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The answer to a market where the participants compete to make things worse by following bad incentives is to ask what is creating those bad incentives and to stop doing that, not to impose a monopoly.
That thought is my response to, and my almost entire agreement with, an ASI blog posting by Anton Howes, which is critical of Education Minister Michael Gove’s plan to replace competing examination boards with a state monopoly examination board. Gove says these are now racing each other to the bottom, racing each other, that is to say, in lowering standards.
But, says Howes:
The proposals to limit exam board competition to monopolies for every subject (or duopolies between O-levels and CSEs) would therefore exacerbate the problem by limiting healthy academic discrimination even further. With only one exam board to be lobbied for each subject, we would face a system where every self-interested education minister could easily ‘dumb down’ the system even further, no matter how much an overhaul could raise standards in the immediate short term.
Howes is spot on in identifying one of the biggest reasons why state action is so frequently resorted to, even by politicians generally inclined to favour free market solutions. To start with, state action sometimes seems to improve matters, definitely so to many eyes. Only later does the arrangement revert to brazen, monopolised incompetence. Markets, on the other hand, often start out as a bit of a shambles, and only yield their benefits to politicians who are prepared to be patient. In the long run, markets are incomparably superior, and some politicians do know this. But politics mostly happens in the short run.
Howes also notes that “free marketeer” Lizz Truss MP supports Gove in this move towards state monopoly.
Alas, Howes himself gets a bit confused in his final paragraph:
… the real solution to grade inflation may lie in more accurate and discriminating government league tables, …
Excuse me! Now who is putting his faith in a government monopoly? But before even the next full stop arrives, Howes corrects himself.
… or even their replacement with a competing system of tables by universities, employers, and other private groups.
Quite so. But lose that “even”.
“Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000. In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.”
Via Instapundit. He was quoting from an article by the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, such “remote learning” is not quite as new as it might appear: even the Open University system in the UK has been going for more than 40 years. But the internet and related technologies are accelerating developments in this vein. Given all the issues surrounding the need to cut the cost of the public sector and improve standards and teaching, anything that can drive change in a better direction is a good thing. I wish this “education entrepreneur” well. If the best minds in Silicon Valley – and elsewhere – get involved, then this is one of those developments that will be arguably more significant than any amount of public service tinkering that usually makes more noise in the news.
Of course, his supreme blog highness, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, has been pushing the whole theme of there being a higher education “bubble” for some time, but being the kind of person he is, does not just complain. He likes to pounce on examples of how to move education in a saner direction.
I came across the nine-year-old girl blogging about her school dinners a few weeks ago. Now the local council have banned her from taking photos of her meals because they did not like the attention she generated. I think this amounts to a freedom of speech violation because the school canteen is not private property, it is controlled by the state. The council has annoyed the Internet; The Streisand effect looms over them.
Via Guido Fawkes, are these comments from UK Education Secretary Michael Gove. He is not bashing private (or as we Brits confusingly call them, public schools) but making a point, which I think need to be made, that many of the leftist-leaning people who run important media and related institutions were educated privately:
“Armando Iannucci, David Baddiel, Michael McIntyre, Jack Whitehall, Miles Jupp, Armstrong from Armstrong and Miller and Mitchell from Mitchell and Webb were all privately educated. 2010’s Mercury Music Prize was a battle between privately educated Laura Marling and privately-educated Marcus Mumford. And from Chris Martin of Coldplay to Tom Chaplin of Keane – popular music is populated by public school boys. Indeed when Keane were playing last Sunday on the Andrew Marr show everyone in that studio – the band, the presenter and the other guests – Lib Dem peer Matthew Oakeshott, Radio 3 Presenter Clemency Burton-Hill and Sarah Sands, editor of the London Evening Standard – were all privately educated.
Indeed it’s in the media that the public school stranglehold is strongest. The Chairman of the BBC and its Director-General are public school boys. And it’s not just the Evening Standard which has a privately-educated editor. My old paper The Times is edited by an old boy of St Pauls and its sister paper the Sunday Times by an old Bedfordian. The new editor of the Mail on Sunday is an old Etonian, the editor of the Financial Times is an old Alleynian and the editor of the Guardian is an Old Cranleighan. Indeed the Guardian has been edited by privately educated men for the last sixty years… But then many of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers are also privately educated.
George Monbiot of the Guardian was at Stowe, Seumas Milne of the Guardian was at Winchester and perhaps the most radical new voice of all Laurie Penny of the Independent – was educated here at Brighton College. Now I record these achievements not because I wish to either decry the individuals concerned or criticise the schools they attended. Far from it. It is undeniable that the individuals I have named are hugely talented and the schools they attended are premier league institutions.”
