The long road ahead for Boston’s schools

Every day, miracles are happening in the Boston Public Schools that should be celebrated. Thousands of dedicated teachers, incredible support staff, and talented school leaders pour their hearts and souls into preparing students to succeed. Students from diverse backgrounds, varying home situations, and disparate economic means work to achieve success. Every year, thousands of BPS students and alumni thrive with a strong foundation based in the education they received in our public schools.

We embrace these success stories, but we must also realize that many students are struggling. The Valedictorians Project, published in the Boston Globe Magazine in January, highlighted what data have shown us for years: Even our highest-performing students are not achieving the success for which BPS should have prepared them, and Boston’s schools are failing too many families. We need to improve practice and policy. Let’s get back to work to rewrite this story.

Stop wasting millions of dollars on a bloated bureaucracy in the BPS Central Office. Spend the money where the students are. Invest in real supports in our schools. Shrink class size so children can get the attention they need and explore their curriculum deeply. Stop asking teachers with multiple licenses to pretend they are more than one teacher. Give students the opportunity to study serious content seriously. Add more Advanced Placement and honors classes and allow students to double up on courses to strengthen their transcripts and prepare for college studies. Allow them the opportunity to extend their studies during the summer and create an opportunity for students to add a post-graduate year. Use this year 13 to improve grades, cover additional content, and better prepare students for college.

Make sure schools have full-time nurses, student support services, and libraries that function. We have overworked our teachers and underfunded our nurses.

We don’t provide the full spectrum of enrichments provided by our suburban counterparts for their students. Teach kids math, writing, languages, research, science, and history. And then teach them more of it. Give them a real opportunity to explore the arts. Help them explore vocational and technical education. Give them the tools they need to be successful in life. These are the same skills they need to be successful in college. We need to avoid just dumping curriculum on our kids, but instead make sure they have the tools to explore the content and to experience it.

Stop experimenting with our kids, and allow teachers to teach. We broke up many of our big traditional high schools that were oozing with pride, school spirit, and consistent teachers and staff ,and turned them into “small learning communities” for a few bucks from Bill and Melinda Gates. Take any generous donations and allow our teachers and guidance counselors, who know our kids best, to continue to support them post-graduation. Yes, allow them to hold their students’ hands a little longer.

Hire more guidance counselors who will help kids get into college and then support them into and through those early years when colleges most often fail our kids. We know many hit serious roadblocks in that first year.

Hold the colleges accountable. They need to step up. They are too quick to dump students who don’t make the mark. Even with a full scholarship for Boston’s best and brightest, we know the true cost extends far beyond the tuition bill. Let’s stop pushing our kids to the schools that we know won’t support them.

It is a bold willingness to act by the city, in partnership with the School Committee and BPS, that can make this happen. Our city holds the key to our kids finding the success they deserve. And if we agree change needs to happen, let’s get to it.

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UK: A Desolation of Learning

When I was on a teacher training course during the mid 1980s, the education academics running the course were cock-a-hoop that the nasty old O level was about to be consigned to history and replaced by the all inclusive, all embracing GCSE, with its A to G grades, all of which were equally worth having. Some of us were suspicious. The establishment in question being an ancient seat of learning, our tutors were even more concerned to promote their Inner London Education Authority – worshipping political credentials.

Everything was about impressing upon us the importance of getting children working in groups, working in pairs, rearranging the furniture to this end, having lots of talk and movement, yes, noise if necessary. Was this drama for nine year olds? No, we’re talking secondary school English. Was this meant to be a classroom management and teaching style to be tried now and again? No, this was how it should be all the time.

There was to be no whole class teaching (or only in rare circumstances), no expectation that pupils (as they were called back then) should ever work quietly on individual endeavours. This was the era when teachers were starting to be thought of as learning facilitators, libraries became resource centres and child centred learning was the only show in town.  

Sir Chris Woodhead, the scourge of the teaching unions and the educationalist establishment, was a formidable personality throughout the six years up to 2000 that he was HM Chief Inspector of Schools and head of Ofsted. When he died three years ago, national newspapers on both the right and the left paid tribute. The Daily Telegraph obituary highlighted his belief that he was ‘paid to challenge mediocrity, failure and complacency’, his resistance to the orthodoxy that smaller classes automatically led to better results, his unwavering conviction that phonics was the best way to teach reading and his visceral opposition to the control of schools by local authorities.

