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Education

Facepalm

No, no, no, no, no:

So Michael Gove’s announcement on the Andrew Marr show this morning that the government plans to introduce an English baccalaureate is to be welcomed.

The whole damn point of the baccalaureate is that it is international.

That is, that the idiot educational establishment in Britain isn\’t able to get its hands on it and promote cooperation in plasticine snake making over the ability to read and write.

The entire point of the whole thing is to make sure that those who read and write The Guardian\’s education supplements have fuck all to do with anything.

Sadly, hanging them all would be illegal but at least we can make them irrelevant.

If you don\’t understand the original reason

The of course your criticism is going to be false, isn\’t it?

Self-service checkouts were intended to bring an end to long supermarket queues, but research suggests some lines have lengthened since the technology was introduced.

There then follows lots of harrumphing from both sides about whether the self service checkouts have in fact reduced queueing times or not. The supermarkets against the union.

But self service checkouts haven\’t been brought in to reduce check out times. They\’ve been brought in to reduce labour costs: as with almost all automation, this is the reason.

You end up with one bird monitoring 6,8,10 checkouts, instead of needing one per check out.

So far so trivial, but it\’s an important lesson that a certain type of lefty needs to get. Raise wages and people will look at ways to employ less labour. And it\’s not just buying in from lower wage countries either: almost any job can be automated to some extent if the wages go high enough that it\’s worth doing so.

Those arguing, for example, for a \”living wage!\” would do well to remember this. At any one time there are some number of jobs which are just on the cusp of it being worth automating them. A 10%, 20%, rise in wages will be enough to tip the decision to automate rather than employ.

Which jobs those are is constantly changing of course as technology advances.

In the larger scheme of things of course this is wonderful: freed from check outs that labour is now available to go and do something else: wipe bottys or pour pints for example, meaning we get both checked out groceries and wiped botties or pulled pints. We\’ve two things instead of one to enjoy as a society and are thus richer.

But in that smaller sense it\’s worth remembering that raising the price of labour is going to reduce the number of people employed in current activities as raising the price of labour increases the motivation to automate.

As we can see in that humblest of scenes, the supermarket check out queue.

And as, in fact, that earlier burst of automation, bar codes, did when they came out.

Logic fail

\”A full-blown graduate tax of say 5% on earning for the rest of your working life faces considerable opposition,\” a senior government source said. \”It creates an incentive for people to leave the country and study abroad.\”

No it doesn\’t you twat. It creates an incentive to get the education here for free then go abroad to work where you don\’t have to pay the tax. It also creates an incentive to come here from abroad for your education (for EU students must be treated the same way as domestic) for free and then bugger off back home.

Given that the problem is not enough money and too many people applying this really doesn\’t sound like a sensible solution at all.

An interesting business opportunity

I\’ve just written up a quick ad, elsewhere, for a company offering tutoring. US high school sort of stuff. Online tutoring.

They offer 24/7 service, as much as any one child wants, in any and every subject, for $99 a month. No, not per subject, total.

Given the length of the school year that\’s about £700 or so a year I think.

If I set up a free school the government will give me something like £8,000 per year per pupil. A linux type netbook costs about £200 these days.

My God, I\’m going to make a fortune.

Being ever so slightly serious about this though, in the early days of a new technology it\’s not always clear which industries it\’s going to change, revolutionise. We might think the jetliner has transformed tourism but it\’s had as large, or larger, effect on sucking out the need for capital from businesses by enabling just in time stocking of parts.

Arguably the Model T changed dating and marriage habits more than anything else.

It\’s possible that the internet is going to change the education business more than any other sector of the economy. Why ship every child in and out each and every day to watch someone standing on their hind legs lecturing them when you can just beam the same thing to their PC?

What would a \”teach once, learn many\” model do to labour productivity among the educrats, eh?

As William Baumol keeps pointing out, it\’s not the inventions which continually raise productivity, something which is exactly the same as making us all richer, it\’s what people find to do with the inventions which raises productivity which makes us all richer.

Some hidden privilege….

The taxpayer is spending more than £15m a year to send the children of British diplomats and military officers to private schools such as Fettes, Winchester, Roedean and Marlborough.

The subsidies – costing as much as £30,000 a year in school fees – are being paid by the Foreign Office even when the diplomats have returned to the UK and then stay on for years.

