Developing metrics for equity, diversity and competition: New measures for schools and universities.

Abstract

Introduction
Equity, diversity and competition, which together form a ‘holy trinity’ of effective educational provision in schools and universities, are closely related to each other and to our notion of social justice. They also form the basis for educational choice as the preferred lever for systemic improvement in developed economies; the theory being that more choice leads to greater competition, increased diversity in the marketplace and ultimately to greater equity in terms of student attainment and social mobility. Choice in education effectively devolves responsibility for attainment and social mobility from the state to the parent-consumer, and the facility for parents to choose their schools and colleges free from government involvement is increasing in popularity, as evidenced by the growing number of Charter Schools in the US and Academies in the UK and the emergence of privately owned, publicly funded universities. The traditional social democratic imperative is that good publicly funded education for all is necessary for social mobility even if that sometimes means whole-scale restructuring, but there are also neo-liberal imperatives at work supporting the same direction of travel. The latter view is that parents have the moral right to use their resources to benefit their own children and that this should be facilitated by the state even if it reinforces existing social hierarchies. Parents acting in the best interest of their own children generate competition for both schools and universities, which is why choice is fundamental to the new (neo-liberal) right and tolerated by the new (social democratic) left: poor schools are shut down, which is the intention, and informed parents transfer their children to better schools.

Parents familiar with the education system and in possession of ‘hot’ information derived from their social networks, discussed in Chapter 9, have the ability to seek out effective schools and universities, whereas disadvantaged parents rarely have the right information at the right time to enable them to make the best choices. Affluent and better-educated parents are also more selective about the schools and universities they choose, especially when governments fail to extend choice programmes to include the independent and faith sectors or provide the necessary transport assistance to disadvantaged students to increase participation rates in these sectors, and they are more involved in governorship and school committees of one sort or another. Although these bureaucratic involvements can sometimes be more symbolic than influential, as Chapter 3 illustrates, they are social markers for creating networks of like-minded parents who rally to the same flag to the exclusion of those who have inferior levels of social capital or who have different sets of beliefs. For example, in the US and elsewhere, where faith schools outperform public schools, school choice has become a battleground for the wider struggle between religion and secularism in society. There is the widespread perception among religious-minded parents that the values taught in public schools are not just intolerant of religion, but are anti-religious, which then becomes exacerbated by the fact that parents committed to their religious beliefs abandon the public school system in large numbers for independent or home schooling, leaving an irreligious remnant behind to justify the original allegation of bias (Kelly 2009a).

Of course, the exercise of choice does not flow automatically from the existence of choice, and since choice in education is driven by the value placed on freedom, rather than by concerns for equity or the needs of local communities, pressure has been put on parents to take responsibility for exercising it wisely. Choice is about passing responsibility and the risk of failure to the consumer, and what differentiates the professional classes from other groups in this respect is that they are at heart more risk-friendly even if they are also more apprehensive because they depend on education to maintain their favourable social trajectory. Families from lower socio-economic groupings tend to be more fatalistic about choice and tend not to spend time using their social capital to manage risk on behalf of their children. Independent fee-paying schools exist and function in response to this risk management (Kelly, 2009a) because school choice is as much about who else chooses a school as the school one chooses oneself. Fee-paying schools minimise the risk of the same school being chosen by those who might lessen the benefit, and they provide boundaries that prevent the kind of mixing that dilutes middle-class aspiration and work ethic. The riskier society is perceived to be, the more those who can afford it turn to fee-paying schools, but this carries with it conflicting feelings of guilt: for choosing private schooling when not everyone can afford it or for not choosing private schooling and failing to provide for one’s children to the best of one’s ability.

