Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, did not even try to hide his irritation.
On the day the GCSE results were released last month, he lashed out at those
who would claim that the exams were being dumbed down. "It is
class-based elitism that instinctively wants to ration success and cap the
aspirations of the less advantaged," he wrote. "The underlying
premise is that there is a fixed pool of talent in society."
And then came this breathtaking assertion: "There is no genetic or moral
reason why the whole of society should not succeed to the degree that the
children of the professional classes do today, virtually all getting five or
more good GCSEs and staying on in education beyond 16."
Adonis, like almost all politicians left or right in the United States or
Britain, is an educational romantic, insisting that all children (bar a few
with severe handicaps) can succeed on the academic track if schools do their
job.
However, he is wrong. There are both genetic and moral reasons that children
of the professional classes come out on top.
Let's start with the simple truth that many children are just not gifted
enough to learn to do academic tasks at more than a rudimentary level, and
schools can tweak their performance only at the margins. That would be
uncontroversial if it described any accomplishment but an intellectual one.
Suppose I had said that many children are just not athletically gifted
enough to learn how to do a somersault with a half twist off the pommel
horse, no matter how hard they try.
It's obviously true. To be below average in any ability is to be quite limited
in the things one can do - and, ineluctably, half of us are below average in
every ability. When it comes to reading and maths, many children are just
not gifted enough to understand text with big words and complicated syntax,
and many are just not gifted enough to factor an equation. This is no more
remarkable than being limited in the things one can do in sport or music.
And yet to say such things in public is to invite shock and ridicule. The
educational romantics will pummel you with four objections: 1) when children
are below average we can raise their ability; 2) the schools are so bad that
children at all levels of ability can learn much more than they are learning
now; 3) the rising test scores of the past decade prove that big
improvements are possible; and 4) there's no reason why the high educational
achievement of children of the professional classes cannot be achieved by
all classes.
Let's take each in turn. Do we know how to raise academic ability through
interventions? I will use exhaustive American data for the answer: the best
we can do is to nudge academic ability by a small increment, and even that
much is difficult and uncertain.
Attempts to raise academic ability have focused on the pre-school years, on
the assumption that this is the period when the brain and personality are
most malleable. Two decades ago a US academic group called the Consortium
for Longitudinal Studies conducted an analysis of 11 of the best pre-school
interventions and found they produced an average short-term gain of about
seven IQ points relative to a control group, which fell off to a trivial
three IQ points after three years - and to nothing in the final follow-up.
The consortium's bottom line was that "the effect of early education on
intelligence test scores was not permanent".
Since then there have been other attempts using intensive pre-school
interventions, notably the Abecedarian project in North Carolina and
Columbia University's infant health and development programme. They shared a
common fate - large gains in the early years then fading out to
insignificance by adolescence.
The bottom line: at best we can move children from far below average
intellectually to somewhat less below average. Nobody claims (with data that
survive examination) that any project anywhere has proved more than that.
Never mind, say the educational romantics. The schools are so bad that even
low-ability students can learn a lot more than they do now. And it's true
that the worst inner-city schools, in which nothing is taught, can of course
do much better. But the vast majority of schools are ordinary rather than
terrible. How much can an ordinary British school do to raise the academic
performance of its students?
If the question is framed in terms of teaching them factual material about
history, politics, science and the arts, the increases in learning across
the board can be dramatic. But if the question is about reading and maths,
the answer is that the quality of the school makes surprisingly little
difference.
This counterintuitive result was first exposed in the United States in 1966,
with the publication of the Coleman report. To everyone's shock, the study -
whose sample included 645,000 students - found that the quality of schools
explained almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Measures
such as the credentials of the teachers, the extensiveness of physical
facilities, money spent per student - none of the things people assumed to
be important in explaining educational achievement was important in fact.
Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining
student achievement. And the collection of new data over many years
continues to support that core finding: the quality of schools just doesn't
make much difference in mean student test scores.
The educational romantics have an answer for that too: such results merely
show how terrible all the schools are by comparison with what they could be.
To fix the problem, the left advocates innovative teaching techniques and
curriculums. The right advocates greater use of vouchers and other methods
of privatising the schools.
Once again the United States has voluminous data for assessing the success of
both strategies. What they reveal is that no model of school reform tried in
America has demonstrated, with evidence that withstands scientific scrutiny,
the kind of dramatic impact on academic performance that the educational
romantics say is possible.
