Inspection: what’s in it for us?
(David Thomas, The Times, October 6, 1999)
Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, is reported as telling a conference that if a school didn’t agree with its inspection report, it should put it in the bin. This advice, while refreshingly liberal, does bring into question the value of an exercise that can cost a large comprehensive up to £22,000. More directly, what help is the inspection process to parents?
There is nothing new in the idea of school inspection, but the previous Government wanted the process to involve inspectors from outside the perceived cosiness of the educational world.
When Ofsted was set up, each school received full inspection every four years. This is now being refined so that “more effective” schools can get a shorter inspection, while others continue to get the full treatment. It is also likely that “more effective” schools will be inspected less often, perhaps once every six years.
So, from next year what sort of inspection your children's school is about to undergo will be an early indication of its past record. “More effective” schools have a record of high key-stage GCSE results and “very favourable” findings from the previous inspection, especially in teaching, progress, management and school improvement.
To see this information, you can read a copy of the latest inspection report, which each school is obliged to keep for reference, or you can access the Internet on www ofsted.gov uk.
During a full inspection week, every aspect of school life is seen and evaluated. Parents’ concerns — the access road that poses a safety threat; the lack of homework; the cramped dining-room; bullying — become the inspectors’ concerns and are commented on in the full report.
The size and the cost of an inspection team vary according to the numbers in the school and the type of school. Team members are responsible for their subject specialisms and for various aspects of school life, such as accommodation and resources.
Inspectors tend to be middle-aged with a background in school senior management or county advisory services. There is also a lay member who brings outside experience. If the inspection is gruelling for teachers, it is also work under pressure for inspectors who have to compile a long report in double-quick time. A further concern is that because payment for inspection is falling, many experienced inspectors are giving up — and morale is sometimes low.
The full inspection report, running probably to about 50 pages, is necessarily detailed but it begins with an overview of the school and the inspectors' main findings of what it does well and where it has weaknesses, expressed in bullet points. There is also a section headed “key issues for action” which highlights areas that the head and governors should look at as a priority. These may be straightforward: “The fire safety procedure needs clarifying”, or complex: “Systems need to be set up so that middle managers are more involved in decision-making.”
Governors have 40 days after receipt of the report to come up with a plan of action. Where there are serious problems — say, of financial mismanagement or an inadequate curriculum — the school may be deemed to be failing and there will be more visits from inspectors to establish what special measures need to be taken.
Parents have a limited but important role in this. Before an inspection, the team leader will hold a meeting at which parents are encouraged to voice their opinions, and all parents have the chance to grade the school’s performance in a questionnaire with statements such as “The school handles complaints well” and “The school enables my child(ren) to achieve a good standard of work”.
Often parental evaluation balances out - ten think there is too much homework, ten not enough — but occasionally a view for good or bad will be made by a large percentage. This will be investigated and a complaint can go on to become a key issue for action.
All parents receive a two or three-page summary of the inspection report, which highlights the school’s strengths and weaknesses, gives grades for overall standards and quality of teaching and comments on any improvement since the previous inspection. Here is the evidence to back up your points it you think that the head teacher is not tackling a weakness. This transparency makes it hard for a head to fob you off with a patronising “We know best”. It also enables parents, children and teachers to take pride in the school’s achievements.
If the inspection findings whet your appetite to become more involved and to have more say in the running of the school, you may be encouraged to stand as a parent governor. At present, there is a shortage of volunteers.
POLITICIANS DON’T GET RESULTS IN EDUCATION. SCHOOLS DO.
(Peter Preston, The Guardian, September 20, 1999)
There’s more to a good school than a slot in some league table. There’s care and buoyant morale and a sense of purpose. A good school values achievement, sure enough, but with that goes something else — enjoyment. The staff feel it, the pupils feel it. These are supposed to be the happiest days.
I encountered a lot of good schools many long years ago when education was my Guardian beat. Public schools like Marlborough, bubbling with enthusiasm as girls (led by the head’s daughter) joined its A-level set: trail-blazing schools like Braehead in Fife (whose headmaster would have given Chris Woodhead palpitations): early sixth-form colleges like Mexborough when that window of opportunity was new.
But there was also, sticking in the memory, a spruce, smiling school set in the (not particularly salubrious) back streets of Bournemouth. It had a solid educational record. Its pupils clearly loved it. And now the local council was going to merge it into some greater comprehensive. Predictable outrage and fury. The head was leading the resistance, the parents rallying round.
An everyday story of 60s life as old Labour put on the screws? Of course, with one difference. This (whisper the words gently in a lather of shame) was a secondary modern school. The defenders at the gates had chosen to value a coinage of learning the politicians were bent on abolishing. They were deeply reluctant to write off their children, their record and their lifetime in the classroom as hopeless, foredoomed failure. And by any current standard, of course, they were right. The sacred trinity of reading, writing and arithmetic was well taught. Children didn’t leave — at 15 — lacking literacy or numeracy. Discipline was good. Job prospects were thought about, planned for, and excellent. There was also an easy, natural flexibility to the pigeon-holing. If pupils, at any stage, showed an unspotted academic potential, they were transferred into the arms of a welcoming grammar school. Nobody used the word “failure” once while I was there.
