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Marc Tucker has more faith in standardized tests than I do, and more faith in the value of international comparisons based on standardized tests. But despite our disagreements, he has been a thoughtful commentator on the failure of market reforms.
This article explains why “market reforms” don’t work.
This is a listing of the top ten nations known for outstanding scores.
While we are on the subject of “free markets” and schooling, it is important to be aware of the dismal results in Sweden after it introduced policies like those advocated by the Trump administration.
Here is one description. Swedish education was once the pride of the nation.
Sweden, once regarded as a byword for high-quality education – free preschool, formal school at seven, no fee-paying private schools, no selection – has seen its scores in Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) assessments plummet in recent years.
Fridolin [the Swedish education minister] acknowledges the sense of shame and embarrassment felt in Sweden. “The problem is that this embarrassment is carried by the teachers. But this embarrassment should be carried by us politicians. We were the ones who created the system. It’s a political failure,” he says….
Fridolin, who has a degree in teaching, says not only have scores in international tests gone down, inequality in the Swedish system has gone up. “This used to be the great success story of the Swedish system,” he said. “We could offer every child, regardless of their background, a really good education. The parents’ educational background is showing more and more in their grades.
“Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not….”
Sweden’s decline follows a raft of changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the educational landscape. A system that had been largely centralised was devolved to municipalities, teacher training was changed, exams and grades changed, and a voucher system was introduced giving parents the power to choose which school to send their child to. Each child was funded by the state, and if the child chose to go do a different school, the money would follow.
Then there is this article from the British New Statesman (which is concerned because its conservative government wants to follow the Swedish path to failure):
We have seen the future in Sweden and it works,” Michael Gove told the Daily Mail in 2008. A few months earlier, Gove and other leading Conservatives had visited schools in Sweden for the first time, a journey that they would repeat in the following years.
“They’ve done something amazing,” he said in a video made for that year’s Tory party conference. “They challenged the conventional wisdom [and] decided that it was parents, not bureaucrats, who should be in charge.”
Sweden’s 800 friskolor make up about a sixth of the country’s state-funded schools. Introduced in 1992, they gave parents the ability to use state spending on education to set up new schools and decide where to send their children. In that decade, friskolor were made easier to set up, with companies given the right to make a profit from running them; other schools were decentralised and a voucher system, allowing parents to choose their children’s school and then awarding funds based on parental demand, was introduced. Tony Blair praised the Swedish model in a 2005 government white paper. For Tories, Sweden’s schools held out a simple message: that competition could transform state education in England.
That message was appealing because it came from “a social-democratic country, far to the left of Britain”, as Gove put it. This was true but only up to a point. The reforms that he enacted after 2010 – notably the introduction of free schools, the speeding up of academisation and changes to the curriculum – owed as much to US “charter schools” as to educational reforms in Sweden.
Even as Gove cited Sweden’s successes in education, its international standing was in decline. Since 2000, standards there have fallen more than in any other country ranked by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) using tests known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or Pisa. Results released in 2013 rated Sweden below Denmark, Finland and Norway by all three measures – reading, maths and science – and worse than the UK. In 2014, 14 per cent of students performed too poorly to qualify for secondary school at 16, a deterioration of 10 per cent on the 2006 level.
Last year, the OECD published a report in which it warned: “Sweden’s school system is in need of urgent change.” Underinvestment is not the problem. The Swedes spend more on education as a percentage of GDP (6.8 per cent) than the OECD average (5.6 per cent). The report describes an education system in chaos, hopelessly fragmented, failing those who need it most. It criticises its “unclear education priorities”, “lack in coherence” and “unreliable data”.
Exactly the path that Trump, DeVos. ALEC, the Friedman Foundation, the Center for Education Reform, the ubiquitous libertarian think tanks, and the “corporate reformers” want to follow. But they can’t or shouldn’t plead ignorance. We know–they should know–that privatization and free markets in schooling produce inequity and lower performance.
The Washington Post published a startling list of Trump’s numerous foreign business ventures. Some with dubious partners. At his press conference a few days ago, Trump made the astonishing claim that a businessman in Dubai offered him a $2 billion deal and he decided to turn it down, even though the president can never have conflicts of interest. So we have a president-elect who believes he can do deals while he is in office, if he feels like it. He says he has no deals in Russia but we can’t know if that is true unless he releases his tax returns.
