Is Education Getting Better?*

Abstract

My thesis is a simple one. This question is education getting better? is relevant, and important at a time when society is concerned to reassess its priorities and the distribution of resources and yet it cannot be answered definitively at the present time. We just do not have sufficient information. Despite the usually optimistic anecdotal reports of classroom innovations from progressive educators and the depressing reports of general decline from the Black Paperites (not to mention the almost daily headlines in the popular press), there is little hard evidence of change either way of the level of success of our educational enterprise. I apologise for the way my question is formulated, but it is the sort of question the layman asks people who are identified as educational researchers. Is education getting better? can start a whole series of debates. What should be included as education? What do we mean by better, and for whom? I accept that there are a number of different interpretations, and that this makes the task of providing answers more difficult, but the question itself must be attacked, evidence must be sought, and we, as educational researchers, have a major responsibility in this regard. Not that I am implying that all educational research should be directed to answering this question in one form or another. It should be no more than a part, maybe a very small part, of our total research endeavour. Yet at a time when the principle of public accountability has legitimately been raised I feel that we have an obligation to provide much more hard evidence. This would help to balance the mass of anecdotal reporting which presently fuels the somewhat irrational political debate.