Grammar schools, mobility & cognitive bias

Why do so many people think grammar schools are a way of improving social mobility? It’s not because the social research says they are. I suspect instead that plain error is involved.
One such error is the availability heuristic, mixed with survivorship bias. The handful of working class people for whom grammar schools were a means of upward mobility have high profiles, make lots of noise and get lots of attention. It’s easy, therefore, to over-estimate their numbers. This is especially true if you were one of these people yourself. By contrast, the many who failed the 11-plus and lost opportunities to “move up” get ignored. Anecdotal evidence can be systematically misleading.
This error might be magnified by a tendency to exaggerate the poverty of the backgrounds of people who did get through grammar school; doing this is a corollary of the middle England error, the tendency to exaggerate median incomes. Matthew D’Ancona (educ: St Dunstan’s, annual fee = £12,660, £2000 more than a full-time minimum wage job) probably thinks that anyone who doesn’t have punctuation in their surname is working class. The truth is, though, that the typical grammar school product is more like Oliver Kamm than me, to take two Wyggestonians.
There is, I suspect, a third motive: wishful thinking. The “right” want to believe that perceived injustices are the result of state actions, rather than impersonal societal forces. This leads them to over-play the role of policy in depressing social mobility. This is especially easily done if they can convince themselves, against the facts, that the policy was that of their opponents. 
Now, I don’t have a dog in this race: I don’t give a damn how much social mobility there is. I say all this not to take a stand on education and social mobility, but rather to point out just how political opinions are shaped by inferential error rather than hard evidence. This is, of course, much easier to spot in other people’s opinions.
Another thing: Let’s be clear. You cannot support both more grammar schools and more choice in education. If schools select pupils, pupils cannot - except by happy coincidence - select their schools.

Comments

[ejh]

You would think from some people that grammar schools were (and are) full of working-class kids: it's nonsense. There were of course working-class kids in grammars but the social profile of a grammar school will look like the top set in a comp, not like the comp itself. This is one reason why statistical comparisons between grammars and comps are very often miselading.

Another, as it goes, is that a lot of schools which used to be grammars subsequently became independent. So if you try to show, for instance, that a larger proportion of Oxbridge students came from grammars forty years ago than come from comps today, you need to recall that a fair number of the schools that figure in the "grammars" column for the earlier date - including some of the largest "suppliers" - are actually in the "independent" column now.

[Nigel]

I do like your cognitive bias posts, but to call you at your own game, I don't think your "another thing" point at the end follows. Private schools are almost all selective but their prospective pupils still end up with a level of choice as to which they try for and, of the ones they get into, which they go to. Obviously not unrestricted choice (and only for those who can afford the fees!) but it shows that a mix of school selection and pupil choice is still possible.

My dad went to the Wyggeston in the '40s. He says the swimming pool was ice cold and the masters were very tough, but I guess there was a war on.

[Ross]

"The “right” want to believe that perceived injustices are the result of state actions, rather than impersonal societal forces. "

Really? I'd have said it was quite the opposite, that the right views injustices as inevitable, whereas the left believes that society is perfectable therefore any injustices are the result of either a lack of wisdom or a lack of goodwill.

For example on the Open Left website on of the questions they ask of various figures
"What most makes you angry about the way Britain is now?", now anger is surely a bizarre emotion to have against impersonal societal forces.

[stan]

I was grammar school and first-generation-university, and no, we weren't rich. Still, the old system was unsustainable. It was perfectly aligned with the British class system: public school for the officers, grammar schools for the NCOs, and secondary moderns for the poor bloody infantry. Great for producing Nobel prize winners and unskilled labourers, but not for a modern economy.

What wrecked comprehensive education was modish neo-Marxism infecting the teaching profession. Mixed ability teaching (an abomination at all levels) and a strange desire to make schools too large. Three form streamed entry is perfectly adequate to cater for all, the top ability form at grammar school standard.

[Andrew]

As another of the granmmar school and first-generation-uni class, I am inclined to bemoan the decline of the grammar; and, like so many others, perhaps for romantic notions rather than those based on fact and logic.

I agree that mixed ability teaching is at the core of the problem and, indeed, saw this first hand when, being at the fag end of the g/s system, I got to see my own school turn comprehensive and fall apart before I left and went to Oxford (being from a council estate, to this day I refuse to say "up").

But, a point which I feel is not sufficiently commented upon, and from which I feel I benefitted through my g/s education, is the fact that many grammars were, indeed, not stuffed to the gills with working class children. Half my class comprised the children of judges, bankers, lawyers etc., who were more than happy to send their offspring to a state school. Being exposed, at an early and formative age, to children from wealthy backgrounds whose families had large houses, and who went on exotic foreign holidays etc., demystified for me, and many others, the social divides at an age, and in an environment, where such matters are best addressed and, if you like, the prejudices conquered.

