In ‘New Exam Weapon Against Exam Cheating‘ the Beeb declare that new computerised techniques devised by Cambridge Assessment will be able to better spot exam cheating. And for that we should all be grateful.

However, Cambridge Assessment’s marketing/sales & PR team must have gone home on Friday extremely happy given the space that the BBC Education article had devoted to their ‘new’ computerised technique.

Even more strangely, in the very same article there’s nothing to suggest that this is news at all for at one point we’re told: “Statistical analysis is already widely used in multiple-choice tests to catch out cheats.” Then why bother reporting this PR plant in the first place?

It’s not as if it was a slow news day what with daily attacks on the UK’s public education system waged by the Tories.

If the largest news organisation on the planet – the Beeb – employs people who can’t spot a product press release then so much for their quality and so much for Reith.

Cambridge Assessment is a company like any other. The Beeb shouldn’t
be promoting its products. Like the ‘Facebook can improve results’
nonsense story of the past, this simply does a company’s marketing for free.

Sorry. Not free, actually, as British licence payers pay for the Beeb. So, in effect, the very same licencees are paying for Cambridge Assessment’s advertising!

The only balance that can be found in the article is when the OCR
are asked to chip in. But obviously bemused if not bored by this non-news story the only reply the OCR could come up with was no more than: “Another weapon in our armoury is always welcome” (i.e. tell us something we don’t know!).

There is then a peculiar whiff around this story. And if we were one of the many other exam providers vying for UK public funds, we’d be pretty miffed with this freebie for Cambridge Assessment.

What could explain this error of judgement? Perhaps knowing the difference between a product press release and a real scoop is not on BBC training manuals anymore.

No wonder Murdoch hates the Beeb.

We did think that by doing supply teaching the current regulations on overseas teachers could be circumvented anyway but regardless of this, the proposed change will at the very least make it even harder for NQTs to find a teaching position and will surely have a knock-on effect on future NQT numbers.

It appears that Gove is modelling this latest innovation on current practice in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) where doctors and nurses have long been recruited from overseas.

In fact, so popular is the UK as a destination for medical staff from overseas that it has led to dangerous shortages in countries where opportunities and wages are lower.

Like with the NHS, however, it has also meant that UK-trained medical staff have capitalised on their training and moved abroad with Australia, Canada and North America especially attractive – have you ever wondered at the number of medical staff in US hospital dramas with British accents?

So instead of attracting trained teachers, the upshot of the Gove-rnor’s reform could actually see an exodus of experienced UK-trained staff moving overseas. And who would blame them with wage and budget cuts.

There are also no guarantees that staff from places like Australia and New Zealand will bother to come to the UK given the strength of their respective economies and currenices.

The UK could be then left with recruitment problems. No overseas-trained staff wanting to come. No UK-trained staff wanting to stay.

In this case, you’d think NQTs would be asked to fill the gap but if they get wind of Gove’s meddling and read the news regarding cuts in training places then they may opt for other careers (and just when the need for primary school teachers has never been greater).

There’ll then be no NQTs to fill the gap. With no NQTs, it seems we are left only with TeachFirst’s undertrained, underexperienced and underqualified newbies to fill the void.

But TeachFirst-ers cost less. And as his management consultant buddies will have reminded him, when you wish your banking chums to keep all their soft-earned cash making cuts to public services is all that matters.

Test developers Grant and Jennifer Wilson think so, and they have developed what they believe are the perfect tests, described in a new novel by UCLA author Ron Dietel. The innovative performance assessments even help the U.S. become number one in the world in math and science. But one day, Jennifer discovers a secret list of student names who are exceptions to the high-stakes consequences of the test. So secret that someone is willing to kill for it.

The Perfect Test has just been published. Further information is available on Dietel’s web site. All royalties are being donated to the non-profit education organizations, Education Writers Association and Learning Matters.

State College, Pennsylvania (CNN) — A Pennsylvania mother has decided she does not want her two children to take the two-week-long standardized tests given by her state as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law. And she hopes other parents will do the same.

Michele Gray’s sons — Ted Rosenblum, 11, and John Michael Rosenblum, 9 — did independent study the week of March 14 while their classmates were filling in hundreds of bubbles in classrooms with doors marked, “Quiet. Testing in Progress.”

Gray says the only legal exemption that would allow her kids to sit out the tests was a religious objection. So that’s what she did.