Even the obituary in The Guardian stated that he “never changed his belief that Labour, in its quest for equality, had betrayed children by denying them what he saw as a given: that children are destined for different things.” His assertion that there were 15000 incompetent teachers and 3000 heads, together with his targeting of methodology and thinking that were sacrosanct in the profession, caused fury within the teaching unions and they never forgave him. Indeed, the NUT campaigned for his removal. This was something that Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to do, to the wrath of his own party’s education establishment, headed up by Roy Hattersley. 

It is approaching the tenth anniversary of Woodhead’s “A Desolation of Learning – Is this The Education Our Children Deserve?” The Conservative Coalition had not yet happened so there are references to Ed Balls as Education Secretary, Michael Gove as the opposition’s spokesman on Education and a section that finds wanting Sir Jim Rose’s Interim review in 2008 of the primary school curriculum. That said, Woodhead’s arguments in a work whose chapters are titled Dumbing Down – the Proof; The Myth of the Knowledge Economy and the Death of Liberal Education; The Flight From Knowledge; The Thought World; and the Failure to Re-invent the Comprehensive School, carry as much weight today as they ever did.

Bear in mind that to attain a good pass now at GCSE in some subjects a mark of about 20 per cent is required. Bear in mind the move in some schools to get rid of intelligent, diagnostic marking and replace with`conferencing’ sessions with children. Bear in mind that many 13 to 16 year olds today cannot read a clock face in the examination hall. Oh and don’t forget that in some parts of the country (according to a 2018 report by the Education Policy Institute), more than three quarters of physics teachers have no relevant degree, let alone one in physics, and in maths some two thirds do not hold a degree for teaching the subject.

Key among Woodhead’s battlegrounds with what Gove would come to describe as “The Blob” is the matter of what it is children need to be taught. He relates the “considerable opposition” from primary school teachers who were antagonised by the idea of having to teach “subjects.”They would, he claims, assert “We teach children, not subjects.’He adds that at secondary school level there is the prevailing sense that if the “wretched curriculum had to be divided up into subjects, then every opportunity should be taken… for the teaching of (cross-curricular) themes and skills.” He observes that one leading emeritus professor of education is uninterested in “intellectual culture”, saying that in “his view, subject disciplines are middle class constructs that working class children find alien.”

Woodhead is clear that what should matter more than children’s enjoyment of learning, “is their actual attainment: what they have mastered.” He deplores the situation where, “knowledge has been marginalised to the point where ignorance is inevitable.”

The teacher as maverick genius is, Woodhead predicts, a thing of the past and we won’t see its like again. He remembers one such headmaster of a prep school that was damned by Ofsted for ignoring “just about every rule in the book and worse still, it was employing traditional teaching methods to achieve dangerously high academic standards.”This “legendary figure in the world of independent education” had an “independence of mind and spirit” and Woodhead states poignantly, “children are increasingly unlikely to be taught by men and women whose maverick genius inspires a real love of learning.”His despair is about a modern lobotomised teaching profession that has been “programmed into a robotic conformity.” Woodhead, it is important to say, does not blame teachers; he says their “promotion depends upon the enthusiasm with which they espouse the latest modern fad.”

Woodhead is clear in his thesis that there is a responsibility to initiate the young into the best that has been thought and written, and that this is not about a “skills-based, socially responsible, politicised curriculum.” This is the “road to freedom” and it goes beyond the utilitarian. He is also clear (and this is true, however much left wing educational orthodoxy refutes it) that not every child is capable of travelling “very far along this road.” He champions the idea of vocational courses and refers to the country’s skills shortages, but he has no truck with “educationalists and politicians, tortured by their egalitarian obsessions, who agonise over ‘parity of esteem.”

It is all about context, as we know if a pipe bursts in the middle of the night. Vocational courses, a good idea for anybody’s children he says, have been “sabotaged by woolly thinking, ministerial gullibility and white collar snobbery.” He is also firm in his conviction that there needs to be a democritisation of education, that state education has to be “less centralist” where schools are allowed “to develop their own particular identity and purpose to compete with one another in the marketplace.”

