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If Gonski is the answer what is the question?

By Steven Meyer - posted Tuesday, 11 September 2012


It may turn out that of all the fiascos of the Rudd-Gillard era Gonski is the one that does the most long-lasting damage. Gonski gets it wrong for the same reason that most socialist solutions to societal problems are wrong. It answers the wrong question.

The title of the report is: Review of Funding for Schooling. The title reflects the terms of reference which are, in short, to review funding for schooling.

So what question is Gonski trying to answer? Stated succinctly it is something along these lines:

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How can the Commonwealth and state governments change their school funding arrangements to ensure better outcomes across the board for students?

Framing the issues like this comes with three implicit assumptions. The first is that there is something wrong with Australian schools. I think few would argue with that one.

The second assumption is that whatever ails Australian schools can be fixed by changing the funding arrangements. Can it?

The third assumption is that more money needs to be spent on Australian schools. Does it?

Here, I suggest is the question that should be addressed:

How can we deliver the best possible education to each and every child in Australia regardless of geography and socioeconomic status?

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Framing the question in this way has the following advantages:

  • There are no implied assumptions about existing institutional arrangements. Maybe schools in their present form will be part of the mix; or maybe we shall have to experiment with radically different ways of delivering education
  • There is no implication that we need more money. Maybe we do. Maybe we can deliver better education with less money. Maybe too much money is part of the problem.
  • I've included the phrase "each and every child" because I want to get away from the notion of a few sizes fit all children. Maybe we can offer individually tailored educational "packages" to students.

Bear with me while I take a small diversion.

In a previous article, Is the USA in 'irreversible decline'?, I pointed to the enormous rise in manufacturing productivity in the US. In the thirty year period 1980 – 2010 output per employee has risen threefold. It is not manufacturing but manufacturing employment that is in decline in the US.

Of course the rise in manufacturing productivity is not unique to the US. It has been a global phenomenon. All over the world we are producing more and more goods with fewer and fewer people.

Nor is the rise in productivity confined to manufacturing. At the beginning of the twentieth century around one third of the labour force in what are today called "Western" countries was employed on the farm. Today minuscule labour forces produce more food than ever.

The rise in labour productivity has not been confined to manufacturing and agriculture. It has affected almost every aspect of economic activity. This from the NY Times of 4 March 2011.

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" - providing documents relevant to a lawsuit - the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

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But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

How do automated systems of document discovery compare to their human counterparts?

By all accounts automated systems perform better than humans. This is hardly surprising. As any lawyer will tell you, document inspection is insanely boring. It is easy for a human lawyer to miss something important. By some estimates in large cases human lawyers are only right about 60% of the time. That's barely better than a coin toss.

In economic terms what we have seen globally over many centuries is the substitution of capital for labour. The deployment of capital in the form of machines and software enables one man to do the work of many more cheaply and, usually, better. A man with a horse drawn cart with steel-rimmed wheels can shift more cargo more rapidly than a human being can carry on his back. Give the man a diesel truck and decent roads and he can shift even more.

And a small team armed with the right software can do the work of armies of lawyers and do it better and more cheaply.

I think you can all see where this is leading. So let's get back to Gonski.

I suggest that the current model for education belongs to the horse and cart era. Or, if you like, the era of hundreds of lawyers laboriously over thousands of documents. Just as we can substitute capital for labour in every other human enterprise, so I suggest, we can do it in education.

Before people get too angry at these suggestions I want to be explicit about what I'm not saying.

  • I am not saying all children can receive their education by sitting at home in front of a computer screen though I certainly think that would be part of the mix.
  • I am not saying teachers will be cut out of the loop. Instead I am saying that instead of thousands of mostly mediocre and, for their educational level, poorly paid teachers we can make do with hundreds of excellent well-paid teachers. The right equipment will multiply what good teachers can achieve.

I further acknowledge that what pupils learn from each other is at least as important, perhaps more important, than what they learn in the classroom. Isolating kids at home where they cannot interact with their peers would have catastrophic results.

On the other hand delivering at least some education over the internet does have some of the following advantages over the classroom only model.

  • Educational software can be standardised and tested for effectiveness. We can get real data on what methodologies work best for which kinds of students. And we can keep refining and improving. We can expect improved educational packages year on year, something that is not possible now.
  • It offers students more flexibility. A student could simultaneously be studying, say, university level biology and grade 10 history. If a student can finish school in ten years so be it. If it takes 14 years that too may be accommodated.
  • It does away with the tyranny of geography. When we arrived in Australia we discovered, much to our daughter's chagrin, that none of the local schools offered Latin.

Please note that I am thinking of the internet, and maybe other technologies, as tools to multiply the effectiveness of individual teachers, not to replace teachers.

Australia of all countries, which pioneered The School of the Air, lessons delivered by radio, should be embracing the internet as a tool for delivering education.

I have been mulling an article along these lines for some time but what finally galvanised me into action was this piece in New Scientist magazine.

Online schooling is exploding in US

Excerpts:

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Julia Ratten and her brother Jack, who is 7, won't be going back to their local school this month. After the school district in Beaverton, Oregon, announced its latest round of budget cuts, teacher lay-offs and increases in class sizes, Jack and Julia's parents decided to enrol them in the state's full-time online school, Oregon Connections Academy..

As schools around the US come back from their summer break, the Rattens are one of a small but rapidly growing number of families who are turning to the internet as an alternative to chronically under-resourced brick and mortar institutions...

Critics argue that there is little evidence online learning is effective. But as state-run schools, for-profit schools and even free alternatives such as video lessons set up shop online, more and more US students are ditching the traditional classroom.

Florida Virtual School, the first internet-based, state-run high school, opened its virtual doors in 1997. But in the last few years, as the US economy has faltered, some 35 states have cut budgets at all stages of education, from kindergarten to 17 and 18-year-olds in 12th grade, collectively known as K-12. Driven by the promise of reduced costs per student, states have increasingly turned to large-scale online learning programmes. Today, 30 states offer full-time online schools. Some, like Tennessee, require all students to take at least some online classes

Perhaps the schools funding crisis in the US will prove to be a blessing in disguise. It will force them to explore ways of delivering a better education more cost-effectively to more children.

At the beginning of this piece I called Gonski a fiasco and said it could be the one that does the most damage. The reason is that our future as a prosperous nation does not depend on some sort of ever-continuing minerals boom. All minerals booms end and the current one may be sputtering to a close as I write.

More than ever our future prosperity depends on having well-educated skilled people. We need to find better and, yes, more cost-effective, ways of delivering education. That means exploring options that go beyond the classroom-only model. It means recognising that perhaps there is more to improving educational outcomes than tinkering with funding models.

Gonski was a golden opportunity missed.

A final point

I don't see how the educational establishment can stop the use of the internet to deliver education. Once it's out there on the web savvy students (or savvy parents) will use it. Mathematics is mathematics, biology is biology, learning Mandarin as a second language is the same in every English speaking country.

We can call this process the "Amazonisation" of education. It could be that a few companies become global providers of education in various subjects just as Amazon has become a global supplier of books.

The only question to be asked, really, is this:

Is the educational software which is being developed for the internet going to be made available to all Australian students?

Or is it going to be limited to a privileged few?

Teachers' unions take note!

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About the Author

Steven Meyer graduated as a physicist from the University of Cape Town and has spent most of his life in banking, insurance and utilities, with two stints into academe.

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