The Trendiest Current Arguments For Progressive Education Part 2

Yesterday, I began writing about some of the ways I’ve seen people justifying progressive education recently. Here are the other two ways.

3) The Argument from Political Correctness. The last year or so has seen a real resurgence of a type of left-wing politics that was common in the 80s and went out of fashion in the mid 90s. We used to call it “political correctness” back then, and it largely consisted of accusing unsuspecting, and often entirely innocent people of racism, sexism and homophobia. Often it was for not using the latest terminology; sometimes it was for not having the right politics, and at other times it seemed entirely arbitrary. If you are not familiar with the 80s version there are some great examples in the video below (“Anti-Racist Maths” being my personal favourite):

The newer version is, so far, more of a presence in universities than in schools, but it is being pushed by some education researchers and EAL “experts”. The basic idea is still that of thought-crime, condemning people for prejudices that they have never openly expressed or obviously acted on, but that they can be assumed to have on the basis of being white, male or straight. In the 80s version, “black” became the general term for all possible victims of racism (even, say, the Irish or Jews). In the more recent version “white” has become the general term for people who aren’t assumed to be victims of racism. But the effect is the same, you are either oppressor or oppressed and if you are in the wrong category then no matter how good your argument is, or how much the evidence supports your case, expressing your opinion or getting your way in any matter that also involves people who aren’t classed as white is an oppressive use of “privilege”.  This becomes an argument for progressive education where it is applied to the curriculum. A curriculum can be condemned as “white” if it passes on knowledge and ideas valued in British or European culture. The suggested replacement curriculum can be built around political indoctrination, or teaching obscure, but politically approved, knowledge. However, in the most obviously progressive version, the attack on a “white curriculum” is also an attack on the idea that teachers can be experts in subject knowledge that is to be passed on. In this case, the alternative is the idea that students should set the priorities for learning and that what is taught has to be “relevant”.

4) The Free Market Conspiracy. This is another argument from the left. The idea is that education is actually a fight between neo-liberals who wish to turn education into a business opportunity, and those who will resist these plots. Sometimes this is simply a form of denying the debate and discussion of progressive education is dismissed as irrelevant to the “real” political issue of creeping privatisation. We should be careful here to distinguish between opposing a specific market-oriented policy, say PFI for building schools or having private exam boards, and condemnation of a wider variety of non-progressive positions on education which have no, or only incidental, consequences for private companies. And it should definitely not be confused with wanting teachers to have better pay or working conditions. The argument is not about specific policies. It is a form of “virtue-signalling”,  i.e. when people advance an opinion in order to show their own ideological credentials rather than because of the merits of the position. The virtuous left-winger is supporting progressive education out of high-minded, altruistic reasons, while only self-interested, right-wing conspirators (and their dupes) would support more traditional ideas.

Almost any traditionalist ideas in education can be condemned as part of the neo-liberal conspiracy with enough ingenuity. Testing is really just a way of getting schools to compete for market share. Criticism of progressive education is actually a way of bashing teachers, in order to worsen their working conditions. Academic aims in education are a way to prepare students for exploitation in the workplace. Traditional teaching methods are a scam for making money for publishers. Nobody can actually prove they are not part of the conspiracy, or at the very least, that they haven’t been fooled by the propaganda of the conspirators. As with all conspiracy theories, it is usually impossible to persuade the adherents that they are wrong with evidence. It doesn’t matter how far the Tories move away from letting private companies run schools, or how many years they spend in power without introducing it, it can always be claimed that is their ultimate goal. It doesn’t matter that academy chains are charities, they are somehow private interests looking to make money. It doesn’t matter that parents might not want their kids to go to a particular school, the only reason parents may be given a choice between schools is in order to create a market.  Sometimes the argument is then expanded to being one about who should have power in education. Apparently the only non “neo-liberal” way of running education is to put power in the hands of local authority bureaucrats and educationalists in universities, who conveniently, just happen to have been the traditional advocates of progressive education.