What comes through powerfully in the book is not simply the lucidity and intellectual force of Woodhead’s arguments, but also the resilience and character of the man who would become a rock climber as well as one able to square up to the damaging group think of pretty much the entire educational establishment.

At his grammar school there were “foul” dinners and several hours of homework a night, and his playing up landed him a few times in the headmaster’s study for the customary corporal punishment. He recalls, however: “I can remember standing in the rain waiting for the bus one November night after a detention thinking that I had one advantage over the teachers who were persecuting me: I was younger than they were, and the odds were they would die first.’’

His passion for his subject, English, is plain and it is significant that the title words “desolation of learning” comes from a poem by Geoffrey Hill, one of his favourite writers. That passion finds expression in another piercing, but this time joyful, recollection of youth, when he first arrived at Bristol University. “I was an 18 year old who wanted to spend three years of his life reading English literature. I had no idea where my studies would lead and I did not care…it was enough…to walk down from Clifton …to the University Library at the top of Park Street and to revel in the fact that there were so many books I had not read.” It  would go on to inform his unshakeable belief that education matters for its own sake.

He despairs of the dismissal by educationalists, employers and politicians as an “elitist and anachronistic embarrassment” the notion that an academic student might read for a degree because they want to study more about a subject they love. The “agenda”, he laments, is about increasing participation, widening access, making courses more relevant to the supposed needs of the economy, in short getting the “walls of the ivory tower torn down.”

His words are clear. “Nobody believes in universities as centres of liberal learning any more.’’ He says that while writing the book he flicked through the latest edition of his old university’s magazine and found it dedicated to “enterprise” and how to spot business opportunities, with articles like “How I Became a Pie Shop Owner”. He is dismayed by the Vice Chancellor’s trite summing up in the mission statement of the institution’s essential purposes as “learning, discovery and enterprise”. In his days as a student, the university did not feel it needed a mission statement “and its Vice Chancellor would not have dreamt of descending to this level of banality.”

Two decades into the twenty first century, it’s becoming clear that a generation of young people have been conned into taking degrees that lead them into £50,000 worth of debt and into jobs for which they don’t need a degree anyway. Vice chancellors, however, have done very well with their packages, thanks very much. Many of us, Woodhead among those with the highest profile, saw this coming and that it would end in tears. This is what happens when you lose sight of what something is actually for: what education is for, what university is for. It is to learn to think for oneself. On which note, it feels right to quote novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, to whom Woodhead refers in his conclusion: “Education is no longer seen as the road to freedom; it is seen as the road to a higher salary.’’

Freedom is the theme of this book, the freedom that education can and should bring: “A liberation from the tyranny of the majority view, a release from the monotony of the quotidian.” Ironic, then, that it was Woodhead’s vocal detractors all along, with all their received wisdom and dogma about “relevance,” “personalisation” and skills over knowledge, that would do most to usher in utilitarianism and conformity. Free speech in the staffroom anyone? Free speech on campus?

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Australia: Misreading the data will not help the teachers

Outdated teaching methods based on disproved theories remain widespread despite the abundance of good and easily available information on effective, evidence-based instruction.

The gap between research and practice is an enduring and critical challenge in education — nowhere more so than in how to teach reading. Many children in developed countries with high levels of education spending have low literacy when almost all children can learn with good instruction.

What is preventing the uptake of proven teaching methods in classrooms? The Reading Recovery program gives an almost perfect illustration. It is arguably the most widely used intervention for children who need such support in the early years of school.

Developed in New Zealand by Dame Marie Clay in the 1970s based on her theories about how children learn to read, it is used in thousands of schools around the world. Its advocates are strongly committed to the belief that it helps the children who participate. Its critics say that there is no good evidence that the program works, and its teaching methods do not reflect what we now know about how children learn to read.

In this case, lack of evidence doesn’t mean lack of research. Reading Recovery has been the subject of dozens of studies over several decades.

Much of the research is low quality in terms of evidence standards. But some recent research is more rigorous, including longitudinal studies published in Australia, the US and England in recent years.

