What Australian needs to do to become a world leader in education
Dr David Zyngier
By Dr David Zyngier
Australian public schools will never meet the achievement levels of the OECD education leader Finland, unless our ministers of education – both state and federal – change the way education policy is developed and managed.
Most of the so-called innovative and ground-breaking educational policies and reforms adopted in Australia over the past 50 years, whether in the areas of policy, curriculum, pedagogy or assessment have been copied from failed projects in the USA or England. Neither of these countries are at the top end of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings.
Our public schools are reeling from policies existing and proposed.
The new national curriculum is still highly contentious and unravelling.
Teachers are up in arms about performance-based pay and the time taken out of the regular classroom to prepare students for NAPLAN (National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy) testing.
The MySchool website, while improved with the added detail of school income still names and shames those schools that have been left to teach students no one else wants.
The proposal to attach ‘vouchers’ to students as they move between school systems and the growing division of schools and their students into academic- and practical-based further demoralises the public school system.
Perhaps most harmful of all has been the generational promotion of private schools through the massive transfer of public money that ought to be used to improve our dilapidated public school infrastructure.
In the USA today, even the most ardent proponents of the No Child Left Behind Act have recanted their belief in its policies. These policies failed, and yet they are still being touted by Australian advocates.
One may wonder why any rational bureaucrat or education manager might want to adopt practices that are shown by extensive research to produce poor outcomes. But as each new government attempts to makes its own political mark and reverses the decisions of the previous one, these changes to curriculum and teaching generally serve to only unsettle the system.
Finnish governments of various hues have used research to lead policy for many decades. This has allowed them to turn a system designed to support a small rural economy prior to World War Two into a world-leading system in just 50 years.
While Australia’s expenditure per head is now similar to that of Finland’s – Australian has doubled spending on education in the past ten years, mainly due to the growing public funding of private education – our student performance has only marginally improved. In the same period, Finland has increased its spending by only one third, yet Finnish students are outperforming their Australian counterparts.
The gap between lowest- and highest-performing Finnish students continues to narrow as Australia’s widens. Further, the variation between school performances in Finland is among the lowest in the world.
Recent research by the US-based National Centre on Education and the Economy (NCEE) demonstrates that the strategies driving the education policy of Finland are in bleak contrast to the current agenda for education reform in Australia. The NCEE research concludes that what is needed is a system with high expectations for all students, where the support varies to the extent needed to make sure that every student can meet required standards.
Since the 1950s, the Finns have delivered the most funds and resources to students who are the most difficult to teach. This means they get the best teachers, and more time to catch up, whether after school, on weekends or during the summer. In Finland – where producing the highest quality teachers possible is a focus – teachers are carefully trained to quickly diagnose and accurately assess children who exhibit learning problems.
The NCEE found three things affect the quality of teachers: the status of teaching relative to the status of other occupations, the compensation offered relative to other possible choices and the conditions of work.
The Finns have long required all teachers to have a master’s degree, something which Australia is finally (slowly) moving to implement. And candidates who already have a master’s degree must get another masters degree in teaching. There are no “alternative routes” to entering the teaching force in Finland, no equivalent of the Teach for Australia quick fix where the “best and brightest” of university graduates are given a six-week summer cram course before being launched into some of the most difficult-to-teach schools.
The Finns recruit only the highest achievers into teaching and they also receive extensive postgraduate training. Here in Australia the available time for professional development of teachers has not only diminished over the years in the guise of productivity offsets, it now often occurs during holiday breaks.
Significantly, in Finland there has been a shift in the philosophy that education should be reserved only for society’s elites. Australia, on the other hand, continues to maintain and promote a segregated sorting and selecting of children so that only some receive intellectually demanding curricula. Our system recruits only a few teachers who are themselves educated to high levels. It paradoxically funnels public money toward the easiest students to teach (those in private schools who are already achieving well above average results), denying it to those hardest to educate.
High-stakes national testing such as NAPLAN does not exist in Finland. While schools and their teachers assess students regularly, this is not used for accountability purposes, as the basis of teachers’ compensation or to stream students as it is in Australia.
In Finland there is no government support for private schools. Australia is almost alone as a nation in the way it transfers responsibility for education from the public to the private, serving to further advantage society’s elites. The result in Australia is that families with economic power use education to advantage their children.
While we wait for our politicians to understand what is necessary and required, our children are being failed by a system that drives those parents who can afford it from public education.
As the Finns have shown, high-quality staff, equitable funding and coherent systems are the key to a highly successful public education system.
Dr David Zyngier is a Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Education at Monash University.
A version of this article has appeared in The Age.