Category: Education

Categories
Education Research

Methods for studying teachers in social network sites

I recently published a review paper with Bernadette Mercieca and Paul Mercieca in BERA’s journal Review of Education. This paper looks at how 96 different studies by researchers all over the world have analysed teacher activity within social network sites. These are sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many others. What it shows is that there are serious and systemic methodological concerns in how researchers are studying teachers within these platforms.

You can read the full paper online here or access the article directly on my eprints.

The essence of the findings are that any researchers looking at teachers within social network sites should:

  1. Report on the specific qualities of the groups of teachers that they are studying, including its size, origins, privacy, thematic focus, regional focus, and platform
  2. Consider re-using existing frameworks for analysis (such as the ACAD framework of Goodyear & Carvalho, 2014)
  3. Consider re-using or building upon existing coding schemes or research instruments and publish such schemes and instruments with their work to permit them to be re-used in future (a description of instruments that might be re-used are included in the paper)
  4. Consider the sampling methods adopted and ensure that sampling is described in detail with all limitations made salient, with particular attention being given to self-selection and to recruitment within the platforms being studied.
  5. Consider the claims being made and ensure that they are specific with respect to the population that they apply to and the conditions under which they are likely to apply

Of all of these, number (4) is the biggest concern in my opinion. Many studies use self-selection during recruitment; where that self-selection is taking place within a group that is already self-selected by being on that platform. As in, say, teachers using a Twitter hashtag are only a small proportion of all teachers, and then to just sample the teachers who respond to your survey really doesn’t say much about the population of all teachers. Yet many papers seem not to take care with the claims (point (5) here).

The paper also includes a summary of all of the key themes that are addressed with respect to teachers in social network sites (or social media as people sometimes refer to it still). This is Figure 2 within the paper. It shows an abstract model of relationships between domains of change, observable teacher behaviours (within social network sites), and the outcomes that have been hypothesised as resulting from these behaviours. Arrows in this figure do not presume causality; they represent relationships that may come to be understood through future research

This provides a useful map for those studying teachers in social network sites to place their work within a broader framework.

There is also a useful appendix in the paper that lists all 96 studies as a database, with information about each one. This will be useful for any researchers conducting similar reviews in future.

References

Goodyear, P., & Carvalho, L. (2014). Framing the analysis of learning network architectures. In The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks (pp. 66-88). Routledge.

Kelly, N., Mercieca, B., & Mercieca, P. (2021). Studying teachers in social network sites: a review of methods. Review of Education, 9(3), https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3272

Categories
Education Presentation

UAB Guest Lecture: Teacher education and globalisation

Slides from my guest lecture with the Masters of Education Policy students at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 2018.

A lecture about what teacher education is, what teacher education policy looks like, and some lenses for analysing teacher education policy. With a focus upon globalisation and new public management. Five case studies of teacher education policy make up the heart of the talk.

Slides can be found here:

Teacher Education and Globalisation from nickkelly
Categories
Education Research

We need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously: Examples of research supporting teachers’ self determination

This post is based on a seminar presented to the Globalisation and Education and Sociology Policy (GEPS) group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously.

“In my talk today I am arguing that we need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously. The talk has three parts. First, I will talk about why it is so important that we create an environment in which teachers can flourish. Then, I will talk about what I mean by basic psychological needs. Finally, I will give some examples from my work that highlight what this kind of work might look like…”

This post is placeholder for the article that looks likely to be published elsewhere resulting from this seminar.

The slides for the presentation can be found on slideshare:

Educational policy and teachers basic psychological needs: Creating the space for teachers to collaborate from nickkelly
Categories
Design Education Research

How to design online courses for student engagement

I had the great pleasure of working with Neil Martin over a number of years, during his project investigating the way that the principles of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) can be applied for designing engaging online courses.

I’m forever grateful to Neil for getting me to read deeply about positive psychology–the branch of psychology trying to understand the conditions under which humans flourish.

