You know what Tottenham are like? They're like some okay-looking guy who gets his first really pretty girlfriend, and then thinks that because he qualifies for pretty girls now, his own girl ain't pretty enough for him.
Yeah, Ramos seems shit hot, but this is being done for all the wrong reasons, and in the worst possible way.
If a straw man argument is when someone invents an easily tackled enemy that isn't actually there, what do you call it when someone completely ignores highly visible evidence that refutes their thesis? An 'ostrich man' argument?
Here's some dimwit in the Guardian writing a moany piece about how the Bourne Ultimatum has no strong characters, while almost completing ignoring Pamela Landy.
I mean, she actually asks the question 'why can't women in action movies ever do anything useful?' I won't spoil the film, but let it hereby be noted that 'doing something useful' pretty much sums up the Pam Landy character.
A well written article on the role of environment, architecture and work in shaping people's bodies. Nothing new here, but nicely put. However, the following assertion is overstated:
In forgetting to think about how our environment shapes us, it becomes easy to think that our food is made for us. The difficult truth is that, increasingly, capitalism makes us for our food.
No, capitalism does not 'make us for our food'. But it would be very fair to say that our food is not made for us, it is made for our lifestyles (and those are to a large degree made by capitalism).
Today's schmuck of the day club inductee is medical student Alex Thomas, who whines
The constant analysis of GPs' salaries is really starting to irritate me. If the public think it is such an easy ride being a GP, why aren't there more of them applying for the job themselves?
[...]
in addition to A grades in chemistry and biology, applicants may have to be able to discuss Proust or be almost fluent in Spanish or be able to quote extensively from Chaucer, in the original Middle English.
Does this sound easy so far?
Erm, do you sound like a twat so far, Mr Proust Discusser?
So irksome did I find Mr Thomas that I: a) launched the Schmuck of the day club; B) started blogging again; and C) overcame my usual lethargy and wrote a letter to the (Guardian) editor. Well done, Alex - just the cure! Here's that letter:
Let’s hope that medical student Alex Thomas ( Fancy becoming another one of those overpaid GPs?, 17 August) is better at reading patients’ symptoms than he is at plain old reading. In complaining that the public believes that GPs are overpaid and that their job is easy, he is erecting a straw man: the vast majority of the public don’t think being a GP is easy. We do, however, think they are getting a jammy deal. Just because a job is hard and demands great commitment doesn’t mean it should command a six-figure salary, particularly when nurses, whose job is at least as hard as a GPs, are so poorly remunerated.
New health advice:
The new guidelines say:
· 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day is still the minimum, but vigorous as opposed to moderate activity should be "explicitly" recommended
· Combining days of moderate exercise with other days of vigorous exercise is better for you
· Moderate exercise should be in addition to daily activities such as casual walking, shopping or taking out the rubbish
· People should do two weight-training sessions a week
I would imagine that this would help dissuade many people from bothering to do even moderate exercise, since they'll reason that it's not enough.
It'd be fun to do a PhD comparing the strengths and weaknesses of how America educates disaffected teens with how England does it.
Practice exam question: Explain why policy makers should invest more time in understanding processes internal to the family.
Hmm, can start here with Okin's notion of justice, and her contention that underlying all the inequalites specifically affecting women is the unequal distribution of unpaid labour in teh household. And Hobson's contention that the family is a site of great inequality, of a sort which doesn't mirror societal inequality. They should invest more time in understanding it because we have limited understanding of it - i'll discuss the theories of household bargaining that we have. But mainly they should invest more time in understanding it because, as feminist theorists observe, social policy is both shaped by and shaping of what goes on within the so-called black box of the family. And social policy understanding has always been skewed towards the public sphere, but as Hobson argues, the policy divide between public and private is arbitrary, ideological, and not gender neutral. Because women take on more of the caring duties within the family and tend to have weaker bargaining positions economically, policy which does not seek to peer into the black box is policy that tacitly supports, approves of and furthers the current gender gap.
Continue reading "Practice exam question: Inside the black box of the family" »
Practice question: "In the field of social policy, mainstream theories would be more appropriately referred to as malestream theories." Discuss.
Ok, how to address this one? First of all, I don't know a lot about mainstream theories. I know a fair amount about EA, and I know that Willensky's was based on social expenditure. And I know that Marshall was the mac daddy of social citizenship, and that in general social citizenship is defined as one's ability to participate fully in the activities of society. What I could say is that I'll argue that mainstream theories have been said to be malestream because they were far more concerned with the welfare of men than with women. This concern expressed itself through a concentration on class and an ignorance of the role of gender in personal welfare, as well as an implicit assumption that women's primary role was as carer rather than provider.
