Thursday, December 02, 2004

PLAGIARISM: BY STUDENTS? NO. BY THE EDUCATION WATCHDOG ITSELF!

British bureaucracy at its most arrogant

Ofsted, the government's education standards watchdog, has admitted that parts of an inspection report given to a top Birmingham school were copied from a report on another school more than 100 miles away. Lordswood Girls' School - judged in government league tables to be the best in the country for improving pupil performance - is planning to sue Ofsted after discovering that two pages of a critical review were identical to an earlier report on Parkside School in Bradford. 'When I realised my school's report contained judgments on areas that the Ofsted team had not inspected during their visit, I became suspicious,' said Jane Hattatt, the headteacher at Lordswood. 'I thought: "What would a stupid child have done if they wanted to pretend to have completed work they had not done?" [So I] typed key phrases into the internet to find where they came from.'

The fact that an Ofsted report contained inaccurate information from another school will be highly embarrassing for the institution. Parents looking for the best schools read Ofsted reports closely and a good report can lead to a school being over-subscribed. Bad reports can have the opposite effect. Lordswood's challenge is one of a growing number of legal actions facing Ofsted. The beleaguered watchdog raised a storm of protest last Thursday when it announced that 37 further education colleges in England had failed inspections, most of them in the south. 'Claims made by Ofsted that a rise in failing colleges this year was a "national disgrace" are highly inappropriate,' said Dr John Brennan, chief executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC). 'It is inappropriate for immoderate language of this kind to be used about a sector which achieves remarkable success in the face of continuing government underfunding.'

Ofsted admitted this weekend that the inspection team for Lordswood failed to give an accurate and fair portrayal in the section relating to leadership and management of the school. It has promised to amend the report and add an addendum on its website about the school. But Hattatt, who has been head of the 900-pupil school in Harborne for 15 years, and who launched a high-profile complaint against the Ofsted inspection system in February, plans to take her concerns to an independent adjudicator. 'I have no confidence in the system,' she said. 'I would advise anyone with concerns who is going through the complaints procedure to keep on going because they need to be challenged.'

Hattatt raised 31 objections to Ofsted's report, six of which have been upheld, including the duplication charge. In a written response, Ofsted said: 'The number of errors and the duplication of the leadership and management section in the draft report are not acceptable. We have asked the lead inspector to add an addendum to the published report of the school. In addition, we will monitor the work of the lead inspector.'

Ofsted's original report into Lordswood also contained incorrect data on achievement at the school, claiming that no students achieved A or B grades in English A-level when in fact half of them did. Ofsted amended the error in the final document, but failed to update judgments made about performance in the subject based on the results. It has now agreed to make changes.

Lordswood Girls' School is just one of a growing number of schools threatening to challenge Ofsted inspections: in September, the Business Academy, Bexley, in south-east London, threatened to take Ofsted to court over a finding of 'significant weaknesses' in its teaching. Sir David Garrard, chairman of Minerva plc, which sponsors the 31 million pound flagship academy said it was taking a stance 'on behalf of all schools and teachers against the irrational, inconsistent and preposterous posturing of Ofsted.... The inspectors imposed an artificial environment by forcing unqualified and trainee teachers to conduct the lessons alone,' said Garrard. 'The academy is deeply disappointed at Ofsted's failure to have taken into account the legitimate objections to its unsupportable analysis and its refusal to meet with representatives or acknowledge its error. I believe Ofsted is accountable, as are we all, and it has refused, in these circumstances, to be accountable at any level.'

Source





MORE ON INHERITED ABILITIES

Note this post:

The graph below is from a fascinating new paper, What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families?, by Bruce Sacerdote. Holt's International Children's Services places children, primarily Koreans, with families in the United States. Holt has an interesting proviso to their adoption contract, conditional on being accepted into the program, children are randomly assigned. Sacerdote has collected data from children who were adopted between 1970-1980, and thus who today are in their mid 20's or 30's, and their adoptive parents.

The graph shows how parent income at the time of adoption relates to child income for the adopted and "biological" (non-adopted) children. The income of biological children increases strongly with parental income but the income of adoptive children is flat in parent income.


In other words, environment had NO EFFECT on achievement. Kids adopted into high income households did no better than kids adopted into low income households. What made the difference was genetic inheritance. If the kid was the genetic progeny of high income parents he tended to do well and if he was the progeny of low income parents he tended to do poorly. So those poor souls featured in the Time magazine article I discuss immediately below who could not figure out why middle-class blacks kids did poorly at school weren't even looking in the right direction. Class background has NO EFFECT on achievement. It is irrelevant. So no wonder putting black kids into a middle class background did not make them high achievers. It does not make ANYONE a high achiever! Putting it another way, genetic background is overwhelmingly more important than class background. Sad for Leftists with their dreams of social manipulation, I guess, but that's reality.

All the twin studies of IQ show the same thing, of course. In predicting a child's IQ, family background tells you nothing but genetic inheritance tells you heaps. If anybody wants to explore what I have said on these matters more fully, here would be a good place to start.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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