Why Schools May Not Measure Up

If you live in America, you know how our public school system is.

Having made the switch from Catholic school to public school myself in seventh grade, I can vouch for it’s upsides: greater diversity, no uniforms, down-to-earth environment, Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon TGC sessions during lunch -- these are the things that made me love public school, even though I still don’t enjoy getting up early.

What I didn’t like about public school was the curriculum: to be blunt, not everyone was going to use the skills they taught in the required classes. Things like Child Care, Health, and Business Math (AKA taxes, checkbooks and financial skills) were all optional, and while Business Math could at least be substituted for Algebra, the former two weren’t even required to graduate. And while the environment was far more relaxed than my old Catholic school, there was still the pressure to not make mistakes and only worry about your grades, a pressure that’s driven many a student to the brink, and which possibly caused at least one of my upperclassmen to commit suicide in my sophomore year.

Thankfully, some people have common sense. I know, a Unicorn being ridden by an alien down the streets of Atlantis is more likely than that, but some people were born before YOLO SWAG and Jersey Shore.

John Hattie is one of these people, a Kiwi (a New Zealand native, not the fruit or the bird) who directs the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He also directs the Science of Learning Research Centre, which works with over 7,000 schools worldwide. Hattie possesses a Ph.D in statistics and measurement, and has published a dozen books, most of which are about something he calls Visible Learning.

His life’s work boils down to one simple proposition: To improve schools, draw on the best evidence available. Seems obvious on paper, right? It should be, one would think. But in practice, this is rarely taken into account.

“Senior politicians and government officials clearly want to make a difference,” claims Hattie. “But they want to do this, that and the other silly thing which has failed everywhere else, and I want to know why.”

In a new paper, “What Doesn’t Work In Education: The Politics Of Distraction,” published by Pearson Education, Hattie takes on some of the most popular approaches to reform, and proposes some potentially controversial alternatives.

1. Achievement standards. “It seems very sensible. You set up minimum standards you want students to reach; you judge schools by how many reach them,” says Hattie. “But it has a very nasty effect. All those schools who take kids in difficult circumstances are seen as failures, while those who take privileged students and do nothing are seen as successful.”

Similarly, while it seems to make sense to set achievement standards higher with each higher grade level, this assumes each student is on the same page. And since humans are a race of diversity, assuming any uniformity in any given group (especially school-age children) is just asking for trouble. Plus, the further along most students get in school, the more you get kids who are either behind or ahead of the schedule that’s been set to a trite “Average” pace.

The alternative: a focus on individual growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts. This approach takes into account prior knowledge, comprehension levels, and learning strategies. This approach works for mentally deficient students, so why not apply it to the average Joe or Jane?

2. Achievement tests. Turns out, high performing schools and countries don’t judge a student’s worth based on how they score on standardized tests. It’s almost like a stressful, inefficient way of testing how well you do at the test itself has proven an ineffective way of teaching. Who knew? Unlike the good old US of A, most countries with school systems that actually work either give very little standardized testing, or none at all.

The alternative: testing that emphasizes immediate feedback that can be acted upon to adjust teaching accordingly. The current emphasis in schools is less about actual learning, and more about how mistakes ruin your life and are a sin worse than murder if you get even one “F” on your report card.

3. School choice. Education reformers tout this one as a tool for parent empowerment, and school improvement by competitive pressure. But according to Hattie’s own research, once you account for the economic background of of students, private schools offer no real advantage on average, unless you like uniforms and ridiculous tuition prices. As for charter schools, they have some advantage, but only by a hair.

The alternative: Teacher choice! Variation within schools accounts for 70 percent of differences in scores on the international PISA exam (PISA = Program for International Student Assessment) while variation between schools makes up the other 30 percent. Hattie argues that if parents had the right to select the best teachers in a given school, then they could be truly empowered. It would also be challenging to implement, partially because of…

4. Class size. One of Hattie’s more controversial claims. While groups in the US such as Class Size Matters propose that fewer students per teacher is a recipe for success, Hattie argues that this would come as a surprise to Japan and Korea, two of the highest-performing education systems in the world, with average class sizes of 33. (For comparison, the outlier in the other direction is Russia, a below-average system with average classes of 18. Thanks Putin.)

The alternative that is technically not an alternative maybe?: Hattie admits that smaller class sizes can have positive impact, but only if teachers are encouraged to take advantage of it by actually changing the way they teach. Collaboration, personalized feedback, and continually measuring their impact so as to constantly improve are a must, according to Hattie.

5. More money. Because the American government is as straightforward and understandable as the ravings of a poetic doomsayer with no teeth, public schools are always strapped for cash. That’s a problem, because the cost of a reasonable education from age 6 to high school graduation is at least $40,000 for one kid. Countries that spend less than this per student, all of which are poor, tend to have much lower reading scores in the international PISA exam, and their performance correlates strongly with the money they spend. But for countries that can afford 40K per student, anything too far above that threshold makes no discernable difference. For example, Korea and Finland far outscore the USA on the PISA, while spending $60,000, $75,000, and $105,000 respectively.

The alternative: Money is a necessity for schools, something the American government often forgets. But more money isn’t a fix-all; a million dollars won’t fix something that doesn’t work to begin with. Give the schools more funding, but don’t go overboard.

And those are the five big ideas that don’t work in education, according to one Mr. John Hattie, Ph.D. This hard-thinking Kiwi’s 13th book, coming in September, will present case studies of 15 schools that are implementing some ideas with the strongest evidence behind them. He says many of these are, at their most basic, meant to empower teachers to work in collaboration and continuously improve.

“Around the world, there is so much excellence,” he says. “Have we got the spine to identify and grow that?” I wish I knew, Mr. Hattie. I wish I knew.

Kamenetz, A. (2015, August 13). 5 Big Ideas That Don’t Work In Education. Retrieved August 17, 2015, from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/08/13/430050765/five-big-ideas-that-...