Continue reading "Practice exam question: "Malestream" theories" »
In what ways can policies that seek to address the distribution of unpaid and caring work be seen as an attempt to solve Wollstonecraft's dilemma by requiring both women and men to be "citizen workers"?
Ok, I'm a bit shaky on this material right now, but the purpose of this practice question is to get me up to speed with the key concepts and contributors. So here goes a kitchen skink approach, which I'l clean up later.
Continue reading "Practice exam question: citizenship, gender, and Wollstonecraft's dilemma" »
UPDATE: While my criticism of Blythman's article focused on the idiocy of her belief that public health policy can be based on middle class behaviour and assumptions, the article also deserved a right royal bollocking for its dodgy use of research. Adopting the faux objectivity characteristic of so much of the American press, it pretended to present two sides of the story by: A) offering accepted scientific evidence, then B) providing oppositional critiques of the mainstream science. See the trick here? It presents two sides of teh argument, but only lets one side critique the other. Thankfully, wiser men than me have called her on it. The best bit is the second letter, which points out that one of her key critics of putting folic acid in bread runs an online health food shop that sells - you guessed it - folic acid. Joanna, you got played.
This is one of the most egregious, up its own ass articles I've ever read. Joanna Blythman's normally pretty good, but in this piece she seems to be willfully myopic about the ways that socio-economic realities and the diets of the poor. Eg, she quotes, approvingly, this guy:
"It is noticeable that the FSA isn't proposing adding it to wholemeal bread because it already contains it. Why doesn't the FSA just tell people to eat more wholemeal bread?"
Um, because that wouldn't work, especially not with the mums who need this. (Hint: they don't have the same approach to food as you.)
Ok, that's one stupid question answered; how about another one?
The other main objection is that fortification is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The estimate is that adding folic acid to bread will save 120 babies in the UK every year from spina bifida, but for every baby saved, half a million people, male and female, will have to take the added folic acid. "Why not target potential young mothers rather than mass-supplementing the population at large ?" asks Holford.
Hey, toughie! How about 'Because the young mothers who need this don't respond to government messages on health and diet?' You do; they don't - wishing ain't gonna change that. Or maybe the poor all quit smoking when I wasn't looking.
Pathetic.
Via Ezra Klein, here's an american example of the genre, in which well-off journalists who work from home bash those who don't make the time to cook proper meals after a 10-hour day.
The very good Mike Baker of the BBC writes:
As Blair departs, many will hope for an end to "initiative-itis" and policy overload. No more targets. No more bully-pulpit politics. No more "modernising" of the comprehensives. But they will be disappointed. Gordon Brown is just as fond of targets. He will insist on a something-for-something return for every extra pound that goes to education.
In a recent interview, he told me education would be "my passion ... my priority". The big question for Brown is: why, after so much more investment, do teachers, lecturers and parents still feel dissatisfied?
I think Julian Le Grand's "knights and knaves" work answers that final question.
At least once a week now, the Guardian has a column bemoaning the cruelty and arrogance of atheists, and the dire lot of the religious in this country. For example, Madeline Bunting recently railed against outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins.
Don't get me wrong, I think Dawkins is a bore. But when they criticism him and his anti-religion ilk, Bunting and the burgeoning religious crew writing inthe Guardian appear to operate under the fallacy that it's only the anti-religious lot who are attempting to impose their values, and that religion is a poor bullied weakling. Tell that to the gays, Madeline (famous apologist for homophobic Muslim clerics). And tell that to the 17-year-old girl in Ireland who the religious crew is trying to force to stay in Ireland and bring her baby to term, rather than go to England for a termination, even though the baby has no head, and is guaranteed to die within three days of birth. And tell it, Madeline, to the UK women unfortunate enough to have as a doctor one of the 40% of GPs who say they would refuse to refer a woman on for an abortion, on 'moral grounds'.
Religion has been imposing itself on the rest of us for thousands and thousands of years. Just because in a relatively enlightened country such as the UK it has less power to do so than before, doesn't mean it still isn't doing it all the time, and still trying to do it even more. Just because you take this for granted, Maddy, doesn't mean it isnt' happening. So enough with this silly notion that religion is the victim because a handful of verbal atheists are giving it a heckling. It's been bullying us for years, and isn't going to stop until we force it to.
