Fixing education

Over the weekend, Mrs Thornton, herself a popular and effective university teacher, made the obvious point that quality teaching requires quality teachers.

It is not just a matter of money. People of Henry's age, (like most of Henry's readers), received a better education 40 or 50 years ago when Australia, and the world, was far poorer than it is now.

Nor is it just a matter of class sizes. The Asian nations like Singapore and China have larger class sizes than we do, and higher educational achievements. And students of Chinese heritage here do far better on average than students of traditional modern Australian heritage. I venture the hypothesis that children of recent migrants generally also do better on average. All these facts point to cultural factors that are most likely negativelyrelated to the wealth of the relevant parents.

Mrs T has a nice theory to explain the decline in teaching standards that we older people routinely bewail.

Forty or fifty years ago, women had many fewer opportunities in the marts of trade, the professions or the major corporations. Teaching and nursing were the main careers open to most women, and therefore there was a far larger amount of high talent in these professions.

Ergo, teaching (and I suspect nursing) standards were higher then, and as a result children were better educated, especially in primary schools where women teachers were in a strong majority.

I am not sure how the role of women plays out in university education now and then. As a student at Melbourne University I found several formidable women teachers, but only one who had reached the dizzy heights of an Associate-Professorship. Certainly teaching standards generally were far more rigorous than I observe applied to my children's education, but then mass tertiary education has undoubtedly lowered standards of average students as well as their teachers.

The universities I know a fair bit about have women assuming the main burden of teaching, while the blokes mostly pursue 'research', writing papers that in many cases would be better left unwritten for journals that serve mostly to provide points in support of applications for promotion.

Teaching rather than research is a choice often made by women who have children to bring up and hence are forced to compromise far more than blokes in balancing the needs of paid and unpaid work.

Henry knows one of the Group of Eight Research Universities in which a new dean tried to make redundant the five women in their fifties who earnt most of the faculty's large profit from teaching mass classes full of overseas, full fee paying students.

The reason for this master-stroke of incompetence was the dean's negative view of their failure to produce 'research'. This was despite the fact that two of the five had explicit contracts to do only teaching, and the other three had assumed far greater teaching loads than others (with full faculty approval) by virtue of their decision not to pursue research.

The net result was that five very effective teachers are either retired, having accepted redundancy packages, or are teaching far less, having decided to shove it up the dean by reigniting their research careers.

Now the mass-income-earning classes are taught by Ph.D. students on sessional contracts, taught far less well it is almost unnecessary to report.

There is some justice in all this. The relevant dean was demoted and is again a mere professor.

The new dean, however, is headed for a major industrial relations fiasco by refusing to allow one of his (female) professors to travel 'Premium Economy' to receive a prestigious award. This is notwithstanding her doctor's certificate asserting that her medical condition should not be subjected to an economy seat on a plane to Europe.

The said dean is a bloke (of course) and from a country that has been thoroughly thatcherised, so I suppose we should be sympathetic. But you'd reckon he'd be a bit smarter than he seems to be.

How to improve the quality of teaching remains unclear. We cannot turn back the clock. Raising wages of teachers relative to those of the average worker might make some minor difference. Chanelling more children into jobs of a lesser academic nature, eg as truck drivers or tradespersons, where chronic shortages exist, would make sense, and would allow at least some universities to again become genuine centres of excellence, teaching students of higher average ability.

Restructuring universities so that every one of the top universities has at least one faculty in which it has a genuine shot at a top ten or top twenty global position is surely not beyond Australia. This would create a series of genuinely excellent faculties, with positive rub-off effects on other faculties.

Here is one radical idea. Henry observes many of his fellow old persons have a lot to offer, would be willing to help and were trained in days when standards were higher. Why not allow them to teach, especially in universities, after intensive short courses in modern teaching methods. This would free younger men and especially women to work harder at 'research'. A win-win, even if most of the additional research was of little interest or relevance.

Henry also adduces other evidence on this matter. Two ANU economists, Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan, concluded in 2006: 'Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find that the aptitude of new teachers has fallen considerably. Between 1983 and 2003, the average percentile rank of those entering teacher education fell from 74 to 61, while the average rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. ...

'We believe that both the fall in average teacher pay, and the rise in pay differentials in non-teaching occupations are responsible for the decline in the academic aptitude of new teachers over the past two decades'.

Here is a link to their full paper.

Henry respectfully concludes that the far wider role of women in the economy generally is also a major factor, especially over the longer period.