Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 February 2012 15:54:48
Yesterday I decided to concentrate on the literature rather than the politics. Today I am going to sort of interweave them.
I have been reading The Half Life of Stars by Louise Wener. It's a story about a woman who discovers herself whilst searching for her brother who has gone missing. As a novel it's a reasonable read which has neither inspired the feeling of having to trudge through the heavy stuff or sheer enjoyment of recent books I have blogged about reading. One of the themes of the book is how and why people might just disappear from the world - how they run away when it all gets too much. It taps in to a daydream I guess we've all had from time to time. This day dream of just escaping it all is something I think Michael Gove's recent comments will further fuel amongst teachers and that is to be the true topic of my post today.
Apparently Michael Gove wants to encourage failiure, (or as I am sure is actually the case reduce the increasing pass rate). The assumption is that pass rates are higher because the exams are getting easier and lack credibility. This is a debate I have commented on every August for some years and I refer you yet again to my most comprehensive post on the subject; the key point which is gatekeeping (ie increased selection of who goes on to A2, or onto AS levels in the first place) is increasing.
10 years ago when I started teaching there was far less care taken in trying to ensure that students got onto the right course. It wasn't people didn't try back then - they did. It is just that in the intervening years the issue of retention aswell as success has become more important. The statistics of both are what you are judged on as a teacher and what you have to justify to everybody...and trust me year on year that justification becomes a more grilling process. Teachers always had to explain how they were going to improve but this has become more pressured and the improvements to be implemented have had to become more measureable year on year. The pass rate is therefore increasing, largely, because teachers don't take risks on students in the way they used to in the past; more and more is being done to improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms and we have learnt that the only option is to teach entirely to exam.
Apparently, as part of the implementation of Gove's New Right vision of education coursework is to end. On one hand this could be seen as good -after all the gender gap between boys and girls is in a large part due to the fact boys do better in coursework than exams. On the otherhand this could be seen as a clear attack on the gains that feminists have helped girls make in education over the last 30 or so years. Whilst I personally have always preferred to teach to exam there are clear reasons why the mix is the right thing for some students - and it does prepare them well for the demands of uni and / or the real world of employment.
What Gove is clearly doing, in this and the downgrading of some voccational subjects, is trying to reassert traditional ideas about meritocracy and role allocation which have been argued to reinforce cultural reproduction and favour the ruling classes against the middle classes. This cannot be a good thing.
I would go on further but I'm not feeling too good today and anyway if you really want to examine the arguments for and against all you need to do is get hold of a AS Sociology textbook - they are all laid out there.