Earlier today I posted a John Quiggin bit to delicious - I thought it was a great piece of political analysis. Yglesias agrees:
John Quiggen makes an important point. An awful lot of the recent changes in American history can be understood as efforts to graft a proper two-party dynamic onto a country that thanks to both an unusual institutional set-up and the legacy of the Civil War and Jim Crow didn't really have one. The rise of the "New Right" essentially turned the GOP into one half of a two-party system, at which point it became devastatingly effective because the opposition was still behaving like one half of the old, more fluid system. Much recent progressive activism has centered around trying to turn the Democrats into "the other party" of a two-party system.
Download patience_capital_and_the_demise_of_the_aristocracy.pdf
I'm not sure I buy the premise of the above paper on 'Patience capital and the demise of the aristocracy', but it's an interesting one, and some of the arguments are interesting. For instance, there's a good point about the fact that urban artisans had a life characterised by a steep income slope (making nothing as an apprentice, pretty little as a journeyman, and hopefully a good deal more as a master) that encouraged long-term planning and financial discipline; this in contrast to those (both poor and rich) in rural areas, for whom the land was worth basically the same when they were 20 as when they were 60. For the latter, lifetime income had more of a tendency to be flat from year to year; thus notions of investment in the future and the accumulation of capital would have been less salient - or so goes the theory. (See bottom of page for data on the landed aristocracy's attitude to business.)
Most interesting for my studies, though, is the notion of patience capital (think the Marshmallow Test, and the ways in which parents strive to teach their children patience and other key non-cognitive skills) is an interesting one.
It may be particularly related to positive outcomes for low-income children who attend decent daycare programmes, argue some. Remember, these kids - eg in the Abecedarian or Perry High Scope project - tend not to show greater cognitive development than their peers over time, but they do show better outcomes. Here's a snippet:
Heckman (2000)
and Heckman and Krueger (2003) review the evidence from a large number of
programs targeting disadvantaged children through family development sup-
port. They show that most programs were successful in permanently raising the
treated children’s non-cognitive skills, turning them more motivated to learn,
less likely to engage in crime, and altogether more future-oriented than children
of non-treated families. On the other hand, the programs were less successful in
raising cognitive skills as measured by IQ test scores.3 The most effective pro-
grams where those targeted to children at a young age, although positive effects
are also documented for programs targeting adolescents. These studies show
how important family transmission is in this particular form of human capital
accumulation, of which the notion of patience discussed in this paper is a com-
ponent. Similar conclusions are reached by a number of studies in child develop-
ment psychology (see e.g., Goleman 1995, Shonkoff and Philips 2000 and Taylor,
McGue, and Iacono 2000). Coleman and Hoffer (1983) argue that the emphasis
on patience and self-discipline is the key of the effectiveness of Catholic schools
in the US. [p 8]
There's also an argument in there that would be useful for understanding cultural transmission, eg through engaging in Lareau-ish analysis of parenting styles:
In our model, in contrast, parents invest in their children’s patience. In this re-
spect, our paper is related to the growing literature on cultural transmission (e.g.,
Bisin and Verdier 2000 and 2001, Hauk and Saez-Marti 2002, Saez-Marti and
Zenou 2004).5 In this literature, parents evaluate their children’s life prospects
from the standpoint of their own preferences, and actively try to manipulate chil-
dren’s preference to induce choices that parents regard as desirable. As these
papers, we argue that economic incentives are crucial in determining the effort
parents exert in affecting their children’s preferences. [p 10]
OK, up above I promised data on the landed aristocracy's attitudes to business. (it's really worth having a look at the table in the pdf; for some reason I can't seem to paste it into this post.)
Table 2 reports the professional choice of Cambridge graduates during
the period 1750–1899. The vast majority of students at Cambridge during this pe-
riod were sons of members of the landowning class, so their professional choices
(other than landowning) give us a good idea of which professions younger sons
entered. Strikingly, until 1850, not a single graduate got involved in banking or
business (widely defined as any “profit-oriented activity”), and even after 1850
the percentage remains surprisingly low.
A Kenan Malik-led talk on childcare in the early years.
Lovely guide on how to set up a regularly updating online collection of different types of feeds, aggregating info in fields you're interested in. I'll definitely do something like this for adult ed.
