British grade-school exams a mess

From coloured graphs manipulated by statisticians to children bewildered by their grades, education is in turmoil

So who is going to carry the buck for this failure? Late results, unmarked papers, baffled teachers, confused children. "We don't want to see excuses about poor performance, what we want to see is clear plans to raise standards." Thus spake Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, in June, of the 638 schools he deemed to be "failing". He gave them 50 days to turn around or face closure or merger. (Their 50 days was up, incidentally, last Wednesday - funny that we haven't heard anything more about it. Or did they all file their reports late as well?)

Who will give Mr Balls his notice to improve? Yesterday, as his department published the results of Key Stage 2 SATs results for 11-year-olds, Mr Balls was nowhere to be heard. These are the results that headteachers have cautioned are seriously flawed: markers received the papers late; the new online system introduced by ETS, the American company to whom the marking had been contracted out, was too complex and slow. Some pupils did not exist, schools had the wrong papers returned to them, or were sent papers that hadn't even been marked; about a third of secondary school pupils did not get their results by the end of term, and legal action is now under way against ETS.

Meanwhile, many experienced markers have abandoned ship having got fed up with the chaos and ETS's unanswered premium-rate telephone lines - a child's education ransomed to profiteering on essential phone calls. It is already getting too late for another company to take over marking for the 2009 tests. This saga is nowhere near ended.

These are real children, with real futures, who have worked hard, and who are utterly confused. It is bad enough to be reduced to a set of numbers in the first place, without all the authorities behind that set of numbers failing even to produce them for you. But instead of coming out fighting for what was left of the results yesterday, Mr Balls has taken to hiding behind his statisticians.

Last week, the Schools Secretary wrote to a House of Commons committee that publication of the results was a matter for his department's "head of statistics", who had advised that they should come out on August 5 despite headteachers' widespread concerns about missing results and marking quality.

An education minister hiding behind his statisticians is like a chancellor cowering behind his economists: it is drivel and deserves to be treated with derision. Yet the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) was at it again yesterday, a spokesman now using the statisticians to deride as not "statistically robust" a well-timed report from the think-tank Civitas.

Civitas found the overwhelming majority of secondary schools that it spoke to had their own doubts on the validity of official SATs results. Nine out of ten of Year 7 teachers who replied to a random survey by Civitas believe the Key Stage 2 SATs tests exaggerate a child's abilities, with around a third of pupils getting higher scores than they deserve. Most secondary schools have to test the children again in their first weeks to determine which level they are really at, as specific coaching at primary school has enabled pupils to skim higher marks in the SATs than they really merit.

And why the coaching? Because the scores feed into the league tables, thence into the furrowed brow of a local parent obsessing over the numbers for her child's potential school. Testing and league tables have their place in our education system, but not at the expense of clarity and honesty; the numbers should elucidate, not confuse.

You choose your statistician and your statistics to suit your case. I was reading an article in the Royal Statistical Society journal a few months ago which argued that school league tables themselves are statistically meaningless as a measure of educational quality. Funny the DCSF doesn't have any departmental statisticians telling it that. And this year's tables will be more unreliable than ever because of the added uncertainty over the accuracy of ETS's SATs results.

No ministers will ever admit to the imperfection of their charts because, in the face of scepticism about the achievements of their Government, these multicoloured graphs have become the only measure by which they can trumpet their success. This explains the obsession with testing: it has become not a tool of policy, but policy itself. By their test results shall you praise or damn them. Imagination and good leadership have shrunk to lines on a graph.

As the date of publication of the SATs results approached, what were education ministers doing? Sending out multicoloured charts to the media to demonstrate their latest anti-obesity drive in primary schools. Hey, your kid may not be able to read, but at least he knows he's fat.

This row over SATs is not just about exam results, it is about a style of government that reduces people to blobs on graphs, to data entered in a system and then manipulated by the statisticians. It is government gone wrong: contracted-out responsibility, lack of accountability, and a ministry that can send out 3,840 pages of instructions to head teachers in a single year, but cannot get exam papers marked on time.

It is a tale of children being failed by a system that turns them into numbers on a chart; which treats their individuality as a problem, problems as targets, and then contracts pupils out to the lowest bidder with a premium-rate phone line to tout.

Great expectations fallen on hard times: it is a tale, ultimately, of the four in ten children, born in the year Labour came to power promising "education, education, education", and leaving primary school today still without real competence in literacy, numeracy and science. Funny that those statisticians cannot come up with a chart illustrating that.

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Education politics in the USA

Teachers' unions are expert at presenting the interests of their members and of public school students as one and the same. Which is why it's always illuminating to see how the nation's largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, spends its political money.

Each year, NEA members pay into a "Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund" that allows the union to spend tens of millions of dollars on all manner of state and national political issues. Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a longtime union watchdog, has tracked this fund's spending. In the 2007-08 fiscal year, not surprisingly, the NEA spent $2.3 million -- on top of $1 million spent the previous fiscal year -- fighting a school voucher referendum in Utah.

But other expenditures reveal this national NEA cash -- which is separate from PAC contributions that must adhere to federal campaign-finance laws -- as a fund for various and sundry left-wing political causes. Mr. Antonucci reports that during the current fiscal year the NEA sent the Hawaii State Teachers Association $20,000 to conduct polling on a state constitutional convention. It sent the Massachusetts Teachers Association $60,000 to oppose a state income-tax repeal. And it sent the Florida Education Association $200,000 to oppose property-tax cuts in the Sunshine State.

Expect more of the same going forward in a state near you. "Unlike most previous years," writes Mr. Antonucci, "NEA finished 2007-08 with a surplus of nearly $5.9 million, which means the union will enter the 2008-09 school year with almost $20 million available to spend." It's a shame the NEA doesn't spend as much money and effort trying to improve lousy schools as it does trying to keep taxes high.

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