Politicomaniac

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Archbishops and Anarchists

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

From the media reporting, you would think that the Archbishop of Canterbury had been kettled and arrested for a public order offence alongside Penny Red and her network of assorted Anarchist Irregulars. However, the well mannered treatise on democratic theory (with a bit of applied theology thrown in at the end for good measure) that appeared in the New Statesman is a far cry from an Anarchist rallying call. He makes some real substantive points, mostly in a paragraph which begins “Incidentally, …”, and I’ll try and pick out the true from the false (without letting my enmity for St. Paul get in the way.)

Firstly, he is right in summarising IDS’ botched and rigged work programme, and the draconian changed to disability benefits (the case for which the DWP and ONS are regularly found to exaggerate – when corrected they are even rumoured to have said “well, it’s still quite a lot…”).

He is also perfectly correct to say that the British people did not vote for any NHS reform. All three parties manifestos, and even the coalition agreement, were firm in their commitment to “no top-down reorganisation;” something Paul Burstow and Andrew Lansley conveniently ignored when drawing up the white paper last summer. He may be premature though, as we haven’t yet seen what changes the government has decided to make to the Health and Social Care Bill in the pause triggered by a combination of Lib Dem pressure and #March26ers- you never know, it might be good news! (maybe)

Finally, he is completely wrong to call free-schools a ‘radical, long-term polic[y] for which no one voted’ – they were in the Tory manifesto, and widely discussed during the election campaign! Or maybe he’s talking about the Pupil Premium, which he bemoans the non-existence of later in the post, when complaining that there are no youth services protected from the cuts as permanent fixtures of long term investment. I agree the government could do more there, but he’s wrong not to mention that, thanks to the Lib Dems, there are some bits that already are shielded, not that Labour in local government aren’t trying to undo that work.

All in all, it’s not a bad little article, apart from him claiming that all left wing political philosophy is inspired by theology these days, and failing to acknowledge IDS’ firm religious basis for his ghastly decision to screw over many people on IB and DLA. I’m sure if he were to ever have the guts to stand for election, Dr. Williams would do fine.

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Posted in Current Affairs, Education, Health, Social Justice | 2 Comments »

Gove is fail

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Part 1: Hypocrite

You all heard it on the Today programme earlier; we have Libertarian Gove (“you can teach whatever you want”) and then we have Stalinist Gove (“but you must teach Churchill on Tuesday mornings”)… Once again this government hasn’t worked out how Localism is supposed to work.

In the first place you need to give people freedom to run a local service however they like (within a minimalist regulatory framework). You need to give them enough money to make that a real freedom, with choices about what to provide, not what to save in the avalanche of cuts.

Then, once you have run “an iteration” (at least a year, probably more in many fields, long enough to collect meaningful success/failure data,) you update the regulations to stop people repeating any dramatic failures, and you publish best practise resources for all the participants, so they can read about the top 15 solutions in detail and emulate the one that is right for their area. There is also scope for peer review of the next years strategic level plans; to have mediocre practitioners forced to justify their choice to continue their own scheme rather than adopt a similar, more successful one.

This is a method for using a population to search a parameter space for innovative ideas to solve a problem. It is not suitable for all problems because some already have loads of success/failure data; so you can provide serious amounts of best practise data off the bat. Education is probably a good example of one of these.

Gove’s interpretation of localism is a strange mixture of opening education up to crazy people (who want to teach that god put the dinosaur skeletons their to tempt us, or something) with imprinting his own prejudice and prescription on the curriculum (the Pope/Shelly, Dickens/Hardy literary sausage-fest.)

Part 2: Idiot

The other problem I have with the Department of Education’s current direction is the emphasis on facts. Spot checking students’ general knowledge is no measure of an education system. If you were to ask me a set of general knowledge questions I would undoubtedly fail dismally, where in contrast to Gove and Gibb’s underlying assumption, I am not a worthless failure according to three of their underlying prejudices (which I’m not going to name, because unlike them I don’t hold those prejudices.)

Feynman was once talking to a bunch of students in South America*. They were discussing the formation of deltas / estuaries and the evolution of rivers, and Feynman asked them for an example of one of these things. They were stumped; and it was up to Feynman to point out to them that they lived next door to the example from which the contents of their text books had been deduced; the Amazon.