UPDATE: Harry Brighouse, Mike Baker and Fiona Millar all have their say. All good stuff. Here's an excerpt from CT comments:
Essentially most of the selection criteria remain the same, and selection is still limited to those in catchment, with the single change that the factor ‘closeness-to-school’ has been replaced by ‘random selection’ (still within catchment, and still balanced against other factors such as siblings’ school location, exceptional circumstances etc).
I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with this change, because ‘closeness-to-school’ is a factor that is by definition manipulable by parents, and more importantly, more easily manipulable by wealthier parents. A defensible choice agenda has to pay SOME attention to the ease and difficulty with which people can make the relevant choices, otherwise the resulting distribution looks likely be inegalitarian, right?
Now, on to my own thoughts. My first one is that I'm very much in favour of school lotteries, as it'll cut down on people like Ladyfriend and I from moving to where the good schools are, and will force the middle class to use voice to improve the schools they're stuck with rather than exit to congregate at the best state schools. As for the fear that the middle class will abandon state schools, I ain't buying. Only 7% of the school population attend independent schools, and they are generally very expensive - too expensive for most middle class parents. Tony Blair and his gang forget this - they seem to assume that most of the middle class is in a similar income bracket as themselves (a mistake also made by the odious Nick Cohen in his incessant rants about how hard life is for couples who earn 'only' 100k between them.) Here in the real world, most of the middle class can afford the partial exit of moving to where the best school are, but not the full exit of leaving the state school system entirely. And as for the idea that so long as the middle class's kids are in state schools, everything's hunky dory: bollocks! When some state schools are full of middle class kids and other state schools only a few miles away are full of low income kids, it's a de facto indepent private school system, but at taxpayer expense.
However, the beeb has an article saying that there's research arguing that lotteries don't actually level the playing field. The article is quoted below, but as far as I can tell, it says very little about the issue at hand. Perhaps the Beeb was just looking for something, anything, and thought this was enough?
Dr Jarvis said: "Our research suggests that lotteries of over-subscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds - greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents."
[....]She and Dr Alvanides looked at 50 primary schools in Newcastle and selected two for intensive study, one in an affluent part of the city, the other in a deprived area.
They worked closely with 10 families from one school and eight from the other.
All but two of the 18 had been allocated a place at their "first choice" school.
None of the poorer families owned a car and walked their children to school, whereas most of the affluent families had two cars and drove there.
When preparing their applications almost all the poorer families had visited just one school, their priority being a "happy child". They paid little heed to future secondary school transfers.
The better-off families had visited two or more, some going to five or more - including private schools - in their search for a "good school". They spent a lot on after-school activities.
The researchers believe they have uncovered significant lessons, most importantly on "the false view that policy makers have of the way parents in different walks of life make choices (assuming they have choices to make) about their children's education".
What does it mean to be so rich that it's almost literally impossible to spend your wealth faster than the interest accrues on it? Via Ezra:
They're just not like you and me -- they're so very much richer:
Mr. Ellison’s net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16 billion and a 10 percent rate of return, Mr. Ellison would need to spend more than $30 million a week simply to keep from accumulating more money than he already has, to say nothing of trying to spend down the $16 billion itself.
He spent something like $100 million on his Japanese-style mansion in Woodside, Calif., making it among the more expensive private residences ever built. But that is only about three weeks worth of the interest he earns on his wealth. And a house doesn’t actually spend down his net worth because it is an asset that can be resold. At least part of the $100 million is just a different way of saving.
Mr. Ellison would have to spend that $30 million a week — $183,000 an hour — on things that can’t be resold, like parties or meals, just to avoid increasing his wealth.
This article has some fairly shocking information. For instance, and here I quote Ezra quoting the author:
"only 4 percent of the richest Americans said that providing an inheritance ranked in their top five reasons for saving." Weirder yet, "the data shows that elderly super-rich people who do not have children save just as much as the ones who do."
So why do the super-rich hoard their wealth? Status, power and greed, basically.
Some economists have dived into the question, and their hypotheses basically boil down to greed. "[The superrich] get something different from having money — clout, power, the ability to dominate an industry. Or perhaps these are just competitive people who care about their position compared with other people on the list." Maybe so. Or maybe this is just humankind's innate loss aversion -- our tendency to irrationally avoid loss even more than we court gain -- at work.
Can you imagine how much good all that money could do? And how much better off countries would be if people with this much money didn't spend so much time fighting for lower taxes?