In particular, I find the work of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci to be extremely elegant, putting this research into human flourishing (or, as it’s referred to, eudaimonia) on solid scientific ground. I thoroughly recommend this paper for anyone wanting a scholarly introduction to the idea of why not all kinds of motivation are equal, regardless of behavioural outcomes.

This post aims to give a brief overview of a paper that Neil led–and very kindly invited me to be a part of–describing the work from his PhD thesis  in developing a MOOC in which every part of the design was informed by thinking about intrinsic motivation from the perspective of SDT.

I feel like the resulting paper (Martin, Kelly, & Terry, 2018) really has a lot in it, and may well be of help to anyone who is doing work designing an online course and wants students to be more engaged.

(It is also worth mentioning that I quite  enjoyed the fact that all three authors have last names that are also first names. It makes me feel like I have at least one thing in common with Elton John,  George Michael and Buddy Holly)

Principles for designing engaging online courses

Some principles for designing engaging online courses can be distilled.

The essential principle of self-determination theory, when applied to motivating people to doing a task, is that human intrinsic motivation has three elements:

  1. Competence. People tend to feel intrinsically motivated for a task if they feel like they have the ability needed to successfully complete the task. In other words, people like the feeling of being good at something.
  2. Relatedness. People tend to feel more intrinsically motivated for a task if they feel that completing the task will, in some way (either direct or indirect), help to connect them with other human beings. In short, people like feeling as though they are developing a relationship with other people.
  3. Autonomy. Autonomy is about giving people the freedom to complete a task in a way that is in harmony with their beliefs about the world, to do things in a way that makes sense to them and fits in with their life.

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of what is a deep theory with decades of research  behind it (see http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/ for a nicely curated website about SDT).

Neil’s work (his PhD is available here and well worth a read for anyone wanting to go much deeper) demonstrated that these principles–of achieving intrinsic motivation of students through support for relatedness, autonomy, and competence–can be applied directly to learning design for online courses.

He found fairly convincing evidence in his work that the students were more engaged with the course, and more likely to complete the course, once it had been redesigned based upon these principles–and as anyone who has tried to make a MOOC knows, getting students to begin the course is one thing, but getting them to complete it is much more challenging!

The figure below is from Martin et al. (2018) and is a summary of what I would call a model for designing engaging online courses. The premise is that if students have their basic psychological needs met, then they will be more engaged with the learning.

designing for engaging online learning

The paper (freely available thanks to the excellent online journal AJET) goes into detail about what all of these things mean and describes this model in detail. It makes a bridge between these three basic psychological needs and what this means in practice when designing for online learning. Some examples:

Autonomy

  • Not having deadlines and reducing pressure
  • Letting participants set their own pace
  • Giving participants meaningful choices wherever possible

Competence

  • Making sure that challenges are optimal (i.e., are within the zone of proximal development)
  • Giving clear rationale for any task
  • Providing constructive feedback on tasks

Relatedness

  • Making sure that the text and interface design of the online course is warm and friendly
  • Making sure that participants have an opportunity to connect with each other
  • This can be done by learning designers by making use of personas (refer to Martin 2017 for more details on this)

I’m writing this post now because I’m finding this to be a big help in some course redesign work that I am doing with La Trobe university, in their MTEACH course.

Hopefully the result will be lots of engaged students!

References

Martin, Neil; Kelly, Nick; Terry, Peter.  (2018).  A framework for self-determination in massive open online courses: Design for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, v. 34, n. 2. Available at: https://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/article/view/3722
Date accessed: 02 nov. 2018.

 

 

Categories
Education Research

Studying teachers in social network sites: Thinking about methodology

teachers in social network sites
teachers in social network sites

There is an entire genre of journal articles about how teachers in social network sites are behaving, what they’re doing, and what benefits they’re getting. This refers to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Ning and EdModo.

