The real education revolution Labor needs
A defining feature of Kevin Rudd’s leadership was inflated expectations. Big promises on climate change, health and education were not matched by performance in government. The much-touted revolution in schooling has been more like a Sunday church picnic than a storming of the barricades. Australia’s schools today are little different from when Labor came to power in 2007.
With the release in December 2012 of international benchmarking results for years 4 and 8 students (directed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), the need for education reform has become unavoidable. The data exposes Australia, measured by the standards of developed nations, as an educational backwater. We are superior to the developing nations of south-east Asia, South America and the Middle East, but struggling against the academic powerhouses of Europe, North America and north-east Asia.
In each of the five disciplines assessed (year 4 reading, maths and science, and Year 8 maths and science) Australia was outranked by Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, the United States, England, Russia and Finland. Furthermore Japan did not participate in the year 4 reading assessment but beat Australia in the other four areas. Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands did not undertake the year 8 assessments but were superior to Australia in the three year 4 tests.
In year 4 reading, we ranked 27th out of 45 nations.
Even more disturbingly, 24% of Australian students were below the intermediate benchmark standard (capable of basic reading comprehension throughout a text).
In year 4 maths, Australia placed 18th of 50 nations, with 30% of students below the intermediate benchmark (basic knowledge in dealing with whole numbers, fractions, shapes, graphs and tables). Year 4 science produced a ranking of 25th out of 50 countries. The year 8 rankings, while better overall (12th out of 42 nations in both maths and science), were marred by poor benchmarking results in maths. Thirty-seven per cent of Australian students lacked basic skills in dealing with decimals, percentages, graphs, tables and simple algebra. If Australia has a future in the so-called Asian century, it is certainly not in maths.
No parent could look at these results and not be deeply concerned. No serious politician, having studied the IAEEA report, could deny the need for action. The spotlight has fallen on Australia’s comprehensive schools system, particularly the majority public sector. Having been involved in and studied public education for many decades, I believe the current system is adding only minimal value to students’ capabilities. Most of the gains in individual learning capacity are fashioned in the home. Parents’ aspirations for their children are a stronger determinant of student achievement than the institution of schooling itself.
In the conventional wisdom, schools are seen as places where children do most of their learning. Yet up to school-leaving age, children spend only a small amount of their time in school (around 10%t). The major role models and opportunities for education are in the home. By age three, for instance, children have acquired more than half of the language they will use for the rest of their lives. Schools, at best, are a useful addition to the learning continuum. At worst, they are places where students muddle through, making only marginal gains in knowledge and life skills.
“The statistics do not lie: comprehensive public education in Australia is struggling.”
The IAEEA findings indicate that Australian schools are muddling through. When excellence occurs, it is due primarily to home-based factors. The school learning environment is of secondary importance. How can this point be proven for Australia’s student population? One way is to take a control group of pupils who have done exceptionally well and examine the factors which contributed to their success, so as to measure the relative contributions of school and family.
The selective high school system in NSW is ideal for this purpose. In their year 7 intake, these schools draw on high-achieving primary school students — a case study in academic excellence. When we examine the features of this cohort (such as demographic and cultural characteristics and primary school education), one factor stands out: Asian heritage. In recent decades, coinciding with the Asian migrant intake to Australia, there has been a sharp rise in the number of selective school students from Chinese and Vietnamese backgrounds. This trend is being supplemented by the emerging success of Indian-origin students in selective entry.
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Categories: Australia
Fully agree with the need to properly motivate and reward teachers (and to get rid of those who aren’t up to it) but the countries with the most consistently successful student attainment results do not have a NAPLAN-style testing regime.
We do need an education revolution but the aim should be to inspire kids to learn, rather than get them through exams; motivate parents to take a more proactive attitude to their kids education; and encourage life long learning for us all by putting schools at the heart of our communities, open from 6 in the morning till 10 at night and buzzing.
by Paul Byard on Mar 11, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Sh*t a brick. A wonderful selection of pollies’ education cliches, written in utter ignorance of schools and schooling, except what the other self styled pundits are spewing forth. Mark, you should be ashamed of yourself.
In this country you can always guarantee yourself uncritical airplay by flogging schools and teachers. The publicity hungry gutter rat pollies know that.
So much crap, so little time. But here goes.
A few really important points It’s not parents’ aspirations that matter or are influential: pretty much all parents want the best for their kids. It’s the social capital they have to pass on. For instance by age three middle class kids’ vocabularies are double those of poor kids and even exceed those of underprivileged adults. Middle class kids are already ahead before they go through the school gates. Lashing the poor for their disadvantages is a pretty awful thing to do, young Mark.
Oh, and poverty has demonstrable effects on kids’ bodies and brains, that lower their life chances. Nothing to do with ‘aspirations’, Mr Blame The Victim.
