So my sister went to an extremely prestigious private school in the UK(basically Eton-level) and they had an easier way around it - they basically wouldn't let students sit exams they knew they would do poorly in, so the school wouldn't lose its great ratings. So my sister wasn't allowed to take maths or chemistry in her A-level years because the school didn't think she was good enough in those subjects to score and A or higher on the exam. So in her final year she only had literally a handful of subjects which weren't a danger to the school's academic rating.
The story I've heard a few times is that students who are expected to perform poorly in their GCSE's or A-Levels get expelled for minor behavioural infractions prior to their final exams so their poor grades don't risk bringing down the average.
It’s more complicated than that. Stage 1 - you can’t do subjects they don’t think you’ll do well in. Stage 2 you won’t be “offered” a place studying for GCSEs if you didn’t do well in the previous year. Stage 3, If you get bad GCSEs you won’t return for A levels. Stage 4, you get an offer from a prestigious university but get caught smoking pot (or some equally expellable act) you’ll be invited to study from home for the rest of the year so they don’t damage their statistics and don’t need to report your behaviour.
I went to the top-ranked state school in Scotland and this absolutely happened to my friends - it’s not limited to private institutions. It was obvious that they were gaming the system at the expense of the pupils even then.
Mine was in the top 2% or so, and that would never fly (One of the most dumbsad things I have seen in my life so far is the sight of watching someone not open his exam paper and fall asleep then try and have a go in the last five minutes in a panicked frenzy)
This is pretty common for med school applications at my undergrad. They would not support your application with a committee letter if they felt you didn't stand a good chance of being accepted. Makes the acceptance rate double the national average, but it's significantly biased for success.
It's very common in German universities that taking exams for a particular requires acquiring a "Schein" (certificate) for that course. Which are often harder and require much more work than preparing for the actual exam.
Eh, I commiserate with the author, and experienced some of the same in American public school. However, this part of the article really stood out to me, as I couldn't imagine it happening in any of my school environments (which were not optimal by any means):
> There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn’t speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down.
Could this behavior by teachers really be widespread??? I think this is just an anomaly of the author's school. Any of my teachers would've been wary of behaving like this. Kids don't keep such things quiet! I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools.
If the people further up the chain have similar incentives (higher scores = we've all done a great job), and most students are either benefiting from the cheating or being harmed by it in only a fairly minor indirect way, it's plausible to me that nobody would want to stick their neck out and make enough of a fuss to change things.
I've never seen anything this egregious, but in my own experience people are usually willing to go along with systems that don't make sense (according to their ostensible purpose) and aren't very fair, if that's what everyone else is doing and there's no personal gain to be had by rocking the boat.
Yes, you make a good point. But there's another factor that I think makes this untenable, at least in the US — the widespread use of well-proctored standardized tests. Very hard to cheat on those.
"...I think makes this untenable, at least in the US"
Some information that may be new to you:
Widespread cheating is common in the US. Atlanta, El Paso, Columbus. Google "big city name + cheating" and you'll likely get a result.
"A state investigation of Columbus, Ohio, public schools found a "top-down culture of data manipulation and employee intimidation" in connection with changes to test scores and student grades" [0]
"An investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) released in July 2011 indicated that 44 out of 56 schools cheated on the 2009 CRCT.[2] One hundred and seventy-eight educators were implicated in correcting answers entered by students" [1]
I attended high school with a person whose mother pretended to be a guidance counselor, and was able to obtain a copy of the SAT test weeks before her daughter took the test.
She graduated from Harvard.
The mom got 24 months probation, 200 hours of community service, and had to pay $15k in restitution.
Also “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed it is indeed possible to bypass ‘well-proctored’ protections.
Very different situation though. A school can't game its stats year after year using measures like this, because they will be caught. From your references, it seems even in isolated cases there's punishment. In larger scales, like that of a whole classroom, subversion of the system is near impossible.
Not sure about the probation but assuming 50$/hr, that's 25k$ to get into Harvard, versus bribes of usually >1M$ for alumni getting their kids in by funding a building, scholarship, or whatever. Sounds like they got a steep (if unreliable) discount.
My thought is that there are a number of parents who would say that the punishment is worth it if you can get your child into a top-tier university (based on my first reference - the parent spent no jail time away).
Give me a break! Are you unaware of the college admissions scandal?
American Exceptionalism — what this comment is — is pure delusion. I watched kids cheat on proctored exams a generation ago, and I’m certain it’s continuing and I’m certain my nieces and nephews will see the same.
What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated)
I noticed then that several governments to please the UN (and get their precious IMF money and whatnot) will then game the stats as needed.
I am from Brazil, here the public schools after UN meddling got in the picture first went the route OP said, but the UN didn't rated the country education based on scores, but based on dropouts, the more dropouts you have the worse your score is.
So solution is not have dropouts! Cue government doing two things:
1. Banning any possible form of homeschooling.
2. Making a law where you can't fail a kid, even if the kid is completely retarded and just drools all day, as long the kid in question can write their own name (even if they don't understand the meaning or treat it just as a drawing), they will pass...
3. Convince the population that avoiding dropouts is important, the government regularly runs massive marketing programs (doesn't even matter if government is left or right) saying how important it is for kids to finish school, and how great it is that now that they can't fail, they don't drop out.
> What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated)
Can you post a link to this human rights document please?
I will quote the relevant phraseS (not the whole article) for brevity:
"Elementary education shall be compulsory"
and
"Education shall ... tons of stuff ... and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace."
And this is reinforced elsewhere.
"Article 29.3:
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
"Article 30:
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."
And just to explain why I said Brazil went with the cheating route after UN meddling:
Until around 1970s, Brazil didn't need the IMF or anything like that, thus it was ignoring the UN regarding certain subjects, among them it was that then the approach to public schooling was that the purpose of the public school was the education of brilliant students, and those that didn't want to be there shouldn't be there, so bad students, bullies, etc... were outright kicked out.
Article 26 is short and sweet, you may as well quote all of it.
> Article 26.
> (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
> (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
> (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
You need to quote all of it to give the correct context.
Here's article 29 in full:
> Article 29.
> (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
> (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
> (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations
29(3) is saying that nation states can't, for example, claim to be providing people with compulsory eduction when in fact those people are being indoctrinated.
Sounds like the UN was correct in criticizing Brazil for failing to uphold the rights of its people to get an education which likely resulted in significantly worse economic outcomes both on an individual level and for Brazil as a whole
I've seen a few variations on this that are less blatant but equally effective at gaming the system. Note that these all happened in college, rather than in HS--I never recall seeing this in high school.
The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work.
Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade.
The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario.
Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result.
As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate).
As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.
On national tests in Norway I've never heard this occur. What they do instead is to ask the weaker pupils not to attend that day to increase the average score.