Recent review papers by Macia & Garcia (2017) and Lantz-Andersson et al. (2018) gives some indication of quite how many articles are out there about teachers using these sites. I’m doing work at the moment with Bernadette Mercieca and Paul Mercieca to conduct a wide, integrative review, that looks at the methodology of studies of teachers in SNSs.

Teachers in social network sites

The rationale for studying what teachers in social network sites are doing is compelling:

  • We know for sure that lots of teachers are using them
  • They are getting all kinds of benefits, such as social/emotional support, exchange of resources, a place to get new ideas, and even occasionally a place to have serious conversations reflecting on practice (Kelly & Antonio, 2016)
  • We want to know how to use social network sites better: How should they be used by individuals? How should policy around them be framed? How should they be a part of teacher education and school operations?

These are all great questions, but I feel like there is a growing need for more maturity in the methodology of studies of teachers in social network sites. Consider the “classic case” of many studies (some of my own included!) of teachers in social network sites:

  1. A sample is being studied that is chosen for convenience: an existing group in a social network site, a cohort of preservice teachers, a group of teachers within a single school, etc.
  2. Often teachers from that sample will self-select to be a part of a study
  3. Traces from the social network site are typically analysed in some way (coding and counting, social network analysis)
  4. Often a survey is conducted (again, often self-selected from participants in the social network site) for self-reported data relating to use of the social network site

In case it isn’t obvious, this is not a great recipe for any kind of generalisability from results. The volume of studies that have been conducted could potentially have led to meta-analysis for some kind of convergent validity–except that often there isn’t enough information included in many studies to know such basic information as:

  • The size of a group (for groups are the unit of study)
  • It’s focus (e.g., subject/region/theme/identity)
  • How it was convened and if it is facilitated

A way to categorise groups productively is discussed by Kelly & Antonio (2016). The key issue is that without this kind of information, there will be no movement towards convergent validity of theories.

Towards theory

We have well and truly past the point of needing studies that point to the potential of social network sites for teachers; or that collect exploratory data from a one-off study. There are many such studies and on their own they are not contributing to a collective whole.

The ideal situation would be to work towards an understanding of how different types of group serve teachers in different ways and how approaches to designing/facilitating/convening groups in social network sites can better lead to desired outcomes (see for example Clarà et al., 2015;  Kelly et al., 2015; Kelly et al., 2016; Mercieca et al, 2017).

The analogy is that of a chemical engineer trying to understand how to create a reaction of some sort–let’s say that she’s trying to create an explosion.  She could work for years randomly combining elements to see what happens, in the hope of coming across something that works.

Far more fruitful would be to develop a theoretical understanding (say, the table of the elements) that allows her to predict what will happen when elements are combined.

In short, what we need is the kind of research that allows us to make theoretical propositions (about teachers in social network sites) that are generally applicable–or where the limits of generality are at least understood. The work of Kraut & Resnick (2012) gives us a glimpse of what such work might look like. We need methodological rigor else our whole domain risks failing to reach maturity.

Thanks to Professor Peter Reimann for the chemistry analogy, it comes from a conversation with him.

References

Clarà, M., Kelly, N., Mauri, T., & Danaher, P. (2015). Can massive communities of teachers facilitate collaborative reflection? Fractal design as a possible answer. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 1-13.

Kelly, N., & Antonio, A. (2016). Teacher peer support in social network sites. Teaching and Teacher Education, 56, 138-149. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.02.007

Kelly, N., Clará, M., & Kickbusch, S. (2015). How to develop an online community for pre-service and early career teachers. Paper presented at the ASCILITE 2015, Perth, Western Australia.

Kelly, N., Clarà, M., Kehrwald, B., & Danaher, P. (2016). Online Learning Networks for Pre-service and Early Career Teachers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan/Palgrave Pivot.

Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (2012). Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Mit Press.

Lantz-Andersson, A., Lundin, M., & Selwyn, N. (2018). Twenty years of online teacher communities: A systematic review of formally-organized and informally-developed professional learning groups. Teaching and Teacher Education, 75, 302-315.

