14,142 research outputs found
Sen and the art of educational maintenance: evidencing a capability, as opposed to an effectiveness, approach to schooling
No full textThere are few more widely applied terms in common parlance than ‘capability’. It is used (inaccurately) to represent everything from the aspiration to provide opportunity to notions of innate academic ability, with everything in between claiming apostolic succession to Amartya Sen, who (with apologies to Aristotle) first developed the concept. This paper attempts to warrant an adaptation of Sen’s capability theory to schooling and schooling policy, and to proof his concepts in the new setting using research involving 100 pupils from 5 English secondary schools and a schedule of questions derived from the capability literature. The findings suggest that a capability approach can provide an alternative to the dominant Benthamite school effectiveness paradigm, and can offer a sound theoretical framework for understanding better the assumed relationship between schooling and well-being
The Production of Educational Knowledge in the Global Era, Review
No full textThis edited book, in six sections, contains nearly three hundred pages of fairly dense print and as one would expect, a high concentration of ideas. The editor, Julia Resnik, an education sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has collected papers that engage the reader in issues of globalisation, supra-nationalism and the commodification of education and knowledge. In places, the book makes a real contribution to our understanding of the impact of globalisation, on Higher Education in particular, and offers a sometimes refreshing critique of the progress that non-western countries have made in the new anti-autarchic paradigm.The running theme of the book is that an education discourse can no longer be had in national contexts, but must be explored in global terms while simultaneously recognising the importance of ‘the local’. It is both a strength and a weakness of the book that it offers such ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson, 1992) as a way forward: it may be appropriate for institutions with strong local allegiances, but it can be constraining for those who wish (or need) to position themselves as international centres.The book examines ways in which non-western education is being integrated into western models, though such shoe-horning does, of course, ‘privilege’ western models as a basis for understanding and exploiting knowledge; while western models are more developed and integration may be a legitimate way for advancing non-western models (Reid & Loxton, 2004), the process of integration should not be a euphemism for suppressing ‘the non-western’ (rather than liberating it from its perceived inferiority).?In the first section, the chapters address the demise of state-centred educational research. Robertson and Dale, and the editor, argue that there is a need for a new paradigm that integrates the local and the global as a way to interrogate, analyse and deconstruct educational research and policy.?Section Two is a discourse in which Benavot proposes a move beyond the universalisation of education to the universalisation of education quality; a contribution made more powerful by the focus on equity added by Cusso in the subsequent chapter. It is argued that while educational efficiency has traditionally been serviced by statistical comparisons of participation and performance, globalisation requires new metrics that additionally capture (amongst other things) hunger, mortality rates and economic deprivation.?Section Three deals with the potential disconnect between reforms in western neo-liberal countries and those in non-western countries, which are ‘deforming’ when based on western templates that have little resonance with local requirements, and when free-market imperatives are not balanced by consideration of the moral values of local people.1?Section Four moves the discussion, such as it exists, to consider the role of international schools and education, noting that there is no accepted framework for understanding the skills, knowledge and values that these schools must develop as they prepare their graduates for the globalised environment.?Chapters 9 and 10 focus on reform in a European context (though the model proposed for enhancing quality looks a lot like TQM). The problem, it is argued, is that European institutions benchmark progress against US ones that are better resourced, have a superior infrastructure and provide greater opportunities for research and mobility. Most commentators agree that in order to improve, systems need to be benchmarked against ‘the best’ and not just against ‘the rest’, but comparisons that do not allow for context are known to entrench a disconnect in educational development.?The final section of the book has three chapters: the first, by Ben-Ari, focuses on early childhood education and care, and notwithstanding its importance, is something of a ‘curiosity’ in a book that deals, in the main, with Higher Education (though its treatment of Japanese attempts to integrate the local and the global provides a reflective opportunity for readers); the second by Naftali deals with the challenges of Chinese education and in particular the notion of transforming the Chinese learner (see Seligman, 1998) from a passive recipient of knowledge to an active participant in its construction; and the final chapter by Wexler hints at a new sociology of education based not on post-modernism but on the fundamental tenets of globalised markets and profit.Every edited book must ultimately be judged on the extent to which its contributions benefit from being part of a concatenation, over and above what they offer individually. Collectively, they should add contestation to what would otherwise be a monologue and offer an exegesis that challenges the ideas presented within the collection. Unfortunately, this (mostly) fails to happen in this book, despite the best efforts of the editor to ‘herd her cats’. And while the book has some coherence in terms of how the sections are ordered, there are a few chapters that are repetitive in their treatment of issues, or are misplaced. The editor might also have taken more risks with the content: perhaps to have included a paper on Sen’s capability approach in the context of Section Two; perhaps something on the production of knowledge for ecological