Month: January 2014

On Expectations

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Two very interesting pieces from the New York Times on the expectations we place on our young people, on those who educate and nurture them, and on our governments. The statistics and minutiae relate to the United States, but the underlying themes and sentiments are, I think, equally relevant to the United Kingdom.

The first is by Thomas Friedman, who lays bare two oft-neglected reasons why educational outcomes in the United States are falling behind those of other countries – the fact that American children are much less willing than they were even in recent decades to put in the work to achieve at high levels, and the fact that their parents demand too little (or demand the wrong things) of the schools to which they are sent. Friedman quotes Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s recent speech to the National Assessment Governing Board’s Education Summit for Parent Leaders:

In 2009, President Obama met with President Lee of South Korea and asked him about his biggest challenge in education. President Lee answered without hesitation: parents in South Korea were ‘too demanding.’ Even his poorest parents demanded a world-class education for their children, and he was having to spend millions of dollars each year to teach English to students in first grade, because his parents won’t let him wait until second grade. … I [wish] our biggest challenge here in the U.S. was too many parents demanding excellent schools.

Imagine that. It would be wonderful to face a problem such as that faced by South Korea here in Britain. A nation full of parents – of all socioeconomic groups – so anxious for their children to succeed, to learn foreign languages, to get ahead from day one, that not only do they actively help their children to succeed academically, but also punish politicians who are perceived to stand in the way of that progress. In Britain, it seems that almost the opposite has taken place – government has rushed with great eagerness to throw money at the education system, with spending doubling in a relatively short period of time, while parents sit back and expect the entire job to be done for them. And those parents who do take a particularly active interest are looked down on by the rest and labelled “pushy parents”, while supposedly serious think tanks propose charging the richer and more astute parents to send their children to the same state schools that other children attend for free.

Friedman asks the following question, one which he hopes President Obama will take up in his upcoming State of the Union address:

Are we falling behind as a country in education not just because we fail to recruit the smartest college students to become teachers or reform-resistant teachers’ unions, but because of our culture today: too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?

Ultimately, it is not all about government. It isn’t all about paying our taxes and sitting back and expecting the rest to fall into place automatically. It is difficult in Britain, because the tax burden is so heavy and the state so large that it is almost right to expect miraculous things from the government in all areas. But as a nation I believe we urgently need to dis-enthrall ourselves from the idea that government spending and government policy are the only lever available to improve educational outcomes.

He may have many powers, but he can't make your kids smarter.
He may have many powers, but he can’t make your kids smarter.

A revolution in personal responsibility and self-motivation would go such a long way. But who will have the courage to lead such a revolution, when the Conservative-led government, supposedly the champions of individual liberty and personal responsibility, is more inclined to protect parents from the potential consequences of their lazy parenting by erecting a pornography filter on the internet than to risk offending them by suggesting that they are derelict in allowing television and the internet to raise their children unsupervised?

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The second article is depressing in quite another way, and concerns parents who suspect that their child might be gifted. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes that an analysis of Google searches reveals that parents in the United States are much more likely to suspect their sons of being intellectually gifted than their daughters, and are more likely to worry about the weight of their daughters than their sons. In other words, even if children were to be magically shielded from the weight of expectations and stereotypes in society at large, some of the most pervasive and damaging ones – that girls should be pretty and slim, and boys intelligent – originate from much closer to home.

To wit:

Start with intelligence. It’s hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited at the thought that their child may be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting “Is my 2-year-old,” the most common next word is “gifted.” But this question is not asked equally about young boys and young girls. Parents are two and a half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like, “Is my son a genius?”

And this:

What concerns do parents disproportionately have for their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a child’s weight. Parents Google “Is my daughter overweight?” roughly twice as frequently as they Google “Is my son overweight?” Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 30 percent of girls are overweight, while 33 percent of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see — or worry about — overweight girls much more often than overweight boys.

Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same. Google search data also tell us that mothers and fathers are more likely to wonder whether their daughter is “beautiful” or “ugly.”

If she's gifted then that's a bonus, but the real question is whether or not she is overweight.
If she’s gifted then that’s a bonus, but the real question is whether or not she is overweight.

Apparently these biases transcend socioeconomic group and political affiliation, and so the results cannot be neatly explained away along these lines.

