Tesco Sets the Academic Bar
Some research I’ve been doing this week shoved that fulminatory little issue, grade inflation right into my face and I was nurturing a post on it…but then along came Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s popular CEO, with his articulate and damning attack on current educational standards. Fundamentally we have more and more sixteen year olds passing exams at higher and higher levels, hordes of academically qualified eighteen year olds entering university, yet the largest supermarket chain and most successful business in the country doesn’t rate them. Now if Sir Terry was boss of a nuclear power station or a company that manufactured brain scanners I might not be surprised, but a supermarket? Basically his business challenge is to shove food and stuff in one end of a vast shed then out the other as fast as possible… but with tills in between.
It’s important to add that Sir Terry is also an education adviser to the current Rump and so I guess schools ought to at least sit up and listen. But I wonder if he is aware of the fact that for well over a decade now schools have been bludgeoned, cajoled, bullied and harassed to educate children for the world of work (just look at the entire 14-19 curriculum for example) yet apparently without the kind of success that even a supermarket can value. Why?
Well one reason is because, as Terry Leahy stressed, teachers aren’t allowed to get on with their work without a busy, busy little gaggle of quangos undermining pretty much everything they do. And the world of educational quangos is not exactly replete with individuals who know anything at all about high educational standards. You have to have delivered them to recognise them for a start.
But a second reason is because of a rather unholy alliance between the ICT business and the quangos themselves, an unhealthy symbiosis which has done nothing for the children or teachers on the receiving end.
So amidst a constant demand for children to have 21st century skills and be prepared for the information age and the world of work, and a whole raft of other clichés constantly pushed by the quangos and the businesses, the absolutely fundamental things employers say they need from employees get utterly neglected. The P21 organisation in the US, a prime example of this kind of symbiosis, itself states that when asked the question, Of the high school students that you recently hired, what were their deficiencies?
Employers said the following:
- Written communication 81%
- Leadership 73%
- Work Ethic 70%
- Critical Thinking & Problem Solving 70%
- Self-Direction 58%
I’ve lost count the number of times at educational conferences, when someone is prattling on about how vital it is that kids have ICT skills, I have said my experience of real businesses has been that the one thing they need above all else, is people who can write. And so, to demonstrate just how unholy this technology/quango alliance is, here is a paragraph taken directly from guidance that a UK A level examination board sends to schools for a course that P21 recommends as exactly the kind of new, 21st century skills kids need.
Candidates should prepare there own coursework in the correct format for submission. It is the teachers responsibility to ensure that this has been done correctly and collate all the candidates work from their centre and burn it to disc (see below). They should also verify that the disc has burned correctly by opening it on another computer. (My italics and there’s plenty more where that came from!)
So my advice for any school keen to leap on the 21st century skills bandwagon would be: teach them to write, teach them to behave, teach them to work together and teach them to be responsible. That might help. Needless to say, this is what all schools with genuine high standards do, and without ever having to put it down in a strategy paper for stakeholders anywhere.
Joe Nutt
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If the Simpsons parody a trend, has it peaked? If so, 21st Century Skills may officially have achieved punchline status. In last Sunday’s episode, a classroom prank backfires; Bart and his classmates get their teacher, Mrs. Krabappel, fired. She’s replaced by a Zachary Vaughn, who announces, "I just got my masters in education from Tufts University and you are my first class ever!" But, the energetic newbie quickly adds, "why talk when I can text?" He texts the class a homework assignment: "20 minutes of Twittering." Later, Bart describes his first day with the new teacher:
"Then Zach Skyped us, live blogged our spelling bee and friended us on Facebook!"
"I thought you were studying the Lincoln Douglas debates," replies Lisa.
"You mean the L-Man/D-Dog flamewars?"
In another scene, the teacher mocks a student who describes the Monroe Doctrine, noting "Do you mean to tell me you memorized that fact when anyone with a cellphone can find it out in 30 seconds?"
"I’ve crammed my head full of garbage!" the distraught student moans.
"Yes, you have," says Zach, who also describes Mrs Krabappel’s smiley face stickers on graded papers as "caveman kudos." Naturally, he texts smileys instead.
Tellingly, the rest of the episode involves Bart’s efforts to undo his prank and get his old teacher her job back.
Thanks for the pointer to the Core Knowledge website. UVA is on of the handful of US Universities I've ever visited (and my wife's an alumni) so I fully appreciate its academic provenance.
And as for Bart, wasn't it Juvenal who said something like, "At times like this, it's difficult not to write satire"? Type "BVA Bafta" into Google and have a close look at what it throws up. It's worth making the effort to watch the videos for example, just to see what kind of pupil work is praised but I'll leave you to form your own opinion.
In the first instance, the teacher must expect pupils to be accountable, and for this to have any force there must be sanctions that pupils want to avoid. Sending a pupil to 'inclusion' no longer fills that function as it has become the educational equivalent of an ASBO. And teachers don't operate in a vacuum--with our "behaviour partnerships" doing everything they can to reduce exclusions, pupils know that they can get away with anything.
But the other side of the equation is even more important. What we do is far more important than what we say. A science teacher I know who can manage the most difficult cases in the lowest sets of the most unpromising schools commands respect because he puts everything he has into designing lessons that they can actually learn from, and because they know that he understands his subject. By contrast, younger teachers who have their eye on climbing the greasy pole as quickly as possible are justly held in contempt. As are the time-servers, who simply hold on for the pension, knowing full well they would be lucky to find a job in a call centre if they weren't teaching.
Unfortunately, the kind of person who flourishes in the QCDA believes that 'responsibility', along with all the so-called 'soft skills', are just subjects to be taught--a problem that can be solved by a few CPD modules.