UK: Why it was wrong to cancel exams

Students have been left in limbo, even though any risks could surely have been mitigated.

ALEX STANDISH

In the past week, my two daughters have had their school musical cancelled, along with a cello exam, a clarinet exam, an interview for a student position in school, and a SAT test. Last night we learned that all schools in the UK will close at the end of the week. ‘They are taking away everything that I have been working for’, was how one of my daughters expressed her frustration.

I fear that this will be how many students in Years 11 and 13, along with their teachers, felt yesterday when news broke that this year’s GCSE and A-level exams have been cancelled as a result of the coronavirus crisis and the school closures.

I do not want to understate the challenges posed by setting public exams at a time when schools are closing, or at least paring back provision to cater for a small number of pupils. Exam boards are probably also short-staffed. The closure of schools from next week would have made it difficult for pupils to complete their courses and prepare for their exams.

But many students were about to be granted study leave anyway, either just before or after the Easter holidays, so that they could revise at home. Completing their courses remotely may have put them at a disadvantage, but nearly all pupils would be in a similar situation and exam boards would surely make allowances in terms of grade boundaries.

There would also of course be the challenge of putting on exams in schools that are not fully open. Schools have designated exam officers who may be self-isolating, and invigilators would need to be employed to run the exams. Some students may be unwell with the virus and so would have to take the exams at another time. On the plus side, exams require students to sit and work individually at desks, with minimal social contact.

Exam grades are not the ends of education. Like many others, I have been arguing for some time that schools today place too much emphasis on exams and data, at the expense of the intrinsic value of learning. That is, exploring questions of what is true, what is right and what is beautiful, enabling young people to inherit the wisdom of their teachers, and urging them to join in conversations about society, the economy and the environment.

But exams have an important role to play both for young people and society more broadly – they validate learning and achievement. Exams have their limitations. But for students they provide a focus, structure and culmination for their study. They are an opportunity for students to demonstrate what they have learnt and what they can do. Exams are also, of course, key to how universities and employers assess applicants.

Cancelling these exams presents enormous challenges for assessing student achievement in a way that is fair, valid and standardised. The knock-on effect in terms of university admissions will be highly problematic. More immediately, this move has removed the very thing that students and teachers have been working towards for the best part of two years. What should the teachers teach and what should the students study if the government has just removed the goal to which they have all been working towards?

We could argue that the situation provides an opportunity to show students that education is about more than exams. But this is a hard sell given they certainly were important last week. Plus we should interrogate the context in which this decision was made.

The Covid-19 crisis is an unprecedented situation in recent times. Difficult decisions are having to be made with many people suffering the effects. Judgements need to be made that weigh the costs and benefits of things like keeping schools open versus isolating people to slow the transmission of the virus. Of course, the government wants to protect as many people as possible. But that doesn’t mean that safety is an absolute that overrides all the other aspects of life that we value. Surely these exams could have still gone ahead if sensible steps were taken to minimise any risk.

What message are we sending to young people by cancelling their exams rather than finding a way to allow them to go ahead? And why cancellation rather than postponement, which would at least show that the government recognises and values the important work everyone has put in?

In recent years, schools have given a lot of attention to the idea of building young people’s resilience. But while we can all sit in classrooms and talk about it, real resilience comes from facing and responding to adversity in a mature way. Until now, by keeping schools open during a health emergency, the government and teachers had been doing just that. Unfortunately, when faced with the challenge of public exams, it appears the government has told teachers and students to give up.


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The Price Mechanism in Attending College

In 2019, Maxine Waters (D-CA) ascended to the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. In April, Waters conducted a hearing for which she had assembled the heads of some of America’s largest banks. Waters asked these titans of finance: “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt? Who would like to answer first?” She then went down the line of bankers, who said they were no longer in the student loan business. Finally, she came to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who said, “When the government took over student lending in 2010 or so, we stopped doing student lending.”

Tail between her legs, Waters quickly moved on to other matters. What the exchange demonstrated is that Waters was at the very least unprepared to chair that hearing (about which, more coming up), but what may be even more vexing is that the government takeover Mr. Dimon referred to had received an aye vote from none other than Maxine Waters.

In February of 2018, Investor’s Business Daily ran an important editorial about the 2010 legislation Rep. Waters apparently forgot voting for. IBD asserted that the Act had “effectively nationalized” the student loan business:


“By cutting out the middleman, we'll save the American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years,” Obama said when he signed this change into law. “That's real money.” …As a result, federal student loan debt shot up from $154.9 billion in 2009 to $1.1 trillion by the end of 2017… The problem is that at the same time Obama was getting the government into the lending business in a big way, he was making it easier for students to avoid paying back their loans."


As the IBD editorial outlines, the 2010 takeover of student loans was sold as a moneymaker for the government. Instead, it’s turning out to be a huge loser. The act also provides for a disturbing amount of student debt forgiveness. That’s on top of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program enacted on 2007. Even so, Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders urges that Congress enact legislation that would forgive all student loan debt.

In June of 2019, the New York Times ran “Canceling Student Loan Debt Doesnʼt Make Problems Disappear” by guest Kevin Carey, who wrote about another proposal of Sanders’: making all undergraduate programs at public universities and colleges “free.” But, as Carey shows, Sanders’ proposal doesn’t add up:


"That’s because most student loan debt isn’t taken out to attend undergraduate programs at public colleges and universities. Most loans are used for private colleges, for-profit colleges and, most of all, graduate school."


Is it not remarkable that the federal government actually extends loans to attend for-profit colleges, not to mention private colleges that have multi-billion-dollar endowments? And then the feds forgive many of the loans by putting the taxpayer on the hook.

Carey also touched on the issue of the “pricing power” exercised by colleges, and how it would work under Sanders’ new regime of free undergraduate college: “The universities would have no pricing power, because there would be no prices.” We might also consider pricing power under the current system. Isn’t price discovery likely to get all bollixed up when an entity that can “print” money gets involved?

What the federal government should be doing is the exact opposite of what Bernie Sanders has proposed: Congress should end the federal student loan program for undergraduate education altogether. Too many young people are attending college who shouldn’t be attending. Also, it is undergraduate education where much harm is being done. It’s the undergraduates who are being turned into entitled little snowflakes who feel they can destroy property with impunity (as with Confederate statues). Let them pay for their indoctrination with their own money, not the taxpayers’.

However, if the federal government did end its loans for undergraduate education, wouldn’t that dash the hopes of youngsters who are indeed motivated and who should be in college -- wouldn’t they be priced out? One of the reasons prices for tuitions are so high is because so many kids are attending. If enough of them elected to forgo college, prices should fall.

On March 3 of 2020, the Boston Globe ran “The real story on the $1.6 trillion student loan debt crisis” by Josh Wright, who wrote:


"Over half of student loan borrowers (around 25 million people) owe less than $20,000, but they have higher default rates than the borrowers who owe more. The student borrowers with over $100,000 in federal student debt (about 7 percent of borrowers) are, in fact, the least likely to default on their loans."


Since it’s much more expensive to attend graduate school, a good bet is that most of those kids who’ve racked up less than $20K in student loan debt did it attending undergraduate school. In the real world, any cohort that could be identified as being more likely to default on their loans than other groups would either not get loans or have their interest rates raised.

As for continuing to extend loans to grad students, that, too, needs to be tweaked. The feds don’t need to be extending credit to students pursuing graduate degrees in Art History, Philosophy, Literature, and other programs in the Arts and Humanities departments. And the feds certainly shouldn’t be making loans to students in Law School (we have enough lawyers as it is, thank you). Perhaps it’s time for the federal government to get completely out of the student loan business. The only areas where it makes sense are in medicine, pharmacology, dentistry, engineering, some sciences, and other disciplines that are undeniably in the “common weal.”

At Media Research Center, one can watch a 45-second clip of Maxine Waters’ “cringeworthy” hearing; it also includes a short article by Brittany Hughes worth reading. The legislation Waters forgot voting aye for was the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. The education part of the act started out as a stand-alone bill in 2009, but having been passed only by the House was attached as a rider to the larger bill, (which might account for Rep. Waters’ confusion). The main part of the bill was to amend the ACA, ObamaCare, which had been signed into law just one week earlier. When critics claim that ObamaCare was passed with the reconciliation process, they’re referring to this piece of legislation.

It was fitting that education funding was attached to the ObamaCare amendments of the reconciliation bill, because price inflation in both education and health care is largely due to government. (Just as with the price of health care, if you want the price of college to soar, make it free.) We’re also seeing attempts to attach “riders” to the legislation addressing the coronavirus pandemic that are entirely unrelated, such as funding for abortion. There ought to be a law against such legislative shenanigans, but that would require, uh, legislation.

It’s likely that in addition to not reading ObamaCare, Auntie Maxine also failed to read the reconciliation bill that followed. As for Obama’s claim, rather than government “cutting out the middleman,” what really happened is that government became the middleman. How’s that working out for you, America?



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The soft power of education

Education has long been accepted as a way of building Australia’s soft power.

When we say soft power, we’re talking about the use of “positive attraction and persuasion to achieve foreign policy objectives” rather than the military and economic might of hard power. And education has “the ability to influence the behaviour or thinking of others through the power of attraction and ideas”.

In the 1950s, Australia made international education part of its foreign policy when, as part of the Colombo Plan, it funded scholarships to bring the future leaders of Asia to study in Australia.

The Australian government saw the benefit of “the body of people in Asian countries which is gradually built up with an intimate knowledge of Australia and, it may be hoped, some affection for this country”.

If we work on this criterion, the Colombo Plan can be considered a real success.

By 1985, the Colombo Plan had brought over 20,000 students to Australia — many of whom went on to work in key positions across Asia, giving Australia a soft power connection.

In Malaysia, alumni include a minister for trade, a chief minister and a renowned architect. A quarter of Mongolia’s current cabinet studied in Australia.

Australia’s Foreign Policy White Paper points to the soft power effects of study in Australia: “Many foreign government and business leaders, including heads of state, ministers and CEOs, have studied in Australia and understand our institutions, values and perspective on the world. This is a significant asset for Australia.”

It also outlines the efforts being put into an Australia Global Alumni program to leverage these connections.

But the picture is now more complex for at least four reasons.

* A smaller budget

First, Australia is no longer investing sufficiently in funded study to Australia to have large-scale impact.

The Colombo Plan’s successor, the Australia Awards, has become the victim of funding cuts. In 2016, it was reported that around 3500 scholarships, fellowships and short courses were funded.

Four years later, there are only 1982 Australia Awards.

Additionally, research tells us that Australia’s investment in diplomacy, development and trade is now at its lowest level ever.

On top of this, other countries have been investing more. In Laos, for example, Australia offers 30 scholarships, while China offers 1000.

* Self-funded student experience

International education is a significant business: it is now Australia’s third biggest export.

The vast majority of international students in Australia are fee-paying (which was true even during the Colombo Plan). In 2019, there were more than 750,000 international students in Australia including 25,000 secondary school students.

Whether these students add to Australia’s soft power depends crucially on whether they have a positive experience in Australia.

The worst-case scenario is that they speak mainly to other overseas students, don’t form friendships with Australians and leave having formed few connections or perhaps even negative views about Australia.

It’s up to schools and universities to be aware of this and work to ensure students feel welcome and at home during their time in Australia.

* Getting Australians into the region

Australia’s old model needs to be updated to take into account the effect of Australia’s new outbound program to take Australian students to the Indo-Pacific, known as the New Colombo Plan.

Launched in 2014 by then Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop as one of her signature initiatives, the New Colombo Plan aims to get young Australians to study and work in the region, rather than heading to traditional destinations like the US and Europe, as “a rite of passage to benefit us all”.

According to Julie Bishop: “Our country will benefit enormously from having young ambassadors from Australia who have an understanding of and an insight into the region that only comes from living, studying and working there.”

The New Colombo Plan takes Australian students to the Indo-Pacific region. Picture: Shutterstock
The scale of the New Colombo Plan — by the end of last year 60,000 young people had been funded to live and learn in 40 countries — suggest there is likely to be a significant soft power ripple effect.

Having thousands of young people serve as unofficial ambassadors for Australia in the region is likely to have a positive impact, particularly when the New Colombo Plan shows two of the hallmarks of best practice in public diplomacy: genuineness and mutuality.

* The global classroom

New technology means that coming to study in Australia isn’t the only way that education can have an effect.

Global organisations like ours are operating a number of intercultural learning programs, aiming to link our classrooms to the world.

The Asia Education Foundation’s school partnership program, Building Relationships through Intercultural Dialogue Growing Engagement or BRIDGE, has been operating for over ten years, establishing more than 500 school partnerships across 21 countries.

Funded by the Australian Government, it fosters these important people-to-people links through establishing relationships between students, teachers and school communities — helping teachers to open their classrooms to the world.

Intercultural learning lets us explore our differences and similarities through empathy and critical discussion.

It’s about relationships where both groups change and respond, forming cultural connections, rather than one-way transmission. It helps build global mindset and intercultural capabilities through learning together in a cross-cultural setting.

There are an estimated 750 million youth across Indo-Pacific aged 12 to 25, compared to 4.3 million young Australians. So, it’s essential that this generation must be able to develop deeper understandings of culture, communication, and connection.

The original Colombo Plan was small but precisely targeted and achieved the aim of creating significant long-term soft power benefit.

It provided a foundation for Australia to build rich contacts with the nations around us.

But today’s challenge is to update our model to include the many ways that education impacts on Australia’s image and influence in the region. And education remains one of the best ways to build soft power — creating bonds of affection as well as a deeper and more enriched intercultural understanding of the world.

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