I have voted for Republicans and Democrats. I am not doctrinaire. I respect the Office of the Presidency but I do not respect the man who is about to occupy it. He does not respect the public enough to dis lose his financial holdings. We have no way to judge whether his decisions are based on the public interest or private financial gain. He disrespects us by transferring ownership of his business to his adult sons, as if that relieves him of his financial conflicts.
“Donald Trump will enter the White House with a network of unorthodox foreign contacts — some of them high-living risk-takers, some with past trouble with the law — who have done business with him in nations from Latin America to the Middle East to Asia.
“Several of Trump’s foreign business partners have been investigated for financial improprieties, and some of them were required to pay large fines or settlements. Others were relatively inexperienced local developers who had major economic problems with their risky, Trump-branded mega-projects. Trump has also worked with businessmen with close connections to authoritarian governments.
“Ethics lawyers have raised concerns about whether some of the Trump family’s overseas alliances could raise conflicts of interest for the incoming president or tie the White House to questionable characters.
“A businessman can deal with these types of businesspeople and hopefully be smart enough not to get sucked in or be taken advantage of,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and a vocal critic of Trump. “But when you move into public service as president of the United States, these are exactly the types of business entanglements you have to dispose of.”
“Washington Post correspondents in nine countries reviewed the records of many of those whom Trump and his family have worked with on foreign real estate, golf and hotel projects. Like Trump, some are outspoken and larger-than-life characters with a taste for glitz and Rolls-Royces. A couple of them have also jumped from business into politics — one has a plan to “make Mumbai great again” and another said he intends to run for president of Indonesia.
“Trump will be the first U.S. president who has built a fortune by turning himself into a global business brand, and his constellation of foreign contacts is unique. Many previous presidents had cultivated networks of diplomats, political leaders, military officers, intelligence officials and dissidents before entering the White House. But Trump’s overseas partners have been primarily businessmen looking to make a profit using his name.
THE NINE BUSINESS PARTNERS:
Dubai: Hussain Sajwani
Indonesia: Hary Tanoesoedibjo
Canada: Tony Tiah
Dominican Republic: Ricardo Hazoury
India: Mangal Prabhat Lodha
Turkey: Mehmet Ali Yalcindag
Russia: Aras and Emin Agalarov
Panama: Roger Khafif
Brazil: Paulo Figueiredo Filho
“Trump on Wednesday announced a plan to shift his assets into a trust managed by his sons and a longtime employee and turn over operation of his business to them. The Trump Organization said it will also avoid any new foreign deals during his presidency. But Trump will still own the business, and concerns remain that policies he pursues in office could affect the value of his family’s holdings.”
Phil Cullen, an educator in Australia who writes a blog called Treehorn Express, wrote the following about “Kleinism” in Australia.
http://treehornexpress.wordpress.com
KLEINISM IN AUSTRALIA. WILL IT GO AWAY?
A REVIEW
The summer holidays are over ‘down under’, and Australia will commence the new school year under the most peculiar circumstances. We’d like to start a new year of school learning with high levels of confidence in our pupils’ abilities to do as well as they can and with our own usual high level of teacher zest for teaching young people how to go about it. In the long run, we’d like to see Australia at the top of the pole for schooling excellence and our country amongst the leaders of commercial enterprise because of our business expertise in fundamentals and our ability to solve problems, innovate productively and enjoy challenges. Sadly, these fundamental characteristics of a successful schooling system have to be held on hold for some years; replaced by a testing regime invented by a New York curriculum incompetent, teacher-hater, ex-lawyer; once in charge of a school district there.
We aren’t allowed to start the school year down under with high hopes and positive attitudes. We are obliged to maintain the ridiculous; to start as early as possible with heavy preparation and intense practice for our annual standardized blanket testing program called NAPLAN, held each May. Its clone is called NCLB in the US. As educators at the chalk-face, we have no option, no choice, no say. Our system is controlled by testucators, disciples of Kleinism….a fear based system of schooling that was imported in 2008 by Julia Gillard, later our Prime Minister; then federal minister for education. It was one of the biggest mistakes a government representative ever made.
