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1.
Published indicators of school ‘performance’, such as those shown annually in league tables in England, have been controversial since their inception. Raw‐score figures for school outcomes are heavily dependent on the prior attainment and family background of the students. Policy‐makers in Wales have reacted to this fundamental flaw by withdrawing the publication of school results. In England, on the other hand, they have reacted by asking for more information to be added to tables, in the form of student context such as the percentage with a special educational need, and ‘value‐added’ figures. In 2004, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) value‐added figures for England were based on student progress from Key Stage 2 at the end of primary education to GCSE at the end of compulsory secondary education. For 2005, at time of writing, the DfES plan to use context information in their model as well. This paper re‐analyses the 2004 value‐added figures and shows that they contain the same flaw as the original raw‐score tables. The purported value‐added scores turn out to be a proxy for the overall level of attainment in the school, and almost entirely independent of any differential progress made by the students. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings, if accepted, for policies based on identifying schools that are clearly more or less effective, and for the field of school effectiveness and improvement research.  相似文献   

2.
Launched in January 2010, the MySchool.edu.au website, which ranks and compares schools on the basis of standardised literacy and numeracy tests, has been the subject of intense media coverage. This article examines 34 editorials focused on MySchool, published from October 2009 to August 2010, and identifies three key narratives in operation, those of distrust, choice and performance. It argues that these narratives work together to reinforce and promote neoliberal educational discourses at the heart of what Michael Apple has termed the ‘conservative modernisation’ of education and other social services. Together, the dominant narratives position MySchool and the ensuing newspaper-generated and published league tables as the solution to problems of poor performance, ‘bad’ schools and ‘bad’ teachers in the face of times characterised by self-interested teachers and governments keen to shirk their responsibility in the education arena.  相似文献   

3.
Since 1992, the UK Government has published so‐called ‘school league tables’ summarising the average General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) ‘attainment’ and ‘progress’ made by pupils in each state‐funded secondary school in England. While the headline measure of school attainment has remained the percentage of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs, the headline measure of school progress has changed from ‘value‐added’ (2002–2005) to ‘contextual value‐added’ (2006–2010) to ‘expected progress’ (2011–2015) to ‘progress 8’ (2016–). This paper charts this evolution with a critical eye. First, we describe the headline measures of school progress. Second, we question the Government's justifications for scrapping contextual value‐added. Third, we argue that the current expected progress measure suffers from fundamental design flaws. Fourth, we examine the stability of school rankings across contextual value‐added and expected progress. Fifth, we discuss the extent to which progress 8 will address the weaknesses of expected progress. We conclude that all these progress measures and school league tables more generally should be viewed with far more scepticism and interpreted far more cautiously than they have often been to date.  相似文献   

4.
5.
Cultures of performativity in English primary schools refer to systems and relationships of: target‐setting; Ofsted inspections; school league tables constructed from pupil test scores; performance management; performance related pay; threshold assessment; and advanced skills teachers. Systems which demand that teachers ‘perform’ and in which individuals are made accountable. These policy measures, introduced to improve levels of achievement and increased international economic competitiveness, have, potentially, profound implications for the meaning and experience of primary teachers’ work; their identities; their commitment to teaching; and how they view their careers. At the same time as policies of performativity are being implemented there is now increasing advocacy for the adoption and advancement of ‘creativity’ policies within primary education. These major developments are being introduced in the context of a wide range of social/educational policies also aimed at the introduction of creativity initiatives into schools and teaching. This complex policy context has major implications for the implementation process and also primary teachers’ work and how they experience it. The ethnographic research reported in this article has been conducted over a school year in six English primary schools in order to analyse the effects of creativity and performativity policy initiatives at the implementation stage. The article concludes by arguing that in the schools of our research the drive to raise pupil test scores involves both performative and creative strategies and that this critical mediation goes beyond amelioration toward a more complex view of professional practice. Implementing creativity and performativity policies provided important contextual influencing factors on teacher commitment. These were: curriculum coverage and task completion; and providing psychic rewards of teaching.  相似文献   

