Bright kids shouldn't be expected to help bad schools
Mythbuster on why forcing private school kids into state sector won't live up to the hype of helping the latter
I like this quote I just read, from a senior adviser to Margaret Thatcher:
“it is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient”.
We shouldn’t tolerate bad ideas and bad argument just because they are the zeitgeist. Education tax is a bad idea supported by bad arguments. There’s stiff competition for the title “worst argument” but personally, I think it’s the widely-touted idea that forcing “rich, bright” children into state schools will transform those state schools.
TL;DR 1 minute summary (10 minute read otherwise):
it’s alleged that private school families’ freedom-of-association means they form high-performing enclaves and deprive others of their positive influence; it would then be “fairer” if freedom-of-association was limited, or at least taxed, so that we’d drive more of them into state schools, Magickly improving Ye State Schooles to the Most Greate Benefitte of everyone.
today’s post explains why this
witchcraftargument is economically and morally wrong.there’s a jokey reference about Will in the Inbetweeners, not amazing but lightens the tone.
the argument isn’t supported by theory or evidence
the behaviour and effect of ~2million affluent families already in state schools IS evidence
the documented failure of mixed settings to provide appropriate stretch to higher-ability pupils IS evidence
Finland ISN’T evidence
Reported correlation between good outcomes and socially-mixed schools in the USA AREN’T evidence (good school outcomes encourage socially-mixed attendance, not the other way around; and anyway it’s not acceptable to assume the behaviour of people who chose these schools automatically extends to people who might be forced into them).
Conclusion: it’s just “something I read in the Guardian”. It’s a fantastic idea - literally, it’s a fantasy. It’s “tall-poppy syndrome”; or a variation of one of my favourite cartoons:
The Argument
In context of the current debate, it goes as follows:
We’ll raise £1.7bn (or whatever) by taxing schools
This will work because “the rich will pay, they always do”, so hardly any children will move to state schools, and the policy will definitely raise money
….but even if they do, and it doesn’t, it’s still a winner because actually those children flooding into state schools will transform them for the better
The Adam Smith Institute paper and this blog (here, here and here) have focussed on points 1 and 2 - the fiscal argument - saying the tax revenue is highly uncertain and comes with significant downsides.
But let’s focus today on point 3. A component of the Education Tax Debate is whether independent education has social benefit (encourages human capital formation; saves taxpayer money; provides bursaries, supports partnerships and sustains cultural assets) or causes social harm (inequality and social immobility). Among the alleged social harms we find the argument in question: that it’s better for society if private school children are forced into state schools, because their arrival will in itself make state schools better. For example in the IFS’ report (my emphasis):
one could imagine that there are positive spillover or peer effects from pupils from private schools being part of the state system, particularly if such pupils have high ability
Does anyone think it’s convincing or even acceptable for the “independent” IFS to “imagine” an argument against the existence of private schools? Explanation / evidence not required - and this report is the entire economic justification for this radical, global outlier tax on education.
As a slight aside, whenever opponents of Education Tax say anything - parent surveys point strongly and repeatedly to unaffordability of VAT; parents not paying fees might work less hard and pay less tax; schools will overwhelmingly manage VAT by increasing fees and/or cutting back bursaries - fans of the Education Tax demand our evidence, and then tell us it’s not good enough. But the IFS gets to “imagine”.
Another variety of the argument is found here. It’s not just the presence of certain pupils that would transform state schools, it’s the energy and involvement of “the rich and powerful”
Members of the ancient regime reel in horror and accuse private-education abolitionists of wanting to drag everyone down to some notional level located perilously close to the hell you reach in a handcart. But think what would happen if the rich and powerful had to send their children to state schools. Standards would rise, sharpish. As I say, pity it’ll never happen.
There’s also Alastair Campbell’s speech to the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association, reviewed here, in which he said:
“Then there is the claim that ‘disadvantaged’ students will no longer be able to get into some schools because places will be taken by students coming from the private sector. But it is just as likely the ex-private school students won’t all get into their favoured schools. As a result we will have more socially mixed state schools, which I would see as a positive thing for our society.”
So the theory is putting affluent private-school families into state education would help the latter in two ways: the energy and engagement of the parents, and the positive influence of bright children themselves. And Alastair Campbell thinks it’s a Good Idea.
Now to pick it apart…it’s not difficult, trust me. We’ll meet the three great ogres of progressivism: overstated benefits, unidentified costs and confusion of cause and effect due to not understanding correlation.