Macià, M., & García, I. (2016). Informal online communities and networks as a source of teacher professional development: A review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 55, 291-307.

Mercieca, B., & Kelly, N. (2017). Early career teacher peer support through private groups in social media. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 1-17.

Categories
Education Media Articles Research

How design thinking can help teachers collaborate

I wrote this article with Les Dawes, Natalie Wright, and Jeremy Kerr for The Conversation about how design thinking can help teachers collaborate.

The original article is under a Creative Commons attribution license and is located here: https://theconversation.com/how-design-thinking-can-help-teachers-collaborate-95932

I have included a reprint here:

 

The recent release of the Gonski 2.0 report has done an excellent job of re-opening the conversation around how our schools could better fulfil their purpose.

Much of the commentary has centred on the report’s recommendations for teaching and learning in schools. But the whole chapter focused on “creating, supporting and valuing a profession of expert educators” has not received enough attention.

The suggestion that teaching and learning can be significantly improved by better supporting our teachers is vital and should not be overlooked. In particular, there is growing evidence that teacher collaboration can lead to more satisfied teachers while producing better outcomes for students.

What does Gonski say?

The positive impact of active collaboration is summarised in the report on page 58:

Teacher collaboration occurs in many forms, however not all types are equally effective. Active collaboration — such as peer observation and feedback, coaching, mentoring, team teaching and joint research projects — allows teachers to learn from each other and typically has a positive impact on students. In contrast, collaboration that concentrates on simply sharing resources, planning activities or administrative issues has little or no positive effect on student achievement.

While the report flags the need for action on embedding professional collaboration in everyday teaching practice, it doesn’t provide much in the way of suggestions for how to achieve this. This criticism has been repeated by many in education.

While active collaboration between teachers has long been recognised and encouraged (for example, as a part of the AITSL teacher professional standards), the reality for many teachers is there is precious little time in which to collaborate. Even where there is time, there is a need for more structure to the way teachers collaborate so it happens in an authentic, productive way.

What is design thinking?

The ability to empathise, think creatively, collaborate productively, experiment with solutions and communicate ideas are all key parts of design. They are skills anybody can learn.



Read more:
How the mindset of designers can make us better leaders

The term design thinking has become a popular buzzword to refer to this set of skills. It’s particularly popular in education because design thinking is a great way to learn 21st century skills, such as creativity and critical thinking. If teachers develop these skills themselves, then they are in a better position to teach them.

Design thinking is not just about knowing the design process and having the tools to use it, but also about adopting a design thinking mindset. This involves seeing the world in a solution-focused way and having the creative self-confidence to try tackling problems in new ways.

Design thinking in schools

Our team has been working for the last year on a project that involves partnering with groups of teachers in different schools around Queensland to work on design problems. This kind of partnership between designers and non-designers to solve problems is known as co-design.

Teachers engage in collaborative design tasks as part of a research project in Queensland.
Author provided, Author provided (No reuse)

The first problem that we have worked on is the planning of a term of work for the new ACARA Digital Technologies curriculum. Instead of teachers working individually, we work with school leadership to create time and space for them to work as a group. We support them in framing the problem, developing student-centered ideas, and preparing classes. Teachers learn to adopt a design thinking mindset simply by taking part in this process.

For example, some teachers implicitly conceive of curriculum planning as “making sure that the curriculum gets covered”. We challenge them to work as a team to reframe the problem through a journey-mapping exercise. We find they come up with a new frame such as “keeping students as engaged as possible for an entire term”.

We also use exercises such as developing personas and brainstorming to come up with ideas that are more “out there” than they might first think possible. We then provide the technological and content knowledge to help them achieve their goals.

This form of facilitated collaboration with teachers around design tasks has had success. Preliminary results show that teachers feel supported (because they can draw on the help of a team), happy (because collaboration is one of the fundamental drivers of professional satisfaction), and empowered (because they see the results with the students).

