Here comes another 2020 vision

2016 John Hattie analysed 5,639 pieces of research that proved quality teaching matters. Prime Minister Joyce and Governor-General Howard signed school voucher funding into law. The Gonski recommendations were quietly abandoned after The Australian reported that a panel member had once used an official car for a private purpose. Five school principals were charged with cheating in the NAPLAN tests. A new bureaucracy, Fair Test Australia, was set up to administer the tests. A Herald-Sun exclusive revealed that 50% of kids were below average.

2017 Taking a different tack, the Productivity Commission pointed to misplaced school reform as the reason behind Australia's skill shortage, lack of competitiveness and rising welfare costs. The Joyce Government responded by implementing a 'no child left behind or else' policy and mandated that 10% of schools would become discipline schools. My School included a new index showing the number of children chastised by teachers in each school; the Fairfax press obligingly produced a discipline league table. A Daily Telegraph exclusive revealed that 70% of kids were now below average

2018PISA tests showed that low-SES fifteen-year-olds were now over four years behind high-SES students and also were doing very badly in foreign languages. 300 hours of language were mandated for all schools. Visual arts disappeared from the curriculum. The Grattan Institute showed that Malawi had overtaken Australia in PISA because all their kids wore school uniforms. The maths curriculum was altered to explain more about averages.

2019 School attendance and retention rates seriously declined amidst widespread concern about disconnected kids - highly publicized research developed by the ACER showed that civic-mindedness was weak in schools. The Bernadi Government said that it would no longer be soft on civics and decreed that NAPLAN would test civics and niceness. Drama slipped off the curriculum. John Hattie analysed 23,918 pieces of research that proved beyond doubt that quality teaching matters.

2020 Now this is different: Education historians have just unearthed a copy of the Gonski review from DEEWR archives. The new government has declared that it will implement the lot because nothing else over the last ten years had has worked.

So there you go. Yes, some of it is fanciful and I've thrown in some pet aversions. But when you think about it, many of the listed events have been tried in various places without success: policy driven by moral panic and the media, privatization in its various guises, reward and punishment funding, test-driven change. We haven't introduced some of them yet in Australia, but give us time. They are alive and well (and selectively researched) overseas just waiting to land in Oz.

We don't really have to be locked into Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We know what successful school systems do and some of this is quite different. And yes, much of what we have to do differently has to happen in schools. Some ideas about this have been developed in other contributions to OLO this month. My commitment to doing things differently within schools is best reflected in my work for Big Picture Education Australia. http://www.bigpicture.org.au/

And despite some of the above we need to value the work done by people such as John Hattie and Ben Jensen, but alongside other perspectives as well. Doing schooling better is about fixing schools on the outside as well as the inside http://inside.org.au/gonski-the-game-changer/. We can't afford to have an ever-growing underclass of Jareds.

Chris Bonnor is a fellow of the centre for Policy Development and co-author (with Jane Caro) of What Makes a Good School (forthcoming, July 2012).