Following the 2007 federal elections, she was charged by her senior colleague Kevin Rudd, new to the job as PM, to reform the Australian education system almost immediately, because his fellow neo-cons were telling him that teachers were making a mess of it and that most Australian children couldn’t spell or calculate. He used serious threatening language in his instructions to the teaching force and to her, to find something better than what we had. The Business Council of Australia and the ‘Four Pillars of Australian Banking’, both organisations of neo-liberal persuasion, roundly approved, despite both politicians being known within their temples of wisdom, as ‘lefties’. It was a peculiar liaison….and became a weird time in our history. Dutifully, she booked her flight to find a place somewhere in the world that had a reputation. Actually, Australia had a reputation itself for being amongst the world’s best at the time, but anti-school fanatics were the preferred mouthpieces of the local press – especially the Murdoch press. No. She didn’t select Finland, South Korea or nearby New Zealand whose schooling achievements were beyond the ordinary. Her first stop was New York. As macabre as the scenario appears, on her first day, she visited Rupert Murdoch, a requirement of all Australian leaders when they travel overseas….. to get their riding instructions. He arranged for her to attend a cocktail party being organized by the Rockefeller Foundation where she was introduced to Joel Klein, a fellow lawyer who, as strange as it seemed to Australians, was in executive charge of a large school district in New York. His system had a reputation. Indeed. It had a really big reputation – not for learning or teaching or anything to do with the realities of schooling, but for threatening learners and teachers and principals and schools to do as they were told and, if they didn’t measure up to his requirements, they were out of a job or the school was closed. He sweet-talked our Julia into the effectiveness of this sort of approach to school leadership and,…..within minutes…..Australia had a new system.
She didn’t request a study of the effects of high stakes testing on schooling, nor check the credentials of the New York operators. She was conned, big time. Rupert and Joel Klein rubbed their hands with glee, because they were in the publishing, programming business, worth billions.
Not long later, Klein openly boasted to the world that his test-based scheme was well established in Australia. He was correct. Although it is based on fear and deceit and child abuse, Australia still has it. The big boys, of the kind that were at the cocktail party, will not allow our government to have any other kind. Their colleagues in the BCA and banking fraternity keep vigilant. That’s clear. Julia felt that she had found the ultimate touchstone of school control, and was able to persuade the Australian banking community to pay the cost of a visit by her ‘pin-up boy’, as she called co-lawyer Klein, to speak to them in their own fortresses in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Despite some ethical uncertainties which she later modified by capturing the ‘approval’ of the principals of all Australian schools with a very swift, cunning and deceitful maneuver. They had to carry the can for professional ethics, once they pronounced their approval of kleinist naplan. Indeed, they dutifully suspended their professional ethics and still do….adopting an attitude that disappoints proud principals of the present and past wondering how this happened to organisations that were once stalwart and proud of their protection of children’s rights. Federal and state education bodies, once citadels of wholesome schooling, succumbed to the use of fear and the abuse of mental health of children for whom they are supposed to be responsible…..and….as Aussies say: “She was in with Flynn”. No blood on her hands.
She established a special unit called the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority a sort of third level of government power, a sort of bundestag that now completely controls schooling; and she made sure that it was staffed with expert measurers whose experience in schooling and teaching and learning was severely limited. This incongruous mis-match between knowledge of testing and knowledge of learning between people running the show, has had profound consequences. After all, whoever controls the schooling system, controls the country’s future. The outcomes of constructing testing devices that contain inbuilt pupil dislike and distaste for particular school subjects and for school itself …and doing so in a most rigid manner….has had effects that run counter to the faith that she and ‘pin-up’ Klein had in improvement of PISA and NAPLAN raw scores. They flopped, failed, flunked all neo-con expectations as schools are doing in countries that are overdoing the fear base; and, it must be noted, run counter to the expectations of parents for schoolies to do the right thing. Despites their attitude to childhood, they’d like their kids to do well. Australia, after eight years of kleinism is heading downhill fast.
The last few years in the US and in Australia have clearly demonstrated that no schooling system can progress while its most outstanding features at the chalk-face, each capable of gynormous damage, include
Fear of failing
Deceit
Abuse of mental health.
all deliberately imposed by forces beyond the classroom. Office-based testucators of known kleinish measurement calibre have no idea of what happens in the classroom. They just mass-produce tests, send them to schools, gather the data, pat themselves on the back, blame teachers when things don’t go so well.
But, hold! Now, a breath of fresh air. A hopeful start has been made in the US education circles, our major mentors, in December 2016, by reducing the ponderous effects of centralised control. Releasing states from their fearful obligations is a small step, but it is a step in the right direction. Maybe, one day, control of the learning act will seep down through the numerous know-it-all hierarchies to the real learning centres in all countries where the teaching/learning experts reside, now being wrecked by the corrupting influences of kleinism – fear, deceit and abuse.