I don't now present the Bournemouth of decades past as some golden model of a golden age. It was just one good, cohesive secondary modern. There were many like it — but there were, equally, many perfunctory schools which never lifted their eyes. The system, as a whole, wasted too much potential, based too many expectations on the frail hinge of intelligence testing. An impossible political sell. You could see why it had to go; and see, too, why today it is better gone.
Yet that (in the Guardian wake of Nick Davies and more denunciations from David Blunkett) is not the complete story. The point of Bournemouth — which was also the point of Bob Mackenzie’s devoted, child-centred Braehead — is that systems don't get results. Schools get results. Individual teachers, working to any number of prescriptions, following any number of stars, get results. They all make a contribution. They all have something to teach us. The wonder of Molly Hattersley (wife of Lord Roy) when she was pioneering mixed-ability teaching was that she made it work triumphantly. The mixed-ability disillusion of Mr Blunkett and Mr Blair today reflects only the glum truth that there aren’t enough Mollys to go round.
Examine, then, a few of that Bournemouth school’s modest virtues. It was relatively small — a few hundred rather than a thousand or two. Since there was, of course, no sixth form, there was no need for the gigantic intake neighbourhood comprehensives must have to offer enough subjects at A-level. Size matters. The bigger the school, the tougher the discipline problems. The wider the spread of challenge, the harder the focusing.
There was a relatively straightforward task: equipping its pupils for a life where basic skills were basic to survival. There was, within its walls, no stark division between the followers of an academic education (handed down by Oxbridge to the public schools and grammar schools) and the rest. Time was well, intensively, spent. We hadn’t, then, had the initial debacle of Minister Thatcher’s raising of the school leaving age to 16 (without a blind idea of what kids would do in that extra year). Bournemouth didn’t have sink classes of the disaffected or dispossessed who’d fallen out of an alien, quasi-academic mainstream. The same morale touched every classroom. No second-class pupils, no second-class teachers.
An example — but not, of course, a system. And here’s the crux to a debate which never ends. Nick Davies is amazed to discover that “the politics of education are built on foundations of ignorance” — that the most sweeping reforms this century were rooted in “guesswork, personal whim and bare-knuckle politics”. Gosh! Where has he been all these years?
It is the great delusion of British schooling that there can be “a system” which politicians can promise and impose and which thereafter brings astounding results. There has never been such a system; nor will there ever be one. There are only tinkerings and experiments and dreams delivered by political parties who are never around long enough to produce permanent progress. David Blunkett (though he writes me huffy letters) is probably the best secretary of state I can remember because his “system” self-evidently doesn’t rest on yet another reorganisation of buildings and intakes — and nor, on the most cursory inspection, do his grander pledges have the sense of system. No selection at 11! But instant streaming at 11 and a day. Instant “distinct teaching and learning programmes for the most able 5-10% of pupils”. Piloted “masterclasses” for gifted pupils. World-class tests at 9, 13 and 18 to be calibrated against Singapore and Switzerland. No selection — just world-class testing.
Of course it doesn’t make sense. Of course it’s not a “system”. Of course what happens in Sheffield and St Austell will be and must be hugely different. But that, beneath all the mounds of initiatives and specialist extensions and action zones, is probably a strength, not a weakness. Britain isn’t Switzerland or Singapore — or even Sweden, where the first comprehensive reformers pitched their tents. It is a large post-industrial society with great disparities of wealth and expectation whose education has always been organised bottom-up (via the ancient school boards) rather than top-down in the Napoleonic fashion.
That means what is fizziest and most innovative grows close to the grass roots and can’t be ordained from on high. The Bournemouths and Braeheads and Molly Mixeds matter. A system that defeats them defeats itself. Has David Blunkett realised that? Perhaps, a little. At least he talks targets as much as means. At least, perhaps, he knows that there is no nirvana ordained from Downing Street, no single lever to pull — but that, if you keep trying everything, some things work.
A THOUSAND YEARS OF CLASS DIVISION IN THE CLASSROOM
(Stuart Maclure, The Independent, December 16, 1999)
Formal education, though not the only kind of teaching and learning, was for centuries strictly a minority interest. In England it was always tied up with social class and occupational group. The Victorians accepted inequality and devised a school system which reflected it. Our “failing” schools of today could be said to be inheritors of that inequality.
The Church was the main source of education in the early centuries. Religious houses were dotted around Britain where monks added to their spiritual duties the illumination of manuscripts and preserving the relics of classical civilisation.
The Church needed literate or semi-literate priests and deacons and, for their vocation, education was a condition of employment - Latin for the liturgy, some theological study, and education enough for a “plain Saxon sermon”. The Church, of course, was the repository of secular as well as sacred learning and provided the clerisy for royal government till Elizabethan times, including the top public servants - all those hastily-ordained deacons like Thomas à Becket who showed monarchs how to raise taxes and carry on diplomacy.
Literacy was also needed for a minority of others in civil society. A definition of functional literacy in the 13th or 14th century would have been closely related to your station in life. Noblemen would employ a chaplain as secretary or call on the services of one when needed. As wealth spread and the elements of a mercantile middle class came on the scene more people needed to read, write and cipher.
Merchants needed to send letters and issue bills. Commerce generated legal disputes and the need for lawyers who, in turn, created their own legal education and focused on the Inns of Court, as Michael Holroyd brought out in his recent biography of Thomas More.
