Why is it only the right that gets angry about how state schools fail the poor?

[longfingernails]

A truly fantastic article.

blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/06/christine-blower-the-nut-and-the-bigotry-of-low-expectation/

My favourite snippet:
This is what separates British left and right now. The left, in their post-Blair phase, is no longer very worked up about the poor doing badly at school. (?It may matter or it may not,? Blower said about poor children not going to top universities). The standard left response is to talk philosophically about inequality in society, as if this has the slightest bearing on whether the concept of a sink school ought to be tolerated in this day and age.

By contrast, the right are hopping mad about educational inequality. When the subject is raised in front of Michael Gove, it?s like flicking a switch. He blows his top. When I last interviewed him and raised the subject about whether it poor kids should be expected to do as well as rich, he replied in a crescendo of anger.

[Crumbledwalnuts]

I think Gove and IDS are extremely interested in poor people. It's just prejudice to say they aren't. All the evidence shows that they are. It just doesn't suit the Labour agenda.

For other Tories, poor people may be seen as a wasted resource, a drain of the purse, a resource which with investment (education) can better itself and the whole country.

For Labour, a drain on the public purse is a bonus - it's an extra vote, or family of votes.

[ravenAK]

I think Arisbottle was deploying sarcasm, SirChenjin.

Speaking as a teacher, I only know two right wing teachers. One's thick as mince & the other one's a nasty piece of work.

The rest of us are lovely, talented, & irreproachably lefty.

HTH.

[Arisbottle]

I come from a background I am happy to label as poor, that meant we went hungry , wore old clothes, pissed in an outside loo and lived in shit housing, nothing to do with not going to a Russell group university.

I am angry that children from my background , in particular boys, are failed by parts of our state education system. I am angry that children from my background are statistically likely to do worse than middle class kids in just about every state school in this country.

[claig]

Good points by beatback. There is lots of money in this country that is being wasted by the establishment, by the system. Not just on MPs' expenses, and home flipping, but hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money being wasted that could be put to much better use in our schools and hospitals.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337596/BBC-bosses-knew-THREE-YEARS-AGO-100million-IT-project-doomed-failure.html

[Arisbottle]

I do actually think that Gove does want to raise standards for children from "poor backgrounds". I do think he was right to address the issue that in many schools students from my kind of background who are seen as trouble are pushed into doing qualifications that will not open doors for them in later life. I do think there are schools in poor areas that are more focused on trying to control behaviour than getting them a decent education. I might not agree with the exact way he is going about it but I think he and Michael Wilshaw are certainly right to raise the issue and demand something is done about it.

[Crumbledwalnuts]

I know loads of right wing teachers, and they're all marvellous.

[Arisbottle]

Lol crumbled. I have to say that I would struggle to think of any. I suspect I am possibly the most right wing at my school.

[beatback]

Crumbledwalnuts. I am a person who is right wing but when i hear I.D.S i want cringe the man tried to say he could live on benefits and when he was shown up as prat gave the most pathetic interview to the daily mail saying he knew what it was like to be unemployed when he left the guards as an officer married to a daughter of a titled family. With amazing luck this Unemployed ex Eton ex guard officer got a job with jane"s defence magazine "THE SORT OF JOB EVERY UNEMPLOYED PERSON CAN GET" and then gets a safe politcal seat. I.D.S is probably the most clueless member of a useless cabinet.

[SirChenjin]

I work in the NHS (definitely not one of the suits) and know people who are right wing, lefty and solidly SNP - some are nasty, others are lovely, regardless of their politics.

[claig]

beatback, IDS didn't go to Eton.

[moondog]

Gove is an absolute hero.
Blower is a terrifyingly stupid woman.
I've spent 20 years working in scores of different schools and what I see chills my blood.
I spend a large proportion of my time teaching my children basic things they have not learnt in school.
I would swim through a sewer to have my children in a free school far from the clutches of lunatic unions and the idiocy of the national curriculum.
I read that 39% of kids in Toby youngs free school are entitled to free school meals. Rather puts paid to the evil untruth that only posh film will use them.

