Treasury’s education advice is based on a very simple a dry, warm environment. Each of these contributing factors or business process theory of the public service world. The ‘bean conditions (oils, chemicals, storage, heat) on its own does not counter’s dilemma’, as it were, is that we have a long tail of cause the tea towels to combust, but the combination may create educational underachievement which creates social (crime, the conditions in which they do. The philosopher J L Mackie health) and economic (welfare, GDP) costs. If the tail is reduced explained this as: ‘the cause is an Insufficient but Necessary or removed, the theory goes, society and the economy will benefit part of a condition which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient’ as gross domestic product (GDP) rises. The most cost-effective or an ‘INUS condition’. INUS is a multiple, not a singular way to improve society and the economy, according to Treasury, explanation of causal relationships. It recognises that otherwise is to improve the quality of teaching. The bean counter’s solution unimportant and unremarkable aspects of a phenomenon can, is to: (i) specify desirable, clearly measurable educational in combination, produce important effects. This is a theory improvement goals and milestone targets; (ii) measure students’ of the real world. The Treasury view of the world consistently progress towards the goals and targets; (iii) incentivise teachers advocates a spontaneously combusting tea towel theory whose students make better for increasing GDP through than expected progress; (iv) education. It is a theory of provide additional support a modelled world. Treasury (PLD) to underachieving needs to develop an INUS teachers so that they engage theory (which in fact it does in in desired pedagogies and some background papers but measure student progress more not in the advice it presents precisely (Exemplars, PaCT); to Ministers and the public). and (v) sanction teachers Otherwise, its public policy whose students continue to advice will continue to exert make worse than expected distorting and potentially very progress. The bean counter’s harmful effects on educational solution requires a combination inequalities as they are lived of value-added measures of by real children and real student achievement (VAM), teachers (remember the class utilitarian professional learning size debacle). Photo courtesy: Fairfax Media / Dominion Post and de velopment (PLD) There is a better way programmes, and performance forward as far as reducing related pay (PRP). The underpinning logic assumption is that educational inequalities goes. The starting point is to recognise VAM+PLD+PRP= increased GDP. This is the orthodox business that the business process solution may actually be the problem process model. It completely dominates Treasury thinking. in education. Treasury’s power in policy debates rest largely on It is simplistic and completely inappropriate for improving its sentinel role with regard to the Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994. classroom teaching practice, which, when done well, involves the All legislation (and therefore policy) in New Zealand has to be orchestration of numerous seemingly unimportant teaching and fiscally responsible, but there is no equivalent requirement for it learning variables, and attention to their interaction. to be socially responsible. Education is a social activity that has When the Backbenchers pub in Wellington was severely to be developed according to a theory of social responsibility damaged by fire in 2012, the favoured media explanation for or justice (otherwise there would be no obligation to address the cause of the fire was ‘spontaneously combusting tea towels’. inequalities). Fiscal and social responsibilities have to be given The whole country appeared to take this theory at face value. equal consideration in education. Such a stance would require It is an appealing theory, perhaps, but it is simplistic and significant changes to the processes for deciding national wrong. Tea towels do not just catch fire. What happens is that education policy settings. Not least it would raise the possibility in a hospitality environment they tend to accumulate fats and that some current policy settings may be both simplistic and oils through use. When they are washed, they retain a residue wrong. For example, it would be nice to think that we could of these, and of the detergent chemicals in which they are accurately read the messages from international comparative washed. They get left in a dryer or folded and piled and left in achievement studies and develop specific solutions to address
not be reduced using theory
specific education problems. To give one example, when the latest TIMSS mathematics results were released in February 2013, Hon Hekia Parata was reported in the NZ Herald as considering a return to rote learning of number operations in order to improve national performance. A month later, a mathematics education academic pointed out that the results actually showed that our Year 9 students were relatively strong in statistics and probability, and to a lesser extent number, but relatively weak in algebra and geometry. The Minister of Education and the media yet again opted for the spontaneously combusting tea towels policy option, when an INUS approach would have required a more thoughtful consideration of what the data actually say. In mathematics, as in any of the learning areas, there are complex reasons why children may not do well in international assessments. We know, for example, that the government has invested heavily in PLD in mathematics over the course of a decade or more. This would suggest that the quality of classroom teaching should have improved. However, just as with science, primary school teachers may not be particularly confident or competent to teach the subject. We allow secondary school students to ‘drop’ mathematics and science at relatively early ages; we have seriously underinvested in initial teacher education so primary teacher undergraduate candidates have had