UK: Without exams, education falls apart

This year’s results are totally meaningless

The integrity of public exams is set to be the latest victim of the coronavirus lockdown. Fears are mounting that results for English schools over the next couple of weeks will be engulfed by the same furore that has gripped Scotland.

All national exams were cancelled this summer as part of the Covid-19 measures. Instead, grades were awarded based on a combination of teacher judgement and exam-board moderation. But as the Scottish results have already shown, this is a recipe for disaster.

If Scotland had used teacher-assessed grades alone, results would have improved by their biggest ever margin. However, following the exam boards’ moderation processes, over a quarter of all grades were changed. Around 125,000 results were downgraded, with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds disproportionately affected. Scottish students have been demonstrating in response, and a no-confidence vote was proposed against the SNP education secretary John Swinney. Yesterday, he made a u-turn, promising to restore the grades to those recommended by teachers.

Meanwhile, the Times Educational Supplement reports that the English exams regulator Ofqual has already instructed exam boards to ignore teacher-assessed grades for the majority of awards – most grades will instead be based on statistical modelling. Education secretary Gavin Williamson has belatedly introduced a ‘triple lock’ for A-Level grades, meaning that students can appeal to exam boards to get whichever grade is the highest from their estimated grade, from mock exams already taken and from a resit in the autumn.

To understand what’s going on here, it is important first of all to recognise that methods for producing grades have varied from school to school. Some have required their pupils to sit past exam papers and marked them in line with the original grade boundaries. Others have extrapolated from student attainment data from the rest of the year. Some schools have produced bespoke assessments, while some schools have no doubt not codified the process at all and have left the matter entirely up to the estimation of individual teachers.

In this way, schools have been placed in a difficult position. The evidence they have provided for these grades has been non-uniform, partly subjective, retrospective, and somewhat cobbled together. It does not represent a level playing field.

This is why the exam boards have compared these grades with historical data indicating what the school would deliver in an average year. Where discrepancies have occurred, the exam board has changed the teacher grade to bring it more in line with previous trends.

So a ragbag of evidence, thrown together on the hoof, has been compared with data generated during ‘business as usual’ times. This predicament was made even worse by a perception across the secondary sector that there was no alternative. Added to that was a sense of urgency because students need these grades for entrance to university, further education and employment.

How could anyone have ever hoped such an arrangement might work? This was a slow-motion car crash set in train from the beginning of lockdown. It has revealed the unbelievably weak grip the UK and devolved governments have had on education during the pandemic.

Yet it was not unreasonable to expect that results would be down this year anyway. School teaching was largely abandoned during the lockdown. It is obvious that if you leave students to study in isolation through a computer, many are not going to perform well under assessment. However, the current crisis isn’t so much about the performance of pupils. Instead, it reveals the vital role exams play in holding two competing views of education in tension.

It is a teacher’s job to see every pupil as an individual case, to work out what the subject means to that individual, the extent of his or her desire to learn, and where the points of cohesion and resistance sit. Examiners, on the other hand, necessarily take a statistical viewpoint. Candidates are just so many numbers on a bell curve, and what has happened before will likely repeat without much change. Increased commercial competition between exam boards and a business-model approach to school improvement have both entrenched this economistic and algorithmic view.

That’s why exams are fundamentally good in principle. They mediate between the two viewpoints. Exams represent the culmination of an education in a particular discipline on a single day. The subjectivity of the teacher finally reaches full expression in the subjectivity of the learner, in a way that permits direct objective comparisons between learners. Subjective and objective aspects are united and what is created is put to scrutiny.

However, education is losing sight of its subjective elements, and as teacher authority and autonomy rest on this subjectivity, they have been increasingly contested. Teaching has become more tightly focused around instrumental methods and, as a result, teachers are principally valued as the means to achieving the necessary exam grades.

Where personal judgement counts for little and exam grades count for everything, it is hardly surprising that predictions tend to inflate. When your honest view as a teacher isn’t valuable on its own terms, you will start making predictions as a way of signalling that expectations remain high, to guard against negative perceptions of your performance, to reassure or motivate pupils, or simply to keep parents off your back.

Exams are the glue that holds the edifice of education together. And without exams – as spiked was quick to point out – the whole project of education is dangerously unbalanced.

Students would have been much better off taking to the streets to protest for the right to sit their exams in the first place rather than complaining they haven’t got what they were expecting. But it is even more naive to believe that putting government ministers under pressure to intervene with a technical fix will make the problem go away.

Ultimately, nobody wins in this situation. The information on this year’s certificates won’t really help any of the various stakeholders: pupils and their families, universities, employers, boards, quangos or central government. The rows set teachers against examiners, and create an impression that neither has a clear view of students’ capabilities. This ultimately will erode trust in this system even further.

If education is about nothing more than grades, it has little meaning. But in essence, exams are important. As we are seeing, without them education falls apart.

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US Justice Department finds Yale discriminates against Asian and white students

The findings are the result of a two-year investigation in response to a complaint by Asian American groups and are in violation of US civil rights law, the department said.

If the university in New Haven, Connecticut did not take "remedial measures", the department said it was prepared to file a lawsuit against it.

A Yale spokeswoman said the university "categorically denies" the allegations but cooperated fully with the investigation.

The Justice Department made its findings before allowing Yale to provide requested documents, she said.