The English universities were firmly under clerical control and the colleges would for many centuries be run by clergymen. But they soon became more than seminaries for the education of clergymen - though many graduates and all college fellows would take orders. The Renaissance and the printing press reinforced the supremacy of classical learning and enriched it with more Latin and Greek texts. As Erasmus showed, it was relatively easy to commute between European universities. Oxbridge colleges flourished and declined, living off their endowments and fees, acutely sensitive to the ups and downs of political fortune.
After the Reformation they became Anglican foundations with no place for dissenters or Roman Catholics till well into the 19th century. Classical studies and mathematics had pride of place as a preparation for service in church and state. Becoming a parson was likely also to mean becoming a teacher - eking out the parson’s stipend by taking pupils who would be taught the rudiments of Latin and mathematics.
The 16th century saw the foundation of a spate of new schools, some of them royal, like Henry VIII’s Eton, well endowed with land and wealth, others much less rich, set up by benefactors with an eye to immortality. This was the period in which many local grammar schools were established for the education of - say - 10 poor scholars with money to provide a teacher, often the local parson. The whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail to school had become familiar enough to groundlings and gentry alike for Shakespeare to use him to symbolise one of the seven ages of man.
Grammar schools appeared in most country towns, but the records show they were incredibly badly managed. Many collapsed and were re-founded several times over in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were known as “Endowed Schools” but their endowments seldom paid for what was necessary and by the 19th century many schools, founded as charities to provide education for poor scholars, had been colonised by the well-to-do. By the middle of the 19th century it had become obvious that something had to be done to create an education system out of the haphazard growth of schools.
Before they could bring themselves to grasp the nettle of education for the masses, the Victorians set about bringing order to the secondary schools by appointing an Endowed Schools Commission under Lord Taunton to sort them out. They found themselves dealing with a job lot - alongside the old grammar schools (about 700) there were also some 2,200 non-classical schools which were devoted, both by their foundations and by actual use, to the education of the labouring classes. In addition, there were 10,000 “private” schools run by proprietors for their own profit. Dotheboys Hall was presumably one of them.
The commissioners saw the schools as serving particular markets among the children of the estimated three million members of the middle and higher classes. They identified three grades of school, ranked according to the aspirations of the parents. The first grade schools were for the children of parents who would keep them at school to 18 - men of independent means and various gradations of professional men and some members of the poorer gentry.
Second grade schools kept pupils up to the age of 16 and offered Latin and modern subjects, but not Greek, for the boys headed for the army and trades and professions which they would need to enter at 16. The third grade schools stopped at 14 and were for the sons of tenant farmers, small tradesmen and artisans and would offer them a clerk’s education.
The Victorians were realists and the lesson they learnt from the sociology of education was to accept inequality and devise a system of secondary education, firmly rooted in parental expectation and social position and the notion of an educated class. As the middle class expanded and got richer, the range of secondary schools widened, and after 1902 the county councils added yet more. Their pupils included scholarship holders as well as fee-payers, and provided a vehicle of social mobility for bright working class boys (and girls). But they were essentially institutions for the minority of pupils - nevermore than 15 per cent - with superior abilities or well-to-do parents.
Earlier, there had been moves to reform the ancient universities, now joined by King’s College London, the first of the new 19th century foundations. Oxford’s famous riposte to Lord John Russell’s Royal Commission indicated what the reformers were up against. The Hebdomadal Board saw no need for any action because two centuries ago - in 1636 - the university revised the whole body of its statutes, and the academic system of study was admirably arranged at a time when not only the nature and faculties of the human mind were exactly what they are still, and must, of course, remain, but the principles also of sound and enlarged intellectual culture were far from being imperfectly understood.
Educational reformers also had to do something about the mixed bunch of schools founded by the churches and by other philanthropists to provide elementary schooling for the children of the poor - the great mass of the population. Eventually in 1870, Forster’s Act created School Boards to fill up the gaps left by the churches and non-denominational school-providers. Compulsory education followed a few years later.
These schools provided the education thought suitable for working class children - a minimal introduction to the basics. Again, the rationale was strictly in sociological terms, and it related to a world in which children were wage earners before they entered their teens. Elementary schools for the mass of the population continued till the 1944 Act, by which time the leaving age had crept up from 10 or 11 to 14 years.
Building on foundations like these, it is hardly surprising that it has proved difficult to create a unified system of education based on equality of opportunity. The tension continues. What pupils and parents want from school is still related to the prospects of employment - while teachers and educationists - and now politicians - have higher aspirations. Educational development, post-World War Two, has gathered pace in the past 15 years from a gallop to a break-neck stampede. It was only in the mid-1980s that the proportion of the age-group staying on at school beyond the minimum leaving age topped 50 per cent. Enrolment in higher education has rapidly moved up from around 15 per cent to more than 30 per cent. More than one in 20 of the work force is employed in education.
The Education Reform Act of 1988 completed the task of organising the system begun by the Victorians nationalising the school curriculum and prescribing it in detail by Parliamentary Order.
But social factors still impose themselves on educational performance. A thousand years of education have shown how closely education is linked to jobs and social status. It was true of the vocational education of novices in a medieval religious house, it was also true of the preparation of would-be district commissioners within public schools, and it explains many of the troubles of “failing” schools in our modern urban slums. At the beginning of the new millennium, nothing suggests that education has lost its significance as a way of transmitting wealth and social position from one generation to another. Ministerial task forces and Ofsted inspectors are unlikely to stop this. Meanwhile, the British universities are going down the slot because they have ceased to have friends in high places.