The commodification and marketisation of education has increased the risks associated with educational choice and the consequences of being wrong. Most educational choice markets are quasi-markets rather than true markets. Some policies like university league tables (considered in detail in Chapter 2 and Chapter 7) and the schools awards market (considered in detail in Chapter 5) aim to stimulate competition, while other policies like schemes to encourage research partnerships (considered in Chapter 6) aim to encourage cooperation, but overall, these markets are driven and regulated by global rather than national forces. The belief that society has entered a new post-capitalist phase is widely accepted by policy-makers, providing a political foundation for new explicit partnerships between the state and agents of the free market (Kelly, 2009a), and indeed the nature of states themselves has changed to more ‘agentic’ versions of their old selves. A market state perceives its role as providing opportunity for the most dynamic of its citizens to generate prosperity for everyone, but social mobility has not increased with the popularity of this political philosophy. Instead, a new under-class seems to have replaced the old working-class, and governments have shifted their allegiance from the principle of choice between private and public provision to privatised public provision wherein their role – the role of the ‘partnership state’ - is to guarantee access to basic public services but not to provide them. This in turn has enabled policy-makers to drive education using economic imperatives and to devolve liability for ineffective outcomes to parents and students, while simultaneous global pressures have restricted the ability of governments to intervene in the market on behalf of their citizens. Critics and supporters posit it differently of course: the former suggest that globalisation has usurped the authority of democratic governments to act in the interests of their citizens; the latter suggest that globalisation has forced governments to act with proper discipline by not interfering with the market and that only a free market can guarantee prosperity in the long-term (Kelly 2009a).

Agentic statehood subordinates the will of the individual to the will of government and in regarding people as economic entities it supports and legitimises capitalism while trying to maintain social cohesion. They embrace the relationship between education, economic prosperity and equity, the metrics for which are discussed at length in Chapter 4. They accept the burden of neutralising the effects of factors that impact on educational attainment - Chapter 8 discusses measuring diversity and Chapter 9 considers the birth-order effect – but there is a paradox at the heart of these neo-liberal imperatives; namely, that the state must occasionally deal with its own failure and be forced into intervention in the marketplace in contradiction of its basic tenet.

In the UK, the Conservative governments of the 1980s were the first to adopt marketising neo-liberal educational initiatives, cutting expenditure on universities and allowing parents greater choice in schooling. Later, the 1988 Education Act, which created the first quasi-market in education, allowed schools to switch to direct funding from central government rather than remain within their local authority, gave parents freedom to select schools and schools the freedom to select students, and encouraged competition and accountability by publishing league tables of examination results. When New Labour was elected to government in 1997 after nearly two decades of conservative rule, its education policies differed little from those of its predecessors. It retained the previous emphasis on accountability, standards and centralisation, and introduced more testing, greater intrusion into teaching methods and yet more league tables for schools and universities (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 7). The reliance of New Labour on a technicist form of conservatism – it introduced an extraordinary array of ‘technical’ initiatives in education, health, law and other public services - led to greater private finance involvement in the building of new public schools, the privatisation of existing schools, and support for privately owned, publicly funded universities. And like its Conservative predecessor, New Labour presented the welfare state as inefficient and a threat to entrepreneurship, which then enabled it to transfer public agencies whole-scale to the commercial sector.

It would be wrong to assume that all this has occurred without opposition. The social democratic, anti-neoliberal case has been made, if infrequently and sometimes inconsistently, that democracy flourishes better in a society where education is regarded as something provided for the common good and the state has the dominant role in its provision. The social democratic perspective holds that education policies that foster competition and stratification do so at the expense of developing social capital and that as a consequence schools which are free from each other and from local control serve the needs of exclusive subgroups based on social class and ethnicity. However, some have suggested that the social democratic advocacy of public education is based on an outmoded view of democracy that is no longer relevant in a globalised society. The circumstances and contexts in which nation states now operate have changed so much, they say, that it is no longer enough for supporters of public education to argue in favour of the Keynesian approach (Kelly 2009b).

The communitarian view is part of the anti-neoliberal coalition. It starts from the premise that well-being is best defined in a local context and that nation states must extend their democracies internally before they can join meaningfully with other states to address external global issues. Some have argued in favour of a ‘thin’ communitarianism in line with Foucault’s interconnected cosmopolitan democracy where policies that preserve the openness of power structures are followed and there is protection for small-scale producers of basic goods and services. They argue that state schools become ‘demutualised’ if they lose their altruistic identity and the state system becomes less efficient if it loses its economy of scale, so that the neo-liberal approach is both unfair and self-defeating.


The measurement imperative and a new capability approach to effectiveness
The dominant theme underpinning both neo-liberal and social democratic education policies in the UK and elsewhere has shifted from leadership to ‘performativity’: the positivist assumption that it is both possible and desirable to measure performance. This fits well with the educational effectiveness paradigm in which this book is located, though I will argue now for a new capability approach within that educational effectiveness paradigm to replace the current Benthamite one.

