Part Three: Shifting the Focus
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.
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