In campaigning for the State election John Brumby racked his brains wondering what he could promise for the state education system and, at some cost, came up with . . . school camps. Can’t say I thought it was the most important thing that could be done with a few additional millions of dollars in education, but what would I know?

School camps are all the rage in Australia’s private schools, or at least Victoria’s ones. They raise equity problems at state schools because they’re expensive. Not so much of a problem at the more expensive end of the private school market. Indeed some schools have you spending literally over a thousand dollars on carefully prescribed camping kit.

Of course if kids want to go on these things that’s well and good.  But lots of kids don’t.  But there seems to be a strong consensus in schools that these exercises are Very Good. So much so that some schools actually spend a term or a year in semi-camp conditions – although obviously for that period of time it’s a cross between a camp and a boarding school. This also seems to be growing in popularity.  I recall Prince Charles going to Timbertop, but now there are quite a few similar operations.

I heard the Principal of one Melbourne girls school say that their year 9 exercise where all the girls go away for the entire year really matures the girls. I’ve also heard of horror stories in which eating disorders surge and bullying reaches new heights.

Anyway, as you know Troppo shares virtually all of its basic philosophies with Fox News, most particularly our commitment to open and honest deliberation. In what may (but almost certainly wont’) become a series of such posts, we ask . . . . What do you think (Oh Troppodillians)?

Here is a guest post by Avi Waksberg. NG

Should we pay teachers performance bonuses for teachers based on standardised testing of their pupils? The teachers I’ve spoken to about this have invariably argued that it encourages them to ‘teach to the test’ whilst neglecting hard to test skills. In contrast, most economists I’ve spoken with favour some kind of ‘merit pay’, often raising promising examples from Israel (Lavy 2004) or Colorado (see de Grow 2007). However, imposing performance-based compensation upon hostile teachers seems a good way to ensure the approach does not work. (Chait 2007).

I am confident that people respond to incentives. However, teaching is difficult to quantify, complex and multidimensional. These are job characteristics that Dixit (2002) found tend to make performance pay less likely to be used. This leads to a situation where we focus on simplified metrics. But if incentives are not well targeted or the desired outcome accurately measured, then the response will be to overly focus on those aspects that are measured at the expense of other responsibilities. This is what underlies the complaint that teachers would be encouraged to ‘teach to the test’.

Moreover, there is no consensus on what constitutes teaching excellence. Is a teacher supposed to maximise: grades, enthusiasm for learning, clear thinking, university entrance, lifetime income, or life satisfaction? Goldhaber (2009) argued that while we may know little about how to objectively and accurately quantify teacher productivity, this problem is surmountable using merit pay programs with several evaluation components (such as Principal or peer evaluation, school-wide analysis, professional development and incentives for hard-to-fill skills and positions). However, any form of merit pay would still require the support of teachers, schools and administrators. Successful programs often emphasize collaboration and improvement rather than dividing teachers into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.

I have a suggestion that, while incentive-based, seems to have registered a more positive response from teachers I have interviewed. Instead of rewards based on test results, I suggest offering prizes to teachers for posting excellent lesson plans to password-protected teachers’ forums (such as the Ultranet that is used in Victoria). This would potentially have the added advantage of encouraging a sense of sharing and collegiality among teachers, whilst not making them feel under-appreciated and judged in the way that bonuses based on testing can. If only teachers who are logged into secure forums can download the lesson plans, then it would be easy to simply record unique downloads (i.e. the number of downloads from different teacher logins as opposed to total number of downloads) and offer rewards to teachers for the most downloaded lesson plans in each year and subject. This approach has the advantage of addressing the tricky problem: what quantifies good teaching? In essence, we let the people who are best qualified to answer, the teachers themselves, decide what represents the best in their field.

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I have written a few posts about education.  But I’d not seen this presentation by Conrad Wolfram – brother of someone who may be one of the intellectual giants of our time – Stephen. (Since Stephen is a good deal older – born in 1959 with Conrad born in 1970 – perhaps one might call Conrad “Wolfram Beta”, but I digress).

Anyway, Conrad’s TED talk is very well worth watching. His case is simple and compelling. I couldn’t agree more.  It’s kind of tantalising, frustrating to have something so obvious within our intellectual grasp and yet to be so far off in terms of realisation, so far off because the workplace is a mass of routines. Even small routines can be difficult to break but usually they come in numbers which form a thicket which somehow kills off its enemies which die the death of a thousand cuts.

For those of you who don’t want to watch the video – I sympathise – after all you could read the words, jumping in and out at points of greater and less interest in a fraction of the time. If that’s you, you can read the words here.  Even better, I’ll summarise the basic message which is pretty straightforward.

Maths, Wolfram argues consists of four steps.

And as Wolfram says:

Here’s the funny thing. We insist that the entire population learns how to do step 3 by hand. Perhaps 80% of doing math education at school is step 3 by hand and largely not doing steps 1, 2, and 4. And yet step 3 is the step that computers can do vastly better than any human at this point, so it’s kind of bizarre that that’s the way around we’re doing things. Instead, I think we should be using computers to do step 3 and we should be using students to do steps 1, 2, and 4 to a much greater extent than we are.

Remarkably like the teaching of economics too – though it focuses on both calculation and model building, but only in passing on 1 and 2 and just a bit on 4.

Interesting graph from the OECD which came with this email to subscribers – I think it’s to journalists, and I’m on it because I’ve sought various reports to write columns on.  I haven’t read the referenced material, but it’s light and predigested so no doubt some enterprising Troppodillians with some time on their hands will do so.

Hello

Thought this might be of interest: new OECD analysis of international educational performance reveals that one in three children from poor homes manages to “beat the odds stacked against them to outperform peers from the same socio-economic background and be ranked among the top quarter of students internationally.”

The study, based on the OECD’s PISA maths, science and reading tests of 15-year olds in PISA 2006 and 2009, shows wide differences between countries: Korea, Finland, Japan, Turkey and Canada do best, while students from countries including Austria, Germany and Brazil are among the weakest performers. Among regional education systems, Shanghai-China and Hong-Kong China do the best.

Students’ confidence in their abilities and their attending regular lessons are the key to success, the report finds. Students that believe they will do well in exams do better than less confident students: for example, PISA 2006 revealed that 50% of “resilient” students in OECD countries believed that learning advanced science topics would be easy for them, while only about 40% of disadvantaged low-achievers thought so. In some countries, personal motivation, rather than external motivation such as the prospect of a job or salary, also makes a difference.

Countries take different approaches to ensuring that disadvantaged students spend enough time in class: in the US, for example, compulsory attendance in science class makes a relatively modest improvement in performance for most students, of around 15 score points on the PISA science scale. But among disadvantaged students, that advantage triples to more than 40 points, the equivalent of a full year of schooling. In Australia, the odds that a disadvantaged student who attends a compulsory science course will do better than his peers are four times greater than for a disadvantaged student who does not attend compulsory classes.

“All of these findings suggest that schools may have an important role to play in fostering resilience”, says the report. “They could start by providing more opportunities for disadvantaged students to learn in class by developing activities, classroom practices and teaching methods that encourage learning and foster motivation and self-confidence among students. High-quality mentoring programmes, for example, have been shown to be particularly beneficial. Focusing these activities on disadvantaged students is crucial, as they are the student who are least likely to receive this support elsewhere.”

The report is available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf . The data in Excel is in the attached file.

Postscript: the chart on the right does not square particularly well with this chart from the Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi Commission. In this one NZ has much more unequal results than Oz.