Overstated benefits and unidentified costs
What will actually happen if a “high ability” affluent child from a private school (or who was en route to private school) becomes a “high ability” affluent child somewhere in the state system? The Adam Smith Institute paper gives a steer, noting the uneven performance within the state system (which opponents of private schools don’t like talking about, because they want education inequality to be the fault of private schools, see cartoon above):
Scenario A: If high ability Child A is lucky to arrive in a “good” state school, there’s probably a heap of high ability children already there. There’s no reason to expect significant marginal benefit from A’s arrival. There’s a clear cost when some other kid gets displaced from that “good” state school into a less good one (good schools being oversubscribed). And there’s a cost to Child A and his family because he’s no longer receiving the education that his parents considered more enriching, for whatever reason. Finally there’s a cost to future society because there’s at least one fewer child, plus probably some other displaced child, in a setting of their parents’ choice.
Scenario B: If high ability Child B ends up in a state school that’s struggling with academic and social issues (and those, unsurprisingly, are the schools with loads of places), there’s no explanation how Child B’s raises academic or social standards in the new school. Are the children who swear at the teacher really going to swear less and work harder, because Child B has nice manners and does his/her homework when asked? It seems rather improbable. Is the “benefit” that the sheer number of disruptive children can be diluted by peaceable children who can sadly then expect no attention? And there’s a cost to Child B’s education, and to future society, and those costs are even greater than those to Child A.
As the proverb doesn’t quite say: putting a great apple into a bad barrel doesn’t transform the quality of the barrel, but it doesn’t do much good to the apple either.
Scenario C: What about the IFS’ assumption that private school children are “high ability”? What if Child C isn’t “high ability”? What if they have special educational needs (SEN) that state school provision has, for whatever reason, struggled to meet in the past? What if they have other non-SEN needs, such as anxiety, being victim to bullying, trauma, bereavement, which can be motivators for the choice of private school in the first place? What then the benefits to the creaking state school that’s pushed on class sizes, where well-meaning teachers struggle to cater to the individual? What then the cost to the
acceptable collateral damage/guinea-pigChild C when they lose the education their parents chose, and paid for, that delivered particular benefit to particular needs in a particular setting? And (broken record) how is society better off having moved a vulnerable child from a chosen setting to a less-preferred setting?
It’s much more simple
As I keep saying on this blog, I’m just for good schools wherever they arise. We want as many good schools, and as many children as possible attending good schools, as we possibly can. Any policy that harms good schools or pulls children out of good schools starts from a clear negative. That means the burden-of-proof is with those advocating this argument - ideally, with something a bit more robust than the IFS’ “imagination”. So we need evidence…really good evidence. Let’s take a look next.
What evidence do we have?
Well, there’s ex-private schoolboy Will in the Inbetweeners who is relentlessly bullied, adopts the boorish habits of his new schoolmates, and at no point exerts a positive academic or social influence. Childish, moi? Perhaps, but it’s better evidence than anyone has advanced in favour of the argument.
More seriously…
UK
590,000 (6.5%) British children attend private schools. Assuming they’re all from the top 25pc of so of incomes (which they’re not due partly to bursaries and partly to EHCPs…but let’s be generous to our opponents) that leaves ~19% of mass affluent children attending state schools, from households with at least £63k annual income (according to the IFS’ own percentile calculator; in fact more than £63k because school-age families sit higher in the income distribution; the lower percentiles are dominated by younger adults, but let’s be generous again). That’s around 2,000,000 children. And of that 19% many are, like private school children, from households earning £100k, £150k, or more.
If putting a few tens of thousands, up to perhaps 135,000 “rich” or “high ability” kids and their “sharp-elbowed families” into the state system is just the ticket to improve state schools, then why, oh why, aren’t the 2,000,000 fairly rich kids already in the state system having that effect? The answer, of course, is complicated. Those kids’ parents spend £ getting them into grammar schools and catchment areas, creating association effects remarkably similar to those found in private schools, and then (to the extent of their famous sharp elbows) spend their £ on private tutoring and extra-curricular activities, still having ample £ left over for a Porsche and a generous budget for five-star skiing holidays without financial stress.
On the latter point, I unfairly generalise, following the equally unfair generalisation that all private school families are gazillionaires with spare money and posh cars (mine’s a 7-year-old Toyota). Raising a state school family on £63k up to (say) £100k isn’t luxury, and paying for private school on £80-125k (often with more work/stress and definitely with more taxes) isn’t luxury either. Few families in either sector have access, like the featured state school parents, to grandpa’s apartment in a top-notch ski resort. But nobody’s talking, and they should be, about the affluent or very rich families in state education.