fewer opportunities to fill gaps in their knowledge; we have hugely increased assessment and reporting and other compliance burdens on classroom teachers; for public accountability purposes, we have forced schools serving disadvantaged children to spend most of their time worrying about national standards in reading, writing and numeracy, to survive by using increasing numbers of worksheets and other off-the-shelf reinforcement resources, and to abandon the principle of teachable moments that make learning more like real life. Each one of these in isolation may not have adversely affected the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms. In combination they undoubtedly have. Last year, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman singled out the Ministry of Education and the class size policy failure as one example of poor quality public policy setting. More generally he observed that poor public policy making occurs when scientific evidence and values are conflated during the consideration of alternatives. As we know, education policy is highly susceptible to capture by ideologues who promote their pet policy even in the face of good independent evidence of their harmful effects (e.g. charter schools and national testing). Gluckman put it gently: if the evidence is not considered properly, bad policy outcomes are inevitable. Professor Robin Alexander, who led the major review of the National curriculum in England put it more sharply:
politicians and officials have moved from ‘evidence-based policy’ to ‘policy-based evidence’. In other words, evidence is selectively sought and deployed to justify policy decisions that have already been taken. This short-cut takes politicians and officials into very dangerous territory indeed: the conscious decision not to acknowledge and consider all relevant evidence. As the moral philosopher Sissela Bok pointed out in her landmark work, Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life, omission with the intention to deceive is a form of lying. I feel considerable sympathy for today’s education officials. As recent books by Cathy Wylie and Sir Geoffrey Palmer have implied, the traditional commitment to public policy advice that is free, frank and fearless is under serious threat. No one moment or decision can explain an apparent change in the style and substance of policy advice but many of us researching education
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policy nevertheless detect a creeping rust at work in the various background and cabinet papers that emerge into the light via the Official Information Act process. New public management is another spontaneously combusting tea towels theory of how the State Services Commission should run the core public service: employing generically trained policy advisers, managers and chief executives with ‘transferrable’ skills as opposed to discipline and sector knowledge. In practice, homogenisation of government departments has produced a singularly unhelpful combination of an ‘audit culture’ and ‘rituals of verification’ (to use Michael Power’s terms) together with an ‘erosion of trust’ in the loyalty of public servants (to use Onora O’Neill’s). If officials’ first responsibility now is to the Minister of the day, and to present their Minister with a limited, quickly scanned takeaway menu of numbered education policy options that is based exclusively on fiscal considerations, and to ignore or downplay the more problematic evidence of complex social interactions in the area of education under consideration, then something has gone badly wrong with the education policy setting process. Officials must be permitted to be servants of the public, not government servants. Paradoxically, in an era when there is more evidence than ever to read and make sense of in the education world, and many more possible sources of that evidence (good, bad and indifferent), it is also essential that officials have the discipline knowledge and skills to assess the quality of evidence about a particular policy issue, and the warrant to present that evidence to Ministers, warts ‘n’ all. An informed reading of the evidence from national monitoring and international tests does provide a basis for sensible
educational debate about the most appropriate policy settings that are needed to address educational inequalities. If we choose to drill deeply enough, the PISA student survey database, for example, tells us that around one in five fifteen year olds report that they are sometimes or often in classes where the teacher does not create the best conditions for learning; PIRLS and TIMSS data suggest that we do better than other participating countries between Years 5 and 9 for the lowest performing students ; NCEA participation data tell us that we permit far too many students to opt out of NCEA Level 1 science; and my own analyses of readily available data shows that, on the one hand, we spend less per student than the OECD average in primary and lower secondary schools and, on the other hand, that government investment in initial teacher education was around twenty per cent lower in real terms in 2010 than it was in 1993. Each of these conditions may have arisen for perfectly rational and defensible reasons at the time. In combination, however, they have led to serious, long-term barriers to the possibility of high quality teaching and learning in our classrooms. Politicians and officials have to take their fair share of the responsibility for the reality of today’s structural educational inequalities and fundamentally change the basis on which evidence is sought, sifted, analysed and weighed in order to arrive at sound educational policy options for the future. It’s not just about the quality of teachers and teaching; it’s also about the right policies to enable them to do their work. The commentary draws on work completed with my Education Policy Response Group colleagues (Ivan Snook, Stuart Birks, John Church and Peter Rawlins) in our 2013 report, The Assessment of Teacher Quality.
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