Loco Parents

Schools have traditionally treated the teacher-student relationship as one in which the teacher is in loco parentis; that is, the teacher acts in place of a parent. If this were the gold standard, it would save much difficulty in ethical discussion — the teacher would have parental-level rights within the bounds of the school, and commensurate responsibilities. And of course, teachers would be bound by the kind of proprieties and conventions that exist between parent and child.

The contract should work both ways; should parents NOT desire this state of affairs, they should not be sending their children to school. Rather, such parents should educate the children at home, either by themselves, or through private tuition.

I think the point at which the relationship broke down was when schools began to be seen as service providers, with parents as clients and children as objects deposited at the schools by parents for 'servicing' and 'upgrading'. This had at least three bad effects: parents offloaded part of their responsibility, some children no longer thought of teachers as anything but (under)qualified technicians, and some teachers thought of their work as a mechanistic process (no matter how artful).

The only way to repair this situation is to allow the traditional state to persist. Teachers share in the parenting of the child, as far as education goes. You send children to school, the teachers school them. You don't like it, take them out.

Research: A Bitch Too Far?

Busy busy, they all say. Too busy for research. It is a widespread lament in schools. But the irony is that if they were indeed too busy for research, they were likely so because of -lack- of research.

Research is a simple thing. You look at something. You wonder if you can more fully DESCRIBE, EXPLAIN, PREDICT or IMPROVE the phenomenon you're looking at. You make sure that your conclusions are supportable, and then you proceed to lay out how you came to them and what they mean.

That's all.

Changing Atlantean Schools

Atlantis, as has often been said, is a meritocracy. And that said, there are two major flaws in that — the question of what merit is, and the problem of deciding whether such merit is appropriately privileged.

I spoke to Wolff, who once was Sir Wolff, almost Lord Wolff. And Wolff laughed that deep rolling laugh of his, that rare and dangerous laugh, and he told me some stories.

There is always privilege, he said, and always people who resent such. There are those who claim the aegis of the Dauntless Hero, but who have never sought to live up to his ideals. I have said, not all our sons from Cathay or Sind or more distant lands are worthy of the name. Indeed, I suggest that each year, not more than 20% of such sons be allowed to claim a birthright. We need new blood.

I replied, "My friend, how can you deny such people their birthright? Their fathers were alumni, why should they not benefit?"

Wolff's laughter now had an edge to it. Four generations of my lineage have been sons of the Hero. Far be it from me to be ungrateful. But I must quote the words of the Man, when he said not all who called him Lord would be recognized by him. I suggest that the Governing Authorities decide, case by case, on who should receive such honours. And when there are no more places, THERE ARE NO MORE PLACES.

His voice turned melancholy. But the main problem is that of Atlantis itself, a nation now of nit-pickers, if not fruit-pickers wandering soulless orchard roads. Why should the young be sifted like chaff and wheat at 12 short years of age? And to four decimal places too, forsooth. They should be banded, banked and balloted. If randomness prevail to some extent, fewer will be inclined to overclock their children, or as the terrible legend goes, send their children through the fire of Moloch.

Give them their bonuses for proximity, but do not give them too much. Let each council of each school choose who they take in, but only to a fifth of the harvest. Let the remaining four fifths be as random as the raindrops in the ocean. Then we will know which schools are truly best, and which have been as milkmaids stealing cream.

I laughed at that. The spell shattered, and I awoke alone to the sound of distant howling, as if a wolf had claimed all the wilderness for his own.

Secondary Schooling

"And so it has come to this...", as the excellent webcomic xkcd notes, is a rather useful line. It happened to insert itself into my stream of consciousness as I contemplated Monday's changes at the Citadel of Wyverns on the imaginary White Cliffs.

I saw change coming about nine years ago, and the documentary evidence for that is (amazingly) still stored in places as diverse as the Cathedral of the Book. However, reactionary forces of the decadent establishment pushed back strongly. Many felt that change for the sake of change was being proposed. They were unable to see necessary change, even as it forced them to move along.

And here we stand. Will people still keep building sandcastles as the tide comes in? Some people are too young to be acting so old; some are too old to be acting so young. The staff room in the old days reminded me of a Fox TV series I like a lot: NCIS. You could get your team together and start moving quickly when there was work to do.

Now, it's all drama and intrigue and something more like Borgias and bourgeoisie than sense and sensibility. But there is light coming down from the shiny and upright dome that looms above the benighted hill. And so, we Wyverns keep the faith and wait.

I shall go look for Sir Wolff and the blade that Oldham gave his forefathers.