Similar shenanigans happened in California during the brief period of rating schools by student's test scores. The tests were not annual, so poor performers would repeat a grade the year before the test. Then schools were rated lower for having kids repeat grades. They did the encouraging poor performers to be absent on test day thing as well, so the state subtracted points for poor attendance and had a second day for kids who missed the first.
On top of this, anecdotally it seemed that the marginal schools were made worse because they would spend time teaching to the test, while the higher performing schools didn't feel compelled to do that.
There are still knock-on effects today after having stopped that. Our daughter has been consistently behind by 1-1.5 years in assessment testing in every subject from grades 1-6. It took years of fighting to get her retained.
An actual conversation ended with the person we were talking to admitting that the best thing for both the school and our daughter would be to retain her, and that the only reason they were refusing was because "it is against policy for us to retain any student for any reason other than a long-term absence"
Fortunately once that was said out loud we made progress through the system again. Prior to that there was all sorts of apologia for the policy, and how retaining our daughter would cause irreparable damage to her psyche; as if her knowing she was the "dumb kid" and having entire lessons go completely over her head was not at all damaging...
In my state, they report the number of students who took the state test for each school as a percentage of population. I would be suspicious of any school that doesn't have over 98% take.
Yeah they can have a few kids not take it, but the overall score still is impacted by 98%.
In my experience, this kind of thing happened more in lower-tier classes than upper-tier ones. Lower-quality teachers might have less compunction over cheating than their upper-quality counterparts and often get the non-AP/IB classes due to their qualifications.
In my maths GCSE (UK) one of the teachers observed I was having some trouble expanding brackets and whispered a mnemonic she had taught us weeks previously to help. One data point, one observation... but yes, I can believe it.
One of my old school teachers (ordinary UK comprehensive) was fired for doing German speaking tests one on one with some helpful phrases written on the board in the background.
Twenty years ago I was sharing a conclusion w/ my kids' principal - that preparing for state assessment tests was cheating.
The point of the tests is to evaluate the schools overall effectiveness. As much as test-centric cramming effects those results, it creates a false picture.
Some notes and observations:
Because the state both accommodates and encourages this scenario, the fault can't reasonably be laid on the schools.
A more impeccable (but problematic) way to handle these tests would be for the state to show up with little/no notice and administer it.
I'm personally inclined to scrap state assessment testing altogether. The zero-sum nature of pitting the schools against each other for limited funding consumes a great deal of precious teaching time for little clear benefit.
This conversation happened at our county's first charter school. A few years earlier, this principal happened to be my son's PS teacher.
The point of the tests should be to determine what topics a student has successfully mastered and which they need to spend more time on. If each school is allowed to come up with their own standard, it will be difficult to tell which schools are lowering standard. Using it as a measure of school effectiveness is a secondary measure that is really not possible without longitudinal data.
Schools on poor areas in general go bad on tests not just because the teachers are bad, there are other socioeconomic variables that influence much more on student grades, like poverty, nutrition, violence, and so on.
Even if you do believe evaluation works the way it is I still think its execution doesn't make any sense. You're taking schools that have bad grades and granting them less money on the next term, what positive effect is this supposed to have?
> Schools on poor areas in general go bad on tests not just because the teachers are bad...
True, but if you see scores consistently jump in one subject year-over-year, that's probably because of a good teacher. For evaluating teachers, relative test scores are more interesting.
As for schools, yeah, it's heard when you're bumping into a lot of external limitations. You almost need to model expected performance and benchmark against that because it's incredibly hard to get mediocre performance out of bad circumstances.
If the test is good, there is nothing wrong with teaching to the test.
If test scores are rewarded, teachers will teach to the test. The obvious solution is to accept the fact that people respond to incentives, and make the test better.
How about this, then: Each school gets a share of the economic benefit it generates. That is, every year after leaving the school, every student is graded by what they paid in taxes, earned in income, contributed to social security, or whatever scheme you can make up. This grade then goes back to the school. This should be arguably the best and most relevant test one can conceive. Do you see anything wrong with that?
Determining how well a school did at teaching people subjects like literature, foreign languages, science, mathematics and history now depends on how many of their graduates became stockbrokers and business executives, not on whether the school actually did a good job at educating their students.
Assessing the quality of education by economic output means the engineer who declines a job at Google or Facebook to take a job at a human rights non-profit is a "worse" engineer, and their education must be considered substandard compared to one who goes and takes a Big Tech job. Same with doctors who volunteer to run free HIV clinics in sub-Saharan Africa when they could get a job doing buttlifts for movie stars in Los Angeles, or lawyers who become public defenders or represent asylum seekers and other public interest clients rather than doing extremely well-compensated corporate work.
In as much as it reduces all of human life and values to numbers on a spreadsheet, yes, there is almost certainly something wrong with it.
yes. High income is more to do with where you are born, not how well you did in school. though there may be a gigantic gray area, this holds true in general. You will be throwing money where it's needed the least and will help the least.
First, it's obviously not a fair measure; tax contributed is not a direct reflection of education quality. Parents, background, accidents, moving abroad... You can't possibly clean the statistics enough to get rid of all those factors.
Second, it's not the business of the school to know my tax information and employment status. You can't measure something based on a number that you can't know.
Reducing humans to hedonic consumption machines where life satisfaction is measured by consumption and value is measured by production is easy and terrible.
Allow me to explain one reason to have standardised tests. My last teaching job before retiring was in a school where the administration expected 75% of the students to pass Yr 9 Maths. The Middle School Head had come to my class a number of times to help the students, so she certainly knew what their ability was. It would have been no surprise to her that, rather than 75% passing the test, 75% failed badly. Yet, she was not prepared to accept those results. She pointed out that one particularly disruptive student had passed the previous year. Fortunately, I could point to the standardised test that showed that that particular student was in the bottom 10% in the state. My implication was that his pass in the previous year was fabricated. I was instructed not to hand back any of the students' test results, at that time. I left the school shortly after and have no idea how they would get 75% of the students to pass. But I did know that the standardised results would be a truer indication of that class's Maths ability, than the school's results would be.
Personally, I feel we have reached the limits of what schools can do with the current structures, that there is very little improvement that can be mined.
The things we do to maximize fiscal efficiency (grouping by age, school start times during optimal sleep periods) aren't in the students' best interests. The OP's article seems to bear witness of that.
I'm not sure what it would look like, but I'd like to see kids a few years older teaching younger kids. You get a much better understanding of the subject when you have to teach it.
In the early 70s I was part of an experiment that did just that. We were one very large class of grades 1-6. Older kids were assigned younger ones to mentor.
I was in it for two years; it was a really good experience. As for the outcome, all I know it wasn't broadly adopted.
