In City Journal Dalrymple reports on the uncovering of a corruption scandal in the British educational bureacracy:
The Times Educational Supplement is Britain’s most important journal for the teaching profession. In the January 6 edition, it described the methods school principals use to deceive the official inspectorate of schools. The inspectorate’s reports, in the words of the TES, “are vital checks on the performance of schools, relied on and trusted by parents and those running and working in the system.” The precise extent of the principals’ cheating is, in the nature of things, difficult to measure. But once the principals know that an inspection is coming, many employ techniques such as paying disruptive pupils to stay home, sending bad pupils on day trips to amusement parks, pretending to take disciplinary action against bad teachers, drafting well-regarded teachers temporarily from other schools, borrowing displays of student work done in other schools, and so forth. It’s Gogol’s Government Inspector translated to the educational sphere.
Plenty of this happens in Australia as well. Additionally, there’s a silly standardised literacy/numeracy test which all the kids sit in Years 7 and 9 (age 12-13 and 14-15), the pretext for which is “identification of schools in need” (its real purpose, of course, is to provide employment or at least activity for those in the increasingly bloated education bureaucracy). Schools have been in a state of panic over this since it’s been introduced, and keeping underperforming kids away from school on the day of the test is now standard practice at a great many schools (not all of them public, either, by any means).
I’ve known this for years. I was at a secondary school in central England in 1996 when a school inspection was announced. Most of the teachers openly mocked the idea of the inspection, and would boast to the pupils/students of how they were going to give a false impression to the inspectors when they came. I remember thinking how stupid it was that warnings were given to the school as to when the inspections were going to take place.
Thanks, Mike and Andrew. It’s good to hear first-hand confirmation from actual witnesses. I’m sure the same thing goes on here in America, especially in New York, where the education bureaucracy’s hold on the system is total, and students are the least of the concerns.