Young Mark acknowledges that background factors are more influential than school but he’d still like to bring a regime of punishing teachers for not being able to compensate for all the problems that kids bring with them.
NAPLAN? JEEEZUS. Just a few NAPLAN facts; not all subjects are tested by NAPLAN, in fact most individual subjects aren’t. SO how do we test the value added of all those teachers that don’t have a NAPLAN score to point to? It helps if you know what you are talking about, Latham, which you plainly don’t.
And inequality has a lot to answer for. There is plenty of strong evidence that a country’s educational performance is negatively correlated with its degree of inequality.
Have a look at slide 20 (although the rest are also worth a look)
http://www.slideshare.net/joseevans/spirit-levelslidesfromtheequalitytrust-3837594
And Australia a might not be ‘winning PISA’ (yep, that what schooling’s for - for our kids to beat their kids) but we are winning the race to the bottom on the injustice barrel.
Over the past 15 years there has been a significant increase in income inequality in Australia.
‘How Australia is Faring’ http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/node/217
Since the mid-1990s, Australia’s level of inequality has increased by more than the OECD average, resulting in Australia’s ranking moving from being more equal than the OECD average to being slightly less equal in the latest period.
If you look, that decline in equality started ‘round about when Australia stopped ‘winning’ at PISA. And the younger kids who haven’t done very well in the latest round of tests have lived all their lives in the new, messed up Australia.
Go back to school, Latham.
by Catherine Scott on Mar 11, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Unfortunately the solutions to the problem suggested by <ark Latham fail to adequately address many of the issues such as the disproportionate funding to those schools which are religious and selective.
While it always fun to blame old, lazy and tired teachers and ignorant new staff it is not helpful. Teachers are some of the most dedicated people around and deriding their skills and abilities is not helpful.
The changing policies whereby there is ever increasing levels of accountability in place of actual upgrading skills and teaching has been one of the main changes in recent years. The more that there have been measures put in place the worse the educational results.
There are many young people who will avoid teaching as a result of the negative image reinforced in this article even if the salaries were worthwhile at a professional level.
The best thing that could happen for education would be to have politicians making policies that have some relation to the real world and to stop deriding the profession for political gain.
After all why should parents care too much about education except for their choice, as the way that Australia has gone in recent years is that the school a child attends is far more important in the post school world than the results obtained.
Nothing in the proposed "solutions" will address the basic inequalities inherent in our system and more than likely will be made worse by people who have no ideas of the inherent problems of teaching students who are trained at home for constant stimulation by a plethora of electronic devices rather than thought and analysis.
by Tom Jones on Mar 11, 2013 at 3:25 pm
Interesting article. And most points are quite valid despite Ms Scott’s redoubtable opinion. Way off the mark in most cases - in particular he wasn’t lashing the poor but it would be stupid to ignore the obvious factors.
by Mark from Melbourne on Mar 11, 2013 at 4:00 pm
I am not a teacher, but my daughter is. Most of what Catherine says is correct. Most of what Mark is saying - what is he saying exactly??? Continue on our merry way, giving every advantage to the middle and upper class children?
You were right the first time around, Mark - back in 2004? We should remove most of the funding from the private education sector, and turn our public schools into decent places for all children to learn. Until we do that, poor children haven’t got a hope in he+l!
My daughter became fed up with banging her head against a brick wall a couple of years ago, and reluctantly left classroom teaching. She spent over 10 years as a maths and science teacher in very disadvantaged secondary schools (her choice), with no money, no decent management and total resistance to any innovative or new teaching methods, even though she was able to prove what she had introduced made an enormous difference to the motivation of students. Give principals more power? Students and teachers need that like they need a hole in the head!!!
by CML on Mar 11, 2013 at 5:41 pm
Mark, you appear to have borrowed from other high performing nations (Finland. Singapore) and added the US model of standardised testing. I agree that we need to attract the best and brightest to lift the profile of the profession. I also agree that there needs to be a culture of learning that is embraced by families and our communities. However, I think that your suggestions are too simplistic to solve the myriad of social, familial and learning issues that many students bring to school. It would seem that you have never been at the coalface and tried to teach a group of 28 kids all with differing learning needs and abilities and many arriving at school having not had breakfast or a decent night’s sleep. I agree that families need more support and education but I also believe that there are some families that need support with life skills as well as perhaps literacy and numeracy. As for NAPLAN I think that the US has provided enough evidence to suggest that standardised testing alone is not the answer. It’s far easier to to teach to a test than it is inspire a love of learning. And as you would no doubt have experienced, it is also easy to study for an exam and perform well only to forget what you had learnt later on. The use of NAPLAN and MY School data to expose underperformance in both teachers and schools alone does not improve teacher or school performance. While the data is important for guiding future planning a school that has positive and progressive leadership with a strong culture of performance and development where staff are motivated intrinsically to improve their practise would be a far better institution than one that is reacting to negative data by firing teachers. I agree that there needs to system wide reform to improve educational outcomes for all our students and I think it’s great that you have made a contribution to the much needed discussion, however, I’m not sure that you are quite on the mark.
by Peter Kerr on Mar 11, 2013 at 6:23 pm
Full marks Catherine Scott and CML. Nails. Hammers. Heads.