6.
International large-scale student assessments (ILSAs) in education represent a valuable source of information for policy-makers, not only on student achievements, but also on their relationship with different contextual factors. The results are partly described in the official studies’ reports; more can be derived from the publicly released data sets. However, league tables are often the only evidence used in policy debates and decisions on education. Indeed, the comparison of student achievement across the participating educational systems is a legitimate proxy for estimating countries’ development and productivity, but the use of league tables more often turns into ‘horse-ranking’, ignoring the contexts of teaching and learning. This is often supported by the media, turning the use of results into their abuse. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use and misuse of league tables in reporting ILSA results, vs. the use of data for in-depth analysis in order to make informed decisions.  相似文献   

7.
This article analyses a Chinese approach to social justice in education using the example of Shanghai. In addressing schooling inequalities, Shanghai illustrates social justice education with Chinese characteristics, which revolves around the ideal of ‘educational balance’ (jiaoyu junheng). The ‘balance’ in question is about achieving a values-centred and all-round education in and across all schools through the cultivation of a school’s ‘inner quality’ (neihan). This Chinese formulation of social justice education is manifested through two representative policy measures: creating and strengthening ‘new high-quality schools’ and helping weak schools to level up. The Chinese characteristics of these action plans are seen in two ways: a focus on social justice between schools rather than between students; and an emphasis on the moral cultivation of students. It is argued that a Chinese model of social justice education promotes educational equity to some extent through the politics of redistribution, recognition and representation. However, a major critique is its hegemonic and top-down nature, which overlooks alternative and competitive voices—especially those of migrant children—as part of a politics of representation.  相似文献   

8.
While the publication of school league tables is prohibited by law in Ireland, the publication of data categorising university placements achieved per school has become common practice. A central argument advanced in this endeavour includes the provision of information for parents. The views of parents on this issue have, until now, not been explored in Ireland. The current paper outlines the findings of a national survey of 1915 parents on the publication of school league tables. The findings of this research highlight a widespread rejection of the practice. Concerns surrounding the narrowing of educational experience, the intensification of performance pressures and the rise of elitism in schools were noted. Calls for greater teacher accountability were also noted and deemed to transcend the publication of school league tables.  相似文献   

9.
Lesley Vidovich 《Compare》2004,34(4):443-461
The primary focus of this paper is two case study schools, one in Singapore and one in Australia, which have both been actively pursuing an agenda to build a unique internationally‐oriented curriculum, in a context of globalization, but also within the constraints set by national/State curriculum frameworks, examinations and league tables. Interviews were used to collect data in each school, and then cross‐case analysis was conducted to reveal both similarities and differences in the way the two schools are moving towards internationalizing their curriculum. Emergent meta‐level conceptual themes around policy for ‘internationalization’ of the curriculum are discussed: enablers and constraints; the issue of whether such internationalization fosters a market ideology; changing power relationships; and the relevance of distinctions between internationalization and globalization. The paper concludes by pointing to the contribution of the ‘sociology of knowledge’ and ‘critical policy analysis’ in disrupting the potentially hegemonic economic discourses associated with internationalizing the curriculum.  相似文献   

10.
League tables of universities that measure performance in various ways are now commonplace, with numerous bodies providing their own rankings of how institutions throughout the world are seen to be performing on a range of metrics. This paper uses Lyotard's notion of language games to theorise that universities are regaining some power over being placed on league tables by creating narratives that manipulate their rankings to promote their own strengths. This paper examines the findings of a study involving university responses to global rankings throughout 2016 produced by two major ranking bodies, Times Higher Education and QS Top Universities. The existing literature has established that ranking tables can be used as a vehicle for humiliation and can produce terrors for all those involved. Thus, the significance of this study's findings is in new ways of theorising university responses to appearing on league tables at a time when academia is a high‐stakes activity where institutions’ abilities are measured and reported on at a global scale.  相似文献   

