By: Eva Frydensberg Holm

The Danish primary school could become a model for the world to follow, said the English Professor Mortimore, when he visited Denmark four years ago as the head of the OECD team that analysed the Danish 'Folkeskole'. Now he is back, but this time his evaluation is less positive:

"Four years ago, I said that IF the Danish government prevented ranking and IF you managed to apply testing in the right way, you could develop a world class system. Right now it could go either way, because even though I find that there is awareness of some of the pitfalls of testing, you have introduced national tests anyway, and from what I have heard, the government is not adverse to publication of the schools' results."

One strength of the Danish system is, according to Professor Mortimore, that it is 'patient'; pupils do not experience failure as much as they do in other school systems, and therefore they are willing to keep learning even into adulthood. If testing and ranking should become dominant, however, this quality will be lost, and the result could be a system much like the English or American. Systems that have been shown to fail.

Professor Mortimore is not the only one to worry. David C. Berliner is a professor at Arizona State University, where he has researched into learning and teacher education for several years. In recent years, he has studied the unintended consequences of the Bush-administration's school reform 'No child Left Behind' from 2002, which intensified the testing in the educational system all across the United States. His message is unmistakeable:

"In Denmark, you have established a system based on sound values such as democracy and the community, but at the moment, you are changing the system to resemble the American, and that is a cause for concern, because the American 'No Child Left Behind' is a massive failure in a number of ways, and it has caused a great deal of harm. You must learn from that mistake."

Too many tests lead to cheating

The distinction between 'good' and 'bad' schools and the resulting ghettofication and teachers leaving their jobs. Teaching to the test. Narrowing of the curriculum and teaching of skills that only prepare pupils to score well in tests, not for the challenges they will face in the future. Those are just some of the consequences that the two professors warn Danish policy-makers against repeating.

In the United States in particular, good test scores are so important that cheating, corruption and poor morals have become widespread among administrators, teachers and pupils.

Professor Berliner has seen both good students who were forced to take a test despite sick, and schools where the number of suspended pupils rose significantly just before a test, to keep away those who scored low in tests. He can show how some schools have deliberately changed their reports, and he has witnessed teachers help their students during tests so they could score better.

"Testing corrupts the indicators, and thereby also the people who are involved. Plus the more there is at stake, the worse it gets. When you evaluate, and possibly even reward or punish, a teacher or principal on the basis of a test, you invite to immoral behaviour and defensive teaching. You begin to see the pupils, not as pupils, but as scores that can increase or decrease your personal income", the American professor explains.

He refers to Campbell's Law, which states that the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more prone it will be to corruption and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

As an example, the professor points to the NYPD, who were offered bonuses if they managed to increase the percentage of solved crimes. The result was indeed an increased efficiency and a higher percentage of solved crimes, but the reality behind the improvements was that criminals were offered shorter sentences in return for pleading guilty to more crimes than they had actually committed.

When Professor Berliner claims that the American school reform No Child Left Behind has failed, he not only points to the unintended consequences and immoral behaviour that he has found in his research as the reason. Test results from each state and the results on a national level reveal the truth. Since the launch of No child Left Behind in 2002, the national results have improved less than before, while the state-level results have all improved significantly.

"Each state likes to brag about the scores they get, but the national achievement level shows no improvement. This shows that pupils do well when teachers know what they will be tested in and can adjust their teaching accordingly."

The government failed to listen

Professor Mortimore points to similar examples of inappropriate behaviour in England, and he easily recognises the picture of teaching as solely focused on tests as a direct result of increasing control of the teachers and the focus on test scores. He adds that the more experienced teachers in particular are prone to leave their jobs because the objective is no longer what it used to be – which was learning.

Since the late 1970s, Professor Mortimore has examined 'school effectiveness'. Critics might say that he and many other researchers in the 1980s and 1990s are the direct progenitors of the educational policy in England because they introduced the 'what works?'-principle, and that this led to the national curriculum, and national tests of a series of specific skills and a system of inspection designed to control the individual schools' implementation of 'best practice'.

According to Professor Mortimore, the explanation is rather that the policy-makers failed to listen to the other half of the message.

"Our research clearly showed that some schools managed to promote greater achievement or better improvement than average - not just in each subject, but also socially and psychologically. Through our research, we identified certain factors that characterised these efficient schools. Ever since my first studies in 1979, however, I have stressed the need to take into account the intake of students. Some schools only appear to do well because they have better than average pupils, while other schools appear to perform badly, because their students start at a lower level - but the 'bad' schools may well have produced the greater improvement in their pupils. And that part of the message was ignored by the English policy-makers."

