问答题

Schools outside cities[A] With its sandy beaches, charming ruins and occasionally blue waters, the Isle of Wight is a perfect spot off England’s southern coast. Wealthy Londoners sail their boats there. It seems odd that such a place should contain some of the worst-performing schools in England. But it does: and in this, the Isle of Wight is not quite as strange as it seems.[B] Provisional figures show that last year just 49% of 16-year-olds on the island got at least five C grades, including in English and maths, in GCSE exams. That is fewer than in any of London’s 32 boroughs (行政区), or indeed anywhere in the southern half of England apart from nearby Portsmouth. In the previous year the Isle of Wight was second to bottom in the whole country. Just 23% of pupils entitled to free school meals (a representative of poverty) got five decent grades, compared with a national average of 36%. In September the island’s schools were deemed so bad that Hampshire County Council took them over.[C] Part of the explanation is distinctively local. Luring good teachers to an out-of-the-way spot is hard. In 2011 the island endured a confused transition from the sort of three-tier school system common in America, with primary, middle and secondary schools, to the two-tier one that is standard in England. But its results were bad even before that change. The Isle of Wight’s real problems are structural. It suffers from three things that might appear to be advantages but are actually the opposite. The island lacks a large city: it has some, but not many, poor children: and it is almost entirely white.[D] England’s worst schools used to be urban, poor and black—or sometimes Asian. But these days pupils, including poor ones, often fare better in inner cities than elsewhere. In Tower Hamlets, an east London borough that is the third most deprived place in England, children entitled to free school meals do better in GCSE exams than do all children in the country as a whole. Bangladeshis, who are concentrated in that borough, used to perform considerably worse than whites nationally: now they do better.[E] Poor whites are now the country’s signal educational underachievers. Just 31% of white British children entitled to free school meals got five good GCSEs two years ago, fewer than poor children from any other ethnic group. They fare especially badly in suburbs, small towns and on the coast—places like the Isle of Wight.[F] Although the island contains pockets of poverty, it is hardly poverty-stricken: overall it comes 106th out of 326 local authorities in England on the government’s deprivation index. A bigger problem is a pervasive lack of faith in education as a means of self-improvement. Steph Boyd, who runs a new free school on the island, says some parents doubt whether the education system can help their children— not altogether surprising given the island’s failings. A few are more anxious for their offspring to go out and get jobs. And nearby career options are limited, points out Pat Goodhead, the headmistress of Christ the King College, the island’s best secondary school. The jobs pages of the County Press, the local newspaper, are filled with advertisements for care workers, barmen and cleaners.The advantage of deep poverty[G] Oddly, the Isle of Wight might do better if it were poorer. Truly poor parts of England receive large amounts of government cash. Schools in Tower Hamlets get ￡7,014 a year for each child, compared with ￡4,489 in the Isle of Wight. In addition, secondary schools get ￡900 for each poor child thanks to the "pupil premium" introduced by the coalition government. Poverty-stricken spots also benefit from energetic, idealistic young teachers. Teach First, a programme that sends top graduates into poor schools for at least two years, started in London in 2002. Then it expanded to other big cities such as Manchester. Last year it started sending teachers to south coast towns, but in tiny numbers. Of the 1,261 graduates who joined the programme last year, just 25 were placed on the entire south coast, compared with 553 in London.[H] Poor children do best in schools where they are either scarce or very numerous. Where they are few, teachers can give them plenty of attention. Where they are numerous, as in the East End of London, schools have no choice but to focus on them. Most ill-served are those who fall in between, in schools where they are insufficiently numerous to merit attention but too many to succeed alone. The Isle of Wight’s six state secondary schools are all stuck in the unhappy middle: between 9% and 17% of the children in them are entitled to free school meals.[I] One woman, who moved to the island from east London with her young daughter, suspects that the Isle of Wight’s lack of diversity is itself a problem. She may be right about that. Illiteracy among white British children can be easier to overlook than illiteracy among immigrants. Where schools are forced to help the latter, natives often benefit too, says Matthew Coffey of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. That seems to have happened in Lincolnshire, which has seen a surge in Portuguese and east European immigration.[J] The government and Ofsted are increasingly worried about the gap in attainment between poor white Britons and the rest. The Department for Education reckons changing the way schools’ success is measured could help. The current emphasis on grades of C and above encourages teachers to focus on children on the edge of attaining that grade, at the expense of those who do really badly. Beginning in 2016 schools will have to track more closely the progress of each child, no matter what grades they are predicted to get. That should raise attentions of schools that have been able to coast along, ignoring the neediest, to give them more attention. But such reforms may not make much difference on the Isle of Wight. Schools there have struggled even against the current benchmark.[K] They might look to east London for inspiration. The dramatic improvement in Tower Hamlets resulted partly from efforts to change local culture. Schools ran programmes through mosques to tackle absenteeism (旷课). Parents were encouraged to become governors. But change will be harder outside the capital. Tower Hamlets benefits from nearby Canary Wharf, the capital’s second financial district, which supplies good jobs and middle-class advisers. The levers of change are less obvious where poor children are scattered thin. And there are fewer obvious institutions through which to try and improve the lot of the godless white majority. Poor schools in big cities embrace more young energetic teachers than those schools in south coast.