Low expectations and other forms of bigotry

The real problem is the low expectations we hold of teachers. And it's not a problem which will be solved by throwing money at it - until good teachers are recognised and given more challenges/opportunities quicker than mediocre teachers, it will not be an attractive field for ambitious, smart graduates. Of course there are clever, hard-working teachers, but you need a LOT of self-motivation to keep pushing in such a stultifying work environment.

One wonders why [some leftist] teachers think that children from less affluent backgrounds cannot achieve these levels. Are they suggesting that better-educated parents are better teachers than they are? (they surely are not suggesting it is in the genes!). Of course they may be right and RS may have rather missed the point (4% is bigger than 2% but still small). Getting kids from disadvantaged families to do homework in 'clubs' in the homes and with the parents of the more educated might be better.

A small PS -

More Euclidean geometry might be a good move. Firstly anything that has stood the test of 2000 years (until very recently) might be worth a try! And secondly the point is not so much the geometry per se - but the logical puzzles that end in 'QED'. Children love puzzles and this might also be less daunting for poorly-educated teachers, whilst being very good for logical thinking.

I really like this move with the change to league tables. It might be that the value is in switching the measures every so often, just to expose those schools that are gaming the system - and if schools start to have the expectation that the measure will be changed without warning, they might decide to give the kids a well-rounded education just to cover all their bases. If it's too much to hope that they might just give them a decent education because it's the right thing to do.

When I was at school it did seem to me that poverty of expectation started in the classroom. Both my parents left school at 15 but were still more positive about my aim to go to a Russell Group university rather either my careers adviser or guidance teacher. I went to an open evening at the ex-poly and got talking to a lab technician there who asked me my predicted grades and told me if I was her kid she'd tell me to apply to the Russell group uni and forget her own institution. Navigating my way through a system that my family had no experience of, I have so much reason to be grateful that that woman was there to give me some decent honest advice.

Teaching other people's kids 30 at a time is a noble profession done for little esteem and even less money. Raising standards and increased transparency are great. But that's not addressing the problem. Of course, there's a shortage of math and science teachers when anyone skilled in basic numeracy can see that being a teacher is working hideous hours, in awful conditions for low pay. In a magazine called the Economist, there should be less surprise that people have gotten exactly what they've been willing to pay for.

Finally, I would humbly recommend that the Bagehot columnist say his or her own profession before asking other people to quit theirs. That last sentence makes this sound less like a call to action and more like someone's indignant dad yelling at a professional athlete for missing a shot. At least they're on the field.

whitelies,

Tough and all as I'm sure it is, if a significant proportion of kids are coming out of primary school without basic numeracy skills then it's not teaching they've been subjected to, it's crowd control. I feel really sorry for the kids in that position: when you're 7, sitting in a classroom feels like really hard work and you would wish for them that in return they'll end up at least being able to read, count and know that the dinosaurs came before the Romans.

I think this maths qualification thing is a bit of a red herring, too. It shouldn't be necessary to attract maths specialists to ensure decent teaching: surely if you have to teach someone fractions for example, you just need to know a) fractions and b) how to teach?

Primary school teachers have no confidence with teaching math? they should have a degree in math to teach primary level math? again with the bigotry of low expectation. Surely being able to perform long division after ANY university education would be a low expectation.

As for those kids that may excel at dance... great, but they still have to read and do sums. comparing a C grade with an athletic feat that only olympiads can perform should be grounds for dismissal for any teacher.

s_b "I think this maths qualification thing is a bit of a red herring, too. It shouldn't be necessary to attract maths specialists to ensure decent teaching: surely if you have to teach someone fractions for example, you just need to know a) fractions and b) how to teach?"

My wife does a lot of tutoring, which in the US, includes a great deal of SAT exam test prep. She's no great mathematician- she has a spotty grade record in high school maths and two English degrees. However, she knows how do all the maths one might find on a standard test, and she's a skilled teacher. Her record of improving student scores on the math sections is excellent.

There are two really important things: eroding the reflexive assumption that maths is hard, and actually teaching the basic principles, rather than dishing out formulas without explanation.

There's a crucial problem with your argument; if A implies B, and A is false, it does not imply that B is false. Similarly: "a C-grade pass or above in English [...] signals a decent if basic level of literacy"; but lack of a C-grade pass does not mean the lack of a basic level of literacy.

This fallacy is particularly pernicious in your case for English, because the English subject as taught isn't really about literacy; it's about literature.

(FWIW, I write as someone who failed English twice, first at the higher level, and at the second attempt at the ordinary level, in my final examinations in Ireland.)

Kaveh,

Of course, at least a LARGE part of the problem is due to lack of funding; teacher salaries must go up. Otherwise, a bright maths graduate will never be interested in pursuing a teaching position in school when he can make much more in other career paths. Rather than funding wars, this can be solved with more _____(fill in the blank -higher salaries is one possible answer at least).

I know that in Canada, one cannot teach without a "teaching post-grad" degree which is like 2 years, I think...that is possibly one reason why I never remember having an awful teacher at my public school there...

Just my 2 cents.

I have upon several occasions taught more that 2 years of math in less than thirty minutes, to more than one child. One child had been deemed mentally retarded. The other as having an attention disorder.
I found that small amounts of money or chocolate motivates children to learn to solve math problems. Say what you want, people are motivated by incentives, just like teaching a horse with treats.
I admit that it would look silly for a teacher to give candies for every right answer, but what looks silly to us might in fact be wise.

