Despite the left’s mythologising about Whitlam and “free university”, during the Menzies era, almost all university students were funded by the government. But it was a merit-based system: score well enough on your matriculation, and the government paid your tuition.
Teacher training, even more so: by far the majority of teachers were funded by bursaries. Again, merit-based.
Australia abandoned all that, long ago.
Now, more and more, teaching in Australia is becoming the remit of: those who can’t, do. Entry requirements for teacher courses at Australia universities have been progressively “dumbed down”. Nearly 10% of would-be teachers fail basic requirements in literacy and numeracy.
Is it any wonder that Australia continues to slide down international education rankings?
Singapore recruits its teachers exclusively from the top 10 per cent of applicants and trains them at a single, highly regarded institution with a sole focus on making them ready to teach.
Australia used to sit alongside Singapore in the top performing nations in education outcomes, but in the past 20 years Singapore has improved its standards while Australia has gone backwards.
Teachers’ unions insist that the answer is more money. But Australia has spent more money – more and more each year – and standards have continued to slide in direct correlation.
Clearly, money is not the answer.
We have lost the equivalent of a year’s worth of learning. The average 15-year-old Singaporean student is three years ahead of the average 15-year-old Australian in mathematics and 18 months ahead in reading and science.
This is shocking. It’s embarrassing.
So how do we turn this around? Through the human capital we recruit. Recruiting exceptional talent and training them in evidence-based practices are not the only things that lead to higher standards in schools but they are universally regarded as among the most, if not the most, important things.
The Grattan Institute estimates recruiting a higher-achieving teaching workforce would boost the average student’s learning by six to 12 months, almost reversing the two-decade decline.
It’s not that there aren’t dedicated and hardworking teachers, who approach their profession as a vocation. But they are being let down, not just by universities with progressively lowered standards, but by an ideologically-driven education bureaucracy.
Many teacher education faculties have been infected with dogma and teaching fads at the expense of evidence-based practices. The clearest example of this is how students are taught to read.
Teaching reading has, for decades, been dominated in Australia by the long-discredited dogma of “Whole Language”.
Rather than learning to decode words using phonics, kids should guess at words based on the pictures they saw and the context. There is no evidence to support this as the most effective method for teaching kids to read.
Indeed, national reading inquiries in the US in 2000, Britain in 2006 and our own in 2005 concluded that decoding (phonics) must be taught systematically along with vocabulary and comprehension. Recent research has reinforced these findings.
Despite the clear evidence, phonics is still mostly not taught in teacher education. Yet, when La Trobe University recently launched a short course in phonics, teachers rushed to sign up.
This tells me that teachers want to learn best-practice teaching methods. But it is also an indictment on teacher education faculties that they weren’t taught this to begin with.
The other great obsession of education bureaucrats is “child-led” learning. The leftist mindset revolts against the “hierarchical” notion of a teacher standing at the front of the class, explicitly teaching kids.
McKinsey analysis shows a student who is taught predominantly through explicit teaching methods has a 10-month advantage in their learning at age 15.
The evidence is clear, but it still is resisted by many in education faculties.
The Morrison government has undertaken a review of teacher training. Expect vicious and sustained blow-back from bureaucrats and teachers’ unions. Especially if it threatens their little, ivory tower empires.
We also need a more practical focus in teacher education courses. This is something the old teachers colleges got right. We need to get more principals and leading teachers, who are the real experts on effective instruction, involved in training future teachers, rather than only academics and researchers. In medicine, practitioners are typically the teachers of future doctors and the same principle should apply in education.
The Australian
Fascism! Next, they’ll be expecting teachers to learn their kids betterer.
And who will teach them gender theory? Climate change?
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