Conservative commitments - 4, 4 fails

4.   Open 500 more free schools

A free school in this context is a type of academy, which is a not-for-profit, independent, state-funded school. It is free to attend but not controlled by the local authority. Free schools are funded per pupil in the same way as state schools, but receive start-up grants.

The goal of free schools is to improve education by putting parents and interested groups in charge of it rather than teachers and experts working for the DfE. They are also expected to increase local competition, which is regarded as the only force that can drive up standards.

There is a host of issues with this policy, starting with government waste. Government is funding this competition with normal government-funded state schools, in effect duplicating its effort. Some companies run internal competition, but I have yet to see anyone who thinks it’s wise for a company to compete directly with itself for precisely the same market. Yet this policy is supposed to bring efficient business practices to government. The start-up costs for 500 schools will be immense and will be wasted. Free schools often start in areas where no new school is needed, ensuring that pre-existing government buildings that have been maintained for the purpose of education are rendered redundant even if the free school is a success.

We require teachers to have qualifications for a reason; it’s a basic standard to ensure acceptable teaching across the country. If this is a bad idea, school heads could be freed from the requirement without needing to set up new schools just to experiment with unqualified teachers.

Free schools require proposals from keen people. The people who are keenest, and able to negotiate the paperwork and project management to start a new school, are those who are either already well-off or have a specific desire to indoctrinate children. The well-off want to create high-performing schools with just their own children, who will do well anyway due to parental support; this helps explain the few results where free schools have been found to have higher performance. Indoctrination of children, such as for religious reasons, is a bad thing and should not be supported. Children are not parents’ property, to be fed ideas that their parents have chosen. They should be educated as independent people who will grow into independent, free-thinking adults.

Either way, free schools won’t help poor children who have little money or parental support. Children rely on their parents to make good choices. The problem we already have is with parents who cannot or will not make good choices for their children. Providing more choice simply will not help; it will help leave poor children behind.

The monstrosity of mindless management

I learnt last week the ICAEW MI module. I was shocked at the simplicity. The refresher course we were sent in the post started with basic arithmetic and went so far as to explain what an average was.
The course was similar, with rote-learning of a formula for calculating where a straight line between two points (either side of the x-axis) would cross the axis. This is stuff we worked out in maths GCSE without being taught. That was the last chapter, after a week of mental arithmetic (and the exciting revelation that variance analysis has nothing to do with analysis of variance, or even variance, but with differences between numbers. If only I had known before!).

This week's bundle of joy is the Business and Finance module. We started off with a definition of an organisation, for those of us who hadn't quite grasped the language yet. We then learned that an insightful chap called (Robert) Simon has pointed out that businesses don't always make decisions with reference to their primary objective of wealth creation because constraints such as legal issues apply.
Really!? I had no idea! Do laws actually exist? No Wai!!!11!!
Or perhaps 'Simon' is talking rubbish, because the businesses only care about the law because of the fines and penalties that would impede wealth creation and maintenance were the law broken. Or does 'avoiding fines and penalties' count as a secondary objective? Not to worry: discussion isn't allowed in this course, and definition is king, so we'll move on and say no more about it.

By this point I'd finished deriving the formula for the value of a perpetuity, which was troubling me from last week, and we moved on to chapter 2. Here we discovered what 'culture' is. I realise that as accountants we're not expected to be especially exciting people, but I'd have thought that most of us have encountered culture before. We also came close to transcendental enlightenment with such revealing facts as 'top managers are higher in the hierarchy than middle managers'.

Did you know that lubricants count as supplies but tools as capital goods? Don't thank me, it's my public duty to share vital information.

What things would you want to get right if you were procuring something? Got your answer? Well, forget it and learn these five words: quantity, quality, price and lead time. No, synonyms don't count.

The Harvard four cs, the Four Ps, the Seven Ps, the French and Raven powers, the five principles of scientific management, Likert's continuum, Belbin's roles and Tuckman's stages of group development (norming? Really? I justing hoathe meanless neologisms. If you haven't heard of normalising, check whether a word exists already before you make a new one) all spring out on us, unwary adventurers that we are into the world of worthless jargon. Management makes modern philosophy seem plain-speaking.
There are over 15 lists in the chapter, all desperate for criticism and the bin of academic history. But no, ours is not to reason why... ours is but to waste our time. Who cares if some idiot took two incompatible indices, put them at 90 degrees to each other and named the new index 'my grid'? Is this just some elaborate initiation ceremony in which senior accountants snigger to themselves as they torture the juniors with utter rubbish? Does it really matter if it's called participative or authoritarian or impoverished (sorry, that should be 'Participative, Authoritarian and Impoverished)? If I call things bad, commanding and involved, can you really be sure I understand it any less?