Heigh-ho it is some comfort to know that it will all be one with Nineveh and Tyre a thousand years from now.
UNIT VI. EDUCATION ANDCULTURE
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Main topic: Cultural education Additional topics:
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THE LONG MARCH OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION
(David Pascall, The Times, November 30, 1992)
The 1988 Education Reform Act provides a vision of a broad and civilising curriculum which gives children the opportunity to grow spiritually, morally, culturally, mentally and physically. Now that the ten subjects of the national curriculum are in place, I wish to highlight the cultural dimension of education and to emphasise the key role of the arts in the school curriculum.
The word culture has three main meanings. One indicates a particular way of life and describes the customs, values and beliefs of a society. The key point is that the culture of a society is defined by its political and social history, its religious and moral beliefs, and its intellectual and artistic traditions. Our modes of thought and feeling are defined by the culture in which we live.
It follows that we must ensure that the curriculum provides young people with the cultural understanding they will need if they are to make informed choices which enrich their own lives and contribute to the development of society.
It may seem simplistic or even dangerous to refer in late-20th-century multi-cultural Britain to any one cultural tradition. Our society is certainly multi-cultural in that throughout our history we have welcomed people with different cultural backgrounds and have been enriched and influenced in many profoundly important ways by their cultures. But this does not mean we live in a society which has no dominant culture. We share a set of values and traditions which have been developed over the centuries, which benefit from the rich cultural diversity of Britain today and which will be passed on to subsequent generations. An important role of education is to ensure that every child growing up in Britain, irrespective of religion or the community in which he or she lives, is taught about key traditions and influences within this heritage.
The first influence on the child will, of course, be the home. The underlying ethos and culture of the school also sends important messages about values through such things as the way the building is decorated, how staff and pupils relate to each other, the material presented at assembly, the variety of plays, concerts and celebrations, and the contribution of the school to the wider community, as well as academic and sporting achievement. Schools should not be afraid to agree on core values and standards of behaviour to which they subscribe and which are communicated to parents.
The second meaning of culture is a general process of intellectual, spiritual and moral development. Michael Oakeshott argued that the fundamental purpose of education was to equip children to enter what he called “the conversations of mankind”, conversations “begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries”. If new generations are to be able to participate in these conversations, they must learn something of the achievements of the scientists, writers, musicians, painters and historians who have gone before.
All subjects of the curriculum have a role to play in spiritual, moral and cultural development. Take science, for example. The pursuit of science rests on the recognition that the natural world is governed by laws which are independent of us and cannot be manipulated. This recognition, this concern for truth and knowledge, lies at the heart of education.
The third sense of culture is the participation in and appreciation of the arts in general and great art in particular. If one objective of the national curriculum is to swing the pendulum away from a narrowly conceived, utilitarian education to one which fulfils the inspiring aims of the Education Reform Act, then we need a convincing rationale for the importance of the arts.
One important answer is that the arts can be a source of great and life-long enjoyment. I am referring here both to the appreciation of art in all its many forms and the opportunity to participate directly in the creative arts. The arts also play a key role in stimulating the curiosity and creativity which is fundamental to learning.
The other important reason why the arts must be taught as part of a civilising curriculum is that they can change the way in which we see ourselves and the world. And it is for this reason that the curriculum should introduce pupils to the excitement of great works of art and literature. Such works raise our spiritual, moral and aesthetic consciousness and many pupils may never experience them outside schools.
A piece of music, a painting, a piece of writing may be a model of technical perfection but if it has nothing to say about values and fails to move or challenge us then it has no soul, no vitality. For most people, the great works which address their own condition are those which have grown within them, within their own cultural tradition — for these are the works which address the questions and stir the memories of a shared past and point towards a shared future.
Great art stems from the artist's engagement with the challenging experiences of life and from a search for meaning in life. Its honesty, its refusal to sacrifice the reality of the particular experience to the norms of conventional expectation or to what is immediately consoling, provides us with new insights into what it is to be human.
“Try to imagine,” Mahler said, thinking of the resounding hymn to the Holy Spirit Veni, Creator Spiritus which opens his eighth symphony, “the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. These are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” If we were not moved by feelings of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world we live in, at the power of artists, musicians and writers to manipulate sound, space and language, we would surely be living in an inner cultural desert.
Within a crowded curriculum, I have argued that knowledge and appreciation of great art and our cultural heritage is a priority. I have also emphasised the importance of participation in the creative arts. In developing this case, I do not wish, however, to dismiss the role of contemporary or popular culture. Education does need to take a lead in helping pupils to appreciate culture in its widest sense and in developing their critical faculties so they are able to make choices and apply an intelligent, discriminating attitude to popular culture.
An understanding of why great art transcends its time — why Shakespeare or Mozart has lasted - can help us to be discerning in our response to popular and contemporary culture. Popular culture does, of course, play an important part in our lives. It can be very enjoyable and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of it may well survive our generation. But allowing the curriculum to be dominated by popular and temporary cultural movements will only serve to separate our children from their inheritance which has shaped our society today.