Food for thought.
Andrew Copson asks rhetorically in the pages of the Guardian, “Should we allow faith schools at all?” The general opinion in the comments is that “we” should not.
To be fair to Mr Copson, he probably did not write the subheading and his article talks about state funded faith schools. A proposal to ban state funded faith schools, though clearly intended to ensure that pupils are not exposed to opinions Mr Copson does not like, is less illiberal than a proposal to ban faith schools tout court. (In fact I am in favour of such a ban myself, though my ban would be accompanied by a ban on state funding of all other types of school, and preferably all other types of anything.) Many of the Guardian commenters reject such quibbles and are simply totalitarians. For instance, the second comment by “whitesteps”, recommended by 123 people at the time of writing, says,
Of course there shouldn’t be faith schools, though such a ban wouldn’t go anywhere near far enough.
Religion should be treated as a controlled substance only accessible after a certain age, with the religious indoctrination of small children treated as a form of mental abuse.
I always find the sublime confidence of such people that they will always be the ones to allow or forbid very strange. Given the course of events over my lifetime, perhaps such confidence on the part of “progressives” and tranzis is justified – however there are many still alive who remember a time in Britain when certain religious prohibitions were backed both by force of law, and by the sort of public opinion that leaves offenders with fewer teeth. I used to think that the lesson had been learned by all sides. I used to think that nowadays the principle that freedom of belief must apply to all to protect all was accepted by all. How naive I was.
Teachers hate legislation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers is a British teaching union. In 2010 its then president Lesley Ward said:
What was being debated in the 1970s is pretty similar to what is being debated four decades later. I am onto my 15th secretary of state for education and my 29th minister for education. I have lived through, endured, survived, call it what you like, 54 pieces of education legislation since I started teaching. One more and it would be one for each year of my life.
Clearly she wants to get the government out of education and her life. “Trust us and leave us to do our job,” she concludes. Good for her!
Then yesterday:
A motion at the [ATL] conference called on ministers to introduce “stringent legislation” to counter the “negative effects some computer games are having on the very young”.
I imagine that most teachers have no difficulty holding both of these views. Most people would like government to leave them alone and stop other people from annoying them.
I get emails occasionally from readers. This one interested me:
“I am a student at the University of Southern California’s M.A. program in occupational therapy. In 2010 our national organization, the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), included Social Justice in our code of ethics. About 12 states incorporate by reference AOTA’s code of ethics as part of their licensing requirements, meaning that getting an occupational therapy license and keeping it requires adherence to social justice, which is a set of political values and a political agenda that is today associated with those who are termed left, liberal, or progressive. For example, the code of ethics states that we are to advocate for social justice, which requires an equitable distribution of resources to all individuals and groups. Professors also use the requirement as an excuse to teach “social justice activities” in class.”
Interesting. The email continues:
“This is actually a trend in all the health sciences today. My hope is that this trend can be stopped as it normalizes setting political litmus tests to practice a profession. In 2015 AOTA votes again on the contents of its code of ethics and I will be submitting a motion to remove the social justice requirement. I am working now to educate members on this issue before the 2015 vote.”
“One of the things that makes this a hard road to travel is that if I tell a health science student that social justice is a highly political concept used today to promote a left/liberal/progressive agenda, they easily shrug it off because of the way in which the material is presented to them. They are simply told things like, “social justice is about fairness in receiving society’s resources” or something equally bland and nice-sounding.”
The correspondent, by the name of A.D, asked me to sign a statement with others opposing this. As a Brit, I am not sure whether any signature of support from me would be valid but I am happy to lend my voice to this issue. As the late FA Hayek famously pointed out, “social justice” is one of those question-begging terms that takes as given such ideas as the presumption in favour of equal distribution of wealth by some sort of “distributor”. It is not a neutral term – ideas of socialism and state ownership are baked into it. And while “justice” is a word that might mean something, “social justice” is very different.
I wish this gentleman success. You can visit his website here. And he has a related item with a large number of comments here.
The founder of the X-Prize (well known around these parts due to events such as the space ventures side of things) now wants to launch a prize for people with good ideas on how to sort out education. (H/T, Instapundit). I can suggest two quick ideas:
Give the prize immediately to Professor James Tooley.
Or, Give it to me, as I have this brilliant idea – just get the state out of education, full stop.
Simple, really.
Katharine Birbalsingh is an heroic, principled woman who, against hideous odds, is trying desperately to open a free school – the Michaela Community School – in a part of South London woefully ill-served by state secondary schools. It will provide academic rigour, discipline, a liberal arts curriculum including Latin, uniforms, sporting facilities and extended school hours to children in one of the most deprived parts of London, regardless of race or social class or ability to pay. For those children whose parents can’t afford to go private, the school will be a godsend – possibly the single thing that makes all the difference in their life between success and failure.
