A report card on Australian schools

In the second decade of the twenty first century Australia is faced with an apparent paradox in school education. On the one hand there has been a greatly increased involvement by federal governments, whether Coalition or Labor, and combined spending on education by federal and state Governments increased by a dramatic 44 per cent between 2000 and 2009. On the other hand this increase in involvement has been accompanied by a significant fall in our international ranking – both in absolute terms and in relation to other countries, in reading literacy, mathematics and science, and in our ranking on equity.

Federal involvement in secondary education began with the Menzies Liberal Government providing funding for struggling Catholic schools in the 1960s and with the Whitlam governments funding of disadvantaged schools. Intervention of a more top-down nature began with the Howard Coalition Government. At first there was a focus on ‘values’ and an implied criticism of government schools. The funding of flag poles and chaplains were essentially symbolic gestures, but millions of dollars were also spent on summer schools for those who were already seen as high performing teachers.

It was under the Rudd Governments ‘Education Revolution’, with Julia Gillard as Education Minister that the real intervention began. A program of national testing at both primary and secondary levels – NAPLAN – was introduced with one stated aim being to link funding to schools with results of the testing. This was followed by the roll out of student computers’, the school building program, and the nationalisation of the Australian curriculum: but what has happened to our international standing?

Our international ranking

There are two main measures by which schools across the world can be tested. The first is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) organised by the OECD and the second is Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) organised by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement with the support of the United States National Center for Education Statistics. I will focus on PISA because it includes reading and writing as well as mathematics and science and embodies a wider range of countries, although Australia’s results are relatively consistent across the two systems of assessment.

PISA is far more than a simple multiple choice exam testing rote knowledge. PISA uses the word “Literacy” to apply to all the areas of reading/writing, science and mathematics because its focus is on measuring how well students are equipped to apply what they have learnt to real-life situations. In the words of the 2009 Report: “The emphasis is on mastering processes, understanding concepts and functioning in various contexts.”

When interpreting PISA results it is necessary to take into account that over ten years the number of educational jurisdictions involved in the program has increased as more countries have realised the value of seeing how they perform internationally and this has included a number from the Asian region. Of these Hong Kong and Shanghai in China, as well as Singapore, have joined Japan and Korea near the top of the performers. Shanghai has performed particularly well, outranking the previous ‘star’ – Finland – in all three areas of reading, mathematics and science.

The accompanying table ranks the top nine countries on the average of their 2009 scores in Reading, Science and Maths. The U.K. and U.S. are added for comparison, although in both case their results place near them the middle of a total of 65 countries. The table also shows the variation in results between 2003 and 2009 where regions did the assessments in both years.

Australia performed particularly well in Reading in 2003, with a score of 528 being in a group with New Zealand and Canada, but behind Finland and Japan. However by 2009 it had dropped 10 points (equivalent to about three months schooling). The score in Science has held up but Maths is our weakest subject. Our 2009 score places us 15^th.

It is, however, important to realise that these results are mean scores and as such can conceal wide variations between the States and Territories and between males and females. A few examples will have to suffice. In Maths in Western Australia the mean score in Maths is 529 – equivalent to that of Japan. In the ACT the mean score in Reading is 531 and for females in the ACT it is 560, which is well above the mean score for Finland. However the score for females in Finland is probably higher, because Finland actually has a larger gap between male and female performance.

Tasmania and the Northern Territory on the other hand have significantly lower means – 483 in reading and 487 in Mathematics – closer to the mean scores of the United States in these areas and significantly below the International mean.

How do we perform on equity?

There is one further consideration to be taken into account in a snapshot of how Australia performs on the international scene and that is how we perform on equity. If we compared two students of similar intellectual ability, one from a group of low socio-economic status (SES) and one from a group of high SES, would they be likely to perform just as well?

The level of equity is measured by graphing individual student's results against their SES and drawing a line of best fit through the result. As one would expect, in all countries there is a slope upwards from low socio-economic status to high, but what is significant is whether this slope is flatter or steeper. Hong Kong has a high level of equity and the graph is relatively flat, where Australia is closer to the OECD average. Again there are significant differences within Australia. South Australia has the highest level of equity and the ACT is the most inequitable.

The strength of the relationship between student performance and SES can also be shown as a mathematical figure, where a higher figure indicates a higher level of inequality. The following table places the countries in the same order of achievement as the first table and shows their inequity index:

While it is clear that there is not a direct link between equity and performance – as Shanghai, Singapore and New Zealand indicate – it goes without saying that raising the results for disadvantaged students in Australia would, apart from improving the life chances of individuals, significantly raise our mean international performance.

Australia continues to perform reasonably well in English and Science but the three things we need to be concerned about are: the fact that we are slipping behind overall; our results in Maths; and our ranking on equity. To what extent are these are particularly Australian problems and what we can learn from other countries successes?