While I probably should not be surprised at these findings, they still make for fairly sobering reading. Stephens-Davidowitz wonders whether there might be a measurable change in the statistics once a woman is elected president and that the eyes of the holdouts might then finally be opened to the intellectual equality of women, but I fear that just as the Obama presidency failed to usher in the post-racial American era, so the first woman president will struggle to overcome the inertia of this weight of expectation.

Two pieces on expectations. The expectations we hold for ourselves, our children and our government. Some food for thought as the weekend draws to a close.

Iain Duncan Smith Swings And Misses

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Iain Duncan Smith 2

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Four years of painstaking research have finally revealed the gaping black hole in Britain’s finances, the reason why the British state has grown so large and expensive yet manages to achieve such mediocre outcomes in so many areas.

No, it wasn’t throwing ever larger sums of money at the same inefficient education and healthcare delivery models. Nothing to do with a rigid retirement age at a time of ever increasing life expectancy. It turns out that the problem was providing multilingual access to benefit claim forms, and translating services to immigrants who lack fluent English. Armed with this knowledge, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions secretary, has drafted a clever scheme to fix everything.

The Daily Mail, for whose readers this policy was so transparently and cravenly crafted, summarises it thus:

In a radical bid to slash Britain’s benefits bill, the Prime Minister intends to stop printing welfare paperwork in foreign languages and prevent claimants using taxpayer-funded translators at benefits offices.

The move – which would also hit British residents who cannot speak English – was due to be announced tomorrow, but has been delayed following a row with Nick Clegg.

Tories hope that axeing foreign-language versions of documents explaining how to claim benefits would make it harder for immigrants such as newly arrived Romanians and Bulgarians to cash in on the UK’s benefits system, encourage others already here to learn English – and save money spent on translators.

Anyone who thinks that taking this action will slash Britain’s annual welfare bill needs to go away, look at the figures and then maintain a long period of dignified silence. Social security spending (pensions and benefits) will cost Britain £256 billion in 2014. How much of that vast sum do people really think goes toward printing forms in multiple language and hiring translators? Who, exactly, is the Work and Pensions secretary trying to fool?

Just use Google Translator
Just use Google Translator, that will save some cash.

 

If you want to do the things that IDS proposes to save some money around the edges then that’s one thing, but to enact them and claim that it will “slash the welfare bill” is misleading and disingenuous. Iain Duncan Smith is a talented minister with otherwise good ideas, and it is discouraging to see him wasting his efforts proposing ideas such as this when he knows full well that they will go nowhere towards solving our fiscal problems.

Of course, there are doubtless some lazy immigrants who are perfectly capable of learning English sufficiently well to be able to function independently, and yet who choose not to do so for one reason or another. Where this refusal is rooted in a stubborn unwillingness to integrate into British society and desire to remain part of an insular and closed community, this is a particular cause for concern, because integrating new immigrants effectively into our country is vital for social, law and order and national security reasons. But threatening to cut benefits from immigrant claimants is highly unlikely to either solve the problem of people persistently failing to learn English or dramatically cut the welfare bill.

If the Tories’ concern about new immigrants struggling to integrate into British society is genuine, then they should propose some positive ideas to help promote inclusion and cohesion, and suggest ways to make it easier for new arrivals to learn their new native language. There should be some carrot (even if the incentive is of the cheapest kind, such as pointing people in the direction of existing English courses at local colleges and institutions) as well as the stick of cutting off access to benefits. If they are not seen to tackle the problem from both ends, many people (myself included) will suspect them of cynical motives.

And cynical they are. This is a proposal designed entirely to grab headlines, but more worryingly than that, it is a proposal designed to win the approval of the Daily Mail. If the Conservative party is really gearing up for 2015 general election mode by pandering to the prejudices of their base rather than reaching out to those whose instincts are to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat (who are likely to roll their eyes at policy announcements such as this) then there is grave cause for concern at their electoral prospects.

All is not yet lost – the Conservative Party has recently shown some signs of attempting to reach out beyond their core supporters. But, as so often, we see these small steps forward immediately neutralised by the two steps back of the let’s-bash-the-immigrants rhetoric. Shedding the label of the “nasty party” is not helped by policy proposals such as this.

The sardonic response from the Liberal Democrats puts it best:

“These are proposals from the Tories which haven’t been agreed in Government,” [the LibDem source] said.