The examples are endless: 'technostructure' competes with Fayol's 14 principles of effective functioning for valuable memory space, edging out such wastes of space as cherished memories of my distant childhood. Sadly one of these principles of effective functioning doesn't seem to be not to waste time on the dungheap of management theory. If my staff aren't being paid enough, I find it hard to imagine that knowing Fayol's 13th principle will make me realise this any faster.
The classical compound of 'adhocracy' sounds fun enough, and I suppose it's better than proutocracy (?).

So we have to learn a load of tautologies and obvious observations? So what? Well, the questions really reveal the problem.
'Management belong to the 'classical school' because they adhere to the concept of unity of command. This means that a person should receive orders from one manager, there should be one manager for one activity, authority flows down one chain of command or work should be specialised?'

Really, swearing is the only answer here. Why should I care about the arbitrary definition of an unclear phrase? If you want to say 'one manager per person', feel free. If you want me to understand the pros and cons of such a system, I'm happy to learn and form my own opinion. Did you know that as of today, chocolate cake now means a black gay man? I'm going to test you on that in a week.
Is it the case that once we've learned the jargon, we'll then be taught why it's worthwhile? Why split it that way? We're a load of educated, thoughtful trainees, selected for our high levels of critical intelligence. If you want automata, write a computer programme and save some money. In this course we've been taught that people need a number of things from a job... and stimulation and a challenge are among them. The requirement to learn without analysis a load of data doesn't equate to learning information (another lesson of the course: information is processed data).
If I have the option to store meaningful information or a collection of data, I'd rather store information. When it comes to my memory, it's not merely a sensible preference, but a mental requirement, as enunciated by some management theorist whose work I'd have thought was obvious. Since it hasn't filtered through to the hopefully senior accountants who decide what future accountants need to know, maybe it was worth pointing out. Sadly, however, simply enunciating the fact doesn't mean that the course developers understand it, another conclusion that has relevance for the module. Repetition is not the same as understanding. Sir Ken Robinson has been saying so for a long time, and research backs this up. And, for those who want to quibble, it's also clear that understanding and being able to use that understanding is the more important skill for the real world.


It gets worse. The 4 Ss, 4Ds, PESTEL, 9 Ms and SWOT all follow in rapid succession. What does SWOT stand for? Strengths, weaknesses, oppportunities and threats. You know what? It would never have occurred to me to consider the weaknesses of my business if I hadn't had the handy SWOT mnemonic sitting in my mind.
Let me throw in another definition for the management-minded: a sarchasm is the gulf between the user of sarcasm and those who don't get it.

Why should I learn to call a (probably) unprofitable product a dog, rather than a cash cow? What is so special about Boston Consulting Group's terminology? Why not call it 'bad'? Dogs are loyal, beautiful and very successful as a species.
'The area outside an information systems boundary is known as the: location, setting, context or environment?'
I wouldn't have made this up before I came here. I'd have thought that this would be too extreme: so stupid that no-one would actually put it in an exam. These words are effectively synonyms. They mean the same thing. I can feel my brain rotting away just from reading this stuff.
Next up: '[Insert name here] is advising the MD of [amusing name here] plc of the advantages of setting standards and targets to specify the levels of performance that underpin the company's control system. Which three are the main components of that control system: 'measurement of actual performance and comparison against targets', 'identification of deviations from the plan', 'establishment of standards or targets to express planned performance', 'follow-up action to correct adverse results or to exploit favourable variances [sic]', 'measurement of ideal performance' or 'devising the plan'?
It turns out it's 1,2 and 4. Who cares that you can't identify deviations from something that you haven't devised, nor compare to targets you haven't established? What matters is whether you successfully learned by rote the sentences summarising the 'main components' of a control system. That you understand how a control system works doesn't matter, nor that if you were shipped off to an alien race you could introduce and implement one. You just need to know that some guy in an office somewhere decreed that this definition of this step is a main component, rather than a different arbitrary division of the process into descriptions.

One more, please: 'According to Neil Cowan, which two of the following should be considered key aspects of business ethics? Transparency, a duty of care, real acceptance of responsibility, honesty and fair-mindedness.'
The answer includes two sneaky entries from Ms Foster-Back, who also created a list of key aspects of business ethics. Since when did it matter who said which theory? Does a theory not stand or fall on its merits (in these cases, fall)? Honesty and fair-mindedness seem like good ideas to me, even if Neil Cowan missed them out.

This moronic pile of tautologies, common sense, jargon, pointless definitions and theorists claiming credit for insight worthy of a five year-old counts towards one of the professional qualifications of our society. As we have learned this week, accountants are vital for providing and providing assurance about financial data. If they've been taught to have the common sense of a computer, memorise rubbish by rote because authority says so and forgo any understanding or insightful thought it's no surprise that our financial system is in such a mess.