So
there is no evidence that 2,000,000 well-off families in state schools are stalwarts and advocates of state education in general, or that their conduct or mere presence is beneficial to the struggling parts of the sector
there is even less evidence or reason to suppose that 40-135,000 ex-private-school families, having started from a position of preferring the private system, now arriving in the state system in a state of “fed-up”, will act differently
Again, I’m all for school choice and for quality wherever it’s found, and I’m not looking to level-down top state schools…but I’m also opposed to wildly concocted theories of family behaviour that are used to justify harming private schools.
You want more evidence, because 2m children aren’t enough? Let’s go:
Too many bright children let down in the state system - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) According to OFSTED, high ability children get a raw deal in mixed-ability settings. Dramatically so.
“teaching was insufficiently focused on the needs of the most able, particularly at Key Stage 3 (ages 11 – 14).
…many students became used to performing at a lower level than they were capable of. Parents or carers and teachers accepted this too readily. Students did not do the hard work and develop the resilience needed to perform at a higher level because more challenging tasks were not regularly demanded of them. The work was pitched at the middle and did not extend the most able. School leaders did not evaluate how well mixed-ability group teaching was challenging the most able students…
Insufficient support and guidance were provided to those most able students whose family members had not attended university
It is a serious concern that many non-selective schools fail to imbue their most able students with the confidence and high ambition that characterise many students in the selective or independent sector.”
Pretty damning stuff. The country needs high performers - desperately. If forcing high-ability Child A or B into such settings is the cost of the policy, the burden-of-proof for benefits must be pretty darned high, and we’re not seeing it.
On socially-mixed schools (USA)
Evidence from USA reports on a number of benefits from socially-integrated schools. Allegedly socially-integrated schools outperform, they prove beneficial for lower income children, they outperform “high poverty schools”, they have better dropout rates, compared to high poverty schools, they even provide benefits in e.g., critical thinking including to affluent children, and of course they have benefits in equality. It’s worth reading the article and it sounds amazing!
Erm….not so fast. I’ve had a read of the underlying papers and they don’t support the conclusions. Correlation doesn’t prove cause, and the authors pay insufficient attention to other, more probable explanations.
Correlation between “socially-mixed” and “good outcomes” doesn’t mean the former causes the latter. It could be the other way around. Higher earners / middle-class families have choices: buy into a different school, move house, move state. The simpler explanation is that good schools attract (or don’t repel) families with choices; “good outcomes” cause “socially-mixed”, the opposite of the conclusion. This is a questionable cause fallacy”; if we celebrate socially-mixed schools per se, we fail to investigate the ultimate factors that create a good school in the first place.
There’s also a range of possible third factors that explain both socially-mixed schools and coincidentally good outcomes. To pick one example, the papers don’t consider if smaller communities have different social dynamics to larger towns and cities. Smaller towns are likely to have more social mixing, in school and everywhere, and (for example) can have a higher reputational cost of anti-social behaviour. And smaller towns can be associated with the sort of small-c conservatism of good families, nice manners and good discipline…all the values that higher earners allegedly bring to poor schools. It’s more probable that community and family (X) can shape both social mixing (Y) and good schools (Z), and there’s no causal relationship between Y and Z. If that’s true, we should be focussing on community and family, not engineering school attendance.
There’s not much discussion of the impact on the affluent / middle-class children in the socially-mixed schools. But if there’s harm to the middle-class children, if they’d be better off in another school, then it’s a cost of the argument. If instead there’s benefit to the middle-class children (for example in developing certain “soft skills” which the article refers to in general but unmeasured terms), it points to informing / persuading those families of the benefits so they choose accordingly, not forcing them to participate - in other words, letting the market do its work.
Finally, the apparent success of socially-mixed schools that already exist doesn’t allow us to assume similar success if we engineer/coerce/disrupt more affluent families into socially-mixed settings. Having committed to some other setting, for whatever reason, and now arriving at the new setting they didn’t think much of, and being in a state of “thoroughly fed-up”…they aren’t going to be in the mood to work that magick even if the magick existed.
On Finland
At this point, somebody rolls out Finland and insists they have “proved” how socially-mixed schools and the abolition of private education lead to terrific outcomes for everyone. It’s worth an article in its own right, however let’s quickly note that:
Finland didn’t ban private education; Finland has both state-funded price-capped private schools, and uncapped private schools that don’t have to pay VAT. Wealthier Finnish parents aren’t forced into state schools, they choose them because they’re pretty good and don’t appear to suffer from the widespread system failures OFSTED identifies in the UK.