In the teaching of the arts as in every other area of the curriculum, we need to raise our expectations. Children need to be introduced progressively and sensitively to more demanding texts, pictures and pieces of music. All of us can appreciate moments of truth, of beauty, of pain, through our responses to a moment in music, art, literature and painting. These experiences and what we make of them lie at the heart of our humanity. As parents and teachers, we need to develop these moments in the lives of our children and see that they are not wasted.
ASSIGNMENTS:
I. Language
1. Explain in English and then translate the following words and expressions into Russian:
Multi-cultural, heritage, creative arts.
2. Translate the following expressions into Russian:
A broad and civilising curriculum, to highlight the cultural dimension of education, to provide sb with cultural understanding, to share a set of values and traditions, to benefit from the rich cultural diversity, to agree on core values and standards of behaviour, a narrowly conceived utilitarian education, a convincing rationale for the importance of the arts, to introduce pupils to the excitement of great works, to move sb, to address the questions, to stir the memories of a shared past, to stem from, to apply a discriminating attitude to popular culture, discerning.
II. Contents
When carrying out the following assignments, please make use of the previously discussed words and expressions, as well as the ones below:
Modes of thinking and feeling, to enrich one’s own life, simplistic, subsequent generations, to relate to each other, the pursuit of science, concern for truth and knowledge, appreciation of art, to stimulate the curiosity and creativity, to raise sb’s (spiritual, moral and aesthetic) consciousness, a piece of music / writing, to wonder at sth.
1. What are the three meanings of the word ‘culture’ the author uses? Please briefly sum up the information provided in the text.
2. How does the author suggest that culture should be taught at school?
3. What is your opinion of the necessity of culture studies at school and at the university? Please give examples.
4. In addition to culture studies already in existence at the university, what would you propose to add?
5. What is your opinion of popular culture and how can it be incorporated into the program of our university? Please indicate what educational purposes it would serve.
ADDITIONAL TEXTS
BILINGUALISM: QUÉ PASA?
(John Leo, US News and World Report, November 7, 1994)
A strange story made it onto Page One of the Washington Post last week. At least it must have seemed strange to readers who don't keep up with the byzantine politics of bilingualism.
“Plan to Meld Cultures Divides D.C. School,” said the headline. It was about a $1 million federal grant for a new bilingual program at unsuspecting H. D. Cooke Elementary School, which is about half Latino, half black.
The experiment in culture melding amounts to this: Starting in prekindergarten and kindergarten, and advancing one grade a year, both Latinos and non-Latinos will be taught in Spanish as well as English. Up through third grade, 80 percent of all teaching will be in Spanish. In later grades, it will taper off to half Spanish, half English.
First obvious question: Why would non-Hispanic parents want four-fifths of their children’s lessons to be taught in Spanish?
Other obvious questions: How did the United States reach the point where bilingualism, which was designed to help immigrant children learn English, turned into a plan to teach non-immigrants in a foreign language? And if a dual-language precedent is established, how do we then go about withholding the same system in schools that are, say, half Hmong speaking or half Vietnamese speaking?
Bilingual school programs, launched in 1968 with a budget of $7.5 million, evolved into a bureaucratic monster that eats up almost $10 billion a year. Though everyone agrees that non-English-speaking newcomers need help, at no point along the way has anyone demonstrated any connection between money spent and goals sought.
New York City has just issued a gloomy report showing that it apparently gets very little for the $300 million it spends each year on bilingual education: Immigrant children enrolled in bilingual programs in city public schools do less well, on average, and at every grade level, than similar students who take most or all of their classes in English
$10 BILLION ESTABLISHMENT. This is an old story. In 1990, researcher Christine Rossell surveyed studies in the field and found that 71 percent showed that transitional bilingual education was no different from doing nothing at all for non-English-speaking children. Yet the $10 billion bilingual establishment keeps chugging along, sometimes getting what it wants by dangling a million dollars in front of a poor school like H.D. Cooke.
According to the Post, parents of Latino students “seemed less informed about the proposal, and they have not organized to support it.” Unsurprisingly, black parents and teachers seem angry, particularly the teachers, wondering why their school has to be radically altered.
One reason, it seems, is to avoid the segregation that bilingual classes regularly bring — Spanish-speaking children will not be off by themselves. But the main function of the plan is to establish Spanish as a school language on a par with English. Like Canada, Cooke would officially be bilingual.
This development is softened with familiar rhetoric about the supposed advantages of a fully bilingual system. The Post report says “Through sharing language, Latino and non-Latino children are expected to develop more empathy for one another and their cultures.” But such bursts of empathy are rare among those forced to struggle with someone else’s language while not yet fluent in their own. (Parents could opt out of the program, but saying no to the bilingual juggernaut has often involved long waiting lists and buses to another school.)
Non-Latinos are supposed to benefit by mastering a second language, but in reality, that won't happen. Diana Walsh of the San Francisco Examiner looked hard at a roughly similar plan in her city and concluded: “The English-speaking kids don’t learn how to speak Spanish... The school district knows that, and if you push them they will concede that.” She says 80 percent of black kids in Spanish-language classes were reading below grade level.