Does it constitute a strong, persuasive argument against this project that Katharine Birbalsingh has a name which you can twist with an unfunny pun? Or that she’s disliked by some of her colleagues? Or that, in the eyes of her accuser, she speaks “BS.”?
No, it doesn’t. Indeed I’d suggest that these comments are actually counterproductive. They draw attention to the fact that criticism of Katharine Birbalsingh’s noble project is based not on reasoned argument but on prejudice and incoherent rage. This is why they’re so well worth quoting: because they let the enemy do our work for us.
– Delingpole comments on a comment.
This evening I attended the E. G. West Memorial Lecture, which was delivered by James Tooley, one of my favourite public intellectuals. The audience was large, and our response was attentive and at the end, enthusiastic.
Tooley started by describing the discoveries of E. G. West concerning the huge contribution to education in nineteenth century Britain made by the private sector, which had pretty much licked the problem of mass literacy and mass numeracy, only for the state then to come crashing in, crowding out the private sector and stealing all of the credit for what the private sector had accomplished.
Tooley then described how he has personally been finding the exact same story unfolding in the Third World right now. There too, the private sector is running state education ragged.
In the course of his lecture, Tooley presented this complete and comprehensive list of exactly what the state should be contributing to the funding, regulation and provision of education:
As often happens with my photos, people who care about such things will quibble about technical adequacy and artistic impression. But, I trust you get Tooley’s message.
I realised while listening to Tooley talk that I have been somewhat losing track of what he’s been up to lately. So when I got home, I ordered a copy of his book, The Beautiful Tree, which he mentioned in the course of his lecture, and in which I hope to learn many more of the details of what he’s been finding out about one of the great success stories of the world now.
During the Q&A after the lecture, Tooley was asked what Britain’s politicians should be doing about it all. What reforms ought they to be trying to contrive? Tooley said he expected very little from our politicians, predicting instead that if changes along the lines he would like do come, it will be because of foreign educational enterprises opening branches here, offering a cheap and effective alternative to state education at very little extra cost. That, said Tooley, will be when the good educational stuff starts happening in Britain, again, if it ever does.
LATER: A few more pictures here.
Recently a friend told me something about kibbutzes (kibbutzim?) in Israel, which got me into speculation mode. My friend had, he told me, met quite a few people in the course of his various globetrottings who, attracted by the aura of idealism and general world-savingness that kibbutzes radiate, had spent time in a kibbutz. Such pilgrims, said my friend, had quite soon left, all of them disgusted by the experience. Far from being havens of a higher form of humanity, kibbutzes are incubators of nastiness and personal backbiting and unpleasantness of all kinds. Kibbutz life, said these people, had cured them of socialism for ever. Which makes me speculate that kibbutzes are, for this reason, a spectacularly good thing, for the people thus inoculated, and for the world, in more ways than I can count in a short blog posting.
The only kind of people said my friend, who live well in kibbutzes are, well, the kind of people who live well in kibbutzes. People who thrive under totalitarian socialism, basically. Good at politics, good at screwing people without appearing too obviously to screw them, in accordance with the rules of rigid egalitarianism. There are lots of rules, to suppress individualism, getting ahead, getting richer, and so on, and the individuals who understand these rules use them ruthlessly to get ahead, and even, if you are flexible about how you measure wealth, to get wealthy.
These “alpha personalities”, as my friend described them, stick around, ruling the kibbutz with a rod of egalitarian iron. Many of the people lower down the Greek alphabet, without whom these alphas would presumably be rather helpless, are the transients, some of whom my friend had talked with. Young idealists, for whom life on a kibbutz is some kind of rite of Jewish passage. They arrive, serve their time until they can stand it no longer, and leave, taking with them an education in the realities of egalitarian collectivism that is given to few others in what is basically, still, a moderately free world. They experience such a regime good and hard, in a form that they can contrast with a life outside that kibbutz that is still massively freer, and then leave, taking that knowledge with them.
So, in addition to being one of the great new hubs of technological innovation in the world, the state of Israel, by permitting with its laws (including, presumably, a law which says that kibbutzes may not imprison those who no longer consent to being there), and encouraging with its ideological traditions, master classes in the realities of collectivism, is doing the world another huge favour. Kibbutzes are, you might say, re-education camps for precisely the sort of people who most require such re-education, and at a time in their lives soon enough to make a huge difference, to them and to the world.