As I said last time, the four arguments in these two posts are not meant to be an exhaustive list of the arguments for progressive education, nor even the most common, they are simply the ones that seem to have become more common recently. As I also said, by not linking to examples I am opening myself to claims of inventing straw men (although freeing myself from those who want to quibble over interpretation of those examples), so I will just ask you to watch out for them. If you see them, please feel free to provide links in the comments; if you don’t, then I guess it doesn’t matter.

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The Trendiest Current Arguments For Progressive Education Part 1

One of the best analyses of progressive education is “The Crisis in Education” by Hannah Arendt. An online copy can be found here and you should read it. It was written in the early 60s, and as well as analysing the progressive movements of the time, it made the following prediction about the chances of reversing the progressive tide in education:

…wherever the crisis has occurred in the modern world, one cannot simply go on nor yet simply turn back. Such a reversal will never bring us anywhere except to the same situation out of which the crisis has just arisen. The return would simply be a repeat performance–though perhaps different in form, since there are no limits to the possibilities of nonsense and capricious notions that can be decked out as the last word in science.

While not every movement towards progressive education that has occurred since then has claimed to be scientific, very many have; but the point that progressive education will keep reappearing has been spot on. Many of the arguments for it are fairly timeless. Technology is always about to make traditional education obsolete. Schools (despite the influence of the last progressive invasion) are always presented as an out-of-date product of a past era (usually the 19th century, sometimes the 50s, occasionally Roman times or something similarly exotic). Another country is always showing us the way with their latest experiment in project-based learning or discovery learning. There is always some list of aims of education that go far beyond the academic. However, some arguments appear for a time, then fall out of favour. For instance, only the most behind-the-times progressive would argue that we need more progressive education to satisfy kinesthetic learners, or to enable girls to compete academically with boys.

In this post and tomorrow’s, I aim to mention some of the arguments for progressive education I have been seeing lately (mainly in blogs) that I don’t remember seeing much of 10 years ago. I didn’t note them down when I saw them, and it is only as they are repeated that they’ve made an impression, so I’m not able to conveniently link to examples and, no doubt, somebody will accuse me of creating straw men. At the very least, if I mention them we can all watch out for them and see them in the context of an attempt to present an ideology of teaching from over 100 years ago as a novel response to contemporary concerns.

1) The Argument from Mental Health. I don’t want to dismiss concern about children’s mental health, although I am, as ever, sceptical when medically unqualified adults claim to be able to make amateur diagnoses of medical conditions in other people’s children. The access (or lack if it) to mental health services for children is an important issue and we should take mental health seriously. However, I have seen increasing attempts to blur the line between actual mental health issues, and any kind of emotional discomfort for children. I have seen bullying described as a mental health issue. I have seen people take the leap from concern about mental health, to the importance of “wellbeing” , or “resilience” as an aim of schooling and then to a downplaying of the academic purpose of schooling, or the need for knowledge. Most commonly though, I have seen “stress” and “anxiety” join “self-esteem” as an argument against various traditional practices, from strict discipline to setting exams. Indeed, the idea that children are traumatised by exams seems particularly popular at the moment, often tied to the bizarre claim that the amount of exams children sit is being increased by politicians.

There are two key assumptions in the mental health argument. The first is that teachers should absorb ever more responsibility for other people’s children, effectively usurping parents. This is then combined with the assumption that the liberal, middle class parent who is concerned only about their child’s day-to-day happiness and autonomy, rather than their long-term interests, will have children with better mental health. As I am fond of quoting, R.S. Peters described the first assumption as the idea that schools should be “orphanages for children with parents” and can be best challenged by a defence of the rights of parents to raise their own children. As for the second assumption, it’s a debate that I can’t really go into here too much, but it is highly dubious and worth considering in the light of the attitudes of different cultures. Despite the claims of progressives, it is not the most authoritarian countries that have the highest youth suicide rates, nor is it obvious that those raised by liberal parents are beacons of good mental health in their youth or later.

