learn from successful models-regular visitation, sharing of data, exchanges among schools on a broad scale."

And Hargreaves said that reformers become too vested in championing certain types of reforms rather than looking at the track records of individual efforts. "What we need to celebrate is what goes on in schools, rather than the type of schools," he said. "It's not type that produces the results. There is very little honesty about that in the discourse at the moment."

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Valerie Strauss, 'Why Teaching Experience Really Matters', Washington Post, 20 November 2010

If you are a wealthy philanthropist or a politician you don't need evidence to implement policies that will have far reaching consequences. Even so there is a measure of difference. Politicians are, in the final analysis, accountable to the Parliament and to the people and one would also hope they have a frank and fearless department advising them.  Philanthropists are only accountable to their share holders. 

This article takes a critical look at the influence of Bill Gates "who appears to be running for shadow education secretary". His latest campaign is for paying teachers according to "value-added based" merit systems that will at least in part rely on standardized test scores to judge how well a teacher is doing.  This is despite any evidence that this will work and in fact some evidence to the contrary.

Experience in teaching doesn't matter much, nor do advanced education degrees, Gates said in a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers' annual policy forum in Louisville on Friday.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan made the same argument about advanced education degrees two days earlier in a speech, and many times previously had backed eliminating experience as a criterion for judging and compensating teachers.

(In their speeches this week, both men called for districts to consider raising class size. A coincidence, no doubt.)

Actually, experience in the classroom does matter.

The following was written by Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This post originally appeared on the institute's blog.

The topic of teacher experience is getting a lot of attention in education debates. In part, this makes sense, since experience (years of service) does play several important roles in education policy, including teachers' raises and transfer/layoff policies.

Usually, experience is discussed in terms of its relationship to performance -whether more experienced teachers produce larger student test score gains than less experienced teachers. There is a pretty impressive body of research on this topic, the findings of which are sometimes used to argue for policy changes that eliminate the role of experience in salary and other employment policies. Proponents of these changes often argue that experience is only weakly related to performance, and therefore shouldn't be used in determining salary and other conditions of work. It is not unusual to hear people say that experience doesn't matter at all.

As is often the case when empirical research finds its way into policy debates, the "weakly related" characterization of the findings on the experience/achievement relationship borders on oversimplification, while the claim that experience doesn't matter is flat-out wrong. The relationship is substantial but context-dependent, and blanket statements about it often hide as much as they reveal.

The dozens of analyses of teacher experience show that it matters a great deal in the early years on the job (also see here, here, here and here). There is general consensus that the returns to experience are strongest in the first year of teaching. Then the rate of improvement starts to level off quickly - usually stagnating within about 4-5 years (time frames vary a bit). After that, most teachers tend to remain relatively stable in terms of their effects on student test scores (though a very large proportion leaves the profession before that point).

But these overall findings ignore the fact that the experience/achievement relationship differs a great deal by context. For instance, the returns to experience appear to vary by where teachers work. The relationship is more consistent among elementary school teachers (especially compared with those in high schools). The effect of experience on teacher productivity may also be mediated by the quality of their peers in the same school - i.e., that novice teachers with more effective peers in the same school do better.

Similarly, there is evidence that experience matters less - or less consistently - in poorer schools (also see here). There are several plausible explanations for this discrepancy, such as the possibility that teachers in poorer schools burn out more rapidly, or that there are difficulties in teaching lower-income children that are harder to adjust to.

The experience factor not only varies by where you teach, but also by what you teach. Math teachers seem to improve more quickly (and consistently) than reading teachers, while newer evidence suggests that the same is true for teachers who remain in the same grade for multiple years.

Finally, it bears mentioning the obvious point that the effect of teacher experience might be totally different if we were able to look at outcomes other than test scores. The idea that experience doesn't matter after five or so years incorrectly implies that test scores are the only relevant outcome. Nobody believes that is the case. (And, for what it's worth, teachers with whom I've spoken find the idea that they stop improving after four or five years laughable.)

Teachers who produce test score gains are not always the same ones who are effective at imparting other types of skills. It seems quite plausible (if not probable) that teachers do exhibit longer-term improvement in their students' learning other skills, such as social/behavioral skills, that elude standardized tests. Let's also keep in mind that it remains an open question whether the returns to experience follow a similar pattern among teachers not in tested grades or subjects (which is roughly three in four teachers).

That said, experience is actually one of the very few observable teacher characteristics that is consistently correlated with achievement, and its effect is among the strongest, especially for some sub-groups, such as elementary school and math teachers.

Even those who think the magnitude of these returns is not commensurate with the role of experience in education policy cannot dispute that it is still a proven signal of quality, at least during the early years of teachers' careers. And it is virtually certain that teachers also improve in other ways that don't show up in their students' test scores.

So, unless we are going to design employment policies based strictly on test scores (which is both ridiculous and logistically impossible), we might recalibrate these policies to exploit the findings above, including using other measures along with experience, restructuring salary schedules, keeping teachers in the same grade over multiple years, or paying more attention to the important role of peers in shaping teachers' learning curves.

Let's tone down the rhetoric, and try not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Erin Richards, 'School districts wrestle with effective ways to judge instructors' performance" Journal Sentinel, 14 November 2010  - Part 1 in a series

In the growing national debate on how to raise the quality of public school teaching in America, performance evaluations have become both a lightning rod and a sticking point.

Most evaluation systems in public schools provide little information to properly assess teachers' strengths and weaknesses. And because teachers are rarely dismissed over their performance, formal evaluations seldom carry much weight.

In the push to create more great teachers and raise student achievement, President Barack Obama's administration has championed stronger performance evaluations, tied to student test scores, and bonus pay systems to better place, support and reward excellent educators. The administration also wants school districts to justify the dismissal of those who are ineffective.