No evidence suggests that the black students at Cooke will do any better under similar conditions. It’s a dubious experiment at their expense. Whatever the advantages of learning about Spanish language and culture, the sheer weight of this instruction will displace much of what the black children need to learn to get ahead. Putting English and Spanish on a par obscures the obvious truth that learning English is crucial for Latinos, but learning Spanish, or French, or Chinese, is very much marginal for non-Latinos.
Latino children seem to be pawns here too. The initial idea behind the bilingual movement was that classes were to be “transitional” — temporary and aimed at getting children into the English-speaking mainstream as quickly as possible. The New York City report shows that Korean-speaking and Russian-speaking immigrant children manage this with stunning swiftness. But activists have encouraged Latino children to think of themselves as permanently culturally distinct. So many activists aim to extend “transitional” programs as far as possible, creating jobs for Spanish-speaking teachers and using schools to enforce ethnic solidarity.
This is a corruption of sensible bilingualism, and there’s no reason for a school such as Cooke to buy it.
QUIET: WOMEN AT WORK
(Libby Purves, The Times, November 9, 1994)
Twenty-five years ago this autumn, I woke in my room in an Oxford college to find two large men standing over the bed. They carried bottles and were swaying a little. One of them was a rejected suitor. Do not, however, lick your lips at the prospect of an Angus Diggle story. All that actually happened was that I sat up, drew the bedclothes around me and squeaked – “Guy! Philip! Go away!” And they did, and went on, I believe, to long and honourable careers in local government. I am happy to say that one of them left his bottle, so I drank it.
Today I could have invoked all kinds of harassment procedures, and boosted the survey which yesterday claimed four out of five women at Oxford have been sexually harassed. It is, as usual, infuriatingly weakened by the PC way that “teasing” is included, and the deeply unsurprising fact that most of the harassment occurred “at occasions involving alcohol and men in large groups”.
Nonetheless, there is worse in there: rape, indecent assault, insult, humiliation, and the kind of persistent, cruel pursuit which can make your life a misery at any age.
But most interesting was the finding that more than half the women felt “uncomfortable in some college settings”, such as the bar and common-room. In other words, some members of colleges are sneaking from the library straight to their bedrooms, rather than face beery cries of “Wooarr!” from fellow-scholars. Do not tell me that they ought to stiffen up and swat these pimply lads with the ‘Works of Gower’. Some girls can, some can't- and if you are away from home, studying for a tough degree and growing up fast, nobody has the right to make your life harder.
There is a particular irony in the figure of four out of five women, because as of this term four out of five of the former women’s colleges have become mixed. Somerville, after bitter opposition, took delivery of its first lads this term; only St. Hilda’s remains. The survey was not broken down by college, but Jenni Borg, of the union which compiled it, admits that quite a few respondents said: “This doesn’t apply to me, because I’ve been at an all-women college.”
These lucky ones can feel happy about their bar, their common-room, their corridors. They have somewhere to retreat and to relax their fragile, new-minted social persona as adult women. That relaxedness helps them to make real male friends, as well as giving them the strength to swat the pests. They invite men into the sanctum, but as Ms Borg cannily observes, the way men act as visitors to a women’s college is circumspect. “They sense it’s women’s territory, and behave.”
Conversely, the way that the first men admitted into women’s colleges behaved has passed into Oxford legend: they shouted, they drank, they vomited in the dean’s flowerbed, they clumped, they took over all the key positions on undergraduate committees. Evidence of how bad some of these changeovers were (most have settled now) is that Somerville was so careful this term. There is a women-only common-room, and the college held a men’s lunch at the beginning of term, to explain why they had been opposed and why women need private space.
Ms Borg reports that “so far it seems to be going OK, although you do see stereotyped things happening. It isn’t that all-women colleges were fluffy or anything, it’s just that men are — er – louder.”
Quite. Not all, but many very young men are full of surging testosterone, as unsure of themselves as any girl but prone to express it in swagger. They are hard enough for quieter boys to put up with en masse; for girls, they can be hell. A female space provides respite and laughter. It is not much to ask.
Women’s colleges, like girls’ schools, offer other huge advantages. They enable young women to have a go at being leaders, fighters and campaigners without worrying that they seem “pushy” to some jeering man. They are not convents, on the contrary, they force you to go out and widen your horizons.
My generation had to roam the university, setting out alone to join everything from the OUDS to the Anarchist Club to find a love-life (can’t recommend the anarchists, wouldn't wear watches, always late). Today, “college couples” settle into depressing, prematurely domestic routines. The girls wash the boys’ socks, so I am told. That is not progress. The tragedy is that just as the new generation of women start to see this, the old order has been swept away.
Except at St Hilda’s. I am relying on it to hold out until my daughter is 18. She may opt against it, but at least she will have had the option.
ACADEMIC BATTLE OF THE SEXES
(Lucy Hodges, The Independent, December 3, 1998)
Despite the amazing advance of girls in exam league tables, young men still do better than women when it comes to first-class degrees at university. Women achieve more upper and lower seconds than men, but men walk away with the most glittering prizes of all. Why is this?
New research from Sussex University last week aimed to shed light on this controversial issue by suggesting that women’s agreeableness and openness - so often cited as contributing to female success in the workplace - may work against them when it comes to academic performance at the very highest levels. Men may excel at constructing bold and original arguments on paper because they are prepared to stick their necks out and take risks in a way women aren’t, says Dr Ruth Woodfield, dean of social sciences at Sussex and co-author of the Sussex project.
