Crisis, what crisis?
Read the nation’s newspapers or listen to some of our politicians and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Australian schools are in a state of crisis. Is that really the case? In a word, no!
Schools and teachers make for convenient stalking horses, especially it seems for those on the conservative side of politics, who think that ideologically motivated teachers are preventing students from learning, but it’s not often that the talk turns to crisis – unless you want to read Why Our Schools are Failing, by Dr Kevin Donnelly, the Chief of Staff for Kevin Andrews, the Commonwealth Minister for Employment and Community Relations.
According to Dr Donnelly, ‘Whether measured by staff morale, student absenteeism and lack of interest, the exodus of parents out of the government system, falling standards or the politically correct nature of the curriculum, the reality is that our education system is in crisis.’ What Dr Donnelly seems to ignore is the context in which schools function and the significant changes that have taken place in the role of teachers in a changing society. The average teacher today is extremely well educated in terms of content and pedagogical skills. Teachers are expected to have a deep knowledge of their subject and to convey this in a way their students can understand. They need an understanding of sociology, psychology and an expanding knowledge of how the mind works. They need a wide range of organisational skills to deal with a multitude of activities in the school and the community.
At the same time, massive social changes have had an enormous impact on what happens in schools. The students in our schools come from homes where they’re financially and emotionally secure and from environments of poverty, despair and violence. The contribution that all schools make in improving the chances of disadvantaged students is one of the great unsung achievements of the teaching profession. More and more, the health of our society depends on the contribution of teachers, counsellors and support staff in schools. Far from being in crisis, our schools are typically helping to prevent one.
What about educational outcomes? Do we have a crisis when it comes to these? Look at data on from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), drawn from testing instruments that are as free as possible from cultural biases to measure educational outcomes in thirty-one of the most highly developed nations in the world. In scores for Reading Literacy, Finland stands out, as it does on all indicators, with Australia in fourth position behind Canada and New Zealand, with little significant difference between the three. In Mathematical Literacy and Scientific Literacy, Japan and Korea lead, followed by a group comprising New Zealand, Finland, Australia and Canada. For comparison, the relative positions for the United States are fifteenth, nineteenth and fourteenth respectively, with values close to the mean. These figures give little evidence of Dr Donnelly’s ‘falling standards’ or an ‘education system in crisis.’
There is one other international comparison, that of students’ perceptions of their teachers, that as a teacher myself I find most encouraging. Students were asked to respond to four statements about their teachers. Did their teachers: help them with their work; check their homework; give students the opportunity to express their opinions; and continue teaching until all students understand? Australia ranked highest overall, alongside the United Kingdom.
What about Dr Donnelly’s ‘exodus of parents out of the government system’? Between 2000 and 2003, the national move from public to private schools was 1.49 per cent, with the highest being 3 per cent in the ACT and the lowest 0.23 per cent in Queensland, which looks like a ‘drift,’ not an ‘exodus.’ Look at a ten-year period and you get a 22.3 per cent increase in private as compared with 1.2 per cent increase in public schools. Keep in mind, however, that those increases are percentages of two quite different sizes of populations.
What’s behind this drift? Dr Donnelly assumes that parents are choosing private education because the educational outcomes are better, but parents themselves don’t give this reason – in a survey conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald in August, 2004, only eight per cent said better results or higher achievement levels were a reason for choosing a private school. I’ve yet to see a study of comparative outcomes between public and private schools that has demonstrated any difference in achievement levels, which is a little odd considering the amount of public and private money spent supporting an alternative system. It’s more likely that parent’s choose a private school for its values, but again there is no comparative data available and we all know that in all schools there can be a divergence between stated aims and actual outcomes.
In my experience, the values held by public and private school teachers cover a very similar range, and the vast majority of teachers in all systems share the key values of Australian society, which include the belief that a developing adolescent should be exposed to a variety of views and develop the ability to think for herself or himself. It’s worth remembering, as Barry McGaw, the Australian director of the OECD points out, that the drift is also the result of the peculiar way in which Australia’s public schools have to compete with private schools that can draw on public funding and private resources.
While you might call it a side issue, our schools are also failing, apparently, because of ‘political correctness.’ Indeed, Dr Donnelly devotes one fifth of Why Our Schools are Failing to this much abused term. He tries to back up such a claim by drawing very selectively on extracts from syllabus documents that actually express a wide range of views. We do live in a democracy and school systems do reflect a cross-section of values held in our society, rather than just the views held by Dr Donnelly, and it’s the teacher’s responsibility to help students to examine this whole range of views critically. Notwithstanding the comments of the Commonwealth Treasurer, Peter Costello, in the Age in August, the political positions teachers hold cover a range that differs little from those with a similar educational background, but the great majority of teachers of all political persuasions, know that central to their professional responsibilities is a duty to present a balanced view of controversial issues. In good schools at the end of the day students will have experienced a variety of views and will be much further on the way to being able to evaluate different points of view and think for themselves.
So is it true to assert that our schools are failing? In a word, no. Our education system is of a world-class standard. While not all our students would say they love going to school each day, they do have great respect for the involvement teachers demonstrate in their education. If teachers have a low morale, one of the greatest factors for this is the persistence of ill-founded attacks on the profession, often made in the mainstream press, and the lack of recognition teachers get for their achievements.What we all need to do as citizens is ensure that all schools are truly funded equitably, irrespective of the wealth of the community from which their students come, and that we celebrate rather than denigrate the contributions to society and the achievements made by all teachers in all systems.
This article was based on a paper presented at a Conference of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia (www.isaa.org.au) and was published in this form in the Professional Educator of October, 2005. Thanks to Dr Steve Holden for the editing.
Education for Democracy 