2) Debate Denialism. The argument between traditional and progressive education are ancient (a case can be made that they date back to at least Plato) and have been expressed in those terms, i.e. “traditional” and “progressive”, for at least 100 years. There are good arguments that “traditional”, “progressive” and other terms like “child-centred” are misleading, and what they stand for can change over time. However, they have been the standard terms for the debate over many decades and represent real divides.  In the period between 2001 and 2010 when the traditional side was largely suppressed, many progressives thought the debate was over and they had won. It came as a shock to the system for many that values that were unopposed for almost a decade were once more being challenged in public. One of the responses has been to simply deny that the debate exists and, therefore, the “progressive” domination of state education is a myth and so any challenge to it can be dismissed. So we see people claim that terms like “progressive” and “traditional” are meaningless; that this debate is stale and irrelevant, or that “progressive” is an insult and should not be used to describe people who champion the ideas that, historically, were described in that way. Progressives have always been coy about the history of their ideas, invariably the old dogmas are presented as new innovations, but this takes it to a new level by denying that the argument about their ideas ever existed.

Of course, there is something absurd about the idea that the language that allows us to distinguish between different values and methods in education should be discontinued or that the debate is over. There are variations of that idea used to make it more plausible. Sometimes it is combined with the suggestion that the words only apply to teaching methods, not the values we use to choose between teaching methods. This means that one can claim to use a mix of methods, or observe that most teachers use a mix of methods, and then can claim to be neither “progressive” nor “traditional” ignoring the philosophies that guide how we choose our mix. Sometimes it is combined with talk of evidence and “what works” as if we can judge this in the absence of a view about what we are trying to achieve. Perhaps there can be confused positions; progressives do go through periods of claiming that their methods are the best ways of achieving traditional, academic ends (periods that usually end when promised improvements in academic performance don’t materialise). But if one cannot identify clear and genuine disagreements between those in the traditional and those in the progressive camp, then one simply needs to read up. Perhaps “Left Back – A Century of Failed School Reforms” by Diane Ravitch might be a good place to start.

Continued tomorrow. 

 

 

 

FLOATING VOTERS WEEK Revisited (From @LabourTeachers)

I wrote this post a few weeks ago For the Labour Teachers blog, where it appeared here. However, enough of it is about my views about education that it seems also appropriate to share it here as well.

Back in half term, we followed up the election defeat with a series of posts by teachers who hadn’t voted Labour in at least one of the last two general elections, but would consider it in the future. The request was that they comment on education policies which might convince them to vote Labour, although people often wrote more broadly. The posts can be found here:

1. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Why I spoiled my ballot | @jcoleman85
2. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Floating Away | @HeatherBellaF
3. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Labour Dos and Don’ts | @stephanootis
4. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: I’m not that bothered about Labour losing because I’m most interested in education | @StuartLock
5. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Teacher Recruitment | @miss_trainee
6. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Dyed in the Wool but Angry | @kennypieper
7. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Confessions of a Swinging Voter | @HoratioSpeaks
8. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Educational policy should be devised at the front line | @leonardjamesuk
9.  FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: What education policies could make you vote Labour next time? | @steveadcock81
10. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: Irreverence on Irrelevance | @Bottoms_bray
11. FLOATING VOTERS WEEK: A bonus post | @Miss_Snuffy

Obviously these posts are in no way a representative sample of any real demographic other than, perhaps, bloggers I personally happen to get on with. But I thought it might be worth drawing out some of the recurring themes and giving my personal response to some of the issues raised.

Firstly, there were several references to moving power over aspects of education from politicians to experts (although one post also talked about taking it away from experts and giving it to teachers). This is also something that is constantly being suggested in posts submitted to Labour Teachers from Labour supporting teachers. There is a real problem if those in education have given up on the possibility that representative democracy can deliver the right outcomes in education, and only some form of technocratic dictatorship can work. However, I’m not inclined to sympathise. As political activists we should stand up for politics as a means to get things done. The answer to a loss of faith in politics has got to be further efforts to be get politicians listening to teachers, not to give power to bureaucrats and vested interests. That is largely what happened between 2001 and 2010, and while many managers, bureaucrats and consultants see that as a golden era, it was an era where classroom teachers were actively deterred from doing anything but following orders and keeping their mouths shut about what was going on in schools. Thanks to social media, I don’t think we can ever go back to that as the power of vested interests in the system to silence teachers is now gone. The enlightened dictators would get as much hassle as the politicians do, and if they couldn’t respond to it, the politicians would soon take power back.

