Within the national notion of education-  creativity sometimes seems to be  valued only in terms quantifiable and measurable  outcomes. Unless it is useful in its  aesthetic  it is held with the same regard  and affection of a weed trying to push through the  black tarmacadam of the playground. Beautiful to look at but ultimately doomed -chanced upon by the overseer tasked with maintaining that space of practice. Enclosed  in its own concrete framed  flower bed it remains apart from the purely  functional

as this flyer from LESOCO illustrates the arts must be commodified and sold to prospective learners in language like this: (the Creative Industries) are the most exciting – and fastest growing – sector of the British economy. If people tell you there aren’t jobs in the Creative Industries – they’re wrong! Did you know that the creative sector makes more than £8m an hour, and employs nearly 1.7m people? And 35.5% of the UK’s creative businesses are based in London.

Bob And Roberta Smith-Why I am Standing Against Michael Gove?

http://bobandrobertasmith.co.uk/why-im-standing-against-michael-gove/

Taking a break

The Unlesson Manifesto is taking a break until the new year. There may be odd posts and links to other excellent sites so do please keep returning. We deeply value your interest in our writings and ramblings and we hope there is currently enough material here to keep you busy making defences for less prescribed pedagogies. Keep learning, keep teaching, keep reflecting and keep challenging the neoliberal educational agenda. Keep making a difference. 

As Deleuze & Guattari say:

'Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency'

Here's to 2015. 

The Case for a PISA Alternative? Exploring the Global Educational Reform Movement

Part Three: Shifting the Focus

The PISA Results Summary 2012 state on page 9 that ‘Countries with large numbers of students who struggle to master basic reading skills at age 15 are likely to be held back in the future’. This is an obvious statement and certainly not new - in 1696 the Scottish Parliament passed its ‘Act for Setting Schools’ with the very purpose to generate a literate society, but by stating the obvious PISA is leading governments to respond in kind, with little sensitivity or invention. Governments see the data stating that there must be more opportunity for literacy in schools, increase the provision of English lessons, which then in turn diminishes the wider experiences available to students, as there has to be a cut in curriculum provision elsewhere to accommodate the increase in literacy. An example of this can be seen with the launch of the English Baccalaureate by the United Kingdom’s coalition government, which was a direct response to the country falling behind others in PISA league tables and in it’s demand for students to study the 5 GCSE qualification it reduced the subject options available to students. So what then occurs? Interestingly it’s PISA again that:

reveals that in most countries and economies, far too many students do not make the most of the learning opportunities available to them because they are not engaged with school and learning 

PISA Results Summary 2012, 20

The apparent contradiction of the types of issue PISA state to be problematic in students’ successful development and how then policy applies the solution is interesting. It results in a discrepancy of the PISA analysis. Currently there is a paradox between policy implementation on the very professional bodies that are contesting the effects as reality as a result of the:

new ideological element… [where] the response of public opinion, as economic crisis has accentuated a long-standing crisis of education, worsening both the conditions of student life and the conditions of teachers’ work

Dreux et al. 2013, 24

The simple answer is perhaps to allow students to select subjects that interest them and deliver the importance of reading, mathematics, and scientific literacy through these lessons of choice. A study carried out by James Catterall in the United States of over 25,000 students found that secondary school students who ‘report consistent high levels of involvement in instrumental music… show significantly higher levels of mathematics proficiency’ whilst ‘[s]ustained student involvement in theatre arts [show] gains in reading proficiency, gains in self-concept and motivation’ (Catterall 2009, 2). Thus providing an answer to the concerns raised by PISA data without diminishing a student’s holistic learning and perhaps begins to answer, in reality, some of Schleicher’s earlier radical concepts regarding individualised educational experiences.

When the coalition government of Great Britain announced its white paper, ‘The importance of Teaching’ in 2010, it turned its back on the previous government’s Creative Partnerships programme. Instead it set out to ‘devolve as much power as possible to the front line, while retaining high levels of accountability’. It’s reasoning as set out by the Prime Minister in its Forward stated:

The OECD has shown that countries which give the most autonomy to head teachers and teachers are the ones that do best. Finland and South Korea – the highest performing countries in PISA – have clearly defined and challenging universal standards, along with individual school autonomy

Yet when the new draft programmes of study were published in 2012 a joint statement by academics, teachers’ unions, professional associations and children’s authors found that:

too many of the proposals would inhibit progress for large numbers of children and would label others as failures… [T]he proposed curriculum was over-prescriptive and left little or no room for teacher or school flexibility. There was concern that the principal emphasis on just three core subjects would lead to loss of breadth and balance in the curriculum 

 Steers 2014, 11

This curriculum bears little resemblance to the Finnish model of schooling, cited by David Cameron in the white paper, where its teachers have the main role in the planning of their curriculum and ‘mutual responsibility’ takes the place of accountability as they design an approach to aid student development. 

Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator cites the current reforms to the English education system, amongst others, in his ‘Conversation On Lessons From Finland’ found on his website, in an analysis of how PISA is being used by governments:

Unfortunately PISA is often like a box of matches in the hands of a child. PISA certainly has had negative consequences in some places where it has taken the driver’s seat in determining priorities in national education policies… I have been very disappointed by how poorly people in general understand what PISA is actually able to reveal. Most people, educators included, seem to perceive PISA as a global league table that is like a thermometer showing how good or poor the health of your schools system is.