Here’s a note from the past I just found. It reads: “I’m sorry Mr and Mrs Latham but your young Mark is going to have to do a few catchup lessons because he’s just not grasping the basic concepts and can’t put together a coherent, logical argument. Lord help us if he should ever aspire to be Prime Minister!”
Mark, besting G Henderson is the upper limit of your capabilities. Stick to doing that and leave the important stuff to the people who know what they’re talking about.
by Jim Moore on Mar 11, 2013 at 9:21 pm
Of course, what Ms Scott doesn’t allude to from the research is that teachers are largely ineffective, in that parenting is a much greater indicator.
Oh yes, that sort of analysis, where you tie facts to inevitable logical conclusions.
Unfortunately teachers aren’t good at that.
Mind you, there is no doubt that our school funding is cock-eyed, and let’s get down to facts here, this is another poisonous legacy of that trumped up incompetent govt led by John Howard. Just another poison pill they left on society.
You think teachers are bad these days, and yes, as a group they are, but look further up the chain. I work at a university, and the difference in knowledge and skills of a graduate from a year 12 leaver are negligible, and in spite of the well worn clichés, university does not teach you how to think, and that is the problem.
Anything non-linear is just beyond the vast majority of people.
If you aren’t studying philosophy or mathematics then you aren’t learning how to think, and if you aren’t studying English you are probably unlikely to be able to express any ideas you might have.
The English skills of the average school leaver, nay graduate, are appalling.
And don’t get me started on the genius idea of allowing kids to drop maths for their HSC.
Brilliant!
by Dogs breakfast on Mar 11, 2013 at 9:46 pm
Sad to read Mark Latham’s piece on schools. He began well by noting the Rudd/Gillard policy was to effectively continue the Howard policies. In my mind this is the single most shameful feature of the Labor years 2007-13. For a Labor govt to keep Howard’s malicious funding models for schools which have as their central aim the weakening of public schools, is a disgrace. So, if international comparisons point to a problem in Australian schools isn’t it fair to ask whether the Howard/Rudd/Gillard model isn’t the problem? Mark Latham proposes more of the same: mindless Naplan tests every year,Chris Pyne-style attacks on teacher quality etc. Hang on, make that Pyne/Garrett style attacks after hearing Peter Garrett on ABC Drive last night explain that any problems in our schools are due to teacher literacy/numeracy ” failings”. (Admired Waleed Ali’s line of questioning which was to ask the minister where the evidence was. Rare in an ABC journo.) So, Mark, does Finland have Naplan tests every year? A hugely subsidised private sector? And does anyone actually want to copy Singapore in any respect? Sad to think that 1996-2013 have just about killed public education with 5 of those years under Labor. As a former long time teacher I find everything Julia Gillard says about education to be appalling. Can we look forward to Christopher Pyne decreeing from Canberra (and does the federal government actually run a single school?) how teachers will teach, what they teach and who gets to be a teacher? Hard to imagine after all these years of News Ltd public school/teacher bashing that anyone would actually want to become a teacher. The Simpsons episode in which Lisa hides the teacher answer book points to the kind of “education” these barbarian lawyers have in mind: mindless rote learning and multiple choice testing.
by cnewt27 on Mar 12, 2013 at 8:16 am
Mr Latham’s proposals may be too simplistic, but they do raise valid points: there are systemic issues in government schools that we aren’t acknowledging when we insist on talking only about disadvantage, funding, etc.
We moved our kids from the local public school because the quality of teaching was uneven, a pattern that seemed entrenched. This school was high SES, low LBOTE / disadvantage and its P&C couldn’t work out how to spend all the money it raised in certain budget areas. And while even the worst teachers we had were caring and dedicated (and as it happens, also more experienced than the best ones), it didn’t mean they were good. A year with a teacher who directed their teaching only to less able kids was a wasted year for those at the other end of the spectrum (and reasons for this varied from ideological position, to lack of teacher ability to differentiate, in my opinion).
Worse, the two best teachers our kids had (as it happens, newer graduates) could not secure permanent employment after a couple of years there, AT THE SAME TIME as dedicated, experienced (etc) but ultimately worse teachers were being retained and even newly recruited to that school.
