Social class 'determines child's success' in Britain

Given the woeful standards of government schools, it's no surprise. People with a bit of money in Britain send their kids private

Children's social class is still the most significant factor in determining their exam success in state schools, the Government's head of teacher training acknowledges today. In an interview with The Independent, Graham Holley, the chief executive of the Training and Development Agency, said: "The performance of a school and a child in it is highly linked to social class. "If you turn the clock back on pupils in school today 15 years and predict their outcomes from where they were born, you can do it.

"We need to change that. It's not something this government has done. It's not something the last government has done. It's something that has been there since the Second World War and probably even before that."

Mr Holley also warned that as many as three in every 10 secondary schools (around 1,000 state schools) were "arguably still performing unsatisfactorily". But he distanced himself from the claim made by Gordon Brown that schools that failed to get 30 per cent of their pupils to achieve five A* to C grade passes at GCSE were "failing". "I'm not saying they [the three in ten] are failing and I'm not saying that these schools all have a challenging intake. There are some schools whose results do not look bad on paper that are complacent and coasting and they're not doing as well with their children as are schools in very similar circumstances. "We have to ask why is that? It is not down to individual teachers' competence. It is down to they way they are managed."

Mr Holley was speaking after presenting his views to a high level private meeting of senior educationalists in an attempt to improve the impact teaching can have on the quality of children's lives. He called for moves to ensure the most highly qualified teachers were persuaded to teach in the country's most disadvantaged schools.

He said the Training and Development Agency was examining ways of achieving this - including the prospect of paying "golden hellos" and "golden handcuffs" (where newly-qualified teachers are paid extra provided they sign a contract committing themselves to working for a certain period of time in a school). But he insisted: "It's not just about money. We need to ensure they have the professional support to deal with issues as they arise. "It takes some time to manage a class well and control and manage behaviour - including poor behaviour. It is quite possible to tolerate a level of disruption in a class and for there still to be learning taking place. Also, just because pupils have stopped throwing things about, it doesn't mean they're now learning well. "It is a very difficult challenge for a teacher to learn this. They will not have had this experience and they will need continuing professional development."

Mr Holley also called for more investment in schools offering extended services - such as breakfast and homework clubs - to help deprived children overcome the handicaps of working at home. "Children are turning up to school, cold hungry and not in the right frame of mind to learn," he said. "There also may be nowhere for them to do homework at home - their parents may be working or a single parent could be pre-occupied with other things."

He also revealed that the agency is increasing the number of "enhancement" courses to boost the number of maths and science teachers in schools. Under this initiative, graduates with an allied degree - in engineering or, say, oceanography - can spend up to six months topping up their skills to become science teachers. They would be paid a bursary of œ225 a week while on the course.

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1 in 5 fail portion of Grade 10 Massachusetts exam

The percentage of sophomores who passed the MCAS exam on the first try this year declined for the first time because thousands of students failed the science section, a new graduation requirement, according to statewide scores released yesterday. Twenty percent of the class of 2010 failed at least one portion of the test, compared with 13 percent last year, when sophomores needed to pass only the math and English portions.

One of the few bright spots in the latest results of the 10-year-old Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam was math, where scores hit a historic high for all grade levels. But even there, state education officials expressed concern that middle school math performance remained stubbornly sluggish. Subpar math scores have largely caused the state to designate two-thirds of the state's middle schools for improvement under a federal accountability law, according to a recent Globe analysis.

Overall, the results of the spring exams showed a persistent achievement gap, with white and Asian students outperforming other students at all grade levels, often by a wide margin, while reading scores for the youngest test-takers declined.

The mixed results prompted many state education advocates to highlight the urgent need to jump-start the state's 15-year-old effort to overhaul education, which they contend has sputtered in recent years. "State policy makers are getting wobbly in their support for education and high standards," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute.

The results could also provide fodder for next year's debate on Governor Deval Patrick's sweeping 10-year plan to better prepare students for college and jobs in the fields that drive the state's economy: biotechnology, engineering, healthcare, and other science-related fields.

State education officials were mostly upbeat about the results during a press conference yesterday morning. They applauded improvement in performance among student groups who historically struggle on the exam, such as black and Latino students, although the officials voiced frustration that the achievement gap remains wide. For instance, in Grade 4 math, Latinos scoring in the top two categories improved by 4 percentage points, to 28 percent. White students improved by 2 percentage points, to 56 percent. The four scoring categories are advanced, proficient, needs improvement, and warning/failing. "Students of color and low-income backgrounds have made more progress than their counterparts . . . but we need to do a better job," said Mitchell Chester, the state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education.

Yesterday the state released only statewide results for the exam, which is given each spring to students in grades 3 through 8 and in Grade 10. Individual district and school scores are scheduled for release next week. The exam, part of the 1993 Education Reform Act, was first given to students in 1998.

Students in the class of 2010, who took the MCAS this past spring as sophomores, will be the first group that must pass the science exam to graduate, adding to a five-year-old graduation requirement for passing the math and English exams. Students have the choice of testing in biology, chemistry, physics, or technology/engineering, and must take at least one of those exams either their freshman or sophomore year.

