Curriculum Evaluation in Schools

Robert McCormick, Mary James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138318878
• eBook ISBN: 9780429845093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1983 and as a second edition in 1988. An attempt is made in this book to disentangle some of the professional, ethical, political, theoretical and practical issues involved in curriculum evaluation. This book present evidence concerning a number of evaluation strategies and techniques, drawing on experience in several countries, including the UK, Australia and the US, to debate the potential of insider and outsider approaches to evaluation, and combinations of the two. It also offers a practical source book for those wishing to plan and conduct curriculum evaluations. Finally, it considers the crucial question of how evaluation can influence curriculum action and, thereby, teaching and learning.

Part One

Directions

1 Accountability and Evaluation

Introduction

It has now become commonplace to observe that the 1960s witnessed a rapid increase in educational investment on both sides of the Atlantic. However, in relation to the theme of this chapter, this development was significant because it created an urgent need to justify the massive input of resources. Taxpayers, ratepayers, policy makers and administrators all demanded information about the way in which the money they provided was being spent. Thus, by the 1970s, the age of accountability had arrived and the concept of educational evaluation had acquired a new meaning.

By the early 1980s, the concept of educational evaluation was often so interwoven with the concept of accountability that the two were difficult to distinguish; indeed Nuttall (Open University, 1982, Block 1) suggests that the distinction may be untenable. However, Elliott (1981b), following Becher (1979), argues that whilst evaluation and accountability are closely inter-related, the relationship is not symmetrical. Accountability usually presupposes evaluation, but evaluation does not necessarily imply accountability. This latter view is the one we subscribe to in this book, for although we consider evaluation as a response to, or the process of, accountability, we also consider evaluation in two other contexts, which, unlike Nuttall, we have chosen to distinguish from accountability. (See chapters 2 and 3.)

Accountability Pressures

We have already mentioned one of the factors that gave rise to the emergence of accountability as a central issue in education: the need to justify increased spending in the 1960s. This was however, only the most obvious of a number of complex social, economic and political pressures, which contributed to a gradual change in the climate that surrounds most public institutions in the western world. Equally important, although in many ways distinct, was a perceptible decline in public confidence. According to Halsey (1979) the 1970s witnessed a widespread ‘rotting of public confidence in public institutions’. As a consequence we seem to have entered a strongly conservative phase with an unmistakeable emphasis on consumer rights.

Before focusing on the way in which educational accountability has manifested itself in evaluation procedures we want to spend a little time exploring this more general picture. Our thesis is this: educational accountability is not a localised phenomenon, therefore, what appear to be local responses may have a wider significance than was imagined at their inception. After all, policy makers rarely start from first principles but borrow and adapt structures and procedures which they see operating effectively elsewhere. For this reason the American experience has relevance to the United Kingdom, and perhaps vice versa; and developments in law, medicine, the police force and the social services are worthy of the attention of those within education. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) in England and Wales has some of the characteristics of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the US; or that new moves in the UK to establish procedures to make incompetent teachers liable to sanctions (reported in the Times Educational Supplement. 27 Nov. 1981) coincided with the publication (on 25 Nov. 1981) of the Scarman Report which recommended the introduction of an independent element in the police complaints procedure.

In two papers outlining some of the causes of public discontent and their impact on education in the United States, Atkin (1979, 1980) provides a useful framework for comparing the situation in the UK (especially England and Wales) with that in the USA. Educational accountability emerged in the United States earlier than the United Kingdom, where the term did not appear in an official document until the publication of the ‘Green Paper’ (DES, 1977b). Despite this qualifcation, the trend on this side of the Atlantic now seems established and many of the features of North American accountability have counter-parts here. In the rest of this section, therefore, we have used Atkin’s framework to draw out some of these similarities.

Economic decline and the failure of education to improve industrial performance.