Down under, we’re notoriously slow to examine the effects of imports from up over. The big boys there and here do not like it, when educators reveal the truth….that the problem lies within the testing itself. We can’t expect any improvement to learning in our schools in 2017. Both places have a devil-may-care attitude towards children and their schooling; and basic timidity prevents us from sticking up for kids.
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As I have written many times, the scores on international tests have no predictive value about our economy. If they did, we would be a third world country by now since our scores have always been mediocre to very low on those tests. To learn more, read my chapter on international scores in “Reign of Error.”
Now, surprisingly, an article appears in Forbes challenging the PISA methodology and asserting that Asian nations get to choose their best students.
This false information has been used by the media and “reformers” to bash public schools and promote privatization.
Shameful. A hoax.
James Harvey is executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. See their excellent report “The Iceberg Effect,” which put international comparisons of schools into a broad context.
He commented today, in response to an article claiming that we spend more than other nations and get worse results:
The “we spend more than anyone less for poorer results” argument is specious. We’d really need a forensic examination of finances to get a better fix on this, but American schools carry in their budgets hugely expensive line items for benefits and health insurance, transportation, and athletics that other nations pay for in municipal budgets or through community groups (in the case of athletics). An apples to apples comparison would either eliminate those costs from American school budgets (to get a better fix on true educational expenditures) or calculate, for schools elsewhere, equivalent contributions from outside the school system.
The Brookings Institution was once known as a reliable source of thoughtful, informed analysis of important policy issues. In the past decade, it has turned its education commentary over to rightwing ideologues, who are driven by ideology and indifferent to facts that they ought to know.
On behalf of Brookings, Jonathan Rothwell, economist for Gallup, complains that the U.S. spends more on education, has seen no improvement in decades, and is seeing no gains in productivity. He ends by saying that low-income families can’t afford private tutors or home schooling, as though these were viable ways to improve education for the poorest children .
I can’t unpack all this in a short space, but I would like to show you in a few paragraphs why this is an uninformed article. To begin with, Rothwell cherrypicks the data on test scores. This makes his analysis misleading and wrong. Test scores are the highest they have ever been on the only longitudinal measure we have: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). He selectively quotes one version of the NAEP, while ignoring the other.
There are actually two versions of NAEP. One is called the “Long Term Trend” (LTT) data, the other is main NAEP. The LTT is offered every four years to samples of students at age 9, 13, and 17. Main NAEP is given every other year to students in grades 4 and 8.
LTT contains questions that are unchanged since the early 1970s and have no relation to what students are taught today. Occasionally, questions are deleted because their content is obsolete (e.g., a question that refers to S&H Green Stamps). The data for 17-year-olds is especially dubious because this group has no incentive to take the NAEP tests seriously.
The National Assessment Governing Board is aware of the problem of low motivation among 17-year-olds. When I served on the board, from 1994-2001, we devoted a large part of one of our quarterly meetings to this problem. There was talk of incentives, pizza parties, cash, but it was not resolved. The bottom line, however, is that any data about the test scores of 17-year-olds must acknowledge that this group doesn’t care about the test because they know it doesn’t matter. What the board learned when we discussed it is that some 17-year-olds doodle on the answer sheet or answer every question by checking the same letter. They don’t care.
I recommend that Rothwell read Chapter 5 of my book Reign of Error. He would learn there that the scores on the main NAEP reached their highest point ever in 2013 (they were flat for the first time in many years in 2015). This was true for every group of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. He would also learn that the graduation rate was the highest ever for these groups, and the dropout rate was the lowest ever. He would see a different reading of the LTT data, showing a dramatic rise in test scores in math for black students and Hispanic students in all three age groups, and for white students at ages 9 and 13, from 1973 to 2008. Even white 17-year-olds saw a gain, but it was small.
If I may quote my analysis, based on a review of both versions of NAEP, “NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades: slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics.”
I would also urge Rothwell to read chapter 7, which reviews the international test scores. It shows that we were never #1 in test scores on international tests. In fact, when the first international tests were given in 1964, we were last among 12 nations. Yet over the half century that followed, we outpaced all the other 11 nations by every measure.
I know that Brookings uses Google or some other search engine to find anything that quotes its articles and research. I hope that they find this article and bring it to the attention of Jonathan Rothwell.
More important, I can only hope and wish that Brookings would make the effort to employ genuine education researchers to write and declaim about this important subject. Over the past decade, its education spokesman was Grover Whitehurst, George W. Bush’s former research director, who turned Brookings into a cheerleading think tank for school choice. This is unworthy of a once-great and once-trusted institution.