Not sure about the UK, but in the US, it's the opposite. Failing schools get more funding, at least temporarily, with the expectation they turn the scores around in a few years. They risk losing accreditation if they don't improve, but that's usually years away.
In Maine for example, when the boards are looking into renewing a charter school's license, their test results on the state exam is heavily weighed. Schools that are not performing well on the tests may get their charter revoked. So the benefit is saving children from incompetent management.
My town's school department had 5 elementary schools. During 4th grade, my elementary school which I lived closest to was underperforming in state evaluation tests. This meant that they allowed anybody attending it to transfer over to any other elementary school. I opted for this option and was able to re-attend my original elementary school before I had moved.
My (charter) high school consistently performed in the higher ranks for SAT & state tests. They didn't have any classes to prepare us for them, although that probably would have been useful from a college admissions perspective. If a school is performing really badly it's probably that their curriculum is flawed or that management isn't doing a good job. Competition applied to learning helps light a fire under people doing a bad job running a school.
I believe it is district funding that suffers for low grades and that it takes a few years of consistently low performance before the state applies any action. I should note that our schools are primarily funded from county taxes but state funding is enough to matter.
However, the testing dynamic tends to nurture a perverse incentive for counties to showcase their high performing schools and increase funding to them. Some school boards resist that temptation better than others.
I would have thought that the most significant form of gaming the system would be discreet student selection. This is available to both independent and state school systems. You find a kid who isn't doing well in your school, and as the head teacher you find a way to invite them to leave. That way you don't need to have the resource for whatever special requirements they need, it gets dumped on some other school. It has the nice benefit of being vaguely justifiable, because of course there are kids who genuinely need special help.
On the other end you game the system by offering scholarships, and by selecting parents who are keen enough to part with a few tens of thousands of pounds a year.
I'm pretty surprised at the outright exam cheating though. My guess would be that if it happened it would be the teachers doctoring the papers without the students seeing it.
My impression of the UK school system is that they've done a lot with reducing bullying in the last couple of decades. It's visible when you visit a school that they care about it, and the kids have assemblies about it, something that would have been left to the kids themselves back in my day.
> I would have thought that the most significant form of gaming the system would be discreet student selection.
This is very common in the private, for-profit schools in Sweden. The general procedure goes as follows:
1. Spend heavily on marketing to attract 'good students'
2. Avoid selecting 'bad students'
3. Automatically use the scores that follow from this selection to create a feedback loop that keeps bringing in good students
4. Cut as much spending as you can - you're getting paid a set amount of money per student from the government, after all
5. Pocket the difference
Meanwhile, the public schools are not allowed to engage in the same sort of filtering and are hence required to accept the 'bad students', which constrains their resources and creating the opposite feedback loop to what the private for-profit schools have.
I feel like it is only the worst 5% of kids who ruin public school for everyone else, but it’s those students who the school devotes the most resources to “fixing” or “helping” which rarely work. If the bottom 5% were sent to a different school system where the objective was just to keep them away from the other 95% and prepare them for a life of beating their wives and robbing liquor stores, the other kids would do much better.
> I feel like it is only the worst 5% of kids who ruin public school for everyone else
Can confirm, as a former teacher. There were days when that 1 kid was sick, and the entire class worked completely differently. Suddenly it was possible to teach, the other kids learned, and some of them even said they preferred it that way. Then that 1 kid returned.
In teachers' room, 95% of time spent talking about students, is usually about the same 5 kids.
Let's just create an explicit class system, assign people to those classes using some weird metrics and then decide their whole life for them using those classes!
What a perfect solution!
We already do: the upper class is the kids whose parents either by home prices or private school tuition can get their kids the hell away from the losers.
I agree with this. I spent most of my time in the AP classes so I never saw any of this until I took a photography elective my senior year. Just 2 people out of 30 ruined the class. They were loud, disruptive, making it impossible to concentrate. The teacher was forced to spend all her time dealing with those two. Everyone would have been better off if they weren't there.
It occurs at a higher level than that due to neighborhood gentrification and school zoning.
This effect is already seen heavily in suburbs of Australia, where Asian (particularly Chinese) migrants will buy into suburbs with good schools - pushing out poorer families due to increased pricing.
The fundamental problem is that we need to treat poor behaviour in the same way we treat serious autism - with special schools for those students. The problem is that those schools will get filled with minorities, the whole thing will be attacked as 'racist', and we'll be back to square one.
Happens in the US too. It's similar to what's known as "white flight".
White people leave an area due to minorities coming. The new area property value increases... More tax money, resources for schools, better teachers get attracted to schools and districts with more resources.
Also a part of my wonders how much influence schools even have on the kids. Families with more resources can pay to get outside help, like enrolling their kids in Kumon...or getting a private SAT tutor.
>White people leave an area due to minorities coming. The new area property value increases... More tax money, resources for schools, better teachers get attracted to schools and districts with more resources.
This is a commonly held myth but it's not backed up by the data. Inner city districts are usually near the top of their state for per pupil spending. What they lack in residential tax base they usually make up for in commercial buildings. All of those high rise office buildings pay lots of property tax and don't send any kids to school.
Schooling has little impact on final outcomes generally. The biggest factors are genetics, and parenting.
The problem is that acknowledging this leads to politically incorrect conclusions, so we continue to throw money at education and certain schools.
We'd achieve better outcomes by reducing air and plastic pollution which are shown to have substantial negative potential impacts on intelligence and personality.
Well, I stand corrected and can't find a way to edit my perpetuation of the myth. I live in Georgia so here's my data of spending per student per distrct
Atlanta Public Schools: $15300
Fulton: $12700
Gwinnett: $9500
Forsyth: $9200
Dekalb County: $8800
I left Dekalb for Gwinnett. Gwinnett and Forsyth in general have much better schools, but spending is similar. Atlanta Public Schools has the highest spending in the state, and is the source of the cheating scandal from years back and in general does not have great schools.
I've not seen numbers for that but the difference is usually quite large. For example, Atlanta Public Schools is 14k per pupil while the Georgia state average is 10k.
Why is it sickening? And why have good students in quotes?
Students that for example try to rank high in status by using violence in class or bullying will also always exist. They are extremely costly and teachers are not allowed to incentivize good behavior.
What I mean is that private schools quickly understand just how much damage a student can do and the teacher board / politicians really don’t, they think everything is sunshine and unicorns and put systems in place that are extremely naive.
The system in place only highlights the problem, but it’s not the root cause.
If it was both easy and desirable for private[0] schools to both spot and expel the violent, the current Prime Minister of the UK would not have completed Eton and from there gotten into Oxford, where he developed his current thuggish reputation by smashing up restaurants.
"What I mean is that private schools quickly understand just how much damage a student can do and the teacher board / politicians really don’t, they think everything is sunshine and unicorns and put systems in place that are extremely naive."
