A few ideas on how to arrest our freefalling education system

We need to change our attitudes

Children of migrants for whom English is a second language actually perform better in the tests on average than children born here. This might seem explicable in maths and science where the language is the most international, but it isn't intuitive when it comes to English.

The multi-factors here comprise how second language teaching uses phonics/explicit teaching methods; and the family and cultural factors that drive a family to leave one country and come to another to advance themselves.

Asian cultures prize learning, as witnessed by the top performers in PISA all being Asian-Singapore, Macau, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea-and they take that part of their culture with them when they migrate.

Students attend a class at Dajia Elementary School in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 29, 2020. (Sam Yeh /AFP via Getty Images)

Work out school governance issues

A last factor is surely the ownership and control of schools.

American Thomas Sowell has demonstrated the extraordinary results that charter schools have achieved in the United States elevating the results of poor black students to being some of the best in the country.

In Australia, it is the private schools that do best in PISA. Some of this is no doubt due to private schools being drawn from the higher SES cohort that outperforms wherever they are.

However, there are a lot of lower SES students in the cheaper fee-paying private schools.

I went to such a school, and my recollection is that of the six students who received the highest ranking in our last year only one came from a privileged family, one was a migrant, and the other four from very modest backgrounds.

Smartphones are another issue

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff trace the rise in social contagions, like self-harm and gender confusion, to the arrival of the smartphone around 2009.

It's a plausible thesis, although PISA decline started well before the smartphone, and has eased off lately, even though the phones are now ubiquitous.