There are many dif¬ferent approaches to gauging effectiveness and how well a society is served by its education system, but all of them require measurement. Some metrics were at the level of the student and some were at the level of the institution; some took account of context while others did not. The traditional approach was utilitarian, but in all cases the need to extrapolate from student attainment (whether contextualised or not) to how students were maximising their own ‘well-being’ was never made or even attempted. Adapting Amartya Sen’s capability approach to educational effectiveness would correct for this shortcoming because capability looks at the motivation behind choice, treating it as a parametric variable that coincides or not with the pursuit of self-interest (see Chapter 3). In such a capability approach, well-being is the way of viewing student self-interest, and ‘advantage’ the way of viewing relative opportunity, which are no longer judged solely on attainment as in the traditional utilitarian approach. In terms of translating attainment into social mobility, it is possible for a student to have real advantages but not to make good use of them or not to make use of the freedom to achieve more. It is possible to have opportunity but not to achieve. While opportunity is intrinsically linked to choice, they are not the same thing. Opportunity is not simply whether, for example, entrance to a research-intensive university is a realisable option for a student, but whether (say) the student’s family can afford to support the student at the more expensive university and whether the student can benefit from the particular curriculum on offer there (Kelly 2012a).

Attending a school or university gives a student command over some of the desirable properties of education as a commodity - satisfying the desire for learning, providing opportunities for friendship, opening the door to economic prosperity and so forth - but the mere acquisition of a commodity does not guarantee the acquisition of its desirable properties nor does its possession determine what can be done with it. So in judging the well-being of students using a capability (as opposed to a utilitarian) approach to educational effectiveness, student ‘functionings’ - what students actually succeed in doing with their schooling - must be considered (Kelly, 2010).

A functioning is a personal achievement distinguishable from the well-being it generates. The physical act of going to a university is not the same as deriving benefit from attending. What a capability approach captures is the extent to which students have the freedom to choose the functionings they value, rather than the economic functionings the state dictates that they should want. In essence, the traditional utilitarian approach within the educational effectiveness paradigm does not distinguish between functioning and capability, but a capability approach does make that distinction. For example, having a free school meal is a functioning, but it matters whether it is the result of social deprivation at home or the result of free choice. The functioning is having the free school meal, but the capability to eat a school meal without any associated social stigma is the key to evaluating a student’s well-being in this situation (Kelly, 2012a).

A student’s set of feasible functionings is his or her ‘capability set’. It comprises the alternative combinations of functionings a student can achieve, so it represents his or her opportunity to generate valuable outcomes, taking into account relevant personal circumstances and external factors. The distinguishing feature of the capability approach is the importance of ‘freedom to achieve’; the view being that if freedom were only to have instrumental value to a student’s well-being (i.e. if it were only valuable as a means to an end) and had no intrinsic value, then the capability set would not capture what the student is capable of being and doing. Capability in education is not just about attainment.

The well-being of a student is an index of what he or she is succeeding in doing with his or her education. Having more of it can increase his or her ability to function in desirable ways and to live a better life free of various deprivations, but the conversion of education into personal achievement depends on a variety of non-educational factors such as birth order (which is discussed in Chapter 9) and socio-economic status, as well as on personal traits like ambition and perseverance. The sum of these various alternative func¬tioning bundles, which the student can achieve through choice, is his / her capability, which is why increasing choice in education must be accompanied by a raising of expectation in order to raise achievement across the system as a whole. Too often, capability is increased through greater choice yet fails to result in greater well-being because students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds have become reconciled to under-achievement - as occasionally have their teachers - or have acquired an inconvenient set of anti-aspirations. And merely transferring high-performing students from bad schools to better schools does little for those left behind (Kelly, 2012a). The utilitarian Benthamite approach to educational effectiveness also overlooks the more affective-conative (as opposed to cognitive) aspects to schooling that we know are important, like the problem of adaptive preferences where students are conditioned to come to terms with disadvantage as a means of ‘survival’.

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ORCID for Anthony Kelly: orcid.org/0000-0003-4664-8585

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