On May 6th the British People voted for a hung parliament.

There is a tradition in journalism to seek to reduce complex issues down to the simple; to form a narrative which describes in terms that a casual reader/viewer/listener can consume with the minimum of effort. So far as the reduction accurately describes the situation they attempt to convey, the journalist succeeds.

Facts are simple, but their analysis is complex. Let’s start with some facts: excluding the one constituency that has not yet returned at the time of writing, 29,653,638 people voted in 649 constituencies for dozens of parliamentary candidates, the majority of whom were representatives of political parties. Within each constituency, candidates who received the most votes won their seat and became an MP. 306 of those were Conservative, 258 were Labour, 57 were Liberal Democrat. Other parties got 28 seats between them.

The first-past-the-post system means that the votes for a losing party in a constituency count for nothing. If we disregard these votes, then actually 13,863,530 people voted for their MP, which is 47% of the overall turnout. 7,279,220 voted for a Conservative MP which is 25% of all the people who voted. The turnout was around 65%, so as a percentage of people who could have voted, the people actually responsible for returning the 306 Conservative MPs constitutes 16.25% of the electorate.
(Data Source The Guardian DataBlog).

As I have suggested, analysis of these results is complex, so I will attempt to be minimalistic in my interpretation. What is clear, I think is that the signal that is produced by this (perhaps any?) election is chaotic, and complex. However the analysis that the the British People ’spoke with one voice’ is absurd. Patently they spoke with many, many voices. How then can the journalistic trick of reducing the signal of the election down to the pithy simplification that “the British people voted for a hung parliament”? It confuses intention with consequence in the most pathetic manner. To restate it correctly, the British people voted, the result of which is a hung parliament.

So What?

The electoral system manipulates the votes of the electorate to produce a result. If you infer from the consequences of the vote to what the voters intended then you are bound to ascribe to the voters their support for the electoral system. That is to say, because the result was a hung parliament, voters voted for a hung parliament. Or, going further: Voters got exactly what they wanted. Concluding by going further still on this grotesque line of reasoning, therefore Voters rejected electoral reform; they got what they voted for.

Wait, what? If you remove the result from that, doesn’t that come down to arguing that because voters voted under a particular electoral system, they voted for that electoral system? That line of reasoning is preposterous. Surely no serious journalist would use such a slight-of-logic?

Kay Burley, Sky News

This interview exchange between Kay Burley of Sky News and David Babbs of 38 Degrees may sound familiar…

• Burley The public have voted for a hung parliament, we got exactly what we voted for
• Babbs What the people voted for [we believe] is they voted with hope for something better…
• Burley 65% of the public who were eligible to vote, voted for a hung parliament
• Babbs Yes, and people who… [gets cut off, the first of many]

Kay Burley’s analysis of the election is exactly the sort of lazy analysis I suggested above. She does herself no favours by the interview disintegrating into a series of ugly attacks on Babbs that is frankly painful to watch, but the crux of the interview is that she has swallowed the ‘voted for a hung parliament’ narrative lock-stock and barrel, and refuses to discuss electoral reform outside that narrative.

Relevance

The real argument about electoral reform is about enfranchisement. This goes back to my earlier numbers; it could be argued that if the Conservative party were to govern as a minority, then only 16.25% of people in the country are responsible for that government, or 23.5% if you include the people who voted for Conservatives who weren’t elected, or 36.1% if you further disregard the people who did not vote. Whichever percentage you choose, they achieved 47.1% of the seats at the election. There is the source of the inequality that Babbs is arguing against.

The discussion about electoral reform should be: can people live with an electoral system that has that statistical reality? The only relevance that the current election should have in this discussion is that the result brings about the sorts of power brokerage necessary for a discussion on electoral reform to happen at high levels, because the Liberal Democrats could act as king-makers.

This is not particularly relevant to this blog, but I have no other forum on which to express these views. Ordinarily I try not to get involved in such discussions. However, there is much to discuss here from a philosophical and political perspective (as well as a statistical one). If the general election is not being discussed in classrooms, then it should be. I can’t believe that it is not.

If you are interested in doing your own statistical analysis of the election (or previous elections), then the Guardian offers data for you to do so:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/may/07/uk-election-results-data-candidates-seats

Report on Finland’s Education System

I think there are a few things that they miss out from the report, like a very homogenous population, a smaller wealth gap between rich and poor, and a very low density of population. Still, it does paint the picture of an idyllic scenario of an educational system free from interference from politics. I with a party in the UK would put that in their manifesto!

This article is a little heavy on the politics for an average maths classroom, but is perhaps useful for A-level students, and is definitely useful for any teachers teaching the IB, as it has excellent cross-over with theory of knowledge. Worth a look

As I read the part on SATs I reflected on the way in which the relationship between politics and education continues to work to this day. The review argues that SATs narrow the curriculum focus and put pressure on children unnecessarily. It argues that the concept of standards that underlies the system of SATs is “restricted, restrictive and misleading”. It further argues that assessment of childrens’ learning should be detached from assessment of schools’ accountability.

