Archives for category: International
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

What We Can Learn from Japan

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2012 //
5

The New York Times had a front-page story about a generational divide in Japan.

The article begins, “As Japan has ceded dominance in industry after industry that once lifted this nation to economic greatness, there has been plenty of blame to go around. A nuclear disaster that raised energy costs. A lack of entrepreneurship. China’s relatively cheap work force.”

The article says that the government’s decision to have a strong yen favors the elderly and protects their pensions, but makes Japanese products prohibitively expensive, which is “hollowing out the country’s industrial base” and “exacerbating the nation’s two-decade-long economic stagnation.”

As I read the article, I thought about how American policymakers look enviously at Japan’s high test scores on international assessments.

And it struck me that the economic problems in Japan are not caused by the schools. And the high test scores are not a source of entrepreneurship, nor have they guaranteed a strong economy.

All this deserves consideration. In our nation, our greatest strength is creativity, innovation, risk-taking, and imagination.

Now our policymakers want us to use Japan and other nations with high test scores as a model, claiming that this will lead us to even greater economic growth in the future.

Japan’s dilemma today disproves the theory on which contemporary corporate-driven school reform is based.

Let us learn from their example.

Economic decisions drive the economy. Creative people build a better economy. Higher test scores do not produce a better economy, nor do they nurture the creative genius needed for future innovation.

Will there be an “aha!” moment when leaders of the corporate reform movement realize they are on the wrong track?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Economy, Education Reform, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Testing

A Debate about U.K. Education

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2012 //
3

A reader in the U.K. Offers a dissent to a previous post:

I think that the current British Government are seeking to emulate the worst travesties present in the US system. This is largely because emulating the best practice in more successful education systems will cost money and as such is the last thing they are likely to do.

I disagree the free schools and academies freedom from following the National Curriculum is not a move towards standardised testing. What it does is give them licence to not teach subjects that they view as peripheral (arts, Design and Technology, Food Technology, RE etc) which is likely to lead on more focus on the subjects that are EBAC subjects. This is likely to result in more standardisation of the curriculum and a significant narrowing of the curriculum. it also allows them to opt out of certain subjects that require expensive specialist rooms or equipment.

The governments decision that Qualified Teacher Status is not needed is a nonsense that can only harm children. It is an attack on the teaching profession and a transparent attempt to worsen teachers pay and conditions and make our ineffectual unions even less effective. It also proves that all their rhetoric about raising the status of the profession was nothing more than a lie.

Their making the process for sacking poor teachers part of the performance management process is ill conceived and makes a poor, meaningless process significantly worse. Their constant teacher bashing displays a dislike of and contempt for the profession that fits in with their decision to allow academies and free schools to employ unqualified teachers.

Sadly there are a large number of teachers that appear to be enthusiastic about the worst of these changes and are determined to be the turkeys that vote for Christmas.

There are those that support performance related pay and local pay bargaining because they for some reason believe these will result in them getting paid more.

There are those career-oriented types that vocally support any nonsense that is introduced without first engaging their brains and looking at it. So desperate are they to appear on message they will endorse any old nonsense and try to make us all embrace it too. When I think of the amount of money that has gone from our schools into the hands of private companies for all kinds of nonsense I despair.

My main concern is that government policy flies in the face of their stated aims.

They say they want to give schools more autonomy:
1) They have dramatically increased the number of schools that are only answerable to the secretary of state for education (and nominally the market).
2) The league tables essentially determine which subjects schools teach and which they focus on most
3) OFSTED (the inspection regime) have a staggeringly prescriptive definition of good teaching which is borderline facistic in its demands that certain things MUST be included in lessons if teaching is to be considered satisfactory or better. Many of these things have little or no evidence to support their inclusion in my opinion.

They say they want to raise the status of the profession:
1) They have removed that requirement that teachers have a teaching qualification
2) They constantly focus on coasting and bad teaching and incessantly denigrate the profession.
3) The constantly misuse statistics and mangle the english language to create the impression that the results are worse than they are.

