There's no doubt that education standards are falling - we need to act

Ravitch argues: “In the current education system, with public schools committed to multiculturalism, bilingualism, and other forms of particularism, it is difficult to argue that parents should not be able to choose schools that meet their cultural needs”.

So much for the Australian Education Union’s argument that the reason there has been a surge in non-government school enrolments is because such schools, when compared to government schools, supposedly are better resourced.

Unease and dissatisfaction with what is happening in Australian schools is not restricted to parents.

As evidenced by the research carried out in writing Why Our Schools Are Failing, our system has a long way to go before we can be considered among the best in the world or in line with what research tells us is the best way to teach.

Since the Keating government’s national curriculum was developed in the early 1990s, all Australian state and territory education departments have adopted variations of what is termed an outcomes-based approach to education.

Significant is that those countries that perform best in international tests, such as the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Singapore and South Korea, forsake outcomes-based education in favour of a syllabus approach.

Unlike Australia, curriculum in such countries is discipline-based, measurable, incorporates high-stakes testing, relates to specific year levels and enforces system accountability with specific rewards and sanctions (under-performing schools are identified and successful teachers are rewarded).

Bruce Wilson, head of Australia’s Curriculum Corporation and the person partly responsible for Australia’s adoption of outcomes-based education, now argues that such an approach represents “an unsatisfactory political and intellectual compromise”.

In a speech delivered at the 2002 national conference, Wilson also argues: “let’s get beyond outcomes fetishism. The present form of outcomes has probably outlived its usefulness. Indeed, it is difficult to find a jurisdiction outside Australasia which has persevered with the peculiar approach to outcomes which we have adopted”.

The flaws in Australia’s outcomes-based approach to curriculum are manifold. As a result of adopting such fads as whole language, where students are taught to "look and guess" and to work out the meaning of words from their context, generations of students, especially boys, are placed at risk.

As a result of fuzzy maths, where primary students are allowed to use calculators and where basic algorithms like long division are no longer taught, many students are unable to do mental arithmetic or to recite their times tables. The very skills most needed if students are to master higher-order thinking.

Teaching history has also suffered. As a result of the culture wars, not only is the focus on teaching politically correct values and beliefs, especially in areas like multiculturalism, the environment, feminism and the class war, but many students leave school with a fragmented and superficial knowledge of the past.