Sahlberg has created a name for this distortion of PISA application on national education policy and calls it the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM).

In researching the impact of PISA on global education it seems that the findings are regularly applied subjectively by governments and therefore distorted significantly enough to generate an entire new set of reforms. These reforms are often

the promotion of 'new' policies spun out of attacks on 'old' ideas, an example of the marketplace in which the contemporary global education model has been placed aimed at furthering economic interests in the 'knowledge-based economy'.

C Lonsdale 2014

Or as Stephen Ball puts it in Big Policies/Small World:

[O]ne key facet of the policy process and the formulation of new orthodoxies is critique. New policies feed off and gain legitimacy from the deriding and demolition of previous policies (see Ball, 1990) which are thus rendered `unthinkable’. The `new’ are marked out by and gain credence from their qualities of difference and contrast. In education in particular, part of the attraction of a new policy often rests on the specific allocation of `blame’ from which its logic derives. Blame may either be located in the malfunctions or heresies embedded in the policies it replaces and/or is redistributed by the new policy within the education system itself and is often personified - currently in the UK in the `incompetent teacher’ and `failing school'.

Alexander, 2012, 10 puts this down to policy makers deliberately using the ‘wrong’ type of research into comparative education where studies are designed to inform specific policy through the provision of evidence relevant to the particular policies of those in power. ‘In this sense the problem isn’t so much PISA as what, faced by the resulting league tables and the surrounding media noise, policymakers and their advisors do with what PISA provides’. The ‘Type II’ studies used, with its superficial interpretation of the PISA evidence provided, seems to enhance the methodology of GERM, ‘are acutely vulnerable to the charge of methodological and/or ideological bias’ and are notable for a high degree of selectivity and arbitrariness.

Coffield, 2008, 44 sums up the problems that face education systems in a world of type II analyses where the ‘gap between the rhetoric of policy and the reality of practice has become a chasm’. According to Coffield the most significant problem with policy makers relying on these type II studies is that the information collated is remote from the every day complexities of teaching and learning, as such simplifying the politics involved in aiming to make a quick transformation of a school system to meet the needs of, say an international league table position. He summarises his extensive research into several key policy papers with the insight that:

The sector is now busily responding to this avalanche of policies, with SMTs throughout the country [in this instance the UK] being distracted from meeting the needs of learners, local communities and employers to meeting the needs of Ministers and policy-makers. p48

These responses are designed to ensure that student knowledge is treated as a commodity and therefore sees them directly aligned to a competitive global market with what they learn, leading to the conclusion that they attain quickly measurable economically viable skills over a slower development towards a deeper culture of learning.

This analysis, whilst focusing on the personal application of GERM as opposed to the broader objectivity of PISA, does not exclude the dangers of over-reliance on cross-nationalist analysis. The promising statements regarding individualised learning shared by Schleicher earlier in this essay are certainly part of the problem when aligning education systems to global league tables and can often lead to an under-educational individualisation, or marginalisation, particularly with students who find it hard to achieve in the new narrow core curricula. The contradiction created between strictly adhering to large data systems that measure a certain type of progress, and being encouraged towards autonomy and invention in the successful delivery of policy reforms driven by global analysis places front line educators in a paradox. Coffield 2008, 17 explains this paradox particularly well and it is another example of the aforementioned chasm between policy and practice:

[T]he exhortation from government appears to be: ‘You must innovate, even if you have no evidence to support your innovation; but if you fail, we shall close you down or place you in special measures.

The OECD has such a monopoly on statistical data comparisons between education systems that it quickly becomes impossible to ignore their findings once a government has signed up to the league tables. In turn this enforces the problematical paradox as discussed by Coffield and quickly leads to the neoliberal demands of measuring teacher ability and performance to student test scores. The result is a workforce low in morale as they see the rich curricula and craft of pedagogy reduced to a colourless classroom where:

[e]quating good teaching with good test scores reduces a complex, human process, and the teacher-student relationship, to a cold data point, bereft of nuance. Gude 2013 

This essay has focused on how education systems, all over the world, have developed into a global community with a heavy reliance on a particular form of statistical data designed to improve ones national standing in an international competition. The findings are that, unless a national education system is doing particularly well, they will quickly manipulate the PISA evidence, creating policy to suit a sense of personal political achievement over and above a culture of learning grounded in personal independence, creativity, innovation and social and cultural experiences. The alternative to such an educational straightjacket appears to be simple; to listen to the teachers and educators who are on the front-line or researching the educational processes in different cultural backgrounds and national contexts with the aim to further understand what makes education good and what makes learners learn. These experienced professionals are in the education sector of each individual country with the intention to develop the next generation of workers, parents, politicians and policy-makers into lifelong learners. A good example of this approach in action occurred under the Labour government in the United Kingdom with the aforementioned Creative Partnerships programme. This committee saw the importance of developing learners for the job market but intended on addressing this through ‘a rounded education’ that ‘equipped young people for the future world of work [with] a desire to supplement the focus on basic literacy and numeracy with other areas’ (Education and Skills Committee 2007, 9). The programme saw a need to equip students with creativity in education with the aim to support economic growth in a ‘flexible job market where creative skills and aptitudes were required for survival’.