The extraordinary hidden privilege has been unearthed by Gloria de Piero, a new Labour MP, in written questions. In a co-ordinated response, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development said the perk was necessary to \”recruit, motivate and retain staff who are skilled and equipped to meet the department\’s objectives\”.

It is understood the same privilege is provided to senior members of the military, but no figures have been divulged by the Ministry of Defence.

It\’s extended to all officers, not just senior ones. And it\’s hardly hidden, everyone part of the system knows about it. And it certainly has its problems….promotion to Major/ Lieutenant Commander is pretty much a matter of time served, after that on merit. But if you\’ve not managed promotion from those ranks by 45 ish, you\’re never going to (absent a bloody war or a plague) but the forces won\’t throw you out until you\’re 55. There\’s quite a number serving out that decade as lame ducks on account of the school fees subsidy…..

The reasoning for the perk is simple. Diplomats and military peeps can be and are posted overseas: that\’s part of what the job entails. Sometimes children are not allowed….but that\’s not the only part of it.

I don\’t know what the situation is now but way back when, Pater was posted to Naples. There was a school run by the RAF which took children up to the age of 11 (wouldn\’t pass muster now, two years in one class and all that but it was actually pretty good). My brother and I went to it, being under that age. My sisters were over that age: that meant that they, if they were to be educated in Naples, would have to step outside the English education system. O and A levels would not be possible, they would need to go to either an Italian school (teaching in the Italian language of course, so they\’d have to become fluent in a couple of months) or an American high school.

The posting was for 2 and a half years. At the end of which everyone back to England and so try and get back into the English education system…..

A decade later, Pater was posted back to Naples again. By this time I was 17, with 8 or 9 months to go before taking A levels. Little brother was on the cusp of CSE\’s (as I think they were called at the time). There was still no over age 11 provision of the English education system in Naples.

Under the current system I stayed at the boarding school I\’d been at, the boarding school the MoD paid 75% (not 100% like the diplomats get) of the fees for over the entire time I was there. In the absence of which I could perhaps have moved in with a grandmother or aunt, moved school and town etc. Or lived on my own and attended a sixth form college, gone to an Italian school, or an American high school or…..well, it\’s not entirely obvious that the current system is worse than any of those.

OK, this might be an expensive system, it might not even be the right system (I can see how people might, well, certain rather grumpy people might, say that sending the children of officers to private boarding schools simply perpetuates class divisions….whatever) but some sort of system is obviously needed.

It might be that we should just tell the kiddies of people posted overseas that, well, your education\’s fucked then mate. You\’ll just have to bounce around between different systems and see what you pick up. Or we might need to have English style schools everywhere. There aren\’t that many English kids in Naples at any one time, wouldn\’t cost all that much to educate what, 30 or 40 of them out there, hire a few teachers and get on with it. Or perhaps, given the growth in \”English schools\” around the world since then some form of subsidy to attend private day schools where people are posted to would be appropriate?

For example, there\’s a base at Carcavellos just outside Lisbon (listening centre for radio traffic over the Atlantic I think) and that strip of coast has a couple of English language day schools. Sure, they cost money, but all those military personnel are paying the same taxes as they would in the UK and so are paying for the State to educate their children. If said State has both insisted that they must go there and also is not providing a school, perhaps slipping them into the local private sector is the right thing to do?

Or maybe there should be an expansion of the State boarding sector (yes, it does exist) and military and diplomatic kids get sent off to that? Although I could imagine the social stratification getting even worse with that solution as I think you\’d find that certain schools would pretty quickly get colonised by particular groups: an FCO place. A posh regiments place (Hussars might be willing to let their daughters mix with those of the Guards but perhaps not REME), the Navy might have one specialising in rum, buggery and the lash (the great failure of the Catholic boarding schools is of course the lack of rum) and so on.

My point is, and I do speak from personal experience, that some system needs to be devised so that the children of those posted abroad by the State get to continue their education. Their parents are paying the State for this education after all. Slipping the kids into already extant private boarding schools might not be the most appealing solution to a certain mindset: but for those who want to change it it is incumbent upon them to come up with some other functional system to perform the same task.

How are you going to allow children to continue through the English education system? State boarding schools. farm them out to relatives, build schools everywhere troops go with families, subsidise private educations abroad? Or just chuck them into whatever local education system there is, with all of the attendant language, curriculum and examination difficulties?

Well, what?

Update: As I\’m corrected in the comments, the education thing extends to all ranks, not just officers. My mistake.