The politician Really understand the problem that is the reason their kids are on the private school or them likely live in the ""same district"" then.
> I don't understand this position. violence will always exist but we should blame the politicians?
Yes! Sure, violence will always exist but that doesn’t mean that kids should have to be subjected to it. I was bullied in the “dragged outside of a teachers view and then beaten until I couldn’t move” sense and you know what happened to them… fucking nothing. Like actually literally nothing. Everyone in the school knew all the times it happened including the teachers and administrators but nobody had the power to remove them from school. One of my teachers took pity on me and offered to give me “detention” whenever I needed it. That’s what they could do. My parents fought for years to do something with no avail and then moved me to a private school.
So yeah these practices create inequality because anyone lucky enough to have the means to get out does. As an individual family my parents couldn’t fix my local public school so they did what they could. Therapy was more expensive than the private school tuition.
This kind of sorting could actually be a good thing if resources were adequately devoted toward helping problem students find better outcomes. I wonder, for example, if trades education would be better suited for many of the problem students—allowing of course that there are manifold causes for bad classroom behaviors and poor outcomes.
Education is difficult, and I've snipped a rather lengthy comment that would probably be a waste of time to read. In sum, I think differentiation with strong socio-economic support (i.e., a social respect for all lines work and economic support for them) is probably a better solution than dumping people into classrooms who obviously don't belong there (at least not right now). But this is obviously hard to do (or else we'd probably have done it already).
Pushing troublesome kids out isn't gaming the system in the same sense that fudging exam results is, because it makes the school better for all the remaining kids. (I think "gaming the system" should be reserved for things that are overall zero- or negative-sum.)
The quality of the school experience depends as much on the peer group as on the teachers, curriculum, and facilities. Moving troublesome kids to schools with strict discipline can help them in life, too. But even if not, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
> Pushing troublesome kids out isn't gaming the system in the same sense that fudging exam results is, because it makes the school better for all the remaining kids. (I think "gaming the system" should be reserved for things that are overall zero- or negative-sum.)
The troublesome kid goes somewhere, very likely somewhere worse equipped to deal with troublesome kids, not being a fancy school with a ton of money and all.
That's the bad design of the system, that a kid that predictably will ruin learning experience of all their classmates, has no place to go where they would cause least harm.
The system simply denies existence of such kids, and pretends that teachers just need to work harder, or we need to throw more money on that kid, and then everything will magically be ok.
What's positive sum for the school might be negative sum for the whole school system, or for the whole of society, depending on where the troublemakers end up. Are they sent to a special school with lower class sizes and more oversight, do they just end up at another school down the road, or are they thrown out into a society they're not prepared to deal with?
I claim it's positive sum for society. To be concrete, suppose that moving the troublemakingest 5% out of a school lets the remaining 95% of kids learn 20% more. And the 5% learn about the same. So overall society is up 20% * 95% = 19%.
It depends on the numbers, of course. If the 95% of kids only learned 1% more, it wouldn't be worth it.
It's notoriously hard to measure those numbers because everything is confounded by everything else and experiments take decades to run. But I think 20% is plausible and 1% isn't.
You're only looking at the gained education for the 95% and the lost education for the 5%, not at the social cost of some of the already disengaged 5% ending up in jail for armed robbery or murder.
Again, it all depends on where the 5% end up. You're not allowed to take them out back and shoot them like an aggressive dog, so are you going to look after them and give them some kind of a future, or are you going to throw kids out onto the street to grow up into career criminals?
Those numbers are made up to support your assumptions. I claim the troublemakingest 5% have an increased chance of having an outsized negative effect on overall society, and by tossing them by their ears, we double their chances of behaviors that have serious (10X) negative effects: perpetrating fraud, abuse, or violence.
Depending on assumptions, it is easy to argue that money is best spent accelerating our brightest minds and giving extra support for the most at-risk, letting the middle atrophy. Or it is best to treat everyone equally, which certainly leaves the top underfulfilled and the bottom underprepared. It's just spitballing.
Are we talking about trouble making kids, or kids who aren't going to ace their exams?
Your numbers are all invented whole cloth; please don't try to math with them.
More precisely:
Why should I believe that the remaining kids learn more? In my experience, everyone learns more when they teach, as it forces them to shore up their assumptions. (When you learn something yourself, you learn one wrong way to do it. When you teach, you learn thirty wrong ways.) Having kids who think differently around for peer exchange is then a good thing overall. The struggling kids have stronger peers around to teach them, and the stronger kids have more chances to teach.
In the Bay Area, the cupertino schools are well known to be excellent public schools, always 9 and 10 out of 10 ratings. Schools in surrounding areas are usually not as good. This means all kinds of things, for example cupertino homes have very strong real estate values ("cupertino schools!").
I found out how they do (part of) it. If a child living in the cupertino
school district registers and is not proficient in english, they are "redirected" to a nearby school say in sunnyvale.
What you noticed is what is well known in education--school ratings are merely a proxy for the socioeconomic status of its students/families [0].
What can be teased out from that regarding cause/effect/deterministic is still mostly unknown.
I don't have a canonical source for this, but this nature paper gets the point across. This link [1] also has a useful chart on p. 6 to visualize the point.
I plotted a graph of test scores vs fraction of Latino students for my local school district. It was so linear I did a regression and found that it was more correlated than income or highest level of parental education. Also of note was that there were no schools between 30 and 70% Latino.
If you see the above as a problem, and have a solution other then cross-town bussing, I'm all ears.
If you're a newspaper, you can choose how to write the story. You could go “oh, turns out the Untermensch are inferior, but don't look too hard at my evidence” or you could instead say “we found systematic discrimination again!”.
I thought I read somewhere that most of the richer people in San Francisco send their children to private schools (to the extent that the public schools were minority-white in a majority-white city.) I wonder how much this happens in the Cupertino.
Normally there is some reasoning that public schools do well because of rich parents who can help fund the school and who generally care about their children’s education, and that’s an guess I might make about Cupertino based on your comment, but it seems to not be the case in SF.
Cupertino schools are fairly well funded, but not as well funded as schools in say Palo Alto. It was my experience that in our school the best students did most of their learning outside of class as very few public school teachers could keep up with them. From what I hear, some parents would send their children to private schools because they would do this and the schools would have somewhat better mentoring, but overall I didn't see much difference in the quality of top students from either.
I think your idea of "rich parents funding SF public schools" would probably be rejected by the school board, so for most it's not even worth trying, given the proliferation of high quality private schools nearby. And even if the school accepts it, the community won't.
Say what you want about Zuck, but he donated $75M to the only public hospital in the city and they don't even want to keep the building named after him and his wife (who worked there no less!). Comically, they can't actually do anything about it, so they stick to meaningless non-binding resolutions.