"Had the department fully received and fairly weighed this information, it would have concluded that Yale's practices absolutely comply with decades of Supreme Court precedent," the spokeswoman said.

The Justice Department said although race could lawfully be considered in college admissions in limited circumstances, "Yale's use of race is anything but limited".

The elite school "uses race at multiple steps of its admissions process resulting in a multiplied effect of race on an applicant's likelihood of admission", the Justice Department said.

The Justice Department previously filed legal briefs in support of a lawsuit, brought by affirmative action opponents, accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian Americans.

A federal judge in Boston ruled in favour of Harvard in that case, saying the school's affirmative action program advanced a legitimate interest in having a diverse student body.

An appeal of that ruling is pending.

The case could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

Affirmative action programs in higher education were meant to address racial discrimination.

The Supreme Court has ruled universities may use affirmative action with the aim of helping minority applicants get into college.

US conservatives have said that in helping black and Latino applicants, affirmative action could hurt white people and Asian Americans.

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Parents, Educators, Doctors Join Trump in New Push to Reopen Schools

Dr. Melanie McGraw Piasecki is both a pediatrician and a mother of three who wants to see kids back in school after the COVID-19 lockdown that shuttered classrooms in the spring and is on the cusp of doing so this fall across the country.

“My children did not have a particularly great experience in the spring, particularly my youngest, who was in first grade at the time,” Piasecki, of Charlotte, North Carolina, said Wednesday at a White House event. “I think the online learning for the young ones, it just doesn’t work.”

Her children’s school is moving to a hybrid model, a mix of in-classroom and remote learning.

“In terms of being a pediatrician, I just think the science is so clear that the risk of death or hospitalization for children with this virus is so, so low,” Piasecki said. “We know the risks of missing school are catastrophic. We probably don’t even know how high they are yet, and they cover so many different areas.”

Piasecki was among nine Americans—including parents, doctors, teachers, and education officials—who attended the White House event to advocate the reopening of schools.

“We are 100% with you,” President Donald Trump said, referring to children’s return to school.

Vice President Mike Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, presidential counsel Kellyanne Conway, and new White House medical adviser Dr. Scott Atlas also were part of the event.

“The concept of every other day [school attendance] seems a little ridiculous, right?” Trump asked Piasecki. “If you’re going to do it, you do it. The concept of going back—even from a management standpoint from the school—every other day seems very strange.”

Piasecki explained the thinking behind it, but said she’s generally supportive of returning to school.

“The idea is they are going to take half the student body on ‘A’ days and half the student body on ‘B’ days so they can socially distance in the facility; then if you’re home, you’ll be watching it on technology,” she said.

Trump responded:  “But you’d rather see them go back period, right? You’d rather not see that?”

The doctor answered: “That’s right.”

Trump secured $13 billion for states to spend on K-12 education, and is asking Congress to approve another $70 billion for K-12 schools.

Keeping schools closed harms earning potential for students, said Paul Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

“For every year you spend in school, in the future you will earn 10% more in lifetime earnings,” Peterson said at the White House gathering, adding:

So, if we lock down schools for a year, we assign this generation to a 10% earning loss for the rest of their life. This is profound. The costs are vastly greater than people have appreciated, to say nothing about the importance of young people being together with one another.

At this point, Trump said: “So sitting in isolation with a computer, looking at a laptop, is not the same as being out there in the real world?”

Peterson said the COVID-19 pandemic changed his mind about the effectiveness of remote learning.

“At one point, Mr. President, I thought digital learning was the future,” Peterson said. “But, we have learned through this COVID crisis that we haven’t got digital learning to the point where you can really engage young people. They have got to be in that classroom. They have to be with their peers.”

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Australia: Give low-income parents a school choice

We have to stop using private schools as a scapegoat for everything wrong with Australian education.

It’s recently been argued that to improve equity non-government schools should receive more public funding, in exchange for giving up the ability to receive fees from parents and select who they enrol.

But neither of these things are responsible for the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Sure, Australia’s school system suffers some inequities, but this is due to differences across post codes rather than school sectors.

Even if all selective, independent, and Catholic schools stopped charging fees or even closed down, , it would simply lead to more high-income families moving to areas with the best government schools (raising local house prices and not improving equity).

Australia is actually more equitable — in terms of the effect of student socioeconomic background on achievement and variance in outcomes within schools — than the OECD average, New Zealand, and some top-performing education systems like Singapore. This is despite the fact that Australia has one of the highest global proportions of students attending non-government schools.

So, fee-charging non-government schools aren’t the cause of inequity, but what about their ability to select their students?

The proposal that all non-government schools should be publicly-funded the same as government schools on the condition they give up control over their enrolments isn’t practical. For faith-based schools — especially the smaller, low-fee ones — flexibility in enrolment selection is essential in reflecting the values of their parent community.

What we need to do is expand school choice for low-income parents, not take away existing choice.

A charter school is one that’s publicly funded, but privately managed — meaning parents can have greater choice without facing the burden of cost. It also means that parents have more of a say in how schools are run, rather than enduring the inflexibility of a bureaucratic government-run school system.

Research from the United States — where charter schools are a popular option — shows they improve educational excellence, efficiency — and yes, equity. And the main beneficiaries of expanded school choice are actually disadvantaged students in normal government schools.

School class warfare isn’t going to help solve inequity. But giving low-income parents more choice will.

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