The purpose of stakeholders such as the OECD and PISA should be to support national educational systems such as this and provide data that can then be used as a tool to develop curricula where the responsibility for content is mutually beneficial for all involved; teachers, students and governments and not used as ‘a box of matches in the hands of a child’, where top down political enforcement and corporate reform creates a reactionary workforce. One in which students ultimately bear the burden of failure and teachers become human shields as they try to deflect these political and economic demands whilst shouldering the stress that standardised testing and league-table positions place onto learners. As Gude 2013 puts it:

The anti-reform fight should not be understood as an anti-progressive, hidebound resistance to inexorable technological and historical advancement. Anti-corporate reform educators aren’t hostile to educational progress. They’re fighting a neoliberal model in which teachers as agents – subjects teaching subjects – are reduced to objects constrained and acted upon, told what to do and how to do it.

Education will always remain a political battleground for governments and parties in opposition, there is, in essence, nothing wrong with this. It shows its importance to a country’s wealth and success. It is important however that the wealth and success is shared within the education system of a country through the rich curricula of holistic, experiential learning that encompasses any cultural and social history and a personal pedagogy that understands it. This is the approach that will ensure countries meet the demands of PISA and see the results, however narrow in their outlook, they crave.

The Case for a PISA Alternative? Exploring the Global Educational Reform Movement

Part Two: The Economy of Performance vs Ecologies of Practice

The knowledge economy and the targeting of particular educational objectives to economic focused outcomes is currently in conflict with a profession that has a history of social, moral and cultural approaches to education where:

The professional is motivated by service to the community rather than by the anticipation of an immediate material reward; altruistic values predominate over egoistic inclinations (Turner 1993 p14 cited in Stronach & Corbin 2002 p2)

In early 2014 an open letter written by Heinz-Dieter Meyer and signed by many educationalists challenged some of the perceived problems posed to education by OECD and PISA with some significant arguments that oppose the types of comments shared by Schleicher and others seen earlier in this essay. I would like to share three statements from the letter here:

1. PISA results are anxiously awaited by governments, education ministers, and the editorial boards of newspapers, and are cited authoritatively in countless policy reports. They have begun to deeply influence educational practices in many countries. As a result of PISA, countries are overhauling their education systems in the hopes of improving their rankings. Lack of progress on PISA has led to declarations of crisis and “PISA shock” in many countries, followed by calls for resignations, and far-reaching reforms according to PISA precepts
2. PISA, with its three-year assessment cycle, has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years to come to fruition.
3. PISA takes attention away from the less measurable or immeasurable educational objectives like physical, moral, civic, and artistic development, thereby dangerously narrowing our collective imagination regarding what education is and ought to be about.

These three statements raise important educational concerns about how governments are applying reforms in connection with PISA and I will now analyse them in reverse order by providing three directly contrasting statements that intend to highlight the conflict between the profession and its policy makers. Point three is raised by the new UK Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, who justifies the coalition government reforms as necessary by criticising previous government policy, in the Telegraph on the 11^th August 2014:

England’s performance in international studies stagnated… This wasn’t the fault of hard working teachers, but of a system which prized all the wrong outcomes… as schools were encouraged to push… young people towards poor quality qualifications [which have] little or no labour market value

This statement clearly emphasises a government focus on a particular form of educational attainment as being more important than the less measurable objectives outlined by both Grek and Meyer. 

The issue raised in point 2 above is that under the current reformation this focus is also short-term in its gaze, demanding education systems to apply strategies that are historically expected in the world of corporate business. Subsequently a government’s investment in human capital now demands immediate results and is at odds with the historical approach to the profession that cultivates successful educational content where ‘all good and true education is an expression of national life and character’ (Sadler 1900 cited in Alexander 2001, 27). Sellar and Lingard cite Feher 2009 on this matter and explain that:

[I]n the neoliberal world of globalized and unregulated financial markets, corporate governance is concerned less with optimizing returns on investment over time than with maximizing the distribution of dividends in the short run.

When applied to the education sector of a nation, governments become preoccupied with the perpetual appreciation of the international value of the sector rather than the original investment in training which waits for productive future returns. 