They say they want to support teachers with behaviour issues:
1) The policy of penalising schools for excluding pupils remains and has in fact been worsened.
2) They constantly claim to have given us new rights. Mostly these are things we didn’t want, need or are not new. (Searching pupils bags, confiscating phones, no notice detentions etc)
3) They have not actually done anything that is likely to make behaviour in schools any better and their constant attacks on the profession are only going to make teachers less respected.

I think that all of these moves are a prelude to privatisation and the creation of a two tier system. The creation of academies once past a certain number of academies will make national pay bargaining impossible. The removal of national pay bargaining is an essential step for the right in the march towards privatisation.
Categories Education Reform, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Creationism in UK Schools, Too: UPDATE

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2012 //
8

I got a tweet from Britain saying that Michael Gove, the minister of education, has approved three new schools for state funding that teach creationism as science.

We know that Gove has been consulting with Joel Klein and the leaders of KIPP and has expressed great interest in charter schools. This seems to be the next step.

It does make you wonder if the world is spinning backwards. When will we see a replay of the Scopes trial?

I was re-reading Albert Shanker’s columns from the late 1990s this morning, and he warned that the greatest danger of the charter school idea was that each would “do its own thing,” have its own curriculum, and even its own version of truth. He was right.

UPDATE: Here is another view of creationism in UK schools: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/18/creationist-free-schools-hysteria?intcmp=239

We must remember that US debates are different from those played out in other nations.

Categories Alternate Route To Certification, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Education Reform, International, Vouchers

A Different Perspective from England

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2012 //
5

A reader in the U.K. points out that education issues in the U.S. and U.K. have evolved differently. I am not sure that other readers in the U.K. would agree. There, as here, we have debates about how to educate, what to teach, and who should be in charge. When I visited London a few years ago, I toured “city academies,” which are schools that the government “gives” to wealthy businessmen who are willing to put up about $2 million dollars to build a facility; those I saw were oriented toward vo-tech studies. That seemed to me a clear movement towards privatization.

I don’t know which country is leading and which is following, or whether neither is the right term.

The battles in the U.S. over curriculum content and pedagogy have taken a back seat to the battles over the future of public education and the survival of teaching as a profession.

I hope that other readers in the U.K. weigh in.

As a teacher in England, I follow your blog (and read your books) with a fascination about both the similarities and differences between our education systems. Ideologically the US and England often go through similar fads and exchange thinkers all the time. The current UK government has flirted (I think that’s the best word) with the ideas of the American school reform movement. Most recently Michelle Rhee was over here promoting her own legend and being praised by ministers. However, there are differences as well as similarities.Schools are governed at different levels in our countries. In England (I am glossing over what happens in the other nations of the UK) education is controlled by the UK government, with administrative powers delegated to Local Education Authorities (now just “Local Authorities”) which are the locally elected councils covering cities, London boroughs and counties. These never had as much power as American states (teachers pay and conditions and qualifications were decided nationally) and in many ways may be more comparable to school boards in the US, but were often seen as powerful and unaccountable particularly prior to the 1980s due to the lack of autonomy in individual schools. Power has shifted significantly over the years, with the 1980s seeing an increase in both centralisation (with the setting of the national curriculum and new tests and exams and creation of OFSTED, the national schools inspectorate) and decentralised to schools (with schools being given more responsibility to run their own finances).A lot of political debate since then has centred over where power should lie. The underlying agenda of that article is about the power of local authorities and also the perception of central government (particularly under the Tories) as supporting traditional education and local government as supporting progressive education. The New Statesman magazine (along with the Guardian newspaper) is the voice of the middle-class left in England and for that reason will assume both that local authorities are good and that traditional education is bad. None of this necessarily maps onto reality, nor onto comparisons with the US. The two new(er) types of school that the article opposes are Academies, which are former local authority schools given more power and autonomy, and Free Schools which are new schools set up by parents. While comparisons can be made with Charter Schools and the US situation the following differences are probably key:

1) The English National Curriculum and testing system are already in place. Far from being part of a movement for standardised tests, Academies and free schools are given more freedom from the National Curriculum.

