Not just an educated guess

It was entirely predictable that Professor Ted Wragg, who has been defending the indefensible in education for as long as anyone can remember, should have reacted like a scalded cat to my book, All Must Have Prizes. What is particularly notable, however, is the dishonesty with which he has done so.

He refuses to engage with my fundamental arguments. Instead, he alleges that I selectively cooked the evidence to create a false impression of educational failure. Any reader of the book can see that his claim that I relied on a few "right-wingers" for information is grossly untrue (although, unlike Wragg, I am not frightened of people who don't sport the "correct" political badge).

I reached my conclusions about education mainly from what many very concerned teachers were either telling me or writing: classroom teachers, trainee teachers, university professors, A-level examiners and educational psychologists, not to mention parents and pupils themselves. I also drew upon numerous dire but mainstream educational texts that both reflect and lay down the principles of current education orthodoxy. The unpalatable fact for Wragg is that so much of what is written in educational texts is demonstrable rubbish. It cannot be defended, which is why he chooses instead to cast doubt on the very existence of such evidence.

Wragg claims that no teachers are moral relativists. He ignores the evidence I provide of teachers who have either told me or written that children should no longer be taught "the right answer" and that wrong answers are not to be corrected because such errors are evidence of creativity. He ignores my documented evidence from educationists and their texts of an explicit retreat from the rules, accuracy and exactness. He ignores my evidence from named university maths and language teachers of a catastrophic collapse of knowledge among undergraduates with A and B grade A-levels.

It is a great pity Professor Wragg felt unable to accept his invitation to take part in Thursday's Observer debate on my book. Had he done so, he would no doubt have been amazed to observe one of my "non-existent" sources, a lecturer in German, bravely stand up and summarise the evidence he had given me of undergraduates who can no longer even translate the simplest German sentences. Even professors of education must surely be able to grasp that something peculiar is happening when exam results are improving so spectacularly while universities are building more and more remedial classes into their degree courses.

In his efforts to demonstrate that my evidence is trumped up, Wragg implies I relied on unnamed and therefore dubious sources. Anyone reading my book can see immediately that this is untrue. My anonymous sources are very few. Most of my evidence has come from attributed sources, from conversations I have had with them and from what they have written.

The overwhelming majority of the footnotes are sourced to named individuals or publications. A few people talked to me unattributably, a practice commonly used to protect people in sensitive positions whose information is valuable - a practice Wragg himself was happy enough to abuse in his article so he could toss in some anonymous abuse about myself.

Maybe Wragg's problem is that he didn't actually read the text, since he appears to have spent so much time combing the footnotes. Unfortunately, he doesn't appear to understand them. The "conversation with the author" category that appears to have so upset him as often as not relates to interviews with people who are named in the text. What's wrong with that? Or does he object to my having conversations at all with people who take the opposite view to his own?

I say in my book that teachers are victims of a culture which denies the validity of evidence and which has substituted ideology and prejudice for reality. In dismissing my evidence in such a selective, distorted and prejudiced way, Professor Wragg has very publicly proved my point.

What the papers said

Colin MacCabe, New Statesman

'It says something about the collapse of any hierarchy of authority in knowledge that this farrago of ignorance and inaccuracy can appear under the imprint of a reputable publisher'

Professor Ted Wragg, The Independent

'Take a few prejudices. Lace them liberally with anecdotes ... add some quotes from like-minded mates ... filter out as many facts as possible ... You have just written Melanie Phillips's book'