School league tables are not the way
18th April 2009
Just before Easter my school hosted Jo and Nancy, two young teachers from
England who are holidaying in New Zealand. They loved our school. Talking to them I heard the same comparisons between schools in England and New Zealand that I have heard many times in recent years, and which match my own experiences of teaching in both countries.
Given half an opportunity Jo and Nancy would swap their English classrooms for kiwi ones in a moment. Why? Because education in England has been hammered flat by high-stakes testing, relentless standardisation and a ‘blame and shame’ culture that classifies schools as winners or losers.
In England a broad curriculum - one that teaches art, sport, social studies and values - has been sacrificed for a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy, in which children’s achievement is measured against highly prescribed national standards.
Teachers churn out lessons prepared for them by specialised curriculum writers, all
their energies devoted to hauling their students over the standard, driven by performance pay, a combative audit office and the fear of their school slipping down the local league tables.
After nearly 15 years of this model there are many who believe education in England is in crisis. Teachers are demoralised and children emerge from schools ill-equipped to take their place in the world or, worse, with a pervading sense of failure. While commentators cry out for a more flexible and imaginative curriculum and primary teachers threaten to boycott the annual examinations, Gordon Brown’s government seems more intent on debating how much homework four year olds should be doing.
Recently our own Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, said she is happy that the new national standards in literacy and numeracy for New Zealand schools will lead to higher-stakes assessments and school performance being ranked and published in league tables.
There is nothing wrong with standards in education. Schools have always assessed children against standards of some sort. But there are two issues with national standards.
The first is the intention to set national standards only in literacy and numeracy. Actually standards will be set only in a few aspects of literacy and numeracy – reading, writing and number skills. Standards will not be developed for oral language, geometry or measurement skills. Much less will they be developed for science, technology, art, physical education, social studies, Maori, drama or dance.
And because school performance will be judged against the national standards there will be a tendency for reading, writing and number skills to dominate the primary school curriculum. These skills are important but they do not comprise the well-rounded education we owe our children if they are to compete in an era where creativity and problem-solving will be the measure of success.
The second issue is how widely school achievement information should be published. Mrs Tolley proposes that the data schools gather be minced together to produce a generalised rating that the media can pounce on to produce league tables.
League tables are destructive. They say nothing about the value a school adds to a child’s learning. They strengthen stereotypes about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools and widen social inequalities. They sacrifice the interests of our children to an ideology that believes learning is a commodity and that schools can be managed like businesses trading on a sharemarket.
Mrs Tolley’s ideas place our successful education system at risk. While countries that have embraced high-stakes assessment and reporting struggle to extricate themselves from the mess we should not repeat their folly. Jo and Nancy will tell you we should be learning from England’s failures – not repeating them.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Sensible sentencing is neither sensible nor effective
4th April 2009
The visit to Ashburton last week of Garth McVicar, founder of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, throws a spotlight on the work of that organisation. After nine years in business the Trust is enjoying success. Its message fits closely with conservative voters and reflects the policies of the new government.
McVicar mines a deep vein of support with appeals for tougher sentencing laws, stricter bail conditions and restricted parole. He expresses the frustration felt by many in the face of increasing violence. His desire to revive what he believes were the prominent values of 30 years ago is particularly popular with the middle-aged and older.
The Trust’s vision is to create A Safe New Zealand. Its “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” methods, however, do nothing to achieve this goal.
The vengeful desire to stuff more people into prisons and to keep them there for longer may be a natural response to violent crime. If a person takes a life why shouldn’t they serve the term of their life in retribution? Surely this will deter future offenders?
But there is a problem with this approach.
It doesn’t work.
McVicar says we should look at the example of other countries and ‘get tougher’ but the evidence points strongly to the failure of tougher sentencing laws. The United States has pursued the path of getting tough on crime for years, with disastrous results. Today, the United States locks up 750 out of every 100,000 of its citizens, compared to 197 in New Zealand and far fewer in most other countries, and yet America is awash with violent crime.
People who commit violent crime are not deterred by tougher sentences. The murderer does not stop to reflect on whether the penalty is likely to be 10 years or 20.
Prisons are schools for criminal behaviour. Putting more people into prisons and keeping them there for longer feeds the sub-culture and drives it deeper into the families and communities of the convicted.
McVicar is right in saying we have to learn from our history, he just draws the wrong lessons. We will not build a safer future by recalling a more punitive past, but by addressing the real roots of violent crime, which lie in the social and economic directions we have chosen to take New Zealand in the past 30 years.
Growing inequality is the foundation of lawlessness. We have succeeded in creating a permanent group of poor at the bottom of our society and we treat them with a level of disdain not seen since Victorian times. Child poverty, abuse, ignorance and poor health are not accidental. They are the natural outcomes of deliberate policies, like this week’s tax cuts which effectively redistribute money from low income earners to the wealthiest.
The Sensible Sentencing Trust’s ideas are not only wrong, they are also expensive. Building more prisons is the least cost-effective approach to reducing crime. Research in many parts of the world proves that relatively small sums of money spent on identifying children at risk of criminal behaviour and intervening to support those children and their families has much greater value.