The result of the way the policy-makers have chosen to receive the efficiency research is, according to Professor Mortimore, that you compare schools without taking the composition of pupils into account. Some ministers have even gone one step further and claimed that: If School A can do this, School B can too, which, according to Professor Mortimore, is both unfair and unrealistic. A number of factors influence the final results.

Go for the balanced school system

From the United States, Professor Berliner can echo his colleague's findings. To hear him say it, No Child Left Behind has created a rigid conveyor-belt school, where the only valid measurement is outcome, with no regard for whatever the pupils bring with them into the system. He explains with an example from British Columbia:

A TV-crew went out to cover the worst ranked school of them all. They spent a week there, and found that it was a fantastic school, but that the pupils were poor, had problems of substance abuse in their close family or were immigrants. There was no way they were ever going to get the best test results. They could never top the lists, but the school and the individual teachers still did a very good job and had great results in a number of ways.

It is difficult in England as well as the United States to recruit teachers to so-called low-ranking schools, because it is much harder there to achieve great results and good scores than in schools with pupils from better backgrounds. Another problem in measuring and ranking schools is, according to Professor Mortimore, that you end up with a highly imbalanced school system and disgruntled parents.

"When you rank schools and let people choose, more and more people will choose fewer and fewer schools, and eventually more and more people are dismayed, because they didn't get what they believe is the best. This is what I call 'the fallacy of choice', and that is exactly why the Danish policy-makers should consider very carefully whether that is the way they want to go."    

Research, including Professor Mortimore's, indicate that schools perform best then they manage to strike a balance between the number of pupils who find learning easy, and those who find it more difficult. Therefore, the intelligent choice for a nation that wants the majority of the population to do well and maintain a range of choices in life, would be to strive for a balanced system. The more balanced schools there are, the more acceptable it will become for the parents, and the better the schools will perform.

Use testing intelligently

Neither Professor Mortimore or Professor Berliner oppose tests and evaluations per se. They both believe that tests and evaluations can improve schools and teaching, if the tests are diagnostic and employ a feedback model, so that the professionals in the schools become better at what they do. Professor Mortimore in particular believes that the Danish school system could benefit if a positive evaluation culture could be established.

"I've often said that the older pupils in particular need more challenges in the Danish school system, and I believe that a stronger evaluation culture might bring this about. The system must, however, be based on the positive values that the school system as a whole is based on. More of the wrong sort of tests will only make the pupils feel they are failures, as we have seen it in England."

International surveys like PISA and the American version, NAEP, can lead to improvements of a national school system, according to the two professors, provided they, to use Professor Mortimore's expression, are used intelligently:

"PISA provides no answers in itself, but should be interpreted as the objective gaze that makes not just policy-makers, but society in general, ask questions. Why is it, for example, that in Denmark, girls fail to do significantly better than the boys, when they do so in other countries? What is it that makes Denmark stand out like that? And is it important for us that they improve? PISA must generate these intelligent questions. The answers depend on the national history, culture and context, but you don't do your country a favour by ignoring these questions."

Professor Berliner also believes that surveys such as PISA and NAEP can be used to improve a nation's school system as long as you avoid the irrational belief that test generate improvement by themselves, but use them to figure out what kind of school system it is you want. Furthermore, the American professor is worried that the surveys claim to be able to predict the future.

"PISA claims to know which competencies will be in demand in the future. And the big issue for the test designers is: How do we compose a curriculum that prepares pupils for the future? My response is you can't, because we don't know what the future will bring. We have to prepare children to something that does not yet exist. And that means it will be more important to be good at searching for and finding knowledge than to possess and exact knowledge, but that is not what PISA or any other survey I have ever heard of focus on," Professor Berliner says.

He mentions a survey from the U.S. Department of Labour, in which it is claimed that today's pupils will have held from ten to fourteen different jobs by the age of 38. The same survey shows that the ten most wanted jobs in 2010 did not even exist in 2004.

"How can you prepare children to hold fourteen different jobs, some of which we don''t even know about yet? It's just not possible, and that is why the types of test that we use now are dangerous, not just for the teaching, but for the future of a nation."

Visiting lecture at DPU

On April 3 2008, Professor David C. Berliner, gave a lecture at DPU on the unintended consequences of the US school reform 'No child left behind'.

Watch the lecture