Education

Peter Hoskin is right to be suspicious of the government's latest ploy: mandating that all public bodies have a statutory duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. As you might expect Polly Toynbee is tickled a deepish shade of red by the notion. Nonetheless, consider this snippet from her column today: Poor children might need to have much more spent on their education per head than the better-off do. Sure Start toddlers might need more funds than older children. It might mean local lotteries to see that all children get equal access to the best schools.

Nuff said, methinks. Vouchers and proper school choice programmes aren't the only answer, of course, but it's simple decency to extend to the working class  opportunities taken for granted by the middle-class, including, of course, many teachers themselves. More details on the chart here.

Amazing. Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question. One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully. His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points. On the other hand... you might  say, given that I assume that plenty of the questions (in these shabby, fallen days!

Chris Woodhead, the former head of the schools inspectorate in England and Wales, argues that many private schools are, to all intents and purposes, ripping off their clients. The Telegraph observes that he has an interest to declare, but: Prof Woodhead is the chairman of Cognita, which owns a chain of profitmaking private schools and has purchased four charitable schools. He said running schools as businesses reduced "waste" – such as luxurious sporting facilities and theatres – as fees were kept low to attract parents. "We are absolutely rigorous in not providing frills and frippery, but concentrating on what seems to us to matter most, namely the quality of teaching. I am deeply shocked by the degree of waste within the independent sector.

To return to schools. Did you know that it's a bad thing for a school to be popular? Nor did I. But according to Scott Lemieux a voucher programme is pointless because it can't save every child overnight and, anyway, there aren't enough places at private schools in the first place. This rather conveniently ignores the fact that real school choice is not just a question of competition between private and state-sponsored schools but within the state sector itself. Anyway, Mr Lemieux writes that: A market in education wouldn't function like other markets. Whereas more customers (within reason) for a department store mean more profits, more students for a school makes it harder to educate everyone, and places substantial demands on physical spaces that can't be easily expanded.

Megan McArdle has been on a rare old tear recently, pushing the argument for school choice, here and here and here and here and here. It will not surprise some readers that I rather agree with her. Clearly, however, this just proves my foolishnesss. Did you know that it's impossible to make a good faith argument in favour of school choice or any programme that gives poor families greater input into where their children are educated? Me neither. Time for me to be telt, obviously. Exhibit A) Matt Yglesias: ...the United States already "allows" poor parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems in much the same way that it allows rich and middle class parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems.

Merit pay, eh? Normally I'm all for hopping on the teachers-unions-are-spawn-of-the-devil bandwagon. But they're right to think that performance-related pay, or at least any form of it likely to be introduced by bureaucrats, is likely to be a disaster for exactly the same reason as most government-mandated teaching requirements offer exactly the wrong incentives. Neill Harvey-Smith explains: If one in twelve children sitting their GCSEs in 2010 raise what would have been a D to a C grade, in just one subject, and everything else stays the same, then the government will have met its supposedly tough new target for secondary education. Would your kid have got 5 A to Cs anyway? They don't need extra help. They are doing well enough already. Will your kid get way below 5 A to Cs?

It's a question I've asked before, but it's worth revisiting: if school choice is a nefarious right-wing plot to keep poor people poor and uneducated why is it that Sweden - Sweden! - has a nationwide school voucher programme that is supported by all political parties? Now clearly this doesn't in and of itself demonstrate that open access school choice programmes are necessarily a magic bullet, but it might - or rather ought to - quieten some of the hysterical shrieking one hears from defenders of the status quo in both the USA and the UK. If school choice can be embraced by left-wing Swedes it's just about possible it won't cause the sky to fall tomorrow... A new paper from the Adam Smith Institute (unsurprisingly!

God knows how reliable this sort of sillyness really is (not very, probably) but: Students at many of the country's most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy. According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and universities polled did not earn a passing grade. You can take the test yourself here. I confess I did so with much trepidation. It turns out that I don't know much about judicial review or how the bond market works.

I have no interest whatsoever in health policy, but I am interested in education. Paul Krugman's column yesterday mocked one strand of conservative (libertarian actually) education thinking. So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be -- a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models. Isn't this a transparently ridiculous argument he suggested, before going on to say, well, that's what we currently have in health care.