If the training structure of knowledge modules followed by application modules leads to having this module, it's time to rethink the structure even if the application module is a perfect return to sensible teaching. Sadly, however, I doubt it is. Application will be about remembering these 'management tools' and simply writing them out, rather than criticising them, improving on them or devising perfectly sane and effective equivalent systems.

The real world has long loved to criticise management jargon as pointless and silly. I am here to tell you that it's worse than you ever imagined.

For those who are interested, Ken Robinson makes his point well here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Monstrous education

Why are people so obsessed with the average scores?
If having rich and/or intelligent people in classes with poor/stupid people makes the average level higher beyond the addition of a high-end datum to the mix, it's not necessarily a good thing.
Yes, we want low-achievers to achieve more. But why should we sacrifice the achievement of high-achievers to that end?

If high achievers take less teacher time, and hence allow more time to be dedicated to low achievers in order to get everyone over a threshold, we're sacrificing the high-achiever's achievement beyond that threshold.

What is it that makes a high-achiever deserving of discrimination? Why should such a person get less teaching time than a low achiever?

If we want a society of utter equality, and are willing to enforce it, why don't we shave everyone's head to stop bald people standing out? Why not pluck out everyone's eyes to stop blind people being disadvantaged?

The idea that good pupils should be forced into classes in order to benefit other pupils is monstrous. We should show that this will not hurt their education in any way, and consider other giant reorganisations of the educational system that will cost a lot to introduce, before we jump on the idea.

I am, by the way, very sceptical of the idea that good pupils act as role-models for bad ones. In my limited experience of dealing with children it seems more like a couple of bad apples can sour the whole barrel, rather than a few good ones making everything better.

Private schools do promote inequality. That is a bad thing. But selection is not a bad thing, and if state schools streamed pupils, as happens in Holland, and used to happen here, then I'd happily shut down private schools.

The argument against private schools has to be a separate one from the horrific ideals/ unproven assertions of the arguments against selection.

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.

Equality and Education (from Jan. 2008)

Inspired by:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7189402.stm
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7189874.stm

I was astonished by Wellington's headmaster's views on private schools. These schools take money from taxpaying parents and give them an education whilst the parents' taxes are kept and spent on education for others.
Already it seems that these people are being unfairly treated. They're paying twice for something that everyone else pays once for. But we can justify that, by saying that it's their choice to pay again. They don't like what their first payment gets them, and put their money where their mouths are. Very admirable, very upright and honest, I'd have thought.

Apparently not. These people are evil, stealing teachers, pupils, facilities, university places and results from those hard-working state-school pupils!
Well first let me deal with the quick ones. The facilities would not exist were they not paid for by school fees. Hence they are not stolen from anyone, nor can they possibly deprive anyone of anything.
The pupils are indeed no longer at state schools, but we've just established that pupils are expensive, so stealing them is not a crime, but a generosity (we'll get to a proposed exception in a moment).
University places are awarded by results, so they hardly count as a separate instance of theft. Results are awarded by merit, and therefore not stolen, but earned.
Finally, we get to teachers. Yes, better teachers will go to better schools. To divide schools into groups and say that better schools are stealing the better teachers is simply to state a fact that occurs throughout any workforce. Better shops get better shop assistants. Nicer customers will retain nicer salesmen. It's hardly the fault of a shop if people want to work for it; if it's its responsibility at all, most people would praise the shop for having such a status.
Schools are perceived differently, I would suggest, because people regard education as a right. And to an extent, I'd agree: in this country, we have established access to an education as a right and necessity for children up to 16. But the difference in how I phrased that is importantl. I said 'access to' education. And so many people think that if someone else is getting a better education, their rights are being infringed. Yet at the same time these people acknowledge that brighter pupils learn more, more quickly, which can be described as a better education.
So how can they reconcile the acknowledgement that people have different abilities with the desire for everyone to achieve the same amount? The only solution is for everyone to achieve at the lowest level, and this is what the comprehensive system achieves very well.

And yet I'd say that such a system is also intrinsically unfair, because those intelligent pupils are not being allowed access to education; they are being denied what they could learn. Why should we add to the unfairness of life, in making some people stupid, by acting unfairly; by making everyone else effectively stupid too?
Education is not a material item that can be imparted equally to everyone, no matter their varying abilities to use it. Education is an interactive process, whereby the more capable and motivated make themselves receive more. In this respect education is much like life in general.
But people insist on attempting to distribute education as though motivation and ability were not making a difference. And by doing so they discriminate against the motivated and talented, because these people will do well, and hence receive less effort to educate, because the effort is not spread evenly, but instead spread so as to achieve even results.
As in so many areas of life, I don't judge actions by their results, and nor do most people. If I attempt to murder a man, but miss, and instead save his life, I will still be prosecuted for attempted murder. If I help a runner in a race and he draws for first place, I have still cheated.
I don't see why the good teachers shouldn't go to where the good pupils are, or where the money is. Why should we spread teaching (or medical care) across the country so that no-one can get a good education? That just deprives the talented people of their access to an education.
A good teacher in one place necessarily deprives everywhere else of his teaching. If we followed current principles we'd have the whole country taught by one teacher, because that way no-one would miss out.
If private schools were simply schools with the same mix of talent and motivation in their pupils, but offering more money, I'd still say that they don't necessarily steal teachers from state schools. They create a sanctuary for teachers who might not otherwise become teachers.

