Britain will learn nothing by trying to emulate China’s schools
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Version 0 of 1. One third of England’s secondary schools are “failing”. In some places half of them are “bad”. A total of 170,000 pupils are in “inadequate” institutions – 70,000 more than two years ago. Fifty more schools are in “special measures” than last year. This is the verdict of the nation’s schools inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw. Half a century of incessant centralised reform and upheaval, of restless fidgeting between local and Whitehall control, has come to this conclusion. It is a dreadful comment on British public administration. But what is a failing school, and who says what is bad? Wilshaw’s condemnation is based on the most sophisticated monitoring ever devised. Teachers and pupils are measured, tested, scored and classified. Inspectors claim they can tell whether a school is “good or bad” as soon as they walk in the door. It is, says Wilshaw, a matter of leadership: schools with good leadership get good results. This suggests that Whitehall’s long obsession with school structure and governance has been a waste of time. There appears to be little difference in “results” between local schools, specialist schools, government academies and free schools. The thesis, much-vaunted by Labour and Conservatives alike, that “competition and parental choice” are the way to “force up standards” has been expensive rubbish. So-called results, Wilshaw says, depend on the quality of the headteacher. The millions spent on restructuring would have been better spent selecting and training good heads. Does no one audit these fiascos? More worrying is the role of scoring in these judgments. For decades educationists have tried to assess the output of schools, and largely failed. They have fallen back on anything they can find that is measurable. The outputs are not happy children or well-adjusted or even well-paid ones, let alone a more productive economy or a more stable society. They are merely exam results and test scores, places in a league table. It’s like judging piety by testing the Bible. During the coalition’s “Chinese” phase – roughly 2011-13 – ministers trooped east to learn “how to do it”. Everything was allegedly better in China. Education minister Elizabeth Truss raced there after being mesmerised by its maths scores in the notorious Pisa tables. She found that Beijing had perfected the art of teaching maths and thus come top. England, she decided, should learn and copy. Those closer to the ground knew that China had bamboozled Pisa. Its maths score was the result of industrial-scale cramming, cheating and institutional corruption – and based on just a few schools in Shanghai, not all of China. Whitehall ignored this. The then education secretary Michael Gove even told Ofqual to “benchmark” English test results, especially in maths, to the bogus Chinese ones. The American academic Yong Zhao savagely exposes the myth of Chinese educational excellence in Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? He notes that back in 1964 America scored worst out of 12 top nations in maths and science. Presidents duly hurled initiatives into the breach: Reagan’s Nation at Risk, Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Race to the Top. Each cost millions; each carried a battery of carrots and sticks, measurements and tests. Half a century later, Zhao says, the US is still apparently as “bad” at maths and science. It is way down every league table (alongside Britain), yet over the same period it has outperformed every rival in economic productivity, military might, space exploration, artistic creativity and stable democracy, anything you care to list. It wins the most Nobel prizes. Its companies are best at digital technology and innovation. It writes great novels and makes great films. It is hard to fault its labour force. China urbanised its rural economy and duly boosted industrial productivity. It prospered. But its schools remain rooted in two millennia of keju, the system for selecting a regimented elite loyal to “Confucian orthodoxy and imperial order”, ideally adaptable to communist discipline. Zhao points out that “China saw no renaissance, no enlightenment, no industrial revolution”, and offers none today. It remains an authoritarian state unable to tolerate dissent, experiment or diversity. No educationist stops to ask if something is odd here. The gods of the test defy all challenge. The west associates China’s economic success with maths because it must be due to education, and maths can be easily measured. (Chinese reformers, worried at producing zombie automatons, are ironically seeking to mimic western teaching methods.) The relevance of China’s experience to Britain is that it is based on the same premise that the performance of a school, indeed of an individual teacher or pupil, can be scored and classified. If that were true, Britain over the past 20 years should have shot to the top of every table. It has clearly not done so. Its algorithm count is deplorable and teenage schooling is clearly in the dumps. Yet Britain is recovering fastest of any developed economy. We might as well conclude that our schools are triumphant. The regulatory terrorism practised by Ofsted – the hysteria of the test, the exam result, the shock visit, the league table, the crass classification into good, bad or inadequate – is a parody of Dickens’s Gradgrind. It perpetuates the old fallacy that if what is important cannot be measured, what is measurable must be important. Education reformers from Steiner to Dewey and Montessori tried to wrestle schools from the tyranny of the “objective” test. They have failed. When I studied education, I recall no evidence that testing made teachers more inspiring or pupils happier, more productive, more creative or better at meeting the pressures of life. Pointless subjects were justified as “mind training” or “good for discipline”. There is some hope. Whenever I hear of a school in chaos, its pupils phoning, texting, dealing, gaming and misbehaving – anything but truanting, which Chinese children are excoriated for doing – I sense there is life in the system yet. The reality is that no one has found a way of measuring the purpose or value of education. This must be why its methods and contents are so reactionary. If hospitals were as averse to innovation as schools, we would all be dead of the plague. Whitehall has admitted that its restructuring and monitoring have failed to raise its own definition of standards. Perhaps it might save the two-thirds of teacher time no longer spent in front of pupils but going instead on testing and administration. Perhaps it might divert its attention to training better teachers. But who defines better? |