After the economic boom years of the 1960s, industrial expansion has been arrested, on both sides of the Atlantic. In large measure this is attributable to the world recession which developed after the oil crisis in 1974, although another contributory factor is associated with the failure of western societies to respond sufficiently quickly to the development of new technologies. In particular, the lack of investment planning has hindered the shift in the industrial base of western economies. Anxieties aroused by the economic crisis have rebounded on the education service which, fairly or otherwise, stands accused of not meeting the needs of advanced industrial society. Although the USA has always tended to look to education to solve its national problems, education in the UK has traditionally been viewed more as a benefit to the individual (Taylor, W., 1978). The advent of accountability in the UK has therefore had the effect of bringing closer together the values ascribed to education by both UK and US governments. Offering an American view of British accountability House (1978) describes a shift from individualist to societal values in the following way:

The major shift in values is from individualist values, the traditional emphasis, to society goals and values, from the individual to the government. The longstanding consensus on traditional aims has been broken and the pattern of educational governance is at issue. Education is being pushed more towards being an instrument of national policy, or so it would appear to an outsider. (p.207)

House is perhaps mistaken in believing that individualist values have always held sway in the UK. In earlier periods pressures to provide an education service fitted to the needs of the society have been observed. For instance the Taunton Commission Report, 1868, and the Hadow Report, 1926, were both much influenced by the contemporary view of the needs of the economy (see Musgrave, 1968). It is nevertheless true that the creation of the single subject GCE examinations in the 1950s, and the subsequent development of the CSE (Mode III), allowed considerable power to swing to the teachers. They now had the means to tailor curricula to suit what they perceived to be the abilities and interests of individual children (Lawton, 1980). The advent of the accountability movement in the UK represents, therefore, something in the nature of another swing of the pendulum: back to a reconsideration of societal needs. The current UK trend found an early official expression in the Ruskin College Speech of the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan. In this he initiated the Great Debate by exhorting teachers to ‘satisfy parents and industry that what you are doing meets their requirements and the needs of their children’ (Callaghan, 1976). Subsequent government documents, emanating from both the Department of Education and Science (i.e. Secretaries of State and HMI) and the Department of Industry, have pursued the same theme and in 1985 Better Schools (DES, 1985a) contained the following statement:

It is vital that schools should always remember that preparation for working life is one of their principal functions. The economic stresses of our time and the pressures of international competition make it more necessary than ever before that Britain’s work-force should possess the skills and attitudes, and display the under-standing, the enterprise and adaptability that the pervasive impact of technological advance will increasingly demand. This applies to those who will be employed by others and to the many who may expect, for part or all of their working lives, to be self-employed. The balance within the curriculum and the emphasis in teaching it now need to alter accordingly. (DES, 1985a, para. 46, p. 15)

One manifestation of this statement in terms of policy has been the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) funded by the MSC.

Falling standards, falling roles and higher costs.

Criticism of the education service for failing to meet the needs of an advanced industrial economy is undoubtedly linked with a widely held belief that educational standards, generally, are in decline. In the United States a sharp drop in Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores (an examination used widely to select students for college admission) has been evinced as ‘proof of falling standards. The ensuing public alarm encouraged the setting up of a national commission (chaired by the former Secretary of Labour, Willard Wirtz) to investigate the reasons for such a sharp decline. The commission identified a variety of factors including lack of parental support, the influence of television, the increased proportion of eighteen-year-olds taking the SAT, and a decrease in the importance of formal education in determining life-time earnings. Significantly this list does not include any indication that the quality of educational provision had, itself, declined. Nevertheless the indictment of schooling remains strong in the public mind and an apparent increase in violence in schools serves only to compound this belief.

In England and Wales there is no convenient, popularly accepted, indicator of the effectiveness of schooling to compare with the SAT. No single attainment test is administered to all schools, and GCE and CSE examinations were always dogged by problems of comparability (Schools Council, 1979; Nuttall, Backhouse, and Willmott, 1974). Notwithstanding that, from 1969 onwards, the authors of a series of Black Papers saw fit to castigate schools for falling standards¹. Unfortunately they tended to use polemical fervour as a substitute for evidence. Indeed what evidence there was at that time, for instance from a number of reading surveys, suggested the maintenance or improvement of attainment, although the single exception provoked more media interest (Start and Wells, 1972).

With the publication of the Green Paper (DES, 1977b), the ‘standards’ issue became an official concern. Once more the suggestion was that educational standards had fallen and that this decline was in some way connected with the introduction of progressive forms of education. Again the accusation was presented without evidence. The fact that two years later the HMI Secondary Survey (DES, 1979a) showed that popular fears about falling standards were largely unfounded did conspicuously little to change the prevailing attitude.²

According to MacDonald (1978) the standards debate in England was as much stimulated by an idealised ‘distillation from the past’ as any so called ‘objective’ measures. He writes: ‘It may be that when we “invent” the past, especially the lived past, we serve our self esteem by creating an idealized image of our experience, holding it in our heads until it yields measures of virtue’ (p 30). Certainly, a large section of the British public came to believe that standards had declined, and, as Thomas (1928) observed, ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’. Moreover, as in America, a growing youth movement was attracting media attention and added to the impression that ‘kis can’t read, don’t know how to behave, and aren’t willing to work’. (Taylor, W., 1978).