Finnish per-pupil funding is only a morsel greater than UK; it’s not about money
To the extent government funds education more “generously” for example supporting extended teacher training, it is paid for overwhelmingly by taxing the lower and middle earners far more heavily than we do in the UK.
Lest anyone forget, Finland doesn’t tax education, and nor do any countries tax education.
If Finland is the best evidence for “socially-mixed education”, then advocates need to be honest about the whole puzzle. As I argued in this post it’s not about the money; it’s about re-thinking the entire basis and ethos of state education in ways that would make our famous progressives break out in spots.
Moral objections
If the practicalities of the policy aren’t enough to convince you, how about a few questions about what sort of society we actually want to live in? There are huge moral objections to treating families’ options and children’s education as the property of the state, rather than the prerogative and responsibility of families themselves. For example:
We started with one of our fundamental freedoms: the freedom to associate (which entails the freedom to dissassociate). As long as we’re not plotting high treason or forming the Ku Klux Klan, the state’s role is to uphold that freedom, and not to engineer our associations to suit its interests rather than ours.
The argument we’re considering places a collective claim on privately-acquired human capital. If you have invested time and effort reading to your toddler every night, insisting on good manners and consideration, weaning them on vegetables, supporting their early reading years, and generally being a Fabulous Mum or Dad…then (aside from thanking you for being one of society’s heroes).…who am I to tell you that it’s your child’s responsibility to provide a good educational background for mine? And no, I’m not saying that only private school parents are FMDs…I’m saying that everyone should be an FMD (it’s neither expensive nor difficult), and that FMDs deserve more school choice not less, and that the human capital created in the family belongs to the family alone.
It pulls everything in education into the “equality” bucket. Greater equality (especially if we’re levelling-up, not down) could be one of many things we value in education….but there’s a great risk it becomes the only thing and we stop talking about family, quality, choice, diversity, innovation, competition, efficiency, and “not being educated by the State” because those things are important too.
It undermines agency and the responsibility of the family. When politicians blame unfairness and privilege among posh families for the educational challenges of other families, they’re discouraging families from supporting their own children. We want parents to think “hmm, we can be FMDs, let’s take responsibility by switching off the iPad, pass me the Enid Blyton and some vegetable snacks”. Instead, we’re encouraging unconstructive victimhood. “My school’s not good enough because there aren’t enough rich people’s kids around to make it better for me” - what an awful message to send to the country, and what an insult to the millions of FMDs that aren’t able to buy either posh state education or private education.
It displaces responsibility for dire underperforming schools from the management of those schools and the people attending those schools, to children and families using other schools (see cartoon above). Any excuse, really…
If it’s used to justify the inane VAT policy, it’s setting us up for a smaller, more expensive, more exclusive private education system….that is to say, fewer families able to choose schools. As I keep saying, if exclusivity is the problem, how in the world is taxation the solution?
Conclusion
To be clear, I’ve no objection to socially-mixed schools. I just want good schools. If schools are good enough to attract customers that can choose as well as the more captive audience, that’s terrific. However if the only way to get socially-mixed schools is by forcibly levelling-down good schools, placing quality at risk, disrupting kids’ education and reducing choice, with no theory of benefits and confected evidence, then the end doesn’t begin to justify the means.
As for the colossal “privileges” of choice and association that are more readily available in the private education system, there is of course the opposite solution. Instead of seeking to deny choice to some, why can’t we seek to extend it to everyone? If we really cared about children rather than the expansion of the state, we’d look for policies to expand private education and make it cheaper, as you can read in The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley (strong recommend).
One way to improve schools is to learn from those that succeed on smaller budgets like state-sector Michaela (Katharine Birbalsingh) or the private sector Independent Grammar School Durham (James Tooley again) and to empower parents to demand the quality offered by those institutions. Another (not mutually exclusive) could be to transform the ethos and agency that provides state schools while demanding more funding from the people, at all income levels, actually using those schools (like Finland).
The way to improve schools isn’t to blame the failure of the system on the families that pay for it but don’t use it, and to use that blame as the excuse to mess up kids’ education on a false promise of pour aidez les autres that won’t even work.
I always remember reading this article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138964/Son-Sir-Jonathan-Miller-says-decision-send-brothers-state-school-turned-academic-failures.html
I also worked with a teacher in a state primary who was ideologically opposed to private education but was only working to afford fees for the prep school next door because her son was dyslexic and she knew he would sink in the school she herself taught in. Her subject wasn't Double Standards btw.
They seem to miss the fact that many children in private schools are there because the state was failing them so badly. Force them back and they wont raise the rest up….theyll just sink back to where they were before their parents made huge sacrifices to save them