Secondly, there were a number of teachers willing to defend some of Gove’s reforms. It is probably one of the great mythical narratives of modern politics, that teachers as a whole, opposed all of the education reforms since 2010. There have always been genuine disagreements in the teaching profession and backing the education establishment is not the same as backing teachers. As teachers get used to living without Ofsted lesson grades, worthless vocational qualifications and controlled assessments and find nothing inherently frightening about working for schools that aren’t closely tied to local authorities, the enthusiasm to turn back the clock is only likely to diminish. Labour needs a way to respond to education reform that does not alienate those who supported it, or divide schools and teachers into “goodies” and “baddies”. Perhaps a starting point for this would be to look at parental aspirations first, then ask how they can be delivered, rather than looking at what people with power in the system want to deliver and trying to persuade parents (and voters) they should want it.

Thirdly, there were posts that seemed to skip talking about educational policy and expressed a loss of faith in the Labour Party. They talked about a disconnection between Labour and its traditional voters. I think such a schism cannot be denied. A Labour Party that was less middle class and London based might go some way to resolving this. What I would warn against is the idea that we can recover lost support by swerving to the left. If that was the case, and that disillusioned ex-Labour voters were all left behind by a right-wing party then, as the graph below shows, we should have been picking up votes over the last ten years, not losing them.

 

Finally, and again this is a point that is not specifically about education (although it has parallels there), a number of contributors commented on the tendency of Labour supporters to denigrate those who don’t immediately agree with them. Whilst I don’t have a problem with a fairly combative debate, we must be aware that proclaiming our moral superiority over our opponents is far from persuasive. We are too keen to assume that, where others differ with us, it is because they lack our compassion or a raised consciousness, rather than because our arguments have failed to persuade. Moral purpose is fine, but not if it leads us onto our high horses. No party ever won an election without being able to talk to voters about their own interests; not because voters are terribly selfish, but because politicians are deeply unconvincing as arbiters of morality. We need to be a choice people make because they want competent government, not because they want to demonstrate their laudable character.

If you have a different opinion on the issues here, or any others raised in the Floating Voters Week posts don’t hesitate to comment below. If you are a Labour supporting teacher and would like to submit a 700 word blogpost [for the Labour Teachers blog] in response, please get in touch.

Top Blogs of the Week : Schools Week (July 2015)

Schools Week have published my review of the best blogs of the week.

Activities: the devil will find work for idle hands to do

By @JamesTheo

An English teacher explains how his department has abandoned its old belief that lessons could be planned by identifying great activities to do, and then working out what could be learned from them. “This is the cult of activity: an unconscious belief that occupying pupils with something is the most important part of lesson or homework planning, over and above deciding what it is that we want pupils to learn.”

Continued in

Andrew Old’s top blogs of the week 6 July 2014

Does teaching philosophy to children improve their reading, writing and mathematics achievement? (Guest post by @mjinglis)

I’ve been getting a bit concerned that the EEF’s evaluations of educational methods, which were meant to help provide a more solid evidence base for teaching, are actually leading to the same sort of unreliable research and hype that we have seen all too often in educational research. The following guest post is by Matthew Inglis  (@mjinglis) who kindly offered to comment on a big problem with the recent, widely-reported study showing the effectiveness of Philosophy for Children (P4C). 