This was not, as Gove might argue, a lack of facts. The problem in fact, was too many! The students had been encouraged to memorise large numbers of facts about the geological evolution of rivers and estuaries from a text book, without being examined on their understanding of those facts; the really valuable quantity in education, which enables students form their own arguments and contradict their parents (which is the point of education, obviously**).

There is no way that anyone could know everything anymore; the sum of collective human understanding is too great. Thus, Feynman (and I) argue, you don’t strictly speaking need to remember the longest river in the world or the name of the prime ministers of the nineteenth century (both of which, I am proud to say, I am ignorant of, unless Earl Grey was one of the prime ministers. And that I only know from the packet of tea.) If you need specific situational knowledge, you can look these things up (and we’ve got quite good at making that fast, these days).

No, we need knowledge and skills, in particular the analytical skills to understand and argue with facts. You do not learn maths and science by memorising a list of facts; you learn techniques to practise the theory of maths and science (i.e. logical investigation,) whether that’s the techniques of calculus or how to light a bunsen burner and retain your eyebrows. And where do you learn about argument, rebuttal and refining your language to make your points more effectively? Oh, that’s right in the arts and humanities (whether you are arguing with convincing force that the death of modernism has been greatly exaggerated, or sifting through the facts to prove that JFK was actually killed by aliens***.)

Sadly, in spite of the tories claiming (falsely) that maths and sciences are the most important subjects, which degrees do they have at the DoE? hmm, Gove (English, Oxford) Gibb (Law, Durham) and Loughton (Classical Civilisation, Warwick). The only scientist minister in the department is Sarah Teather (Natural Sciences, Cambridge,) and notice that she isn’t the one calling for a narrowing of the curriculum, and a misplaced emphasis on facts alone.

* sorry, this anecdote is very very vague, but I’ve lost my copy of “Surely you’re joking…” – he may have been talking to or examining the students, and they may not have been asked for an example but rather something technical about sediments. In any case, his point (that facts mean nothing without understanding) is accurate.

** You think I’m joking? The whole of humanity’s progress comes down to people doing things better than their parents did. Being sarcastic at your parents’ prejudices and craziness as a teenager is a solemn and vital duty, just as your childrens’ duty will be too.

*** both noble, but ultimately futile endeavours, alas.

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Posted in Education, Party Politics | No Comments »

Do I cut the Browne Cable?

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Firstly, I am in favour of free university education. This is for fairly standard reasons; graduates earn more and thus pay more tax, they are more likely to give to/volunteer for charity and vote and do all the things “good citizens” do. They pay back far more than they cost in the long term, and have all sorts of positive externalities that aren’t measurable.

But we can’t afford that just now, as we know, so we’re looking at compromises. And I have two problems with the current system that I’d like to see fixed.

Firstly, the explicit debt problem. While currently student debt is payable in the form of a tax, and quite a progressive one with a nice big personal allowance and a low rate of 9% (less than NI,) the thing is that it shows up on your credit rating. The Bank Manager sees it when they decide whether or not to give you a mortgage. This is not good from a liberty point of view: the explicit link to the debt needs to be removed, however the debt is collected.

Secondly, the rich parents problem. Now I see the “Graduate Contribution” (whether it is a fee, an explicit tax or an implicit income-linked tax,) as a charge for the student to pay from the economic gain they (may or may not) garner from the degree. As such it is an obligation on that person, as a result of their personal gain in status in society as a university graduate. At the moment wealthy parents can simply pay the fees in advance, buying their offspring that extra status at no cost to the future graduate themselves. I see this as a form of tax avoidance on the part of those parents for the benefit of the graduate, and the state’s authority should not crumble when challenged by such wealthy libertarians. The children of wealthy parents are already likely to live 15 years longer than the children of poor parents, and do better in school before either child is 6, and so on. Do we really need to give them a legal tax skive in later life as well? This is a serious problem from the point of view of Social Justice and Mobility and all graduates need to be subject to whatever extra “contribution” is to be implemented; their parents shouldn’t be allowed to buy them out of it.

Now I was hopeful as I watched Vince Cable this afternoon that he might have an answer from the Browne report to the second problem. He was talking about making sure that early repayments had an associated cost. However, upon closer inspection it seems that, since he wants to introduce commercial interest rates to the loans, all he wants the parents to do is pay the interest as well. This isn’t going to deter the people I’m talking about, and as such it is pissing in the wind as an answer to the above argument.