In America, recent research by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy was so effective in demonstrating that every dollar spent to support young children at risk saved the taxpayers 3 dollars in the criminal justice system that the state legislature scrapped plans to build a new prison and diverted the money into parenting and youth programmes.
The real solutions to our problems are less attractive than the simple appeal to vengeance of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. They are slow and incremental and they work from the ground up. They require us to confront greed and self-interest. But they are, ultimately, the only sensible solutions.
4th April 2009
The visit to Ashburton last week of Garth McVicar, founder of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, throws a spotlight on the work of that organisation. After nine years in business the Trust is enjoying success. Its message fits closely with conservative voters and reflects the policies of the new government.
McVicar mines a deep vein of support with appeals for tougher sentencing laws, stricter bail conditions and restricted parole. He expresses the frustration felt by many in the face of increasing violence. His desire to revive what he believes were the prominent values of 30 years ago is particularly popular with the middle-aged and older.
The Trust’s vision is to create A Safe New Zealand. Its “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” methods, however, do nothing to achieve this goal.
The vengeful desire to stuff more people into prisons and to keep them there for longer may be a natural response to violent crime. If a person takes a life why shouldn’t they serve the term of their life in retribution? Surely this will deter future offenders?
But there is a problem with this approach.
It doesn’t work.
McVicar says we should look at the example of other countries and ‘get tougher’ but the evidence points strongly to the failure of tougher sentencing laws. The United States has pursued the path of getting tough on crime for years, with disastrous results. Today, the United States locks up 750 out of every 100,000 of its citizens, compared to 197 in New Zealand and far fewer in most other countries, and yet America is awash with violent crime.
People who commit violent crime are not deterred by tougher sentences. The murderer does not stop to reflect on whether the penalty is likely to be 10 years or 20.
Prisons are schools for criminal behaviour. Putting more people into prisons and keeping them there for longer feeds the sub-culture and drives it deeper into the families and communities of the convicted.
McVicar is right in saying we have to learn from our history, he just draws the wrong lessons. We will not build a safer future by recalling a more punitive past, but by addressing the real roots of violent crime, which lie in the social and economic directions we have chosen to take New Zealand in the past 30 years.
Growing inequality is the foundation of lawlessness. We have succeeded in creating a permanent group of poor at the bottom of our society and we treat them with a level of disdain not seen since Victorian times. Child poverty, abuse, ignorance and poor health are not accidental. They are the natural outcomes of deliberate policies, like this week’s tax cuts which effectively redistribute money from low income earners to the wealthiest.
The Sensible Sentencing Trust’s ideas are not only wrong, they are also expensive. Building more prisons is the least cost-effective approach to reducing crime. Research in many parts of the world proves that relatively small sums of money spent on identifying children at risk of criminal behaviour and intervening to support those children and their families has much greater value.
In America, recent research by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy was so effective in demonstrating that every dollar spent to support young children at risk saved the taxpayers 3 dollars in the criminal justice system that the state legislature scrapped plans to build a new prison and diverted the money into parenting and youth programmes.
The real solutions to our problems are less attractive than the simple appeal to vengeance of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. They are slow and incremental and they work from the ground up. They require us to confront greed and self-interest. But they are, ultimately, the only sensible solutions.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Locking up schools is no cure for violent behaviour
12th March 2009
Last week’s stabbing of a teacher in Auckland has most of us in education bracing for the fallout. The response so far inspires little confidence that we can maintain perspective on this issue.
Talk of metal detectors and police patrols adds insult to injury. These are not simply facile responses to a complex issue, they are strategies that will, over time, escalate violence in schools.
There are four sources of violent behaviour in schools. The first, beloved by fiction writers through the ages, is violence from teachers towards students. The Dickensian school master, with stout cane and withering tongue, survived intact until remarkably recently.
Teachers who worked in the era of the cane and strap will tell you the relief they felt at the ending of institutionalised violence towards children. Some will admit it brought out the worst in them, an experience they found deeply unsettling and which clouded their relationships with students.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that teachers no longer bully children, but almost without exception the people who work in our schools today have constructive relationships with students, are highly positive and well supported in managing student behaviour.
The second source of school violence is bullying among students. This is a genuine problem in New Zealand and deserves attention. Bullying is a nexus of factors: individual, institutional and societal. Schools that experience high levels of disruptive behaviour can often link this to high levels of violence within their communities. Some schools succeed in becoming havens of respect and tolerance in even the most difficult communities, but to do so requires vision, stamina and extraordinary commitment from a wide range of agencies.
Bullying among students can usually be controlled by adults but the bullying will only cease when students take ownership of both the problem and the means to end it. Students, not teachers, are the guardians and enforcers of school culture. The most effective behaviour management consists of a student or group of students demonstrating their disapproval of wayward behaviour. This is as true of students at the age of six as it is at sixteen.
The third and fourth kinds are those acts of serious violence committed against students or staff. In one form they may be committed by a member of the school, such as last week’s attack in Auckland. Alternatively they may be the act of an outsider, such as an irate parent coming onto the school grounds to take the law into his own hands. What these two forms of violence have in common is that they can almost never be anticipated, they are highly aggressive and they are rare.
