Ten years of bold education boasts now look sadly hollow | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited
UK beat the US in admitting failure of reading reform … that would have been a catchy news article title. The truth is, neither government will admit anything. Billions of pounds or dollars were spent and little is gained. That’s all.
To their credit, they hadn’t done any harm to the children one way or another. One got to ask, what do you expect out of attempts like this? Take a look at one of my favorite articles here (in particular, this one), and you decide whom to blame.The conclusions of the first three reports should make those running education policy stop and think. They demonstrate that the initial sharp rise in primary school test results between 1995 and 2000 is now understood to be largely a result of teaching to the tests, and not to a dramatic improvement in learning. They point out that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the government’s own Statistics Commission accepted the rises were overstated, only for the DCSF to reject the findings. The review also finds that the primary curriculum has narrowed in response to the testing; that statutory tests make it harder, not easier, to judge pupils’ progress; that there have been rises in test-induced stress among pupils; that the results of the tests are unreliable in up to a third of cases; and that the gap between the highest and lowest achievers in Britain is wider than in many other countries. The reports conclude there has been a genuine, although modest, improvement in children’s numeracy. It cannot say the same about literacy. Some £500m has been spent so far on running the national literacy hour. Yet the review concludes that standards of reading have been "more or less static since the 1950s". The National Literacy Strategy has had "a barely noticeable effect" on reading ability, yet since it has been introduced there has been a substantial fall in children’s enjoyment of reading. Meanwhile the literacy levels of the poorest children are further behind their peers than anywhere in Europe.