School letter

In the same issue of Private Eye there is a letter about comprehensive education which makes a case that is better than grammar schools.
1. Emmanuel, Cambridge, has the best results of the Cambridge colleges and the highest proportion of state-school students.

Something smells... my nose is detecting the whiff of cherry-picking! Why this fact? Why not Oxford? Why not an analysis of overall state-school student performnce? Surely the state-school children who get into an academic hothouse are likely to be as good as those from other backgrounds? In fact, might we not acknowledge that those who overcome adversity, in the form of state education, to be selected for one of the best places on the world, are likely to go on to do better than those who have faced less adversity and achieved the same thing?
Surely we can explain these results by saying that state education is worse?

2. The Sutton Trust has found that students from comprehensive schools do better at Russell Group universities than students from elsewhere, including grammar schools.

This is the same argument, but slightly better: it's been broadened to look more like a sound analysis of an overall effect, rather than a tiny little piece of the whole, that doesn't reflect any sort of overall picture. I'd still be suspicious of someone who thought point 1 worth making though. This point is still not comprehensive enough, however. My previous answer still applies: it could be that the students were so good that they triumphed despite state education, and therefore do better than those who achieved to the same level with better education. Therefore private education is better because it allows 'worse' students to achieve the same results.
These students are at the upper end of the distribution. Unless we can be sure that we have the same segment of the distribution then we can't reliably compare achievement levels and ascribe it to education rather than naturally different ability. Given the vast differences in resources available, and teaching ability, it is more natural to conclude that there are differences in ability independent of the teaching, rather than that having worse funding makes students do better.

3. Countries at the top in the 'Programme of International Student Assessment' have all their children go to state schools.

What about countries at the bottom? What's the distribution? This doesn't even show that there's a clear correlation between state schools and attainment, even before we start to ascertain whether such a correlation is actually the causation he proposes.
This is before we start to assess different types of state education. When he says that these countries all use comprehensive schools, does he mean that none of them uses streaming, setting or other forms of selection to differentiate students by merit?
If these state schools actually do involve selection then they're not like the ideal of comprehensives as currently propounded by politicians, which is that everyone should be thrown in together and hopefully some scum will rise to the top. Is the most important feature of the Chinese attainment the state control, or is it rigid discipline, motivated parents and long hours?


This leads nicely onto the final point, which is that achievement in exams does not predict future success. The ability to find the one right answer in a prepared question does not translate very well into the ability to find good jobs, solve problems and discover one (and preferably the best) of many answers to a question.



Because it's not worth a separate post, I'll also point out that when the Eye mocked the police because an officer tried to infiltrate a peaceful and tiny village campaign group. It might well have been clear to the police that this was a peaceful group, but their undercover operatives need a background in low-level campigning before they're likely to get the trust of more militant people.