sustainability; perhaps a political critique of global forces ‘goose-stepping’ into the subtleties of other cultures as if there were nothing there and stamping western anomie all over them. The book takes a specifically sociological view with little acknowledgement that there are alternative complementary perspectives; it is not a compelling collection for those with an economic, political or philosophical bent. The chapters are of uneven quality and feel too much like a collection of good - sometimes excellent (e.g. Robertson and Dale, some of the editor’s own contributions, and others) - conference proceedings presented by friends and associates in six fugues. The whole would have benefited from a wider variety of contributor, but to be fair to all concerned the chapters do reward re-reading and do avoid the cynical Leftist dissent which so often characterises work in this field. While the book’s production, at least in the paperback version, is not great and would have been enhanced by the inclusion of an index to allow readers to navigate selectively around the multiplicity of concepts, the book deserves (and will get) a place on academic bookshelves, especially those of sociologists and anthropologists. Despite reservations, it is a good book
Interview with Kelly Macfarlane, Downwinders of Utah Archive, September 5, 2018
No full textTranscript (14 pages) of an interview conducted by Anthony Sams with Kelly Macfarlane in Salt Lake City, Utah, September 2018. Interview discusses Macfarlane\u27s memories of his family\u27s businesses in Enterprise Utah, and stories related to radiation exposure. Macfarlane recalls his grandfather and father\u27s experiences with cancer, and shares his perspective on the testing through his profession as a lawyer
Benchmarking for school improvement
No full textIn educational management, benchmarking is a term often used to describe a school’s performance against a national or localised average. This is not the sense in which the process has been used to great effect in the commercial sector, where benchmarking is a comparison against the best, not against the rest. In this, the first book to consider comparative benchmarking in an educational context, Kelly proposes that measuring effectiveness against a national median performance, as opposed to against another organisation which is acknowledged to be effective, is counter productive.‘Benchmarking for School Improvement’ develops comparative benchmarking as a tool for self-assessment in schools and colleges. It is a step-by-step guide to forming profitable partnerships with other organisations and is based upon what national and international school effectiveness research tells us makes for a successful school. It is a practical guide to ‘doing’ benchmarking, linking the process to target-setting as a means of being able to gauge self-improvement
Developing metrics for equity, diversity and competition: New measures for schools and universities.
No full textIntroduction Equity, diversity and competition, which together form a ‘holy trinity’ of effective educational provision in schools and universities, are closely related to each other and to our notion of social justice. They also form the basis for educational choice as the preferred lever for systemic improvement in developed economies; the theory being that more choice leads to greater competition, increased diversity in the marketplace and ultimately to greater equity in terms of student attainment and social mobility. Choice in education effectively devolves responsibility for attainment and social mobility from the state to the parent-consumer, and the facility for parents to choose their schools and colleges free from government involvement is increasing in popularity, as evidenced by the growing number of Charter Schools in the US and Academies in the UK and the emergence of privately owned, publicly funded universities. The traditional social democratic imperative is that good publicly funded education for all is necessary for social mobility even if that sometimes means whole-scale restructuring, but there are also neo-liberal imperatives at work supporting the same direction of travel. The latter view is that parents have the moral right to use their resources to benefit their own children and that this should be facilitated by the state even if it reinforces existing social hierarchies. Parents acting in the best interest of their own children generate competition for both schools and universities, which is why choice is fundamental to the new (neo-liberal) right and tolerated by the new (social democratic) left: poor schools are shut down, which is the intention, and informed parents transfer their children to better schools. Parents familiar with the education system and in possession of ‘hot’ information derived from their social networks, discussed in Chapter 9, have the ability to seek out effective schools and universities, whereas disadvantaged parents rarely have the right information at the right time to enable them to make the best choices. Affluent and better-educated parents are also more selective about the schools and universities they choose, especially when governments fail to extend choice programmes to include the independent and faith sectors or provide the necessary transport assistance to disadvantaged students to increase participation rates in these sectors, and they are more involved in governorship and school committees of one sort or another. Although these bureaucratic involvements can sometimes be more symbolic than influential, as Chapter 3 illustrates, they are social markers for creating networks of like-minded parents who rally to the same flag to the exclusion of those who have inferior levels of social capital or who have different sets of beliefs. For example, in the US and elsewhere, where faith schools outperform public schools, school choice has become a battleground for the wider struggle between religion and secularism in society. There is the widespread perception among religious-minded parents that the values taught in public schools are not just intolerant of religion, but are anti-religious, which then becomes exacerbated by the fact that parents committed to their religious beliefs abandon the public school system in large numbers for independent or home schooling, leaving an irreligious remnant behind to justify the original allegation of bias (Kelly 2009a). Of