“Academics often say things like, ‘She did everything right, but there just wasn’t this extra element of flair’,” she explains. “Women may be perceived as missing the maverick element needed for the very best marks. I certainly don't think it’s to do with IQ”.
“If there were a biological difference between men and women,” she adds, “you would expect a relatively stable showing of the effects over time.”
Although there is a pattern of men achieving more firsts and thirds, and women more second-class degrees, there are differences between subjects, and the relative performance of the sexes can change. National figures show that women do better than men (get more firsts and seconds) in professional subjects such as medicine and law, as well as in chemistry and biological sciences. But men do better than women in arts and humanities - English, languages and history - as well as in mathematics and the physical sciences. The sexes perform about the same in social sciences.
Much attention has focused on history. It’s a subject which women study in large numbers, but men achieve more firsts. In general, figures show the gap between the proportion of men and women getting firsts is more pronounced at the old universities, and most acute at Oxbridge. At Cambridge, 12.5 per cent of women achieved firsts between 1990 and 1996, compared to 20 per cent of men. At Oxford last summer, 15.5 per cent of women got firsts compared with 24.1 per cent of men.
Theories about this gap abound. The Sussex thesis (above) is widely held and presupposes that a certain academic style is being rewarded. Some people believe the answer lies in biology: women simply aren’t as clever. Ernest Rudd, formerly of Essex University, pointed, in a letter to The Independent last week, to research on IQ that shows disproportionately large numbers of men at the genius or near-genius level. Others suggest the reason may lie in the institutions themselves - in tutors’ attitudes, teaching styles or examining systems (some people believe the three-hour exam favours men). Yet others think the answer is cultural - to do with the way women behave.
Whatever the cause, the figures are worrying. Oxford is conducting a research project into what is happening and why. Cambridge has been engaged in a study for some time.
Chris Mann and Patrick Leman, Cambridge researchers, are looking behind the theory that men’s writing style is characterised as having “flair”, or merely “bullshitting”, and that women, by contrast, are more cautious and conscientious. As part of their work they are tracking 200 Cambridge students who will graduate in the year 2000 to find out how they approach their studies.
One of their findings so far is that some subjects are seen as inherently male or female. Mathematics, for example, is seen as a boys’ subject at universities in this country. That is not the case in the US, South America or Italy, where men and women perform equally well at mathematics.
Cambridge has looked hard at its examining practice to ensure that it doesn’t discriminate against women. Melissa Lane, the fellow for women at King’s Cambridge, and a member of the university’s history faculty, believes the problem lies not in the exam process itself but in the run-up to exams, and whether men and women are prepared to go for a first
“It may not be that women are underperforming, but that men are overperforming,” she says. “In most universities you’ll get a 2.1 if you’re a reasonably good student, so why put all that extra effort, which means giving up other things in your life, and risk disappointment, if you might not achieve it? It seems, for various reasons to do with social pressures, it’s harder for women to say publicly, ‘I’ll go for the first’. They say, ‘I’ll get a 2.1 and do other interesting things’.”
It’s not that women at Cambridge lack confidence, she believes. Women are running student societies and debating clubs. “It’s a social issue, of saying to your peers: ‘I am going to go for a first.’ That can be a very intimidating thing to do. It risks social embarrassment and it sets you apart from your friends. I think women are more sensitive to social pressures.”
Not many academics are prepared to argue that women have different abilities for biological reasons, but Colin Blakemore, Wayneflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford, is. Arguing that it’s “silly” to conceal these differences, he says female students are more diligent, cautious and reliable, because that’s the way women have evolved. Since our hunter-gatherer days, those qualities were needed to produce and nurture children. Male students are not as good at handing in work on time, turning up to tutorials and being reliable because they haven’t needed those characteristics as much for survival. But when men do concentrate on work, they do so with an intensity of commitment and style that produces the firsts.
The important question, he adds, is whether we accept the situation or try to change it. He favours the latter. Meanwhile, Professor Lisa Jardine, dean of humanities at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, says she’s bored with research of this kind. She claims that everyone knows women students match men in any subject in the classroom.
“If the exams continue to show a preponderance of men in the top niche, why are we not saying the exams are wrong? Why are we letting a set of contrived, 19th-century exercises be our yardstick?”
THE MALE MINORITY
(Daren Fonda, Time, December 11, 2000)
When Meg DeLong was in high school in the northern Georgia town of Gainesville, she was a serious student with her eye on college. Many of her girlfriends worked towards the same goal. But her younger brother and most of her male friends seemed more inclined to act like Falstaff than to study Shakespeare. “A lot of guys thought studying was for girls,” says DeLong, now a junior French major at the University of Georgia in Athens. “They were really intelligent, but they would goof off, and it seemed to be accepted by the teachers.”
Take DeLong’s experience, multiply it a few thousand times in schools across the state, and it isn’t surprising that at her campus this year, the freshman class is nearly 61% female. In a freshman English tutorial, small clusters of men sit quietly as women dominate class discussions. But outside class, the mood on campus is distinctly male friendly. Tyler Willingham, social chair of the Sigma Nu fraternity, observes that at parties, even guys without dates can choose from “many beautiful women.”