The initial point made by Meyer that I selected is the one that currently causes most conflict within the profession where:

The political conflict relocates the centre of debate outside the profession itself, leaving the professionals mere spectators. Accordingly, one rescue strategy (amongst many others) in such embattled professions is of course to change sides, ‘to abandon the professional mode’ in favour of more successful and dominant contributors to the discourse (Stronach and Corbin 2002, 7)

This significant external influence on the methodology of delivery is seeing the divisive application of approaches such as performance related pay, free schools and academies in England, the compulsory teaching of English in Chinese schools, the Race to the Top contest in the United States and forms of policy borrowing between nations which is resulting in an:

intolerable contradiction between what teachers are expected to do and what they want to do as individuals [longing] for meaningful ways to maintain their self-esteem in new personal and professional identities and to deal with the conflicts between the new roles established by the new curriculum and their ‘old’ identities (S. Guo et al. 2013, 250)

Competition between teachers regarding performance is particularly contentious. Governments feel that they can legitimise attacks on the profession and undermine cultural pedagogical approaches by raising issues found in other countries that are deemed to be successful. It therefore implies that one’s pedagogical strategy has no personalised context for delivery but is universal to any other educational system where other teachers can understand and use the narrative constructed for a particular cultural environment. It could be considered part of an educators professional skill set to be able to manipulate others pedagogical approaches and indeed this is possible, but it does cause confusion within the identity created by each individual, nurtured and developed over time through repetition, trial and error. (Alexander 2001, 30) questions the validity of this interchangeable transnational approach to education:

in countries that are as culturally different as the UK and Japan, treating culture as an independent variable in a statistical calculation encourages the assumption that an educational strategy can be detached from the values and conditions which give it meaning and ensure its success, transpose it to a context where these may be diametrically opposed, and yet expect it to deliver the same results.

Since referring to Meyer’s open letter I have explored areas of tension between policy makers and those who deliver it. But is PISA to blame for how policy makers are using the evidence they provide? Certainly it can be stated at the outset that the focus of PISA on such a narrow band of educational achievement, as discussed in some detail so far, is not particularly helpful. However the data in itself is quite useful and shortly I will explore some possible interpretations that go beyond simply regurgitating the stats in the form of policy before looking at viable alternatives to the pressures of the PISA bubble.

A Lesson(in)Action - Preparation for the new academic year

"The ideological project embodied in educational policies since the ERA [Education Reform Act] has introduced increased regulation of primary [and secondary] education and rapid changes that have contributed to a climate of uncertainty for schools. The threat of failure: for children, teachers, schools and education departments in universities, maintained by the government through policing by Ofsted, reductive league tables and a policy of public naming and shaming, is ever present. The current climate constrains risk-taking and experimentation and obstructs creative approaches to learning and teaching that could result in innovation and originality."

Clare Kelly, 2013

To begin the new academic year you are invited to prepare and take part in A Lesson(in)Action 

The Unlesson Manifesto demands that you actively avoid:

Lesson Aims

Lesson Objectives

The 3-Part Lesson

Assessment for Learning

Pace

Differentiation

Measurable Progress

Learning Outcomes

Interactive Whiteboards

Seating Plans

Prior Learning

By removing the prescribed scaffolding of lesson planning, you are required to recalibrate your delivery. Your education system is working hard to ration every child's comprehensive educational experience and this is an opportunity to work creatively and actively avoid an approach that currently takes place every day across the globe. Through the avoidance of the structures listed above you will need to prepare a minimum of one lesson that encourages you as the teacher and your students to take risks. For some of you it may be a challenge to work outside of these parameters whilst for others it may be a simple reinforcement of how you already deliver in the classroom. Either way it is an attempt at a more conscious approach to how you work. We want to hear about your inventive approaches and conclusions - tweet comments to @BoHetherington and @LessonInAction or share via the comments box on the blog. All the best for the new term, stay strong and believe in your own professionalism. 

The Case for a PISA Alternative? Exploring the Global Educational Reform Movement

Part One: The Global Umbrella

In the global economy, the benchmark for 
educational success is no longer merely 
improvement by local or national standards, 
but the best performing education systems 
internationally

Andreas Schleicher 2014

Education remains one of the key battlegrounds for any government in the build up to an election. Candidates in government or in opposition lay claim to having the answer to solve educational concerns, usually countering any policies that have been put in place over the last term in office. However, now education is no longer a national battleground for politicians but a global one. Stakeholders and global education providers such as Pearson, OECD, UNESCO and McKinsey & Company and research by sources such as CEM and Fischer Family Trust in England, NCATE and the NRC in the United States are providing policy makers with data provision that profess to have the answer to any presumed educational mishap or failure. As such, governments and politicians are entering the educational battleground armed with massive amounts of analytical detail and statistical evidence that claim to provide the correct pathway out of perceived national educational poverty to the Valhalla of international educational acclaim.

The most successful of these provisions is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which triennially examines the comparative performance of educational systems across the world. Grek, 2009 p.1 states that PISA ‘through its direct impact on national education systems… has become an… influential tool of the new political technology of governing’.

Andreas Schleicher, the Deputy Director of the Directorate for Education at the OECD, is a key player in the development of PISA becoming a significant tool for governments to measure educational success. It is his belief that ‘knowledge and skills have become the global currency in the 21st Century’ and states on Pearsons ‘Five Things I’ve Learned’ website that ‘[t]he goal of the past was standardization and conformity; now it’s about being ingenious, about personalizing education experiences.’ In theory this is encouraging – an educational approach that breaks away from conformity, promotes individual learning and supports inventiveness. However in practice this seemingly freewheeling approach has seen a greater focus by many educational systems on exactly the opposite; conformity, standardisation and an educational model, driven by global educational reformists that is impoverished in it’s application of holistic and creative learning as they try to attain high scores on the PISA tables.