Grounds for Refusing to Register a School

In the hallowed temples of the Law in Atlantis are many tablets of Law. Tablet 87 is oft ignored. On Tablet 87, in section 24, one can find these hieroglyphs, or their equivalent. They can be translated as follows, and make interesting reading:

Grounds for refusal to register a school:

24. The Hierophant of the Temple of the Book may refuse to register a school if —

(a) adequate educational facilities already exist in the area in which it is proposed to open the school;
(b) the proposed school premises constitute a dangerous building or are or are likely to be structurally unsuitable for use as a school;
(c) the fire precautions in the proposed school premises are inadequate;
(d) the proposed school premises are insanitary or for reasons of health unsuitable for use as a school;
(e) the area provided for the open air recreation of pupils is inadequate or unsatisfactory;
(f) the proposed school does not conform to the regulations made under this Act;
(g) the proposed fees are excessive, having regard to the cost of maintaining and conducting the proposed school and the standard of education to be provided;
(h) the qualifications and experience of the proposed teachers are not adequate to ensure the efficient conduct of the proposed school;
(i) the proposed salaries of the teachers are not adequate to ensure the efficient performance of their duties;
(j) the proposed school is designed to accommodate more than 1,200 pupils in any one session;
(k) the constitution of the proposed committee of management is not such as to ensure the efficient administration of the proposed school;
(l) the supervisor recommended by the proposed committee of management is not a fit and proper person to act as a supervisor;
(m) the proposed school has previously been refused registration or the registration thereof has been cancelled either under this Act or under any previous written law relating to the registration of schools;
(n) the proposed school is likely to be used for a purpose detrimental to the interests of Atlantis or of the public;
(o) the proposed school is likely to be used for the purpose of instruction detrimental to the interests of the public or of the pupils;
(p) the proposed school is likely to be used as a meeting place of an unlawful society;
(q) the name under which the school is to be registered is against the interests of Atlantis; or
(r) in the application for registration a statement has been made or information has been furnished which is false in a material particular or by reason of the omission of a material particular.

Don't you find these criteria both interesting and amusing? Wednesday 21 December is especially a good day to remember Tablet 87.

School Quality

In 1966, the Coleman Report on Equality of Educational Opportunity was produced under the LBJ administration in the USA. The findings in that report were of great interest, because the main finding was that the effect of school quality on student performance was less than the effect of family background, by a large margin.

The initial reaction from the Johnson administration was disappointment; President Johnson had wanted to establish a fairer society by reducing unfair social advantage through a level educational playing field. Since school quality effects were minimal, it was thought that perhaps making better schools was not necessarily a good thing; rather, they would just magnify the advantage of family background.

However, this was not the whole story. As researchers sometimes observe, some Americans tend to think that because of the amount of published research they produce, their story is the whole story. But in 1982-3, Heyneman and Loxley showed that across nations, something else was in play.

In fact, Heyneman and Loxley found that the 'Coleman Effect' occurred mostly in economically developed countries, while larger school effects and smaller family effects occurred in less wealthy nations. At the same time, achievement in mathematics and science was strongly related to national economic development; about 1/3 of the difference in math/science achievement could be attributed to this. These effects became known as the 'HL Effect', a reversed Coleman Effect which implied that schools were more important than social background in some cases.

Meanwhile, Ceci (1991) found that for every year of schooling, after accounting for all other factors, students gained 0.3 to 0.6 of a point in effective IQ. That is, by standardised measurements of cognitive effectiveness, being in school made students do better in cognitive tasks. (Yes, of the kind that schools are designed to produce and measure, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.)

Such findings can be linked directly to the history of education in Atlantis. Initially, when few people went to school, those few had a huge advantage in achievement as society's manpower markets required people with certain kinds of cognitive skills. However, when many cheap schools were built and mass education took hold, the overall achievement level rose throughout society, and those who came from 'early-adopter' families found their competitive edge eroded.

This competitive edge eroded even more when more and more students, from all backgrounds, began to spend more and more time in school. This unprecedented amount of schooling acted as a massive socio-economic leveller and raised a large middle class in the Atlantean population.

In modern Atlantis, one would expect to see the Coleman Effect in play again, since Atlantis is now very highly developed. And indeed, that is exactly what one might see. The effect of general school quality, although good, now produces a fairly standard, fairly good-quality product — some studies rate the average Atlantean as one of the best math/science students in the world.

Because Atlantean schools in the 1980s and 1990s produced little differentiable product, and all of reasonably good quality, the effect of socioeconomic background again began to be felt. Richer families could support even more extended and diffuse education opportunities beyond the state provisions. The state countered by attempting to finance its own talent supply, in a classic free-market spiral.

The current state of play is interesting. There is still that huge middle-class plateau, but rising above it are the twin peaks of extreme family background and extreme state sponsorship. Of course, being able to pile Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa, as the Giants did, would allow an Atlantean to reach Mount Olympus and wield the thunderbolt against the Gods. And few realise that there is much that remains below the plateau, bound in Tarteros.

Measures of School System Success

Over the last few weeks, an interesting debate about the success of the Atlantean educational system has sprung up. So far, people have weighed in with various ways of measuring that success: some have mentioned behavioral qualities such as filial piety, some have mentioned awards such as Nobel prizes. Some have said the system is unsuccessful since it has produced neither.

It is with amusement that I note that a national system of education normally has only two real criteria for success: 1) that it produces the kind of people the state wants, and 2) that it produces the kind of people the state needs. You can divide this another way: schools must produce the people needed to run the country from within (at all levels) and the people needed to preserve and defend the state's interests against the interests of other states.

