This is the best article i've read for ages from Henry Ergas head of Concept Economics and pretty regular commentator with the OZ.
It recounts the British experience with bureaucratic central planning, performance targets and league-tables in education and health provision. This is really relevant to what Rudd and Gillard are proposing right now is OZ. Rudd is refusing to learn from the Brit's bad example. We are about to go through the same New Labor experiment here and we we are about to learn the same lesson: It doesn't work.
The British experience with performance indicators shows how serious these problems can be. Under the Blair government, schools were set targets defined by performance on tests. Predictably, that is what they focused on, especially as the intention was to penalise low-performing schools. As even the chief inspector of schools recognised, teaching became concentrated on those skills most important in the tests, with less attention being paid to all the other aspects of student development. But even that was only part of the problem, as the emphasis on testing created incentives for schools to select pupils, including by trying to get rid of those who were likely to be the worst performers. The result was to distort the allocation of students across schools and the education students received.
While causing those distortions, the system did little to improve performance, even on the tests. The best evidence available suggests that outcomes improved more rapidly in the final years of the Conservative government, when no targets were set, than they did in the Blair years. The failure to improve performance was compounded by deficiencies in performance evaluation, with numbers fudged and assessments massaged so as to avoid political embarrassment.
But seriously read the whole thing at the link above. It explains brilliantly why "even the best crafted performance indicators will be very partial."
The problem is that you can't synthesize a free-market. Rudd and Gillard say they want competition between schools, but they dont want to actually expose them to market forces by giving parents the choice of their child's school. Empowered consumers make a real market.
In contrast (to performance measures), consumers of the service, in most instances, can weigh up the different elements that comprise performance and can evaluate, on the basis of their experience, the quality of the schools their children attend...
New Labor think they understand economics and laud the value of a free-market, but they never quite have the courage to go there. They want to limit the free market and make it more fair somehow. So they create a hybrid mutant beast: the UNFREE MARKET.
They take away the consumers freedom and instead they make up rules and regulations that they think model a free market and THEN THEY GIVE BUREAUCRATS THE UNFETTERED POWER OF A FREE MARKET.
All of a sudden a school could close at the scratch of a bureaucrat's pencil. This is the only significant difference between the old system and the new, apart from the extra-paper work burdening teachers. These bureaucrats will be only to happy to use their power so they can prove they are helping, not sitting on their arses. They will close schools based on dodgy performance indicators. Where will the kids go?
Labor fundamentally misunderstand the free-market because they cannot cope with the idea of winners and losers. This is one of the underlying principles of a free market. If you're not free to fail you can't be free to succeed. New Labor thinks they've got it, and try to use the free-market to boost up the losers. This is the opposite of what a free market does. It is no surprise to me that the whole thing goes pair shaped in the end.
The cognitive dissonance brought on by this doublethink (winners are best, and losers are also best) causes New Labor to declare statistical war on the underprivileged. They try to write them out of existence, but they never go away, and most of the time they are worse off.
A free-market is the only way to get the "rising tide that lifts all boats." We have to realise that unfortunately not all boats will rise the same amount. The market is not perfectly fair, but it's the closest we can ever get. Labor's attempts to create an artificial market that is more fair just stuffs things up.
For instance, In a free market, money will move away from an under-performing school as parents choose to take their kids somewhere else. If they spot it early, the school can react to this small but significant market signal by lifting it's game. But Labor can't take money away like this. That would just make the underprivileged more underprivileged in their minds. Labor wants to give them more money so they get better. But Labor still wants to apply market principles and punish them somehow for underachieving. Small signals, like fines, are not possible. They are therefore forced into severe measures that cannot be measured in dollars, like sacking the teachers, principles or closing or merging the school with another.
This is utterly perverse. Sacking teachers in underperforming schools is punishing the very people who are helping the most. Teachers are by and large an altruistic breed to who do it mainly for the love, cause it sure ain't for the money. Teachers choose to work in these underprivaged schools knowing that the results are not going to be good, because they want them to be a little better. This dedication cannot be measured on a bureaucrat's chart.
Some schools will be better than others. It will always be thus. You cannot punish them by sacking the principles and or drive the into non-existence by closing them and merging them with other schools. You can leave the teachers to do their jobs properly, rather than burden them with paperwork.
I sounds like i'm in the pay of the teachers unions here, whereas i actually consider them public enemy number one for creating a culture in schools that teaches kids that competition is evil (see below). Some conservatives are happy with the way Rudd is taking on the teachers unions. I of all people would love to see those Lefties humbled, but
introducing these performance measures will merely move power from one public sector union to another, that of the bureaucrats. Labor is in the pocket of both of them, and any reform they introduce will be implemented by these unions and end up strengthening them and entrenching their power.
So do i like teachers or hate them? I like teachers, but hate their union. It's complicated. Let me give you some background. I used to think performance pay for teachers was a good idea because I thought it would reverse the Lefty influence of the teacher's union and encourage a culture of competition in schools between teachers, which would flow on to the students. But I went off it once i did some research that led me to the same conclusion as Ergas: It's an unproductive waste of time, at least in the way we currently think about it. The only way to monitor teacher and school performance in my view is to measure the intangibles with school inspectors that visit the school. Their gut instinct would substitute for alot of statistics. I know these people are bureaucrats, but they are
bureaucrats that once worked as teachers and know what it's like on the ground. Plus they monitor things up close, not from a distance.
As Ergas says, for as long as state schools exist their performance does have to be measured and bureaucrats must have some power. It's a question of how much power and how effective it is in getting the results PARENTS actually want. Like me, Ergas does not outright oppose bureaucratic control but he says that unless there is also real competition between schools, that is parents/consumers can choose their kids school, AND THE MONEY THE SCHOOL MAKES IS TIED TO THAT CHOICE then school standards will not improve. Indeed they may well get worse as the bureaucrats' power increases.
Rudd, the incurable bureaucrat and Hayek-denier, will never admit to any of the flaws in his scheme and will take us down the failed British New Labor path in this country if he is not confronted. I caution other conservatives in their support of him on this issue.
ASIDE: I gotta ask aswell why there is so much emphasis on the needs of the under-performers in education? I think the real problem is that the real high-performers have nowhere to go. They are not encouraged to think of themselves as leaders, and they flounder and develop drug addictions from the sheer boredom. If these bright kids were truly rewarded for their achievement by encouraging them to lead then the other kids would have someone to look up to, to emulate - heroes, mentors whatever you wanna call it. Some people's stomachs turn at the idea of anyone looking up to or emulating anyone else, but we all do it and if we dont put the bright kids up the top the the other kids will just emulate the drug-dealers and no-goodniks. Who can blame them? At least those characters have balls.
Putting most of the attention/praise on the well-behaved child is a well understood concept in parenting. If you spend all your time trying to correct the problem child, and ignore the well behaved one, you inadvertently encourage bad behaviour. Why has this concept never escaped the family and gone out into the wider world? Still more proof that parents should be in charge of education.
