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It’s simple: be unfair and schools get better
Equality, like the unicorn, is a mythical beast. It is an entrancing idea, but it has no reality. Pursuing mythical beasts in the real world is bound to lead to terrible disillusion. The long, cruel, bloody pursuit of communism and socialism, in the relentless hunt for equality, brought unspeakable horrors. The determined pursuit of fairness has proved, tragically, to be both destructive and unfair.
Yet many people are still in full cry after the mythical beast, as in last week’s uproar about lotteries for school places. Brighton and Hove’s Labour council decided by one vote, after a long and nasty public dispute, to impose a lottery system for places at the city’s secondary schools. This was part of a deliberate plan to stop well-off middle-class families monopolising the two best schools because they have been able to buy expensive houses in that catchment area.
The catchment areas of all the city’s eight secondary schools will now be redrawn, to reflect “a better social mix”, and where a school is oversubscribed there will be a lottery for places. In other words, and in the name of equality, many more poor children from deprived areas further away from the best schools will be able to go to them, and many better-off children living close to the best schools will now have to travel to less good or — who knows? — positively bad schools further away.
Hardly surprisingly, things got nasty. Middle-class parents who have worked hard to buy houses near good schools are understandably enraged and have accused the council of gerrymandering and fixing the vote. Indeed Simon Burgess, the Labour leader, admitted he had sacked the Labour vice-chairwoman of the committee concerned only two hours before one vote, because she was going to oppose the policy. This has a distinctly Soviet sound to it.
However, threatening legal action will get the pushy parents nowhere because the government supports lotteries for oversubscribed schools as “appropriate and acceptable practice” and said so clearly in 2005 when it redrafted the code of practice on schools admissions. In the same spirit last week, the national association representing town hall chief education officers said it would consider doing the same across the country.
Like the proverbial Irishman, I wouldn’t start from here. The question, surely, is not what to do about the few very good state schools, but what to do about the many very bad state schools.
If all state schools were at the very least adequate, and if the bad ones were quickly forced to close, then people would not mind so passionately whether their children went to this or that local school. The class and classroom wars arise from the egalitarian policies that have destroyed so many schools, and betrayed so many generations of children into abysmal illiteracy and innumeracy. In the long comprehensive experiment, levelling has meant levelling down. It’s amazing that anyone can still deny that it has failed horribly.
Education ministers and schools should pursue quality — uneven and unfair though it might be — rather than equality. This is what the private sector does, with great success. Some private schools are selective, some are not at all; some select for academic ability, others choose other qualities, such as musical or sports ability. They don’t remotely pretend to be the same or equal or equally desirable. But all survive by giving what Ofsted calls “value added” education — something not equal to all other education but as good as possible for the individual child. That’s why private schools score so highly on “value added” measurements. State schools, by contrast, have a tragic record of value wasted.
There are some obvious ways to set about making all state schools good enough, if not equal, above a basic minimum. All involve following the inegalitarian example of the private sector. The first is to close failing schools and fire failing teachers, without wasting children’s precious time in rescue attempts. Parents wouldn’t pay for that in the private sector. The second is to give schools and teachers the right to discipline all children and to exclude any. Excluded children would have special, and probably much more expensive, remedial education. It takes only a couple of disruptive, violent children to undermine a class or a school, and private schools never permit that, unless they specialise in such problems.
The law would have to be changed so that teachers could count on good behaviour in class, as in private schools. Some physical restraint should be legalised. Why not bring in the army, as some American inner-city sink schools did, to great effect? Teachers should be allowed to select, set and stream children; it works in the private sector in the best interests of all children. Schools that didn’t teach children according to their abilities and offered bad value would have to close. All state schools would have to regard parents as their customers; if they didn’t please their customers they would be allowed to fail.
The customer-parents should have vouchers so they could vote with their feet, as in the private sector. In the name of political reality, these vouchers would be valid only for a standard sum, and could not be topped up at any more expensive private schools (like Sweden). Special needs children would have high-value vouchers.
Finally the persecution of the aspiring middle classes must end. One of the nastiest aspects of the current debate is the punitive attitude expressed about ambitious middle-class parents guilty only of wanting the best possible education for their children.
On the one hand, according to diehard egalitarians in the media, they must be punished for trying to find a way into the best schools (by working hard for expensive housing or believing in God) and their children must be excluded from them if possible. On the other hand such punished parents must use their bourgeois beastliness to raise the level of whichever local sink school their children have been consigned to, as if a few middle-class children could have an effect on a majority of underclass natives and disoriented foreigners.
This is beating up the middle-class goose that lays the golden eggs. It has a horribly old-fashioned Soviet smell of class guilt and class hatred. Too many people are still obsessed by the tragic pursuit of equality.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 04, 2007
Comments:
Dear Ms Marrin,
I could not agree more with your column in 'The Sunday Times' regarding equality versus quality in schools. I totally agree with everything in your article except perhaps the use of a voucher system. I am an American living in England for the past 10 years; and I have a very difficult time understanding this rebellion against the class system cloaked as opposition to people's desire to improve themselves. My grandparents were the children of immigrants who left their home for a better quality of life in America. My parents wanted a better quality of life for me and my sisters than they had, and so it goes, each generation striving to work hard to improve themselves, their prodigy and their lives. That ideal is what America was built upon. This determination to help their children better themselves includes getting a good education which results in buying homes in an area with good schools. Good schools are market led not government led in the US. The present Labour government's major mistake is that they have tried to micro-manage everything, schools, hospitals, transportation, etc by setting targets. One size does not fit all, consequently, centrally imposed targets are not going to work for all and haven't.
Many of the British people seem to be entrenched in the way things were done in the past, with a state of mind that stands in the way of Britain achieving its potential greatness. At times, they seem to be their own worst enemy, unable to think the unthinkable and unwilling to shake off old habits that keep them from improving their lives. I was discussing welfare benefits with a group of friends and I stated that some American states issue plastic cards that are topped up each month with their food benefits, rather than giving the recipients money and that the cards could only be used in grocery stores and could not be used to purchase alcoholic drinks or cigarettes. There was a general outcry at the very idea of restricting the use of money to buy food (necessities) because, and I quote, you cannot take away the only pleasures that these people have in their wretched lives (even though these pursuits damage their liver and lungs). How is that a benefit to those people or to society?
Sincerely,
Diane
Posted by: Diane | 13 Mar 2007 13:39:07