2) The closing of “bad schools” is not yet on the agenda. This may be because demographics mean new schools can be introduced to cope with a rising school population without closing old schools. It might also reflect the fact that there are not, as yet, very many free schools.

3) The traditional vs. progressive faultlines are more clearly on display in the debate here. That is why the charter schools mentioned are KIPP (who are quite traditional on discipline) rather than, say, the online charter schools you have been describing recently. Although some of the free schools can easily be described as “progressive” this is not something the media says much about, and the last thing the New Statesman would admit to.

4) Despite a lot of controversy over exam standards here, our exams have not become mutiple-choice, short answer messes like the American ones and only one of our three main exam boards is private. The government has shown a preference for essay questions, and more challenging exams.

5) Our teaching unions are terrible. They oppose everything but stop nothing and are barely able to work together. The government finds them a useful scapegoat but they really count for nothing.

6) The government has held off on privatisation. A lot of the debate is not about what they are doing to involve private companies, but what they might do in the future.

There is definitely the potential for a US style reform movement lobbying for privatisation and union-busting. There is Teach First, an English equivalent of Teach For America, a lot of similar rhetoric and moves towards unqualified teachers. There are academy sponsors who resemble charter schools chains. But on the whole we are not there yet. I recognise more of the English debate in your older books like “Left Back”, than in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”. Curriculum content is more controversial than anything else. To give examples, the most heated debates in English education recently have been over whether to teach phonics and whether exams have got easier and what to do about that.
Categories International, Privatization

What Michelle Rhee Told the British Education Minister

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2012 //
32

You will not be surprised to learn that when Michelle Rhee went to England recently, she spoke of her great success in improving the D.C. public schools.

Her secret? Finding the best teachers and firing the worst teachers.

The only problem with her narrative is that it is not true.

Her IMPACT system was imposed in 2009. Since then, the D.C. public schools have made little progress on state or national exams.

The D.C. public schools continue to have the largest black-white achievement gap of any district assessed by the federal NAEP.

It is not clear whether her method identified the best teachers or the worst teachers, but it is clear that she created a level of turnover among teachers and principals that is staggering.

A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post said:

DCPS has one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the nation. Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania estimates that, “nationally, on average, about 20 percent of new public school teachers leave their district to teach in another district or leave teaching altogether within one year, one-third do so within two years, and 55 percent do so within five years.” In DCPS, by contrast, 55 percent of new teachers leave in their first two years, according to an analysis by DCPS budget watchdog Mary Levy. Eighty percent are gone by the end of their sixth year. That means that most of the teachers brought in during the past five years are no longer there. By comparison, in Montgomery County just 11.5 percent leave by the end of their second year, and 30 percent by the end of year five. DCPS has become a teacher turnover factory. It has a hard time keeping teachers who are committed to their school and the community it serves.

Most of the principals that Rhee personally hired have left their schools.

If the British follow her suggestions, they too can have churn without improvement.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, International, Teacher Evaluations

The Americanizing of English Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2012 //
8

This writer worries that American ideas are being imported to English schools.

The curious episode at the center of the article is the description of a conference about creating charter schools in the U.K., encouraged by the Conservative government’s Minister of Education Michael Gove:

To see where News Corp’s interest might lie, we can look to a conference organised by Gove’s department in January 2011. Gove had invited Gerald [Joel] Klein, who was then chancellor of the New York City Board of Education, to speak to people “interested in setting up free schools”. (So called “free schools” are a version of academies which both front benches favour.) Four days after Gove extended the invitation, Klein was appointed to the Board of News International. By the time Klein attended the conference he was a News Corp employee, although Gove says he did not know about the appointment.