A large Australian study published by the NSW Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation in 2016 involved more than 20,000 students. It found that children who had participated in Reading Recovery in Year 1 performed worse on the Year 3 NAPLAN reading assessment than a matched sample of students who had not participated in the program. That’s right. Worse.

After up to 20 weeks of daily one-to-one 30-minute lessons with highly trained teachers, these children ended up with lower reading ability than peers who had similar reading ability at the start of the study.

As a result, after years of ignoring researchers in Australia and New Zealand who had been loudly and unswervingly warning that Reading Recovery was not effective for most students, the NSW government finally stopped providing dedicated funding for it.

Nevertheless, despite some of the clearest findings in educational research, public and non-government schools around Australia have continued to fund the program from discretionary budgets. They are convinced that it works, and any new piece of research that appears to confirm that belief is seized upon.

New findings published in Britain last year would appear to vindicate the loyalty of Reading Recovery acolytes. In reality, however, it only proves the lengths that Reading Recovery supporters will go to in order to defend it, even to the extent of obfuscating data.

The latest UK Every Child a Reader study, conducted by academics from University College London and funded and published by the KPMG Foundation, was launched with great fanfare at the House of Lords in December. The report claims to show that Reading Recovery in Year 1 was responsible for high scores in the General Certificate of School Education 10 years later.

The KPMG Foundation commissioned an economic analysis which estimated a £1.2 billion ($2.2bn) boost to the economy if all struggling readers were given Reading Recovery.

However, closer scrutiny of the latest report revealed a methodological mystery — a group of students present in the five-year follow-up study published in 2012 were missing from the 10-year study. The missing children comprised an entire group of more than 50 students (about 20 per cent of the sample) who had formed a second comparison group in the original study and in the
five-year follow-up. The omission of this second comparison group is neither acknowledged nor explained in the 10-year study report.

Why is this a big deal? Because the data from the missing second comparison group completely undermines the conclusions drawn in the published report.

To explain: In the original study, there were three groups of students. Two groups of students came from a set of Reading Recovery schools. Some of the students in the Reading Recovery schools did Reading Recovery in Year 1 (RR group) and some did not do Reading Recovery (RRC). A comparison group of students was drawn from a set of non-Reading Recovery schools (CC).

In the five-year follow-up study, the three groups were compared on their results in the Key Stage 2 (KS2) curriculum tests, taken in Year 6 of primary school. There was no statistically significant difference in the KS2 scores of the two groups of children in Reading Recovery schools (RR and RRC). Both of these groups had significantly higher KS2 scores than children in the non-Reading Recovery schools (CC).

That is, in Year 6, the children in Reading Recovery schools outperformed the comparison students irrespective of whether they actually participated in Reading Recovery.

This indicates that any advantage of the students in Reading Recovery schools was not attributable to participation in Reading Recovery — it must have been due to something else about those students, those schools, or both. In the published version of the 10-year follow-up study, only two groups are compared — the students who did Reading Recovery (RR) and the comparison group from non-Reading Recovery schools (CC).

The students in Reading Recovery schools who did not do Reading Recovery (RRC) are omitted. The RR group had markedly higher GCSE results than the CC group, allowing the authors to conclude that “the positive effect of Reading Recovery on qualifications at age 16 is marked in this study and suggests a sustained intervention effect.”

Having remembered that the five-year study was much less straightforward and conclusive, I wrote to the lead author of the study — Jane Hurry — and asked about the missing group. The professor replied with the explanation that she had written two versions of the 10-year follow-up study, one that included the second comparison group results and one that excluded them. KPMG Foundation chose to publish the latter.

Hurry readily provided me with the copy of the alternative unpublished version of the 10-year follow-up report. It shows that there was no difference in GCSE scores between students in the set of Reading Recovery schools who had done Reading Recovery and those that had not (the missing RRC group). Both of these groups had significantly higher scores than the children in comparison schools.

Again, this means that the higher GCSE scores of children in the set of Reading Recovery schools was not due to participation in Reading Recovery. Children from the same schools who had not done Reading Recovery had performed just as well.

Tolerance for poor evidence standards in education is not a victimless crime. The total cost of implementing ineffective reading programs is much larger than the budget allocated to teacher training and teacher time.

There are enormous and tragic opportunity costs for the children involved, with profound impacts on their educational achievement and wellbeing.

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