That means that by any measure, social cohesion is a more useful 'product' of a school system than are Nobel prizes. Most students have some sort of bond to their classmates, to their schoolmates. This is natural, and it is useful. Then again, social cohesion within a group or institution is not necessarily harnessed to the needs of the state — gangs and multinational companies come to mind, as examples that are not necessarily positive with regard to the states they operate in.

Useful skills help too. A system that produces lots of lawyers and doctors in a state that fancies itself a legal and medical hub is a system that is doing its job. However, a system that is producing hundreds of mediocre teachers in a state that fancies itself an educational hub is a system that is dysfunctional in at least one aspect — especially since breeding bad teachers leads to breeding worse teachers down the road.

So how does one measure the success of a system such as the Atlantean School System? Perhaps the most fun way of doing it is to see how others think of the system. It has become legendary in many other 'advanced' nations that the Atlantean system is horrifyingly great (or greatly horrifying, depending on what your political tendencies are).

So yes, it must be pretty successful. But perhaps not successfully pretty.

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Note: actually, Nobel Prize winning is most strongly correlated to a) the power and influence of a state in the worldwide community (see here), and b) whether you are Jewish (Jews account for about 25-30% of the prizes).

A Hundred-Years' War

It was only a few hours ago that I was transcribing from digital microfilm (yes, you heard me) a letter sent to the press by someone claiming to be a teacher. It was a very interesting letter, sneaking up quietly with elliptical sentences and suchlike before braining you with a couple of main points. With minor editing, I shall present the letter and you can decide what to make of it.

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LOCAL EDUCATION

We have, it is hoped, seen the end for 1910, of the frivolities attending the demonstrations attaching to the education of the rising local generation. Anyone who follows these intelligently, cannot but be struck by the note that pervades them all. The proceedings in all cases, some slightly more ostentatious than others, are the puerile decorations, the gathering of those interested, and, let it not be told in Gath, of those who are not.

A programme at the cost of much labour is prepared and unappreciated. Then follows the reading of the departmental report which is supposed to convey much information to the audience and apparently does so, but of which the writer is, in his heart of hearts, very doubtful. The manager of the establishment then contributes his quota which has been prepared with infinite misgiving, and, in fact, is largely listened to with much the same emotion, though courtesy veils any expression of it. Through the medium of the manager's report everything connected with the matter it deals with is presented in rosy hue, and is blindly accepted by those who possess the faith that removes mountains, though wearying to a degree to the enlightened portion of the audience who accept it for what it is worth.

Among these is, as a rule, to be found Sir John Anderson, who, good man, is by virtue of his official position, practically compelled to be there, though harassed and worried by a hundred matters, more important to the general community. He is, of course, accompanied by Miss Anderson, who graciously receives the eternal bouquet, wreathes her countenance with smiles and with suppressed yawns, follows the programme with heroic fortitude to the point of her ordeal, the "distribution" which she faces without flinching. Then Sir John extricates himself from the trying position as best he can.

What is quite apparent to the few, though unperceived by the many, is the obvious insincerity of it all. It ought not to be necessary to resort to such demonstrations. If education is making headway among the juvenile population, it will proclaim itself, and due credit will be given to those who impart it without the aid of these annual trumpetings. The soil, however, does not lend itself to the growth of intelligence except under abnormal conditions. This was realised a quarter of a century ago, when Sir Clementi Smith in a moment of sentiment felt that very unusual encouragement must be given to the youths of the place, if their dormant intellectual faculties were to be awakened, and involved the colony in an expenditure which has been a burden for a considerable time and finally cancelled.

The expense incurred in maintaining the "Queen's Scholarships" need not be regretted, as it has produced to the colony a number of able men, but it is disappointing to find, after such a lapse of years, that the object of Sir Clementi, which was to stimulate with a view to future self-exertion, has not been realised, and that the youths are now as much in need of a wet-nurse as in their time. Judging from a recent utterance of a manager of a large local educational establishment, it would seem that both teachers and pupils had come to look upon the "Scholarships" as a boon in perpetuity, and depended upon them accordingly. It does not speak well for local youths that it should continue to depend upon an aid intended solely as a temporary stimulant to intelligent self-effort.

Apropos of the subject, it will perhaps be easy to recall to the minds of your readers, a childish exhibition of elation manifested by a certain local school over another at an apparent momentary success at the last annual examination. The whole thing was farcical in the extreme and had it not been seriously supported by the [Vespucian] Consul and the Presiding Elder of the local [Vespucian] Mission, it might have been passed by as a boyish demonstration.

This is what happened:—The Inspector of Schools was said to have entered in his report that the result of the examination of Standard VII in the [Citadel of the Wyverns] occupied the first place. There was surely nothing in this to trumpet about. Perhaps, it is not known to the gentlemen who conducted this puerile performance that they gratuitously supplied the discerning public with a subject of much amusement.