The challenge presented by the Gonski 2.0 report is these benefits need to be scalable — teachers across the country all need to have these opportunities to collaborate meaningfully.

Sharing the knowledge

Our research (based on earlier international work) provides evidence we can achieve this goal by:

  1. Instilling a design thinking mindset in teachers. This has been proven to be a great way to create the space for meaningful collaboration, while developing the capacity of teachers for teaching creativity, critical thinking and interpersonal skills.
  2. Using co-design as professional development to meet these needs in a way that could reach every teacher across a state, through a combination of face-to-face and online workshops.
  3. Sustaining these partnerships over time by creating online spaces for teachers that enable them to share and re-use knowledge but that remain connected to real-world institutions and events. For example, we developed a community of design teachers in Queensland that was underpinned by professional development workshops and support of teacher associations.

These three pillars provide a direct way of responding to the recommendation in Gonski 2.0 for better teacher collaboration.

Our proposal is to shift funding away from the approaches that have defined the past decade — like online databases of resources that give little context, “standalone” online communities that are divorced from real-world organisations, or “driveby” professional development workshops. Funding should instead be put towards the provision of co-design teams that provide the link between professional development, online resources and online communities.



Read more:
Why teachers are turning to Twitter

Further, co-design is a meaningful way of sharing learning between schools. Each time we work with a school we are able to share with them resources and advice from our work with previous schools.

For example, one rural school we worked with took a term-long project that had been successful in a city, and adapted the assignment to make it fit the rural context. Most of the lessons needed only minor changes, and the result was the rural students felt the project spoke directly to their own experiences.

Gonski 2.0 presents an excellent opportunity for us to re-evaluate how we nurture, support and provision our teachers. The report states:

For teachers to fulfil their role as expert educators, schools need to be seen as professional learning organisations. They need to develop a culture that values continuous learning where teachers, as well as students, can feel safe to admit gaps in knowledge and understanding.

We believe that this culture of collaboration, growth and experimentation is best achieved when teachers adopt a design thinking mindset. Teachers come to adopt a design thinking mindset through a combination of design experience, professional development and ongoing support. Co-design presents an excellent way to achieve all three.

Categories
Economics Education Media Articles

Economic thinking in education and its degrading/corrupting effect

This piece on economic thinking in education was originally published on the EduResearchMatters blog of the AARE under the title Economic Thinking is Corrupting Education in Australia where it is freely available.

Introduction

There is a growing trend in education of proposing and enacting policy ideas that are based primarily upon economic thinking. I believe there are hidden impacts of applying economic thinking (typified by price signals, market mechanisms and market-oriented ideas) to education. In this post I want to unpack some of that thinking and look at what is happening to education because of it.

 Corruption of the concept of education

The philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that there are two main arguments against policy based on economic thinking. These arguments are made on the basis of fairness and corruption, and both are significant for education researchers and policy makers. While it is typical in policy formation for much attention to be given to the concept of fairness – with steps taken to ensure that policy is as fair as possible – the concept of corruption is rarely given consideration. In the case of education policy, this relates to questions about how policy can change (or corrupt) society’s conception of the role and purpose of education, and about how the moral value of education can be crowded out by economic values.

If you want to read more about this notion of economic thinking in education you should read Hidden Privatisation in Public Education and (released in July this year) Commercialisation in Australian Public Schooling. This latter study provides data confirming that teachers in Australia are indeed concerned about the influence of commercialism in schools, characterised by “top-down, test-based accountability, the introduction of market competition between schools, the use of private sector managerial practices, and an increasingly standardised curriculum that focuses on literacy and numeracy” .

In this climate of economic thinking there is a great need to attend to the moral value of education – its role and its purpose in society.

Read the rest of the article on the AARE EduResearch Matters blog.

A commenter on this article recommended a related link to this eloquent talk by Professor Alan Reid about the value of public education:

The article follows on from previous discussions on educational economics by talking bout economic thinking in education.

