Degenerate maths and the mystery of the disappearing report

Only one body meets those conditions: it is the organisation that produces all subject syllabi and all assessment programs, the Queensland Studies Authority, QSA, (and its pitiable predecessor up to Year 10, the Queensland Schools Curriculum Council, QSCC). It has been evident for more than 20 years that the weakened maths syllabus up to Year 10 exit would inevitably result in a serious decline in standards at Year 10 exit. Well, it has happened. All we are left with is a pile of horse droppings and the NAPLAN competition to determine who is boss turd. That issue gets wide publicity and in the process obscures the far more important overall degenerate condition of the subject.

Only Parliament has the power to rectify the problem - a fact that I have emphasised for years. Candidly I think that QSA should be sacked for incompetence at least. It is beyond me that Parliament is supine on this issue, especially as education takes by far the largest slice of the State budget. It makes no difference what side of politics I talk to, all they can see is buildings or retention rates or the public/private divide and other second order issues.

But there is the possibility that no official group, QSSC or QSA or, crucially, Parliament itself really knew that a problem existed. Which leads to the corny old question “what did they know and when did they know it?” They had the results of the sequence of very poor TIMSS results. Those results were ignored. Presumably international data was not good enough! Would home grown Queensland data have been more influential and stirred people out of their smug lethargy?

In 1999 the then Queensland Board of Senior Secondary Studies did some careful analysis of the condition of maths at the end of Year 10. It was called Maths as a Foundation. Although the Board were then only responsible for Years 11 and 12, they were the only group that were capable of doing the proper research needed because the QSCC had never done any assessment ever, had no relevant skills, and were useless.

Among other things, Maths as a Foundation found that there were huge differences in standards across the schools, even for those students who were all seen by the schools as performing at the highest possible level. There was overwhelming evidence that performance in applying mathematical techniques, e.g. algebra, on entry to Year 11 was abysmally low even for classes taking the highest levels of maths in Year 11. They also commented on the implications for all other subjects and to the inevitable problems for syllabus construction for later Years.

The report also reproduced a number of samples of student work with an emphasis on algebra. Some of those samples are astonishingly, appallingly weak. Such samples show scant grasp of algebraic concepts and weak technical skills - and these were from Very High Achievement students.

A copy of the draft report forwarded to me chimed well with what many school principals were saying to me in writing as I worked for my PhD thesis on “participation in rigorous maths and science”. They repeatedly asserted that middle schooling maths and science, especially algebra, was very weak and messy. As one principal put it, in respect of maths and science up to Year 10 “the Department is dragging its feet”.

A few years ago at a QSA meeting over changes in senior schooling I raised the issue of the report Maths as a Foundation, because the problems identified in that must still exist. QSA staff claimed that they had never heard of it and could not find it. It is not on the QSA website and, to my knowledge never has been.

Very puzzled, I wondered if the report had never been finalised. However, late last year, while moving house, I found a clean copy of the final report Maths as a Foundation. It had been finalised after all. Now, the QSA took over everything from both the old Board and from the pathetic QSCC. It is vanishingly unlikely that no copies of that report exist in the QSA.

So the QSCC and subsequently the QSA must have certainly known ten years ago that there was extremely serious trouble in maths up to the end of year 10 and they must have known the problems that would occur when writing later subject syllabi.

However, it was not just the QSCC and the QSA who had copies of the report, a report that should have got Parliament sitting up and taking notice. The copy I have in front of me indicates that the report was put in the Queensland Parliamentary Library on July 23, 2001. So the information was definitely available to Parliamentarians.

Clearly no minister or shadow minister or their respective “Sir Humphries” have considered that the catastrophic decline in maths (and allied numerical sciences) education was worth worrying about. None of them has woken up to the fact that the State-wide nature of the decline makes it certain that the problem lies at the centre i.e. within the QSCC and the QSA, both of which are creatures of Parliament. Parliament set up the QSA up and has trusted them. QSCC and QSA have overseen a terrible decline in the education our children receive in an increasingly globalised world.