Therefore, if given the choice, those who can are much more likely to spend 30-50k/year to send their kids to private HS than to try and go through the process of dealing with the city government. I assume that dealing with Cupertino/PA/etc. is frustrating, but not nearly as insane as SF.
I was trying to be quite careful in my comment to not suggest that rich San Francisco were funding public schools, but it seems I wasn’t careful enough.
Every time I see an article like this about how the UK government (all large orginzations of people in general though) is obssessed with measuring meaningless things, I am reminded that it is the birthplace of Goodhart's Law [0].
I'm currently watching The Wire, and this aspect of people juking the stats to move up the ranks is a deep underlying theme.
It's gotten me to thinking: what is the best alternative to focusing on metrics? Surely, relying on something other than data would be no improvement over the status quo.
The only thought I've had is to:
1) Rely on a spectrum of metrics, to get a more holistic perspective. Instead of just seeing "crime is down x%" administrators would see how many reports end up classified as a lower-level infractions, how civilians rate the safety of their area, etc.
2) Add common-sense restrictions to make stat-pumping more difficult. For example, bringing in classroom inspections on random days
3) Penalizing institutions and individuals who are clearly attempting to juke the stats. Enforcement would certainly be difficult, but simply having something to this effect on the books would, imho, reduce schools dedicating time to studying for a standardized test
But the alternative to decision by metrics is decision by committee. The former may be gamed, but the latter may be corrupt. The inherent human nature that leads to corruption cannot be fixed, but in theory there could be a metric that isn't flawed. Therefore the solution is not to abandon evidence based policy, but to have more and better evidence based policy.
I've always wondered about using multiple metrics, but instead of combining them prior to selection, bin the spots and for each bin consider a subset of metrics weighted in different ways. For something like a school ranking, instead of giving a number (which is way more precision than I think these systems can actually achieve), the schools could be tiered - with each bin contributing some spots to the first tier, then repeat.
At the very least it should diversify how people try to game the system, and then the "winners" of various bins could be studied to compare usage of different metrics in selection. If the specific formula could be kept mostly secret, perhaps switched up every so often, it would hopefully disincentivize gaming at all.
Along those lines, committees and metrics could both be used. Give committees control over 10% of the spots or something. Corruption is obviously a downside, but I do think committees also have upsides that are difficult if not impossible to replicate with pure metrics. In doing this committee selections could also be tracked against the various metric ones for longer term outcomes.
The UK government introduced a test to check how children were progressing in phonics. Teachers were told the pass mark to aid in assessment, but the national results showed a remarkable bump for exactly the pass mark:
The government decided to not share the pass mark ahead of time for tests in future years. I attended a conference that year at which the Education Secretary gave a keynote to an audience of educators; he got booed for not trusting teachers as a result.
I hadn't seen greaterwrong.com, and was hoping that it would offer counterarguments to articles on lesswrong.com, but it's just a summary of it.
I get frustrated by articles like this because they focus on second-order causes instead of first-order. I don't know how it works overseas, but the main problem in the US is that schools are funded by property taxes from state and local governments instead of the federal government (which only accounts for less than 10% of funding):
Which means that public schools are a magnifying glass for issues like discrimination and wealth inequality that the whole country is wrestling with. Want to know why schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills? There's your answer. Full stop.
Until we fix that nationally, expect more of the same.
What's the solution? To me it's very simple, but unfortunately we need some kind of consensus on this, and that's not going to happen until people start reaching similar conclusions when presented with the same facts. But we're more polarized than ever.. so.. let me offer an analogy instead:
America is quite strong in certain areas (finance, the military, etc) but so weak in others (education, health and human services, etc) that we've become vulnerable. Look at Texas right now: the fossil fuel energy capital of America (maybe the world?) unable to keep the lights on as its citizens slowly freeze to death. Look at the US response to COVID-19 as hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessary deaths because we weren't brave enough to quarantine long enough. If that stuff isn't biblical, I don't know what is.
No, these problems are not due to failings at the personal or local level. They're systemic, national and cultural.
What adjustment are you thinking of making? If you want to bump up the Beverly Hills per-student spending by assuming parents in Beverly Hills spend money on their students that doesn't show up in the school budgets, you still have to give up on the idea that "funding from local property taxes is the reason schools in the south side of Chicago are doing worse than schools in Beverly Hills, full stop". Unless, of course, you're proposing to prohibit parents from spending money on their own children, as some people in the US actually have.
The analysis would fail anyway, though; spending on students (by parents) is also negatively correlated with student performance within families. Parents seek to bring low-performing children up to the level of high-performing children more than they seek to boost their high-performing children further.
Do you have per-student spending figures for those schools you're comparing? The schools in the cities I'm familiar with, federal supplemental funding actually makes it so the poorer areas are able to spend more per student than the wealthier areas, and the poorer area schools still perform way worse.
IMO money plays some role, but it's not directly the property taxes that matter.
(Greater Wrong is probably great for powerusers, but I find the default view much uglier than LW.)
The article is interesting and depressing. I'm not surprised that the metrics are gamed, but I am surprised by how awful the school was, and how normal that apparently is.
Default font sizes/layouts often don't suit me, so I've become very used to zooming (out, usually). LW is about right for me at 90%, while GW is a bit big at 80% but rather crowded at 70%. I can't pinpoint what I like about the LW layout, but it feels spacious without being wasteful. I think a lot of it might come down to the font itself.
Focusing on the bullying aspects of the article for a moment, homeschooling goes a long way towards making that a non-issue.
Both our homeschooled boys played hockey for a local school and both our homeschooled girls are in Air Cadets, so they get plenty of socialising, and we've never had to deal with bullying.
I understand that homeschooling's not for everyone, but if you can then you should give it serious thought. Homeschooling's been around for decades, and with the advent of the Internet, there are now plenty of resources available - pretty much regardless of what country you're in.
When I was younger, I thought homeschooling was almost exclusively because parents were weird and controlling - maybe even in a cult like situation. Or I thought homeschooling was for socially hopeless kids that couldn’t cut it in “real” school. I have no idea why my perception was so negative. Now that I’m older, my opinion has completely flipped. I am grateful to have had access to public education, but it was probably bronze standard at best. If I had children, I’d probably homeschool them.
A lot of school problems don’t do away in the real world. Cheating, bullying, boredom are regular parts of daily life for many workers. There are life skills that are learned in school that aren’t just textbook educational items
this is nonsense. almost nothing is carried over. it seems like you have never been the target of viscous bullying. there is no comparison whatsoever to bullying in school and in the workplace. the differences are innumerable. the most important difference is that childhood bullying damages the developing brain and creates lasting emotional damage. you are simply more vulnerable at those ages. you will be much, much better equipped to deal with bullying later in life if you are not carrying the emotional scars of being systematically targeted when you were a child. some adversity is necessary but this is a different discussion.
im so sick of people offering this idiotic perspective because they never experienced being the target for more than a year. your opinion hurts people.