Categories
Education Presentation Research

Presentation: Online support for STEM teachers

On Friday 9th June 2017 I had the opportunity to present some of the ideas that have come out from TeachConnect. The presentation was called Online support for STEM teachers and in the audience we had representatives from government and the councils of deans of science and education.

The main thread of my argument is:

  1. There might be a lot of online support available for teachers (in terms of resource banks and open online communities) but it’s incredibly confusing.
  2. What we really need is for the creation of a professional learning network and a professional identity to be supported by the universities from day one of initial teacher education.
  3. To achieve that we need to be the ones that create something online that is more useful than what is currently available
  4. What teachers are actually asking for are four things:
    1. Being able to ask pragmatic questions
    2. Being able to find the right mentor/experienced teacher/professional/peer to have a deep conversation about professional practice
    3. Being able to continue these deep conversations over time for the necessary trust and understanding of context to develop
    4. Being able to share things with the community
  5. What we need to achieve this is, more than anything, leadership from the Deans of Education and Science. The technology and the engagement with students is achievable, but without leadership it will always be an uphill struggle.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Les Dawes, Kathy Nickels, Melissa Nugent and Belinda Eslick for early assistance with this presentation.

Online support for STEM teachers: Enhancing the training of maths and science teachers presentation from nickkelly

 

Categories
Economics Education

Understanding the role of markets in education

This post continues my attempts to understand how educational economics are shaping our understanding of education. This is a philosophical project in the sense that it’s about concepts – understanding the ones that we use and creating new ones where they are needed.

Previously I’ve written about the difference conceptions of education that arise when beginning from ideologies of either equality or liberty.

I’ve recently been reading What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel (a philosophy professor from Harvard – here’s a good review of it and below is clip showing the main arguments).

My takeaway for understanding the role of markets in education is that there are two main arguments against creating a market in any domain:

  1. Fairness: In a world in which different people have access to different resources, there is an inherent unfairness in creating markets for things that ought to be fundamental rights (as indeed education is under the UN charter of human rights). For example, one might be tempted to make the quality of a child’s education entirely dependent upon the willingness of parents to pay. Many reject such a proposal on the grounds of fairness (and hence the presence of government funded education)
  2. Corruption/degradation: Putting a price on something and making it a market fundamentally changes the way that society values something. For example, giving teachers “performance pay” for improving student results is not a neutral action – it fundamentally changes the relationship between teachers and their work.  In this case it might be seen as degrading the idea (held by many teachers) that they do their work to benefit society and not for achieving a financial reward. In other words, the extrinsic reward (of money) can interfere with existing intrinsic rewards.

These two standpoints help to give us some structure for critiquing economic rationale in education. In the first case creating a market creates unfairness; in the second case creating a market in some way changes the values of society in a way that may (morally) be considered detrimental. This second case is often forgotten due to the challenges that it presents.

Why create markets?

A market is fundamentally a way of being able to exchange something. Creating a market is making it possible to exchange something (usually with money) that wasn’t previously able to be exchanged.

In the current climate of neoliberalism, politicians often look for ways to bring “market logic” into education. The rationale for this are complex and I won’t get into the textbook economic theory more than I have to. Mostly it is about:

  1. Efficiency: Markets are really good at ensuring that things get to the people that most value them at the price that best fits the supplier – however, there are plenty of assumptions made about the market for this statement to remain true.
  2. Competition: Making a market introduces competition and (so goes the theory) then the best suppliers win – where success is determined by giving the consumer what they want at the right price. This of course is far more complex in education than this simple idea accounts for. This is why ideas like “making all schools private to improve competition” make little sense when the nuance is considered.
  3. Regulation: Once there is a price on something then it can be controlled and influenced by (government) policy. For example, once teachers have performance pay linked to standardised tests then the logic goes that it’s a matter of finding the right price to “incentivise” them to work harder. (To be clear, in practice there are many issues with all of this – my point here is just to characterise the arguments and policies that are often made).

