Tag Archives: news

Flotsam: Connecting with schools…

education, Ideas, Inequality in Education, , , , , ,

Flotsam is our occasional series of ideas, from other places, that can have impact on education, learners and can support change.

donorschooseLogotext
Discover more on-line here…

 

 

 

 

 

This U.S. based initiative marries the generosity of donors with the needs of an under-resourced public school system in the United States.

Started by a teacher of history in 2000, the project now has heavyweight supporters and has affected the educational lives of some 18 million plus learners. They have ‘mobilised’ over 2 million ‘citizen donors’ to support the work of the project in the intervening years.

Acting as a sort of Kickstarter for a resource hungry education system, vetted schools and teachers can seek supporters through the project web pages for classroom developmental projects. The DonorsChoose team mediate all donations, purchase of resources and their transfer to the  school.

Classroom projects are available on-line, with the often quite modest sums needed, and the web site flags those classrooms closest to the finish line, with the least days left to donate or who have the highest povery of resources.

This short film shows how the impact is achieved.

We liked the enthusiasm and detailed focus of the work. It allows donors to precisely target their donation. We can see that it can also build long term relationships with a school or classroom community and provide a range of enhancements and additionality to for children in an under-resourced sector. See more here…

With perhaps a slightly different angle of approach, is there space in the UK for this attraction of modest donations to local classrooms in a professional, mediated way to bring additionality to the British classroom?

We think there might be.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Academies? Whither…

education, Education reform, Inequality, Inequality in Education, news, , , ,
Storm clouds Image
The clouds gather…

We list below links to a variety of sources that foster a critique of the current relationship between Ofsted and the Academy Trusts.

The links and narrative samples are not ours, they are courtesy of the Reclaiming Education movement. They are telling and offer a comprehensive landscape view of a system in the throes of developmental crisis.

The first reference begins with a letter from Chris Dunne to the Financial Times. ‘We may regret not having defended our education system…’

We commend the suite in entirety to our readers. Please share this article with colleagues.

  • Chris Dunne’s letter, “We will come to regret not having defended our education system”,  in the Financial Times can be seen here
  • Henry Stewart’s piece looking at the progress of academies against maintained schools can be read here.
  • Ofsted condemns Academy Trusts:  The Government has announced that it plans to force all schools to become academies.  The major problem is going to be who will run these schools, given that Ofsted has some major criticisms of at least 8 of the large academy trusts.
  • Ofsted Inspections of Academy TrustsOfsted has carried out focused inspections of academies within 9 multi academy trusts.  Significantly, only one, the last and smallest one, is positive.  The full reports can be found on the Government website here.   A map of where the academies are can be found here.
  •  CfBT:  11 primary/8 Secondary“CfBT took on too many academies too quickly. The trust did not have a clear rationale for the selection of schools, a strategy for creating geographical clusters or a plan to meet academies’ different needs. As a result, standards are too low. The trust relied heavily on external consultants but did not ensure their accountability in securing rapid and secure improvement. Headteachers were unable to provide each other with the much needed mutual support or share available expertise. Current CST leaders openly acknowledge these errors.”  Full report
  • Academies Enterprise Trust:  32 primary/30 secondary/5 special”After operating for nearly eight years, the Trust is failing too many pupils. Almost 40% of the pupils attend AET primary academies that do not provide a good standard of education. It is even worse in secondary, where 47% of pupils attend academies that are less than good……
    “Children from poor backgrounds do particularly badly in this Trust. The attainment and progress of disadvantaged pupils, in both the primary and secondary academies, still lags behind that of other pupils, and gaps in performance are not narrowing quickly enough……
    “The outcomes of the focused inspections failed to demonstrate that the Trust is consistently improving its academies.  Full report
  • Collaborative Academies Trust: 9 schools“Collaborative Academies Trust was set up in 2012 by EdisonLearning ……
    ………Too many academies have not improved since joining the trust. Of the five academies that have had a full inspection since joining the trust, only one has improved its inspection grade compared with its predecessor school. Two have remained the same and two have declined. This means that, at the time of the focused inspection, there were not yet any good or outstanding academies in the trust. “  Full report
  • E-Act (formerly Edutrust): 23 academies (was more)“…Nevertheless, the quality of provision for too many pupils in E-ACT academies is not good enough.
    ……Standards in the secondary academies are too low. Previous interventions by the Trust to raise attainment and accelerate progress have not had enough impact and any improvements have been slow.
    ….Pupils from poor backgrounds do not do well enough. These pupils make less progress than other pupils nationally. This is an area of serious concern. “  Full report
  • Kemnal Academies Trust: 15 secondary/26 primary“Less than half of your academies were good or better and there are no longer any outstanding academies in your chain. ………