Harry Brighouse links to a series of fab-sounding papers on gender egalitarianism. Authors include Gornick and Meyers, Crompton, and plenty of others. The papers can be found here. Just so you I can see what I'd be missing by not clicking through, I've pasted a list of them below, though the links don't seem to work down there. Damn t'internets! Bring back the slateboard!
And they're good enough for today's kids, too. Hi-tech 'educational' toys offer nothing that parental interaction doesn't, according to research.
A government-funded study examining the role of technology in the lives of three- and four-year-old children and their families found that the hi-tech devices - one of the fastest growing sectors of the toy market, aimed at infants as young as nine months - are no more effective than traditional ways of introducing basic literacy and number skills.
Toy laptops and mobile phones were of greater value to young children as an aid to imaginative play such as pretending to make phone calls than in teaching specific skills, researchers at the University of Stirling concluded after tracking families for 15 months.
Youngsters also gained an understanding of the social role of technology simply by watching their parents use computers, digital cameras and mobile phones for work and leisure - far outstripping the benefits of using computers for unrealistic exercises and games while at nursery.
[....]
Lydia Plowman, professor of education at Stirling University, said parents interviewed experienced "a lot of anxiety" about the role of new technology, and felt under pressure from manufacturers to buy educational electronic toys such as Leappads and games consoles.
Professor Plowman, announcing her research yesterday at a conference, Happy Families?, hosted by the Family and Parenting Institute, said such toys were neither harmful nor "particularly beneficial".
She said: "I don't think there is any problem about children having these toys at home, but in terms of basic literacy and number skills I don't think they are more efficient than the more traditional approaches."
Mark Kleiman discusses the role of teacher unions in determining the quality of schools (research verditc: somewhat helpful). The unfoggedetariat discusses.
horrible ghastly beasties, and our only solace is to tell them cruel lies. As the commments section explains.
Actually, beyond the first handful of comments, that section is very poor by unfogged standards - a bunch of childless people commenting knowledgably on how to be a good parent.
Just as everyone who can read the written word thinks they know how to write, everyone who was once a child thinks they know how to parent.
Uni classes being offered free over the internets. And in Ezra's comments, a great phrase: 'the sheepskin effect', ie the difference in earnings between someone who is just shy of a degree and someone who has the piece of paper.
Po Bronson's blog looks very interesting. And here is his Factbook on family.
Via Unfogged, and NY magazine article arguing that praising clever kids for being clever fucks them up; instead, you should praise them for working hard. Bronson and his partner also have some posts on the topic.
From unfogged comments, a potential book reference:
I'm really surprised the article doesn't mention Alfie Kohn (does it?), whose book Punished by Rewards is far and away the most readable, straightforward treatment of this issue.
Posted by: Witt | Link to this comment | 02-15-07 4:21 PM
Good news: everyone's unhappy with their education system, even countries like Holland and Sweden that are held up as beacons to the rest of us.
Via Matt T
Well said, James Hamilton:
I never meant it to be a central theme at this site. You can blame the press that it has been. It was their myth after all - that the kind of feelings fans experience watching football are the same feelings that the team needs to have on the pitch in order to win.
James again, lauding Chris Waddle's commentary (after an unpromising start):
Once the match was underway, though, he was superb. Intelligent, thinking, observing. At one point, he mentioned that Spain would pass to a man who had perhaps two yards of space around him - but England were reluctant to pass to anyone with less than five yards. Better, don’t you think, than merely saying that England weren’t passing the ball as well as Spain? Better than saying that they aren’t as comfortable on the ball as Spain?
Because we know those things already. But Waddle’s way of putting it actually makes you think a bit more about what’s going on - it makes you reflect on how much harder it will be for an England player to be in a position where a pass is on; how much harder for England to work the ball; how much more important each England pass becomes, therefore, because there’ll be fewer of them.
Fun stuff from the Annals of Improbable Research: a study indicating that people are more conformist after being shown a photo of an accountant than after being shown a photo of a punk rocker.
The authority figure asked each of the confederates how many beeps they'd heard. Each of these co-conspirers gave a pre-arranged - and wrong - total.
Now, at long last, the innocent dupe had to speak up. How many beeps had she or he heard?
The innocent dupes who had seen the photo of an accountant fudged their answer. They acquiesced to what everyone else said. The dupes who had looked at a punk rocker did not.