There's wide agreement that current evaluations don't accomplish much; there's little agreement between reformers and unions on how best to improve them.

Across the country, leaders in both the education and political arenas are increasingly focused on strengthening teacher evaluations by basing them in part on student test scores. Critics argue that tests - even ones that measure growth from the beginning to the end of the year - don't reveal everything about teacher quality.

"We're seeing different models now (for teacher evaluations) partly because we know that evaluations are generally bad and that teaching really matters," said Elena Silva, research director at Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., education policy think tank.

The urgency for change is rooted in research. Studies show the most important school-based factor determining student success is the quality of the child's teacher, and that low-performing students benefit from highly effective teachers even more.

Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University education and economics researcher, has popularized studying teacher effectiveness by looking at how much academic growth teachers' students make over the course of a year. As early as 1992, based on results of his research in Gary Ind., Hanushek reported "the difference in student performance in a single academic year from having a good as opposed to a bad teacher can be more than one full year of standardized achievement."

Critics of using test scores to evaluate teachers, or value-added measurements that isolate the impact of a teacher's effect on student learning, often worry that too much emphasis on scores may overlook the intangibles that may contribute to good teaching, such as motivation and presentation skills. Also, test scores may not pick up other nuances of the school environment.

Still, student achievement data is the best information researchers have to measure gains in performance, the ultimate goal.

Sabrina Laine, director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, said no state has yet perfected a model evaluation system.

However with Race to the top money riding on finding a way at least 17 states are trying to come up with some workable mode.  States that have not taken this path have missed out on significant federal funding, it has cost them dearly. What are the issues and barriers?

Creating more fair, comprehensive and useful evaluation systems faces roadblocks from the start.

First, involved parties have to agree on a definition of quality teaching. Then they have to decide what factors to use to measure it.

If student achievement is to be a factor in the evaluation, what tests or student work should be considered? How much of that should count toward the total evaluation score?

"Test scores can only be used for certain teachers because not all teachers teach in tested subjects and grades," Silva said. "You get into this debate where people say, let's use test scores for 42% of the evaluation, or 62% of the evaluation. There's no real rationale for any particular percentage, whether it's half, 51% or 49%."

In Wisconsin, state law requires districts to conduct a personnel evaluation in the first year of employment and at least one every three years after that, Mahaffey said. Individual districts are left to determine the characteristics of their formal teacher evaluations.

Most are based primarily on principal observations, and practices vary.

Some go further than others. In the Cedarburg School District, principals submit three different assessments: a standards rating for each teacher based on how well he or she implements the state's 10 teaching standards, another score based on education consultant Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching and a narrative on the teacher's performance.

One of the sad facts about this situation is that even the states who have forgone making changes in order to be eligible to attract federal funds do also acknowledge that the current system of principal managed performance appraisal does not work either.   And this goes to the issue of Principal quality.

For Mortimer, who has taught in four districts in three states, the issues surrounding teacher quality and performance haven't changed much over the years. If she could wave a magic wand, the evaluation process would be conducted by principals who spend lots of time in classrooms, have experience as high-quality teachers themselves and offer ongoing, constructive feedback.

"I feel passionately that our kids need teachers who want to be in the classroom, who want to be with kids and all their issues, foibles and delights," she said.

But will desire still be a measure of teacher effectiveness in the new world of education reform? Some teachers are great with kids but can't move the needle on test scores. Others may be unimaginative but adept at raising proficiency levels.

Silva, from Education Sector, said she believes stronger evaluation systems will do a lot to better distinguish between educators, and to improve the quality of teaching.

"Principals will tell you, 'I know the good teachers,' " Silva said. "But that doesn't make an evaluation system. That's not enough."

Justin Snider of the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University, contributed to this report.

Audrey Young, 'Expert gives education system top marks', NZ Herald, 18 October 2010

Leading educationist Professor John Hattie has given a more glowing assessment of the education system than the Government often gives it.

He told the Labour Party conference in Auckland on Saturday that parents often underestimated where the New Zealand system stood internationally and thought it was about average when it was among the best in the world

"We are way up there at the top. Something is going right."

Professor Hattie, an assessment specialist, has recently advised Prime Minister John Key and Education Minister Anne Tolley on the implementation of National's contentious national standards policy in primary schools, which National says will lift standards.

Professor Hattie largely avoided the subject on Saturday though he said that average standards for reading, writing and maths over the past 50 years had not changed.

While that might not sound impressive, the system was already near the top of the world.

"Each year we reinvent the problem at the start of the year. So I think it is impressive that our system and our teachers are able to take our kids and get them up to that high international status every year.

"Changing the average of the whole nation is not easy and we need to be careful about asking for it because it's not going to happen easily unless we identify the right problems, which in my opinion are those kids who are not performing up to their potential."

He said NCEA had been successful in keeping students at school and giving them qualifications. And there could be confidence that the assessment was the same throughout the country.

But Professor Hattie spelled out some of the problem areas.

Tomorrow's Schools had many benefits but had created 2700 "islands" of individual schools not co-operating or sharing answers to problems.

He said that while a lot of attention was given to the "tail" of under-achievers, not enough attention was being given to children on the other side of the scale who were not achieving their potential.

He believed the decile system of rating schools should be abolished - though the equity funding that went with it should not.

The decile system did not help anyone except real estate agents selling houses in decile 10 areas.

He said the Ministry of Education did not listen to teachers because they had no organisation dedicated to professional standards as that surgeons, doctors and other professionals had.

New Zealand schools rated poorly in the way students felt about them as a safe and inviting learning environment. In an international comparison, they rated second to last, he said.

I believe that it is now public knowledge that John Hattie will be taking up a professorial position within the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and we look forward to profiling more of his thinking and research in 2011.