Education’s Prison-House: How might we start to measure what we ought to value?

I suggested in my share of the TES article last week, the financial modelling of the examination industry, and its self-perpetuating research agenda, is a waste of financial and human resources. I argued that amidst the current Covid19 crisis, it has thrown into relief the prison-house we have constructed for our teaching and learning. Many colleagues commented on my point of view and I am grateful for their insights and now want to engage with some of the concerns voiced in this longer piece.

I need to be upfront; I am fatigued by the evangelism of education politics. Various groups endlessly setting themselves against one another with the camps largely drawn up along traditional economic and political lines. On the one hand, progressives giving a shout out to social constructivist pedagogies such as concept-based inquiry, or problem-based learning and advocating agentic approaches to student assessment. On the other, conservatives promoting cognitive load theory, self-regulation and outcomes-driven high stakes assessment models. My bias in such a landscape leans more toward the social nature of most learning but I do my best to remember that education serves numerous masters, each with its own political or economic drivers. Furthermore, depending on the socio-political status quo at any one historical period different drivers hold sway. Andy Stables (2009) summarised education’s broad purposes as: 1) morally justifiable; 2) socially empowering; 3) producing substantive economic gains for society; 4) building and maintaining equity. In these definitions it is easy to see how those who align more with the values of 1 and 2 find themselves so often set against those intent on the measuring of 3 and 4.

However, what I’d really like to consider today is how education is dominated by the maintenance of the current socio-economic status quo and to contemplate the extent to which our examination system has become progressively more and more inflexible. This has resulted in us building a complex, industrialised human evaluation machinery, which is set up to sift school graduates and support a social stratification that reinforces the current dominant economic worldview. In other words, a machinery that entrenches versions of educational purposes 3 and 4. Furthermore, these versions of economic gain and equity are guided by a political perspective that is at best individualistic and at worst populist.

For the last few years, thinkers such as Gert Beista have warned we are in danger of simply valuing what is measured rather than measuring what we value (2008). Put another way, David N. Perkins (2014) argued for ‘lifeworthy learning’ in which we value the process and utility of learning rather than simply fixate on the measurement of specific knowledge accumulation. In other words, shift away from only sanctioning a knowledge economy with its standardised ‘credential capital’ (Lauder 2010) and instead see the process of learning as a key element in the journey to individual and collective wisdom, which I think should ideally be the core purpose of formal education.

I should add here that I do not offer this argument from an evangelical position, we don’t build wisdom at the expense of realities of knowledge economics, which is of course another purpose of education. The point is that we have become too fixated with a narrow form of measurement, and consequently it now has an overblown value when considering the purpose of schooling. Today, one’s narrow demonstration of particular types of disciplinary knowledge, its validation and credential accumulation is seen by many as the only reason for an education. Such a state of affairs creates what Michel Foucault termed an ‘episteme’ in that the accumulation of pre-determined knowledge, and its measurement and credentialing all form parts of an enclosed, self-perpetuating model of truth. Formal examinations and their subsequent qualifications have become the end game in most mass learning systems. Standardised curriculum trajectories and industrial scale assessment models downplay much of the intrinsic social values inherent to the process of learning. Such a learning system cordons off many other aspects of school learning because our credentialing apparatus have no way of recognising it in an evaluative way.

Again, this should not be seen as a one side or the other argument. I simply make the point that learning and its assessment is a multifaceted and complex matrix of social interactions and individual developments. For both the teacher and the student learning is iterative; and, dare I say, an organic process that realistically never ends for any of us. However, the current suspension of many forms of examination process around the world perhaps highlights the extent to which our thirst for more and more ‘metrics’ have accentuated the dominant economic and social sifting imperatives inherent in contemporary education. A state of affairs that is detrimental for many of the social values that form our collective wisdom. Schooling these days plays out for many as a cruel social Darwinism; a credentialing of the fittest.

So how might we break out of this prison-house for teaching and learning? Last week, I promised to offer a conversation starter by rethinking where we might go after we return to post-pandemic education. I would argue that we need three organisational and policy developments to shift the truisms of the current knowledge economics:

1) divert exam fees towards investment in quality assured, university admission processes with redirected funding used to build human capacity in university admission departments and increase their ability to utilise smart technology in their processes;

2) for more personalised evidence of mastery, offer a wider range of modular curriculum and assessment models designed around many more longitudinal, low stakes assessment data points running alongside less use of traditional high stakes assessment;

3) drive collective investment by industry, governments, assessment boards and universities in developing secure blockchain, algorithmic credentialing systems that deliver sophisticated portfolios of individual learning into the hands of each graduate, such portfolios can then be added to throughout one’s life.

Such cumulative data profiles would be more difficult to game than current credentials and more accurately reflect a wider range of student skills, knowledge and dispositions. Obviously, this approach to credential profile development requires putting more agency into the hands of the learner so that he or she can choose which credentials they show to whom. It will pose data ownership and security challenges and we need to be mindful of the equity and access arguments I alluded to above. But, the reality is that this new normal is already here and being used in global vocational education (see Certif-ID as an example). The current global pandemic means our dear old examination machinery is looking all of its four thousand years! (Yes, Chinese ministerial exams have been traced back that far.)

At Dulwich College International we are exploring how we might address the credentialing problem in the private education sector where there may be more policy flexibility and potential to innovate. Our search for an alternative credentialing model and the development of its subsequent recognition is driven by our ‘students come first’ values. Indeed, in a recent review of learning across our schools, students repeatedly asked a question reminiscent of those posed by David N. Perkins in Future Wise (2014): “What’s the point of studying for stuff that seems irrelevant to MY future? Is it really just so I can ‘mindfully’ sit in some exam room every day for a month and regurgitate as much as I’ve managed to force down in the last decade?”

The pandemic’s suspension of the normal has handed us a fantastic opportunity to pause and reflect. We’re offered a once in a generation chance to stop and ask ourselves if we can do better by our children, and not default to the comfort of the prison-house. What have we got to lose? Are we all going to sit on our hands because the qualification system changes? Will the need for skills and credentials disappear? We could in this time of seemingly spiralling planetary catastrophe listen to the young and make their learning ‘lifeworthy’ by ensuring knowledge is adaptable and applicable to the real life problems we have laid at their feet. And then, just maybe, we can begin to start measuring what we really ought to value.