Education

Monday

Satya Marar

Want to save public schools? Embrace school choice

From our US edition

Debate over school choice has got ugly. A public school district administrator in Kentucky recently suggested he’d delay students’ graduations if the state legislature passes school choice legislation that would give tax credits to private donors who support voucher programs for kids to attend schools of their choice. The proposed program is similar to one in Florida, and the federal government has reportedly pledged up to $70 million in support to the Bluegrass State if it passes the bill.At the heart of the outraged responses to such programs is the assumption that supporting public school students who want to attend private schools will undermine public education and hurt the kids left behind by transferring funds into private hands.

schools

Friday

David Swift

How Oxbridge PhDs became the preserve of the super-rich

Oxford and Cambridge have gone to great lengths over the last few years to increase the number of admissions of state-school educated students at undergraduate level – to varying degrees of success. As Robin Harman reported in Spectator Life recently, there’s still a worrying disparity between the number of offers made to disadvantaged pupils and the take-up of those offers, even though the number of offers made has risen steadily.

Patrick West

Harry Potter’s dwindling popularity is a great shame

Teenagers are no longer reading Harry Potter books in their legions, it emerged this week, as J.K. Rowling’s series dropped out of the top ten favourite books for secondary school pupils. Instead, teens are reading books aimed at primary school children. This is disquieting news. Of all the books teenagers can access, they should be reading the Harry Potter books. They're not perfect, of course. For one, the storylines are derivate: orphan raised by aunt and uncle encounters a bearded old man, goes on an epic journey with his buddies, undergoes tasks and magic training, and defeats ogres before encountering the dark lord in his lair. Our hero emerges victorious! Star Wars anyone? Lord of the Rings?

Friday

Christian Barnard

Bloomberg’s education policies deserve much more scrutiny

From our US edition

Mayor Mike Bloomberg didn’t fare so well in his debut appearance in Wednesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Every other candidate was intent on exposing various sordid parts of his history, including his mistreatment of women and his former comments on banning the redlining that caused the 2008 financial crisis. But I was surprised that other parts of his record didn’t receive any attention—particularly his comments on K-12 education. After all, Bloomberg once said that if he had things his way, he’d 'cut the number of teachers in half', 'double [their] compensation' and 'weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers'.

education

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Why have the Conservatives decided Chesterfield is a lost cause?

Given up on Chesterfield? Sir: Matthew Parris makes some interesting and accurate points about growing Tory support in the north and Midlands (‘The Tory push north will end in failure’, 7 December). He did not mention Chesterfield in his article, but it is a good example of what he talks about. It seems to me that the Conservatives have decided Chesterfield is a lost cause, even though it would on the face of it seem promising territory for them. With an average age higher than the national average and no university, it is one of those ‘left behind’ areas with a lot of traditional working-class voters who dislike Corbyn. A good local candidate and some active canvassing could at least have made a dent in Labour support. So what did the Tories do?

James Delingpole

What have the Anglo-Saxons ever done for us?

It has been a while since I’ve considered the vexed question of Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’. More than 30 years, in fact. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my Anglo-Saxon tutorials with dear, lovely, gentle Richard Hamer. And now he is the author of the standard translation being used by my children on their own university English Literature courses. (I suppose the Latin equivalent would be having been taught by the author of Kennedy’s ‘Eating’ Primer.

Thursday

Toby Young

Must try harder: Labour wants to reverse a decade of progress in education

If education rather than Brexit or the NHS was the biggest issue in this election campaign, the Tories would be coasting to victory. On Tuesday, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) published its latest rankings, based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in 79 countries, and they show the UK climbing the international league tables. In reading, we’re now 14th (up eight places from 2015); in science, 14th (up a place); and in maths, 18th (up nine places). In other words, British schoolchildren are making huge strides compared to those in other countries. And over a period where money has been pretty tight. Why, then, would you want to overhaul our education system, as the Labour party is proposing to do?

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Asians are doing too well – they must be stopped

Riddle: when is discrimination against a historically disadvantaged racial minority perfectly legal? Answer: when they do too well. The first ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions suit against Harvard University is in. A federal judge in Massachusetts concluded last week that for America’s be-all-and-end-all university to discriminate against Asian applicants in order to serve the all-hallowed goal of ‘diversity’ is constitutional. (Or strictly speaking, if you can follow this logic, the university did not discriminate against Asians by discriminating against them.) The reasoning: ‘Race conscious admissions will always penalise to some extent the groups that are not being advantaged by the process.

Monday

Christopher Snowdon

Labour should scrap state schools, not private ones

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner has promised that if Labour wins the next election it will use its first budget to ‘immediately close the tax loopholes used by elite private schools and use that money to improve the lives of all children.’ This slab of red meat went down well with the class warriors at the party’s conference in Brighton, where there were doubtless plenty of teachers in attendance, but it wasn’t enough. Labour conference not only voted to withdraw charitable status from private schools, but to abolish them altogether. This was described, rather euphemistically, as ‘integrating all private schools into the state sector’ by Holly Rigby of the not remotely euphemistic Abolish Eton campaign.

Tuesday

John Murawski

Woke history is making big inroads in America’s high schools

From our US edition

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: 'whiteness'. Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects. At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out 'a systematized campaign' for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project.

woke history

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

General de Gaulle’s advice to the young Queen Elizabeth

There were so many ear-catching moments in Peter Hennessy’s series for Radio 4, Winds of Change, adapted from his new book by Libby Spurrier and produced by Simon Elmes. Harold Wilson answering a journalist’s question after a sleepless night while awaiting the results of the 1964 election, quizzical, cheeky and so quick off the mark. When asked if he felt like a prime minister, he replied: ‘Quite honestly, I feel like a drink.’ Later he was waylaid at Euston station having just got off the morning train from Liverpool and was still unsure of the result. (Labour won by just four seats after 13 years of Conservative rule.) At 3.50 that afternoon, Wilson, sitting by the phone in Transport House, at last received a message from the Palace.