This essay will explore some of the global education reforms that are currently being implemented across the world and try to make sense of the seemingly contradictory remarks made by such policy advisors that are resulting in educational austerity, at least in the places where they are being strictly adhered to. First, however, it is important to consider in greater detail the process that has taken the implementation of transnational education ‘to be a concern of the highest political priority’. (Hingel 2001 p.10)

[W]e are witnessing across the globe a robust anticipatory and proactive interest in OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA). PISA is no longer just a ‘results phenomenon’. PISA leaders are increasingly getting at what lies behind the numbers and are thus generating key insights and questions.

Michael Fullan (McKinsey 2010)

The OECD’s PISA study, alongside the data from PIRLS, TIMSS and other studies, have transformed our understanding of what works

Michael Gove 2014

[T]he last round of QCDA-led changes… remain informed by a nationally-introspective approach and appear under-informed by lessons from transnational comparisons

Oates 2010 p.5

The sources that organisations use to glean their information are vast. McKinsey refers to 20 different school systems from around the world, PISA/OECD have access to 65 countries and represent ‘more than 80% of the world economy’ (PISA Results Summary 2012), whilst Oates refers to 3 large-scale international surveys – PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS. It would seem to be the case that their extensive research is worthy of listening to as so much evidence, from so many global sources, must provide significant findings regarding answers to successful educational reform. Indeed the provision of knowledge regarding an education systems performance in relation to another; be it a study of students attainment of literacy or mathematics, pedagogy delivery models or teacher and school accountability can be seen as an excellent source for planning and preparation for a country’s personal contextualisation. Yet the narrowing band of analytical performance, with its focus on mathematics, reading and scientific literacy is meaning governments and policy makers are focusing their research and subsequent demand for reform on a particular classification of educational attainment. An example of such an approach can be seen in two separate quotes from Andreas Schleicher regarding educational analysis in Wales and the United States:

1. Mr Schleicher criticised Wales for a lack of long-term vision for education. He said: ‘Your education system today is your economy tomorrow. There's a very, very close linkage between the skills that people develop in school and what they're able to do later in life. Our economies are evolving very rapidly. The demand for better skills, for the right skills. The knowledge economy no longer pays you for what you know... it pays you for what you can do with what you know.’ He also criticised the mindset of Welsh students.

[source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-27785129]

2. The increasing impact of advanced skills on people's life chances -- whether it is employment, earnings or social participation, makes it a priority to do better in providing all talented students, regardless of their background, with access to advanced education…. it is also clear that an increasing number of countries have approached and surpassed U.S. graduation levels and others are bound to follow over the coming years.

[source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andreas-schleicher/us-education_b_2268873.html]

Schleicher is quick to use the same rhetoric for two completely different education systems at different levels (one secondary and one higher education), both of which appear to need to address aspects of its approach to learning and student success. The threat of failure in comparison to other nations is the stick he uses to drive home his point and the evidence he presents is PISA data. Yet in the case of Wales at least a viable and alternative PISA run test presents the argument, as claimed by TLTP Education Recruitment (April 2014), where ‘[a]ccording to the OECD, the UK school system is producing kids that are teeming with cognitive fluidity and equipped with fully developed transferrable thinking skills’. Yet nothing was made of this contradictory and quite significant compliment by the British government. Indeed as Grek, 2009 p.5 cites, PISA ‘does not examine students’ mastery of school curricula nor does it pay attention to less explicit educational aims that resist measurement (e.g. democratic participation, artistic talents, understanding of politics, history etc)’, which then ensnares any national reforms to follow the PISA status quo.

The history and demand for the global knowledge economy, at least in European terms, can be traced back to the implementation of the European Space of Education; co-operation between member states to deliver quality education with the intention ‘to enhance the quality and relevance of human capital development’. In 1976 what Hingel 2001 p.5, describes as the ‘Eurydice action in the field of documentation and statistics’ was set up. It’s intention, in the longer term, was to measure pupil achievement, external evaluations and self-appraisal in schools through the form of quality evaluation and the involvement of stakeholders. Hingel, 2001 p.6, shares with us that in the development of a European Model of Education:

the increasing knowledge on national educational systems have played a central role. The Eurydice collection and analysis of data and information, in close co-operation with Eurostat, has been primordial.

Almost simultaneously in the United States the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 targeted the American system of schooling with remarkably similar language to that used by Mr. Schleicher in its fears of being left behind in a global education race and claimed the ‘unimaginable [in the fact that] others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments’. It used in its reforms what were only described as ‘notable programs and promising approaches [and] existing analyses of problems in education’ sensationally stating on page 1:

[i]f an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

Aronson & Anderson 2013, make it clear that this report, where ‘reformers were able to legitimize their belief that only by tightening control over curriculum and teaching… and making education more disciplined and competitive’ has led to the implementation of market-based reforms that connect globalisation and economic competition. This ‘governance by comparison’, as called by Martens 2007 and cited in Grek 2009, through the quality evaluation of educational measurement, particularly by external sources, has paved the way for stakeholders such as the OECD and it’s subsequent PISA programme where, ‘[t]hrough its statistics, reports and studies, it has achieved a brand which most regard indisputable; OECD’s policy recommendations are accepted as valid by politicians and scholars alike.’ Grek 2009 p.3.