It may be admitted that the [Academy of the Gryphons] has always maintained a fairly good reputation. Its masters in the past have been men of ability. Its chief is a university man, as was his predecessor. As long as it was under the management of a committee, it held the premier position. But recently it became solely a Government establishment, with the result that with the exception of the Headmaster, the best men on the staff have been sent to the Native States or have left the service. This explains how it comes about that the other school accidentally scored a point; but this will recur unless the Government maintains an efficient staff for the so-called higher education.

Practically speaking, local education is of a very elementary character and sadly lacks in the practical. If this were freely admitted the people would know the position and it would not be necessary to resort to artifice and subterfuge to cover the fact.

Yours, etc.,
TEACHER.

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I found it very amusing. This letter, describing events a hundred years ago, was a snarky attack by a miffed gryphon on a typically too self-congratulatory wyvern event. Things have not changed, except for the general literacy level of the overclass.

Integrated Programmes (Part II): Problems With Mission Control

One of the more iconic man-machine SF movies of my time was 1987's Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven. In that movie, an unjustly slain policeman is brought back from death as a cyborg with three key aims:

"What are your Prime Directives?"

"To serve the public trust, protect the innocent and uphold the law."

And that, in a nutshell, was Robocop's mission. It would be great if institutions could make mission statements as sweeping and elegant in conception and content, but as simple and direct in structure and style.

This was the problem with the Integrated Programmes of Atlantis. The mission, in general, was defined as preparing students to take terminal examinations at Grade 12 without an intervening high-stakes examination at Grade 10. The exact form of preparation was left to the schools, but the High Priest of Learning (at that time, the Thaumaturge) was rather specific about what the kind of preparation should lead to:

These new programmes are not just a matter of setting up new structures or pathways. Diversity only goes so far if it is just about different curricula or specializations, or taking one less set of examinations, without changes in how we teach and learn. The real shifts have to be in how teachers interact with students, and in the breadth of experiences we open up for our students. At the end of the day, nothing we are doing with respect to new structures and pathways matters as much as the student's experiences and encounters in the classroom, playing field and auditorium. It is the quality of these experiences, in every school, that will determine if we nurture future generations with the boldness to question, the desire to keep learning through their lives, the compassion for their fellow citizens, and the capacity to lead.

The IP schools themselves are seeking to provide students with an educational experience that goes beyond preparing them for their final examinations when they reach [Grade 12]. They will seek to use the time freed up in through the Integrated Programme to provide students with a more broad-based education that develops their capacities for critical thinking and experimentation, and build teamworking and leadership skills.

A similar endeavour is taking shape across the school system, which each school looking at new ways of developing these skills, taking into account the needs of its own pupils. Every school has to continuously reexamine its current pratices and norms, provide its pupils with more broad-based experiences, and think of more innovative and effective ways of delivering the desired outcomes of education. Every school has to look long term, and develop its pupils holistically.

Centres of learning without much imagination (which was, to be honest, almost all of them) merely selected their favourite buzzwords from the proclamation of the Thaumaturge and crafted a new mission statement. The evidence of this is readily apparent; just walk into any of those schools and look at the walls.

The problem really was that all those schools already had their own mission statements. In the Citadel of the Wyverns, that mission was to provide an education for life in a way that served the greater glory of God. In the Temple of the Flaming Book, it was to create a resilient and enduring scholar. And at the Hall of the Gryphons, it was to reign supreme in every sphere.

What happened next, as these great old schools bowed to serve the new directives, was what we moderns call 'mission creep'. The old ideas were still there, but they were like the faint marking left after scraping a palimpsest. The old marks would always remain, accusatory guidelines in the deeper matrix, but the new words would hold sway, no matter how much less meaningful they were compared to the old ones.

Don't get me wrong. The new words of the Thaumaturge were far from meaningless themselves. They would provide valuable service in directing the ways of newer schools and schools yet to be built. But they had not the visceral and spiritual power of the ancient runes by which the souls of men had been shaped in decades past, the fire of grand endeavour which drove the older schools.

As many generations of explorers and men of action have learnt, if you fail to control the mission, the mission will succeed in controlling you. To clarify, if the mission is not clearly outlined with terms embedded firmly in culture and history, the mission will take over and define a new culture—one that may well be at odds with what an institution used to stand for.

So, in at least one school, the mission of turning a red ocean into a sea of faith has become the mission of seeking blue oceans where there are none to be had. It is no longer the work of redemption, but the work of novelty-seeking, that is the mission of that place; it is no longer saving souls and steadying lives, but developing voluntary trumpets and waltzing emperors. How sad.

Mergers and Inquisitions

As of half past six, yesterday evening, Atlantean time, my mouth was loosened as to the saying of certain things. And yet, it was hard to say what could be said. From 1997 to the present day, the motion of the Atlantean Education System had been peripatetic, peregrine, perambulatory in its pursuit of the 'wholly' grail — the ideal of the Integrated Programme as the structural embodiment of one kind of holism.

The local internet is buzzing with all kinds of sounds of outrage and the clamour of threat, accusation and confusion. Essentially, schools that are forming unusual-looking partnerships are being lambasted for entering into forced marriages. But this is not the case; as the two-headed gryphons know, a single monster can have two heads, and it can also have two bodies that are geographically separated and pretty independent of each other.