This is a project that should interest all readers of the blog as well as state and local school boards and elected officials at every level. It includes a book that reviews education issues around the globe and resources that you may access by clicking the link. The bottom line of a vast amount of research is that privatization is a failed policy, not an innovation. The most effective way to invest public dollars is in improving public schools.
Stanford Graduate School of Education Research Center Introduces Cross-National Study Central to Debates about Future of the U.S. Education System
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Ralph Rogers
Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
650.725.8600
ralphr@stanford.edu
Stanford, CA – December 13, 2016 – In the midst of the ongoing debate and a potential shift in the U.S. approach to education, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) is pleased to introduce new research-based evidence and analysis that supports investment in public schools as a better alternative than the privatization of education.
“This book shows how public investment in education outperforms privatization across three continents, addressing this critical question as President-elect Trump’s appointee, Betsy DeVos, considers shifting U.S. education to a voucher scheme,” said Frank Adamson, PhD, the primary editor, chapter author, and Senior Policy and Research Analyst at SCOPE. “This book offers reasoned evidence to policymakers, communities, and families about how investing in public schools produces better and more equitable outcomes than voucher programs.”
SCOPE’s work addresses the question of how results from public investment approaches compare with those from market-based reforms and provides a timely explanation of alternatives based on real evidence derived from policy analysis and actual outcomes in six different countries. In this project, SCOPE has designed and implemented a set of accessible information resources designed to inform the different constituencies involved in this important debate.
The book, Global Education Reform: How Privatization and Public Investment Influence Education Outcomes, with a set of supporting infographics, videos, and research briefs, provides hard evidence supporting investment in pubic schools. Researchers thoroughly investigated the results of experiments with education in Chile, Sweden, and the U.S. and compared their educational outcomes with those of nearby countries with similar economic and social conditions: Cuba, Finland, and Canada (Ontario). At the national levels in Sweden, the U.S., and Chile, market, charter, or voucher systems are associated with greater disparities and lower student outcomes on international tests.
SCOPE’s project combined in-depth analysis of the different ends of an ideological spectrum – from market-based experiments to strong state investments in public education. Written by education researchers, including Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, Martin Carnoy, and others, the authors present long-term policy analyses based on primary and secondary research on the implementation and results of these different approaches.
To best support an open debate on the issue of school reform, SCOPE has created the following set of free information resources:
Privatization or Public Investment in Education is a free SCOPE research and policy brief summarizing the findings in the book.
Six Countries. Two Educational Strategies. One Consistent Conclusion is a free infographic presenting an accessible and concise summary of the differences in approaches and outcomes – privatization versus public investment in education.
Our Kids, Our Future: Privatization and Public Investment in Education, a 3-minute video providing an overview of the differences between experimental privatization models and public investment in equitable education systems.
How Privatization and Public Investment Influence Education: A Look at the Research, a more detailed 12-minute video explaining the differences between experimental privatization models and public investment in equitable education systems.
Educational Inequities in the New Orleans Charter School System is a free infographic from SCOPE and the Schott Foundation that explains the impact on students and schools of New Orleans becoming a predominantly charter district after Hurricane Katrina.
The Editors
Frank Adamson, PhD, is a Senior Policy and Research Analyst at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.
Björn Åstrand, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer and Dean at Karlstad University in Sweden.
Linda Darling-Hammond, EdD, is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, the author of over 300 publications, and a former president of the American Educational Research Association.
About SCOPE
The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) fosters research, policy, and practice to advance high-quality, equitable education systems in the United States and internationally.
These resources can be downloaded or viewed at the SCOPE Global Education Reform web page.
Simon Greenhalgh is assistant principal at the Seoul Foreign School. Most of his professional career has been spent in education in Asia.
In this article, he warns about the hidden costs to students in East Asia of an educational regime that values high test scores above all else that a student might do or accomplish.
The recent TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey) and PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) results have been met with the usual fanfare or damp squib depending on where you reside. The idea to compare countries’ educational systems via standardized tests always seems to be an ill-considered one, and yet every year such rankings keep coming. There are people eagerly awaiting the results to see whether a country did well enough to provide cause for celebration or poorly enough to allow for an onslaught of criticism.
TIMSS and PISA have many critics, not least from leading academics like Yong Zhao at the University of Kansas; but despite their criticisms they are regularly held up by governments to champion or condemn educational practices in their own country – or other countries. Among other things this has led to an unhealthy obsession among educators from all over the world with Finland, whose results, system, and general educational indefatigability has become the hopeful example of a Western nation that can achieve good scores in the face of competition from Asia, without the need for mirroring long hours and encouraging high pressure competition.