But Gray says her concerns go well beyond religion. “The more I look at standardized tests, the more I realize that we have, as parents, been kind of sold a bill of goods.”

She says the tests are not accurate measures of accomplishment, create undue anxiety for students and are used to punish schools.

She gives the example of her sons’ award-winning school, Park Forest Elementary, which last year was put on “warning” status after the school’s special education students fell below the level of progress the state expects on their exams.

“The more I looked at it, the more outraged I became,” Gray said, “This is not something I want to be contributing to (or) something I want my children participating in.”

Dr. Timothy Slekar, an associate professor of education at Penn State Altoona, agrees. It was his op-ed piece on the Huffington Post website that inspired Gray to take action.

Slekar is also a father and this year chose not to allow his 11-year-old son Luke to take the tests. He says schools are narrowing their curricula in an effort to boost test scores and wasting too much time preparing for, and then taking, the tests.

He says the tests aren’t an accurate indicator of a child’s — or a school’s — performance. “I’m a father and an educator who’s finally said, ‘This is it. I’m done.’ Something has to give. Something has to change,” Slekar said.

Another education professor, Dana Mitra, also isn’t happy with the tests, but decided to allow her third-grader daughter to take them this year because she’s afraid that holding her daughter out could harm the school’s test results.

“Given that we’re interested in wanting our schools to be the best that they can, we feel pressure as parents to want to help our school,” she said. She’s not sure what she’ll do with her daughter next year.

Testing proponents, such as United Negro College Fund President and CEO Michael Lomax, say parents who opt out “are doing their own children a disservice.” He added, “Testing is a parent’s ally” and that in order to compete with countries such as China and India, U.S. schools need to be held to a higher standard. And testing, he says, is the way to do it.

“The testing isn’t the reason the schools are failing. The instruction is the reason the schools are failing,” Lomax insisted.

But “opt-out” parents like Gray and Slekar are undeterred.

Gray has a Facebook page aimed at helping other parents learn that they are able to opt out of testing and how to do it.

Parents in Colorado have created a similar website.

Despite these efforts, opting out of standardized tests is rare nationwide. The U.S. Department of Education says it doesn’t track the numbers.

At Park Forest Elementary, where Gray’s children go, nine out of 500 were held out of standardized tests this year, including Gray’s. Last year, all the students there took the test.

President Barack Obama, at a March speech at a Virginia school, acknowledged testing reform is needed. But he says testing isn’t going away.

“There will be testing,” he said. “We can have accountability without rigidity — accountability that still encourages creativity inside the classroom, and empowers teachers and students and administrators.”

His administration recently announced a $300 million grant aimed at revamping standardized tests.

Meantime, Ted and John Michael won’t be participating. Their mother thinks if enough parents follow her lead, high-stakes testing may go away altogether.

Michael Lomax thinks parents like Gray are hurting education. “I’m sure they love their kids,” he said, “but I think they are wrong.”

“IF AMERICANS harbored any doubts about their eroded global edge, the recent release of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s fourth international comparison of educational performance should rattle the nation from its “We’re No. 1’’ complacency. The latest Program for International Student Assessment study revealed that, although the United States made some modest gains, it is lagging behind many other developed nations in the ability of its 15-year-olds. The country isn’t flunking: like France, England, and Sweden, learning here has stagnated at below-average levels. That “gentleman’s C’’ should be a call to change course.

Finally, with the fourth PISA study again showing that the US education system is lagging those in many other countries, Americans should admit that there is much to learn from these systems. Relying on one’s past reputation is probably not the best approach for transforming an educational system to meet tomorrow’s needs and challenges. With America’s “can do’’ mentality and superior knowledge base in educational improvement, you could shift course before it’s too late.”

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

Illuminating article and video interview with Joanne Barkan of Dissent magazine about about the lack of democratic accountability, business ideology and questionable science that characterises philanthropic interference in US and increasingly, UK education.

“Headteachers and teachers have told me in no uncertain terms that the current teachers’ standards are ineffective, meaningless and muddy, fluffy concepts. There is also no clear evidence that they help to improve standards.”

“current teachers’ standards…no clear evidence that they help to improve standards”?

How on earth do standards improve standards? Is he talking about two kinds of standards or one? In fact, what is he talking about?