I think you're the one whose talking nonsense. Isolating children from the outside world to "protect them" (or for any reason for that matter) should not be celebrated.
I've been the target of relentless, viscous bullying in school, and it was at a time where kids openly bullied in front of teachers (and camp counselors) and it was just considered normal. Nobody ever tried to stop it because at the time that was not considered something to really correct, just part of normal childhood. The main reasons I was bullied was because I was a runt (physically) and I was not taught any social skills by my parents.
HOWEVER, my parents were severely abusive and were much worse bullies than anyone in school. If I were taken out of school because of "bullying" I would just be much, much worse off and I can't see how I'd ever be able to recover from that without exposure to the outside world. How else would I ever learn better, learn social skills, or learn to make friends (eventually)?
>there is no comparison whatsoever to bullying in school and in the workplace
In an office full of college graduates, probably not, but I've experienced very similar bullying at a dysfunctional blue collar job
Beyond that bullying growing up was just as bad at non-school organizations - summer camp, after school programs, and dance/gymnastics classes so I don't see how homeschooling (if my parents weren't abusive) is going to stop bullying without also isolating children from the outside world completely, which would be severely damaging. So you're basically advocating not letting children to socialize in any capacity because their feelings might get hurt by other kids. This is cruel.
My point is, homeschooling doesn't prevent bullying unless completely isolate your children. I'm not accusing all (or even most) homeschoolers of isolating their children, however, all the ones I personally know did isolate their children.
People are actually trying to stop bullying in school nowadays, so my experience would be different nowadays.
>childhood bullying damages the developing brain and creates lasting emotional damage
Oh, please, the severe emotional damage caused by isolating children from the outside world is so much worse. Also the severe emotional damage that parents can inflict on their children are so much worse than anything a peer at school can inflict, like 1000% worse. I was barely phased by the relentless bullying at school because home was just so much worse. (Plus my parents had already taught me that I was worthless, so it wasn't exactly surprising)
I've known a few people (different families) who grew up entirely isolated from the outside world to "protect" them from any person, place, or (especially) idea that wasn't pre-approved by their parents. They are all extremely dysfunctional. My husband was a boss to one of these guys and he literally couldn't function in the workplace and would have emotional breakdowns regularly. He's dead now, he killed himself. The rest I know are perpetual children who literally have no ability to function without a caretaker (usually their parents, one her arranged marriage husband). I have no idea what's going to happen to these people if they outlive their caretaker, I don't want to think about it, it's incredibly sad.
>im so sick of people offering this idiotic perspective because they never experienced being the target for more than a year. your opinion hurts people.
If you want to turn childhood trauma into a competition, I will "win."
> Isolating children from the outside world to "protect them" (or for any reason for that matter) should not be celebrated.
Then why do we isolate adults from criminals, by putting criminals in prisons?
> I was barely phased by the relentless bullying at school because home was just so much worse.
That is wrong. But for many people it's the other way round.
I wonder if we could find a solution that would somehow help both types of kids. Being able to leave home, but also being able to avoid bullies at school.
nobody is saying children should be isolated. they should be isolated from things and people who will damage them regardless of what they do. a stove can harm a child, but a child can choose not to touch a stove. a viscous bully will target and track a child, and in modern schools there is no option to fight back. the child has to simply sit there and endure it. so for example, if you put a child into a good private school this would meet my criteria. almost invariably, bullies behave the way they do because they are abused at home. if you separate your kids from the wife-beating riff-raff then you have done your kids a huge favor without "isolating" them.
i would almost not care about this issue if we still had a sane culture that let kids behave naturally and fight each other from time to time. maybe you are a little older than me, but the way it works now is that kids are raised to believe that without school, their life will be over. worse, they will bring disgrace to themselves and their whole family if they dont do well in school. if you fight, you will jeopardize everything by getting in trouble, getting expelled. we are putting boys between and anvil and a hammer with no way out. if my kid has no way to overcome it, and it causes him intense psychological pain for years, then there is no use in subjecting him to it. i cant understand how anyone can not understand this blindingly simple fact.
the key to raising kids is to let them confront danger, adversity and challenges and to make sure they have some kind of agency to overcome what they are facing. school bullying is unambiguously outside of this category of things because fighting is not allowed. its basically no different than strapping the child down and torturing him. it will build just as much character.
there was never any bullying or heroin overdoses anywhere in my life except for my public school. there are all kinds of people, groups and activities. saying that all outside world interactions are the same is utter drooling nonsense.
palmer luckey and Billie Eilish are both homeschooled and they are doing a lot better than you are. not all homeschooling is the same. i could keep my kid in a cage and call it homeschooling.
i see that you endured intense trauma as a child and you enjoyed it. you would not do it any differently. a pamplet of your story should be given to victims of childhood trauma who have schizophrenia and other trauma-induced diseases. clearly they have an attitude problem. it is not the trauma that hurt them, it was their sour attitude about it. what a revolution you have brought.
Those life skills get taught in homeschool programs too. Or are you under the impression homeschool students are locked away in a closet with a textbook and no windows until they turn 18?
The only lesson a state school can teach that might be missing in a homeschool program is that large institutions are out of your control, have their own motivations, and will maim you without a second's hesitation.
I don't know if you were necessarily 'wrong' for having those perceptions. Homeschooling has become far more of a 'thing' in the past 20+ years, and I think it's been fueled by access to technology and growing concerns over school quality. Even info about 'school quality' is more accessible/shared/debated because of technology (forums/facebook/etc).
That said, the only handful of homeschooling families I knew 40 years ago were - to my recollection - exclusively religious in their motivations. Not everyone homeschooling family I know in the last few years is due to religious conviction, although that's still there in many cases.
let me just say how much i appreciate and admire you. people love to look down their noses at homeschooling and homeschooling has been the subject of terrible and dismissive ridicule. a terrible stigma has been created for home-schoolers. its all nonsense. god bless you for putting up with all of that. its such a shame that the vapid masses impose this emotional tax on smart people like you who are just doing what they think is in the best interest of their children. i think youve done an excellent job.
I have to confess a little sympathy even though I agree it’s dishonest.
Most schools are struggling to evolve in an environment they weren’t set up for. And in parallel, parents with money and/or education for it definitely try to game the system as well. Hence a bit of sympathy on my part.
I attended a private school that did the opposite: no “GPA” (just letter grades, no average nor class rank computed), its own curriculum, no designated “AP” courses (you could take the exam if you liked). And all the graduates did fine at university. It was very clear to me that they could get away with this because they had spent centuries educating kids. They strongly discouraged gaming the system...because they had gamed it at a deeper level already.