The finger pointed at education could not easily be pushed aside, particularly at a time when the period of education had been extended and the school population, on both sides of the Atlantic, was beginning to diminish—factors which should have favoured significant improvement. Furthermore the public expected increased ‘productivity’ in return for the substantial increases in salaries achieved in the 1970s by unionised teachers in both the UK and the USA. To the layman it seemed that a decreasing service was being provided at increasing expense. As a consequence the recent decline in public spending on services, such as education, has gone virtually unchecked.

The failure of education as an instrument of social reform.

Commenting on the US federal government’s increasing involvement in education, Atkin (1980) observed a shift in national priorities during the Kennedy years, which influenced the nature of that involvement. An earlier preoccupation with the space race and national defence had focused attention on improving the state of science education, in the USA. In the 1960s this preoccupation gave way to an urgent need to consider domestic problems such as racial disharmony and poverty. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson, who, according to Atkin, wanted to be remembered as the ‘Education President’, devoted much of his energies to the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which appropriated large sums of money for a compensatory education programme. ‘It was a period of considerable optimism in some quarters that the nation’s ills could be ameliorated by wise policy, diligent effort, and lots of money’ (Atkin, 1979, p.18).

The emphasis on individualism that House (1978) observed prevented education in the UK ever being regarded as an agent of social reform to the extent that it was in the United States. Nevertheless a similar concern was evident in the discussions of ‘positive discrimination’ and the establishment of educational priority areas (EPAs) subsequent to the publication of the Plowden Report in 1967. Moreover, in the secondary sector, it was hoped that comprehensivisation would be effective in equalising opportunities among different social groups.

Faith in this doctrine of meliorism (that progress is inevitable if sufficient money and resources are provided) soon began to fade. In the UK it became increasingly apparent that organisational change in schools was not sufficient to guarantee change in established social attitudes. For instance, some observers suggest that there are few genuine comprehensive schools in this country i.e. schools fully committed to physical, social and curricular integration (see Reynolds et al, 1987, for a recent analysis). Indeed comprehensivisation is now likely to be reversed by government policy to allow schools to opt out of LEA control. In the USA disillusionment was even more obvious, especially after Vietnam and Watergate had turned the national mood from optimism to self-criticism. Furthermore, disagreement over racial desegregation and the policy of bussing revealed a lack of consensus over the social goals that schools were supposed to advance.

Accountability and Evaluation 13 Distrust of authority and scepticism concerning competence

According to Atkin (1979) lack of agreement about social purposes is related to an increasing lack of confidence in those in positions of authority or those who claim specialist knowledge. Nisbet (1979) has pointed out the irony that this new distrust may itself be a product of modern education, since a number of new approaches to teaching and learning encourage children to ‘think for themselves’. Certainly ‘professionalism’ is beginning to be viewed sceptically (Hoyle, 1980) and competence is no longer assumed. On both sides of the Atlantic the decisions of architects, civil engineers, environmental planners, doctors etc. attract public scrutiny and the numbers of government regulating agencies increase.

In the UK the established professions (law and medicine) and some of the semi-professions, such as the police, have traditionally been self-monitoring. Now, however, they are finding this position increasingly difficult to maintain. In the 1980 series of Reith Lectures on BBC radio, Ian Kennedy, a Reader in Law, argued that the disciplinary procedures of the medical profession are more concerned with etiquette than competence. Supporting a notion of consumerism he proposed litigation as a more satisfactory procedure than the existing forms of self-regulation provided by the General Medical Council. In October 1981, a court case, concerning the death of a Down’s Syndrome baby, was brought against a paediatrician by the association ‘Life’. Although in this instance, the doctor’s action was vindicated, the case was illustrative of a greater public willingness to take legal action in circumstances such as these.

In the US this trend has been evident for some time. In the educational sphere, the minimum competencies legislation passed by at least 38 states has provided a possible vehicle (litigation) for ordinary laymen to demand that certain tasks are fulfilled by the professionals. In this context, ‘minimum competencies’ legislation refers to the State’s requirement that pupils should attain an agreed level of mastery of basic skills and satisfactory per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Part One: Directions
• Part Two: Strategies
• Part Three: Techniques
• Part Four: Using Evaluation
• Bibliography
• Index