Keep an eye out for…..

Reports on this paper from the Sutton Trust.

The richest independent schools have been criticised for devoting a smaller portion of their income to bursaries for poor students than their less well-off counterparts, according to new research.

Some journo, commentator, politician, is going to say that it\’s appalling that Eton behaves this way.

That would be proof perfect that said journo, commentator, politician had not bothered to read the report. Eton is excluded from the results/calculations.

Bit of a pity really as Eton, quite famously, subsidises those King\’s Scholars on a means tested basis. But it\’s an \”exempt charity\” meaning that they couldn\’t get a look at the figures.

Pecunia non olet

Trafigura founder Graham Sharp\’s £3m gift to Oxford university causes anger

Donation linked to scandal-hit oil trading company should be rejected, say Oxford students and teaching staff

Twits.

Cash the cheque and use it to educate people. It\’s the education that counts, not where the money came from.

Adam Bouyamourn, a second-year politics, philosophy and economics student at Worcester College, said: \”Surely it is socially, if not globally, irresponsible to provide this tacit endorsement of Trafigura\’s business practices?\”

For example, a philosophy student should know that the correct answer to any question which begins \”surely\” is \”no\”. An economics student should know that the source of funding is irrelevant, it\’s the use to which it will be put that is important. And a politics student should already know that posturing, while being the very essence of politics, does require not checking the dentures of gift horses too closely.

So, yes, there are things which can usefully be done with more cash at Oxford: like teaching second years some politics, philosophy and economics.

Capturing Gordon Brown in one paragraph

It is important to understand that the no-deficit rule was a sharp break with tradition. In the postwar years, many economists argued that you did not need to be in the black every year, as long as budgets were balanced over the course of the economic cycle, so that deficits during slumps would be paid off with surpluses in good years. Whatever the economic rationale for that approach, it didn\’t work in the real world of politicians. Once you break the spell–once governments find that they can get away with borrowing instead of taxing to pay the bills–it is almost impossibly tempting for politicians to do it again and again until the debt is out of control.

That \”balance over the economic cycle\” never happened, did it?

For the simple political pressure is to keep spending, to not do the 50% of the Keynesian prescription, which is to run a budget surplus in the good times.

A theory of economic governance which only works 50% of the time for such political reasons isn\’t all that much good to us  really. Sure, it\’s better than one which works 0% of the time but shouldn\’t we carry on and find one which works 100% of the time?

To the LSE Alumni group on Linked In

We now run monthly drinks in London on the 20th of July, which you will be most welcome to attend.

You might want to rephrase that you know. Come on, we\’re supposed to be graduates of a place for clever people…..

Ms Fiona Millar

Still not quite got the point of these academies and free schools has our Ms. Millar:

The model funding agreement left by Labour attempted to bind academies into the local authority family. If that is torn up by Gove, chaos could ensue…

The calculation is that chaos is better than having schools bound into the local authority family. They may be right or wrong about this (I think they\’re right for whatever that\’s worth) but this is indeed the point of the whole exercise.

To get LAs, LEAs and the entire educational bureaucracy entirely detatched from the actual education system where they do so much harm.

Teachers and the BNP

So, having had the judgment that it\’s OK to have BNP members teaching our kids, it seems these extremists don\’t even have to be quiet about their bigotry. What exactly would it take for a deep-seated racist to be ruled unfit to teach?

I have to admit to being a little puzzled over this. The idea that membership of the BNP makes you unfit to be a teacher.

Yes, yes, I know, nasty little racist shits and all that.

But racism isn\’t the only vile view that various people hold. I\’m sure we could find unreconstructed Marxists and Trotskyites among the massed ranks of teachers. No, not just people who are Marxian in their views, but full on calls for the extermination of the bourgeoisie sort of stuff.

You know, advocates of the mass murder of 60% of the population or so.

What is it that makes that world view acceptable in a teacher and not racism?

Reforming the universities

George Monbiot recommends:

There is a short and simple solution, first proposed 11 years ago by the journalist Peter Wilby. Oxford and Cambridge, he suggested, should offer places to the top one or two pupils from every school, regardless of grades. The next-best universities would offer places to the pupils who come third and fourth, and so on downwards. There would be some adjustment for the size of the school, but the brutal logic holds.

Something like this has actually been done over in the US hasn\’t it? One of the State university systems guarantees a place to anyone who comes in the top 10% of their high school graduating class?