course, the exercise of choice does not flow automatically from the existence of choice, and since choice in education is driven by the value placed on freedom, rather than by concerns for equity or the needs of local communities, pressure has been put on parents to take responsibility for exercising it wisely. Choice is about passing responsibility and the risk of failure to the consumer, and what differentiates the professional classes from other groups in this respect is that they are at heart more risk-friendly even if they are also more apprehensive because they depend on education to maintain their favourable social trajectory. Families from lower socio-economic groupings tend to be more fatalistic about choice and tend not to spend time using their social capital to manage risk on behalf of their children. Independent fee-paying schools exist and function in response to this risk management (Kelly, 2009a) because school choice is as much about who else chooses a school as the school one chooses oneself. Fee-paying schools minimise the risk of the same school being chosen by those who might lessen the benefit, and they provide boundaries that prevent the kind of mixing that dilutes middle-class aspiration and work ethic. The riskier society is perceived to be, the more those who can afford it turn to fee-paying schools, but this carries with it conflicting feelings of guilt: for choosing private schooling when not everyone can afford it or for not choosing private schooling and failing to provide for one’s children to the best of one’s ability. The commodification and marketisation of education has increased the risks associated with educational choice and the consequences of being wrong. Most educational choice markets are quasi-markets rather than true markets. Some policies like university league tables (considered in detail in Chapter 2 and Chapter 7) and the schools awards market (considered in detail in Chapter 5) aim to stimulate competition, while other policies like schemes to encourage research partnerships (considered in Chapter 6) aim to encourage cooperation, but overall, these markets are driven and regulated by global rather than national forces. The belief that society has entered a new post-capitalist phase is widely accepted by policy-makers, providing a political foundation for new explicit partnerships between the state and agents of the free market (Kelly, 2009a), and indeed the nature of states themselves has changed to more ‘agentic’ versions of their old selves. A market state perceives its role as providing opportunity for the most dynamic of its citizens to generate prosperity for everyone, but social mobility has not increased with the popularity of this political philosophy. Instead, a new under-class seems to have replaced the old working-class, and governments have shifted their allegiance from the principle of choice between private and public provision to privatised public provision wherein their role – the role of the ‘partnership state’ - is to guarantee access to basic public services but not to provide them. This in turn has enabled policy-makers to drive education using economic imperatives and to devolve liability for ineffective outcomes to parents and students, while simultaneous global pressures have restricted the ability of governments to intervene in the market on behalf of their citizens. Critics and supporters posit it differently of course: the former suggest that globalisation has usurped the authority of democratic governments to act in the interests of their citizens; the latter suggest that globalisation has forced governments to act with proper discipline by not interfering with the market and that only a free market can guarantee prosperity in the long-term (Kelly 2009a). Agentic statehood subordinates the will of the individual to the will of government and in regarding people as economic entities it supports and legitimises capitalism while trying to maintain social cohesion. They embrace the relationship between education, economic prosperity and equity, the metrics for which are discussed at length in Chapter 4. They accept the burden of neutralising the effects of factors that impact on educational attainment - Chapter 8 discusses measuring diversity and Chapter 9 considers the birth-order effect – but there is a paradox at the heart of these neo-liberal imperatives; namely, that the state must occasionally deal with its own failure and be forced into intervention in the marketplace in contradiction of its basic tenet. In the UK, the Conservative governments of the 1980s were the first to adopt marketising neo-liberal educational initiatives, cutting expenditure on universities and allowing parents greater choice in schooling. Later, the 1988 Education Act, which created the first quasi-market in education, allowed schools to switch to direct funding from central government rather than remain within their local authority, gave parents freedom to select schools and schools the freedom to select students, and encouraged competition and accountability by publishing league tables of examination results. When New Labour was elected to government in 1997 after nearly two decades of conservative rule, its education policies differed little from those of its predecessors. It retained the previous emphasis on accountability, standards and centralisation, and introduced more testing, greater intrusion into teaching methods and yet more league tables for schools and universities (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 7). The reliance of New Labour on a technicist form of conservatism – it introduced an extraordinary array of ‘technical’ initiatives in education, health, law and other public services - led to greater private finance involvement in the building of new public schools, the privatisation of existing schools, and support for privately owned, publicly funded universities. And like its Conservative predecessor, New Labour presented the welfare state as inefficient and a threat to entrepreneurship, which then enabled it to transfer public agencies whole-scale to the commercial sector.It would be wrong to assume that all this has occurred without opposition. The social democratic, anti-neoliberal case has been made, if infrequently and sometimes inconsistently, that democracy flourishes better in a society where education is regarded as something provided for the common good and the state