I wrote recently about the Europe-wide study coordinated by OIDEL, called IPPE: Indicators for Parental Participation in Compulsory Education.
While the United States lags behind most of Europe in recognizing the right of parents to choose schools that reflect their religious convictions without thereby sacrificing the right to publicly funded education enjoyed by their fellow citizens, the IPPE study shows that we are ahead in some other ways. One way in which the U.S. is clearly ahead of most of the countries studied is in the transparency of information about the academic results of local systems, schools and even, in some cases, of individual teachers. While this is quite a new development in the U.S., it is still barely on the horizon in many countries in Europe and elsewhere, largely because of the resistance of the teacher unions.
The IPPE study found that in a number of countries there was little or no information available to parents on school results. In Belgium (a country which is outstanding in terms of parental choice), “assessment is largely communicated by word of mouth with all the errors and bias that this entails. In fact, this all naturally leads to comparative advertising, which the ban on publication of results wanted to avoid ... Sooner or later the matter of assessment will have to be addressed with a more critical and responsible approach.”
In Switzerland (where education is controlled at the canton level), “both the authorities and teachers consulted ... stressed their desire to prevent data regarding school assessments from appearing publicly.” Italy has a national organization assessing the quality of education (one of my former doctoral students works there), but “results on individual schools are not disclosed. In terms of internal assessment, although the idea of quality and school self-assessment was introduced in 1999, it has hardly been expanded on.”
Similar resistance in education circles to the provision of objective data on school results, even on a value-added basis, is found in many other countries, including outside Europe. Last weekend, in editing one of the country profiles from Latin America for the 2012 edition of Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, I learned that its new law on educational assessment, in a provision added at the last minute, states that “diffusion of this information will safeguard the identity of the students, the teachers, and the schools, in order to avoid any sort of stigmatization and discrimination.” As a result, the author concluded, “it seems likely that the process of accountability to parents and to citizens in general will be limited if information on results is provided only at a very general level. Perhaps this could be valid information for policy discussions at the macro level, but it will certainly inhibit discussion at the intermediate level and that of individual schools, which is where the processes of citizen participation and, as a result, accountability are more evident.”
We can be grateful that, as a result of state initiatives and NCLB, American parents and education reformers now have access to information that can help to guide both reforms and school choice. This is a recent accomplishment, and we have not figured out yet how best to use this information. We have a long way to go before the results available address a broad-enough range of outcomes and take appropriate account of differences among pupils and schools. There have been blunders along the way, and there will no doubt be more.
If you doubt, however, that the current focus on measurement of and accountability for outcomes is a necessary means toward the fundamental reforms that American education (and I include higher education, where the process has barely started) needs, I invite you to consider the fervent opposition expressed by the vested interests of the status quo.
One of the recent projects of OIDEL, the Geneva-based NGO mentioned in my last post, has been to coordinate researchers from across Europe in a project to identify and then apply indicators for how national education systems respond to the concerns of parents, including but not limited to their desire to choose the schools that their children attend. It’s called IPPE: Indicators for Parental Participation in Compulsory Education.
I will just summarize IPPE’s conclusions; you can review the whole study and interact with it here. There is also a book with detail on methodology and results country-by-country, published in French in April and in English in September; look for it on https://www.amazon.fr/ in both languages by searching for the first author, Felice Rizzi.
The study makes a distinction between individual and collective rights of parents. In the first category are:
“The category of ‘collective’ parental rights largely refers to parents’ rights to participate in formal structures organised [sic] by the education system.”
Through working closely with the European Parents’ Association and other official and unofficial sources of information, the study was able to draw detailed – though inevitably preliminary – comparative conclusions about the situation with respect to these rights in seven countries of the EU, and then collected less detailed information from eight others.
I’ll focus just on the first of the rights identified. The survey asked two questions: Are there varied educational projects? And are there financial resources in place allowing parents to choose schools "other than those established by the public authorities?" The phrase in quotes is from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
For each of the countries studied, an answer is offered to both questions, as to the others, and a (rather clumsy) numerical score assigned; thus Belgium receives a score of 100 on the right to choose, Spain a 75, and Italy and Portugal each a 60. I would myself rate Italy considerably lower, based on my work there.
The conclusions of the study call for funding of non-public schools and for measures to protect their autonomy from over-regulation.
The study does not compare the EU countries with the United States, and such a comparison would require a refinement of the questions: There is now extensive variety among schools in the US, more so than in some EU countries, because of the spread of charter schools and – less happily – because of the quality differences which are more marked in the US than in most of the EU. Choice among charter and district schools is essentially free of cost. On the other hand, unlike most EU countries, the US does not provide cost-free choice of schools with a religious character, which millions of parents desire so strongly that they pay for it themselves.
For this and other reasons, the narrative portion of the IPPE report seems to me more useful than the attempt to attain precision by assigning numerical values to the different countries on the various questions. Perhaps the greatest value, however, is simply the effort to reach agreement on indicators derived from commonly-recognized parental rights. As these indicators are used by other and more detailed studies, they will make it possible to advance the discussion of parental rights in useful ways.
In the early decades of the 19th century, American education reformers followed eagerly the developments in European countries that were building systems of popular schooling; Horace Mann even spent his honeymoon touring Prussian schools! More recently, however, there has been a marked disinclination to learn from what – for good or ill – is happening in the schools of other countries. Now and again, it is true, there will be a flurry of interest in why measured performance is better in Taiwan or in Finland than in the United States, but the reports we receive commonly lack the context that would allow us to make sense of national differences.
Of course, there are increasingly rich data on performance outcomes, and studies that correlate these outcomes with different characteristics of national education systems. An especially powerful study, for those concerned with education reforms that include both accountability for results and the empowerment of parents and teachers through school autonomy and choice, was published a couple of years ago as School Accountability, Autonomy and Choice around the World, by Ludger Woessmann and others, including Martin West of Harvard.
Those who want more details on how different educational systems – at least those in Europe – function can turn to Eurydice.org or, for a broader but less detailed view, to OECD’s invaluable annual Education at a Glance and to the reports of the World Bank and of UNESCO on a range of education issues. The new edition of our Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, with chapters on more than 50 countries, will be out in four volumes in 2012.
But how to make sense of all this information and, especially, how to think about it in a systematic way that can serve as the basis for structural and governance reforms? It is not enough, surely, simply to assert that reading and math scores will go up if this or that change is made; efficiency in producing such measurable outcomes (while essential) is not the only result that a society expects from its educational system.
Americans often turn to decisions of our Supreme Court, such as Pierce, Meyer, Barnette, Brown, Yoder, Lau, and others, to articulate fundamental principles that should guide decisions about education, and we do so in ways that often go beyond the particular circumstances of the decision or its actual legal implications. We do this because we lack more general formulations of the right to education and rights in education, apart from the varied provisions of state constitutions. This makes it difficult to think and to discuss in a principled way and causes us to fall back on arguments about test scores as though they were the only issue in education. (more…)
