A friend of mine passed on this article to me regarding a radical functioning policy initiative to tackle the chronic underachievement of working class kids in the school system. This problem is as bad here as it is in many countries throughout the world, but politicians are unwilling to really attack the problem.
Sinn Féin in the North have certainly made efforts to try and make changes, but the experience of England is that the removal of the 11+ will not on its own solve the problems faced by working class kids. A more radical approach is required if we truly wish to see children from predominantly working class areas reaching their full potential.
Anyway below is a large chunk of the article. if you wish to read it in full go to
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-from-north-carolina-a-model-of-how-to-transform-education-1803563.html
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Did you know that there are more children getting into Oxbridge every year from the pool of 300 kids at Eton than from the 300,000 kids (in England) on free school meals. Either you believe those Etonians are born smarter – an absurd proposition – or our school system is failing poor children on a vast scale. How many great minds are we allowing to atrophy just because they weren't born to wealth?
It doesn't have to be like this. A far better system is possible; we just need to follow the evidence. And the road-map runs through – of all places – North Carolina. Something extraordinary has been happening in the state's schools over the past few decades, and the best guide to this experiment is an important new book by Professor Gerald Grant called Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.
He looks at two very similar cities – Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level – while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?
He looks at two very similar cities – Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level – while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?
Raleigh's governors decided to do something bold and unconventional: they looked to the scientific evidence. In 1966, Professor James Coleman was commissioned by the White House to conduct the largest study, to that time, of what makes good pupils succeed and bad pupils fail. After years of on-the-ground analysis, he came up with something nobody expected. He found that the single biggest factor determining whether you do well at school or not isn't your parents, your teachers, your school buildings or your genes. It was, overwhelmingly, the other kids sitting in the classroom with you. If a critical mass of them are demotivated, pissed off and disobedient, you won't learn much. But if a critical mass of them are hard-working, keen and stick to the rules, you will probably learn. Watch any 10-year-old: they are little machines for snuffling out the sensitivities of their peer group, and conforming to them.
Facing their schools' failure in the 1980s, the Raleigh school board returned to this evidence and tried to puzzle out: how should it change the way we run our schools? Touring the schools, they could see why the research was right. Children from poor families need more help than kids from rich families. They are more likely to have chaotic home lives, less likely to have the importance of education drilled into them from birth, and they have lower expectations for themselves.
In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school's pupils, the teachers can't cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.
So they formulated a bold – and strikingly simple – solution. They wouldn't allow any school, by law, to have more than 40 per cent of its children on free school meals, or more than 25 per cent of children who were a grade below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the children who needed the most help wouldn't be lumped together where their problems would become insurmountable; they would be broken up and fanned out across the educational system. Raleigh merged its school system with white suburban Wake County, so they became one entity, sharing pupils. In order to soothe suburban suspicion at this change, Raleigh turned a third of its inner-city schools into specialist academies, offering excellent music or drama or language specialisms. Soon, children were bussing in both directions every morning, in and out of the suburbs.
Many conservatives savaged the plan as "social engineering" and said it was doomed to fail. Some parents were angry, and a few decamped for the private school system – until the results came in. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.
It's not hard to see why. Each school had a core majority who respected the rules and valued education – and the other kids normalised to their standards. Those who found it tough could now be given special attention, because they weren't any longer surrounded by a mass of equally troubled kids. Today, 94 per cent of parents in Raleigh say they are happy with their child's education. School boards supporting this integration keep getting re-elected.
Raleigh succeeded because it built genuinely comprehensive schools: in which rich, middle-class and poor kids learned together. In Britain, we tell ourselves we have built "comprehensives" – but, except in a few enclaves, we have done nothing of the sort.
We allocate school places according to how close you live to a school. This immediately creates a social apartheid where middle-class children have successful schools in leafy suburbs, while poorer children are ring-fenced in sink schools and end up at Tesco at 16 with few useable skills. (Rich children are creamed off entirely into private schools.) Comprehensivisation didn't fail; it didn't happen.
There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian – and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools in which just one per cent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country.
So we know how to make schools work: integrate them. Occasionally, our politicians take a tiny step that brings us closer to this. The Labour council in Brighton allocates school places by lottery; the Tories say they will abandon catchment areas, letting a few poor kids slip through. But both only tinker at the extreme social segregation that crowbars apart the educational system.
Integration is a good policy for bleak recession times since it delivers dramatic improvements at little extra cost. Raleigh actually spends less than the US national average on its schools, and 25 per cent less per pupil than failing Syracuse. In the long term, integration actually saves us a fortune in welfare payments and prevented crime.
Yes, the right will scream at first that it is "an attack on the middle class". In fact, it is a great compliment to the middle class: it wants to use their children and their values as the sun around which every child's education revolves. Yes, some parents will scream that they don't want their kids being taught alongside "chavs" and "pikeys". This should be called out bluntly – it is bigotry.
A democracy is based on a bargain: every child gets a chance to succeed, whatever their background. Today, we are breaking our deal. We are leaving millions of children to fail, just because their parents didn't have money. Do we want to be a country where our children are sorted at five into different playgrounds according to Daddy's bank account? Do we want to be an place where rich children only glimpse poor children from the car window as they are driven to their better, plusher school, and their better, plusher lives? Or do we want something better for our kids?