The solution is actually this.
Governments privatize all schools.
Students are given loans to go to school, at 2 percent interest, and the parents are legally co-signers.
Schools can charge what the market can bear.
Alternatively, give tuition vouchers.
And the biggest problem is that the British government has not approved more than 95 percent of the applications to start new schools.
Surely those willing to risk their own money to build a school will do a better job than the current system.
And if they do not, they go bankrupt without any loss to the state.

The solution is actually this.
Governments privatize all schools.
Students are given loans to go to school, at 2 percent interest, and the parents are legally co-signers.
Schools can charge what the market can bear.
Alternatively, give tuition vouchers.
And the biggest problem is that the British government has not approved more than 95 percent of the applications to start new schools.
Surely those willing to risk their own money to build a school will do a better job than the current system.
And if they do not, they go bankrupt without any loss to the state.

shoopshoop,

Sure, higher salaries will help, but my point is there is much lower hanging fruit to try first to both compete up teaching standards and attract more ambitious grads, which won't run up the deficit even further. Throwing money at the public services without reforming their structure first was one of the many reasons Labour squandered so much money while in power.

FWIW, in the UK all teachers (in the state sector at any rate) must do a 1 year teaching course.

For better and for worse, children tend to live up or down to our expectations of them. The real question is, how do we create a situation in which the teachers and parents honestly have high expectations for their children? Easier said than done, and we can't just "fake it 'til we make it." I suppose the real question is, where is this already happening and how do we replicate it?

David Kaiser
CEO and Executive Coach
www.DarkMatterConsulting.com

It is possible to have a league table measuring something that matters - the schools added value (predicted GCSE passes from tests at entry vs actual achieved results).

But nobody wants to talk about it because:
* would be too objective and hard to fudge

* require parents, teachers and politicans to have basic numeracy

* might show the "wrong" schools as actually doing a good job

* prove that quality teachers add value (unions and LEAs
agree on suppressing acknowledgement of this due to impications)

Would work on its own; or with added control for catchement relative wealth as measure of parental support.

If you want to look at causes look at the top. If Education is an industry and has people without a degree and only one 'O' level in charge of organisations like OFSTED then you can expect such low expectations to "trickle down". The criticisms levelled at OFSTED over the years show how such people can bring low an essential institution.

"He is not even asking teachers to cram the beginnings of Euclidian geometry down their throats. What we are really talking about is a decent level of numeracy."

This is low expectations. If a student studies O level maths he or she should be able able to know Euclidian Geometry, Algebra, Trigonometry, Probabilities and Basic Statistics. I don't expect a person with O level to know Calculus or Linear Algebra. They should know enough Maths to qualify as a draftsmen, electrician, etc.

As for the teachers, a proper O level in Maths should be able to teach elementary Maths. Unfortunately many teachers these days don't even have this qualification. A person who has got a good A level Maths result should be able to teach O Level Maths. Only A level Maths requires a Teacher to have Maths / Physics Degree.

To willstewart

The nurture/nature debate has a long history. Why not at least consider the possibility that wealthy parents, on average, are more academically competent than poor parents, and that at least in part, their academic superiority could be passed on in their genes?

Is it "racism" to test that hypothesis? It's surely politically incorrect, but so what?

Apart from that, my respect and admiration to Bagehot for this article.

Whatever you think, one thing is obvious: our state education system is, to be honest, shameful. I spent the first 9 years of my education in the state system (1998-2007) and I was incredibly lucky that my mum decided to put me into private education 3 years ago because the difference was overwhelming. When our state education system now scores lower than Slovenia on maths results whilst our private education system is hailed as one of the best in the world, how can we live with ourselves whilst this gross disparity is allowed to continue.

My 2 cents is this: we have just over 4,000 secondary schools in this country and over 21,000 primary schools, that's 25,000 schools all with different facilities, different funding, in different environments, with different intakes of students, from different cultural and social and economic backgrounds, with different problems so how exactly do we expect a one-size-fits-all approach to work?

There are 4 things that need to happen to solve this problem:
1) we need to make sure that teachers know what they're teaching. If you have a primary school maths teacher then get them to try a SAT paper, and if it turns out that there are things they don't know then give them training so they do. You can hardly expect teachers to teach subjects they don't understand themselves.

2) we need to stop telling teachers how to teach, they all have different students of different abilities and dispositions and so they need to be given the freedom to tailor their teaching to their students. In other words, give schools the freedom to do whatever they think is best for their pupils, regardless of what the opinion of bureaucrats in whitehall (or wherever the national curriculum is administered) think.

3) create an adequate system for evaluating school's performance. Admittedly, I don't have any concrete ideas on this one except that evaluating them on how well their students can tick the boxes on their exam papers is most definitely not going to encourage schools to give them a useful education.

4) Use ofsted to ensure that schools maintain a minimum standard. Obviously, if schools are going to try lots of new things some are bound to fail so you need ofsted to ensure that all schools meet a minimum standard so that no child's education is ruined by an irresponsible, say, headteacher.

Basically, what I'm saying is that each school is different so if you let them adapt to their individual situations and let them innovate new ways of teaching then they will almost certainly do far better. Give them a target to aim for (reform exams and league tables), then give them the freedom to do what they think will best achieve those results, and I guarantee they will find innovative new ways to improve education that nobody in Whitehall would ever dream of (it would help even more if you encourage schools to share their new ideas so the good ones get spread around).

It might also help if the government gave schools some more funding but the main focus has got to be reforming the system, which is what successive governments have failed to do for the last 30 years.