This is the Wiktionary entry for ‘standard’:

Noun
standard (plural standards)
1. A level of quality or attainment.
2. Something used as a measure for comparative evaluations.
3. An object supported in an upright position.
4. A musical work of established popularity.
5. The flag or ensign carried by a cavalry unit.
6. A rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government.
7. A bottle of wine containing 0.750 liters of fluid.
8. One of the upright members that supports the horizontal axis of a transit or theodolite.
9. A manual transmission vehicle.

Surely it can’t be #9, #8, #7, #5, #4 or #3 but what about #1? A level of quality or attainment improves a level of quality or attainment? Or #2? Something used as a measure for comparative evaluations improves something used as a measure for comparative evaluations?

And not forgetting #6: A rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government improves a rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government. Is this what he means?

Of course, he could mean that rewriting the teaching standards will give teachers a better understanding of those standards and their teaching will consequently improve. Not sure.

Whatever he means, Gove seems to think the key to improving teaching is a bit of semantics. You just need to replace a few words and rearrange a few more and you’ll be fine.

We and many others would see things differently. Philosophers for one have shown how definitions are infinitely regressive or subject to circularity. So, for example, standards are a level of quality or attainment are something used as a measure for comparative evaluations are a rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government are and so on and so on. Or, a standard is a level of quality, a level of quality is a standard, which is a level of quality and on it goes.

And for the Rumsfelds and Goves of this world, the problems don’t stop there for even if we did not fall into a regressive or circular trap then there is interpretation and context to worry about. One man’s dog is another man’s friend after all.

We don’t improve teaching by defining something accurately. That is one hell of a dead end. But perhaps the semantics isn’t important. It may be said that Gove has a democratic mandate to raise standards of education. He defines it as he sees fit and there are headteachers, management consultants and researchers more than ready to back him up (in return for a little patronage). He may also say that the ultimate judge of the worth of his reforms is the ballot box, and regardless of the validity of what he is doing the electorate will decide if it is successful or not.

However, it is a pretty strange kind of education where success is determined by the participants and not by its truth. Imagine the success of a new drug or treatment decided by opinions of the patients – important as they are – rather than the hard facts of fewer deaths or longer lives.

But this is how it is with Gove and the Secretary of State role. He can do exactly what he wants and the only thing he worries about is an election every 5 years. And this is the crux of the problem for us.

The Secretary of State can redefine things, declare his commitment to the cause and make speeches but his work isn’t judged until an election. League tables? They reflect on the schools. International comparative studies such as PISA? They can be dealt with – as they are currently – by blaming teachers.

So how can we judge the Secretary’s work better without him taking responsibility for anything? It doesn’t seem that we can. The ballot box is no good. Other measures are sidestepped by criticising others. But we then have a head of tens of thousands of schools, hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of pupils whose performance can never be assessed.

That can’t be right. Perhaps we could raise his standards by improving his standards. Just a thought.

For more information on Sir Ken’s work visit his website

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U[/youtube]

Listen to the broadcast here:

Gove getting a pasting on live BBC radio

Charlie from Lewes, the radio listener, for Education Secretary?! He’ll do a much better job than journo Gove if this is anything to go by.

We should say that we’re not supporting Charles’ opinion that headteachers rather than teachers must be allowed a say in a child’s educational choices. Teachers are far better-suited to the task, especially as headteachers are increasingly seen as business bosses.

However, we fully support treating the choices of all human beings with respect and giving them the chance to make their own choices rather than making decisions for them.

For as Charles from Lewes made clear, educational choices made on the behalf of others will no doubt reflect the self-interest of the patrician and business classes.

Our children are all equal. They’re not factory fodder for the rich and powerful.

How can a school be ‘in the red’? They are publicly-funded. They’re not businesses. Deficits are for companies.

Schools should have enough money. The 6th largest economy in the world has enough money. There’s not a bottomless pit, obviously. But there’s enough to go around. The talk of austerity is a scare tactic.

It is telling that the mainstream media so uncritically employ the language of management consultants, and their co-conspirators in the Tories, to talk about education.

Both these groups do not believe in education as a public good – tuition fees hike, anyone? – and would like nothing better than to privatise the whole thing.

The consultants can be expected to do very nicely in fees from the ‘restructuring’, ‘liberalisation’, ‘marketisation’, ‘streamlining’ or whatever euphemism is en vogue.

The Tories on the other hand can cleverly redirect the taxes paid for education somewhere else, say, lowering income taxes and buying the next election.

For all the balance that the Beeb offers, using neo-liberal business language to talk about state education must be music to Gove and chums’ ears.