So, our first task would be to go and look at what has actually happened rather than rushing off to implement an idea some columnist pulled out of his arse to make a column.

I\’d also note that you\’d find an awful lot of the children of those upper middle classes would be going to two pupil schools….but that\’s another matter.

Apocryphal story about Lord Wolfson

As retailed by my father:

Leonard Wolfson and his parents – he was their only child – were founder trustees of the Wolfson Foundation in 1955. Endowed with £6 million worth of GUS shares, its objectives were the advancement of health, education, science, the arts and humanities. The trust multiplied in value more than a hundredfold, and its website now records that funds stand at £750 million, with more than £1 billion (at current values) having been given away.

Among the most notable of the beneficiaries are Wolfson College, Oxford, which was jointly funded by the Ford Foundation and founded in 1966 with Sir Isaiah Berlin as its president; and Wolfson College, Cambridge, which opened in 1977.

Bumptious Jewish tradesman rolls up to ancient university.

\”I\’d like to make a donation\”.

\”How excellent\”.

\”You\’ll have to name the new college after me\”

\”New college? No, no, we\’ll add a wing or a library to one of the existing ones\”

\”No name, no new college, no money\”.

\”Well, umm, how much did you say you wanted to donate?\”

\”mutter mutter\”

\”What did you say your name was?\”

What a can of worms this is

Oxford students who take \’socially useful\’ jobs could have fees waived

The problem, of course, comes in the definition of \”socially useful\”.

Teaching and social work are suggested.

Hmm….would teaching in a private school be counted as \”socially useful\”? I have my doubts about that. And why would \”social work\” be counted as more socially useful than, say, pharmaceutical research into curing cancer?

Assume that climate change really is happening and also that creation of non carbon forms of energy generation are the solution. It would certainly be socially useful for engineers to work upon such forms of energy generation: some would say vital for the very survival of the species itself. Should not their fees be waved?

Take a concrete example: a particular form of fuel cell needs a particular metal to be found and processed in substantial (compared to current global production) quantities. There are a number of possible ways to do this and all require research so as to work out which will work and within that small class, which would be best. Should researchers, hired by myself for the sake of argument, have their fees waived?

For it would certainly be socially useful to have this metal extracted in those substantial quantities so that this form of fuel cell can be made and thus non (or at least low) carbon energy be generated.

Or if that is a little off the wall, how about installation of solar cells? We already subsidise this, claiming that to do so is socially useful. Ditto insulation installation.

To say nothing of the point that the entrepreneur creates huge social value (one estimate puts the social value created by an innovator at 97% of the total value created, only 3% going to the innovator) and large tuition debts will certainly be a brake upon taking entrepreneurial risks.

An alternative might be that those who go into low paying jobs should have their debts relieved. At which point they might want to have a serious little chat with their own economics department. Wages paid in a job are a useful proxy (only a proxy though, not an absolute measurement) of the value added by that job. So we really would rather that these brightest and best, those benefitting from one of the best educations on the planet, did not go into low paid jobs really: we\’d like them to be off where their human capital (that thing  which has been most expensively invested in) is most productive: where it is most valued. That is, in a nice high paying job.

In the end this is simply a product of the grand illusion: that something is worth other than what people are willing to pay for it. \”Social value\” is an attempt to do an end run around market values and as such is always doomed to failure. For market values are simply the sum of individual valuations and thus are the value that society collectively puts upon something.

Jamie\’s school dinners

Eating Jamie Oliver’s school dinners improves children’s performance in tests, according to researchers who claim that the celebrity chef’s campaign to improve school food has had more impact than government literacy programmes.

The paper is here.

I would like to persuaded, really, I would. But I\’m afraid I\’m not.

Not everyone eats school meals of course. But some get free school meals. We would thus expect those who get free scool meals to have a greater take up of eating school meals than those who do not.

Yes?

So whatever the effect is, if it truly is just the better school meals (as opposed to anything else, like a general rise in standards, which they note, or more attention being paid which is a likely result of such an experiment or other confounding factors) we would expect such effect to be greater among those who get free school meals.

Yes?

