Michael Gove answers on Education

[skirtingtoday]

Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Education) in Jan 2012, answered questions from public engagements and twitter at a Select Committee.

Full transcript is here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 178601.htm but a few questions stand out:

Q97 Chair: Secretary of State, we are moving to a novel, new section: quick fire questions and answers, inspired by the Twitter feed #askgove-5,000-plus wanting to interact with you. So we are going to go round each of us in fairly strict timing. If you could give us quick answers, that would be great.

Michael Gove: I will try my best.

Q98 Chair: One is: if "good" requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?

Michael Gove: By getting better all the time.

Q99 Chair: So it is possible, is it?

Michael Gove: It is possible to get better all the time.

Q100 Chair: Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?

Michael Gove: I cannot remember.

[Sinned]

.... and your point is ....?

[PatJ]

I think the point is that the Government needs to leave education to educators and quit passing laws and establishing rules that make no sense at all.

In addition, I think the article clearly points out that those in the government charged with overseeing education, don't have a clue as to what education is about. Worse, if schools to abide by the government's silly rules and regulations, the government cuts funding for them forcing school administration to impose regulations that both they and the teachers know are bad policies.

If you really want to know how I feel, go teach for 30 years and put up with the nonsense from the government.

Thank you for letting me vent.

PatJ, (A retired school teacher)

[Milfmog]

[Moderator note]

This thread has the potential to stray into political waters, which, as we all know, are off limits here.

Take care folks; I have no desire to lock the thread...

[Moderator note ends]

Have fun,


Ian.

[crfriend]

One needn't get into political waters at all, one can stay happily in the playground of simple statistics and point up how little most folks understand about the notion of "better" -- and why "better" is frequently the enemy of "good enough".

To use an analogy, we can examine the current fad in the US of constantly "raising the bar"; this has the corrosive tendency to undermine entire social systems that actually function quite well by changing the rules on the fly. This destabilizes things which is likely not what the fad-subscriber was trying to do.

Another one is the ever-present demands for "more productivity". The upshot of that is that fewer people are working longer hours, for less pay, to get an ever-increasing amount of stuff done. This deprives others of employment and burns the employed ones out to the point where permanent disability is becoming shockingly common.

All in the name of "better" -- but "better" for whom?

To answer the third question in the OP's post, the guy being interviewed was almost certainly better at literacy than numeracy as he fails to grasp the notion of the simple bell-curve. The bell-curve is by far and away one of the most common expressions in the natural world, and it's very hard to fight nature successfully all the time. It can be done once in a while, but constant success cannot be achieved. It seems that we as societies have forgotten that failure is an important and intrinsic part of success; we don't learn much from success -- we learn from failure, and that's ultimately how we move forward.

The problem here is that by focusing relentlessly on "better" we lose track of the meta-questions that ultimately influence things in the background is remarkably subtle and sometimes unforeseen ways. I think that more attention needs to be paid to concepts like philosophy and ethics as those tend to temper many forms of insanity.

[PatJ]

By definition, most people are average - therefore the bell curve would seem to be where the grades should fall for most schools. Unfortunately, many parents can't imagine their child as being "average" and receiving "C" grades. (Every parent wants their child to be an "A" student.)

Moreover, there are many who advocate pay advancements to teachers, not based on time of service, but student achievement encouraging distortion of the grading system.

Grading scales often times fail miserably in measuring student performance. They often times don't measure what a student learned during the school year, but rather how quickly the student learned it. Mistakes made early in the year, are often mastered by the end of the year, yet poor performance early in the school year lowers the ending average grade.

By the time students get into college - the grading system will not follow the bell shaped curve. Many lower performing students do not continue into college which removes part of the bell and students tend to focus on courses where they have an interest and aptitude. Therefore, students tend to achieve higher grades because they are studying material where their strength is.

[Tor]

I'm not exactly an advocate of schools, but I'll bite on some of that last.

Is a bell curve grading proper? If not, then there is no reason for most students to by definition receive a C. Indeed, if school is mandatory (which, by the way, it isn't in all but a few backwards places), then... Hmmm, might be straying into dangerous territory. Let me close this by noting that bell curve grading of a class is, to the students at least, possibly the most self-esteem damaging method of grading.

As for the issue you mention of beginning of year vs. end of year performance, that can be rectified easily enough by weighting performance over time on a curve, with early scores contributing less to the average than late scores. This, of course, will provoke all kinds of arguments as to what curve should be used... which could be mostly solved by doing away with public schools, whereupon the arguments have a much less portentous effect, and therefore will be much muted.

In case you are wondering, I haven't set foot in an official school classroom as a student since I was ten - except for the college orchestra I take non-credit - since I was sixteen (IIRC). Oh, yes, there was also the college vocal group I was part of for a while, also non-credit.

[crfriend]

Is a bell curve grading proper?