    .. an overwhelming proportion of pupils attending one of the academies inspected are not receiving a good education. “  Full report

  • Oasis Community Learning Trust: 50? Schools – DfE list and Oasis website appear to disagree.The academy trust has grown rapidly, taking on 30 new academies in the last three years …
    Across the trust, some groups of pupils do not achieve well. Disadvantaged pupils, particularly boys, make significantly less progress than their peers nationally………. there is no evidence of an overall strategy or plan that focuses on these particular issues.  Full report
  • School Partnership Trust:  41 schools“The impact of the Trust’s work in bringing about improvement where it is most needed has been too slow. Where standards have been intractably low for some time, the Trust is not driving significant, sustained improvement. …

    ……The standard of education provided by the Trust is not good enough in around 40% of its academies inspected so far. “ Full report

  • The Education Fellowship: 12 schools“There is no clear record of improvement in the trust’s academies and standards across the trust are unacceptably variable. In around three quarters of the academies, standards are poor.
    Standards declined in five of the eight primary academies in 2014. In the majority of the trust’s 12 academies, the gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their better off peers, both within the academies and compared with pupils nationally, remains unacceptably wide.”  Full Report
  • Wakefield City Academies Trust – the only positive one!“Two years into its development, WCAT is making a positive difference to the quality of provision and outcomes for pupils within its academies. “ Full report

You can locate Reclaiming Education here…

Recliaming Education Logotype image
Discover more on-line here…

 

 

 

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Digital Dividend 2016 from the World Bank

education, Education reform, Ideas, Inequality in Education, Research, , , , , ,

Digital Dividends is the 2016 World Bank development report assessing the state of digital access, utility and relevance across the world.

”We find ourselves in the midst of the greatest information and communications revolution in human history. More than 40 percent of the world’s population has access to the internet, with new users coming online every day. Among the poorest 20 percent of households, nearly 7 out of 10 have a mobile phone. The poorest households are more likely to have access to mobile phones than to toilets or clean water”. Source: World Bank, Digital Dividend 2016.

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Get your copy here…(pdf)

The World Bank report is not solely dedicated to education, although beginning on page 258, a series of case studies and assessments take the temperature of digital content and technological availability in the educative orbit.

The news is not all good. Despite advances in distribution and utility, the report argues that lack of access to apprpriate technology remains one of the stumbling blocks of digital emancipation. Within the context of the whole report the old observation is still true, even in 2016. No technology, no equality, or rather no parity of expectation.

”If you compared our world today with the world one hundred years ago, you would encounter amazing advances in science, commerce, health care, transportation, and other areas. But if you were to compare the classroom of a hundred years ago with an average classroom today, you would recognise it immediately: students lined up in rows, paper and pencil in hand; a teacher at the blackboard jotting down facts; students furiously copying all that is written and said, expecting to memorise the facts and spit them out on an exam”. Source: Robert Hawkins (2002), World Bank, Digital Dividend 2016.

Relevant here is the World Bank general observation that despite mushrooming relative growth in device numbers, it is the lack of change, sophistication and learning in the ‘analogue’ institutions of countries in transition, government and civil institutions and, within our field of vision as a project, schools and universities that hampers effective capitalisation of the ‘digital dividend’.

Given that lack of technology is the absolute disenfranchisement in the digital age, the World Bank report offers some interesting insights and recommendations for the skills sector, of whatever shade.

It looks at and notes improvement in uptake of MOOCs (Massive Open On-line Courses) and at the web functionality of services like The Khan Academy, The report notes that even where the Khan toolkit has been applied in the classroom, it is as a supportive, supplementary element to the learning.

Taking a view of the One Laptop per Child initiatives around the globe, the report notes that despite this comprehensive and energetic programme of hardware distribution, the best recorded learning outcomes are arrived at where the laptops are accompanied by instructional support and traditional teaching skills.