I’d love to know about CML’s daughter’s experience. Stories like this, and mine, give a wider insight into what’s really going on on the ground. Disadvantage and funding is some, but not all of the story.
BTW, moving my kids out of the state system saved the NSW & Federal govts a combined $10,000 - even after factoring the (minimal) funding to their new school. Clearly, there’s no incentive for govts to stem the flow of enrolments to private and Catholic schools. But that $10,000, if retained within the education budget, would be a tidy sum to redistribute to schools where funding really is the major barrier to improvement - every time a family left the system. Why is no-one calling for this?
by Parent and Citizen on Mar 12, 2013 at 11:08 am
Latham the dill. NAPLAN is a direct copy of the New York City schools system’s failed testing regime. It was cooked up by a lawyer; Joel Klein - currently employed by Murdoch trying to ensure that his problems with News International don’t hinder News Corp’s US expansion plans. Klein was caught out lowering standards to ensure policy success.
Do some homework and spend a week in Finland before next mouthing off about education.
by negativegearmiddleclasswelfarenow.com on Mar 12, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Some suggested reading for the ill informed Mr Latham.
‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System’-
How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, by Dianne Ravitch former US Assistant Secretary of Education.
Maybe then you’ll understand the intellectual fraud behind standardised testing and have something original to contribute.
by negativegearmiddleclasswelfarenow.com on Mar 12, 2013 at 2:12 pm
There are some interesting points here, but again the finger points at Teachers.
If the author had any idea what it is like to work in a public school, he would know that getting time to prepare for lessons; I mean really sit down and plan and think of your students’ needs, both creatively and critically, is almost an unknown luxury. Most teachers work straight out across the whole day, through breaks dealing with behaviour issues, meaningless departmental meetings about goals that require resources that we don’t have etc. I mean morale is rock bottom, without exaggerating. I would love to have a textbook set for my classes, but they are few and far between.
Please think before you write an article. It is just hard work propping up a system that is incredibly under-resourced coupled with fantasy expectations. Has anyone ever worked in a class with students who destroy lessons through poor behaviour, you know Summer Heights High stuff, and are asked to deal with it within the class as they are often unsupported at a school systemic level? Too many people afraid of what the department will do to their career if they make a fuss. Now through in a pauperish funding model and then re evaluate the life of a State School Teacher.
by Stephen Dunne on Mar 12, 2013 at 8:27 pm
I should have added, that when real resources are given to State Schools, for example with the National Partnership funded schools, you see massive changes to results in educational outcomes. It is about simple as that. Teachers need supporting with resources, not criticism.
by Stephen Dunne on Mar 12, 2013 at 8:32 pm
I just put down your Quarterly Essay entitled, ‘Not dead yet - Labor’s post-left future’ and liked it a lot. However, I thought you were a bit heavy handed on teachers, who by-and-large are doing their best under challenging circumstances in the classroom and in the staff room. Monitoring performance of teaching and learning, and administration and management, then analysing results objectively and tailoring needs is a vital process in successful schools. The staff and students learn from each other. It is the people (staff & student leaders) in the system that should be making the greatest contribution to how performance is measured. If a NAPLAN is included it should carry very little weight in an overall performance measure. To the sideline critics I say: let the leaders in education invent the best methodology to measure overall performance to use to tailor their effort/ method/ resources to achieve excellent outcomes. To those leaders in the system, step up, gather together, change it into the system you want to work in. To those already doing it, keep up the great work.
by Dave Pepper on Mar 18, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Hi Mark. Love your work. I also remember your work as Liverpool’s mayor when you would come to Miller Primary in Sydney’s Green Valley with a ute and shovel and help teachers parents and kids plant trees around a dismal site of redbrick, asphalt stuck in the middle of Housing Commission fibro housing. It was the early 1190s. Remember? As a long time teacher and now teacher educator I think it is time we looked to the quality of graduate teachers and had a good hard look at teachers. To say as Catheri
by Margaret Freund on Mar 20, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Sorry- wasnt finished. (It’s what happens when writing on an i-pad and the cat jumps on your lap!).What I was going to also say is that Teacher Quality is an issue and until we face up to it then nothing will improve. What do you remember from Ashcroft Primary and Hurlstone? I’ll put money on it that it was good teachers. To continue the funding arrangements of Howard is nothing more than a scandal and Gonski needs to be implemented asap. Testing isnt maybe the answer but some properly instituted teacher appraisal is.
Proper debate about education is essential. I’d like to see Christopher Pyne give one of his ‘didactic’ lessons to a bunch of disenfranchised teenagers. Now that would be good for a laugh.
Keep up the great work.
by Margaret Freund on Mar 20, 2013 at 12:37 pm