Thursday

Madeleine Silver

The rise of the flexi-boarder

Spend a night at Woldingham School in Surrey — with its wellness room, indoor tennis dome and a menu offering cod steak with prawns and tarragon, all just an hour’s drive from London — and you may feel like you’re on an upmarket mini-break. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the number of ‘flexi-boarders’ — pupils who stay the night at school just once or twice a week — has grown three-fold since it was introduced three years ago. ‘It’s the perfect solution for us,’ says Siobhan Burgess, who works for the Cabinet Office and whose 14-year-old daughter boards up to two nights a week at the school to fit around sports matches and activities.

Andrew Watts

Learning the ropes

My school owned a boat.  And not some dinghy or fibreglass pleasure craft either:  Jolie Brise — the name was always, of course, pronounced ‘Jolly Breeze’ — is one of the best-known tall ships in the world, three times winner of the Fastnet race, a pilot cutter so famous that she has a pub named after her. (A Wetherspoons, admittedly, but that counts.) It was only after I left that I realised that this was unusual: especially for a former direct grant grammar school in Wiltshire, about as far away from the sea as you can get in England.

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

      Stoke Newington school  This Hackney school — lovingly known as Stokey School — has a strong reputation for both the creative arts and academia. In 2006, it unveiled its new sixth form, and this year students received record-breaking A-level results, with 83 per cent achieving A*–C grades. In 2002 the school was awarded a Media Arts specialism, and until 2013 it was a designated ‘media arts and science college’. The focus on the arts still lies at its heart, with links to organisations such as the Barbican and the BBC, and extracurricular activities ranging from workshops (including a self-esteem workshop with TV presenter Miquita Oliver, pictured) to theatre and museum visits, and even opportunities abroad.

Katherine Whitbourn

Can the school magazine survive the social media age?

After all these years its pages smell distinctly fusty and its rusting staples are hanging on by a thread. But there is something about flicking through an old school magazine that jolts the past back into the present in a way nothing else quite can. More than four decades on, there they still are: those apparently trivial but meaningful events that punctuated my and my schoolmates’ formative years, faithfully chronicled for all time. The doings of the sixth-form committee that ran weekly tea parties for the elderly are painstakingly recorded. A report of a field trip to Warwick sits alongside details of a junior school production of Antigone. Long-forgotten faces from my girls’ grammar school swim into view as I turn the pages.

William Cook

Too cool for school: beware ‘trendy’ teachers

I didn’t know Chris Todd had died until I saw his photo in the newspaper. I hadn’t seen his face for nearly 40 years but he still looked much the same. It was a kind face, decent and dutiful — everything you want from a teacher. I wish I’d known as a schoolboy what I know now — that the Chris Todds of this world are the teachers we recall with real affection, while the teachers we thought were so much cooler we merely remember with contempt. Chris Todd was my form master for several years at my state grammar school. He wasn’t all that strict but he had no trouble keeping order. We all liked him but none of us revered him. We thought he was rather square. He taught chemistry (a subject I hated) and hockey (a sport I loathed).

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: Roedean’s Oliver Blond on etiquette lessons and luxury boarding houses

It’s hard to open a newspaper without spotting a headline about Roedean. One week it’s lessons in Brexit etiquette; the next, phone-free retreats. Days after I meet 51-year-old headmaster Oliver Blond, the Times trumpets: ‘Let homeless eat steak, says Roedean.’ It’s a blustery walk up the drive to the 134-year-old girls’ boarding school, perched on the South Downs overlooking Brighton Marina. Girls stream through the corridors excitedly. There’s a whoop here, a cheer there — not long to go until the end of term. In his office I find Blond in an armchair. He took up teaching following a degree in English and philosophy from the University of Essex, having been educated at a grammar school in the north-west.

The Spectator

School report: a round-up of recent stories from the front line in education

      Unconditional Offers  In the last Spectator Schools, Ross Clark wrote about the dangers of ‘unconditional offers’, whereby a university offers a student a place irrespective of their exam results. The topic has come back into the news following this year’s A-level results, with headmasters bemoaning the apathy among students that unconditional offers can create. A number of heads blamed unconditional offers for the drop in top A-level results, with Universities Minister Jo Johnson writing that unconditional offers risk ‘undermining the faith which rests in our education system’. Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, confirmed that it was concerned over the rise in such offers.

Monday

Steven Fielding

Is this misunderstanding behind the rise of populism?

The latest stage in a series of arcane gambits and cunning plans designed to frustrate Britain’s exit from the EU came in the form of Jeremy Corbyn's recent letter to leading opponents of a no-deal Brexit, inviting them to discuss the joint coordination efforts. In his letter, Corbyn rightly predicts that during the next few weeks the country will enter a ‘constitutional and political storm’. Up to now, however, the response of our political elite to this impending crisis has been confused. Radical Leavers claim Parliament can be prorogued to allow a no-deal Brexit to pass without further intervention from MPs.

Thursday

James Adams

When will American schools catch up with the technological revolution?

From our US edition

As 75 million children head back to school for the fall semester, there are concerns among academics, technologists and social scientists that the current American education system is no longer fit for purpose. Such is the pace of the technology revolution that children in kindergarten or middle school today are likely to be educated for a world that will largely have disappeared by the time they graduate. Even those in high school today are going to find a different world where learning about the past or the present has less and less value for the future. Even universities, which have changed little in the past 25 years are confronting a revolution where whole professions, such as accounting or medicine, which have provided a steady income stream are going to be under assault.

education schools