Can National Standards real achievement gap? John A Clark
School of Educational Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North j.a.clark@massey.ac.nz
New Zealand has a major education problem. The Minister of Education, Mrs Anne Tolley (2011, p. 1), in her address to the 2011 annual conference of NZEI, put it this way: ‘the Government’s biggest concern is the glaring gap between our top performers and those who are failing.’ Elaborating on this, she mounted the following argument: The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment results that were released at the end of last year showed that our top 5 per cent of students are up with the best in the world. As a matter of fact, they show that our top 25 per cent of students are up with the best in the world. ■■ But the gap between our top 5 per cent and our bottom 5 per cent is the worst of the top-performing countries. And the gap between our top 25 per cent and our bottom 25 per cent is also the worst of these top-performing countries. ■■ We will not tolerate one in five children leaving school unable to read, write or do maths anywhere near the level they need to succeed, both as individuals and in employment. This is simply unacceptable. ■■ Those one in five children deserve better, and we are determined to raise their potential. ■■ So, this is why we are focusing on raising achievement in reading, writing and maths (ibid., pp. 1–2). ■■
The facts about the performance gap between our highest and lowest achievers are not disputed. Nor is it denied that we ought to do something about closing the gap. What is contested is the claim that the National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics will close the gap to any significant extent. Despite the Minister’s deeply held political conviction that they will, there are a number of compelling reasons for concluding that they will not. How much closure? An initial difficulty hinges on what would count as successfully closing the achievement gap. Given all of the resources being poured into the National Standards then it would be very troubling indeed if there was no effect at all on student performance. But several issues arise: If National Standards apply to all children, then where will the achievement gains be made – equally across the achievement gap or mainly with the top 5/25 per cent or mainly with the bottom 5/25 per cent? The first will not close the achievement gap, the second will widen the achievement gap, only the third will start to close it. There is no telling where the dice will fall. ■■ There is no criterion for judging the success of National Standards in closing the achievement gap – it should be possible for the Minister to state something along the following lines: that National Standards have been successful in closing ■■
the achievement gap if, by the time students starting school in 2011 reach school leaving age, the achievement gap between the top and bottom 5 per cent falls within the top third of OECD countries. But she has not and presumably will not. ■■ In the absence of a clear empirical goal to be achieved in order to measure success, then the Minister’s promotion of National Standards as the panacea for significantly reducing the achievement gap amounts to little more than political ideology. ■■ There is a fundamental confusion in the Minister’s argument which needs to be cleared up. She wants to raise the performance of the lowest achieving students, and it is possible that this could come about if the bulk of the resources being devoted to National Standards were directed towards assisting these children, but such targeting seems unlikely. She also wants to close the gap between our highest and lowest achievers, which also seems unlikely if the resources for National Standards are distributed across all children which will at best maintain the gap and at worst widen it. It is possible, even probable, that National Standards could both raise the achievement of the lowest achievers and at the same time widen the gap between highest and lowest achievers since the former may make bigger gains than the latter. ■■ As an aside, if school league tables are to be constructed on the basis of published results of school performance then there is no guarantee at all that these will do much at all to close the gap; they may even have the opposite effect of either maintaining or widening the gap.