has the dominant role in its provision. The social democratic perspective holds that education policies that foster competition and stratification do so at the expense of developing social capital and that as a consequence schools which are free from each other and from local control serve the needs of exclusive subgroups based on social class and ethnicity. However, some have suggested that the social democratic advocacy of public education is based on an outmoded view of democracy that is no longer relevant in a globalised society. The circumstances and contexts in which nation states now operate have changed so much, they say, that it is no longer enough for supporters of public education to argue in favour of the Keynesian approach (Kelly 2009b). The communitarian view is part of the anti-neoliberal coalition. It starts from the premise that well-being is best defined in a local context and that nation states must extend their democracies internally before they can join meaningfully with other states to address external global issues. Some have argued in favour of a ‘thin’ communitarianism in line with Foucault’s interconnected cosmopolitan democracy where policies that preserve the openness of power structures are followed and there is protection for small-scale producers of basic goods and services. They argue that state schools become ‘demutualised’ if they lose their altruistic identity and the state system becomes less efficient if it loses its economy of scale, so that the neo-liberal approach is both unfair and self-defeating. The measurement imperative and a new capability approach to effectivenessThe dominant theme underpinning both neo-liberal and social democratic education policies in the UK and elsewhere has shifted from leadership to ‘performativity’: the positivist assumption that it is both possible and desirable to measure performance. This fits well with the educational effectiveness paradigm in which this book is located, though I will argue now for a new capability approach within that educational effectiveness paradigm to replace the current Benthamite one. There are many dif¬ferent approaches to gauging effectiveness and how well a society is served by its education system, but all of them require measurement. Some metrics were at the level of the student and some were at the level of the institution; some took account of context while others did not. The traditional approach was utilitarian, but in all cases the need to extrapolate from student attainment (whether contextualised or not) to how students were maximising their own ‘well-being’ was never made or even attempted. Adapting Amartya Sen’s capability approach to educational effectiveness would correct for this shortcoming because capability looks at the motivation behind choice, treating it as a parametric variable that coincides or not with the pursuit of self-interest (see Chapter 3). In such a capability approach, well-being is the way of viewing student self-interest, and ‘advantage’ the way of viewing relative opportunity, which are no longer judged solely on attainment as in the traditional utilitarian approach. In terms of translating attainment into social mobility, it is possible for a student to have real advantages but not to make good use of them or not to make use of the freedom to achieve more. It is possible to have opportunity but not to achieve. While opportunity is intrinsically linked to choice, they are not the same thing. Opportunity is not simply whether, for example, entrance to a research-intensive university is a realisable option for a student, but whether (say) the student’s family can afford to support the student at the more expensive university and whether the student can benefit from the particular curriculum on offer there (Kelly 2012a). Attending a school or university gives a student command over some of the desirable properties of education as a commodity - satisfying the desire for learning, providing opportunities for friendship, opening the door to economic prosperity and so forth - but the mere acquisition of a commodity does not guarantee the acquisition of its desirable properties nor does its possession determine what can be done with it. So in judging the well-being of students using a capability (as opposed to a utilitarian) approach to educational effectiveness, student ‘functionings’ - what students actually succeed in doing with their schooling - must be considered (Kelly, 2010). A functioning is a personal achievement distinguishable from the well-being it generates. The physical act of going to a university is not the same as deriving benefit from attending. What a capability approach captures is the extent to which students have the freedom to choose the functionings they value, rather than the economic functionings the state dictates that they should want. In essence, the traditional utilitarian approach within the educational effectiveness paradigm does not distinguish between functioning and capability, but a capability approach does make that distinction. For example, having a free school meal is a functioning, but it matters whether it is the result of social deprivation at home or the result of free choice. The functioning is having the free school meal, but the capability to eat a school meal without any associated social stigma is the key to evaluating a student’s well-being in this situation (Kelly, 2012a). A student’s set of feasible functionings is his or her ‘capability set’. It comprises the alternative combinations of functionings a student can achieve, so it represents his or her opportunity to generate valuable outcomes, taking into account relevant personal circumstances and external factors. The distinguishing feature of the capability approach is the importance of ‘freedom to achieve’; the view being that if freedom were only to have instrumental value to a student’s well-being (i.e. if it were only valuable as a means to an end) and had no intrinsic value, then the capability set would not capture what the student is capable of being and doing. Capability in education is not just about attainment. The well-being of a student is an index of what he or she is succeeding in doing with his or her education. Having more of it can increase his or her ability to function in desirable ways and to live a better life free of various deprivations, but the conversion of education into personal achievement depends on a