It is perhaps inevitable that this is how education and politics interact: governments change the way education works with an agenda justified by their electoral mandate, but often with no educational justification to back it up. It can then take a decade or more for evidence to be gathered, arguments to be made and reports to be compiled before the deficiencies of the system can be established to the satisfaction of politicians, and the scheme can be scrapped. Then, another government can come in with their agenda and try again.

I knew that SATs restricted curriculum, failed to assess students reasonably and were a monumental waste of time and money, years ago. I’ve blogged about it before, years ago. Most of the bright, intrested teachers that I’ve met have known similarly. But education is one of the few things that governments with mandates can interfere with almost at will, and the obvious truths for teachers on the ground are difficult to express to people living in the ivory towers of Westminster. It’s about to happen again. I believe that the best we can hope is that they (whoever they are) make a slightly less-bad set of decisions in this next round of reforms.

• I do not want Megrahi to die in prison;
• I want Megrahi not to die in prison.

There ought to be a clear distinction between the intention of the speaker in the two cases: the first does not necessarily convey any intention, while the second takes a clear intentional stance.

On BBC Radio 4 this morning, a five minute interview went frustratingly round in circles because neither the Foreign Secretary nor the interviewer could satisfactorily explain this distinction.

We often use the first form of the sentence when we mean the second, and this linguistic ambiguity was siezed upon in a piece of journalistic opportunisim. Bill Rammel was asked a question about whether the UK government ‘wanted Megrahi to die in prison’. He responded that they did not. The question asked about whether an intention existed; he replied that it did not. He was not asked, nor responded to whether there was the converse intention; he was not asked “Does the UK government want Megrahi to be released from prison before he dies?”, but it is now widely reported that he confirmed exactly that.

Increasingly, it seems that journalists exploit these linguistic ambiguities in order to create a story. No wonder politicians (of every persuasion – I am ambivalent with respect to the different parties) are so careful when asked ‘clear yes and no questions’ and sometimes simply repeat a well-rehearsed phrase. When they are misrepresented so wholly as in this case, can you really blame them?

When they occur, these stories are good opportunities to highlight the ambiguity of language and the care with which language needs to be used to sixth-form philosophy students. It is perhaps the most important practical application of learning philosophy that its students can be forewarned against the pitfalls of such exploitative misrepresentation.

John Gray is currently Professor of European Thought at the LSE, and has been an outspoken and controversial academic throughout his career. He has written about a great breadth of topics, but the thread of thought that ties his work together is his rejection of our contemporary belief in the progress of mankind.

The prepared text of my dad’s overview of Gray’s views is an excellent introductory text, with a good bibliography pointing towards further reading. I would strongly recommend this text to students as an overview of his thought.

John Gray, An Appreciation

Lockhart’s Lament is a a heartfelt plea to the beauty of mathematics, the place of mathematicians as artists, not engineers, and society’s complete miscomprehension of what mathematics actually is.

The article opens with a parody: what if society had the attitude towards music that it currently has to mathematics? Lockhart asks us to imagine a world where students learn musical theory without ever grasping what music is. In this world, students don’t hear music or feel it, it is a word used to describe a formal system, emotionless and austere. Perhaps a few get to understand, listen to and feel music when they get to university. If they try to describe their joy and amazement, people look at them blankly and conjour up memories of their tests on harmonic scales when they were at school.

For Lockhart, Mathematics is in turns the art of explanation and the music of reason. However, it is as poorly understood by modern western society as music is in his imaginary music-less world. Lockhart argues that “there is no more reliable way to kill enthusiasm and interest in a subject than to make it a mandatory part of the school curriculum.” Through standardisation and testing which puts the onus on memorisation over understanding and exploration, the subject is fundamentally undermined.

The breadth of Lockhart’s exasperation is great: from society to schools, to teachers, and universities, but most forcefully to the government and the curriculum. This, written in 2002 is ever more true. It is an unsettling prospect that the USA is further down the road of standardising the maths out of maths than we are in the UK. Perhaps, using them to see into our future we can change it. Reading this Lament strengthens my belief that we must try.

I hope you gain as much enjoyment, and as much fervour from its reading as I did.

The SSAT argue that the government has “consistently exaggerated the technical rigour of national assessments and the GCSE“. They argue that by changing the curriculum and therefore changing the content that is being tested, it becomes extremely problematic to maintain and compare standards.

The SSAT also argue that there are testing cause a degree of stress and that the level of continued stress that students are exposed to has become unreasonable and counter-productive. In place of the SATs they suggest using sample testing of randomly selected pupils to monitor performance.

