Left Back

In an interview on The Crisis in Education

Your next book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, is a case study of America specifically. Tell us about it.

What really comes across when you read Left Back, which is a history of American educational policy over the last hundred years, is that there has always been a certain amount of tension about what a school was for. The author Diane Ravitch finds that when we look at the American education system, one of the ideas that have grown increasingly popular is the view that school can be a place which solves the problems of society. If there is a problem on the streets with homophobia, healthy eating or integration, for example, then we try to solve it with anti-homophobic education, lessons on obesity, or discussion groups on tolerance. However, the more a school focuses on social policy the more they are distracted from what they are really there to do, which is to educate kids.

Is this a shift which has an educational theory to justify it? If so are you persuaded by it?

On the one hand the shift towards treating schools as an instrument of social policy makers is arbitrary rather than a development which has been actively pursued. If you look at the number of reforms to the British education system in the last 13 years, changes that often conflict and lack consistency, then it becomes clear that there is a kind of arbitrariness to educational policy. Policy makers of course try to justify their decisions, using ‘evidence’ to back them up. These arguments are weak because the trouble with ‘evidence-based policy’ is that it’s often not really based upon real empirical evidence at all. Rather, ‘evidence-based policy’ is based upon intuition, such as the intuition that if you talk a lot about sex in schools, this will reduce teenage pregnancy. Of course you could just as easily argue that if you talk a lot about sex in schools, then teenage pregnancy will increase! There is no real evidence for either one of those positions.