Causality There is something troubling about the idea that National Standards have the capacity to reduce the achievement gap. To think that National Standards can significantly reduce the gap is to attribute causal powers to them which they do not seem to possess. If the causes of the achievement gap were located primarily or exclusively within schools and of a kind directly related to National Standards, such that National Standards could alter the causes of the achievement gap which in turn would have a significant effect on student achievement itself, then we might have good reason for supporting the introduction of National Standards. But the causes of the achievement gap, in large part, lie well beyond the four walls of the classroom and the gates of the school. Even if there are some school-based causes, and there seems no point in denying these, they pale into insignificance compared to the far more powerful out-of-school forces which have such an overwhelming effect on children’s lives. To make the point blindingly obvious: take two children who, as fiveyear-olds, start school on the same day. One can read, write and do maths at a level that puts her in the top 25 per cent of new entrant achievers, while the other’s performance in reading,
ly close the
writing and mathematics places her in the bottom 25 per cent of new entrant achievers. Why is this so? If we accept certain relevant assumptions (absence of brain damage, none use of cognitive enhancers, normal functioning of sensory mechanisms and the like) then the causes of this very large differential in performance upon initial entry to school cannot be attributed to the school itself (since at this point the two children have not attended school) but must be sheeted home to non-school causal factors. What would these be? Before we begin to speculate on plausible causal elements, it would be useful to see causes falling into two broad categories where the line between them is blurred rather than being clearly demarcated. Causes, if you will, stretch out on a continuum: at one end are causes of a distal kind, being far removed from the site of action; at the other end are proximal causes which bear directly and immediately on things. Distal causes tend to operate at a distance with the causal path
sometimes difficult to identify while proximal causes lie close to hand. It should never be supposed that there is just one cause which, once identified, can be ‘manipulated’ to effect a desired change. Rather, effects come about as the result of a causal set operating in complex ways, but now problems set in. How are we to identify all the constituent items in the causal set? Even if we can, do all of the items in the causal set have equal causal power or do some have more and others less? It is always possible to play up or play down the importance of a particular causal item by making adjustments elsewhere in the causal set. And after all of this, is it possible to draw out a plausible mechanism to account for what is going on? In considering possible causes for the differences in school achievement, we should perhaps start with three which are all too often posited – social class, ethnicity and gender. If these have any causal power at all, and it seems doubtful that they do, then at best they lie at the outer edge of the distal causes.
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While there may be some correlation between social class and/ or ethnicity and/or gender and school achievement, none of these three stands in a direct and immediate causal role. If they did, then all children of a particular social class or of a particular ethnicity or of a particular gender would succeed or fail. But they do not, for some children of a given social class succeed while others do not, some children of a given ethnicity succeed and others do not, and some children of a given gender succeed and others do not. True, there may be disproportionate distributions of success and failure within and across given social class, ethnic and gender groups but this logically must be attributed to causal factors other than social class, ethnicity and/or gender. Moving closer in, families, media, peers and the like are also often postulated as the causes of differences in school achievement. These, too, seem to still be very crude categories with little causal influence. We need to drill down deeper into particulars, by-passing even proxies. By this I mean, taking families as an example, placing less weight on, for example, whether families have X number of books as an indicator of a literate family and giving far more attention to how books are used in families, if at all. It is family practices which matter: parents read to their children, parents and older siblings help young children to read, books are purchased or borrowed from the library and read by children, and so we could go on. These activities require the appropriate marshalling of family resources for their achievement – financial resources to buy books but books can be borrowed from the public library for free, time made available to engage in reading pursuits rather than being devoted to other things such as long working hours, drug and
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alcohol use and so on, which deprive children of valuable reading experiences, or dispositional resources whereby parents at appropriate junctures subordinate their own interests to those of their children so that the latter receive the help that their well-being requires. Where families have the capability and the capacity to engage in these intergenerational activities, then almost invariably their children will arrive at school on day one well equipped to achieve in their school work; but where children lack these and many other prior-to-entry-to-school experiences, then almost equally invariably they will fare poorly upon starting school as a new entrant. It is these quite specific practices and experiences which have the most direct and immediate causal impact on differential achievement brought into the school on day one and which structurally hold in place continuing differences in school attainment as the years go by. But there is more to it than this. Our experiences are our experiences precisely