Barry White: Why US Could Teach Us Lesson in Avoiding Education Disaster
Posted on: Wednesday, 21 May 2008, 06:00 CDT
But they're not happy with the standard of education in their high schools.
A third of the students drop out and of those who stay on, only half graduate with the skills for college or a decent job. Americans are slipping down the international league tables, and this has inspired an 'Alliance for Excellent Education' which says their schools are obsolete, unsuited to the 21st century, and need reinvention.
The USA is now 18th in the world for high school graduation rates, like our minimum GSCE standard, 15th for reading assessments among 15-year-olds in developed countries and 25th for maths. It's not that the system is getting worse, observers say, it's that other countries are coming on harder and faster.
Here, no one dares say that the reason the grammar schools are fighting comprehensives is that most parents want their children to have professional jobs, offering a good standard of living. In America they don't mind saying that four years of college are becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, and they're worried by the percentage of unqualified school-leavers.
In 1995, USA came second in the world, behind New Zealand, for its four-year college graduation rate. The percentage of graduates has actually increased, but today America only comes 15th.
So what is their solution? Less testing, which is the route we're going down, or a lot more investment in the school system? It isn't an issue in the presidential election, though it should be, but a company which promised to bring back 5,000 jobs from overseas has had so much difficulty recruiting skilled workers that it is investing pound(s)50m to find out why the drop-out rate from high schools is so high.
Even in America, they're realising that international competition is getting so strong that they have to rethink their methods, and how to raise standards. If the economy is going to be put back on track, schools have to produce more skilled people.
Here we should be thinking about the simple answers that Caitriona Ruane has come up with, to answer our problem of the wide differential between our best and worst schools, coupled with falling school rolls.
She wants an end to academic selection, which would mean that inevitably some of the best-performing schools would become less successful. But she can't ban selection, so we'll have an even more divided system, between schools that test, to keep academic standards as high as possible, and schools that don't -- and cater for all abilities, within a small catchment area. Is that a better way to educate children for the future?
The way we weren't
* Just think, if the unionist government of the early Sixties had listened to Labour party and trade union activists like the late Billy Blease, who warned them of growing communal discontent, Northern Ireland might have been spared the Troubles.
I've been reading interviews he gave in 1994, and maybe you could say that our fate was sealed when Terence O'Neill went into hospital when he was due to meet a trade union delegation in 1966 to discuss six 'fundamental citizen's rights', including one man, one vote in local elections and fair allocation of housing.
Cabinet ministers Brian Faulkner and Bill Craig met them instead, and although Faulkner was more conciliatory, "nothing ever happened".
Earlier, Billy's great achievement had been to win government recognition for the northern committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, since it was -- gasp! -- based in Dublin.
He himself began work at 14 as a shop assistant, for 62p a week, with three days summer holiday, and was one of that rare breed whose loyalty was to fellow workers, rather than unionism or nationalism.
They're almost forgotten now, along with the Northern Ireland Labour Party, but they stood for integrity and basic decency, when nationality wasn't a serious question for political discussion.
When someone like Billy Blease dies, a hard-working, benevolent pragmatist, we should remember that there were alternatives to the present scenario.
Heads in the sand
* Listening to the debate on whether Westminster should legislate for abortion in Northern Ireland, one realises why we are a place apart. We would rather stick to 1861 legislation, outlawing abortion, and accept the travelling to England, rather than allow terminations here, on the same basis as other countries.
We're a deeply conservative society, unwilling to face up to the realities of unwanted and crisis pregnancies. Even the most rejectionist, when it happens in their own family, can see that a termination can save life, as well as end it.
But we'd prefer it to be done somewhere else.
I remember hearing the southern Irish solution. At weekends British doctors and nurses would be flown to a Dublin clinic, would treat their well-off patients, and then would fly home. Can we not do better than that?
A Maze-ing solution
* As an ex-biker, I join the clamour for a Maze circuit to overtake road racing. Bikes are too fast and too deadly to be let loose anywhere else.
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Source: Belfast Telegraph
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