Does the British experience of the past decade refute me? When it came to
power in 1997, the Labour government set out to achieve ambitious increases
in test scores, and it succeeded. Key stage 2, key stage 3 and GCSE scores
all bear witness to this achievement.
I haven't the space to present the substantial technical evidence that
teaching to the test, and dumbing down of test content, explain these
increases. Put those two issues aside and consider the results whenever
British students have been tested by people who are not connected with the
government.
The Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University has
conducted studies and found a meaningless one-point increase in
primary-school reading scores between 1997 and 2002, the same years when the
government was pointing with pride to substantial increases in its test
scores.
The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, a sophisticated and
rigorous testing survey covering large samples from 40 countries, showed a
statistically significant decline (yes, decline) in reading scores among
British nine-year-olds during 2001-6 - years when the key stage 2 results
continued to show improvement.
There is some good news in the independently assessed maths scores: British
nine-year-olds showed a significant increase. But maths in the early years
is based on simple concepts that almost all children should be able to
learn. Then, when mathematics moves to the abstractions of algebra and the
logic of geometry, large numbers of children fall by the wayside - they are
just not clever enough in logical-mathematical ability to keep up. That's
why a test at the age of nine can show improvement while a test at 13 does
not.
By the time children reach their teens a third of them at least - arguably
more - should not be on a continuing academic track. By the end of secondary
school that proportion is around 80% or 90%.
The last refuge of the educational romantics is the extremely high proportion
of children of the professional classes who do well in school. Surely that
must be explained by affluence and access to the best schools? That brings
us to the genetic and moral reasons, along with environmental ones, that
need to be confronted.
The genetic reason is that IQ, which is nearly coincident with academic
ability as I defined it, has been proved to be somewhere around 40%-60%
heritable. The second is that people in the professional classes -
barristers, physicians, engineers and so on - are, on average, far above the
rest of the population in IQ. That's an empirical reality, however
politically incorrect it may be to say it.
Studies of the relationship of tested IQ to career success also indicate that
the overwhelming majority of successful business executives are well above
average in IQ. So when a man and woman in the professional classes set out
to have a baby it is extremely likely that at least one gene contributor has
a high IQ.
When we turn to the 40%-60% of IQ that is environmental, children of the
professional classes also have an advantage, but little of it has to do with
money. Reading bedtime stories to toddlers every night does not cost money -
but such behaviour goes from "almost universal" to "uncommon"
as social class goes from top to bottom. To refrain from smoking, alcohol
and drugs during pregnancy costs no money, but such restraint is once again
correlated with social class.
Another empirical finding raises one of the moral issues that Adonis ignores.
Children do best when raised by married biological parents. Children raised
by a divorced mother do next best (whether she remarries doesn't make much
difference). Children raised by an unmarried mother do worst of all.
Let me emphasise that these results are found after controlling for a host of
socioeconomic background variables. Poor and rich children alike benefit
from growing up with both biological parents and suffer from being born to a
lone mother.
The advantages of growing up with biological parents do not include higher
academic ability, but they do include all sorts of other advantages that
affect success in school. Children raised by both parents are more likely to
grow up psychologically healthy, accustomed to a regular routine and self
disciplined than children who grow up with unmarried mothers (again, even
after controlling for socioeconomic variables).
They are more likely to have someone watching over their homework and noticing
if there are problems at school. And another of those empirically undeniable
but unfashionable facts is that lone parenthood is concentrated in the
lowest socioeconomic levels of British society.
Nobody wants to be the person who says "Bah, humbug" to attempts to
improve the education of children who have got the short end of the stick.
The impulse to romanticism is overwhelming, but it has led us to treat
children who are not suited for the academic track in ways that are not in
their best interests.
It is time to recognise that even the best schools cannot overcome the limits
on achievement set by limits on academic ability. This is not a counsel of
despair. The implication is not to stop trying to help but to remove the
ideological blinkers and stop pretending that all children can or should
pursue the academic track.
This does not require a return to the 11-plus system or any other rigid
sorting of children into bins. Rather it requires us to adopt a healthy and
attainable goal: to take advantage of the abilities that children possess,
whatever they may be, and bring children to adulthood having discovered
things they enjoy doing and having learnt how to do them well.
A longer version of this piece appears in the October issue of Standpoint
magazine
