Serious doubts about school effectiveness

By Stephen Gorard. 2010

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper considers the model of school effectiveness (SE) currently dominant in research, policy and practice in England (although the concerns it raises are international). It shows, principally through consideration of initial and propagated error, that SE results cannot be relied upon. By considering the residual difference between the predicted and obtained score for all pupils in any phase of education, SE calculations leave the results to be disproportionately made up of relative error terms. Adding contextual information confuses, but does not help this situation. Having shown and illustrated the sensitivity of SE to this propagation of initial errors, and therefore why it is unworkable, the paper considers some of the reasons why SE has become dominant, outlines the damage this dominant model causes and begins to shape alternative ways of considering what schools do. Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they will tell you anything.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf6c09a9469aa9a83caa69e168a5a3865155a4c5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Stephen Gorard
2. B. See

In Information Systems and Management

1. B. See
2. Stephen Gorard

Citations in the corpus

• How Can We Enhance Enjoyment of Secondary School? The Student View. (2011, background): “Although our measures of intrinsically‐hard‐to‐measure ideas in education will be imprecise, they do not suffer from the problem of propagation of errors that school effectiveness calculations do (Gorard 2010a ).”
• Who Is Eligible for Free School Meals? Characterising Free School Meals as a Measure of Disadvantage in England. (2012, methodology): “The measure of clustering used is the dissimilarity index and the precise steps in calculating it have been covered elsewhere (e.g. Cheng & Gorard, 2010).”