“We’ve already taken significant steps to make sure we all enjoy the right to move and to work, but not a freedom to claim.

“We will look at these proposals, but would prefer the Tories to agree policies in Government rather than chase Ukip’s tail via the Sunday papers.”

The Conservatives would do well to heed this particular pearl of wisdom from their inexperienced junior coalition partners.

Making The Rich Pay Twice

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

We recently saw the Labour Party make some potentially sensible proposals on education – moving to enhance the status of teachers by simultaneously licensing them and requiring them to undertake continual professional accreditation, and making it easier to fire consistently underperforming teachers and helping them transition out of the profession.

Contrast this good news of the Labour Party embracing a carrot-and-stick performance-based approach to educational reform, with this dismal, tired suggestion from Social Market Foundation. The Guardian reports the details of their latest proposal:

One proposal would see popular state schools being means tested, with the most affluent parents being charged for their children to attend top schools.

Families earning more than £80,000 a year should contribute financially, with those with an annual income above £200,000 having to pay the full price of their children’s education at the best state schools. Fees should be the same for the wealthy as those charged at independent day schools.

This “parent premium” for households earning more than £200,000 a year would generate surplus funds, a quarter of which would be retained by the school, with the rest redistributed among other state schools.

We can lump this nonsensical idea together with all of the other vengeful “clobber the rich” schemes broached by those on the left to create a fairly accurate picture of their ideal Britain. In their Ideal Britain, anyone earning much over £150,000 a year would be subject to a 50% marginal tax rate on their income. And when they reached £200,000 a year, a household wanting to send their children to a “popular state school” would have to pay a school fee in line with the fees charged by private day schools, because why the hell not?

Meaningless graphic for a nonsensical policy.
Meaningless graphic for a nonsensical policy.

Implementing this policy would likely cause a fair bit of bemusement and anger among the evil rich fat cats being targeted, as they rightly assume that the hefty taxes that they pay entitle them to equal access to the state services that they help to fund. If, when a household has paid well over half of their income to the government once income tax, national insurance, other direct taxes and VAT are taken into account, I don’t think it is very unreasonable to assume that they have contributed enough and maybe give them a break. But not according to the Social Market Foundation. Having gone through the fiscal wringer once already, SMF sees them ripe for further punitive action, charging them for access to the good state schools that they are already paying to fund.

What next? Means testing access to NHS services? Charging for chemotherapy or kidney transplants? Where does this end?

In fact, the SMF proposal would create the bizarre and perverse financial incentive for parents to send their child to a “less good” or less popular state school so as to avoid spending up to £30,000 a year in fees. Their children might suffer as a result, but perhaps those who advocate for ideas such as this would see that as a good thing. By dragging down the progeny of the rich and successful, we create the more equal, mediocre society that they long for.

This is regressive social engineering of the worst kind, dragging down the successful and clobbering them for more money, funds which would be used for the nebulous purpose of “helping the less fortunate”. As always, the methods of taking from the rich and successful are very enthusiastically and clearly articulated, but the process by which those seized funds would be translated directly into helping the less fortunate is much more vague.

The long and short of it is this. I may greatly disagree with the current heavy tax burden, and the huge, creaking behemoth state that it funds, but I also recognise that it is the concept of everyone paying in and everyone being eligible to partake of the results that helps to create social cohesion and makes us a country rather than a bunch of economic agents who happen to live on the same island. Charging richer parents to send their children to schools that they have already paid taxes to provide – indeed, closing off access to any public services from the wealthy people who provide the lions share of the funding for them – only serves to further entrench the us vs. them atmosphere already roiling our country, but this time would give the rich some ammunition to justifiably argue their corner.

Spending on education increased from £40.6 billion in 1999 to £88.6 billion in 2014, and is estimated to rise further to £90.9 billion in 2016. If British educational standards are indeed stagnating or worsening, chronic underinvestment does not make a convincing scapegoat. Making rich people pay market rates to avail themselves of the public services that they have already funded through their taxes would no doubt fulfill many of the darker, more insidious desires of some on the left. But one thing that it would certainly not do is fix our educational problems.

Cityscapes – 18 January, 2014

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

abbeyroad

Abbey Road, London.

Tourists and Beatles fans waiting to cross the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios, St. John’s Wood. Taken from the top of the 139 bus.