Education

Here’s an interesting – and, for once, encouraging – development. Motherwell College (soon to be moving to a new campus on the site of the old Ravenscraig steel mill) is going to offer students the chance to study for the International Baccalaureate, rather than Scottish Highers. That’s a small, but significant victory for school choice, as teenagers at high schools in Lanarkshire will now have the chance to apply for one of the places on an IB course that has, until now, only been available in the private sector in Scotland. (Indeed, fewer than 150 schools across Britain offer the IB at present, though that number will grow as A-Levels

Peter Hoskin is right to be suspicious of the government’s latest ploy: mandating that all public bodies have a statutory duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. As you might expect Polly Toynbee is tickled a deepish shade of red by the notion. Nonetheless, consider this snippet from her column today: Poor children might need to have much more spent on their education per head than the better-off do. Sure Start toddlers might need more funds than older children. It might mean local lotteries to see that all children get equal access to the best schools. It’s a myth, of course, that simply ploughing more money into schools

Nuff said, methinks. Vouchers and proper school choice programmes aren’t the only answer, of course, but it’s simple decency to extend to the working class  opportunities taken for granted by the middle-class, including, of course, many teachers themselves. More details on the chart here.

Amazing. Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question. One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully. His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points. On the other hand… you might  say, given that I assume that plenty of the questions (in these shabby, fallen days!)

Chris Woodhead, the former head of the schools inspectorate in England and Wales, argues that many private schools are, to all intents and purposes, ripping off their clients. The Telegraph observes that he has an interest to declare, but: Prof Woodhead is the chairman of Cognita, which owns a chain of profitmaking private schools and has purchased four charitable schools. He said running schools as businesses reduced “waste” – such as luxurious sporting facilities and theatres – as fees were kept low to attract parents. “We are absolutely rigorous in not providing frills and frippery, but concentrating on what seems to us to matter most, namely the quality of teaching.

To return to schools. Did you know that it’s a bad thing for a school to be popular? Nor did I. But according to Scott Lemieux a voucher programme is pointless because it can’t save every child overnight and, anyway, there aren’t enough places at private schools in the first place. This rather conveniently ignores the fact that real school choice is not just a question of competition between private and state-sponsored schools but within the state sector itself. Anyway, Mr Lemieux writes that: A market in education wouldn’t function like other markets. Whereas more customers (within reason) for a department store mean more profits, more students for a school

Megan McArdle has been on a rare old tear recently, pushing the argument for school choice, here and here and here and here and here. It will not surprise some readers that I rather agree with her. Clearly, however, this just proves my foolishnesss. Did you know that it’s impossible to make a good faith argument in favour of school choice or any programme that gives poor families greater input into where their children are educated? Me neither. Time for me to be telt, obviously. Exhibit A) Matt Yglesias: …the United States already “allows” poor parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems in much the same way

Merit pay, eh? Normally I’m all for hopping on the teachers-unions-are-spawn-of-the-devil bandwagon. But they’re right to think that performance-related pay, or at least any form of it likely to be introduced by bureaucrats, is likely to be a disaster for exactly the same reason as most government-mandated teaching requirements offer exactly the wrong incentives. Neill Harvey-Smith explains: If one in twelve children sitting their GCSEs in 2010 raise what would have been a D to a C grade, in just one subject, and everything else stays the same, then the government will have met its supposedly tough new target for secondary education. Would your kid have got 5 A to

It’s a question I’ve asked before, but it’s worth revisiting: if school choice is a nefarious right-wing plot to keep poor people poor and uneducated why is it that Sweden – Sweden! – has a nationwide school voucher programme that is supported by all political parties? Now clearly this doesn’t in and of itself demonstrate that open access school choice programmes are necessarily a magic bullet, but it might – or rather ought to – quieten some of the hysterical shrieking one hears from defenders of the status quo in both the USA and the UK. If school choice can be embraced by left-wing Swedes it’s just about possible it