11.
Universalism in philosophy, argue Penny Enslin and Mary Tjiattas, tends to be regarded as an affront to particular affiliations, an act of injustice by misrecognition. While agreeing with criticisms of some expressions of universalism, they take the view that anti‐universalism has become an orthodoxy that deflects attention from pressing issues of global injustice in education. In different ways, recent reformulations of universalism accommodate particularity and claims for recognition. Defending a qualified universalism, they argue, through a discussion of the Education for All campaign, that the present focus on recognition should be widened to address redistribution and representation as elements of global justice in education. In her response to Enslin and Tjiattas, Sharon Todd expresses sympathy for their aspiration towards a ‘qualified universalism’, but she seeks to go beyond the dichotomy of universalism versus anti‐universalism by way of a discussion of aspects of the work of Judith Butler. Butler's emphasis on cultural translation offers a way, it is claimed, to think about the universal that transcends the oppositional relation between culture and commitment to universals. In the light of this she advocates an approach that involves neither universalism nor anti‐universalism but ‘critique of universality’. Thus, the task of translation, on Butler's account, prevents universality from being a standard or home‐base from which we can judge the world and turns it instead into an ongoing struggle for intelligibility. In their rejoinder, Enslin and Tjiattas reject any charge that their own account has fallen into a simple dichotomisation of universalism and anti‐universalism, and reaffirm their commitment to a form of universalism in which (a) partial or contextual considerations count in ethical deliberations, and (b) values and principles are subject to reflexive renegotiation in democratic deliberations, which provides the means of their justification and the source of their legitimacy. This yields, they claim, a non‐standard form of contractualism that is both culturally sensitive and open‐ended. They suggest in conclusion that the debate between themselves and Todd raises questions about whether the analytical and continental traditions can concede one another's place in the philosophy of education.  相似文献   

12.
The Times has been a pioneer in the publication of university league tables in the United Kingdom as an aid to the application process for young people seeking to select the most appropriate course programmes and institutions. It published its unified league table for the first time in 1993. The Times Higher Education Supplement, a weekly newspaper under the same ownership, has complemented The Times operation by publishing simultaneously the data on which The Times ranking is based. These data are intended specifically for consumption by a readership drawn from among academics and administrators in the universities and other higher education institutions of the country. The underlying philosophy of The Times/The Times Higher Education Supplement operation is to reflect the greatest degree of objectivity using publicly available and verifiable data as proxies for measures of performance across a range of criteria. The methodology is subject to continuous review in consultation with the universities.  相似文献   

13.
Patterns of participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, as elsewhere, have been marked by social inequalities for decades. UK Governments have responded with a plethora of policies and agendas aimed at addressing this broad social issue. However, little is known about how higher education institutions (HEIs) interpret and ‘enact’ these policies in relation to institution-specific contexts. Drawing on concepts from policy sociology this paper examines how HEIs in one nation state, Wales, enact its Government’s policy on ‘widening access’ to higher education. Interviews with a range of ‘policy actors’ along with analyses of institutional ‘widening access’ policy documents, reveal divergences between HEIs in how this policy agenda is interpreted and delivered. These differences reflect institution-specific contexts – not least their internal politics and assumptions about the type of students they admit, but also their interests and priorities in relation to their positions within a global, marketised, HE system. The implications of this for the reproduction of university hierarchies in the UK, as well as social inequalities more generally are brought to the fore.  相似文献   

14.
Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and quality across the board, however, we argue that performance-based funding systems naturalise longstanding structurally determined inequalities between institutions by recasting national higher education systems as competitive institutional meritocracies in which institutional inequalities are redefined as objective indicators of intrinsic ‘merit’ or worth. We illustrate how performance-based university funding systems naturalise pre-existing inequalities between universities drawing on the case of Italy, a country characterised by longstanding inequalities between its northern and southern regions which demonstrably impact on the apparent ‘performance’ of universities. The concept of institutional meritocracy captures the illusory nature of this performance game.  相似文献   