Like many studies, this one builds on an existing foundation. Pendry and Carrick acknowledge owing much to a 1996 New York University study about innocent dupes who were shown a list of words about elderly people. The words included: old, lonely, grey, retired, wrinkle, ancient and cautious. The scientists, armed with a stopwatch, discovered that dupes who had seen those words walked away more slowly than dupes who had not.
It's a trick question: they don't.
Larry Bartels of Princeton has recently studied the voting record of the Senate between 1989 and 1994--a time, note, when Democrats controlled Congress. He found that senators were very responsive to the preferences of the upper third of the income spectrum, somewhat less attentive to the middle third, and completely dismissive of the policy preferences of the poorest third. In one striking example, Bartels discovered that senators were likely to vote for a minimum wage increase only when their wealthier constituents favored it--the views of those directly affected by the hike had "no discernible impact."
Nor is this pattern limited to domestic policy. Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have found that the foreign policy views of the executive and legislative branches are primarily influenced by business leaders, policy experts--whose think tanks are often funded by businesses--and, to a lesser extent, organized labor. Jacobs and Page found that the views of the broader public have essentially zero impact on the government when it comes to tariffs, treaties, diplomacy, or military action.
Here NYT "Economic Scene" columns look good.
More from the interview with Learning to Labour's Paul Willis. (Note how Willis isn't actually catching the interviewer out: the latter refers not to middle class kids in the school, but to the school's middle class culture):
Tillekens: In the book, there is some permanent clash going on between the middle-class culture of the school on the one hand and the working class culture of the "lads" on the other and you yourself, so it seems, take a partisan view in this struggle. Willis: Yes, well I'm not sure if the ear'oles in any sense are middle class. For me this is another misunderstanding of the book. Both the lads and ear'oles represent working class culture. So, at school, there were two working class roots at that point and as the subsequent history of the lads and ear'oles shows, in time many of them did change places, depending on the accidents of the labour market.
Below the fold, an idea for my diss. One of the books that might influence it is Paul willis's Learning to labour. In trying to ascertain why, as Willis asks, working class kids let middle class kids get away with taking all the good jobs, one key idea may be the cultural production of meaning in everyday life. As Evans says in her observations of estate life in Bermondsey, working class people are often very proud of many aspects of working class life, and will seek to reproduce those aspects - eg a sense of close kinship and community, the ability to have a laugh, not taking oneself too seriously, and not buckling in to authority. These are good values. The problem is that their reproduction often conflicts with doing well in school, which is of course the ticket into middle class jobs.
Along these lines, it sounds as if Willis's more recent work might be useful:
In my recent book, I'm saying that schooling is a kind of early modernist formation of cultural transmission and there's a huge question about what it means for the subordinate class.
Kevin Drum defines the difference between cheap campaign rhetoric and serious campaign rhetoric:
No child should go without healthcare" is cheap rhetoric, something nobody disagrees with. "I think everyone over the age of 55 should be covered by Medicare" is serious rhetoric. It's not a 300-page white paper, but it clearly delineates a policy priority that not everyone else shares. "I think every man, woman, and child in the country should be covered by Medicare regardless of age" is really serious rhetoric.
The Centre for the wider benefits of learning has published a report entitled Development in the early years: its importance for school performance and adult outcomes. Abstract:
Early development of children’s intellectual, social and physical abilities has the potential to affect their long term achievement, beyond the initial introduction to the classroom, through their school lives and into adulthood. A greater understanding of the processes at work in these early years and their role in later success is therefore important to ensure that resources are appropriately targeted.
Past research has shown that early cognitive attainment is strongly related to later academic success. But we are also interested in the benefit that children gain from arriving at school with particular personal characteristics and the relationship which these may have to cognitive development. We also seek to explore the role of development (as opposed to innate capability) in the pre-school years. Data from the 1970 British Cohort Study is used to examine the importance of early measures of children’s cognitive ability and behavioural development for their subsequent school and labour market achievement.
Our results suggest that, of the various measures used in this study, the most powerful predictor of later academic and labour market success is the ability of children to copy basic designs. However, we do not ignore the influence of behavioural factors and highlight the particular importance of skills related to attention with respect to these outcomes.