This comprehensive and detailed report is not a rant by internet zealots, (…you can find anything on the internet now!). Including enlightenment we suppose. Nor is it a damning case study of the failure of digital access to change the expectations and skills of the digitally connected.

Rather, by 2016, it is understood that pedagogy and the laptop processor have yet to find their final destiny in this joint journey of discovery.

We commend this World Bank report to our readers.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

The Future of Education:
an event report…

Inequlaity in Education, news, reform, Research, , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Great Room at The RSA was full. Like a Calima, drawn towards the depression that is education in England, conversation and debate swept across the room.

We had assembled to hear Profesor Danny Dorling and Professor Diane Reay give their assessments of English education today, and to provide us with both data and questions of challenge in our collective pilgrimage for reform.

The short films below give you a flavour of our event and the messages delivered by our speakers…

youtubeButton  Professor Danny Dorling, Oct. 5th 2015

youtubeButton  Professor Diane Reay, Oct. 5th 2015

Professor Dorling challenged his audience to imagine an education system without so much testing. His exposition included illustrations of how we value memory above problem solving and experimentation. He was delighted to see in the audience, after general questioning, that so many of us had achieved ‘A’ grades. A triumph of conformity, alas, in the Dorling assessment. The whole treatise bringing into doubt the formula that a more expensive education is a more privileged education.

Professor Reay used her allotted time to deliver a statistical analysis of the inequalities in education in our country. Highlighting the fact that in the private sector, for example, spend per pupil is 2.5 times higher than in the state sector. She also highlighted the deficiencies in access to the broad and balanced curriculum which children and young people need, along with a strong section in her presentation, on happiness and wellbeing. Often disregarded, she argued, in any assessment of educational utlilty or achievement.

Whether for learners or teaching staff, levels of distress and dissatisfaction have never been higher, Professor Reay argued. Much was also made of the increasingly low level of professional autonomy afforded teachers in England now.

This was a well attended IETT event, with very high quality engagement and telling analysis from our speakers. This prompted some very lively discussion across the room, as well as new networking and professional acquaintance for many visitors to our conference. Ed.

interneticon2 (copy)  You can see more IETT events on our Conference and Events page here.

interneticon2 (copy)  You can also find more films on this topic on our The Debate – filmed page here.

interneticon2 (copy)Event films by Dan Keeble – Video Editor / Producer / DP     http://dankeeble.com/

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Free money for all –
A basic human right?

Economics, education, Education reform, Ideas, Inequality, Inequality in Education, reform, Universal Basic Income, , , , , , , ,

In the video below, Rutger Bregman as part of a TEDx Maastricht talk, informs us of the validity of a single idea that links Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman.

Bregman argues for the universal dispersion of the basic income, as a human right. His opening argument is based upon the notion of standing on the shoulders of giants. ‘Our forefathers have worked so hard to achieve our level of propserity, we should now be able to give everyone a share of that prosperity…’

He argues that in communities where basic income experiments have been attempted, the outcome can be measured in better educational achievement, lower truancy rates, and higher economic growth. Developing an active, participatory counter to inequality.

In a disenfranchised community, he argues, a basic income frees human capacity…it does not diminish it or whither it out of laziness or lack of engagement in societal progress.

Nixon, in the 1970’s nearly passed legislation that engendered the basic income in the US, arguably at the cost of only 25 per cent of the US Defense Budget. A development now long forgotten in US economic thinking.

The London charitable experiment, cited in the film, to give long term homeless men free money, as an alternative to counselling, police monitoring and other forms of ‘traditional’ support also resulted in a variety of sustainable self help outcomes that was, by conventional critiques of ‘the benefit society’, surprising and enduring.

Bregman argues against the three most often made arguments for a universal ‘citizen wage’. It’s too expensive, all people will stop working and it will never happen, politically. The film highlights both optimism, human nature and the individuals need to make a contribution to society as counters to these narrow objections.

  • The Green Party have argued for the universal wage in their UK manifesto at the last election. Is this an idea that can stand a return to wider national focus?
  • Might this economic reform be the very bedrock of enduring and effective educational reform too?
  • Might the introduction of a universal, non-means tested income prevent the collapse of the middle -class through the unending pressure of inequality?