because it is we who experience them. That is, we learn about, remember and forget our experiences and it is this which underpins school achievement. All of this takes place in our brains. A rich and varied set of before-school experiences are locked into a complex and evolving network of neural connections which hold in place prior learning and provide the necessary foundations for successful later learning as well as providing memory storage of past learning to be drawn upon for future achievements such as solving a problem or passing a test. A meagre and repetitive set of experiences, on the other hand, will not provide a sufficient neural network to support the learning required to do well at school. To make the point in an over-simplified sort of way. If a child has a very limited amount of learning requiring each brain cell to have no more than a single connection to another brain cell, then the processing of information will be contained within an Indian file pattern which makes it hard for recall and further learning. On the other hand, extensive learning requires each brain cell to be connected to thousands, if not millions, of other brain cells so that information is processed in parallel. This requires the plasticity of the brain to make new connections as a result of learning and to retain connections for later memory (pruning of connections leads to the inability to recall, which is critical for tests and examinations as well as for future learning). If we really want to understand the how, the why and the wherefore of learning in order to explain why some children perform well at school while others do not, then there is no escaping the need for teachers to have a far better understanding of, in appropriate terms, the causal chain of learning which incorporates not only the etiological, or external, social factors which impinge on learning and about which teachers are usually very familiar, but also the constitutive, or internal, explanatory neural mechanisms about which teachers in the main remain largely ignorant of. Just as we may be able to drive a car within a social environment without knowing its internal workings, if the car breaks down we are left rather helpless if we cannot get under the bonnet to diagnose the problem and fix it; so too with teachers who may be able to teach well enough but once problems arise, such as explaining the achievement gap and being able to do something about it, they need to be in a strong position to be able to diagnose the problem and reach a well-informed view as to whether, for example, National Standards are the solution to the problem that they are purported to be. The school and National Standards Schools do not create the differences in school achievement,
but they may perpetuate them and possibly even widen the achievement gap. Whether schools can reduce the achievement gap to any appreciable extent remains to be seen. The demand by the present government that the National Standards be mandatory for all primary schools may be well-intentioned (although it also seems to smack of political ideology in the absence of any evidence for its success). The problem is that National Standards might well be a reasonable solution to the problem of the gap in school achievement if the problem were an internal problem to the school such that the causes of the problem were located in the school itself. But it is not an internal problem to schools, causally speaking. The causes are primarily external to the school and embedded in a complex and varied causal set which needs to be directly confronted if the achievement is to be significantly reduced. As government policy, much more than National Standards is required for these only plug one or two holes at the most in a badly leaking dyke. If the new Minister of Education, like her predecessor, is so firmly committed to National Standards as the causal means of closing the school achievement gap then she and her parliamentary colleagues must show even greater fortitude in implementing a raft of other economic and social policies which establish an environment external to the school conducive to providing and supporting the conditions required to enable underperforming children and their families to have those learning experiences which underpin successful school achievement. Sadly, this seems far too difficult for politicians to entertain let alone do anything about; sadder still is their locating the problem in schools and then demanding teachers do something about it by way of a legislatively imposed and mandated set of National Standards.
Conclusion The Minister’s argument is deeply flawed. We may agree with the premises concerning the empirical facts of the matter and we could agree with the premises about the need to do something about closing the achievement gap. The conclusion about National Standards does not logically follow from the premises but presupposes further unstated premises which are extremely problematic. If we really want to make a difference, then we need to go directly to the external causes and address these as a matter of urgency. This requires political will which to date has been singularly lacking. For politicians, it is easier to place the problem of the achievement gap firmly in schools for teachers to do something about than take the politically more courageous path of revising their economic and social policies in order to create the kind of society which, amongst other things, provides the conditions for all children to flourish and succeed at school so that our achievement gap is reduced to such an extent that becomes the smallest in the OECD world. That would be the day when we could say with pride that we have a world-class education system. Until then we should do all that we can to expose the problem of the achievement gap to the full glare of critical inquiry and do our utmost to hit upon that solution which combats the problem. As much as the Minister might wish it otherwise, National Standards is not that solution. Reference Tolley, A (2011). Speech to the NZEI Annual Conference. Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington. 20 August 2011. Available at: www.national. org.nz/Article.aspx?ArticleId=36846
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