From Harlem to Hackney?

By Jim Sweetman /@jimbo9848

External intervention in education takes many forms but most of them either start with the implication that other countries do it better or claim that if we only listened to experts in business and industry everything would be hunky-dory.

A few years ago, educational experts went to Finland in droves to uncover a magic solution which appeared to guarantee constantly rising standards. They came back with lots of trivial stuff but were eventually forced to admit that the Finnish education system is successful because it is reasonably well-funded and because it provides education to supportive homogenous communities where parents have long established and positive attitudes towards schooling. There’s nothing very radical there, even if all that remains an aspiration for the UK. Before that, they went to Singapore and discovered that you could drill numeracy into children in very large classes. That didn’t work here either, although the National Numeracy Strategy tried.

The introduction of the business expert started back in the 1990s. Sponsored City Technology Colleges were transformed into sponsored Education Action Zones, Specialist Schools and, eventually, the Academies programme. The businesspeople who thought that schools could be run more like factories were joined by people from churches who thought they could be made to turn out better citizens and the philanthropic rich who fancied engaging in a little social engineering.

Alongside all this, successive governments were themselves tending to be increasingly interventionist and centralist in their thinking. In spite of the increasing accountability of teachers and schools, there has been an unchallenged assumption throughout this period that schools will only improve if somebody else has a part to play in holding them to account. It might be parents, national strategies, local authorities or Ofsted but there is always someone who can diagnose the illness and who knows the panacea or, perhaps, the medicine required better than the headteacher and the local community.

The Harlem Children’s Zone is the current “answer” to the educational malaise. On the surface, it appears to have transformed the schools in one of the most disadvantaged districts in New York. This has been achieved by community reform, a birth to matriculation approach, by increased pupil teacher ratios, by jacking up expectations and by regular testing. It has involved a public/private partnership and philanthropic cash. It has presidential support and there is funding to extend it across America to other major cities.

Well, that sounds good! When can we have one here? First of all, we need to stand back and take a hard look. This is a good programme but not that good. Firstly, Harlem is not a disadvantaged black ghetto littered with jazz clubs, crack dealers and prostitution. Or, at least, not anymore. Since the mid-1990s the district has been constantly gentrifying, property prices have soared and many of the poorer communities have largely relocated. Secondly, the schools which have shown an improvement are the privately endowed charter schools which, rather like religious or specialist schools in the UK, employ covert selection strategies to ensure they attract aspirant families with the right values. And, finally, the early years programme is limited in scope and has borrowed some of its approaches from our own Sure Start programme.

It would be unfair and untrue to say that some students have not benefited but that is very different from claiming that this is the answer to structural inequalities. The greatest underachievers in our educational system are poor white boys and they are increasingly concentrated in disadvantaged, inner-city communities. Where community reform is supported by economic change, schools can have a pivotal role to play in modelling and supporting that change but, on their own, schools cannot and will not compensate for society – even with the help of churches, car salesmen, carpet manufacturers and the wives of millionaires. However, what they can do in these disadvantaged communities is to provide safe places and family support empowered by strong local democracy, excellent community links and a focus on people and prospects rather than performance statistics. And, if politicians listen to the parents, they will discover that that is exactly what they want.