The complaint about pupils also suggests that state schools are often deprived of talented pupils. Many private schools are selective, and so in a way it's a reasonable complaint. But what does it mean to be 'deprived of talented pupils'? Why are talented pupils a benefit if everyone is to be treated equally?

Of course, we're not supposed to treat pupils equally. Talented pupils take less time to receive the set 'amount' of education that must be dispensed, making the school's job easier. That's why not having them is a deprivation: because without them one cannot steal from their potential in order to compensate for others' lack of ability or motivation.
But as I've explained, education is not a material thing; it's an effort. Talented pupils to reach their potential as much as bad ones, and to resort to the revolting 'sheep and goats' theory ignores this entirely.

This theory categorises children into sheep (who follow the leader) and goats (who lead), after the old trick of putting some goats into a flock of sheep to give the flock some intelligence. The idea was that putting some talented pupils into a class of bad or average ones would raise the ability of the rest, letting them achieve more.

Even as it stands, I don't see the justification. The idea is to deprive a few talented pupils of what they could achieve in order to give more to others who could not achieve without them.
However, that's not how children actually work! In reality, the very bad pupils are the goats, and the average and talented pupils are the sheep; putting bad with better makes everyone bad, rather than everyone better. Everyone must go at the speed of the slowest, not at an average speed of the class in general. So mixing talent together simply deprives the talented of what they might otherwise achieve.

Modern politics is firmly against splitting people up based on talent. It's derided as divisive and elitist; it makes people feel like failures. None of which seem to me to be a bad thing. If people are divided into different talents, if there is an elite, and if some people fail to reach that level, I can't see a problem with recognising it. However, people are still blinded by their desperate desire for everything to be equal. We must be equal, people think, because that's what our society is about, isn't it? So in the face of all the evidence, people refuse to accept that nature grants us varying degrees of ability, and refuse to build a system around reality.
In fact, as I've described above, people try to build a system to create their ideal of everyone being equal, even though the structure of the system implicitly recognises that we are not!

The point I'd like to make is that our society is not actually founded on the ideal of everyone being equal, and nor can we ever achieve a functional society so founded. I read about a dystopia once in which a man woke up in the future in a museum 'stasis chamber' as an example of the distant past. He was shown a world in which he gradually saw decrees issued to ensure that everyone was equal, which sounds a laudable aim in the abstract. But to ensure that everyone was equal at first they were all bald. Then all mandated to walk slowly. Then all disfigured. Then all forced to chop an arm off...
To make people equal is not a laudable aim at all, nor a plausible one. We must aim to treat them equally; to give equality of opportunity. In order to do this in education we need to teach the talented to the best of their ability just as much as the untalented. Stealing time or potential from the talented to help the untalented is not equality of opportunity or treatment.
So state schools still cannot complain if they have no talented pupils. If those pupils are better able to reach their potential in private institutions (and they certainly are) then private schools are serving society very well, whilst allowing state schools more time to deal with less talented pupils.

The idea that if private schools introduced bursaries so that talented poor pupils can attend they'd still not be doing enough is ludicrous, and grates horribly on me. State schools have no intrinsic right to good pupils, nor a right to good results or university places. What matters is that each pupil gets the education he can use, and private schools with bursary systems fills that purpose perfectly. To expect more is simply ridiculous, and a result of unthinking bias against private institutions.

Similarly, to claim that private schools, with the 166 state grammar schools, have an unfair stranglehold on good university places is a revolting inversion of the problem. There is no fault with these selective, high-achieving schools; the fact that they have such a stranglehold proves that selection works to help bright people achieve their best. So it is an example of success, not a sad fact to be bemoaned.
If he wishes to bemoan this fact, he should realise that the underlying reason for it is that people are not intrinsically equal, but that he thinks they all are and should be but are not (and can't seem to make up his mind which).

Why do people have such trouble with natural variability in education? I think that in education it is a problem because motivation can make such a difference that it is indistinguishable from talent. And people do not want to take responsibility for their actions, as I mentioned earlier today. People want the end result to be the same; they want desiring something to be enough to make one deserve it, rather than working for it too.
And as with over-eating, this is reinforced by media and government campaigns and policies when it should be fought.