You can visit the web site http://basic-income.org/ and cast a vote for the universal basic income.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Injustice – why social inequality still persists?

Education reform, Ideas, Inequality, Inequality in Education, news, Research, , , , , , ,

Danny Dorling has a new edition of Injustice – Why social inequality still persists available. You can discover this and more of Danny’s work on the pages of PolicyPress at the University of Bristol here.

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More here…

‘This fully rewritten and updated edition revisits Dorling’s claim that Beveridge’s five social evils are being replaced by five new tenets of injustice: elitism is efficient; exclusion is necessary; prejudice is natural; greed is good and despair is inevitable. By showing these beliefs are unfounded, Dorling offers hope of a more equal society’.

About the author:

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. He is  Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers.

He helped create the website www.worldmapper.org which shows who has most and least in the world, working with Mark Newman,  Anna Barford, Ben Wheeler, John Pritchard, Graham Allsopp and Benjamin Hennig.

Danny and his work can be discovered on his own web pages here.

Professor Dorling was a speaker at our recent RSA conference, The Future of Education in England. Watch this space for an event review and films of our speakers and their contribution to a lively debate and thoughtful deliberation on educational reform.

Remember to visit our Monographia page to see interesting papers and reports which are attuned to our movements aims. Join the debate.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Flotsam series: XQ Super School – school models for the new century…

education, Education reform, Ideas, news, reform, Research, , , , , , ,

superschoolLogoCreating a fifty million dollar fund, engaging all communities of interest in high school education in the U.S. and delivering a new paradigm in governance, delivery, outcome and expectation.

No small task?

XQ, the Super School Project is an open challenge to do just that. Led by the XQ Institute, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the group are intent on the widest possible engagement.

‘From our inception, we realised this will be a many-to-many effort—involving many talented experts at the core of the Institute collaborating with many talented participants in the movement itself…from deep understanding about the science of learning to design thinking skills, from fueling the movement to building compelling digital tools that spark imagination’.

What the XQ Super School project can do is offer some simple and effective road maps and sound structural examples for delivery of projects like IETT.

We are just beginning our journey of levelling inequality in education in the UK, but the steps needed to make challenge and change effective can, arguably, be drawn from models in other educational locations and cultures.

Thus, with XQ, there  are four key steps to their development agenda/competition…

Team Up – ‘Assemble your team and head off into the unknown’. With an open mind and focus on the proposed project outcomes, then a wide variety of voices can be heard and included in the work.

Discover – ‘Start by understanding young people’. A wonderful, people first, philosophy. Deploying knowledge, research and experience that so often gets buried in the political agenda or mainstream educational currency.

Design  ‘…take what you’ve learned and use it to come up with audacious, unconventional, unconstrained ideas…’. Made us feel positively dizzy in the IETT office today!

Develop – ‘Map out a formidable plan for turning your…idea into reality’. From human capital, to governance, to implementation capacity – a good plan is sound thinking for any project or agenda.

interneticon2 (copy)You can discover more about XQ The Super School Project here.

(Flotsam is the IETT occasional series on educational change ideas promulgated in other places).

You can subscribe to these IETT articles by email at the top of every page on our site. You can send us a reflection here on our Contact Us page too.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

The Economics of Inequality

Economics, Ideas, Inequality, insight, news, Research, , , , ,

As we travel the country taking our campaign forward we often see a great book, one quarter read, abandoned on the coffee table. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Trans. Arthur Goldhammer).

A master work of economic analysis, which retuns Marxian thought to the high table of discourse, we would argue, but which the average reader might fail to pursue to the end, due to its length and complexity.

pikettyEconomicsofInequalitycoverPic2 (copy)
Piketty’s paper…

Piketty’s framing propositions were developed, it can be argued, in an an earlier paper authored with Emmanuel Saez, in 1995. The Economics of Inequality is a much shorter work than his later magnum opus. (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 8467. U.S., September 2001)

Recently published as a ‘new’ book by Harvard University Press, The Economics of Inequality (Amazon.co.uk) at 160 pages or so, is a much more digestible read than Capital. It has some newly updated content and tables, although the data used to deliver argument in this new work stops in the mid-nineties of course. (Harvard University Press; July 2015)

View, print or download a copy of the original paper.