This is a question that can be taken in a couple of ways. One of those reflects the responses of a body of pupils to the material in question expressed as a ratio of "right" to "wrong" (obviously, in grey areas like philosophy this rule is not hard and fast, but rather has to do with how well the individual defends his thesis); the other has to do with "shifting the curve" either "up or down" depending on the performance of a local group of individuals.

The former is the accepted mechanism and has been used for decades to establish a "passing grade" which allows a pupil to progress from grade to grade. The latter is a fairly modern -- and rather pernicious -- idiom that penalizes high-achieving pupils in order to make under-achieving ones look good. Clearly a single standard needs to be arrived at -- and adhered to -- so fairness reigns.

If not, then there is no reason for most students to by definition receive a C.

If the overall score of a large body of students/pupils describes a bell-curve (and one does need a large body to draw a reasonable conclusion) and the peak of that is a "C" grade (shall we say a 75% "correctness ratio" on the various tests) then it can be accepted. Ahead of the curve, you'll have types who commit errors less frequently (not that I do not make assumptions of intelligence here) and behind the curve you'll have the ones who do commit errors.

Things get more complex when the entire purpose of the "educational system" is to "teach to the test" with the single-minded focus of maximizing test scores whilst at the same time omitting important lessons that are critical to everyday existence -- and that's what's being increasingly seen in some societies. The net effect of that is to produce folks that can ace a test but yet cannot fill out a job-application or necessarily function in the real world.

Whatever happened to the notion of teaching critical-thinking skills and the ability to seek, and find, the information required to engage critical-thinking? That's the gold standard, if you ask this writer. The problem is that if critical-thinking is encouraged and fostered then it leads to "uncomfortable questions" later being asked by an informed electorate (unless one lives in a despotic regime).

[john62]

It is even worse here in Australia, all students at certain levels have to do these standard tests BUT the results are released to the public, parents therefore attempt to pick the school with the highest level as that school must be "better" than other schools in the area. It has also been stated in some newspapers that some students manage to miss these tests so that the average is higher.

John

[Sarongman]

Good on you John62, I was going to mention the dreaded 'naplan' tests as well. Not only does it score schools unfairly but also stresses pupils and teachers. I have two average granddaughters who are, frankly, frightened of them and a high achiever granddaughter who was encouraged to attend the tests, possibly because her averages leverage the school up the rankings. Said high achiever is now undertaking home schooling due to intolerable bullying

[PatJ]

CR Friend - I need to quote you "Things get more complex when the entire purpose of the "educational system" is to "teach to the test" with the single-minded focus of maximizing test scores whilst at the same time omitting important lessons that are critical to everyday existence."

Amen to that - I have seen far too many teachers who do exactly that - teach to the test so that students achieve high scores for the sake of achieving high scores. They usually end up knowing nothing at all when it comes time to apply the same material to fresh problems.

[Sinned]

I was always taught that the purpose of a Degree course was not so much to teach knowledge but to teach how to think. When I look back on the examinations we had at the end of each module in the CompSci course I did the questions very rarely required a factual regurgitation and were more geared toward the "how would you do this" or at least got you thinking on how to solve practical problems that bore some relation to real life. Admittedly this is a little away from the current thread direction. I come from a Grammar School and there we were taught to expand our education hence us developing in the late 1960's a computer for illustrating the parts of a computer - input, accumulator, memory, display etc. It was called D.E.N.I.C.E - Darlington's Electronic Numerical Instructional Computer Equipment. Very advanced for those times. Another example - we built our own slot racing track from scratch using baseboard and narrow copper strips for the slots. The school supplied some of the materials. Progressive.

[Tor]

If the overall score of a large body of students/pupils describes a bell-curve (and one does need a large body to draw a reasonable conclusion) and the peak of that is a "C" grade (shall we say a 75% "correctness ratio" on the various tests) then it can be accepted. Ahead of the curve, you'll have types who commit errors less frequently (not that I do not make assumptions of intelligence here) and behind the curve you'll have the ones who do commit errors.

True enough that a test of well chosen (or, depending on what it's for, excessive) difficulty given to a suitably large group will produce a response that closely follows a bell curve. No argument there. There remains the question of whether the passing grade should measure a floor competency, in which case the difficulty is set by the purpose and the bell curve can centre where it pleases. If relative ranking is what the test is to produce, then it is a question of setting the test difficulty such that the average person would get a C - but in any case force fitting the resulting scores to a pre-defined curve is no good (as I see you saying).

Perhaps incomplete, but I've been busy and am tired now.

[PatJ]

Oh and there is always the problem with:

"Would 'you' go to a doctor who only passed courses with a 'C-'?"

Grades not only measure performance in school - they label us for life.

[Sarongman]

What about the attitude of the student, which runs the gamut of hostile, a teacher's worst nightmare, at one end to Malala and those like her who CRAVE education, at the other! I, for one, have teachers in my family for at least three generations and the teacher of today has an uphill task, in some areas, to instil any meaningful knowledge into his/her students, the braying of politicians notwithstanding.