Also attending the conference, and present at a dinner hosted by the Department for Education, were Mike Feinberg, co-Founder of KIPP Houston, Paul Castro, Head of High Schools KIPP Houston, Aaron Brenner, Head of Primary schools KIPP Houston, Jo Baker, Director of Washington Public Charter School Board, and Monique Miller, Performance Manager of Washington DC Public Charter School Board.

This goes a way towards explaining Murdoch’s enthusiastic support for charter schools, and his ceaseless disparagement of public schools, in his many media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Yong Zhao on Entrepreneurship

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
4

Yong Zhao is the brilliant scholar whose ideas challenge the orthodoxy of testing, accountability, ranking, metrics, data-based decision making, and competition.

He knows the secret of Chinese test scores, and he says that if we follow their lead, we will destroy entrepreneurial thinking.

Since I discovered his work, I have been dazzled by his fresh approach to educational issues.

He recently published a book called World Class Learners, explaining why our current education policies are doomed not only to fail but to injure our country.

Read his interview in Education Week by Catharine Gewertz and his accompanying article.

Zhao argues that high test scores may actually hamper creativity. The nations with the highest test scores, he says, do not produce high levels of entrepreneurial activity. American policymakers were shocked and awed when Shanghai took the top place in the latest PISA ranking, and both President Obama and Secretary Duncan spoke about “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”  But Zhao says we should not be impressed because the Chinese have mastered the art of test-taking, but not the mindset that promotes creativity.

He writes:

China’s Shanghai took the No. 1 rank in all three areas of the 2009 PISARequires Adobe Acrobat Reader, but the scores do not have any bearing on China’s creativity capacity. In 2008, China had only 473 patent filings with or granted by leading patent offices outside China. The United States had 14,399 patent filings in the same year. Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang put those figures in a broader context, writing in The Wall Street Journal last year: “Starkly put, in 2010 China accounted for 20 percent of the world’s population and 9 percent of the world’s GDP, 12 percent of the world’s [research and development] expenditure, but only 1 percent of the patent filings with or patents granted by any of the leading patent offices outside China.” And 50 percent of the China-origin patents, the writers added, were granted to subsidiaries of foreign multinationals.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, International, Testing

Watch Out for GERM! We Are Infected!

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
6

Pasi Sahlberg is the brilliant Finnish educator who is trying to roll back the global tide of destructive education policies.

Sahlberg wrote an important book, Finnish Lessons, explaining how the Finnish education system was transformed in the past thirty years and became one of the top-performing nations in the world on PISA tests of reading, mathematics, and science.

Recently Sahlberg wrote an article summarizing his views on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post.

Sahlberg warns that there is now an infection sweeping the world which he calls GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).

GERM is characterized by heavy emphasis on market-style reforms: testing, data, measurement of students and teachers, ranking, choice, competition.

Finland has resisted the GERM virus. Its students do not take standardized tests; they take tests made by their teachers, whose professional judgment and autonomy are deeply respected by all.

Finland has made sure that all its children are well cared for; less than 5 percent live in poverty. Our child poverty rate is close to 25 percent.

Finland became a high performer, he writes, not by seeking excellence but by seeking equity, by pursuing the goal of good schools for all.

All Finnish teachers must be well-educated in their subjects and in pedagogy, acquired at an academic university; all teachers must have a masters degree before they can teach. Interesting to note that, by contrast, a growing number of teachers in the U.S. are getting their credentials and degrees from online “universities.” Many states are lowering their requirements for teachers.

Here are the symptoms of GERM, described by Sahlberg:

The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

We have a very bad case of GERM in the U.S. We are even exporting it to other countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Our educational products and ideas should be quarantined at the border. We need medication to stop the virus within our own borders. Let’s recognize the “reform” movement for what it is: a bold effort to privatize public education and open it up for private investment. This is no “civil rights movement.” This is an attack on a basic democratic institution.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Privatization, US Education

A Report from The Netherlands

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
5

We have a tendency in the U.S. to think only of ourselves or to look enviously abroad to wonder what some other nation is doing that we should copy (another way of thinking only of ourselves).

