Human
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Charter Schools, Britain’s Academies Aim High
By Michael
Barone
7/16/2012
LONDON —
1776 is a number with great resonance for Americans, but not one you
expect to
be featured on a British government website.
But there
it is, on the home page of the United Kingdom’s Department of
Education: “As of
1 April 2012, there are 1776 academies open in England.”
Academies,
as you might expect, mean something different in Britain than in the
United
States. They are, approximately, what we would call charter schools.
And there
are 1,776 of them largely because of the energy and determination of
British
Education Secretary Michael Gove.
Britain,
like America, has gotten pretty dismal results for years from its (in
their terminology)
state schools. (British public schools are expensive boarding schools;
they
include Eton, which produced David Cameron and 12 other prime
ministers, and
Fettes, its Scottish equivalent, which graduated former Prime Minister
Tony
Blair.)
This is a
problem that has been recognized by all three British political
parties.
Blair’s New Labor tried to instill more accountability with extensive
testing,
much like George W. Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind law.
But many
tests got dumbed down, and the results have been disappointing.
Education in
both nations has been dominated by what Reagan Education Secretary
William
Bennett called “the Blob,” the combined forces of university education
schools
and teachers unions, which have a bias against rigorous learning and
testing.
The Blob
wants students to have lots of self-esteem and deems it oppressive to
demand
that they learn to read or do multiplication tables.
As a
result, British and American students think highly of themselves but do
much
worse in reading and math than their counterparts in countries like
Singapore
and South Korea.
Gove argues
that this is “a huge crime.” “Traditional subjects taught in a rigorous
fashion,” he says, “help poor children graduate to the middle class.”
In
contrast, “inequality is generated by poor schools.”
Gove is an
example of upward mobility through good education. His parents, who
didn’t
graduate from high school, scrimped and saved from his father’s income
as a
fish merchant to send him to an all-boys, fee-paying school in
Aberdeen,
Scotland.
One of his
teachers suggested he apply to Oxford. He got in and became president
of the
Oxford Union, the well-known debating society. That led to jobs in
journalism
and then to Conservative Party politics. He was elected to Parliament
in 2005,
and in his first term became shadow secretary of education.
When the
2010 general election resulted in Conservatives falling short of a
majority,
Cameron was prepared with a list of policies with which the party was
in
agreement with the Liberal Democrats.
Like some
U.S. Democrats, the Lib Dems had become disillusioned with state
schools’
performance and the teacher unions’ objections to accountability.
Education
became one of the issues on which the Lib Dems decided the two parties
could
work together, and they continue to do so despite Cameron’s failure
last week
to produce the Conservative votes needed to pass the Lib Dems’ proposal
to
change the House of Lords.
Gove has
insisted that state school pupils read 19th century literature — Byron,
Keats,
Dickens, Jane Austen — and study a foreign language. He has pushed more
instruction in history and geography, and higher standards in math and
science.
His
greatest innovation is the academies — an idea he picked up in Sweden,
of all
places. Individual schools, local school authorities, businesses,
universities,
charities and religious organizations can petition to start academies.
But they
have to meet certain standards to be approved.
Like many
American charter schools, the academies can set their own pay and
devise their
own curriculum and schedules; they receive the same per-pupil funding
as state
schools. The idea is to liberate education from domination by the Blob,
and the
results so far seem encouraging.
Gove’s
policies cannot be entirely replicated in the United States. Britain’s
central
government has full authority over schools in England (Scotland and
Northern
Ireland have their own systems), while in the U.S. education is largely
controlled by state governments and local school boards often dominated
by
teachers unions.
But we
might do well to keep an eye on Britain’s 1,776 academies, which now
number
1,957, as a subsidiary page on the website informs us. We
English-speaking
peoples have been lagging behind on education.
We can do
better, and as Gove says, those most in need are the poor and
disadvantaged.
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