This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Thursday 5th September 2013 at 12.54pm
IDS making stuff up
There's an idea for a tumblr there... anyway here's the latest incident (Zoe Williams, Guardian).
Again, headteachers crop up to give compelling evidence with no numbers. "One head told us, 'in the vast majority of cases a lack of aspiration explains variation in outcomes'." It's handy that they're all anonymous, isn't it? Even if there were something worth checking in that statement, who would you go to? In fact, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published comprehensive research on parental expectation last year, showing only a weak correlation between that and "outcomes", and pointing out mildly that parents often calibrate their expectation to the abilities of their child. But who needs a large-scale study when you've got an anonymous head?
It is the stock-in-trade of this thinktank and the MPs it sweeps along with it, to jerk itself off over the imagined moral deficiencies of the poor, so that their circumstances become a consequence of their unfitness – as parents first, and ultimately, as people. But vigilance is needed outside this pocket of prejudice, to make sure this portrait of an underclass doesn't become the backdrop that we all accept.
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