As readers will be more than aware, I’m resolutely not a fan of the Albanese government. That said, to damn them with faint praise, they are at least doing – or trying to do – one thing right. Ironically, that one thing is trying to fix decades of bad policy inflicted by their own.
Like New Zealand, education standards in Australia have been steadily declining for decades. This, in spite of ever more money poured into the system. Much of the decline can be slated home to destructive fashionable education theories peddled by the left. Including in how teachers are trained.
To his credit, a Labor Education Minister is finally trying to fix the mess his predecessors created.
Australia’s universities are about to be pulled into line over one of their greatest acts of betrayal. In an encouraging step – perhaps a breakthrough moment – federal and state education ministers have endorsed principles to redesign the university training of teachers.
This strikes at the heart of the decline in Australian school standards. It suggests a clear-eyed determination by Labor’s new federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, to enhance teaching professionalism and confront the defects in classroom methods that have held back Australian schoolchildren for decades […]
The universities are principal agents in this failure. It is central to the disappointing outcomes from the Gonski funding model, the crazy culture war that has raged for decades over how children should be taught and the disorientation teachers feel entering classrooms after such inadequate training.
A young man of my acquaintance entered a Masters of Teaching course full of bright-eyed enthusiasm. Within just a few weeks, that enthusiasm was totally destroyed by the reality of university teacher education. The worst of it was, indeed, that the course was long on neo-Marxist theory, but totally devoid of such practical basics as classroom management and lesson planning. On his first training placement, he was thrown in without the least coaching in how to manage a classroom.
For years economists correctly said more funding of education would increase human capital development, leading to greater productivity. What the economists missed was this truth was valid only with proper teaching methods in the classroom – and those methods were missing in one of Australia’s greatest social and economic reform debacles across the past generation.
All credit to Jason Clare for wanting to lay down the law.
Interviewed by this column, Clare says: “I’m not interested in culture wars or fake fights. The only thing I’m interested in is what works, what’s going to help a child from school, like the one I went to, to catch up, to keep up and to finish school.
“The Productivity Commission put out a report in January where they assessed the current National School Reform Agreement. They were blistering in their criticism. They said it didn’t include any targets or any practical reforms. What it pointed out is if you’re a child from a poor family or the bush, you are three times more likely to fall behind at school, and if you’re one of those children you’re less likely to finish high school and less likely to go to university.
“If you ask a lot of teachers they’ll tell you the same thing – there wasn’t enough focus at university on the fundamentals, on the skills necessary to teach a child to read, to write, to do maths, to manage classroom behaviour. The practical experience wasn’t up to scratch, nowhere near what a nurse or doctor gets when they’re training in a hospital.”
This is exactly what former Coalition education minister Alan Tudge was saying when interviewed by this newspaper in 2021: “I believe that teacher education faculties are largely responsible for the decline. This goes back to the responsibility of universities in terms of the people they accept into teacher training courses but, more importantly, how they are trained. There is too much dogma at the expense of established evidence-based practices.”
Unfortunately, Tudge was up against the intransigently left-wing teacher unions and education bureaucrats. Whether a Labor government has a better chance at forcing through real reform is the big question.
Until they do, the system is only going to continue to crush bright and talented prospective teachers. As the aforementioned would-be teacher found, his initial enthusiasm was quickly crushed by a suffocating tsunami of Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory gibberish. “I can’t teach this stuff.”
The merit of the Scott report is that it goes to the fundamentals – that schoolchildren have not been properly instructed in reading, maths and science. Many recommendations sound shocking because they reflect a failure of first principles that would not be tolerated in the teaching of disciplines such as medicine.
The report says accredited teaching programs at universities must require “knowledge and evidence-based practices” for trainee teachers to deliver “the greatest impact on student learning”.
In his down-to-earth manner, after the report’s release Clare says this means ensuring student teachers understand “how children learn, how the brain works, how they retain information” and ensuring “they get taught the practices that actually work”. That means more knowledge-based explicit instruction by teachers.
To grasp the scale of the atrocity in many university courses, the equivalent would be a medicine course where students weren’t taught how the body functioned.
All of which is the sheerest heresy to the half-witted wokeists running university teacher training.
But even with the best training in the world, teachers will still struggle – as will their students, in turn – when they are weighed down with a curriculum millstone of gender and race theory.
Clare says the changes will be “mandated”. In truth, implementation won’t be easy. Resistance to evidence-based teaching practice has a disreputable history over a generation that has seen the betrayal of children and teachers […]
Early signs are that Clare is shaping as a no-nonsense, non-ideological, evidence-based minister. That is exactly what is required to deliver these reforms. Being Labor is important since most state education ministers are also Labor. Clare knows he can’t dictate to the states.
“I think my state education ministers realise we’re not going to make long-lasting change unless we work together,” he says. “I don’t run schools or employ teachers. But I can provide national leadership and encourage more people to enrol in teaching at university and improve initial teacher education.”
The Australian
Good luck with that – because, God knows, we all need it.