I can't see how old the author is but my son's primary school got 24hrs notice of their last inspection a coule of years back. A ex-teacher friend 10 years ago told me it was a lot less than a week's notice for her larger secondary.
I'm sure some details are gameable, but what I'm more interested in are the inspectors' incentives, not just the schools'.
The author's experiences are historic. In 2012, the notice period for inspections was reduced to the afternoon before the inspectors turned up, but prior to that it could be several weeks:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-education-insp...
The London Challenge was implemented to turn around the issues in London schools that the author recounts, and did so remarkably successfully:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Challeng
I can't imagine teachers at my school ever actually cheating by giving results in exams. Teachers Unions in the UK fought very hard to remove exam invigilation from Teachers responsibilities, which makes that much harder.
However, the inspection thing chimes strongly with my experience and the focus on the resistant materials track of design technology as a way that anyone can get a 'good pass'.
All the effort went in to getting border line D kids to borderline C. If you were a borderline 5C candidate (a key metric in the UK at the time) you were on detention every night to try and trip over the line.
I went to a "blue ribbon" school that was attached to a continuation school. It was a great school. Kids behaved well, very upper middle class.
However, if you were doing at all not great for any reason -- C average, struggling with depression or learning, anything -- they would pressure you into the continuation school right next door. So you have one school operating as two schools so that they can pretend to be the top school in the state by moving the bottom set next door.
UK school leader here. I can't argue with the perceptions in general, but an important thing to acknowledge is that school inspectors are not born yesterday. The inspectors will be former school leaders, and some still will be in schools themselves. They also speak to parents and students to get a full picture of the school. Is it all disingenuous? A bit, but doesn't everyone tidy their house before someone comes round?
I attended state run schools in Australia in the 90s and this experience sounds so foreign to me. Sure, there were shitty kids and other problems, but we were learning consistently.
The Australian Federal government has since introduced standardised testing in the form of NAPLAN and, yes, schools try to teach to the test. But the idea of teachers outright cheating on behalf of students is unfathomable.
Was I an outlier? Or did the author just have bad luck?
We once had a young teacher, who had to pass his own entrance exam for a permanent position. He was to be tested by teaching us, while a senior teacher sitting in the back judges him. A week before his test, this young teacher then goes through everything that was supposed to happen in that class with us, right down to the questions he'd ask and the answers a specific pupil was supposed to give. At the end of it, he promised us a keg of beer if he passed (Germany, younger pupils would maybe have gotten sweets).
He passed with flying colours, after which the senior teacher asked discreetely when we intended to drink that beer, because he wanted to attend. Obviously stuff like this was completely normal and expected.
I went to a state run (public in local parlance) high school in Australia in the 2000s. The school was in an area that was beginning to gentrify. It had students from a variety of backgrounds, with the majority being working class. The school had many problem students to keep staff occupied and looked as though it was very under-funded. However I agree with GP: I never saw any of the kind of incompetence and institutional dishonesty this article talks about. One thing I'll say of Australia, it's public institutions seem reasonably honest.
I don't get this cheating comment. Schools have internal exams sure, but they don't count for much - the ones that count (at high school) are GCSEs, A-Levels, and other external exams.
Teachers can't cheat on these as they don't have the tests until it opens. If the actual exams were happening in the way the author depicts, then
1) There would be a whistleblower
2) The people marking the exams would notice that people were getting the exact same answers (unlike US SATs, UK exams are mainly written answers, very few questions are multiple choice)
Now teachers do have copies of previous years exams, and go over those in class, and use them for mock-exams earlier in the year, isn't that normal? It's not cheating -- exams are an imperfect system, but if you're going to have exams, having test exams and going over what worked and what didn't is valid.
In the U.S., I heard from a parent whose kids go to exclusive private schools that the schools will often hold new students back a year or even two, as they are more likely to do better in class, do well on standardized tests, and exceed in certain sports - all of which burnish the schools' reputations and lead to better college placements, which often means Ivies and other elite schools.
Another option for students who struggle at public or private high schools (and whose parents can afford it) is a "post-graduate" year at a dedicated private academy for 18 and 19 year olds. The main purpose of these academies is to bring their grades and SATs up to a good level so they are more likely to get in to a good college. I know two people who did this in the 90s, one of them got into NYU after the post-grad academy.
There is a private school I know of that has the reputation of putting new students back a year--but this typically would be in intake years such as sixth grade. Given that the school is also known for sports, I'm not sure to what extent this is for academics and to what extent for athletics.
Same kind of cheating is present in Canadian public schools, too. This is a case that has been exposed. Just to give some context, the French language schools in an English speaking area in Canada is highly desirable by parents. Only the students who are strong academically attend those schools.
i went to one of the best public schools in the states. even then the environment was toxic. heroin was dealt in the hallways, many kids even died of heroin overdoses. kids were viciously bullied and physically assaulted while the drooling, slack-jawed staff looked onward. i never put it together until now that this was probably because formally acknowledging what was going on would negatively impact the schools numbers/ratings.
the school system as a whole wore away at the physical and psychological health of a massive number of kids because of the insane schedule that deprives them of sleep. this was scientifically proven a while ago.
american public schools are a disgrace. i would never enroll my kids into a public school. they are glorified daycare centers where the inmates run the asylum. and all you have to do is reflect on your interactions with average americans to understand the fact that these schools are more likely to damage a person intellectually than advance them.
the only thing that separates people who had a good experience vs people who didnt is their personality. if you are not on the spectrum then its just one big pleasant vacation. but if you are unhealthy, on the spectrum, have a troubled childhood or for whatever reason fall behind emotionally or socially, then public schools are worse than a death sentence. everyone involved should be ashamed.
In high school, state and ETS (e.g. PSAT/SAT) tests were always required to be taken at a school from another district.
For example, if you went to school in district A, everyone from district A took the test in a school building located in district B. The reverse was also true.
This has always struck me as such an easy system to implement that I'm always surprised when I hear about the "teachers just changed the results" stories. While I'm sure this doesn't eliminate the risk of collusion, doesn't it dramatically reduce it?
Plus, wasn't an entire chapter of Freakonomics dedicated to how teacher cheating can largely be caught algorithmically? In this day and age I would think it's even easier.
Exactly the same thing I read about Delhi (Indian) Schools, 10th standard is board exams where the marks are published Nation-wide so to look good on Media, students who didn't do well during their 9th standard were "Pushed-out" of it to different schools so that their 10th std cohort looks awesome - https://thewire.in/education/delhi-govts-push-out-policy-for...
My grammar school definitely mentioned in assemblies before the inspections that we should all be on our best behaviour, I'm pretty sure that's fairly standard in UK.
I think you’re right that telling students to behave is common. I think now the assessments happen wi less notice (day of or day before.)
