Australia once led the world in education standards. Then we had the Long March through the institutions. Australian education became “progressive” and “inclusive”. The “latest pegagogies” and “21st century learning styles” were embraced by education bureaucrats and teachers’ unions alike.
And the results are in.
Australian education rankings have steadily slid from the top three to the lower teens. Talk about “Modern Educayshun”!
Australian students’ results have declined in absolute terms and relative to other countries, with China (four provinces only) and Singapore topping the rankings in all three domains. But two things really stand out this time: across Australia, the proportion of low performers has increased and the proportion of high-performing students has fallen.
A look at reading literacy, which has been tested since 2000 and was a major focus again in this most recent round, shows that Australian students’ average score has declined from 529 to 503, meaning our students performed worse than their predecessors 18 years earlier. Despite huge increases in spending on education — and all kinds of innovations in literacy — the proportion of high performers is down by seven percentage points, and low performers increased by four percentage points […]
The relentless downward drift is accompanied by the even more worrying drop in the number of students reaching PISA’s National Proficient Standard — down from close to two-thirds in 2003 to just over half last year. Only 54 per cent of young Australians met the standard in mathematics last year, a performance almost exactly on the OECD average and three years lower than that of leading country Singapore.
China’s results should be treated with a great deal of suspicion, of course: China carefully cherry-picks just the four wealthiest and most advanced of its 23 provinces. But the rest of the PISA participants who are running rings around Australia cannot be dismissed so easily. This appalling decline represents a systemic failure without excuse.
(New Zealanders, by the way, might not want to gloat: although Kiwi students’ scores remain slightly higher than Australia’s, New Zealand has also slid dramatically in the past two decades. Australia’s worst decline occurred in the wake of the Gillard Labor government’s “reforms”: is Australia merely New Zealand’s future under the COL?)
This is an indictment of education policies and practices around the country. These young people will almost certainly enter adulthood without the confidence and competence they need to compete in a complex world.
It is hard to see them as anything other than the tragic product of education systems that simply pass children along from one year to the next, unwilling or unable to lift them out of the spiral of decline […] Attempts to downplay the significance of these results do our disadvantaged students a severe disservice.
Policy alarm bells should have been ringing following the release of the 2015 PISA results, especially when OECD director for education and skills, Andreas Schleicher, accused Australia of tolerating failure and not looking at evidence-based strategies for supporting struggling students.
Teachers unions can whine all they like about funding, but the undeniable fact is that funding has increased by $20 billion – at the same time that results have categorically declined.
Endless reviews and reports have concluded that teachers lack expertise and too many teach outside their subject areas, academic standards are low and assessment processes (especially for years 11 and 12) are variable — the list goes on. Cultural differences also come into play; Australian students show far less respect for education, as reflected in their classroom behaviour, in comparison to their peers in better-performing countries.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/expel-those-who-fail-to-educate-our-youth/
Yes, but they know how to count imaginary genders, dress in drag, and wave placards and shout nonsense about the end of the world. These are the new standards Australia’s education bureaucrats have set: the new “Three Rs” are “Raunchy, Resentful and Reprobate”.
Given such undeniable evidence of a catastrophic failure of education, how do educrats respond?
A state-led review into NAPLAN has flagged a “radical proposal” to stop publishing individual schools’ literacy and numeracy results on the My School website, in a move geared at limiting public scrutiny at a time when the nation’s academic performance has plummeted.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/push-to-keep-naplan-results-from-public/
There is no failure of education. Ignorance is strength.
