UK government to drop high-stakes testing?

The new Conservative Education Secretary in the UK, Michael Gove, is to appoint a commission to re-evaluate the use of high-stakes testing in elementary schools in that country, called the Sats, as well as the "league tables" or report cards based on their results:

The education secretary, Michael Gove, wants teachers to be more autonomous – or "free to set their own direction". The Department for Education said "too many schools believe they must drill children for tests and spend too much time on test preparation at the expense of productive teaching and learning".

Yet the same so-called "expert" who helped devise this system in the UK under the Labor government went on to develop our accountability system here in NYC and is still pushing the adoption of these systems nationwide -- Sir Michael Barber, now at McKinsey.

The above article also omits mentioning that one of the primary reasons driving this re-evaluation was provoked by the fact that one fourth of UK teachers had their students boycott the tests this year. Steve Koss has written extensively on this blog about the widespread dissatisfaction with the high-stakes accountability system among British teachers and parents alike and its negative impact. See this, for example:Want to See the Future of NCLB? Look to the UK.

Is it too much to hope that the re-evaluation in the UK triggers a similar re-examination of this issue here in the US, where the Obama administration seems wedded to this version of education reform?

The hiring crisis in our schools: what brought us to this point?

The Times performs a double whammy today by running an editorial in favor of the Race to the Top proposals; featuring a direct attack on the teachers unions for opposing tying the evaluation of teachers to standardized test scores: Editorial: Accountability in Public Schools.

The paper also features an article, Amid Hiring Freeze, Principals Leave Jobs Empty , about how principals are refusing to hire experienced teachers on ATR (absent teacher reserve) – of which there are nearly 2,000 -- despite 1800 teaching openings. Instead, principals are hiring new teachers as “permanent” substitutes, waiting out the hiring freeze that Klein announced a few months ago. What the article fails to discuss is how this is a crisis entirely of Joel Klein’s making, and represents one of the biggest management blunders of his career.

Klein has continued to pay for Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows program to recruit new candidates long after it was clear that a huge pool of experienced teachers was growing, who are being paid full salary and yet have no regular classroom assignments-- through no fault of their own. In the article, no mention is made of what led to this crisis: how Klein changed the school funding system, under the advice of Sir Michael Barber, a management consultant from McKinsey and Co., whose advice to the Blair administration to impose a similar scheme in the UK had earlier caused massive teacher layoffs and what was described as the most serious educational crisis in that nation’s post-war history.

NYC’s so-called “fair funding” system was specifically designed so that for the first time, principals would have to pay for their own staffing of teachers and for their full salaries, to give them an incentive to hire new, cheaper teachers rather than experienced ones. Many critics warned that given budget cuts to come, the refusal of DOE to fund teachers centrally -- as opposed to say, school achievement facilitators, data inquiry teams or parent coordinators, all of which is directly financed by the administration -- would lead to principals being forced to choose between larger classes and less experienced teachers, and this is exactly what has occurred.

See, for example, our exchange with Robert Gordon, who designed the funding system for Klein, in March 2007, and earlier comments from Noreen Connell and Gordon in a Times article from Jan. 27, 2007, Seeking Equity, School Chief Outlines a Financing Plan:

The expert, Noreen Connell, who leads the Educational Priorities Panel, a nonprofit group, said that the changes would initially make the budget system more complicated, and would be harmful long term by making it overly expensive for schools to retain veteran teachers.
While the new plan would provide money to schools and require principals to cover payroll and other expenses, Ms. Connell said in an interview that she preferred a system that seeks to calculate a school's staffing needs and then provides the dollars to meet them.

''The funding proposals,'' she wrote in commentary posted on the group's Web site, ''have the potential to do lasting damage for decades to come.'' In the interview, Ms. Connell also said the chancellor did not have time to carry out the plan before the end of Mr. Bloomberg's term in 2009. ''They won't be around to suffer the consequences,'' she said.

Robert Gordon, the Education Department's managing director for resource allocation, who is designing the new system, said it would maximize the amount of control that principals have over their budgets, allowing them ''to retain their most experienced teachers if that is what they want to do.''

Why should the school funding system be designed to force principals to choose between hiring or retaining experienced teachers and smaller classes – when these are among the few factors that have been proven to result in better schools ? Do public schools in the suburbs have to choose between these goals, or the private schools to which Klein and Bloomberg sent their kids?

