Making Better Schools, By....

It has long been suggested that the primary reason for student performance and behavior in better private schools has been the schools' ability to control the composition of the student body. If they do admit a student who is unduly disruptive, expulsion is a powerful tool both to remove the student and send a message to the rest of the student body. In public schools, for a wide range of reasons, expulsion is much less common and typically requires much worse conduct than would be tolerated in a private school.

Britain has been experimenting with "academy schools" to replace "struggling" public schools (using,here, the American definition of "public" - state funded). "In each case the government puts in £22m to set up the academy, with a private organisation donating £2m in each case and taking control of the schools' day to day running." The aim is to have 200 such academies across the nation within five years. And, while not having the same ability as private schools to exclude applicants, they seem to have already learned the value of showing disruptive students to the door:

One of Tony Blair's favoured new academy schools revealed its hard line yesterday when it admitted that its exclusion rate is 10 times the national average.

Which, of course, raises the following question: If the "struggling" schools were permitted similar latitude in expelling problem students, would there be any actual need for the academies? (And this is no surprise - problem students expelled from academy schools are subsequently "taught at neighbouring schools" - which, presumably, continue to "struggle" with that burden.)

I don't really have a problem with state funded "academy schools" for students who are more interested in learning, or who at least have better classroom decorum, but let's not pretend that this type of system is really about improving public schools or easing their "struggle" - if anything, it makes their job more difficult. If you siphon off the smarter, better behaved kids, you make their struggle harder (and you make teaching far less rewarding in the "struggling" schools). If you don't, the smarter, better behaved kids will, for the most part, receive a lesser education. Perhaps to a politician's ear the rhetoric sounds better when it is directed at "improving struggling schools", as opposed to a more accurate description which might sound elitist, or somehow condemnatory of the students who, for various reasons, would be left behind in the "struggling" schools.