What I would caution against is the making of many words without wisdom, as the LORD said unto Job. At least, while the details are still being worked out and the principalities and powers are having their arms and tongues twisted, people should forbear to make unsavoury comments. The point is that mergers of minds need not mean the submergence of tradition nor the emergence of unseemly chimeras.

Historically speaking, there are many undercurrents that people fail to recognize. The same people who set up the beautiful halls of the Jade and Gold were also the ones who financed schools like the first citadels of the Wyvern Knights. It is all in my writings, and the writings of many before me. And if sibling schools cannot share secrets as members of the same family, who then should they share secrets with?

There are yet more secrets which are known only to a few. But these shall become plain in the course of the next few months. For what has been done cannot be hidden, and all that is done shall be laid bare in the light of day. None of us comes out looking particularly clever, but some will unfortunately look more venal than others.

The Paper Machine

When people think of information technology, they seldom think of the cellulose-based matrix which has been a mainstay of that technology for the last few centuries at least, and was first deployed millennia ago. But paper, and the technologies that allow for making it and marking it, is something ubiquitous in our human environment. It is hard to find places with none at all.

In fact, a quick calculation shows that most of our civic institutions are enormous consumers of paper. Supposing a school with 3000 students charges them each about $100 a year for photocopied or printed materials. Let's next suppose that the cost of printing or photocopying a single sheet (considering that this is bulk production) is 2.5 cents. That would mean 4000 sheets per student, and TWELVE MILLION (yes, 12,000,000) sheets of paper consumed per year.

Even if we tweak the figures generously, to $60 per year per student and 3 cents per sheet, we'd still have 2000 sheets per student and 6,000,000 sheets a year. If we were to assume that the school prints on both sides of each sheet, that's still 3,000,000 sheets of paper a year. A ream of paper is 500 sheets, so we are talking about 6000 reams.

Do we really need to print that much material each year? Is a school nothing but a paper machine, endlessly producing sheets of stuff that are digested and transformed into higher-class sheets called examination scripts, and then even higher-class ones called diplomas?

I am sure that this is unnecessary. In fact, I am quite certain that the money such a school requires (and budgets), is always in excess of necessity. This is the nature of such machines.

Foundation

At the beginning of a grand endeavour, before you know that it will be one, is always the whispering of a prayer, the enunciation of hope rather than the renunciation of the past. I remember these words from 1995, uttered by a senior member of the Church: "It is a school founded on faith, faith in the promise of young persons, faith in the importance of education and faith in the future, no matter how unpromising or insignificant the start."

These are sentiments not from a citadel of wyverns, but from a home on a hill; they are words spoken under the banner of 'Simple dans ma vertu, forte dans mon devoir'. I first heard those words when I was a young teacher, and I carried them in my heart. I quoted them in my Master's dissertation. I told myself that this was how a school should be blessed, by founding words that were based on a sure foundation.

I thank God for such things. I realise that schools, like nations, rise and fall; yet schools are unlike nations in that they are supposed to benefit all the people in them, not breaking any, but improving the lot of all — not by accident or incident, but by deliberation and as much wisdom as God might grant.

The Paradox of School Reform

Tyack and Cuban (1995) have pointed out that historically, people have always 'wanted schools to serve different and often contradictory purposes for their own children.' These are listed as follows, in the text:

• to socialize them to be obedient, yet to teach them to be critical thinkers;
• to pass on the best academic knowledge that the past has to offer, yet also to teach marketable and practical skills;
• to cultivate cooperation, yet to teach students to compete with one another in school and later in life;
• to stress basic skills but also encourage creativity and higher-order thinking;
• to focus on the academic 'basics' yet to permit a wide range of choice of courses.

They also mention three other issues related to the collective functions of schooling: assimilation of newcomers ('foreign talent'?) vs affirming ethnic (cultural?) diversity; perpetuating gender roles or challenging them; and giving equal opportunity while preserving the advantages of a favoured class.

Some things don't change across modern nations, states and cities, it seems. But the key to reform opportunities and moments is that when one of these balances is heavily shifted by a sudden change to one of two opposing factors, societal change forces make it more likely that education will be seen to be 'in crisis'. Examples of this are: a dramatic rise in immigration, the rise of protest movements such as civil rights, the challenge of global competition.

This book was written 15 years ago. Its lessons are all too relevant today in Atlantis.

Sooo... What Makes a Good School?

Let's just look at the question in terms of how a school is run, and not in the complex cultural terms that would entail a look at the roles of tradition, alumni, mission, philosophy, and other social dynamics that are often linked with a long history.

David Tyack in his landmark work The One Best System (Harvard University, 1974) cautioned us against looking for a magic formula that would apply to all schools. His survey covered the entire history of urban education in the US, and showed both the successes and failures of the various systems that the 'US education system' really was.