I am a huge admirer of that human semi-collectivity called Jews, and pretty much an uncritical supporter of the state of Israel in its ongoing struggle to stay in existence and to flourish. But, and please do not misunderstand this next bit, I sort of agree with some of the more admiring bits in the ravings of the world’s many anti-semites, present and past. Jews are rather special. A century ago or so, Jews did have an influence on the world that was far greater than their mere numbers would seem to have allowed. (I am a classical music fan, and the sheer scale of the Jewish presence in that world has been and remains extraordinary.) It did not follow from the super-achievements of Jews that therefore the Jews were evil and should all be murdered, and it does not follow now. But, they were a group of people very much to be reckoned with, and they surely still are, again way beyond their mere numbers in the world.
I therefore now surmise that an ongoing education programme, which turns energetic, adventurous and idealistic young Jews from devotees of collectivism in devotees of something more like the opposite, has got to be one of the very best things now going on in the world.
But, this is pretty much all speculation on my part. The question mark at the end of my heading is no mere afterthought. I admire Israel from afar, but have never been there, nor have I travelled very much in the world. (Maybe if I spent more time in Isreal, I would admire it less.) So I end with all the usual questions which thinking-aloud, but-what-do-I-know?, guess postings of this kind generally do and always should end with. Does any of the above make sense to any of our commentariat? In particular, how do the above speculations strike any readers of this who have pertinent knowledge of the matters I speculate about, of the sort which I do not have, beyond that small item of chat from a friend?
I can well imagine that kibbutzes might indeed do a bit of the good I describe, but be doing a lot more harm in other ways. Also, my friend, being of a strongly anti-collectivist inclination himself, could have been suffering from severe selection error. Maybe the world is full of Jews who have lived in a kibbutz and would like nothing less than to kibbutzise the entire world. But, I like to think not.
Stretch yourselves. Answer these questions, if you think you’re hard enough:
* There were no _________ remarks at the parents’ evening. Is the correct word: dissaproving disaproveing dissapproving disapproving?
* A lesson begins at 11:40. The teacher prepares a 10-minute introduction followed by a 15-minute video clip and then a 25-minute activity. At what time does the activity end? Give your answer using the 24-hour clock.
* The children enjoyed the _________ nature of the task. Is the correct word: mathmatical, mathematical, mathemmatical or mathematicall?
* Teachers organised activities for three classes of 24 pupils and four classes of 28 pupils. What was the total number of pupils involved?
* For a science experiment a teacher needed 95 cubic centimetres of vinegar for each pupil. There were 20 pupils in the class. Vinegar comes in 1,000 cubic centimetre bottles. How many bottles of vinegar were needed?
Michael Gove to set out tougher teacher training rules, reports the Telegraph.
Mr Gove is to publish new requirements for the “basic skills tests” to be completed before embarking on teacher training. Candidates will also be allowed a maximum of two re-sits for each exam.
The questions quoted above were from the current versions of these literacy and numeracy basic skills tests. One in five trainee teachers fails either the literacy or numeracy part of this fiendish Educational Tripos on the first sitting.
Oh dear. Is the correct word perthetic, pafetic, or pathetic?
Answer: all three, with knobs on. You might think from this that I am going to urge the Secretary of State for Education to an even more drastic reform than allowing only two re-sits. One re-sit! One re-sit and then euthanasia!
I make no such urgings. It none of it matters. The trouble is, to put in terms that an old D&D-er like the Minister would understand, is that it is a very bad idea to magic missile the orcs while the lich remains undefeated. The least of the problems with state education is that orcs who made a bad INT roll are let into the profession. Orcs can do quite nicely as teachers. A teacher needs to roll for three characteristics:
– knowledge of the subject he or she is to teach,
– the knack of teaching,
– ability to maintain classroom discipline.
Of course it is good to have rolled high in all three, and, to be fair to Mr Gove’s latest initiative, he is probably right that a 1 in any of them probably should disqualify the applicant. But a good score in two qualities can usually compensate for one bad roll.
But by Garl Glittergold’s holy nugget, I did not mean to get distracted by recommending this tweak or that tweak of Mr Gove’s new “tougher” criteria! It’s all pointless, I tell you. (Particularly as by Mr Gove’s express wish, a person who really had passed the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge would be refused a bursary to train as a maths teacher, if he or she had only a third class degree. Yes, really, even if they could work out how many bottles of vinegar were needed.)
The point was this. You don’t fight the orcs, Gove the Mighty But Deluded. You fight the liches. Give the man his due, allowing for the fact that “Secretary of State for Education” is a useless character class that ought to be deleted from any future editions, he is doing better than any we have had for years. If he survives the liches, he may even take the fight to the Blob itself.
Just leave the orcs alone. Head teachers can fight their own orcs, or hire ’em, you don’t have to worry which. It is unbecoming for anyone above fifth level to bash an orc.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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