variety of non-educational factors such as birth order (which is discussed in Chapter 9) and socio-economic status, as well as on personal traits like ambition and perseverance. The sum of these various alternative func¬tioning bundles, which the student can achieve through choice, is his / her capability, which is why increasing choice in education must be accompanied by a raising of expectation in order to raise achievement across the system as a whole. Too often, capability is increased through greater choice yet fails to result in greater well-being because students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds have become reconciled to under-achievement - as occasionally have their teachers - or have acquired an inconvenient set of anti-aspirations. And merely transferring high-performing students from bad schools to better schools does little for those left behind (Kelly, 2012a). The utilitarian Benthamite approach to educational effectiveness also overlooks the more affective-conative (as opposed to cognitive) aspects to schooling that we know are important, like the problem of adaptive preferences where students are conditioned to come to terms with disadvantage as a means of ‘survival’. <br/
The intellectual capital of schools: lessons from the commercial sector
No full textThis is the first book to develop a theory of intellectual capital for schools, from an author with considerable experience in extending sophisticated external concepts to education. it will be of interest to practitioners, academics and students in the fields of education, business and social enterprise.It is difficult to measure effectiveness in not-for-profit organisations like schools; there is no ‘bottom-line’ against which to gauge performance and managers struggle to make meaningful comparisons between outcomes and targets. In education, well-publicised attempts have been made to establish - some would say impose - a set of criteria against which schools can measure success or failure. These have so far centred on measuring external stakeholder outcomes like examination results, parental satisfaction, inspection grades and so on, but have failed to capture the essence of what it is to be - or what it takes to become - a successful school. This book is an attempt to describe the potential of a school for improvement and to gauge its success in new intrinsic terms ... in terms of its internal intellectual capital; the resource that comes from relationships between a school and its stakeholders, from its ability to innovate and manage change, from its infrastructure, and from the knowledge and transferable competencies of its staff. Intellectual capital is at the core of what society deems to be the purpose and definition of successful schooling, and being largely internal, it promises maximum leverage in the search for improvement
Ranking the outcomes from the assessment of research in the UK
No full textThe Research Excellence Framework (REF), previously the ‘RAE’, is an assessment undertaken on behalf of the UK government to gauge the quality of research in universities. It is a public display of reputation that carries with it considerable risk in terms of losing face and funding. The 2008 RAE focused on three categories of research output quantified on a common scale and ranked by the national media (and internally by universities) using an arbitrary weighting system. Using data from ‘Education’ as an example, this paper develops an alternative ‘justified’ weighting system for possible use in the forthcoming (2014) RE
Juxtaposing some contradictory findings from international research on school choice
No full textResearch over the last twenty years on school choice and local markets in education has been contradictory or inconclusive: some supports the movement to give parents more freedom in choosing schools; other findings support the view that greater choice further disadvantages the already disadvantaged. Irrespective of philosophical position, it can be said that school choice is driven by political economy in that its benefits and shortcomings are as a consequence of engagement with political or socio-economic imperatives. This paper juxtaposes some findings from the UK, the US and Europe in a socio-political context and discusses their theoretical implication
Measuring ‘equity’ and ‘equitability’ in school effectiveness research
No full textThis paper introduces a Gini-type index for measuring ‘attainment equity’ in schools; that is to say, how far a school (or group of schools) is from having a ‘fair’ proportion of its examination success attributable to a fair proportion of its student population. Using data from the National Pupil Database, the Index is applied to more than 20,000 students with matched attainment records at KS2 and KS4 in two ‘statistical-neighbour’ local authorities in England, capturing the extent to which they are meeting a public policy notion of equity. It is then combined with existing contextual value added measures to analyse school and local authority performance in terms of both attainment equity and context
Funding in English universities and its relationship to the Research Excellence Framework
No full textThe purpose of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is to judge the quality of research in the UK and on that basis to apportion to universities, in a transparent manner, differential shares in the UK’s £1.6 billion pot of research funding. However, the funding process is anything but transparent! While the REF process was known years in advance and remained constant throughout the assessment exercise, the mechanisms for the subsequent award of quality-related research (QR) funding in England were opaque and ‘adjustable’. The financial outcomes were put in the public domain following publication of the REF outcomes, but the calculations still remain a ‘black box’ even for experienced university administrators. The funding factors were not revealed in advance and dramatic changes were made to the formula once the REF results were known. This paper explores the intricacies involved in university QR funding and looks at the correlations between it and various REF outcomes. It discusses the tactical implications for academics and university administrators, and whether simpler alternatives that are just as effective can be developed in time for the next iteration
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