The educational reforms in China and Asia followed later than in Europe and the United States but they have not been any less aligned to global capitalism. China launched their New Curriculum Reform in 2001 and S. Guo et al. 2013 p.259 state that ‘[u]nder China’s market economy, education is also undergoing the process of marketisation, and privatisation in terms of orientation, provision, curriculum and financing.’

The 34 nations that are members of the programme, and 31 additional other countries that refer to the results have created a competitive global umbrella that currently covers all 65 educational systems desperate to nurture student excellence in mathematics, reading and science to ensure they have the 'positive learning climate' required to 'produce the vanguard of a competitive, knowledge-based global economy' (PISA Results Summary 2012). In the mean time the less explicit educational aims, regarded as so by PISA, leave a generation of students at risk of a lack of creativity, awareness of social justice and cultural learning. 

The second of three parts of this essay will be posted soon and will explore 'The Economy of Performance versus Ecologies of Practice' - the conflict between the new educational objectives aligned to economic focused outcomes and the traditional social, moral and cultural status of teaching. 

GERM - Global Education Reform Movement

GERM - is it losing momentum? 

http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/news-and-media/blogs/warwick-mansell/does-goves-demotion-show-education-reform-has-a-popularity-problem/

The NAHT has a long way to go to prove to teachers that they feel GERM is detrimental to our education system and personally I think it is too much to hope for at present but I am delighted it is even being discussed. 

Pasi Sahlberg - newly added to the web links below, and well worth exploring, shares some thoughts on GERM & PISA and the Finnish approach to education (as shared by Kevin Courtney (NUT) via twitter recently). Something appears to be being lost in translation:

So why do head teachers in the UK appear to be getting it so wrong when converting the OECD/PISA data and expectations into school policy? Any thoughts or answers would be appreciated as I am currently constructing an essay on this topic and reader input - via any good web links or your own thoughts would be appreciated. The essay will appear in chunks on The Unlesson Manifesto over the next couple of months. 

Through a glass darkly....

The tech utopia nobody wants: why the world nerds are creating will be awful http://gu.com/p/4v54g

Spot the Statistical Anomaly

Something struck me the other day with greater clarity than normal. I was teaching a class of GCSE students and helping one girl in particular. On this occasion she smelt so badly that I could not physically inhale without choking. I worked closely to her for approximately 5 minutes trying very hard to inhale as minimally as possible and only breathe through my mouth. As I moved away I stood and watched my class and observed the following things:

One student had asked if she could sleep during my lesson as she had been up all night dealing with her new born sister as her mother was unable to attend the baby. She had her head on the table. Another had a TA (teaching assistant) working closely with them as they have a learning age of an 8 year old.

The lesson was interrupted by a younger girl who had walked out of a maths lesson as she had had enough and she came to find her sister. Both girls live practically on their own as mother is such a complete alcoholic who does not function in any capacity. She politely asked to stay and as 'on call' were aware of her movements I happily let her sit down and join in.

Another student, who had failed to do any work for the past 2 hours was now working quietly - she is on the police aware terror suspect list and often makes threats of bomb making and suicide.

Two other students were drawing on their arms. One has a lot of scars from self harming. It was the first lesson back for her due to being kept in 'inclusion' for 7 weeks due to refusal to change hair colour. The other was possibly abused as a child, the investigation is ongoing. The content of the conversation was graphically sexual in nature.

Yet another student had headphones in their ears and was talking loudly about becoming a DJ. There are significant drug references in the conversation and often drugs have been taken before attending school.

One other always arrives and sits doing nothing, for every lesson. Never once producing a single piece of work in the whole year.

These are tiny snippets of only 10 students from one class of 22. It is quite an abnormal class for my school but not for hundreds of others. Five different classes of kids will pass through my classroom in a day. Each one of the children in every class will have a story; they may not have eaten properly that day or they may have had a problem in a previous lesson resulting in them feeling disengaged. One's mother may be dying from cancer whilst another's father passed away in a car accident the previous year. Another one might have seen a promising sports career go up in smoke as they have just had to have serious knee reconstruction surgery. Others still might just find growing up a little bit tough and despite all the love and support from a good family unit they just don't care enough about school.

Whatever the story (all true and plenty, plenty more) it is my job to engage them, motivate them, make them laugh, encourage them to learn, discipline them, listen to them and support them.

Regardless of the statistical data, the measurements of progress every 7 weeks, the amount of marks and feedback I give them or what I tell their parents or carers, in the end some of them will surpass their predicted grades, others will not attain it. I will do my best to help them, I will try and encourage them to do their best as they work with me.

But they are human beings, individuals with problems, baggage, self-confidence issues, pressures and passions. The only thing they have in common is that not one of them is a statistic.

Data works, it's extremely useful sometimes. It works particularly well on a large scale. It works rather less well when reduced to a class size or an individual. I'm not only a teacher, I'm a manager. I use data every day. I often question the arbitrary data that comes in telling me that young Samantha attained level 5 in ks2 (key stage 2) numeracy so therefore she should secure a grade B in GCSE Art but I keep it, monitor it and add it to my own data. I just don't treat it as more important than any of the individuals I teach in any of my classes. I never will.

