WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
Wesley Fryer’s blog Moving at the Speed of Creativity is a goldmine for educators, and I read it often. However, I’ve only just come across his excellent regular podcasts. A recent one, entitled High Stakes Testing is the Enemy, includes a lecture given by Dr. David Berliner in which he discusses the effect of high-stakes testing on American education. It’s a great lecture/talk and raises some important issues, most of them universal to Western education systems…
Although Dr. Berliner talks at length about issues pertinent mainly to the American education system, the beginning of his presentation in particular brings up some major issues which are relevant to the situation I’ve seen in English schools. Dr. Berliner talks about the divisive nature of high-stakes testing - which in England means the GCSE examinations students take at 16. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in my posts about the purpose of education, although I agree that examinations, certification and standards are important to some extent, the situation where students are mainly taught to the exam is training, not education. Dr. Berliner makes the extremely important point that an examination is only ‘fair’ (in terms of not being biased towards one social group) if students from all parts of society have had access to the same resources, standard of teaching and expectations of them. I, for one, know that this isn’t the case in most schools: setting and streaming, whilst helpful for behaviour management purposes, doesn’t lead to equality of opportunity for most students.
An amount of curriculum standardization is important for a number of reasons, including:
- Ensuring some continuity in educational experience for more mobile students
- Increasing the likelihood of equality of opportunity for students
- Reducing workload for teachers through sharing of resources, etc.
- Maintaining or improving the quality of the curriculum on offer to students
The most important factors in student achievement, however, are expectations (both home and school), peer pressure, and social class. The latter of these, whilst denied - sometimes vehemently - by those in favour of maintaining the status quo, is perhaps the single most important causal factor in how successful a student will be under the current system. The English GCSE qualification, although theoretically allowing for all students to achieve equally, in practice discriminates against those who don’t conform to the (usually) white, middle-class, organized and motivated model student.
So what happens to those who don’t conform to this stereotype? Well, increasingly, they’re labelled as having a ‘learning difficulty’ either by home (to prevent social embarrassment) or by schools (to prevent their results being included in league tables). Easy vocational qualifications and curricula, originally meant to be relevant to only a small number of students are being used more and more to ship off students to participate in ‘work-related’ activities. Even those vocational qualifications which are supposed to be open to students of all backgrounds and abilities are normally used by schools to help remove low-achieving students from league tables.
Described in this way, the education system seems to be a mess. And it is. What has happened is that ad-hoc reforms and compromises reaches on education-related legislation since 1870 have resulted in a bureaucatic and monolithic system. This, coupled to the current mania for running schools as businesses rather than institutions focused on providing ‘a good’ to society means that education as it is provided and education as it should be are two vastly different beasts.
So what should be done? First of all there needs to be a recognition that the current system isn’t up to scratch. This has already happened, to some extent, through the commissioning of the Tomlinson report and the current QCA investigations into how the curriculum can be modified. Unfortunately, as with all politically-charged issues, proposed bold reforms which would affect the very structure of educational provision are watered down, changed, or simply ignored.
Educators come at these problems and issues from many different angles. Some people (like myself) who are idealists, tend to rail against the current structure whilst teaching within the strictures of the system. Introducing things which change the teacher-student dynamic such as negotiated schemes of work, greater flexibility over methods of assessment and more cooperative learning activities. All this can only occur within the larger context of school culture and governmental policy, however. A framework which actually trusts teachers’ professionalism and their commitment to their art is needed; one that doesn’t see the end of education as improving the results of high-stakes tests through even more tests designed to force students into a mould. We need a system that doesn’t have at its core a fundamental distrust of the motives and commitment of teachers and students. As I said above, one of the main motivating factors in education - and in fact in life in general - is expectations. If a profession is viewed by those responsible for it as filled with those who need constant guidance and direction as well as interventions in terms of relentless, unfocused observations. This no longer becomes a profession, it becomes an extension of the civil service.
What needs to change is our collective attitude towards education. It isn’t something that can be transmitted wholesale, it isn’t something that exists independently of the learner, and it isn’t best ‘caught’ through constant and high-stakes testing.
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I think you raise a key contradiction with respect to educational quality and reform to which we need to pay more attention. Two things are simultaneously true:
1- Our educational system has some problems and needs help being “fixed” / improved. The system does not “work” for many of the students in it. Just look at our dropout rates in the US for unequivocal proof of this.
2- We need a system that trusts and empowers teachers more. We have thousands of fantastic teachers out there, who unfortunately are essentially branded as “losers” and “poor performers” but observation one above. But many, many teachers are fantastic, in my experience.
These observations are both true, in my opinion, but are seemlingly contradictory. How can a system not work when a large number of people working at the grassroots level (teachers) are working their hearts out, doing an amazing job, but still getting blamed as not properly educating our youth.
Some who have a very conspiratorial take on these topics allege (including Berliner) that this is one of the political goals of NCLB and the high stakes testing / accountability movements: to discredit teachers for political ends: like commercializing education through vouchers, and winning elections because of “education miracles” that that purported to have been achieved in my home state of Texas.
Teachers are caught up in an immoral system which presents many with what seems like no-win situations. That is addressed by Berliner in the podcast, in terms of how high-stakes testing environments corrupt teachers and the profession as a whole. He references “Campbell’s law” in this discussion.
I am very glad you found this podcast and are writing about these ideas. We need to reflect more on them, and eventually (hopefully before too long) figure out what ACTIONS we need to take in response.
Thanks for your comments, Wes and taking the time to put your thoughts here. I’ve been doing some supply teaching recently (although now I’m staying in one school for the foreseeable future) and have seen the same thing all over - students in Years 10 and 11 (14-16 year-olds) becoming increasingly despondent and disillusioned with school. It seems as if anything they’re actually interested in is actively suppressed, resulting in frustration and opposition.