Teaching by Numbers
Why excellent education doesn’t scale
A curious thing has been happening in UK education and it’s a trend that’s occurring globally as the craft of teaching is being transformed into a “science”. The Economist recently published an article titled “How to make a good teacher” that proclaimed:
“The premise that teaching ability is something you either have or don’t is mistaken. A new breed of teacher-trainers is founding a rigorous science of pedagogy. The aim is to make ordinary teachers great, just as sports coaches help athletes of all abilities to improve their personal best. Done right, this will revolutionise schools and change lives.”
So if we extend that premise to other activities, for example playing the piano, then any young Freddy could become Chopin given the right amount of measurement and instruction in the rigorous science of piano playing.
This canard that anyone can be a great teacher by just following the recipe is of course, nonsense, however it is at the core of western education transformation that is being lead by data-driven zealots who now populate our governments, think tanks and organisations like Teach for All or here in the UK, Teach First. The joke in the UK is that you “teach first and join a hedge fund later” given the revolving door between Teach First alumni and the financial community. These days you can scratch a teacher, find a banker.
After a Shakespearean fortnight in British politics where the population protested against the establishment by voting in the establishment the UK’s new Prime Minister, Theresa May appointed a former accountant, Justine Greening, to be Secretary of State for Education. This is in addition to the appointment of Amanda Speilman, also a former accountant, as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills (HMCI). The HMCI’s job as head of schools regulator Ofsted is to “inspect and regulate services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills for learners of all ages”.
Ofsted is supposed to be an independent, non-ministerial government department reporting directly to Parliament. There is a reason that the DfE and the Ofsted regulator are not the same department given that one is intended to regulate and monitor the performance of the other. Yet, the choice of HMCI was made by the outgoing Education Secretary despite being rejected by the House of Commons Education Committee. This essentially breached what is supposed to be an arms length relationship between the provider and the regulator.
My interest was piqued by the background of the heads of both of these organisations as well as what I see as a global trend of appointing people from the finance, banking and accountancy sectors to positions of power and influence in the education sector. It should also be noted that under Greening’s watch as Secretary of State for International Development she signed off on the investment of a $6 million grant from the public purse to US for-profit edubusiness, Bridge International Academies.
Accountants, as a profession, study the past and they are not skilled at predicting the future especially when we live in times where change is not linear. During the 20th century we did become accustomed to gradual, linear change in the form of industrialisation. By measuring and tweaking the production lines we could maintain a standardised output with linear improvements in cost efficiency over time. Accountants and management consultancies were in their element, bathed in the security of the things they could measure.
This century, however, things have changed as digital transformation means that barriers to entry into industries have been lowered and persistent reductions in technology costs have made new business models feasible. Regrettably the only indication of this phenomenon in education has been delivering 19th century education and assessment with 21st century platforms.
Accountants are seldom innovators. In fact, innovation and its bedfellow, creativity, positively scare them because they are impossible to measure. I know of no successful innovation company that is lead by an accountant. That’s not to say that accountants can’t be creative but the ones that are usually end up behind bars. Accountants like the definite, the cold hard facts of numbers and that’s why they look at the future in the rear view mirror.
There have, of course, been large corporations that ended up being run by accountants and finance people. These companies include Blackberry (RIM), Kodak, Enron, SwissAir and Nokia. For lots of good reasons people from these backgrounds have highly virulent innovation immune systems which is why in times of recession innovation stalls as optimism about the future dissipates and the steely accountants armed with the evidence of their spreadsheets take over.
And that’s where we are with education right now.
I have attended meetings where senior leadership teams boast about how they are data-driven and evidence-based. Indeed there are whole conferences dedicated to cheering each other on and slapping each other on their backs with their measuring sticks. Well, of course, nobody would ask for less evidence would they?
Martyn Hammersley, Emeritus Professor of Education and Social Research, Open University, in his book, Educational Research and Evidence-based Practice, suggests:
“There is an initial, and generic, problem with the notion of evidence-based practice which needs to be dealt with. This is that its name is a slogan whose rhetorical effect is to discredit opposition.”
It’s become quite obvious by the actions of governments, in concert with “think tanks” and the $multi-billion assessment industry lead by corporations like Pearson, that the reductionist view of what teaching is, as reflected in the Economist article, is driving a data-driven agenda.
As indicated in an earlier article “Trads Will Eat Themselves” this reductionist view is aligned with the commercial interests of private companies that see efficiencies in de-skilling the teaching profession and, like Frederick Taylor, transforming craft production to mass production.
This reductionism not only impoverishes the learning experiences and opportunities of all children in state sector education but has the long term effect of creating an algorithmic society devoid of difference, compliant and easy to govern but devoid of creative thought. This, in my opinion, is a ticking time bomb.
So it concerns me further that when we examine the UK’s Prime Ministers choice of special adviser and joint Chief of Staff we find Nick Timothy, formerly of the New Schools Network a quango that was created after, education ideologue, Michael Gove closed all the other quango’s and gave Rachel Wolf a £500K bung to promote free schools. New Schools Network also has a group of undisclosed donors and strong links to UK “think tank” cum “donor laundering operation”, Policy Exchange:
Those readers familiar with my investigative writing will recall that Wolf trousered the public money before leaving for New York to work for Rupert Murdoch’s education play, Amplify, whose objective was to transform education by delivering a narrow data-driven curriculum via tablet computers. Once Amplify went bankrupt Wolf returned to the UK to join the UK governments policy office at No.10 Downing St. Wolf is married to James Frayne, an expert in public persuasion and director of, well you guessed it, Policy Exchange. Frayne recently called for the government to, “open super-selective schools to extend elite education into state sector”.
The hiring of accountants, banking and finance people into leadership positions within the education sector is based on the false premise that education can scale like factory production lines. This transformation of education based around neo-Taylorism is doomed to failure unless we’re happy with our schools turning out a production line of standardised individuals. The command and control principles of 20th century manufacturing, which also inform the methodologies of outdated management consultancies such as McKinsey, that might work in China for making iPhones just don’t work for children. What it does result in is a significant increase in child and adolescent mental health problems as we try to fit the beautiful spectrum of human diversity thru a homogenisation process based around an arbitrary normal.
Great schools and their leadership teams should and can inspire other schools and their teams to be great but this doesn’t occur by simply measuring everything and then scaling it by replication. This would be like taking scaling your favourite restaurant, it will just end up as McDonalds and that just isn’t nourishing enough for our children, anywhere.
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Unless specifically stated, opinions and points of view shared are my own.
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An entertaining & thought provoking slayer of sacred cows, Graham Brown-Martin works globally with senior leadership teams to help organisations adapt in the face of rapid change & innovation. By challenging entrenched thinking he liberates teams to think in new ways to solve complex challenges. His book Learning {Re}imagined is published by Bloomsbury and he is represented for speaking engagements via Wendy Morris at the London Speakers Bureau.