[Startail]

Personally I think the Tories think there are votes in improving (making a noise about improving) education for the 'poor'.

Less uneducated people, equals less people who have an excuse not to work, equals less benefit scroungers.
This pleases the MC.

Better education for poorer DCs and better teaching in middle to lower sets may well please those working class parents with 'average' DCs, but no choice of school.

Do the Tories really expect education standards of the poor to rise I'm not sure, but if in trying they can win votes and make the NUT look foolish they are happy.

Many educated labour voters are teachers, HCP and social workers. They would like to see the poor in society get a better deal, but when it comes to education they know that many of their pupils, patients, service uses are genetically not very bright.

[Arisbottle]

WLFS has about 23% of its students on free school meals, think in 2012 that went up to 25%. That is between 7-10% lower than the local schools.

[beatback]

CLAIG. APPOLIGIES . Your quite right but it has been reported that he did looking at his biography it is quite anormal state school in solihull and training on the merchant navy so why does he say such stupid things then. It just goes to show that the left learning media will let people believe things that are not true.

[beatback]

Sorry Bad grammar. Quite a normal state school in solihull and in to training with the merchant navy.

[moondog]

Apologies if figures are incorrect. I can't locate original source. My point still stands nevertheless.

[noblegiraffe]

Moondog,

"But Toby Young, an author and journalist who set up the West London free school, disputed the figures for the proportion of children on free school meals in his school's local authority. According to the data, 23.3% of children at his school are entitled to free school meals, compared with 32.1% in secondaries across the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham."

And "At least three-quarters of the coalition's flagship free schools have admitted a lower proportion of deprived pupils than is average for their wider neighbourhood, government data shows."

m.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/apr/23/free-schools-deprived-pupils-average

[moondog]

Your point being?

[southeastastra]

toby young isn't a great embassador for the free school movement is he

[claig]

"but when it comes to education they know that many of their pupils, patients, service uses are genetically not very bright."

This is a common argument of the left and they use it to explain the failure of the education system and ti prop up the status quo. I don't believe it for one minute.

300 years ago, nearly all of our ancestors were peasants on the land and the elite looked down on them and thought that they were genetically inferior and "genetically not very bright" and women were denied an education.

But the reality is that we the people are far brighter than most of teh privileged elite. There are tens of thousands of working class people with higher grades than Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry despite their riches and privilege.

Let's not write off large swathes of our population as being "genetically not very bright", because I don't believe it. With the right education, they can excel and surpass some of the "Tim Nice But Dims"

[claig]

Gove is spot on about this, and he won't accept the defeatist leftist views which consign ordinary people to the scrapheap.

"It is snobbery to say that working class people cannot achieve in the same way as others and I?ve had it up to here with people saying oh don?t expect too much of them, these are high-falutin? expectations."

[beatback]

Moondog. Its great to hear a teacher not afraid to air opinions different from the mainsteam within teaching. As for gove he thinks he is the new Keith Joseph and like Keith Joseph comes across as a bit weird and unable to listen to other people. I am sure gove has some decent ideas but he needs to think deeper,and how his changes will work before he sets out unrealistic timetables.

[Arisbottle]

I do think Toby Young is providing more of a service to children from "poor" homes than most free schools . I think the average free school meal intake of free schools is 10% although of course you have to bear in mind that his figure is much lower than the other schools in his area and the average figure will of course vary according to regions .

Like Gove, I think that Young has laudable aims.

[noblegiraffe]

The point being, moondog, that rather than helping the poor, free schools appear to be selecting against them in some way as they are ending up with fewer of them than they should have by rights.

[Arisbottle]

I agree Claig, I was considered thick for much of my time at school because my family were notorious, my parents barely literate and usually pissed. Luckily my potential was spotted and I managed to escape.