Our politicians insist that "we're all in this together". This will only be true if – at last, and at least – our children go to school together.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
Its simple Darwin - natural selection.
ReplyDeleteKids born to parents with high IQ are likely themselves to have a similar IQ, that's basic genetics.
Kids born to parents who spend their lives on the dole, leeching off the state, are likely to do the same, as they grow up in an environment where such parasitic behaviour is viewed as acceptable.
Peter Valhala said...
ReplyDelete"Its simple Darwin - natural selection.
Kids born to parents with high IQ are likely themselves to have a similar IQ, that's basic genetics.
Kids born to parents who spend their lives on the dole, leeching off the state, are likely to do the same, as they grow up in an environment where such parasitic behaviour is viewed as acceptable."
- A Reply -
Of course most children in more deprived areas (indeed in many middle wage earner areas) had parents working to scrape a living together in order to maintain any sense of normality in this greed driven and subsequently high cost society. Increasingly, we do find that parents are unemployed or underemployed due to the catastrophic economic decisions made by this govt and the devotion shown by the govt to their cronies; whether they be bankers, developers or any other idiot with an inflated sense of their own abilities.
The idea of education is to fulfill and nurture the potential of every child in society so that they may contribute individually in their own unique way to the society in which they live. A pipe fitter is every bit as important to society as doctor is; although it is very questionable what value bankers, estate agents and such ilk actually provide to society. It's interesting to note that bankers are often high IQ individuals.
I believe since Darwin first postulated his insights into natural selection further studies have found that a species who becomes too specialised often faces extinction. Expanding on this theory, it is found that such species who have evolved into such specialisation mode are often incapable of dealing with unspecified risks and dangers due to their over-reliance on a small number of survival traits. Rather than creating new traits, they just perpetuate the existing traits in splendid isolation from their total environment. They become too cocky, if you like, of their own attributes; having attached too much weight to specific survival traits without developing a requisite number of broad and adaptable features to ensure survival of the entire species over time.
We are experiencing human corollary to this theory in that a subsection of our society is becoming organised within such a narrow and narrowing band of traits. Recently, high IQ individuals, some of the most educated people in Western civilisation, constructed one of the most elaborate financial system failures in human history. These people, who were not content with feeding off the toil of industry and its workers through interest payment extraction, required ever bigger masses of capital to accumulate. As with all parasites, they became very specialised in how they operated and with whom they socialised.
They often go to the same type of schools, if not the very same schools. They've spread into the media, govt and the financial matrixx. The fence themselves off from the rest of society and continually self reinforce their own sense of entitlements. They create myths to explain their success while ignoring the collateral damage inflicted on wage earners throughout their societies via the machinisations of their asset inflating schemes. There is no lie too big enough, no omission of balanced analysis or facts which they will not gleefully manipulate to their own advantage. As always, they manipulate the media and find scapegoats. Not content with merely creating indebtitude through mortgage and other interest payments on wage earners, they have foisted the burden of their stupidity onto the ordinary workers across most Western countries through various tax payer bailouts. They continually have their cronies in government rewrite the laws to suit their narrow interests.
Thus we come to a conundrum that Darwin probably didn't envision. Namely, he didn't seem to envision a specialised subspecies within a given phylum who turns parasitic by the very virtue of their specialisation and can therefore destroy not only the subspecies but the entire species.
Peter, a chara
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that smarts have very little to do with what you achieve. The Brits have today a report on this reporting how location is the main factor not ability.
However i would say that England under labour has pursued an educational policy that is nominally designed to be more equal and more focussed on the child but has by all accounts descended into a mess of politically correct, aspirational nonsense removed from the kids interest.
The paper work per kid is apparently horrendous. This is anecdotal and I am open to correction from others.
malcolm gladwell's outliers is a nice popular science review of this topic showing how advantage is the driver and not ability.
Peter, finally of course its foolish to think that leeches only operate at the top. People like sean of Bert. Its foolish to think leeches are not in the bottom levels of society. Of course they are.
But its surely blind work to think that wealth is a reflection of your moral rectitude. Are you from the 19th Century :) ?
J
A lot of this had to do with the parents.and it is a class issue unfortunately , those with the money know how importantly education is and they continually aspire to have their children attend the very best.We I mean the working class have our children going to schools where a lot of the teachers( I speak from my experience of sending 4 kids under 12 going to school presently)don't have the interest and they the teachers deal with kids who have serious difficulties.
ReplyDeleteAlso the Parents in my opinion are inclined now to put their children secondly to the parents social life., Latch door kids are the norm now.
The Mother HAS to work outside the home now, this has serious implications for society AND IN
Ireland we have not yet felt the real effects of this yet.What we need are quality teachers like what they have in finland. they have big numbers of kids in each classroom, but very high quality kids. The teachers should be made to sit exams every couple of years, they are extremely important to us and therefore they should be paid very well, but only quality will do.
I and My wife made decision not to socialise but to give our kids everything we didn't have in terms of education, let them try all different aspects. it is tough, But I feel they are experiencing more that we ever did and hpefully society will benifet from that expierence. but then again families on lower income that us,don't have the money for this, but instead smoke and piss it down the drain.and then wonder what has gone wrong.I could go on for ever.BUT EDUCATION EMPOWERS ALL OF US