No silver bullet – increased funding for schools

This is likely to be one of a continuing series highlighting the weaknesses of policy debates which talk about particular interventions or policy options in terms of a ‘silver bullet’ which can deliver the intended impacts without any help from other interventions or supportive context.

The release of the latest PISA results has led to handwringing in Australia as our test scores have declined – and, more to the point, the gap between good and bad schools has widened. The Age reported on a Grattan Institute report “Catching up: Learning from the best school systems in East Asia“:

SCHOOL funding levels are no guarantee of good student results, a report to be released today reveals.

The Grattan Institute report turns much accepted wisdom about education in Australia on its head.

It shows there is no clear link between school funding levels and good test results, with Korea spending less than Australia on students and performing better than them in a range of subjects.

Nor do smaller class sizes guarantee good educational outcomes; teachers in Shanghai spent 10 to 12 hours directly teaching students each week, working with an average class size of 40 students.

It’s very unhelpful to discuss funding levels and class sizes as if they could ever “guarantee” better outcomes.

For a more thoughtful discussion of these issues, check out Tim Hacsi’s book “Children As Pawns: The Politics of Education Reform” , which reviews the research evidence on this and clearly comes out with a conclusion that “additional funding, used wisely” is what is needed.  You can read some of this on google books.

And for an interesting analysis, see Tino Sanandaji’s post on his blog “Super-economy” which shows how the regression line between countries’ education expenditure and results changes when a simple revision is made to address different proportions of immigrant children (who in many cases have lower levels of language skills in the local language).

More broadly, I see this as part of a fundamental flaw in the way research and evaluation are conceptualised and used: the fundamental assumption that it is useful to think about interventions as being both necessary and sufficient to produce the intended outcomes and impacts – the ‘silver bullet’.

It’s something I’m going to be doing some more thinking about this year, given the increasing recognition of the crowded policy space in which interventions are launched, and the increasing focus on partnership approaches.