Raising the threshold to £21k from £15k will mean everyone pays the loan of more slowly, which may or may not be good, but I don’t see how it will help with the deficit.

Crunching some numbers:
Someone who pays £7k a year in fees for 3 years financed by a student loan will have a debt of £22k when they leave (accounting inflation interest during the course). If they are lucky enough to go into a job with a salary of above £21k upon graduating they will be charged interest at, say, 6% on the loan (3% inflation, 3% commercial,) a yearly addition to the debt of £1320. You will have to be £14,666 above the threshold to even pay the interest on that loan, which means you need to earn £35,666. Whereas if you earn £20,999 you pay only inflation interest, and have no repayment contributions.

Now I don’t know if that is fair or not; it’s tax and there are thresholds and stuff, and it can be judged by various criteria. To be sure, you need to be approaching the top 50% of earners to pay the commercial interest and start getting charged repayment fees, so there’s half an argument that it is nearly “progressive”. But what I do know is that your parents can buy you out of it in advance, and that your bank manager could well deny you a mortgage at 38 because you still haven’t paid your student debts.

If I were an MP I would be voting against the Browne report’s changes, if implemented as proposed by Vince Cable in the house today. I know many Lib Dem MPs are planning to do just that, and I encourage them to mobilise, co-ordinate with Labour (opportunistic as they’re being) and show you can bring down the government on this bill. It won’t be the end of the coalition, but it might just be enough to make Vince think twice about this. At the very least it will help save your seats next election (which will be a bloodbath for the Lib Dems if this passes, not that that should be a reason to change one’s behaviour of course.)

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Posted in Current Affairs, Education, Social Justice | 2 Comments »

Free Schools: they’ve got Freedom right there in the name!

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Lib Dem Conference (affectionately known as ldconf) has just passed a motion attacking free schools and encouraging people not to apply to set them up. The media will try and package this as a coalition split; nonsense. It is Lib Dems deciding party policy, which (alas) is not the same as government policy. It does not bind the coalition; it does change what Lib Dems argue for inside the ministerial offices though. So we could see a movement in government policy as a result, particularly as several points raised in the motion are in the Free Schools and Academies Act 2010 but not the Coalition Agreement; and thus are up for debate, amendment, or repeal in this parliamentary term.

Lib Dems in the House of Lords (house of geeks, I prefer to call it) did manage to water the act down a bit, but it was rushed through parliament with ridiculous urgency. There was a general feeling in the speeches that this was hasty, poor legislation, so I sincerely hope that our agent in the DoE can wheedle something back, perhaps in the way of a supplementary act. We shall see, but here are the arguments aired about the shocking socially divisive, damaging to existing schools, religious segregationist free-for-all that is the so-called “free” schools policy.

Stockholm Syndrome

The Swedish model, used by proponents of free schools, shows attainment rising by a small amount on average. However, a closer inspection of the data shows that it is privileged, and therefore higher attaining, pupils who benefit a lot, and disadvantaged pupils either stay put or a pulled back by the introduction of the system. I am sure this suits the Tories just fine, but it is not the Lib dem way.

Comprehensive schools axed, or losing funding, in favour of free schools applications.

A new comprehensive school in Harrow was, ldconf heard, axed in favour of a free school, applied for by a Tory supporter. We heard numerous other warnings about free schools taking regionally allocated funds from adjacent schools, rather than the businesses or groups wanting to set up the schools footing the setup costs themselves. In any other culture this would be called corruption; in the UK it is sanctioned by the Tories’ flagship education policy, sadly voted for my Lib Dem MPs who didn’t have time to give it proper scrutiny. This is the point where we hang our heads in shame, briefly. Go on, I’m not joking.

Out of the sixteen applications for free schools, seven have so far been approved. Of those seven, two are Jewish, one is Sikh, three are Christian. Far from being a faith schools issue, although it is that as well, this is a segregationist issue; why are we allowing faiths, strongly linked to ethnicities, to set up their own exclusive schools? Free schools can’t set their own entry criteria but they can draw their own catchment area; we heard about a school in Yorkshire that has drawn it’s boundary very close to the school on one side to avoid including a deprived area, and an ethnically diverse area. This is coming very close to racism, let alone religious discrimination, and the detrimental effect on social mobility as a result of drawing catchment areas avoiding the local council estates is indefensible.