In many respects, I feel my own mobility was helped by these extra curricular facets as much as it was by my formal education.

[ejh]

1. The term "modish neo-Marxism" doesn't mean anything, does it?

2. It's funny, I've heard many rightwingers say that leftists think "society is perfectable" but I've never, ever, heard an actual leftist say that.

3. It's also funny how many people assume comprehensives are dominated by mixed-ability teaching. One wonders how much knowledge and experience they have of actual comprehensives. It's also funny how they think this wrecks education: one wonders how much knowledge they have of the relevant research. (There's a summary of the research in Hodgen, "Setting, streaming and mixed-ability teaching" in Dillon/Maguire (eds) "Becoming a Teacher", McGraw-Hill, 2007. It does not appear to show any overall detrimental effect on educational achievement from mixed-ability teaching.)

[Note: the author of this post attended a comprehensive school which used streaming extensively.]

[CharlieMcMenamin]

As a secondary modern type - 4th kid ever to get to university from the school, and it had been open for 15 years when I left - I can vouch that the grammar school system worked wonders in keeping (most of) the hoi polloi way from the children of the middle classes. And that was the point, after all, wasn't it?

[Derek Jeffries]

" It's also funny how many people assume comprehensives are dominated by mixed-ability teaching. One wonders how much knowledge and experience they have of actual comprehensives. "

Well, I've taught in comprehensives for 16 years and apart from some setting in Maths (where it is all but impossible to avoid) almost every class I have ever taught or heard about has been mixed-ability.

The dominant concept is 'differentiation', and it is one of the 'skills' most emphasized by teacher training. The idea being to prepare lesson plans which address the different levels of ability in a single classroom.

An odd thing I noticed about the way we were taught this in college (and reflected in the research literature we were referred to)- it seemed to deal mainly with how to accommodate the needs of less able kids.
There was very little about how to address the needs and interests of the smart kids in a class.

Which is a terrible tragedy because I have seen very many clever kids be bored to tears by the dumbass curriculum, and distracted by the errant behaviour of 'less able' kids with whom they are forced to share a room.

[Tim Worstall]

"If schools select pupils, pupils cannot - except by happy coincidence - select their schools."

That's pretty much the death of markets in anything then, isn't it? If suppliers choose then consumers cannot, if consumers choose then suppliers cannot?

Don't we more normally assume that each side does a bit of choosing leading to a somewhat messy compromise?

[jameshigham]

The “right” want to believe that perceived injustices are the result of state actions, rather than impersonal societal forces.

Good to see you're thinking clearly here. Not all, of course and there's a pernicious global influence.

One golden rule - if the state goes anywhere near it, it goes pear-shaped.

[ejh]

"That's pretty much the death of markets in anything then, isn't it? If suppliers choose then consumers cannot, if consumers choose then suppliers cannot?"

What a remarkably foolish comment. Because something applies to a specific situation - schools and parents - that necessarily applies to all"anything", to all situations where there are consumers and suppliers?

Oh, talking of dogma...

"One golden rule - if the state goes anywhere near it, it goes pear-shaped."

One geninely golden rule - people who come out with statements like yours are dogmatists with no interest in whether or not reality fits their dogma.

[ejh]

Derek

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/blair-fails-on-pledge-to-increase-setting-in-secondary-schools-466023.html

syggests that 38 per cent of lessons observed by OFSTED in secondary schools were in streamed classes a rather larger percentage than I think your observations suggests.

Incidentally you might find this:

http://www.crme.soton.ac.uk/publications/kjpubs/somelessons.html

of interest.

(My personal preference, by the way, is generally for setting in situations where there are not the resources to teach mixed-ability classes in the way teachers
would likme to. But I also have a preference for the debate to be informed by professional knowledge - like yours - and research, whatever it may say, rather than myth.)

[HarryTheHorse]

Coming late to the debate, for the record may I say that as a lefty I don't believe that society is perfectable or that all people are equal. I also benefitted from an education, and I use the term loosely, at a secondary modern school after having failed the 11-plus. This is the side of selection that few on the pro-grammar side wish to address - that the return of the local grammar school means the return of several local secondary moderns in its wake. I am sure that some politically correct evasion will be used to describe such schools. Opportunity Schools? But that is what they will be. No matter how bad some comprehensives may be, I refuse to believe that any are as hopeless as the secondary modern I attended. And the pernicious thing about the secondary modern is that it was designed to be that bad, malice aforethought caused it to offer a restricted curriculum that wouldn't tax the intelligence of a newt. It's all very well to say that it shouldn't have been like that, but it was. And that is all that matters. I don't want a return to a system like that and it appears clear that the majority of people in this country do not want its return. It's all very well supporting grammar schools if you think your kid is a shoo-in for a grammar school place. But if you think he might not get in, your position might be rather different.