The market isn't enough. Education is like medicine in that most parents have no idea what constitutes a good school or the good educational methodology required to achieve it. Unlike medicine, educational theory doesn't insist upon falsifiability to make bold claims with no empirical basis. How many parent have even heard of Cognitive Load Theory, for example?
That being said, London as a single city seems to have largely conquered the racial attainment gap in education in the UK at a national level. A Peter Boghossian interview with Katherine Birbalsingh provides an example of one school which has confounded expectations and blasted away many of the arguments against charters, particularly those surrounding student exclusion. It's not the only example. The state-run Brampton Manor Academy consistently outperforms Eton in both 'A' Level exam results and placements to Oxbridge. These are not isolated examples. The exam results for an entire metropolitan capital speak for themselves.
I have a sneaking suspicion that, in the uneasy alliance and partisan lull which characterised the New Labour/Compassionate Conservatism era, people lost enough of their ideology to look to the failures of the progressive educational approach in Northern Ireland for inspiration. That the generally much poorer, socially deprived and, until recently, highly discriminated against, Northern Irish Catholics were consistently outperforming there more affluent leafy suburb living upper middle class North Irish Protestant counterparts in education, was becoming somewhat of a national embarrassment for the institutional educational establishment back on the UK mainland. The evidence is admittedly scant for this hypothesis. Institutional are loathe to look to the roots of their failures, or even acknowledge them, but the fact remains that a combination of the social cohesion caused by faith communities, a lower divorce rate and the generally more socially conservative scepticism of the trendy fads coming out of the progressive educational mill all combined into a living experiment where a community facing huge and seemingly insurmountable economic and social inequities resoundingly thrashed their more privileged peers.
Despite all this, there is still huge resistance on the Left to the idea of adopting an exemplary model for education more broadly. Faced with the choice between an ideology which offers the false promise of miraculous social transformation through the political coercion of 'tyranny of others' majoritarianism set against the chance of improvement of children's future prospects for an entire nation through empirically proven methods, the chance to apply political coercion to enact broad societal and economic changes is obviously more alluring.
The market isn't enough. Education is like medicine in that most parents have no idea what constitutes a good school or the good educational methodology required to achieve it. Unlike medicine, educational theory doesn't insist upon falsifiability to make bold claims with no empirical basis. How many parent have even heard of Cognitive Load Theory, for example?
That being said, London as a single city seems to have largely conquered the racial attainment gap in education in the UK at a national level. A Peter Boghossian interview with Katherine Birbalsingh provides an example of one school which has confounded expectations and blasted away many of the arguments against charters, particularly those surrounding student exclusion. It's not the only example. The state-run Brampton Manor Academy consistently outperforms Eton in both 'A' Level exam results and placements to Oxbridge. These are not isolated examples. The exam results for an entire metropolitan capital speak for themselves.
I have a sneaking suspicion that, in the uneasy alliance and partisan lull which characterised the New Labour/Compassionate Conservatism era, people lost enough of their ideology to look to the failures of the progressive educational approach in Northern Ireland for inspiration. That the generally much poorer, socially deprived and, until recently, highly discriminated against, Northern Irish Catholics were consistently outperforming there more affluent leafy suburb living upper middle class North Irish Protestant counterparts in education, was becoming somewhat of a national embarrassment for the institutional educational establishment back on the UK mainland. The evidence is admittedly scant for this hypothesis. Institutional are loathe to look to the roots of their failures, or even acknowledge them, but the fact remains that a combination of the social cohesion caused by faith communities, a lower divorce rate and the generally more socially conservative scepticism of the trendy fads coming out of the progressive educational mill all combined into a living experiment where a community facing huge and seemingly insurmountable economic and social inequities resoundingly thrashed their more privileged peers.
Despite all this, there is still huge resistance on the Left to the idea of adopting an exemplary model for education more broadly. Faced with the choice between an ideology which offers the false promise of miraculous social transformation through the political coercion of 'tyranny of others' majoritarianism set against the chance of improvement of children's future prospects for an entire nation through empirically proven methods, the chance to apply political coercion to enact broad societal and economic changes is obviously more alluring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3taXF-cjLBc