The article also omits its own reporting of the fact that there has been a decrease of 1600 in the number of classroom teachers under this administration, with a concurrent rise in ten thousand out of classroom positions, including two thousand more school secretaries.

The only thing incorrect about Noreen Connell’s predictions in 2007 is that we may be saddled with Chancellor Klein for years to come, because of Bloomberg’s overturning of term limits. Robert Gordon has now moved onto the Obama administration, where he is probably designing similarly destructive funding schemes on a national scale. Sadly, the Educational Priorities Panel, one of the few objective monitors of DOE’s spending practices, is gone, apparently because the NYC foundation world didn’t see the point in supporting the sort of expert analysis that EPP was able to provide.

The corporate mindset at Tweed: a tale of two Sirs

See this recent BBC article, about a speech by Sir Richard Pring, who to terrific applause, lambasted the corporate mentality that has come to infect the field of education in Great Britain. Pring was presenting the latest report from Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, (in pdf) that examines how the aims and values of education have come to be "dominated by the language of management." Here is an excerpt:

When education is conceived in terms of inputs leading to measurable outputs, or in terms of targets which constitute the performance indicators against which learning can be audited, or when teachers are seen as curriculum deliverers, or when cuts in resources are referred to as efficiency gains, then education is being conceived very differently from how it was seen only a few decades ago. …. Change the metaphor, and you change the understanding of the aims of education and the values which such aims embody.

A similar perspective has invaded the management of NYC schools during this administration. Joel Klein tries to justify inflated salaries (and a huge PR staff) by saying that they are "running a $20 billion company" and could earn three times as much in the private sector. (Then send them back!) See also all the chief officers of this and that who inhabit the elegant halls of Tweed --a chief accountability officer (earning $196,000), a chief knowledge officer ($177,000), a chief talent officer ($172,000) and a chief portfolio officer ($162,000).

Many parents noted critically in our independent parent survey the way in which the administration viewed our schools as businesses rather than educational enterprises; in the words of one, children are "being treated like they are a business venture instead of like human beings." Now that we have a deficit, management is not surprisingly pushing most of the cuts to the lower level of the organization (in this case, our underfunded schools) rather than making the savings at headquarters, where there is alot more fat to cut.

The resemblance between the corporate mentality in the UK educational establishment and at Tweed is not coincidental; both have been heavily influenced by Sir Michael Barber, former efficiency expert who advised Tony Blair on education and subsequently became an adviser to Joel Klein.

The NY Times carried a puff piece about Barber in August; Sir Richard Pring wrote a famous but still unpublished letter to the Times in response, disputing the article's claim that Barber's advice had led to real improvements in the UK . Here is an excerpt from Pring's letter:

In the last few years, England has created the most tested school population in the world from age 5 to age 18. School improvement lies in scoring even higher in the national tests, irrespective of whether these tests bear any relation to the quality of learning, and schools which see the poverty of the testing regime suffer the penalty of going down the very public league tables. The results of the 'high stakes testing' are that teachers increasingly teach to the test, young people are disillusioned and disengaged, higher education complains that those matriculating (despite higher scores) are ill prepared for university studies, and intelligent and creative teachers incleasingly feel dissatisfied with their professional work. ...'What counts as an educated 19 year old in this day and age?'. The answers which we are receiving from teachers, universities, employers and the community would point to a system very different from the one which Sir Michael nurtured and is now selling to the United States.

What’s funny (or sad) is that few impartial observers in the UK think that the Blair/Barber reforms have been successful, just as there are extremely few in NYC who currently believe in the Bloomberg/Klein initiatives -- so much so that a recent article in Education Next was forced to quote a hedge fund manager who supports charter schools in their defense.

See this semi-amusing tidbit from an interview with Joel Klein published in the British Guardian in 2006:

Klein is a fan of Blair's education reforms and "learnt a lot" from talking to Sir Michael Barber, the former No 10 education adviser. "The UK is performing better on international tests and moving in the right direction," he says. "They have a lot of the challenges we have." He is surprised when I mention the sense of failure, especially in London. "The work just hasn't finished," he says, blithely.

But Barber cleverly keeps traveling to new climes, before his failures can catch up with him. He seems to continually find new people to pay him for his advice, as he merrily trips along. His motto? If "everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.”

For the entire Pring letter, see Diane Ravitch's posting in the Huffington Post.