This week, President Bush signed a grandly-named education bill into law. The 'No Child Left Behind Act of 2001' is being presented as a major reform of the American public education system, and certainly some of its provisions are praiseworthy. Despite the Bush administration's passionate belief in tax cuts, the new law provides for greater public spending on schooling - $26.5 billion per year, an increase of $4 billion. It also gives school districts more flexibility in choosing how they want to spend their money.

However, the most radical part of the new law is the introduction of new forms of testing for students. From the 2004-5 school year, pupils in grades three to eight will begin taking standardised tests in reading and mathematics. Tests in science subjects will begin a year later. The tests will be used to assess schools, and to identify those that aren't achieving good enough results. Extra funding will be made available to schools where the results fail to improve over two years.

But if that doesn't produce an improvement in a school's scores in the tests, that school's students will be allowed to move to other schools or be given funds to pay for tutors. The final sanction comes in if a school fails to improve after six years, when the new law calls for staff changes in the struggling schools. Teacher will, in effect, be told to shape up or lose their jobs.

Bush has said this week:
'The fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn. We expect every child to learn, and you must show us whether or not every child is learning. We must not trap children in schools that will not teach and will not change. It is important to free families from failure in public education, and that's what this bill does.'

On the face of it, this seems fair enough. Of course every child should get the best education possible. But to British readers, particularly anyone working in education, these new American initiatives may sound oddly familiar.

For years now, the UK government's education policy has been based around School Performance Tables, or 'league tables' for schools. The exam results obtained by schools across Britain have been published in newspapers, ostensibly to give parents the best possible information before deciding where to send their children.

But the policy has had some unwanted side-effects - not least on teacher morale. Many teachers have felt unfairly judged. As I know from talking to a friend of mine who works as a teacher in my home city of Bradford, the cold statistics of examination passes and failures hardly tell the whole story about how good or bad a school is. In Bradford, there is a very large immigrant population, largely concentrated in specific areas of the city. There are, thus, many children in those areas who do not hear English being spoken at home. Schools in those areas are therefore hardly likely to obtain the same exam results, for exams taken in English, as schools in areas where English is the first language of most of the population.

Yet schools are judged as if all such circumstances are irrelevant. The result has been a great deal of extra stress on teachers, and an exodus from the profession. So many teachers have quit that the Government has been forced to spend a lot of public money on an advertising campaign to try to persuade people that teaching is a good career option - despite the fact that it's rarely well paid, and there's a significant risk of being physically attacked by parents or pupils if you go to work in certain schools. Such has been the backlash from teachers against the school 'league tables' that the regional assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland have voted to stop publishing them.

It is only right and proper that students should be encouraged to try to fulfil their potential, but there is such a thing as putting too much emphasis on getting the best grades. When I was a teenager, the main school exams in Britain were called GCE 'O' levels and 'A' levels, the initials standing for General Certificate of Education Ordinary and Advanced levels. You took your 'O' levels at the age of 16.

I don't think I'll ever forget a teacher solemnly informing the class I was in that the week we took our 'O' levels would be the most important of our lives. It was an epiphany for me: the moment when it suddenly hit me that people in positions of authority were capable of telling outrageous lies to people who trusted them.

Even at 15, I could see that the teacher's statement was utter nonsense. The most important week of your life? What about the week you choose a career, or decide whether or not to get married or to have children? Come to that, what on earth did the same teacher say to the students two years older than us, who were about to take their 'A' levels?

But there have been cases where students have taken such pressure tragically seriously, and have ended up committing suicide due to anxiety over exams. Yes, getting good grades matters... but so does coming out of adolescence as a reasonably well-adjusted human being. Young people really shouldn't be pushed so hard to achieve that they end up having their first nervous breakdowns before they're legally allowed to have sex.

So I hope that the American experience proves to be better than the British one when it comes to comparing schools and forcing them to compete. President Bush should know that being an ace student isn't everything for a young person. After all, he wasn't that hot at school himself - but somehow it didn't seem to do his career prospects much harm.

All of us who write here on h2g2 are, of course, Researchers. But sometimes, I feel that I'd like to be a researcher out there in the world beyond the Internet. I am constantly amazed by scientific research, and the remarkable insights it produces.

Two researchers from Warwick University, Andrew Oswald and Jonathan Gardner, have just published the results of a 10-year research project measuring the happiness of 9,000 British families throughout the 1990s. They measured the family members' psychological health using standard scientific indicators to calculate their stress levels.

And at the end of it all, they have concluded that you are more likely to be happy if you've got money than if you haven't.

During the study, quite a few of the people involved came into money in unexpected ways, such as gambling wins or inheritances. Amazingly, those who suddenly found themselves much better off financially appeared to become happier in the following year!

However, the researchers found that real contentment requires serious money.
'We calculated that to turn an average person into a very happy one using money alone took £1 million'

Professor Oswald has commented.

Even so, money really isn't everything. Good health and a loving relationship were also found to be important factors in promoting happiness, while losing a job or getting divorced were the things most likely to cause discontent.

Well, frankly, I don't think this matter has been studied nearly enough. I'd like to volunteer to be experimented upon. The researchers are hereby invited to study my stress levels, then give me a lot of money and see if I cheer up.

Alternatively, since job security has been found to be so important, perhaps they could just tell me how I could get a job that would allow me to spend ten years studying, before bringing out a report apparently largely devoted to stating the obvious?

Finally, an interesting little postscript to last week's item about the Lake Superior State University in Michigan, USA, and their 'List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness'.

Regular readers might recall that the University's team nominated the abbreviation '9-11' as one of the irritating expressions most deserving of banishment. But in the land of the free, there's room for a wide range of opinions: and the American Dialect Society has voted '9-11' its Word of the Year.

The awards were announced by the chair of the ADS' New Words Committee, Professor Wayne Glowka of Georgia College and State University, at a ceremony in San Francisco.

Other awards included one for the Word Least Likely to Succeed. That went to 'Osamaniac', meaning a woman sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden. The award for the Most Creative piece of word-invention went to 'Shuicide-Bomber', meant to denote a terrorist with explosives packed in his shoes.

The ADS did agree with the Michigan team on one thing, however. Like them, and like me, they disapprove of military euphemisms . The ADS award for the Most Euphemistic expression went to the US Air Force, for 'Daisy-Cutter Bomb'.

Quite right too. A lawnmower cuts daisies. A bomb - well, that just ruins your lawn.

Ormondroyd

10.01.02. Front Page

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