On Friday the Independent newspaper tweeted that the “best way to boost children’s maths scores” is to “teach them philosophy”. A highly implausible claim one might think: surely teaching them mathematics would be better? The study which gave rise to this remarkable headline was conducted by Stephen Gorard, Nadia Siddiqui and Beng Huat See of Durham University. Funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), they conducted a year-long investigation of the ‘Philosophy for Children’ (P4C) teaching programme. The children who participated in P4C engaged in group dialogues on important philosophical issues – the nature of truth, fairness, friendship and so on.

I have a lot of respect for philosophy and philosophers. Although it is not my main area of interest, I regularly attend philosophy conferences, I have active collaborations with a number of philosophers, and I’ve published papers in philosophy journals and edited volumes. Encouraging children to engage in philosophical conversations sounds like a good idea to me. But could it really improve their reading, writing and mathematics achievement? Let alone be the best way of doing this? Let’s look at the evidence Gorard and colleagues presented.

Gorard and his team recruited 48 schools to participate in their study. About half were randomly allocated to the intervention: they received the P4C programme. The others formed the control group. The primary outcome measures were Key Stage 1 and 2 results for reading, writing and mathematics. Because different tests were used at KS1 and KS2, the researchers standardised the scores from each test so that they had a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

The researchers reported that the intervention had yielded greater gains for the treatment group than the control group, with effect sizes of g = +0.12, +0.03 and +0.10 for reading, writing and mathematics respectively. In other words the rate of improvement was around a tenth of a standard deviation greater in the treatment group than in the control group. These effect sizes are trivially small, but the sample was extremely large (N = 1529) , so perhaps they are meaningful. But before we start to worry about issues of statistical significance*, we need to take a look at the data. I’ve plotted the means of the groups here.

Any researcher who sees these graphs should immediately spot a rather large problem: there were substantial group differences at pre-test. In other words the process of allocating students to groups, by randomising at the school level, did not result in equivalent groups.

Why is this a problem? Because of a well known statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean. If a variable is more extreme on its first measurement, then it will tend to be closer to the mean on its second measurement. This is a general phenomenon that will occur any time two successive measurements of the same variable are taken.

Here’s an example from one of my own research studies (Hodds, Alcock & Inglis, 2014, Experiment 3). We took two achievement measurements after an educational intervention (the details don’t really matter), one immediately and one two weeks later. Here I’ve split the group of participants into two – a high-achieving group and a low-achieving group – based on their scores on the immediate post test.

 

As you can see, the high achievers in the immediate post test performed worse in the delayed post test, and the low achievers performed better. Both groups regressed towards the mean. In this case we can be absolutely sure that the low achieving group’s ‘improvement’ wasn’t due to an intervention because there wasn’t one: the intervention took place before the first measurement.

Regression to the mean is a threat to validity whenever two groups differ on a pre-test. And, unfortunately for Gorard and colleagues, their treatment group performed quite a bit worse than their control group at pre-test. So the treatment group was always going to regress upwards, and the control group was always going to regress downwards. It was inevitable that there would be a between-groups difference in gain scores, simply because there was a between-groups difference on the pre-test.

So what can we conclude from this study? Very little. Given the pre-test scores, if the P4C intervention had no effect whatsoever on reading, writing or mathematics, then this pattern of data is exactly what we would expect to see.

What is most curious about this incident is that this obvious account of the data was not presented as a possible (let alone a highly probable) explanation in the final report, or in any of the EEF press releases about the study. Instead, the Director of the EEF was quoted as saying “It’s absolutely brilliant that today’s results give us evidence of [P4C]’s positive impact on primary pupils’ maths and reading results”, and Stephen Gorard remarked that “these philosophy sessions can have a positive impact on pupils’ maths, reading and perhaps their writing skills.” Neither of these claims is justified.

That such weak evidence can result in a national newspaper reporting that the “best way to boost children’s maths scores” is to “teach them philosophy” should be of concern to everyone who cares about education research and its use in schools. The EEF ought to pause and reflect on the effectiveness of their peer review system and on whether they include sufficient caveats in their press releases.

 

*The comment about “statistical significance” reflects additional concerns others had expressed about the methodology, for instance: here.