Education Reform Summit, London 10th July 2014

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/michael-gove-speaks-about-the-future-of-education-reform

The Education Secretary spoke to the members of the Education Reform Summit as teachers and other public workers marched in strike action nearby. It's a very interesting speech and worth a read. It does underline the intention of aligning educational reform with economic globalisation where measurement across nations, in the form of PISA, is pressurising our managers to conform to the multi-national framework of performance - despite the illusion of increased autonomy spoken about throughout the speech, but below are several excerpts of other issues raised that I want to touch on in this short blog:

'In the past, great teachers - and indeed education ministers - have operated in isolation from any systematic and rigorous analysis of which of their interventions worked. Views on pedagogy or funding had to be taken on trust.

But in the last decade there has been a much more rigorous and scientific approach to learning. Instead of a faddish adherence to quack theories about multiple intelligences or kinaesthetic learners, we have had the solidly grounded research into how children actually learn of leading academics such as E.D. Hirsch or Daniel T. Willingham....

...Underperforming schools taken into the academies programme and placed under the leadership of great heads are improving more rapidly than those schools which remain in the hands of local politicians.

A stunning example of what’s happened under this programme is the progress made by a school in London which used to be called Downhills Primary and which has been reborn as Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane. [Please view Academies & Lies film linked below on the right]

When Downhills was under the control of local politicians, it failed its pupils year after year.

...The unions, in the past, have claimed to ‘stand up for education’. Today they’re standing up for their own pay and pensions.

I urge them to join all of us in this hall, all of us who are really standing up for education - putting education first and foremost - and the education of our most deprived children most of all.'

This rhetoric, which is the promotion of 'new' policies spun out of attacks on 'old' ideas, is an example of the marketplace in which the contemporary global education model has been placed aimed at furthering economic interests in the 'knowledge-based economy'. Or as Stephen Ball puts it in Big Policies/Small World:

'[O]ne key facet of the policy process and the formulation of new orthodoxies is critique. New policies feed off and gain legitimacy from the deriding and demolition of previous policies (see Ball, 1990) which are thus rendered `unthinkable’. The `new’ are marked out by and gain credence from their qualities of difference and contrast. In education in particular, part of the attraction of a new policy often rests on the specific allocation of `blame’ from which its logic derives. Blame may either be located in the malfunctions or heresies embedded in the policies it replaces and/or is redistributed by the new policy within the education system itself and is often personified - currently in the UK in the `incompetent teacher’ and `failing school’ (see Thrupp (1998) on the politics of blame).'

The speech may promote the current neoliberal agenda with a naturally positive spin but as Ken Jones writes in The Politics of Austerity:

'In terms of education, England is experiencing a less severe austerity than Spain or Greece. Cuts in spending, pay and pensions rights are significant, but are not at Greek levels, Youth unemployment is high, but has reached less than half the height of Spain - and so on, indicator by indicator. Nevertheless, in many respects, the programme of restructuring that accompanies austerity is more sweeping than that of other countries: the complete withdrawal of state funding for undergraduate arts, humanities and social science courses; the cutting of financial support for 16-18 year olds; the loading up of university graduates with as much as £45,000 of debt; the transfer of more than half of England's secondary schools to private management; revisions in curriculum and assessment that most experts think will increase educational failure'

In this instance I am seeing very little evidence of the 'celebratory, ambitious, inspiring day for all of us' that Mr. Gove shared with the Education Reform Summit.

The Subordination of Public Interest to Private Interest...

One of the best banners I came across at the London rally today. There is a lot of good content and compelling research over at the blog linked below on the right entitled 'Disgruntled Teacher'. Do spend some time looking at this valuable commentary. 

Marching Again

Dear friends in education,

I am travelling into London as I write this. Another strike, another march. Another attempt to tell this government and this education secretary that their policy to align education to global economic demands and outcomes is not the right way to engage learners. Education is not about measuring progress and diminishing a breadth and depth of experience to a selective few subjects where learners will continue to regurgitate 'knowledge' to secure grades. It is not about securing quotas of students into a higher education system where this attack is further along the line than we currently see in secondary and primary schooling. It is not about offering up a free system of learning to corporate practices that carry both political and economic agendas. Education remains about instilling a love of learning for life. My own educational measurement is reasonably poor - 8 Scottish standard grades (only 4 of which were graded 3 or higher) and 2 Scottish highers (1 graded B and the other a D). Hardly earth shattering. Yet I am in the classroom teaching the next generations. Why? Simply because I was encouraged to love learning, both inside school (despite reasonably poor academic attainment) and at home. This love of learning sat dormant until I turned 20 when I decided to return to college, apply for university to study Fine Art and then practice secondary pedagogy in Art & Design. I am now half way through an MA (and doing considerably better at academic attainment!) At 35 years old my desire for knowledge - real knowledge, is still increasing and my daily job is to instill this life long love of learning in others. I strike again today not to break a child's education or to cause their families disruption. I strike for exactly the opposite reason; to warn children and their families that without teachers who care so passionately for their children's quality of education they are walking blindly into an education model that is, at a fierce rate, destroying their educational chances to become life long learners who love to be educated and want to educate others. Sometimes you have to fight in this life. This is one of these times. 