The response from the DCSF is staggering: “… we are not looking at sample testing of randomly selected pupils … It is hard to see how any sample of children could be truly representative of one school … the idea that children are over tested is not a view that the government accepts … we don’t believe that in this day and age parents can be expected to have hidden from them the real achievements of their children at school.”

If the governmental body responsible for our curriculum do not understand sample testing, then I am deeply concerned with the science curriculum; if do not understand how sample testing can give representative data, then they do not understand science. Science is based wholly upon the statistical analysis of sample data. Given a sample and the overall population size, we can very accurately calculate how representative that sample is. Simply, this argument is nonsense.

The original premise for introducing SATs was as a means of measuring schools performance. The DCSF statement concedes that they have now become GCSEs for younger students – performance assessments for the students and their parents to measure themselves with.

Despite this the government does not accept that children are over tested. I am absolutely and utterly convinced that the government is wrong about this. Sadly, there is no easy way of measuring what level of stress is acceptable to expose children to. However, I would have thought that until tests GCSEs, the natural inclinations of all parents and teachers would be to minimise unnecessary stress. This is not the government’s inclination.

The findings are quantified: around the world the top educational systems are found in South Korea, Finland, Singapore and Hong Kong. In these countries, teachers come from the top 5%, 10%, 30% and 30% of the graduates respectively. As a comparison, in the USA teachers come from the bottom 33% of graduates. The figures aren’t specified for the UK, though it is considered ‘between the two extremes’.

Their conclusions are that the only way to improve the outcomes of pupils is to improve the quality of instruction. When a profession is high-status, top graduates want to do it and the quality of their instruction improves.

Having read this article yesterday, this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme I heard a lady talk about one of the changes between when she grew up and now: when she was at school she was told that (as a woman) she could become “a teacher or a nurse” whereas now she might have aspired to be a “doctor or a lawyer”. The status levels are clear, and still entrenched. Doctors and lawyers are high-status professions. A teacher is respected, but is essentially a carer in some important way. I can’t believe that in Finland or South Korea these unfortunate couplets would trip off the tongue so readily.

I am glad that McKinsey has produced this report, because ministers are liable only to listen to a big consultancy business. My heart sinks to imagine how much money has been thrown at this consultancy giant to point out the mind-blowingly obvious. What is scary to me is that ministers appear to be genuinely unable to appreciate these truths without a consultancy-led statistically-backed study, whereas surely a moment of rational reflection shows their conclusions to be self-evident.

It is encouraging that the media is starting to pick up on the reality that testing and league tables helps only the government and not the students. As far as I am concerned, this is patently obvious for the majority of teachers in schools. The testing regime was a top-down initiative which never really had the students’ best interests at heart.

In the report, Mary Hilton of Cambridge University argued that in their last year of primary schools, children in England are “trained and drilled for the tests and its disastrous”. Ask any parent whether they would prefer their child to experience motivating and engaging ideas in classrooms or test revision, and they would all want the engaging ideas… that is unless they had become caught up in a system whereby they worry that their child will be disadvantaged in some way by not being drilled for the test.

This is a problem: testing regimes bootstrap themselves; by introducing a mandatory testing regime, everybody must be seen to perform at least at their level of expectation within that regime, but everyone will strive to perform better. Therefore increasingly attention will be diverted towards the regime. More and more people spend more and more time focussing on the test rather than on what the test was introducted to test.

SATS help the government because they make measurable the achievements of schools. One ought to have reason to pause at this idea. What exactly has been measured?

The improvement that any student achieves while at school is due to a combination of three factors: the speed of their natural development, the nourishment (in every sense) and education that their parents provide, and the education that the school provides. At the very best measuring students’ academic performances does not measure what the school adds to the students. The clearest example of this is that in comfortable middle class areas where, other things being equal, parents tend to have more time and more knowledge about how to educate their children, schools perform better than in deprived areas. In what sense can SATs be thought to be comparing the two schools’ performances by comparing their SATs results? Value Added measurements attempt to get around that problem, but it is not really clear that they do.

Do tests actually measure understanding? At their most sophisticated, testing measures understanding by asking questions which catch students off guard or are unusual in some way. Then the student must adapt using what they know to this new scenario. There is a good reason why at around 16-18, as learners begin to move into an abstract sphere of understanding, that the first meaningful tests that students sit occur in cultures around the world. Before then, tests are likely not to measure understanding.

Driven by the desire for all testing to be standardised and comparable, tests have increasingly become tests of memorisation. Testing 11 year olds will inevitably test learnable skills not creative understanding. Thus, SAT questions are familiar and routine. Performance in answering routine questions can be improved through drill. It is not unreasonable to argue that one of the things tests actually measure is the amount that a child has been drilled for the test.

What is worse, Channel 4 News reports that experts argue that the testing regime is actually particularly bad for lower achievers at school. Not only are they counter-productive, they are particularly counter-productive for students at the bottom of the pile. One can only hope that the clamour to overhaul this current system will grow and grow.