Ah, no:

So far we have included all pupils in the analysis. However, only part of them has
been truly treated, those who actually eat school meals. We do not have individual
information about who is eating school meals and who is not. The only information
we have is whether the pupil is eligible for free school meals. One could argue that
“free school meals” pupils are more likely to have been treated than the other pupils.
However, we cannot be sure that the change in diet has been most significant for these
pupils in comparison to others. Thus, we should be careful with the interpretation of
the results. Table 7 reports regression results based on the sample of free school meal
children only. We find that most of the positive significant effects decrease or
disappear entirely. Thus, we fail to find evidence that the campaign specifically
helped those children who benefit from free school meals. This result may seem
counter-intuitive, as the FSM pupils should presumably be the most likely pupils in
the school to be eating the meals. One possible story is that FSM pupils are those for
which the change has been to most difficult to implement, since these pupils were
probably eating the “unhealthy” meals on a daily basis and would therefore maybe be
the most put off by the change in menus. Anecdotal evidence (from the TV
programme) suggests that some children refused to eat the healthy meals, which
would probably have harmed cognitive performance more than eating anything albeit
something of little nutritional value.

Those explanations could also be true reflections of reality.

Now I\’m perfectly willing to agree that better food could lead to better performance. Entirely happy with the idea that a full belly of decent nosh improves matters. Certainly that Jamie deserves the knighthood he\’s definitely going to get for even trying.

I\’m just not convinced that this specific paper proves the hoped for link. For it finds exactly the opposite effect that we would hope for if it really was as simple as sticking better food into the little blighters.

I will make one prediction though. This paper will be used as absolute proof that it does work and as all the proof that is needed to ban vending machines, lock the pupils in so that they don\’t go off to the chippie, as \”proof\” that additives destroy young minds and that turkey twizzlers are child abuse.

Any and all of those things could be true and or necessary: but this paper doesn\’t prove them.

Why am I not surprised?

The number of independent schools judged to have breeched minimum standards set by the Government has trebled, new figures have revealed.

It\’s \”breached\”….we\’re talking about breaking, not giving birth. But examples of those rules being broken?

School cooks have not been formally trained in child protection.

Pupils and parents had not been supplied with details about how to complain to Ofsted about the school.

Parents were not made aware that they can request sight of a copy of the school\’s plan to meet the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 2002.

Hang them, hang them all.

Ritchie says that Big Business should pay for universities

Yes, he does.

Lecturers’ union UCU will call on the government to abolish all university tuition fees – and force big business to pick up the tab. The demand is made in a new report highlighting Britain’s status as one of the cheapest countries for firms to do business.

Currently British businesses only pay 28 per cent combined corporate income tax rate, the lowest rate in the G7 with the exception of Italy. UCU is demanding that tax be raised to the G7 average of 32.87 per cent, with the billions this would raise each year ploughed into education.

It says its proposals for a business education tax are the \”first coherent attempt at making business pay its way for the numerous benefits it gets from UK higher education,\” after years of neglect and underinvestment. Research by the union and left Labour pressure group Compass has revealed that higher education contributes £59 billion to the economy every year. Graduates are also more likely to cost less to the economy through more secure employment and be healthier, more active individuals, the union states.

UCU general secretary Sally Hunt pointed out that the proposed increase in corporation tax would still be lower than when the Tories were last in power.

\”Our proposals are based on fairness,\” she said. \”The future for the UK is as a high-skilled knowledge economy and that requires business to pay its fair share towards something which benefits us all,\” she said.

One of the problems with this is of course that old one about pipers and tunes.If we\’re going to insist that business pays then business clearly should be able to decide what the education is. The logic seems difficult to escape. UCU says business benefits from having graduates, therefore business should pay for creating graduates. If this is so then business should obviously only be paying for those graduates which benefit business.

Which might not be quite what the UCU would like to hear:

In a report, billed as a pre-election manifesto, the AGR said: “The introduction of a target to get 50 per cent of all under-30s into higher education by 2010 has driven down standards, devalued the currency of a degree and damaged the quality of the student university experience.

“Growing numbers of students are studying degree courses which lack rigour in below-average institutions.

“This does not help young people’s life chances or represent a good financial investment. It also creates problems for graduate employers who can no longer be sure what the value of certain degree courses and institutions is.

“The focus must shift back to quality rather than quantity, while the offering must adapt to meet the needs of a wider range of backgrounds and abilities.”

Business wants fewer, better graduates. And if they\’re going to be paying for it why shouldn\’t their desires be taken account of? Equally, if they\’re not going to be the people paying for it then the UCU is entirely at liberty to tell \’em to go piss up a rope.

But not both: you pay and by the way, here\’s what we want to provide, not what you want to pay for.