Rethinking school change and the role of evaluation: two anglophone countries experience

En este artículo se toman en cuenta las formas particulares que el cambio escolar y la evaluación han tomado en países dominados por una ideología neo-liberal. Geográficamente, se enfoca particularmente en los países anglófonos más poderosos, Inglaterra y Estados Unidos, cuyos políticos se impulsan unos a otros en sus decisiones, seguidos muy de cerca por Australia, que parece siempre estar listo para imitar sus peores iniciativas. En particular, el artículo resalta cómo los paradigmas conocidos como Eficacia Escolar y Mejora de la Escuela se unieron en el contexto de la mercadización escolar en Inglaterra. El artículo concluye observando el daño que las evaluaciones de alta repercusión en la toma de decisiones, causan a las relaciones humanas y apunta a posibilidades más fructíferas para evaluar el desarrollo humano en las escuelas.This paper concerns the particular forms which school change and evaluation have taken in countries dominated by neoliberal ideology. Geographically its focus is particularly on the most powerful anglophone countries England and the US, whose politicians play leapfrog with each other, followed closely by Australia which always seems ready to imitate their worst initiatives. In particular, the paper highlights how paradigms known as School Effectiveness and School Improvement came together in the context of the marketisation of schooling in England. The paper concludes by looking at the damage which high-stakes evaluation does to human relationships and points to more fruitful possibilities for evaluating human development in schools

Opening up pedagogies: Making a space for children

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XThis article argues that children and young people in places such as England or the USA are subjected to an educational regime which constrains their development and eclipses their emergent identities. Paradoxically, the accountability systems which claim to make children’s learning visible to management create a distortion of vision by emphasising only the child’s ‘data shadow’. The article argues for pedagogies which provide space for each learner’s authentic encounter with our cultural inheritance as human beings. It concludes by presenting the idea of ‘open architectures’, a set of pedagogical methods which holds children together as a learning community while providing spaces for initiative.http://dx.doi.org/10.15730/forum.2016.58.3.33158pubpub

The zombie theory of innate IQ

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XAttempts are being made to resuscitate the idea that ability is predetermined by our genes – doubtless linked to moves within the Conservative Party to reintroduce grammar schools and selection at 11. Recent research by Robert Plomin claims that 60 percent of achievement in GCSE Maths or Science is genetic. His work is acclaimed by Michael Gove’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings. (See the linked article earlier in this issue Bad science, worse politics.) The belief that academic ability is genetically inherited has long served to justify inequality. The tendency for children from prosperous families to score higher on IQ tests was used to justify these families’ wealth.pubpu

For the many: A curriculum for social justice

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XIn recent years educational preoccupations have largely focused on 'teaching and learning', often drawing on deficit models of teaching and encouraging myths about 'poor teachers' and 'bad teaching'. Debate about the curriculum has been discouraged - but this has not stopped it being 'reformed', often in profoundly reactionary ways. This article analyses developments in the English school curriculum and argues that Labour's proposed National Education Service offers an opportunity to consider what a genuinely socially just curriculum might look like.http://doi.org/10.15730/forum.2018.60.2.17960pubpub

Bullying by numbers

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XStatistics can be a serious tool of critical analysis, by providing a graphic overview of a situation. However they can also distort reality by reducing educational processes - and children themselves - to numerical data: the only thing that matters is what can be counted.https://issuu.com/synergyprint/docs/primary_first_12https://nape.org.uk/publications/pubpub1

School effectiveness and school improvement: questioning the paradigms

School Effectiveness and School Improvement have achieved a hegemonic position as paradigms of educational evaluation and development, both as research paradigms and as discursive practices shaping policy and practice. This is true internationally but with particular strength in the governance of English schools, thus the texts which constitute this doctoral submission - namely a book and several journal articles, and an extended commentary upon them - are grounded specifically in that context. The concept of paradigm is deployed in order to question systematically their (often tacit) methodological and political assumptions and to establish some foundations and justification for alternative models of school quality and educational change. A particular emphasis is placed upon the neglect, within these dominant paradigms, of educational and social aims, curriculum and pedagogy, and their inadequate framing of the relationship between schools and social context. These texts also focus strongly upon the situation of schools serving inner city and other highpoverty neighbourhoods, as a kind of border situation which exposes the limitations of these paradigms

Not so simple: The problem with 'evidence-based practice' and the EEF toolkit

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XThere are increasing calls for policy and practice to be 'evidence informed'. At surface value, there may appear much to commend such an approach. However, it is important to understand that 'evidence' and 'knowledge' are being mobilised in very particular ways. The danger is that rather than promote a rich and lively debate about what counts as evidence, and how it can help educators, the reality is the development of a narrow 'what works' agenda which in turn imposes a 'one best way' approach to pedagogical practice.http://doi.org/10.15730/forum.2016.58.2.23758pubpub

Baseline testing: Science or fantasy?

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XThere’s nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can’t see, So try me on and I will tell you Where you ought to be. The selection of children into houses at Hogwarts famously involves a magic 'sorting hat'. A fiction, of course, unlike baseline tests in real schools. The Government's baseline tests at the start of Reception produce numerical data, so they have an aura of scientific accuracy. They are anything but. This article will focus particularly on the tests designed by CEM as one of the three approved providers of Reception Baseline Assessment in September 2015. This is not because CEM are incompetent but rather the opposite: they were the most experienced providers. Their test was based on PIPS, sold commercially to hundreds of schools in various countries and refined over more than a decade.https://issuu.com/synergyprint/docs/primary_first_19/5pubpub1

A new curriculum for a new public school

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XThis article is written in response to widespread concerns about the inadequacy of the school curriculum in England, and the urgent need to rethink what public education should involve. It builds on earlier contributions in FORUM and elsewhere by discussing curricular opportunities arising from Labour's proposal for a National Education Service. This is particularly timely given the limited horizons and understanding shown in Ofsted's call for better curriculum planning. In contrast to neoliberal obsessions with schooling as the production of human resources, and the neoconservative dependence on tradition, the article discusses how we might build a curriculum oriented to social justice, environmental responsibility and democratic citizenship. It addresses core issues such as age appropriateness; the relationship between everyday and academic knowledge; the importance of cognitive, practical, aesthetic and ethical dimensions; and how we might make a socially just and politically serious selection of knowledge. Whilst drawing on the strengths of earlier curriculum development, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, it also points towards more recent international developments drawing on place, story and enquiry, which have been eclipsed by high-stakes acccountability regimes. This broad ranging article throws out a challenge: how to avoid retreading a traditional path of alienated knowledge acquisition and create a framework for authentic learning and really powerful knowledge.http://doi.org/10.15730/forum.2019.61.3.31761pubpub

The zombie theory of genetic intelligence

Terry Wrigley - ORCID 0000-0002-1536-243X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1536-243XThe notion that 'intelligence' or 'ability' is genetically inherited refuses to die. This article reviews the way such a notion has long been used to justify inequality in society, and considers the methodological failings and deceptions, and the interpretative blind spots, of those who advance the heritability of 'intelligence' as a basis for understanding people's learning.http://doi.org/10.15730/forum.2019.61.1.7761pubpub