Much more recently, a consortium (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu & Easton) has come out with Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago (University of Chicago, 2010), an interesting look at the Chicagoan educational landscape of about 500 schools from 1990 to 2005. They've identified five main points which lead to the success of urban schools (at least in Chicago):

1. Strong leadership, in the sense that principals are “strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive of others in their work”;
2. A welcoming attitude toward parents, and formation of connections with the community;
3. Development of professional capacity, which refers to the quality of the teaching staff, teachers’ belief that schools can change, and participation in good professional development and collaborative work;
4. A learning climate that is safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing to all students; and
5. Strong instructional guidance and materials.

I think my immediate response (quite apart from the 'ah, another elite US university study that the innocent will think applies to urban centres worldwide' response) was that I didn't see anything new in this piece of work. Indeed, Education Week seems to say (subscription required) that what makes this book different is the level of detail and the amount of data collected.

How disappointing. But then again, what else could be expected?

There are several things that are missing from this list. Here's an example: controlling your intake. In these days of political correctness, the idea of elitism is a no-no. But let's face it, if you had some sort of meritocratic basis for selection, you could have nothing but students who are above-average in producing results. Then you would have a successful urban school. And if you have students who are good at it, a principal can pay less attention to those aspects they are good at and develop other aspects, thus enabling his school to tack on the 'holistic education' label which I find so reprehensible.

But just like any other post-colonial output (by which I mean that which is put out after the colon does its job), your intake is the key to the fragrance of success. Control that, and you will be able to produce good regular output. It will be a programme that is breath-taking in its simplicity, smooth in its processes, consistent (also coherent and cohesive) in its product quality. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Well, that was the gratuitous post-colonial joke out of the way. But seriously, there is nothing new at all in this latest book. It's probably an excellent piece of research that tells us a lot about Chicagoan elementary schools, but it tells us nothing that we have not already learnt about schools in general. And as usual, it leaves the special development of lead teaching staff who are also administrators to the realm of the implicit.

Almost every piece on school success talks about principals and teachers. The point is that in most schools, there are at least two extra layers: between the principal and the teachers, the senior teaching staff who are also educational leaders and who actually are directly responsible for large chunks of the five factors mentioned; and the service staff who support the physical endeavour — janitors, custodians, IT support professionals, the secretariat, PR, HR, finance staff, and so on.

As far as I know, the only paper that talks about the neglected first extra layer is here and I haven't actually found one on the neglected second extra layer. Anybody know where such things might be found?

Gangsterism in Schools

I spent some time thinking about this topic recently. A lot of sociologists and psychologists give the standard reason that gangs and tribes are part of normal human behaviour, so it's all a question of how these groups are formed and to what ends they act. But it seems to me that, if schools are indeed agents of socialisation, they should be determining the way gangs behave.

What troubles me more is the equivalent of white-collar gangs. Intellectual gangs. Debater gangs. Children-of-privilege gangs. Scholarship-leads-to-power gangs. This kind of gangsterism is what drives the big crimes, the ones that aren't really crimes and are condoned by society. There are dark imperatives building in that area between black and white, where you can't tell which are the men in either colour.

Get your scholarship. Get an advanced degree. Become a boss. Treat people like crap and eliminate your rivals using everything they taught you at the local civil service training centre, and some things they didn't dare teach you. At any sign that an employee is unhappy, that's disloyalty, for why would he be unhappy with your regime? After all, you have the God-given wisdom to know what's best for him. Best get rid of him then, no need to find out why he is unhappy because that would surely be his lack of wisdom, not yours.

The mafia of the new academic world are not sub-educated grunts, but over-educated villains. And like the stereotypical Bond villain, they have no sense of humour but make you feel like laughing. Of course, if you do, you will suffer drastic consequences.

University Rankings

Well, the 2010 Sunday Times University Rankings came out about a month ago, thematically a sort of update on the Times Higher Education figures here. This of course will make people with academic desires, predilections, or pretensions lust after places at renowned Cambridge, Oxford and the Ivy League schools.

Someone (well, many people, deprived of commentary) asked me what I thought of these rankings. Frankly, they are all what I call pseudo-quantitative exercises. Without looking at what the numbers measure, we already know that these are dubious exercises. Why?

Firstly, the numbers you see rely a lot on either qualitative inputs converted to numerical form (like the infamous and hugely popular Likert scales). In theory, a large enough collection of inputs should work to minimise error; in practice, we simply do not know if this is true, considering that the inputs are non-random. How random can the respondents to a survey on universities be?

Other forms of non-linear 'hashing' such as converting raw data to a normalised index have also been used. An example of this is to take the 'best' value and convert it to 100/100, and then pro-rate the other values accordingly. Slightly geeky example follows:

Supposing you have a Physics test, and the best student scores 25/100. We have a few ways to convert this to 100/100: we can 1) multiply by 4, 2) take the square root and multiply by 20, 3) divide the score by 25, take the arcsine of that (in radians) and multiply by 200/π, and so on. A score of 10 on that test would get you 1) 40, 2) 63.3 or 3) 26.2 marks respectively.