Part of this is national narcissism but also incredible naiveté. As Yong Zhao has written in his books and blogs and articles, we look enviously at the test-driven schools of China at the same time that the Chinese wonder how to be more creative and entrepreneurial like us.

We can always learn from the experiences of other nations. One reader asked the question, what will happen when the “reformers” have passed so many punitive laws that no one will want to teach? A reader in The Netherlands responded:

When schools ‘suffer’ from a shortage, they will hire unqualified ‘teachers’ to fill up the vacancies. They will keep silent about that, and since the government is their best accomplice, they will keep silent about it too.In The Netherlands there is a big shortage of qualified teachers, for about 15 years. Even though we have lowered the qualification norms (you can be a teacher here if you can’t divide 4 by 0,5, or if you believe that the Second World War was some fight between Germans and Americans), still one out of every three secondary teachers is unqualified. Parents don’t know this, pupils don’t know this. It is a fact admitted by the Education Department, but they don’t do anything about it. Their main concern is that ‘someone’ is teaching, whoever it is, and whatever their capability. In short, teaching as a job is sold out by employers and the government.Some context: public education in The Netherlands consist of 99% charter schools and 1% private schools. All schools get an equal sum of money for every student. School boards receive a lumpsum every year; a big bag of money that they can spend any way they like, as long as students make ‘sufficient’ progress. ‘Sufficient’ is not an absolute norm but a relative one: school boards must make sure that their schools don’t get in the bottom 10%. When a school gets in the bottom 10%, directors usually leave the school and get better paid positions at other schools. No one is accountable exept for the ‘interim manager’ who receives a high fee for getting the school on track and in the ‘upper’ 90%.The economic prosperity 1990-2008 has led to a huge expansion of management, consultancy and bureaucracy in education. In contrast, the economic adversity 2008-present has led to increasing class size, canceling of educational programs for deprived children, more teaching hours per teacher, and teachers’ wages being frozen for four years.It seems like employers don’t care that there is a huge shortage of qualified employees. I can’t think of any other profession with such a phenomenon. Just imagine a shortage of medical doctors, lawyers, policemen etc. – and employers silently hiring tens of thousands unqualified people to fill up the vacancies!
Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, International, Teachers and Teaching

Pearson Wields Undue Power in Britain Too

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
6

A recent article in the Guardian explores how the publishing giant Pearson commands the education world in Britain.

Pearson not only sells textbooks and testing, but also owns Britain’s biggest national examination system, which is operated for profit.

But that’s not all.

Pearson is now promoting itself as a policy studies outfit and think tank, studying the problems of British education and offering solutions. In whose interest, one wonders.

And of course it is developing a model school with a computer-based curriculum called the “Always Learning Gateway,” covering 11 subject areas. It is being tried out for free but will eventually be offered for profit.

Pearson is preparing a report on which the English examination system is promoting high standards and positioning Britain to be a global leader.

“Alasdair Smith, national secretary of the Anti Academies Alliance, which is critical of corporate influence in education, says: “This stuff frightens the life out of me. My concern is that business dictates the nature of education, and especially the aims of education, when it should be one voice among others.”

“Ball says private influence does not stop at Pearson. He mentions McKinsey, the management consultant that has published two widely cited international reports on successful education systems, as evidence of companies’ incursion into policymaking. Sir Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former education standards guru, was an author of both McKinsey reports. He now works for Pearson.

“Last month, it was reported that ministers want to “outsource” some policymaking to companies, consultants and thinktanks in a bid to scale down the civil service.”

The British government, it seems, is outsourcing education policy to the nation’s largest vendor of education products and services.

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, International, On-Line Education, Pearson, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »