UK: We should never have closed schools

The A-level by algorithm scandal rolls on, lurching from crisis to chaos. Government messaging shifts randomly between an insistence that nothing will change and suggesting that if students are disappointed with their allotted grades, they can simply pick others. Just this weekend, reassurances about appealing lower-than-expected results were swiftly followed by Ofqual (the exams regulator) removing from its website all details of how the appeals process would work.

The devastating impact this has on the lives of all involved cannot be overstated. A cohort of 18-year-olds have missed the end of their school days with all the associated rites of passage, had summer holidays and festivals cancelled, and have been unable to get jobs in bars or restaurants, only to see their exam results turned into a political football. Some have lost university places and are now having to drastically rethink their future plans.

What has gone so badly wrong? Amid all the noise it’s easy to miss the fact that, across the board, A-level grades are actually up on previous years. The proportion of entries graded at A or above has increased to 27.6 per cent from 25.2 per cent last year. Results were deliberately kept in line with past performance in order to avoid grade inflation and, importantly, devaluing this year’s marks.

Even though results are up overall, almost 40 per cent of grades awarded fell below those predicted by teachers. If teacher assessments stand unmoderated, there will be a large increase in the proportion of students getting top marks. Ofqual has been critical of schools making ‘implausibly high judgements’. There are many reasons why teachers might be generous in making predictions. Exam results are used to judge the performance of both schools and individual teachers. Perhaps more significantly, teachers want what’s best for their pupils and exam success is seen as key to university, future employment prospects and self-esteem. Ofqual’s algorithm was designed to compensate for teacher generosity and to keep each school’s performance in line with previous years.

The problems this creates were surely predictable. The algorithm cannot discern whether a teacher is being generous to the bright students at schools that perform poorly or to the lazy students who attend high-performing schools. Instead, it bakes in pre-existing differences and then further exacerbates inequality by excluding schools with only a small cohort of A-level pupils from the algorithm’s workings. In such cases, generous teacher-assessed grades stand unmoderated. The upshot is that pupils at smaller schools – which are more likely to be fee-paying – have, in general, received the grades the teachers predicted for them while students at large sixth forms, particularly those in more disadvantaged areas, have been awarded lower grades.

The Department for Education and Ofqual are now, rightly, facing a barrage of criticism for their handling of this situation. Angry students and parents are demanding the national algorithm be corrected and reapplied. But no algorithm, no matter how sophisticated or how rigorously applied, could ever provide a fair measure of individual performance in the same way as an exam. The fact that all students sit the same exam, at the same time, under the same conditions, acts as a great leveller. It provides an opportunity for determined youngsters to prove their capabilities no matter what their postcode or which school they attended. Scrapping exams – and not the application of a dodgy algorithm – has denied an entire cohort this opportunity.

Cancelling exams was rarely questioned back in March when schools were closed. It was seen as inevitable – and perhaps for good reason. Over the past five months huge educational inequalities have been exposed. Whereas some, mainly private-school pupils, have received a full timetable of online lessons, others have barely received an emailed worksheet to complete. It would hardly have been fair to pitch pupils who had been taught up to the last minute against those who had gone for three months without any contact with a teacher, no wifi and not even an open library. Although, as we are now discovering, perhaps this would still have been more equitable than an algorithm.

Closing schools has led directly to the current results fiasco. But it is the very same people who demanded school closures back in March, and who had an almighty strop every time the prospect of reopening schools was mooted, who are now complaining most loudly about inequality and injustice. They let a cohort of youngsters down and now they have the cheek to complain. It truly beggars belief.

Schools were shut so casually because education carries so little value today. To government ministers, grades are simply about opening doors to university and employment. To some teaching-union leaders and commentators, exams are stressful, unfair and should be scrapped altogether. Almost no one argues that exam results provide a measure of what students know about a subject and that this is important in its own terms.

There is nothing inevitable about the current exam chaos. We could, right now, have a fair appeals system up and running. Results could have been released to schools at the beginning of this month, in time for teachers to flag up errors and appeal on behalf of individual pupils. Alternative forms of assessment could have replaced exams. Schools could have remained open to students in their final year of GCSE or A-levels. But all of these solutions would require valuing education and seeing 18-year-olds not as numbers on a spreadsheet or as vulnerable creatures to be flattered and appeased, but as capable and resilient young adults.

As we head into next academic year amid continued panic about schools and coronavirus, two things are clear: exams are the fairest method we have of assessing individual merit and we must do everything possible to keep schools open. Let’s hope students are not the only ones capable of learning lessons.

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UK: The exams fiasco is just the beginning

You’ve got to feel for Gavin Williamson, who having presided over the corona exams fiasco may just go down as one of the worst education secretaries in history.

I mean, who could have foreseen the crisis that met him after A-level results were released last week – whereby the decision to cancel exams over the pandemic, and then award grades by algorithm, was revealed to have led to bright students from disadvantaged schools being penalised?

Well, everyone except him, as it turns out.

Indeed, the Class of 2020 crisis has unfurled with the grim inevitability of a slow-motion car crash, not least as a near identical crisis had unfurled in Scotland a week earlier, forcing an embarrassing u-turn.

Still, Gav barrelled into A-level results day last week insisting there would be ‘no u-turns’ and chiding the Scottish government for caving in to the backlash and reverting back to teachers’ predicted grades, thus fuelling grade inflation.

Days later, he followed in the Scots’ footsteps. And even before the Scottish results, many people were raising the alarm about the absurdities and injustices that would inevitably result from assigning grades by computer model.

Back in July, the Education Select Committee raised concerns about how the standardisation model, developed by exams and qualifications regulator Ofqual, might unfairly affect new and improving schools.

The Times reports today that Williamson was warned six weeks ago that the system could lead to hundreds of thousands of pupils being given the wrong results, disproportionately hitting disadvantaged kids.

Sir Jon Coles, a former director-general at the Department for Education, warned Williamson that the model would be at best 75 per cent accurate in predicting A-level and GCSE grades.

That, as it turned out, was optimistic: Ofqual’s own tests, the results of which were published last week, suggested it was only 60 per cent accurate.

The Guardian reports, meanwhile, that external advisers tried to warn Ofqual of the coming storm but were similarly ignored.

As we now know, while the standardisation process kept a lid on potential grade inflation, from teachers predicting overly optimistic grades for their pupils, bright poor kids were the collateral damage.

As Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies explains, the way in which the algorithm took into account a school’s prior exams record made it ‘impossible for students at historically poor-performing sixth forms to get top grades’.

It also favoured schools in which small numbers of pupils sit any individual A-level (ie, private schools).

But again, all this had been suspected for some time. As Sam Freedman, former DfE adviser, pointed out, Ofqual guidance, published weeks ago, acknowledged that standardisation would be unfair on bright students in poor-performing schools.

Williamson’s claim that he only clocked the issues with the algorithm at the weekend suggests he is either incompetent or lying through his teeth. There’s a case to be made for either.

His blundering attempts to contain the initial crisis seemed the work of a man who had no idea what he was doing. He suggested mocks should be used by students to appeal their results, only for teachers to point out this was a terrible idea, as different schools grade them in very different ways.

Ofqual seemed to agree. Its guidance for the appeals process, swiftly published and then unpublished over the weekend, directly contradicted Williamson, saying teachers’ grades were more reliable than, and so would take precedence over, mock results.

None of this does much to dispel the image of Williamson, nicknamed Frank Spencer after the accident-prone 70s sitcom character, as a serial bungler who is only kept in cabinet because, as a former chief whip, he knows where all the bodies are buried.

His previous exploits include telling Russia to ‘go away and shut up’ while Theresa May’s defence secretary, and being subsequently sacked for allegedly leaking from a meeting of the National Security Council.

The rank incompetence of Williamson is beyond doubt. It is hard to think how this crisis could have been handled any worse, unless one Chris Grayling (who recently lost a rigged election) had been at the helm.

Ofqual also deserves its fair share of responsibility here for shunning the concerns of outside experts in recent months. That it was people within Ofqual who were first pushing for a u-turn over their own algorithm is absurd.

This all looks like a colossal failure of nerve. Williamson et al were clearly convinced that individual injustices could be dealt with and that the knock-on effects of rampant grade inflation – as we see in today’s record-breaking GCSE results – could be worse.

But as Joanna Williams argued on spiked this week, the die was cast when schools were closed and exams were cancelled back in March. And let’s not forget, these were moves that the government’s harshest critics were also demanding.

Yes, the government has badly mishandled this, as it has so much over the past few months, but the cancellation of exams was always going to blow up in our faces.

It was always absurd to think that we could determine individual attainment by computer model, or that teacher-predicted grades are any substitute for proper examinations. Even now there are concerns about the unfair treatment of the pupils of teachers who weren’t quite so generous in their predictions.

The u-turn has only shifted the administrative chaos on to universities, and the longer-term impacts of these past few months on the younger generation are only starting to reveal themselves.

Even those who didn’t sit exams this year will have had their educational development severely set back by the decision to shut down our education system. And it will be poorer kids who will inevitably bear the brunt.

Williamson should go. His authority is shattered and his incompetence has been revealed for all to see. But ultimate blame for this mess lies with No10, who made the decision to close schools, to cancel exams, as well as to make this week’s u-turn.

It is one thing to close schools in a moment of global panic, it is quite another to keep them closed even as evidence poured in that they could be reopened safely, and to cancel exams, even though they were pretty much already conducted in a socially distanced way.

In Germany, exams went ahead across the country, despite protests from some students and teachers who raised concerns about safety and how the pandemic might hit attainment. In the end, several states reported results that were higher than usual.

In Britain, we have lived under a tyranny of presentism and panic for months. Entire sections of economic, civic and social life have been shut down, with little thought given to the obvious carnage and injustice this will unleash further down the line.

The exams fiasco is just the beginning.

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Public School Libraries Commit to 'Anti-Racism'

After having spent half the summer informing our readers about the popularity of White Fragility and How to Be an Anti-Racist, the scene now shifts from the trendy "woke" crowd to libraries and schools as the academic year kicks off.

While practically all libraries were shuttered during the Wuhan flu outbreak, their umbrella group was apologizing for a past sin they likely weren't even aware of until the riots began. "The American Library Association (ALA) accepts and acknowledges its role in upholding unjust systems of racism and discrimination against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) within the association and the profession," the ALA wrote in a June release. "We recognize that the founding of our Association was not built on inclusion and equity, but instead was built on systemic racism and discrimination in many forms. We also recognize the hurt and harm done to BIPOC library workers and communities due to these racist structures."

Chastened enough that they felt the need for a mea culpa, individual libraries have been hard at work compiling book lists to assuage their guilt. But fear of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction has led critics to question the sincerity and goals of the ALA. At the same time, schools are rushing to re-educate their staff about this new paradigm.

Where libraries go, however, so do schools. Many students returning this fall will be tasked with reading one or more of these approved tomes, with discussions likely being led in a similar manner to these guidelines put out by, of all groups, the National Park Service. Its handy guide to the "'How to Be an Antiracist' Book Club" shows that "woke" people in government have way too much time on their hands. But it also shows how dead serious are those who believe that skin color supersedes the content of one's character and how committed they are to installing this view as our nation's predominant belief system.

It's no accident that these authors are targeting our young people with their latest appeal. And unfortunately, given the relatively recent indoctrination of their moms and dads, it won't take a lot of convincing — even if this initiative is all about righting wrongs none of us were around to commit.

No one questions that we need to continue to strive for a more perfect union. But our contention is that we've made a lot of progress on racial issues since the days of Jim Crow, even though some of the "advances" — such as erasing the father from many black families — have done a lot more harm than good.

Instead of these activist authors trying to place blame where it doesn't belong, perhaps a book built around the Golden Rule would be a more valuable lesson for all of us.

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Australia: Curriculum ignores history value

Twenty-first century history is being made each day. The news is full of  statue-toppling anarchists and clueless looters, politicians making life and death decisions on COVID-19, increasing cyber crime and human rights abuses, loss of respect for longstanding international conventions of the sea and air … and the list goes on.

As times like these, there can be a realisation of a desperate need for knowledge and skills to examine ourselves and our past to reassure ourselves that people are capable of great goodness.

Only the sophisticated, inquiry-based study of human history can do this.

Down Under, reviewers of the Australian Curriculum have a tiny window of opportunity to make History the go-to subject that will finally stand tall alongside English, Mathematics and Science as signalled when those first four learning areas were prioritised back in 2011.

Unfortunately, like foreign languages and the arts, Australian education places History in the category of ‘nice to have’ but without widely accepted value ‘in the real world’.

This subject area suffers from some of the same issues as STEM and languages – too few highly trained teachers, and too little public support for intellectually rigorous education.

At its very best, the study of history — more than any other area of the curriculum — produces analytical thinkers, researchers with academic integrity and deep curiosity, competent writers and thoughtful debaters who marshal the evidence to explain the past, the present and the possible future.

But Australian education is reaping what we have sown — a weak, disjointed curriculum, lacking a powerful overarching national narrative (see Singapore for contrast) and clear, high standards.  This is particularly evident in History, with its inconsistent delivery, small enrolments in Years 11 and 12 and minimal alignment with the separate subject of Civics and Citizenship.

So who will write the history of these strange times? As the saying goes, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And history does tend to be written by the winners.

The revised Australian Curriculum needs to be a winner, especially in that most precious field of History.

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