In a recent New York Times book review, Inequality as it was viewed in the 90’s, the review article argues that Piketty has achieved something of a volte-face on the 1%, and their limiting effect on the economic distribution of wealth and resources.

…the most important contribution of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was precisely its suggestion that since then a rising share of after-tax profits in national income has indeed set us on the path back to a rentier society, in which the rich live off inherited wealth’.

The article expounds further that Piketty’s Capital ‘…made a disturbing case that we are well on the way to re-establishing “patrimonial capitalism,” a society dominated by oligarchs who inherit their wealth’.

The weakness in this earlier paper, The Economics of Inequality, the reviewer argues, is that Piketty declares, in his original research with Saez, that ”…progressive taxation seems to have prevented a return to 19th-century rentier society”. We disagree. This shorter paper is still a key piece of analysis on an emerging understanding of inequality even with an anti-rentier argument, with all its concomitant impact on economics, education, property and law.

A better critique, we would argue, is that Piketty has spent another two decades researching and thinking about his core propositions and has tempered his analytical ‘oratory’ accordingly with the publication of Capital.

Do open or download Piketty’s original paper from this page and see if you agree. The paper has some interesting historical analysis on the rise of I.T. professions and their effect on wages. (Even though contemporary analysis would now hold that this view is a ‘paperless office’ proposition, which technology also failed to achieve -Ed ).

interneticon2 (copy)Useful links:  An on-line version of the NYT Book Review here.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Flotsam: Educational ideas from other places…

education, Education reform, Ideas, Inequality in Education, news, , ,

Welcome to Flotsam, our new occasional series of ideas, thoughts and web assets, on educational change and innovation. They reach us on the tide from other places.

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Flotsam – an occasional series

This, the first in our series, looks at Bright – What’s New in Education?

As might be expected from a resource that is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the focus of the publication is Americo-centric, but the debate, ideas promulgated and practice argued for in the pages of this Medium published, independent journal are sound regardless of geography.

interneticon2 (copy)You can find the latest stories on Bright here.

Below is a current story from Bright, which we hope will stimulate a conversation, recharge a jaded educational battery or fire a new project. ( All of which could be the basis of a new Turning the Tide group perhaps? – Ed. )

Audrey Watters, who describes herself as an ‘…education writer, recovering academic and serial droput‘, writes in her article about the potential of giving every learner their own domain on the internet.

In The Web We Need to Give Students Audrey argues for the creation of a digital domain for life, for every student. A web presence for the individual, initially fostered and managed by the student’s school, which eventually becomes the individual’s ‘digital domain’ in adulthood.

‘Education technology — and more broadly, the culture of education — does a terrible job with this sort of portability and interoperability’.

In her article Watters recognises that much of current educational provision of a digital life is destroyed when a learner moves through their transitions. Local Authorities and schools are not in the digital archive business, one might argue. There is a fracture in a student’s e-life whenever their portfolios, web creations or learning records are deleted as they begin another part of their life journey.

Watters also has some interesting things to say about privacy and data ownership, despite an ever growing retention of learner data by big private, corporate players in education. The debate with the student is, she argues, often about appropriateness and fear of the web, not necessarily about their enduring creativity, or indeed what the student thinks of their own burgeoning intellectual property.

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See the Watters debate on domain ownership here…

Provocative and timely, we commend the Watters article to our readers.

See more here.

Beach image: Sue Martin FRSA

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference

Promoting ideas
– changing education

Education reform, Inequality in Education, insight, news, Research, , ,

Welcome to our journal pages, The Tide.

Here you will be able to find news and updates about our progress as a project, along with announcements about new groups and communities of interest that we can inspire in the English regions.

teachinggroupIcon3-copy  You can also submit reviews, papers and articles for our journal page at any time.  We will publish with full attribution and circulate the details to our subscribers by email and Twitter, of course.

emailicon2 (copy)  Our editorial email address is office (at) inequalityineducation.org

If you are interested in the debate about education, concerned about the direction of travel or just want to make a contribution to our movement – this is the page for you.

We are on a journey of discovery and change together, happy to have you along.

Turning the tide - making a difference
Turning the tide – making a difference