This year, in a pattern that is becoming monotonous to follow, the Asia-Pacific has all the real winners, with the TIMSS results showing that Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Japan significantly outperformed all other countries. These locations have used their success in these global standardized tests to boast of their educational systems, schools, teachers, and students. On the back of this success, we have witnessed a gentle wooing of the West, where, for example, the U.K. now widely utilizes a Singapore mathematics scheme. Alongside these academic initiatives, we have also been subjected to the unusual spectacle of a number of bizarre and disingenuous exchanges, mostly in the name of entertainment. We have seen, on the BBC no less, British children sent to Chinese schools (it was too hard, the Brits were too rude, and they gave up) and Chinese teachers sent to U.K. schools (the children were too rude and wouldn’t listen, so the teachers gave up).
In a recent follow-up, the BBC covered three Welsh children in South Korean schools and found that the truth is far more complicated than anything a standardized test can show. South Korean children are studying 14 to 16 hours a day to compete, ultimately, in a make-or-break university entrance exam. Welsh children don’t need to do this and they have more free time, which, depending on who you ask, may be a good or a bad thing.
Welsh PISA scores are lower than South Korean ones, but comparing the two is like comparing leeks and kimchi. The Asia-Pacific countries near the top of PISA rankings all feature tough final university entrance exams in highly competitive social environments, whereas Western countries left this behind a long time ago. A key moment in the story of the Welsh children in South Korea came when one of the South Korean children talks about suicides from her peer group due to the pressure coming from family and teachers over the college entrance exam results. How many suicides are worth it so that a country can attain the highest PISA scores?
The BBC, keen to make us laugh at hapless Welsh teenagers trying to mop the floors in a Seoul high school, also makes the more morbid point that South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the industrialized world, plausibly linked to the competitive nature of the society. However, those familiar with the countries that topped the TIMSS and PISA rankings will not be surprised by the suicides, the competitiveness, nor the 14-16 hour days of the students. This is the norm in these countries. This is not the norm in Wales and other Western countries for a reason: a different culture exists….
The real story is that whilst the wealthier Asian countries dominate these tables, the students are paying a price to do so. The long-term implications at an individual level aren’t really known. The stories of children studying until midnight every night and putting in a double shift all weekend are forgotten in the league tables. What does this mean? That the educational systems are not as good or simply that they have a different focus? At the end of the day, comparing apples and orange will never produce a meaningful or fair comparison. Those that want oranges will never agree that apples are better and the apple lovers shouldn’t mimicking orange growers in the hope of getting better apples.
Pasi Sahlberg is the great Finnish educator whose book Finnish Lessons gave us a vision of a nation that succeeds without high-stakes testing, without standardized testing, and without charter schools or vouchers. He wrote of highly educated teachers who have wide scope and autonomy in their classrooms and who collaborate with their colleagues to do what is best for their children. He wrote of a national school system that values the arts, physical activity, and play. And, lo and behold, the OECD calls it the best school system in the world!
So entranced was I but what I read about Finland that I visited there a few years ago and had Pasi as my guide. The schools and classes were everything he claimed and more.
Pasi, like many other education experts, is aghast at the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) that has swept the world. The agency that has spread GERM far and wide is international testing, the great horse race that only a few can win. Since most are losers, the frenzy for more testing becomes even stronger.
Pasi suggests a different approach. Instead of Big Data, produced by mass standardized testing, why not search for small data?
Here is Pasi’s thumbnail sketch of the contrast between Big Data and small data:
Big data is a commonly used term in daily discourse that often comes with a label that big data will transform the way we think, work, and live. For many of us, this is an optimistic promise, while for others it creates anxiety and concern regarding control and privacy. In general terms, big data means data of very large size to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant practical challenges.
The main difference between big and small data in education is, of course, the size of data and how these data are collected and used. Big data in education always requires dedicated devices for collecting massive amounts of noisy data, such as specific hardware and software to capture students’ facial expressions, movements in class, eye movements while on task, body postures, classroom talk, and interaction with others. Small data relies primarily on observations and recordings made by human beings. In education, these include students’ self-assessments, teachers’ participatory notes on learning process, external school surveys, and observations made of teaching and learning situations.
To watch and listen to Pasi, introduced by Howard Gardner, here is the lecture he gave at Wellesley College in October.
Diane Ravitch's blog 