Rene’s Assessment

I must first of all thank Stephen Downes for his truly excellent post on the  Monkeysphere Ideology. It is a profound and insightful analysis of some unhealthy fundamentals in society, of which this banking crisis is perhaps just a single symptom. This post is about how the education sector perhaps is suffering the same symptoms, and so might actually be headed for a similar meltdown.

Fail

It is argued that the financial crisis is one of destructive incentives, and hyperinflation of quality ratings, that lead to a massive over-investment in what turned out to be worthless assets. A truly horrific oversimplification, but it will do for the purposes of this post. Higher Education also rates it’s products, and ironically it is a credit rating system. Attainment in the UK is measured in academic credit on levels 4 (first year undergraduate) to 8 (doctorate). Credit on these levels is highly valued, and often seen as key to successful participation in the modern information society. As a result there is a dramatic effort to widen participation in an attempt to get up to 40% of the population equiped with a level 4 qualification or higher. And in a similar way to how mortgages were handed out without ensuring clients had sufficient capital and earnings for repayment, we are now handing out academic credit without ensuring that when we hand it out, it represents adequate intellectual capital.

There is no need for this, as my case certainly doesn’t revolve around some elitist notion that the majority of the population is fundamentally incapable of learning and functioning on this level. The problem is that we are being given the wrong incentives. We are incentivized to pass, preferably with a first. Our funding, and our ranking in league-tables depends on it. And slowly but surely, this erosion is also eroding the value of Higher Education. And unfortunately, it erodes the value of all degrees, just as the credit crisis is devaluing all our houses, regardless of our credit-worthiness. And with the value of qualifications diminishing, and their cost increasing, inevitably the time will come that this eroded qualification is no longer worth the inflated tuition fee that is being asked for it.

The key for recovery to me is failure. We should be allowed to fail, learn from that failure, and let a phoenix arise from it’s ashes. We seem to have missed the point that success is a value that is relative, relative to failure. We forget that the greatest of successes have often come from strings of failures. Who knows what great innovative company might arise from the ashes of a bankrupt General Motors, but we will probably never know. Just like we will never know how great some of our students might have been after overcoming criticism, setbacks and failure, because in stead we have sent them away with only a marginal and ever decreasing  successes. Failure is the foundation of greatness, and we need to learn to embrace it.

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There’s been a lot of upheaval this week about SAT tests. After a report published by the Children, Schools and Family committee of the House of Commons, MPs warn that national Sats tests distort education, which then lead to the schools minister defending the Sats, followed by technical difficulties with the tests. Personally I am not convinced the tests are really the problem.

One of the keynotes at the Blackboard Europe 2008 conference was given by Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA program for the OECD. He presented a very compelling set of ideas around successful (secondary) educations. Some of the conditions he identified (and all of these are based on the data gathered by the programme over the past years) are:

• No stratification. Education systems that have separate streams, schools and or qualifications for learners based on their performance tend to do poorly. An example of this is the Dutch system, where secondary education is stratified over VMBO, HAVO and VWO based on a learners performance in primary school. The British system actually comes out quite well here (if we ignore the stratification that takes place because of the divide between private and public schools that is).
• Standards. It is important to work to common standards. Central examinations are one way of enforcing common standards, and so the SAT tests do satisfy this condition.
• Autonomy. It is crucial for schools and teachers to have a high degree of autonomy as long as their performance raises no concerns. Here we obviously fail completely as the British system dictates how schools teach and assess to a very high degree.
• High Expectations, challenge and support. Both for teachers and learners, education should provide challenge, the expectation of high performance, but also plenty of support (staff development for instance). I think this is another area in which we fail to deliver.

Our main problem lies in the area of autonomy. We no longer trust our teachers and schools do do what they do best based on their professional judgments. In stead there is this weird notion that education is better served by central generic judgments made by policymakers. The problem with SATs isn’t that they provide a common high stakes benchmark for learners. The problem is that this information is abused for public league tables and the like, which inevitably leads to pressures on learners that have nothing to do with their personal learning. It’s the same pressures that lead to Universities coercing students into filling out the national student survey more favorably.

In Finland schools have no idea about their performance related to their neighbors. Funny enough in Finland it doesn’t really make a difference. Only 4% of the variance in scores on the PISA tests can be assigned to the difference in quality between schools. Finnish schools have around 9 applicants for every position offered, and this is not because of higher salaries or anything like that. It is because the system in Finland provides a challenging environment in which people are valued, can grow and develop and actually make a difference.

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It’s been a long day full of many, many presentations. Fortunately the last presentation was actually one of the more interesting ones, and I did not have to fight off the embarrassment of falling asleep too hard. It was a presentation by Jakob Wandall from Skolestyrelsen.
about the new national computer based assessments in secondary education that have been introduced in Denmark.

While the technical side of this was interesting (they were using computer adaptive testing for instance), the most interesting bit of the talk had nothing to do with technology at all. It had to do with how the test was used, presented used and regulated.

In England, high stakes tests are a very big deal. The main reason is that they are always is that they are inevitable translated into rankings and funding consequences, leading to teachers and school becoming completely obsessed with assessments, drilling students until they are green in the face in the idle expectation it might raise the school a place or 2 in the oh so important regional league tables. It is this abomination that I think the Danish have elegantly addressed (apparently with the English system as the example of what they wanted to avoid at all costs, and understandably so!)

The publication of the results of these national benchmarks is strictly regulated. The national average is published and used for policy purposes, but no regional or individual result is public. Teachers can review all results of all their students, and even responses to individual questions, but are forbidden to communicate these results other then to the student and their parents (and this communication is not in the form of a grade, but of a textual report with feedback). Students have to be given their result by a qualified teacher that discusses the results and provides relevant feedback on the performance.

So it is impossible for a school, a local authority or the press, to rate and rank scores just on the numerical outcomes of a single test. It provides stakeholders on every level with the relevant information, without the detrimental effects of publication that we see in the US and UK. I think we’ve got a lot to learn from the Scandinavian approach to education

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