I’m not sure how I feel about inspections happening with so little notice. It’s surely a very stressful time to be a teacher. I wonder if inspections might be more fair if instead of a single inspection, several could be made over a year and then aggregated into the school’s grade.
I would think unannounced inspections might be less stressful than announced ones. You have to make less effort preparing for them, and the standards are going to be a bit more relaxed, because the inspectors won't assume that you have prepared.
Well if you’re having a bad week or teaching a harder/slower/weirder part of the curriculum at the time or otherwise feel like you’re not on your best form it could be stressful. I don’t know how important inspections are to eg teachers’ pay or promotions but if they do matter then I think teachers would be stressed by a random inspection having an outsize impact on their careers compared to every other day
Ofsted has changed somewhat because they moved to 24 hour notice of inspection.
When I was at secondary school, we did the same lesson three times with my French teacher before an upcoming OFSTED inspection and he said if we all kept quiet, he'd buy us all an Aero.
the uk DofE are themselves guilty of the same crime. The school league tables do not include gcse statistics for key stage 3 students. This is because students in state schools don't take gcses before ks4- only private schools offer them. In order not to draw attention to the academic superiority of private schools and embarrass the state run schools, they simply ignore those gcse results! this artificially "improves" the quality of state education vs private.
UK state schools absolutely suck. My experience mirrors that of the author in a lot of ways.
I will say though, some of the content of this article appears outdated, and the author doesn't seem to have checked to see if their memory lines up with the reality of how things work today.
For example, about Ofsted inspections:
> Now, you may imagine that these inspections would be unannounced, so as to best get a real image of how a school works. Not the case. They’re scheduled well in advance.
This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0]. Schools don't really have a window of opportunity to game the inspection in the way the author describes.
> Another way the stats were gamed was by not recording bad behavior
This whole section seems a little naive. Teachers in lower sets have an incredibly tough job, and have to try to support those students who genuinely want to learn, but are struggling, while also managing the behaviour of disruptive children. Sometimes, it is the better option to just allow some disruptive behaviour slide (e.g: swearing) rather than interrupting the whole lesson just to deal with one kid. A lot of the time, if behaviour doesn't provoke any response, it won't escalate. As the author says, if a student is actually aggressive towards other students, then obviously action is taken, but I'm not sure they quite appreciate how difficult it is to try to teach a struggling class.
wrt cheating, it definitely happens. I'm not personally aware of any examples quite as extreme as what the author described, but I know my Spanish teacher turned a blind eye while I let my friends copy my work, for example, and I'm sure in the lower sets behaviour such as this was more widespread. I will say though, the exams the author is talking about here are GCSEs. They don't determine your ability to get into university, they're only used by 6th-forms (equivalent of US high school) to determine what subjects you can study. While they absolutely affect parents' perception of schools, they are not quite as serious as if students were receiving A-levels based on cheating. Also, students choose GCSE subjects. If someone only speaks 20 words of French, it's unlikely they would choose to study French.
> This is absolutely not the case today. Schools have a general idea of when an inspection will be (i.e: what season of the year) based on when their last inspection was, but they're only told that an inspection will happen on the morning of the inspection [0].
I have family still in the school system in the UK - but they still get advanced notice. Essentially somebody at the school either knows the inspector or somebody very close to them, and gets a tip off about when it will occur. The system is still corrupt.
One of the biggest things they do is to take a disruptive child and literally lock them up in a building called "room 101". The entire school would have an assembly on that morning at very first thing and told to behave or else.
Half of the stories reflect exactly cases I know to have happened in my local secondary schools, where both students and teachers have acted badly, and in many cases illegally. Honestly, it really makes home schooling an attractive option if you can afford to do so.
> Essentially somebody at the school either knows the inspector or somebody very close to them, and gets a tip off about when it will occur.
That's impressive corruption. My mother works in one of the local secondary schools, and they absolutely do not get know when inspections will occur, I guess that really depends on the school.
It begins to look as if the test-examination-marks business is a gigantic racket, the purpose of which is to enable students, teachers, and schools to take part in a joint pretense that the students know everything they are supposed to know, when in fact they know only a small part of it--if any at all. Why do we always announce exams in advance, if not to give students a chance to cram for them? Why do teachers, even in graduate schools, always say quite specifically what the exam will be about, even telling the type of questions that will be given? Because otherwise too many students would flunk. What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it.
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When I was in my last year at school, we seniors stayed around an extra week to cram for college boards. Our ancient-history teacher told us, on the basis of long experience, that we would do well to prepare ourselves to write for twenty minutes on each of a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. We studied his list. We knew the wisdom of taking that kind of advice; if we had not, we would not have been at that school. When the boards came, we found that his list comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we were asked. So we got credit for knowing a great deal about ancient history, which we did not, he got credit for being a good teacher, which he was not, and the school got credit for being, as it was, a good place to go if you wanted to be sure of getting into a prestige college. The fact was that I knew very little about ancient history; that much of what I thought I knew was misleading or false; that then, and for many years afterwards, I disliked history and thought it pointless and a waste of time; and that two months later I could not have come close to passing the history college boards, or even a much easier test, but who cared?
I have played the game myself. When I began teaching I thought, naively, that the purpose of a test was to test, to find out what the students knew about the course. It didn't take me long to find out that if I gave my students surprise tests, covering the whole material of the course to date, almost everyone flunked. This made me look bad, and posed problems for the school. I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later learned that teachers do this everywhere. We know that what we are doing is not really honest, but we dare not be the first to stop, and we try to justify or excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, it does no particular harm. But we are wrong; it does great harm.
It does harm, first of all, because it is dishonest and the students know it. My friends and I, breezing through the ancient-history boards, knew very well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on whom. Our success on the boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor, which was great. Even children much younger than we were learn that what most teachers' want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them. The smart and able ones, at least, come to look on school as something of a racket, which it is their job to learn how to beat. And learn they do; they become experts at smelling out the unspoken and often unconscious preferences and prejudices of their teachers, and at taking full advantage of them. My first English teacher at prep school gave us Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive to read, and from his pleasure in reading it aloud I saw that he was a sucker for the periodic sentence, a long complex sentence with the main verb at the end. Thereafter I took care to construct at least one such sentence in every paper I wrote for him, and thus assured myself a good mark in the course.
Not only does the examination racket do harm by making students feel that a search for honest understanding is beside the point; it does further harm by discouraging those few students who go on making that search in spite of everything. The student who will not be satisfied merely to know "right answers" or recipes for getting them will not have an easy time in school, particularly since facts and recipes may be all that his teachers know. They tend to be impatient or even angry with the student who wants to know, not just what happened, but why it happened as it did and not some other way. They rarely have the knowledge to answer such questions, and even more rarely have the time; there is all that material to cover.
In short, our "Tell-'em-and-test-'em" way of teaching leaves most students increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions.