Secondly, a lot of it depends on subjective data. By subjective data, I mean that the data originates from people who have no means of comparison with other institutions. For example, supposing I ask you to rank your experience in Institution A on a scale of 1-10. You give me an '8'. Four years later, you are at Institution B, which you now rank as '8' and you express the thought that perhaps you should have given Institution A a '6' instead because it is not half as good as B. Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but if it weren't half as good as B, perhaps you should have given it at most a '4'?

The 220,000 students surveyed in the Sunday Times version are like that; they are rating their degree of satisfaction without comparison, without objective measures, without reliability. Can we assume that the presumable error will cancel out? No...

Thirdly, many ranking systems rely on measuring awards. If we were to follow the silly example of this Professor of Economics, we'd be measuring universities in terms of Nobel Prizes. What's so bad about that? Well, the Nobel Prizes are one-off, first past the post awards. There are no prizes for second or third place, so we have no idea how close any given university came to getting one. It is like saying an MP is infinitely better than his defeated opponent even though he got 49.1% of the vote and his opponent got 48.7%. It is also like saying that all MPs are equal.

Fourthly, methodologies change from year to year and there's nothing that can be done about it. Ideally, they should improve; but in point of fact, the market that wants ranking data will require different measures each year, and hence require different methodologies in terms of data collection, weighting, cross-comparison and so on. Such a state has been passed off as 'good news', but I don't think that's necessarily true.

I could go on and on about how flawed everything is. But my readers are practical people, so what can we do about it? What I would say is that if you can live without brand names, most universities are fine.

A student should really be evaluating the environment in which that university is in, as well as what that student is going to university for. If university is a disguised career move, then you need a brand name. If university is a preparation for academic life, check out the research statistics and whether leading researchers are there. If university is an excuse to bum around, check out the social statistics. If university is a balance between personal finance and a reasonably sound education, check out the educational cost and its average returns (i.e. how much does a graduate in your chosen course of study earn within 1, 3, 5, or 10 years after graduating, ceteris paribus?)

There's lot's to say, really. I try to provide educational advice if anybody wants to ask, but here are my initial caveats.

1. Good advice requires good information, and to advise you, I'd need to know you intrusively well;
2. I come from an academic family, so I have a bias in certain directions;
3. I didn't graduate from a top 10 university, and never felt the need to have done so;
4. I believe that history and culture should have some weight;
5. I believe that a lot of students are attracted by the dream or ideal of a particular place, and not the hard data.

And, oh yes, I quite enjoyed living in Cambridge, but then again, I also enjoyed living in Columbia University. Your mileage might vary.

Rationalising Football

Let's for a moment put aside personal philosophies and such, and say that based on likelihood of winning the English Premier League, Manchester United Football Club is often said to be the #1 club in England. It is tempting to say, therefore, that it is a 'better' club than others, since the statistics don't lie, supposedly.

This is exactly the problem that academic league tables face. If a club is successful, or a school is successful, as a matter of fact, then it is assumed that whatever it does must be somehow cleverer than what its rivals do. This is called ex post facto rationalisation; you invent reasons for victory and/or loss after the result is determined.

I have no quarrel with this practice in terms of its entertainment value, but I will point out that it is actually a sort of pseudo-science. What happens on a pitch is a social event; the interactions are too complex to map adequately and the rules (and their enforcement) are unevenly implemented. The difference between defeat and victory, often irrevocably etched, can go down to one man's opinion about whether enough time has passed, or whether another man fell, dived, or was pushed.

You can say of a team that always wins 1-0 that they have no plan B, and if the '1' doesn't materialise, they'll be down to 0-0 or 0-1. But if they always win 1-0, and another team alternates between 4-0 and 0-1, the 1-0 people will win the competition. The 'no plan B' argument never takes into account the fact that every stadium is different, the team itself is different from day to day, the weather is different, and the plan itself, on closer inspection, is never the same. There is no plan B, because there is no plan A; there is just an endless cavalcade of different plans, tweaked on the spur of the moment.

It's the same with schools. You can buy a team, spend money on buildings, and so on. But attention to each student, a plan for each student — these are the things that make a school great. If each student is a winner, then the school wins. The school shouldn't be aiming to 'win the championship' by making some big wins and some small losses out of its students; it should aim to make them all winners.

Sometimes, it seems like a matter of luck. Sometimes, there are allegations of referee bias or undetected fouls. But the fact remains that despite the detailed analysis, sometimes all we have is the factual situation, and no deep explanation as to why it is so. Ask Manchester United how they beat their City rivals last night, and how they lost to Burnley at Turf Moor, and you will hear a tonne of explanations that do not amount to truth.

Last Legs

It's always been a quirk of human thought (and of some languages, in particular) that verbs and nouns can take the same form and be confused (or at least commingled) in the mind. In other words, the thing to be done or the thing doing it are mixed up.

This is the case when we say that entity A is on its last legs, while also saying that entity A's journey is on its last leg. The leg is the instrument of entity A's movement, but it is also the distance coverable by the leg, as well as the act of doing said covering by said instrument (i.e., 'legging it').

