Curios of the week #180

Last Saturday, I attended researchED Melbourne as a regular punter. Held at Haileybury independent school’s City Campus, it was somewhat unique. If you missed my rundown of the day, you can catch it here.

It has been cold and wet in Ballarat. This is good for the farmers and contrasts with the dry weather I am hearing about in Europe. Sadly, one of the lettuces I planted has died, but the rest are doing well.

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This week’s Curios include an audible groan, a potential vibe shift, a cash injection into Chilean schools and much more.

I promise I won’t keep going on about it, but one advantage of l’affaire Arday is that it has drawn a spotlight to the excesses of education scholarship—if that is the right word. I suspect the wider public is vaguely suspicious of education researchers or educational sociologists, but they now have more of a sense of why they should be. The Arday case is a reductio ad absurdum—a distillation, if you will—of the weakest education scholarship. Such work has the property of not only using potentially weak research designs such as autoethnography, but of being highly derivative. For example, how many more times can a paper draw on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ to say something underwhelming? And what can be more derivative than alleged plagiarism?

There have been many hot takes on the case and plenty of rocks upturned as the story lives on. Writing in The Telegraph, Gordon Rayner, Albert Tait and Janet Eastham highlight some comments by Arday’s boss, Hilary Cremin, Professor of Education and head of Cambridge’s education faculty. Again, I feel as if nature is offering up an archetype rather than a mere example.

Rayner and colleagues refer to a video interview Cremin gave where she said:

“I think we need to move away from the idea of high-stakes testing – the idea of an A* at 18, which will be a gateway into what you do next, but which is a completely arbitrary thing…

It doesn’t signal intelligence or potential, trust me – I meet these young people in Cambridge. It’s simply a marker of schooling. And, as I was saying earlier, you can buy that. So it’s ultimately a marker of wealth.”

Cremin then goes on to claim that ‘education exacerbates inequality’ and bemoan a lack of a focus on critical thinking.

I have two thoughts.

What does it say about the academy that an education professor believes that obtaining the highest possible grade at 18 is arbitrary and does not signal intelligence or potential, and that the very field in which they obtained a professorship is a source of inequality?

And I wish I had been the first person to point this out, but the boss who failed to spot some notable inconsistencies in her star recruit’s research and life story should hardly be lecturing others about critical thinking. All I can add is a reminder that critical thinking is not a general skill and perhaps Cremin is excellent at it in areas where she possesses substantial background knowledge.

Whatever they are.

Edit: since drafting this piece I have learnt the terrible news of the passing of Jason Arday. I feel deeply sorry for this friends and family.

Does Alpha School work? The hype has been receding in recent weeks, but this remains an important question, given the attention the model has generated.