Markets in education

Where does all of this get us to? The aim is to provide some clear thinking to get us out of the bind that we in education seem to frequently find ourselves in – having to deal with increasing attempts to create markets and set prices within education.

Some examples from around the world:

  • The cost of private schools
  •  Paying students [in low income areas] to read books or take advanced courses
  • Paying students for their performance (e.g., in standardised tests)
  • Paying teachers for their performance (e.g. in standardised tests)
  • Funding schools according to their performance (e.g., in standardised tests or in truancy rates)
  • Funding universities according to the salaries achieved by their graduates
  • Etc

In every case the advocates of the market solution point us to the ways that efficiency will increase and the way that all parties involved will win from increased funding and choice.

The point of this post is to encourage everyone to consider more deeply the two initial criteria:

  1. Is this change, with all of its economic rationale, fair for all involved?
  2. What are the impacts of this change on the values that society holds about education, and the values of the people involved in education? Are we prepared to accept such degradation (where it exists)?

The former question is frequently addressed in media reports (e.g. this was discussed widely regards the recent HECS/HELP repayment thresholds in Australia). My concern is that the second question is rarely considered, let alone actually treated by politicians as holding weight.

Yet an education system always embodies the moral values of a society. When will we start actually having a conversation around these moral values rather than utilitarian outcomes?

Categories
Economics Education Research

The Educational Economics of School Choice

Ever since Friedman’s work on the educational economics of school choice (Friedman, 1962) the debate has gone round in circles about the merits of a comprehensive public system compared to what is known as a voucher system. It is likely that in some country, somewhere in the world, right now a government is attempting to implement “more competition in the schooling sector” through a voucher system. Is this a good thing?

My fundamental argument in this post is that schooling policy can either work to create a low-friction market or to reduce inequality but not both. I’ll return to this post over time to make improvements as I get a handle on the arguments. My conclusion thus far is that I am strongly opposed to voucher systems based on their tendency to increase inequality.

Some arguments in brief. Schools change slowly. There is a great deal of friction in an educational marketplace (i.e. it is hard to change schools). Critically, human geography (and the social inequality that determines it) makes the idea of choosing schools challenging. There is a strong motivation in a deregulated, competitive market for schools to spend increased amounts of money on advertising (when compared to teaching), to the detriment of all. There are many benefits of schools working in collaboration rather than competition that are lost.

I’m sure there are many more, strong arguments. For now, this is a summary from Dolton (2003) in The Economic Journal:

Opponents of the school choice movement (see Smith and Meier (1995) for example) suggest that it will lead to the destruction of public schools and the increased segregation of schools by race, class and ability and induce greater in- equality. Opponents to the market model suggest that empirical evidence relating to the successes of existing choice-based systems are questionable and that the theories and assumptions that provide intellectual support for choice are abstract and have never been systematically tested. ‘The new market “model” is often not spelt out in detail nor are the assumptions concerning individual and institutional behaviour that would be required to provide the anticipated efficiency gains’, Witte (2000, p. 11). One prominent critique of the public choice also suggests that it ‘will erode the public forums in which decisions with societal consequences can democratically be resolved’,

The central questions in the school choice debate remain: what exactly is meant by school choice; who chooses to select private schools and how do they choose; what do families really know about schools; what are the reasons and rationale for choices; in reality how much choice is there for most families; what happens to the children left behind in the public schools in districts which introduce voucher schemes; how much diversity is there after a voucher scheme is introduced; are parents more satisfied by the market alternative; are parents making rational choices and are market forces leading to improvements in standards?

Empirical evidence which answers these questions can be very negative (see Gorard (1997) for example) suggesting that: schools are basically very similar, families consider very few schools in reality, selection by mortgage/house prices operates powerfully, formal sources of information like league tables are of little consequence and choices are often made long in advance by default. Alternative evidence suggests that the consequences of introducing school choice can lead to positive educational improvements in all schools.