National curriculum exemption

I went to a Roman Catholic Comprehensive school; they taught me the national curriculum; I am against faith schools in principal but I am happy to let existing ones continue in a proper framework, governed by the national curriculum. Free schools are exempt from the national curriculum, and are therefore free to stop teaching people about sexual health and start teaching them creationism. This is a massive destruction of the freedom of young adults to make their own choices in life, and is a classic example of confusing parental freedom for child freedom. More on this in other contexts later.

Entrenchment of centralism

The final point I want to highlight is the myth that free schools are localist. LEAs have, to quote a headmaster of 35 years, “not been controlling schools for decades.” They used to control them down to the dotting of Is and crossing of Ts, but not since the 80s has this been the case; schools are controlled by headmasters and governors these days. The LEA provides services to the local schools, including administering the admissions system, but “Local Authority Control” is a myth. What “freeing” the schools from this control actually means is making it directly accountable only to a national complaints body, and ensuring it’s funding is guaranteed by Whitehall, unlike the existing state schools – to quote my landlord (a professor at the Institute of Education) “Giving the secretary of state the most power since the 1944 Act.”

Free schools are not fair, take funding from existing schools, not aren’t diverse (to put it charitably), are free to indoctrinate and omit sexual health education, and is a policy entrenchment of centralism. There is nothing Liberal Democrat about this policy, this act or these problems, and today our conference proudly decried it.

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Posted in Education | No Comments »

Graduate Tax- I Agree with Vince

Friday, July 16th, 2010

I have written about the NUS graduate tax proposal before, and I think it’s time for another attempt. Please read my previous post if you want to understand where I’m coming from here, and this (overdue) update aims to convince you that you do like the idea, as a compromise and a step in the right direction.

Let’s do a quick analysis of the winners and losers under a Graduate Tax that takes the form of a fixed term tax (for 10 years after graduation, say) which is, just like student loan repayments, 9% of income above £15k, compared to the current system. Firstly, people whose parents were wealthy enough to just pay the fees are now in: no more privelege premium. Secondly, those who went straight from a law degree to corporate law on hundreds of thousands (and paid off their loan in about 6 months) now have to pay considerably more. Thirdly, those who chose to work as teachers or for a charity for much less than they could earn elsewhere are paying much less; because their tax cuts out quicker. People like me who went straight from graduation to a technical career on £26-35k will pay about the same (as it’s these people who would normally take the proposed 10 years to pay of their loans).

But, why are we justified in messing with the sorry mess that is the tuition fees system? Those earning lots of money (the big loosers) are already paying higher rate tax, what justifies taking any more off them? The starting point is that university education is a public service, not a comodity. Graduates are much more likely to vote, to give to charity, to be model citizens. Having more of them around is in everyones interest, and the public purse should be a significant (if not the only) contributer to the costs. Given that free university education is not possible at the moment, the graduate tax has many advantages over the tuition fee model:

  • Firstly, we get closer to measuring what each individual degree is worth, and charge people on that basis, rather than a one size fits all, English Literature is the same price as Law model. Since we only charge the tax on earnings above a baseline that roughly represents what people might have earned without the degree, we are literally taking a portion of the personal gain they got from taking the course.
  • Secondly, given that we already have the student loans contributions system integrated into PAYE, the cost of the extra bureaucracy is minimal compared to basically any other change. This is not a “new” tax, people are already used to paying it.
  • Thirdly, the disincentive to apply for university that is caused by the requirement to put oneself into thousands of pounds of debt is completely removed. Banks are no longer allowed to discriminate their mortgage deals based on the existig debt, and the system is seen as low-risk; if you don’t gain and end up working at starbucks, your grad tax is tiny (unlike the debt you would have under the current system.)

In summary, university should be free. But since it can’t be, let’s have a system that charges people based on personal economic gain, not one that charges everyone the same. It is fairer, as the rich pay more than they do at the moment, it incentivises people to work as a teacher or for a charity for a few years after graduation, to dodge part of the tax, and it requires minimal implementation costs.

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Posted in Current Affairs, Education | 3 Comments »