Federal School Education Minister
But it really only confirms what most parents already suspect: standards are slipping and have been for a long time.
Despite all the money going to primary school education, all the efforts into reducing class sizes, all the talk about boosting children’s creativity, the national school report card gets a big C.
Getting a pass, let alone a distinction, won’t come from just putting more funding into public schools as constantly demanded by the Australian Education Union. Nor will the problem be fixed by a new more expensive funding model as outlined by the Gonski report.
Any prospect of improvement requires radically different thinking rather than more of the same, boosted by more dollars.
The idea that Year 4 students rank the lowest for reading of any English-speaking nation and 27th out of 48 countries is clearly a much more complicated story.
The Year 4 results for maths (18th) and science (25th) aren’t much better, although they pick up somewhat by Year 8 (12th).
The federal government will claim it is already on the case with its pursuit of a new national curriculum, the new funding model courtesy of Gonski, new national testing and results available on the MySchool website, and the push for higher merit-based pay for teachers.
But parents and their children shouldn’t be tricked into believing this will mean automatic progress, or even that the bar is steadily moving up rather than down.
That’s not just because it is the states that still have the main responsibility for administering the public school system while the Commonwealth funding is directed to independent schools.
It’s because too many Australian education experts have spent too many decades since the 1970s in educational fad-land. This included dismissing as old-fashioned any belief in the importance of a basic grasp of grammar or of learning the multiplication tables by heart. Students were instead encouraged into more modern, creative thinking such as the “whole of language" approach, where children were to guess the meaning of words rather than adopt phonetic spelling out.
Other countries similarly tempted, such the US, realised the mistake and quickly reverted to more traditional teaching methods. Not Australia.
Worse, many Australian students who were taught according to this much more flexible (and less effective) approach became teachers themselves, often ill-equipped to teach a new generation about odd concepts such as grammar even when a modest version started to come back into fashion.
Many universities hold remedial writing classes to assist students who may be bright and have the Year 12 results to prove it, but still have little understanding of how to write a complete sentence.
One former Labor education shadow minister used to joke several years ago that he could always tell adults’ ages by whether they knew how to use an apostrophe. At that stage, he figured the cut off-rate was 35.
I was certainly astonished at the difference in expectations and standards in basic skills when my primary school-aged children returned to Australia after three years in the US in the late 1990s. (And not just because my then seven-year-old was as delighted as I was appalled that there was no homework.)
Even so, many teachers of all ages in Australian schools are excellent as well as dedicated. They inspire their students, help them to do their best and teach them according to the highest standards.
But that’s more often despite the system rather than because of it, due more to individual skills and instinct rather than state-wide or even school-wide methods of education. Don’t forget how hard the education unions have fought against greater autonomy for principals to be able to select the teachers they want.
And with particularly self-defeating logic, teachers reach the top pay level after only about eight years in the classroom. To get more money, they usually have to go into administrative roles out of the classroom, or leave. Five years ago, the Business Council of Australia proposed a huge increase in teachers’ pay to encourage the best young people to enter the profession and remain there. This is still largely a good idea with little practical follow-through. The idea of merit pay is gaining traction, but it is small scale with limited bonus payments for a tiny minority.
At the same time, Australia’s system seems reluctant to take any lessons from a country such as Singapore, with its successful focus on the most effective practical teaching methods, strong mentoring, individual reviews of teachers leading to bonus payments, and better teacher education and recruitment. Now that really would be an education revolution. email@example.com
The Australian Financial Review