Sacrificing Education on the Altar of Performance

In our technological age it is universally believed that there is a technique to solve every problem. It’s just a question of finding the right technique and applying it. The technique to improve education seems to be a rigorous regime of performance management. This regime is having the (presumably unintended) consequence of driving many dedicated teachers out of education.

These days, in every walk of life, we are all expected to bow down before the altar of performance. Every day (in every way) we all have to get better and better. If we don’t keep up we’ll be run down by the mass of people behind us. Everybody’s running but are we getting anywhere?

In this performance environment teachers are constantly monitored, observed, assessed and judged in order to improve the quality of teaching. But what exactly are we measuring and do we really know it’s an indicator of good teaching?

Let’s take an example. At an academy run school (where students are processed like threads on a carpet loom) there were two teachers: one was consistently judged to be ‘inadequate’ in lesson observations while the other teacher was consistently judged to be ‘excellent’. The ‘inadequate’ teacher got demoralised and pressured into changing the way they taught, the ‘excellent’ teacher felt good and was encouraged to carry on in similar fashion. Based on this picture we would probably want our kids to be taught by the ‘excellent’ teacher and not the ‘inadequate’ one. But we’d be wrong.

Both teachers had the same set of students so any difference in performance between them is not down to groups with widely different abilities. And yet, in terms of teaching outcomes as measured by exam results, the ‘inadequate’ teacher got among the best results in the school and the ‘excellent’ teacher got among the worst results. Now who do you want teaching your child?

Clearly there is something wrong with how teacher performance is being measured. And what I think is wrong here is that when teachers are assessed, through lesson observations, they are measured in terms of their adherence to a very formulaic model of the ‘ideal’ lesson. Therefore, teachers of little imagination and bureaucratic tendencies score highly, whereas truly inspiring teachers, who don’t stick to a formulaic pattern in their teaching, score badly.

Probably, every inspiring teacher anyone ever had (including the people who invented the measurement system) would score ‘inadequate’ under the current performance regime. If I’m right about this then the more strictly the performance regime is enforced the more quality of teaching and outcomes will decline rather than improve. We have an education system with people busily running around enforcing something that will have the unintended consequence of making learning boring, pedestrian and ineffective.

Bruno Latour, the French philosopher of science, coined the term immutable mobiles to refer to the way science employs summaries of information, abstracted from the messy reality of the real world, in order to be able to share and distribute information. It is through the employment of immutable mobiles that science is able to persuade and have power over the objects it studies. It’s a useful concept to have in mind when thinking about how teaching is monitored and assessed.

In his sociological studies of laboratory practice Latour noticed that ‘anything and everything was transformed into inscriptions’. That is, it was noted, written down, compiled into data, summary statistics, charts etc. An immutable mobile is this two dimensional summary of data, often in the form of charts, graphs or tables which is easily transported, hence mobile, and immutable in that it does not change when it is transported.

For instance a map is portable, whereas what it represents is not, and the statistical results of tests on laboratory animals are mobile whereas the laboratory and its contents are much harder to move. What is represented in the map and the graph stays the same when it is moved from one location to another.

These immutable mobiles are the things that scientists spend most of their time thinking about, and they are used to persuade people to subscribe to the conclusions the scientists draw. Ironically, big shifts in scientific thinking are not made through observation of the real world, but through manipulation of the abstractions derived from it, in the form of immutable mobiles. As Latour says, ‘why is it is so important for Brahe, Boyle, Pasteur or Guillemin to work on two-dimensional inscriptions instead of the sky, the air, health, or the brain?’

Immutable mobiles are essentially abstractions from reality and enable scientists to convince people, without the need to go to the original sources. And these immutable mobiles give people power over the things represented in them and actually come to replace the things themselves. As Latour says, ‘The objects are discarded or often absent from laboratories. Bleeding and screaming rats are quickly dispatched. What is extracted from them is a tiny set of figures.’

Another feature of immutable mobiles is that they form cascades whereby more and more data are combined into ever simplified aggregated figures that are used to persuade. Does any of this sound familiar?

Education too has its immutable mobiles and cascades in the form of teaching assessments, Ofsted reports, and league tables. And of course there’s not a bleeding rat in sight though they must be there somewhere.

But the problem with all of this is that it is an abstraction. It is not reality. It is not a true reflection of the teaching situation in the classroom. So, when the ‘ideal lesson’ is put into a formula and teachers are more or less forced to use it, this is potentially very damaging, because the formula is based on an abstraction (an immutable mobile) that does not accurately reflect the real world situation. The more zealously these simplistic assessment methods are employed the more harm they will do.

Teaching is essentially a relational activity. And it is this, the essence of good teaching, that is missing from the immutable mobiles. In the hands of zealous educational bureaucrats they are causing unintended consequences that are damaging our education system and driving talented teachers out of the profession.

Colin Pink