15.
16.
This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education (HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use Bernstein’s model of pedagogic rights and Fraser’s model of social justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice. Referring to recent student protests in South Africa, we show the extent of student anger and frustration at the misrecognition they experience due to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies at postcolonial universities. The article is an attempt to respond to students’ calls about ‘black pain’, ‘black debt’ and for the ‘decolonisation’ of South African universities. In particular, we focus on theories of recognition and how these are being played out in the current South African HE context. Our aim is not to critique student politics, but to understand the position and heed the cry of the subaltern student. We deliberate on what an adequate response, framed within a model of pedagogic rights, might be from those who teach in and manage universities. We note some impediments to implementing this response and conclude by asserting the importance of working with a politics of recognition and representation as well as redistribution.  相似文献   

17.
This article addresses the policy implications of participation in international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), particularly the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the ways in which such implications might influence mathematics education. Taking Norway as a special case, this discussion focuses on insights into teaching, learning and assessment practices that can be inferred from the PISA study, and how participation in ILSAs has contributed to educational policy and even changed policymakers’ perspectives on schools, teachers and students. Following publication of the PISA 2000 results, Norway experienced a ‘PISA shock’, leading to the implementation of a national quality assessment system and national tests. In addition, changes were made to the mathematics curriculum for compulsory school and to mathematics teacher education. More recently, public debate has focused less on rank and league tables, shifting instead to the high number of low-achieving students and the low number of high achievers. Moreover, there has been little uptake of policy advice provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which focuses on strengthening accountability measures. Furthermore, although the Norwegian educational system in the past decade has undergone a decentralisation process, the educational system still follows the Nordic model, which focuses on equity and ‘education for all’. Analyses of the Norwegian case indicate that policymaking takes place in highly cultural contexts, and that international studies might be used merely to validate existing policy directions.  相似文献   

18.
In the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, ways of thinking in the Western world transformed in fundamental ways; even words that remained the same took on new meanings. In the field of the history of ideas, the period 1700–1850 is also called the ‘saddle‐period’. Philosophers of history have argued that the new basic concepts that emerged at this time indicate how social reality has come to be comprehended in the modern era. Various segments of the population relied on them to act, understand, interpret and reform reality. These concepts are crucial to the discursive constitution of the world—in the economy, politics, science, art, education and so on. They play their part in the dissolution of the ‘old’ world and the emergence of a ‘new’ one. They can thus also be studied with regard to their functioning as both factors in and indicators of evolutionary processes. This article deals with a small aspect of the historical co‐evolution of concepts and structures in education. It examines the non‐random character of the variations in the discourses on the social function of education, especially in the eighteenth century.  相似文献   

19.
This paper illustrates how critical use of Basil Bernstein's theory illuminates the mechanisms by which university knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy both reproduce and interrupt social inequalities. To this end, empirical examples are selected from the findings of the ESRC-funded project ‘Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees' (RES-062-23-1438, November 2008–January 2012). The project investigated sociology-related social science degrees in four social science departments in universities in different positions in influential UK higher education league tables. A Bernsteinian lens throws fresh light on how university education might contribute to a more egalitarian society.  相似文献   

20.
This paper explores constructions of the ‘new’ university student in the context of UK government policy to widen participation in higher education. New Labour discourse stresses the benefits of widening participation for both individuals and society, although increasing the levels of participation of students from groups who have not traditionally entered university has been accompanied by a discourse of ‘dumbing down’ and lowering standards. The paper draws on an ongoing longitudinal study of undergraduate students in a post–1992 inner‐city university in the UK to examine students' constructions of their experiences and identities in the context of public discourses of the ‘new’ higher education student. Many of the participants in this study would be regarded as ‘non‐traditional’ students, i.e. those students who are the focus of widening participation policy initiatives. As Reay et al. (2002) discovered, for many ‘non‐traditional’ students studying in higher education is characterized by ‘struggle’, something that also emerged as an important theme in this research. The paper examines the ways in which these new student identities both echo the New Labour dream of widening participation and yet continue to reflect and re‐construct classed and other identities and inequalities.  相似文献   

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