While the decrease in the percentage of students passing the test disappointed many educators and advocates, many believed that students did much better than expected on the science exam. The 17 percent of sophomores who failed the science exam this year represented a decrease from the 25 percent who flunked last year. "This is a great start," said Jill Norton, executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. "As people become more familiar with the science exam, we'll see scores increase in the coming years."

However, many student groups who typically struggle in school are in jeopardy of not graduating because of the science exam, alarming many educators and advocates. Overall pass rates for English, math, and science show barely half of black and Latino 10th-graders and less than half of students with disabilities passed. Even more staggering, just 28 percent of students who speak limited English passed all three tests. By contrast, 85 percent or more of Asian and white students passed.

"A tremendous amount of work remains," said Lance Hartford, executive director of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation. "I'm increasingly concerned about the gap between inner-city students and what's going on with students in the rest of the state."

Boosting performance, educators and advocates said, may have to start as early as kindergarten to foster a genuine interest in the sciences among students. That, they said, will require devoting more time to the subject in elementary schools and more training for those teachers.

In secondary schools, the state is facing a critical shortage of qualified science teachers. Yesterday, educators and advocates said the state needs to do more to bolster the numbers by creating mentoring programs or paying those teachers more. Science labs, many of which date to the 1960s, also require updating.

In the short term, students who fail the science exam once can file an appeal with the state based on passing grades in a comparable high school course, under emergency rules adopted last week by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Students have to take the math and English exams three times before appealing. Prospects for a successful appeal are slim. The department has granted only 2,800 appeals in the last five years, rejecting roughly 20 percent to 30 percent in recent years. A rejected appeal would force students to take the science test again.

Reading scores for younger students also raised concern. They dropped for grades 3, 4, and 5 after largely stagnating in recent years, prompting state education leaders once again to call for a renewed focus on the lower grades. A student's ability to master reading is widely considered the best gauge of future academic success. Chester said he believes schools are doing a good job in teaching the fundamentals of reading, such as letter and word identification, but more attention needs to be devoted to teaching students to read for meaning.

State Representative Patricia Haddad, a Somerset Democrat who is chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Education, said she found the flatness in the middle school scores in English to be the most worrisome. "The middle school scores are a really good indicator of where kids are heading," she said.

Yesterday Chester and Education Secretary Paul Reville reaffirmed their support for MCAS testing as the governor embarks on a host of initiatives aimed at overhauling the education system. They were attempting to quash speculation within the state's education community that the less stringent appeals process on the science exam was a sign that the agency was softening its stance on MCAS as a graduation requirement. "When you are adding a new requirement, like science," Chester said, "it's hard for me to see how that's backing off standards."

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Shock! Horror! Politician speaks the truth!

It's only part of the truth but we have to be thankful for small mercies. This story is from Australia but could easily be from the USA. The previously unmentionable fact is that blacks are, by and large, educationally hopeless. And Queensland has a lot of blacks. But that is not of course the whole story. The other half is that Left-run educational systems don't educate very well and there is a lot of "postmodernist" nonsense in Qld. schools

STATE Education Minister Rod Welford has blamed indigenous and remote area students for dragging down Queensland's academic performance. In comments to the Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations' annual general meeting, Mr Welford said the state had been "weighed down" in the national literacy and numeracy tests for Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students. Queensland finished second last among the eight states and territories, prompting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the state education system.

Mr Welford yesterday said he was simply making the observation that "statistically there are groups that get lower scores", which affected average scores. "This isn't a reflection on any of those communities," he said. Mr Welford also acknowledged more had to be done to lift indigenous and remote area classroom standards.

However Mr Welford's remarks have sparked an angry backlash from Aboriginal education leaders, who say Education Queensland has badly failed disadvantaged children. "I find it offensive," Indigenous Education Leadership Institute executive director Dr Chris Sarra said. "I acknowledge the lag associated with indigenous performance (but) the system is failing indigenous kids quite dramatically."

Dr Sarra, leader of a successful national program to raise classroom performance through self-belief, said that accepting low standards and poor use of current resources were at the core of problems.

Indigenous scholarship program founder and Yalari chief executive Waverley Stanley said Mr Welford was trying hard but repeated failures called for a new approach. "It's about time we gave the education system a big kick up the bum," he said. "The definition of insanity is doing things over and over and not expecting the same result."

Academics such as Dr Peter Ridd, of Queensland's James Cook University, claim a wider overhaul of education in Queensland is needed. "There is clearly a problem ... you have to fix the syllabus," he said. Dr Ridd said the Queensland Studies Authority - the statutory body responsible for syllabuses and testing - was "woolly eyed" and corrupted by modern teaching philosophies inferior to traditional approaches in other states and countries that get results.

Opposition education spokesman John-Paul Langbroek, the MP for Surfers Paradise, said Mr Welford's remarks were a sign of failure. The Isolated Children's Parents Association of Australia has been campaigning for more teachers and teacher aides in remote area schools for 18 months.

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