Gonski is no teacher or educator... his opinions on the Education System and how to improve it are just that the opinions of the inexperienced.Mollycoddled students fail the test of improved education standards
The Australian
12:00AM May 4, 2018
Henry Ergas
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the town of Macondo is afflicted by a memory plague. To counter the mass amnesia, Jose Arcadio Buendia, who begins as the town’s energetic founder and ends as a madman who has to be tied to a tree, affixes a description of its purpose to every object he can find. “This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk.”
Quite what Buendia would have pinned on the entrance to an Australian school we will never know. What seems certain, however, is that it would not be: “This is a school. Here children learn.” And it seems equally certain that the recently released review of Australian schools chaired by David Gonski will do little to improve the situation.
That is not to suggest that the review ignores our education system’s woes. On the contrary, pointing to trends whose “importance … can hardly be overstated”, the panel’s report highlights the collapse in Australia’s rankings on international standardised tests.
With the gap between the performance of Australian students and that of their counterparts in the top five systems overseas doubling for mathematics and science in the past decade, the report paints a picture of decline affecting every area of assessment, every type of school and students from every socio-economic group.
Yet having presented that analysis, the report does not even attempt to provide an explanation of what caused the worsening. In the absence of any diagnosis, it is impossible to understand why the panel believes its recommendations — which, torturing the English language, it describes as “impactful” — would prevent those causal factors, and the damage they wreak, from persisting.
In reality, the deterioration in Australia’s performance is even greater than the report claims. Although our ranking in maths has been poor to middling for many years, that was not the case in other assessment areas, where Australian students did relatively well in the 1960s and 70s.
No one could sensibly blame the subsequent worsening on inadequate funding. Having grown by almost 30 per cent in real terms since 2000-01, public expenditure per student is at all-time highs. Nor are there too few teachers: while the number of students increased by 25 per cent during the past 40 years, teacher numbers rose 60 per cent, halving the student-teacher ratio compared with the 60s.
What has changed, however, is that how well students do in school no longer matters. University places used to be tightly rationed, and tertiary admission depended on the scores students received on completing secondary schooling; now, with 44 per cent of students proceeding to university and that proportion set to rise further, test scores scarcely have any enduring impact.
The contrast with the countries whose performance the report wants us to emulate could not be starker. Although the report seems entirely unaware of this fact, in Japan, South Korea and the Chinese-speaking jurisdictions — which invariably dominate the league tables — matriculation rankings are the primary factor determining students’ long-term prospects. Put in the language of sociology, these systems are sternly unforgiving, offering few or no second chances.
And even in Finland, whose approach is less harsh, Amanda Ripley’s widely acclaimed book, The Smartest Kids in the World, concludes that “school is hard, and tests affect students’ lives”, “creating a bright line” that shapes future career opportunities.
Little wonder, then, that parents in those countries invest so heavily in making sure students take school extremely seriously. And little wonder students put in long hours, with the schools inculcating what the Finns call “sisu” — tenacity in the face of great odds.
It would be foolish to argue that we should copy the Asian countries in the enormous weight they place on students’ test scores at age 17 or 18. As well as leading to unacceptably high levels of stress and of youth suicide, hinging young people’s prospects almost entirely on one set of exams encourages over-investment in cramming and deprives society of late-developers’ talents.
It is, however, no less foolish to believe students and parents will devote the effort real learning demands if there are few rewards for achievement and no penalties for falling behind.
Yet the whole thrust of the report is to cushion failure and ignore excellence.
For example, rather than emphasising the need to reverse the steep decline in the proportion of young Australians who score towards the top of the international distribution, the report gives the highest priority to ensuring that all students progress by at least one year of curriculum achievement each year.
Were that recommendation to focus schools on “growing student outcomes” adopted, its effect would be to further divert resources from the best students, who easily meet the improvement standard, to the worst, who don’t.
Nor are its recommendations about teachers better conceived.
On average, one Australian state school teacher in every 7000 is dismissed each year for incompetence, a dismissal rate far lower than that for criminal offences. But instead of increasing the scope to remove poor performers, the report proposes “improvement journeys” (presumably in first class) that would only coddle them further, as would its suggestion that what little pressure the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy places on schools and teachers be eased.
That is hardly the approach that helped Sydney Grammar School, which Gonski attended, forge so many stellar achievers. Clearly, mass amnesia has not only erased our memory of what serious analysis looks like, allowing jargon-infested puffery to take its place; it has also made us forget what serious schooling involves.
That’s bad news for those who value learning. But the teachers, administrators, parents and students who don’t care can sleep easy. No matter how hopeless they are, this report promises them a hundred years of solicitude.
The Teacher's Union and their ilk seek more funding, more funding but we have already shown that more funding is not the answer.
Ask teachers and they will tell you the answer is to fix the Curriculum... concentrate on the 3Rs in the early years and stop wasting teachers and students time with all the politically correct and radical agenda driven nonsense that the PC Prog Left have stuffed in it over the years.