The Dolton article provides an excellent review of the key questions around the issue of implementing voucher schemes. A critical one being the idea that voucher systems presuppose all schools being private. When there is a parallel private and public system then it becomes an issue of “exit and voice” (see Hirschman (1970)):

This problem is that there will not be an effective mechanism for change if the most influential parents choose to ‘exit’ from the state schools to the private schools rather than ‘voice’ their views in an attempt to change the state schools.

The argument that Dolton is making here is that for a competitive market to actually work, there needs to be an accountability – where the needs of consumers (parents) are taken into account by the market (schools). This does not happen in practice.

The key gap in the literature is that models of school choice theory “do not explicitly address the issue of how parents exiting from the public school sector to the private sector will affect outcomes in public schools” (F179)

Paywall link: http://www.jstor.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/stable/3590143

References

Dolton, P. (2003), A review of ‘The Economics of School Choice’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 113, No. 485, Features (Feb., 2003), pp. F167-F179

Friedman, M. (1962), The Role of Government in Education. In Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the community on the economics StackExchange site for help with researching this post, especially the user luchonacho. You can read the full thread here: http://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/16128/is-there-any-work-on-equality-in-a-market-versus-friction/16158#16158

Update and edit:

This theme was recently addressed by Amanda Keddie in an excellent post on the EduResearch Matters blog on Why Australia should not follow Nick Gibb’s advice on how to run our schools.

My comment on her post is reproduced here as it is germane to this discussion:

Thanks Amanda for a well-written post arguing for nuance in this debate around educational reform.

I am writing this comment to take up the thread and argue for a high level of debate around this issue. To my mind there are three levels at which debate tends to occur when it comes to ideas of school privatisation:

1. Ideology: People who talk passionately about educational systems tend to hold one of two ideals. If liberty is your ideal then anything to do with “competition”, “autonomy”, and “choice” is a good thing. If equality is your ideal then anything to do with “social justice”, “opportunity”, and “social mobility” is a good thing. At this level, the debate can go nowhere and cannot attempt to find common ground. (For the record: I favour equality but I recognise that this is simply not as important as liberty for many people in society).

An example of commentary at the level of ideology: “I believe that choice is also a major piece in the puzzle of providing the best education to young Australians” – Senator the Hon. Simon Birmingham

2. Empirical: Sometimes the debate rises to the point that people start throwing around the conclusions of one or other study from the literature. At its worst there is cherrypicking of whichever study best supports ideology. Often there is simply a lack of recognition that education is highly contextual. Something that works in one country with its own culture and educational history may have entirely different outcomes in another country. At its best there is nuanced weighing up of empirical evidence from both sides and attempts to find trends and contradictions.

3. Theoretical: We need debate that attempts to understand why studies produce the outcomes that they do. Debate that leaves ideology at the door and perhaps even moves beyond prior examples to imagining what could be possible. This would involve firstly having a discussion around the objectives for what we want the outcomes for a school system to be. For example: Do we want better international PISA scores (often assumed to be a goal) or do we care more about a reduced disparity between advantaged and disadvantaged (one of many other possible aims)? Is it possible to achieve both without significantly more funding? What do we choose if it must be one or the other?

From a considered understanding of desired outcomes, we can then learn from many the nuanced examples in the literature. The literature around these issues is far more broad than many recognise, spanning many decades and multiple paradigms: applied economics, education, sociology, history, etc. We need to learn from all of it if we want to get arrive at good policy that fits with our own context in Australia.

For example, this is a quote from Dolton (2003, The Economic Journal 113(485)) trying to find the nuance in the debate around “school choice”:

“The central questions in the school choice debate remain: what exactly is meant by school choice; who chooses to select private schools and how do they choose; what do families really know about schools; what are the reasons and rationale for choices; in reality how much choice is there for most families; what happens to the children left behind in the public schools in districts which introduce voucher schemes; how much diversity is there after a voucher scheme is introduced; are parents more satisfied by the market alternative; are parents making rational choices and are market forces leading to improvements in standards?”