School Lines The GERM that is spawning BUGS Lester Flockton feedback, feedforward, Feedup, feeddown lester.flockton@otago.ac.nz
At the time of writing this column, Pasi Sahlberg, Finland’s child left behind’ or ‘five out of five’ succeeding, performance pay former Head of Education, has been receiving some media to “incentivise” improved learning outcomes (i.e. test scores), attention during his visit to New Zealand. Why? Because he is bigger schools to provide better learning opportunities, bigger describing the values, policies, and process of a country that class sizes to save money – because some unearthed researcher won a first place in the international horse race of educational says class size doesn’t matter. And so the list of simplicities and achievement; a country whose ambition was not to seek such sillinesses could go on. fame, yet a country that has worked intelligently to provide its While the GERM is on track for divesting New Zealand’s children with an excellent education. Being ‘top’ was not the education system of proven indigenous capability for bright goal (perhaps the Finns know that ‘top’ is simply a reductionist thinking and creative ideas, its contaminants are spreading like statistical contrivance), but being a high performing education fleas on a dog’s back. The GERM is spawning BUGS! Bugs are both system that provides children with top quality schooling most infectious and disturbingly contagious, to the extent that they are certainly was the goal. Sahlberg has warmed us with insightful indiscriminately invading almost every school. But let me digress messages undergirded by profound good sense, truth and for a moment. I have just finished reading Joe Bennett’s latest fresh air – something that is book, “Double Happiness. How being insidiously sucked out We need a BUGS resistant system Bullshit Happens”. It advises of New Zealand’s education that bullshit has become so system by asphyxiating policies that truthfully and publicly recognises accepted that people cannot and incompetent management only make a living from it, and of their implementation. The diversity and individuality use it to achieve power, prestige arrogance of power, control, fast among children – their differing and wealth, they can even win talk and much half-truth research prizes for it. The book also warns we are currently suffering is the natural assets, their variable of two possible consequences outcome of contamination. It is of this exposure. One is that a contamination that Sahlberg life circumstances, challenges bullshit will be laughed out of has labelled the GERM: Global and opportunities, and their unique existence forever. The other Education Reform Movement. and more likely consequence It is a movement wedded to personalities. is that bullshit will continue to centralised governmental and proliferate and bullshitters will bureaucratic control, competition, market forces, public-private prosper. Now The New Zealand Principal is a very respectable partnerships (charter schools), bigger schools, narrowed publication, and the use of words such as bullshit might be curriculum (literacy and numeracy), national standards, terribly offensive to some very proper, polite and educated more accountability, targets, data-data-data, measurement, readers. But it is a true word, because it can be found in good performance pay, and a great deal of nonsense in definitions of dictionaries. Moreover, Joe Bennett is a highly educated man quality teaching and good schools. (MA from Cambridge; former English teacher) who is “well” Historically unprecedented and wide-reaching education above the national standard for writing! So, he’s a role model! reform in New Zealand began with Tomorrow’s Schools back in Like Bennett, however, I am fearful that bullshit will continue to 1989. But far from being germinated by a globalised movement, flourish and flow because we are afraid or too polite to laugh it off. that reform was largely of our own making and design. What has We clap after a minister of education or senior bureaucrat shovels followed, however, is the imposition of a cumulating succession it to us at a conference. Why don’t we simply laugh them off? of reforms that derive not so much from grounded good sense, Now, to return to the BUGS: the “Bullshit Undermining Good collaboration and wide agreement, but from the insatiable Schools”. Many schools are now either drowning in the stuff, or thirst of political, bureaucratic and, in some quarters, academic gleefully swimming around in it under the misapprehension opportunism and egotism. Each of these constituencies takes its that it fertilises both thought and practice, and raises student sustenance from selected global fraternities that are in sympathy achievement. The symptoms are all too apparent in the language with their own fixated viewpoints (plenty of fraternities are not). and jargon that have come to symbolise the bugs – language Laughable examples: data driven school improvement, national intended to acculturate and capture the profession into the standards to raise the achievement of children who struggle, ‘no ways of reformers (usually in the guise of so-called “experts”):
targets, outcomes, learning intentions, standards, assessment, data- school needs to ask itself why it has become so contaminated. data-data, evidence (best evidence), triangulation, moderation, Has it lost its strength of true professionalism (which includes WALTs, next steps, feedback, learning journeys, acceleration, autonomy of mind)? Has it failed to develop professional critical recovery, pathways, new possibilities, best practice, inquiry . . . literacies (being able to see, analyse and critique the effects of and so the list could go on. The sad thing is that many of these relationships among texts, language, power, systems, social words can be profitably interpreted in a variety of ways and to groups, social practices, values, attitudes, beliefs, experiences, good ends. But what is happening is that they have been ascribed etc.)? Has it lost sight of the nature of childhood and its role as narrow, prescriptive meanings with the intention of formulating protector of that uniquely special time in life? how schools and teachers should think and work. Take, for We need a BUGS resistant system that truthfully and example, the word data. It has come publicly recognises diversity and to symbolise an industry of numeric Take, for example, the word individuality among children lunacy that churns out, compares – their differing natural assets, and publishes quantifications of data . . . It gives illusions of their variable life circumstances, performance outcomes across a very challenges and opportunities, and narrow representation of curric authority, truthfulness their unique personalities. We need ulum, teaching and learning activity. and trustworthiness that it a system that gives priority to the It gives illusions of authority, truth importance of developing their fulness and trustworthiness that it simply does not deserve. sense of fun, humour, curiosity, simply does not deserve. Further adventure, imagination, ambition, more, the more copious the data, the less you see the reality of self-confidence, self-discipline and passion for learning. Children the individual child, and the more preoccupied principals and are not mini-adults – and it is an adult crime to deny them the teachers become with data, the further they distance themselves joys of their childhood. Children deserve to learn in a BUGS from what the real work of education is really about. I strongly free environment. advise, therefore, that schools unshackle themselves from the word data, and replace it with a bugs-free term such as learning information. Most of the really valuable information about Footnote children’s learning eludes the sterility and simplicity of data. Alternate words that may be used to represent the “B” in BUGS: It is hard to control the GERM in the current malaise, but bollocks, bogwash, blather, bigheads, bollockticians, bureaucrats, BUGS will proliferate only if we let them. A heavily infected balderdash, blah, blarney, blowholes, bewitchment, and bedazzlement.
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