The recent slump in teacher morale
documented by a YouGov poll published a few days ago represents a severe
indictment of Michael Gove’s education policies. Largely the extreme logical
conclusion of a quarter of a century’s education policies his policies started
with Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Education Act and were carried on by a Blairite
government too timid to change them.
These right-wing education policies have
continuously relied on assertions that applying toytown market reductionism and
simplistic MBA-style solutions to schools will achieve improvements. The
problem for those advocating these right-wing policies is that they have almost
always relied on unsupported declarations and failed to include any serious
data or even arguments to support their claims.
Now everything is starting to fall apart,
the core of Gove’s policies; fragmentation through academies and “free”
schools, top-down imposition of performance-related-pay, greater centralization
of the curriculum, giving heads too much power, abandoning initial teacher
education and over-reliance on exams and testing. The head of Ofsted’s idiotic
comment "If anyone says to you that 'staff morale is at an all-time low'
you know you are doing something right." Is now threatening to make him
look even more out of touch than his boss.
The problem is that as teacher morale
decreases (and resulting industrial action increases) the status of teaching
decreases and this hits recruitment and retention of teachers. Already, despite
a severe shortage of jobs for graduates and young people, recruitment is
starting to suffer, and disillusionment of teachers is falling.
The problem has been that pretty much every
right-wing education initiative imposed on schools since May 2010 has been
based on untested assumptions, or even, in some cases, assumptions for which
there is significant evidence to the contrary – such as “free” schools.
Just one example of such an assertion is
the claim by Teach First that sending barely-trained graduates into schools for
a couple of years while they wait for a job to come up in banking or
accountancy will “raise the status of teaching”. Brett Wigdortz, the head of
Teach First has repeatedly made this assertion but has never supplied any
justification for it. Indeed he has never even supported it with any serious
argument, never mind any data. The decline on the status of teaching associated
with the figures for teacher morale now gives lie to his vacuous assertions,
repeated, Goebbels fashion to make them true.
This reflects one of the defining features
of those advocating right-wing education policies has traditionally been the
substitution of anecdotes for data, and unsupported assertion for actual evidence;
something which runs through the entire New Educational Establishment (NEE)
from Katherine Birbalsingh and Toby Young to Joel Klein and Michael Wilshaw.
In fact the British NEE is but a subsection
of the GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement) as Pasi Sahlberg has
Christened it; a barely-disguised corporate-run Astroturf movement dedicated to
educational privatization, increased testing, and subjecting children to greater
regimentation and conformity. Yet it uses the language of educational
improvement to disguise a reduction in educational quality for our children.
Every school a crammer, is now the
effective policy, one that was probably inevitable from the start of the
current right-wing education “reforms” in 1988. Ofsted used to say that, “if
pupils are not learning, teachers are not teaching.” Well this logic has now
come full circle. Dr Tony Wagner has shown how rote memorization of test
answers has effectively replaced real learning, and Prof. Paul Dowling and Prof
Andrew Brown’s research in secondary schools has shown that many secondary
school children now regard the curriculum as little more than a ticket to the
next level, like a computer game. Learning has been replaced by information to
be memorized for exams but useless for anything else and soon forgotten. The
children in our schools learn nothing more than to pass exams and schools have
become adept at producing good exam results without actually teaching the
children anything useful.
So what is the motivation behind the GERM?
The cat was let out of the bag by a Tea-Party pundit during the American
election who admitted that people are more likely to vote Republican the
wealthier they become, but that this is reduced significantly if they are well
educated. The problem is that the more educated people are the better able they
are to see through the unsupported assertions, hyperbole, propaganda and
outright lies of right-wing parties.
The problem is that no-one is going to win
any election by telling people they are going to make education worse, so a
systematic dumbing-down of educational has to be dressed up as educational
improvement, with the full force of the right-wing propaganda machine behind
it. Some people have suggested that it is Gove’s background as a journalist that
has resulted in him being given an easy ride by the media. This is probably an
oversimplification. They are doing it because they need to maintain the myths
upon which his policies are based in the face of considerable evidence on the
ground to the contrary.