This sort of gender gap is glaring and growing at campuses across America. Until 1979, men made up the majority of college students. As women won increasing equality elsewhere in society, it was natural and expected that they would reach parity in college, which they did by the early 1980s. But the surprise has been that men’s enrolment in higher education has declined since 1992. Males now make up just 44% of undergraduate students nationwide. And federal projections show their share shrinking to as little as 42% by 2010. This trend is among the hottest topics of debate among college-admissions officers. And some private liberal arts colleges have quietly begun special efforts to recruit men – including admissions preferences for them.
Why the shortage? There are few hard facts, but lots of theories. Anecdotal evidence suggests that more men than women respond to the lure of high-tech jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. Some call this the Bill Gates syndrome, after the college-dropout chairman of Microsoft. But high-tech industries employ only about 9% of the U.S. work force. Amid the hot economy of recent years, a large group of men – especially those from lower-income families – might be heading straight from high school into fields like aircraft mechanics and telephone- and power-line repair that pay an average of $ 850 a week rather than taking on a load of college debt. Some social critics blame a dearth of male role models among schoolteachers, and a culture that promotes anti-intellectualism among boys. And, especially in inner cities, crime and gangs entice more boys than girls away from learning.
How pervasive is the gender gap? According to Thomas Mortenson, an education analyst in Oskaloosa, Iowa, the share of college degrees earned by males has been declining for decades. U.S. government figures show that from 1970 to 1996, as the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by women increased by 77%, the number earned by men rose by 19%. Not all schools are feeling the imbalance; many elite colleges and universities have seen applications soar from both sexes. But the overall numbers, says Mortenson, should make us “wake up and see that boys are in trouble.”
Jacqueline King, author of a recent study on the gender gap in college, emphasizes that it is widest among blacks (63% women to 37% men in the latest figures), Hispanics (57% to 43%), and, in her analysis, lower-income whites (54% to 46%). “It’s not middle-class white young men who aren’t going to college,” she says. And an enrollment boom among older women is further skewing the numbers.
Mortenson, though, cites U.S. Census measures indicating that the gap cuts across racial and income groups. Moreover, he and others argue, boys as a group trail girls at many stages of K-12 achievement: boys tend to earn lower grades and are less likely to earn a high school diploma. They score marginally higher on SAT, but only 65% of boys who apply are admitted to college, vs. 69% of girls.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative education analyst, writes in her recent book, The War Against Boys, that schoolboys are “routinely regarded as protosexists, potential harassers and perpetuators of gender inequity” who “live under a cloud of censure”. Sommers cites studies showing that boys come to school less prepared than girls, do less homework and get suspended more often. “For males, there’s no social currency in being a straight-A student,” says Clifford Thornton, associate dean of admissions at Wesleyan University. Although the latest figures show that college graduates earn, on average, almost double the wages of those with no college, “there’s a sense among many boys that it’s sissy to go to college,” says sociologist and author Michael Kimmel. “The thinking is, ‘I can get a job without it.’”
Consider Justin Spagnoli. After high school he took classes at a community college before quitting to work in his father’s cabinet shop in Royston, Ga. Today Spagnoli, 25, earns $ 50,000 a year, while his buddies are just finishing college, taking jobs for lower pay. “You don’t need [a degree],” he says, if you have a talent.
Some private liberal arts colleges are making it easier for men to get in. At Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., this year’s freshman class is 43% male – up from 36% last year – in part because the school gave preference to “qualified male candidates on the margin,” says Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment and student life. The idea gets mixed reviews among Dickinson’s students. “It reeks of affirmative action,” says physics major Michelle Edwards. But Massa emphasizes that “the men we admitted were as qualified as women.”
Last July the University of Georgia lost a lawsuit filed by female students who were denied admission because of an affirmative-action policy that favored men. Says junior Shanna Norris, 20: “It’s not fair that a boy would get extra weight [in the admissions index] over a girl, but it would be better if there were more boys on campus.”
How then to recruit more guys? At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recruiters aggressively tout math and science programs – traditionally popular among male applicants. Chicago’s DePaul University (59% female) sends out extra mailings to boys.
Public universities, though, could face legal challenges if they were to try recruiting more males. In California a strict anti-affirmative-action statute effectively precludes gender-based outreach. In Texas and Florida – both of which have largely abolished preferences in admission policies – state officials say there are no special plans to lure more men. Many school still try to balance programs historically dominated by one gender (like engineering and social work) by offering slots to underrepresented students. But that doesn’t necessarily boost, say, the number of Hispanic males. And that has led some educators to skirt the recruiting rules. At San Francisco State University, Roberto Haro, a professor of ethnic studies, routinely recruits minority males at Boys clubs and middle schools in inner-city areas. As a result, he says, “in the past year, we’ve seen a slight increase in the number of minority males who have applied.”
Black fraternities are also getting involved. In Maryland the Howard County alumni chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha runs a mentoring program for high school males, helping boost their grades and inspiring them to apply to college. Says program head David Barrett: “So many of our boys are in prison. The ones in school – they’re under tremendous pressure from their peers not to excel academically. We want to show them that learning is O.K.”
Michael Kimmel believes that once we begin to change the anti-intellectual current in our culture, market forces will help address the gender gap. “Eventually,” he says, “men will start going back to college to meet the demand for an educated labor force.” And surely more men will also be lured onto the campuses by the realization that they’ll be surrounded by smart, attractive women with great earnings prospects.