The results clearly show that early development of both cognitive and behavioural skills have a role in subsequent achievement. In this respect, we believe that the findings in this report add to the debate on the appropriate balance between cognitive and non-cognitive skills at different ages and for different groups of children. In particular, failure to place sufficient emphasis on cognitive development may run counter to the interests of children from low SES groups. We believe that pedagogy should continue to address ways in which cognitive and non-cognitive abilities can support one another and how the interactions between these different groups of skills can best be harnessed for different groups of children.
Education Sector publishes a report on the advantages - and lack thereof - of getting kids to spend more time in school:
while time certainly matters, it may not be the linchpin of school improvement. Of course it's a valuable resource for schools and yes, in good schools with quality teachers and strong curriculum, having more of it will lead to more good learning. But in schools with fewer experienced teachers, high turnover rates in staff and leadership, and a record of poor performance, it just doesn't sit right to keep kids in these schools longer. The kids in these schools-- generally the poorer kids who don't have their parents waiting at home to read to them or take them to private music lessons or language programs--do need more quality learning time to keep up with their peers and to get the education they deserve. But we must be careful not to assume that quantity matters as much as quality. It simply doesn't.
If the following letter to today's Guardian Education is correct, I say we completely revamp English spelling now. Anything less is discriminatory, and an invitation to low skills that we all will have to pay for:
Following your reports on how we educate children with special needs (Learning the hard way, January 16), should we stop to consider why there is almost no dyslexia in Finland or Italy, while here around 10% of the population is affected by it? Should we also investigate why bilingual speakers of English and Welsh are far less dyslexic in Welsh than in English?
I had no trouble at all learning to read and write Lithuanian, Russian and German. Becoming literate in English took me much more sustained effort. Helping dyslexic pupils to cope with their learning difficulty costs a great deal of money. Would it not be wiser to identify the root cause of their difficulties and tackle that?
Masha Bell
Author of Understanding English Spelling, Wareham, Dorset
Speaking of dyslexia and costs to society, this article cites a claim that more than half of prisoners are dyslexic - in contrast to Cambridge research that puts the figure at 5% - which is half Dyslexia Action's figure of 10% for the entire (free and unfree) population. A lot of agreement there, then.
Few things irritate me more than faith schools' ability to discriminate against non-Christians / non-Whatevers. Here's an interesting article about a selective, high-performing Liverpool school that the COE says is a church school; the school, however, says it wants nothing to do with the church, even though it has a daily act of Christian worship. The COE already controls 4,600 schools; does it need another?
To add to my anger, here's the COE on admissions:
the governors fear a creeping Anglicanisation that would change the school for ever. Only last week, the church sent guidance on admissions to all its 4,600 schools, requiring them to rank children in tiers - "at the heart of the church", "attached to the church" and "known to the church" - when allocating places in oversubscribed schools.
Via unfogged, the NYT looks at American school systems that, in response to well-documented slumps in performance for kids at middle school age, are trying alternative arrangements. For some, the best approch is to put the youngsters in wiht high schoolers; for others, it's to turn lower school into K-8.
Re the former, more common approach:
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that students at Philadelphia’s established K-8 schools outperformed students at traditional middle schools, but that those schools had fewer poor and minority students and more experienced teachers, which could have largely explained the results.
In Philadelphia’s newer K-8s, which are more similar demographically to the city’s middle schools, students performed slightly better than at middle schools, but those advantages were not always statistically significant.
Re creating 6-12 schools, the key focus appears to be to give the principal and teachers more time to prepare the kids to succeed in life, preferably by getting into uni. A lot of this seems to be based on getting kids when they're young enough to successfully adapt to an ambitious, disciplined school ethos.
The 6th- through 12th-grade school is less common, and less studied. In New York City, where such schools have proliferated — 38 have opened since 2002 — the shift is being driven largely by nonprofit organizations that have helped start new, small schools. These schools are under pressure to show they can produce better results than traditional ones.
In many ways these schools were conceived less as a solution to the middle school problem than as solutions to the high school problem — that is, the problem of having just four years to work magic with woefully underprepared freshmen.
This is interesting:
Both 6-12 and K-8 schools eliminate one transition from students’ lives. Both also tend to have far fewer sixth- through eighth-grade students than the typical middle school — a difference that those who work with middle school students say cannot be underestimated.
“One middle school student is like three high school students in terms of their behavioral needs and the issues you’re confronted with,” said Fred Walsh, principal of the School for International Studies in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
In either case, I would agree that 11 is a challenging age to be making a transition from one sort of school to another - while on the other hand I can see the arguments for putting kids into ambitious settings younger.