Schools have procedures to handle these events and react swiftly and firmly to minimise the risk to students and staff.
The debate in the past week has concerned itself almost exclusively with school violence of the third and fourth kinds. Several voices have chided schools for not doing enough to prevent such acts of violence. These contributors to the debate tend to be fans of metal detectors at the gate and police patrols in the playground but their solutions are more damaging to schools than the continuance of the very small risk posed by violent offenders of the third and fourth kind.
I have worked in schools in England where, in the climate of fear created by high level violence, school security is extreme. With chain link fences, metal gates, swipe cards and access codes schools have come to resemble prisons.
From my observation these measures have two effects. First, they seriously damage a school’s relationship with its community. The message to parents is, “we do not believe this community is a safe place for children, so we will make their safety the role of the state.” The security measures effectively disempower parents and children from taking responsibility for their behaviour. Unsurprisingly bullying and violence are major problems.
Second, the security measures do not work. It is impossible to keep a school in permanent lockdown. School boundaries are porous – people are constantly moving in and out for a hundred good reasons. The gates and security codes are impossible to enforce to the degree where they would exclude a person intent on harm.
Maintaining high-level security would be even more challenging in New Zealand where our schools, happily, are designed to be open to their communities.
In fact the greatest risk in over-reacting to last week’s incident is that we will draw a curtain between school and community. Violence in schools can be solved only by schools and communities working together. The idea that schools must be made into islands of safety in a dangerous world nurtures a climate of fear, creates discord among the groups that share the problem and leads to greater violence.
12th March 2009
Last week’s stabbing of a teacher in Auckland has most of us in education bracing for the fallout. The response so far inspires little confidence that we can maintain perspective on this issue.
Talk of metal detectors and police patrols adds insult to injury. These are not simply facile responses to a complex issue, they are strategies that will, over time, escalate violence in schools.
There are four sources of violent behaviour in schools. The first, beloved by fiction writers through the ages, is violence from teachers towards students. The Dickensian school master, with stout cane and withering tongue, survived intact until remarkably recently.
Teachers who worked in the era of the cane and strap will tell you the relief they felt at the ending of institutionalised violence towards children. Some will admit it brought out the worst in them, an experience they found deeply unsettling and which clouded their relationships with students.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that teachers no longer bully children, but almost without exception the people who work in our schools today have constructive relationships with students, are highly positive and well supported in managing student behaviour.
The second source of school violence is bullying among students. This is a genuine problem in New Zealand and deserves attention. Bullying is a nexus of factors: individual, institutional and societal. Schools that experience high levels of disruptive behaviour can often link this to high levels of violence within their communities. Some schools succeed in becoming havens of respect and tolerance in even the most difficult communities, but to do so requires vision, stamina and extraordinary commitment from a wide range of agencies.
Bullying among students can usually be controlled by adults but the bullying will only cease when students take ownership of both the problem and the means to end it. Students, not teachers, are the guardians and enforcers of school culture. The most effective behaviour management consists of a student or group of students demonstrating their disapproval of wayward behaviour. This is as true of students at the age of six as it is at sixteen.
The third and fourth kinds are those acts of serious violence committed against students or staff. In one form they may be committed by a member of the school, such as last week’s attack in Auckland. Alternatively they may be the act of an outsider, such as an irate parent coming onto the school grounds to take the law into his own hands. What these two forms of violence have in common is that they can almost never be anticipated, they are highly aggressive and they are rare.
Schools have procedures to handle these events and react swiftly and firmly to minimise the risk to students and staff.
The debate in the past week has concerned itself almost exclusively with school violence of the third and fourth kinds. Several voices have chided schools for not doing enough to prevent such acts of violence. These contributors to the debate tend to be fans of metal detectors at the gate and police patrols in the playground but their solutions are more damaging to schools than the continuance of the very small risk posed by violent offenders of the third and fourth kind.
I have worked in schools in England where, in the climate of fear created by high level violence, school security is extreme. With chain link fences, metal gates, swipe cards and access codes schools have come to resemble prisons.
From my observation these measures have two effects. First, they seriously damage a school’s relationship with its community. The message to parents is, “we do not believe this community is a safe place for children, so we will make their safety the role of the state.” The security measures effectively disempower parents and children from taking responsibility for their behaviour. Unsurprisingly bullying and violence are major problems.
Second, the security measures do not work. It is impossible to keep a school in permanent lockdown. School boundaries are porous – people are constantly moving in and out for a hundred good reasons. The gates and security codes are impossible to enforce to the degree where they would exclude a person intent on harm.
Maintaining high-level security would be even more challenging in New Zealand where our schools, happily, are designed to be open to their communities.
In fact the greatest risk in over-reacting to last week’s incident is that we will draw a curtain between school and community. Violence in schools can be solved only by schools and communities working together. The idea that schools must be made into islands of safety in a dangerous world nurtures a climate of fear, creates discord among the groups that share the problem and leads to greater violence.
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