Take for example the case where entity A is a horse. The horse 'on its last legs' is a horse that has little capacity left in its legs for legging it over the last leg. The 'last leg' of the horse's journey is the last lap, the last bit of the distance, which will consume the last part of the horse's capacity for legging it.

In such form, I say that a whole lot of my students are on the last legs of their journeys. In fact, the whole school is on its last legs as it approaches the end of the year. But here we run into another source of confusion.

A scholar (or student, in modern parlance) is an element, a member, of a school. If the scholars are confused with the school, then if the scholars are on their last legs (of capacity or of chronological distance), the school must also be, right? No, not when the school is a corporate entity. Such an entity lives on, technically, whether or not it has any students whatsoever.

In fact, you can tell which schools are legally immortal while rubbing your face in it. These are the schools whose principals (no longer the first among equals, as in the Latin principes) call themselves Chief Executive Officers and are very proud of it. To the credit of certain principals, they cringe at the idea of being referred to in such wise. Such wisdom.

When 'More Class' Does Not Mean 'More Class'

It is that time of year in Atlantis when some kind of perversion overtakes the education system. It is perverse because a one-week respite from the arduous and wearisome life of the school suddenly turns into a nightmare of extra classes for purported remediation of the student body's collective shortcomings.

This is how it works.

At the end of Year N, the teachers in each school have worked out beautiful and professional departmental workplans and schemes of work. By Week X of Year N+1, these documents say in incredible detail, the teachers shall have covered syllabus sections A1, A2... ...An, using the following tools and strategies, and so on.

By Week X-2, however, there is the sinking feeling that the syllabus has not been adequately covered. And hence, by September, frantic plans to force students to stay back to cover syllabus sections An (and possibly A(n-1), A(n-2) as well) have been put in place. So the one-week break becomes a couple of days' worth (12-16 hours) of extra classes.

The reasons are many, both the explicitly announced ones and the secret ones that no one dares to mention. Let me attempt to draw back the veil (the Greek word apocalüpsis, which means exactly that, is quite appropriate here). Here are some possibilities which I have seen in real life during my time:

• It's actually quite likely that the school has, as a mega-entity, put so many extra activities in its calendar that the scheme of work has failed for lack of days in which to execute it. Of course, the sub-entities (i.e. teachers and heads) often have no clue how many days this will be. Most know to subtract available days around public holidays and such, but many don't compensate for the odd extra concerts, emergency briefings, meetings which take good teachers away from their classes, and suchlike.
• Some teachers are incompetent. You can tell when every class has got a different schedule and they're all learning different things, and yet sitting for the same papers. Somebody is probably teaching too slowly. I know this because topics that should have taken two weeks (or 7 teaching sessions) have ended up taking five weeks because some teachers can't get their lessons to work.
• Some teachers are subcompetent. You can tell they know their stuff. But they're not good at handling a class well enough to cover the material sufficiently within the time given.
• You can often blame the students, but my experience is that students will take whatever they can get. Most of them don't keep tabs on the scheme of work, which rightly should be executed well by the department concerned.
• Teachers sometimes have a reluctance to teach too quickly because then students might fail their tests and blame the teacher. I think this is nonsense. Students ought to learn quickly if the teachers are competent. If they refuse to learn quickly, then there are several possibilities — here are three: the scheme of work is screwed up because it doesn't take into account the student body; the teacher is not doing a good job of assessing student weaknesses and dealing with them; the school is in denial because it thinks its students (or teachers) are very smart, but they're not. That said, teaching slowly doesn't often help as much as teaching quickly and getting down to application of what has been taught.

These are some of the main reasons why I've got students going back to school during their break. Of course, the real reason might be something better or worse. You could always ask the right people, and you might learn something too.

My personal opinion is that students spend too much time in school. I am certain that you can have them spend two-thirds of the time in school and still get them a proper education. It doesn't make sense to produce statistics saying that these young people are the best in the world and then say implicitly that it's because you keep them in school so long. That's not value-addedness. It's more like expanding your economy without upgrading it. 'More class' certainly doesn't mean 'more class'; it might not even end up 'world class'.

Out of Commission

Over the last year or so, I've had ample opportunity to kibitz on the goings-on involving the Joint Commission International. This interesting organisation does accreditation for many hospitals worldwide, using standards that seem pretty rigorous and certainly work towards enhancing patient safety, security and survival. It's sufficiently well-known that is has a disputed Wikipedia page, which means it must have some sort of celebrity status such that people can make disputable or arguable claims about it.

But I'm not so much interested in the healthcare ramifications of JCI as in the idea that it might be possible to have something like that for schools. As long-time readers of this blog know, I've looked at fish-tanks and Petri dishes while researching education, and I have many ideas about what constitutes a good education or a good school.

The JCI, if I'm not wrong, sets ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED criteria for a hospital. They get extremely sharp healthcare people to come down, physically check random items, interview random people, run around all over the shop, and then write a report on how well your hospital did by those measureables.

I wish they did it for schools, because I can imagine some worthy objects of this fantastic evaluation strategy.