You are Never Alone

28 October, ABC’s Australia Talks, Education Revolution. - podcast of the programme available.

The preamble:

The Rudd government says it’s committed to establishing Australia as one of the world’s most highly educated and skilled nations. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says the promised education revolution marks the first time all states and territories have committed to a national program to improve our education system from pre-school to upper secondary.

If you compare the performance of Australian schools with other countries in the OECD between 2003 and 2006, Australia declined in both absolute and relative terms in reading literacy. Over the past six years there has been no improvement in the percentage of Australian students who are less than proficient at maths.

In response, the government has promised report cards for schools, a computer for every student and incentives to encourage the best and brightest to pursue teaching as a career path. So are these measures revolutionary? What does it take to make a real difference in our classrooms?

Paul Barclay asked “what does it take to make an education revolution?”
His online guests were Deb Hayes, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Sydney  and Max Angus, Professor of Education, Edith Cowan University.

Deb Hayes - these [better digital connections and equipment] are things we’d expect schools in the digital age to have. A revolution needs to go further than putting computers in schools.

Max Angus - there is a raft of problems that need fixing, and COAG is showing good signs of doing this. The computers in schools programme has left out the first sebven years of schooling. Reform is needed in the school funding system, and the low socio economic schools that have very demanding kids and parents need assistance.

This was a “talkback” programme with members of the public phoning in.

The first caller said “teachers make the difference” and Deb Hayes responded that teachers need a lot of support. In response to Paul Barclay, Deb Hayes said that computers will not make poor teachers better. Professional development for teachers is the key.

The second caller argued teachers needed better remuneration, and incentives to attract better candidates into teaching.

The third caller says that the problem in Australian education is equity.  He advocated the “Finnish model” as against the prescriptive “New York” model.
This led to a discussion of comparing school performance and the possibility of schools being ranked and the ranking being available to the public. Max Angus said that schools would be “put on notice” for a poor performance.
A school principal said that “league tables” do not sit with Australian culture. Deb Hayes said that there can be vast differences between like schools, the cause being teacher quality. The people who benefit from league tables are those with mobility, who can move their children from one school to another. League tables don’t benefit the kids being “left behind”.  League tables in the UK have led to the label of “failing schools”.

The discussion then moved on to funding issues. Why hasn’t increased funding led to a rise in literacy standards? It seems likely that in schools, extra funding for targeted projects like literacy, is being spent more generally rather than being directed to use for specific students. Max Angus said that in the testing programmes, it seems that each year the test pick up the “tail’ of 10-14% of the year level who score poorly. They seem to be the same students each year, and they present very difficult problems. They are very resource intensive. The use of funding has to be targeted, but quite often the school is unable to get the teacher resource that they need, so th money may even go unspent.
A school principal said we have a growing number of students with learning difficulties- not only are we getting better at identifying these problems, but also we have students for whom English is not their first language, but these are not all from the same cultural background. Funding in Australia supports on average the bottom 5-10% of students, where as in Finland the support level is for the lowest 30%.

I didn’t have time to listen to the whole podcast but the issues being raised were very interesting, but what I heard, in the long run, didn’t really relate to the Digital Education Revolution, more to where our education system is in the world competitive stakes.