Education Revolution - radical change or chucking a 360?

The constant stream of assignments makes it inevitable that the whole system is discriminatory against students from lower socio economic backgrounds and, furthermore, is discriminatory against males. Even where there are exams the discrimination again the poor and male continues across Australia. The questions are verbalised to the point that one submission to a parliamentary Inquiry, “Boys: getting it right” (2002) stated: “the level of nomenclature and sophisticated verbal reasoning skills that are required - to even understand what the problem is - is on average four times greater than what is required in Australian history and English literature.”

It is a disgrace that the Boards and Education theorists have totally ignored a finding of the highest democratic body in the land which was “assessment procedures must, as a first requirement, provide information about students’ knowledge, skills and achievement on the subject, and not be a de facto examination of students’ English comprehension and expression.”

When the operatic Mussolini was in power in Italy his Minister of Education - a dedicated book burner - decided to bring in assessment methods other than exams. He wanted the sort of assessments that we have nowadays. The Communist Deputy Gramski spoke against the idea in Parliament arguing that a move away from exams would adversely affect the poor and the peasants. All absolutely obvious of course - except to the Education Establishment.

For some time now there have been moves by Commonwealth governments and to some extent State Education Departments to list what are called “essential learnings”. Translated into humanoid that phrase means the things that must be taught to all students. These “learnings” are by subject or by grouping - e.g. SOSE. By definition these “learnings” are aimed at, written for, the weaker students. The “learnings” are accompanied by an assessment system. In the case of the recently released version of “learnings” in Queensland (QCAR), the assessment system is, inevitably, meaningless.

As mentioned earlier Australian students do appallingly badly in terms of the percentage that achieve the TIMSS level “Advanced”. Singaporean students are more than six times as likely to reach that standard. Listing “essential learnings”, the rock bottom minima, will do nothing to improve the shockingly feeble performance in mathematics demonstrated by the upper half of Australian students. For them the problem is that the subject syllabi themselves are feeble and non-challenging, especially for Years 8,9 and 10.

Assuming that Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard want to improve our performance in STEM then they have no choice but to face the reality that the basic STEM subject, maths, is a sequential subject. It is foolish and very cruel to teach the same material to all students when it is a fact that at, say, the Year 8 level those students will have maths attainments varying from seven-year-olds to 15-year-olds, and whose Piagetian development levels vary from the lowest level to the highest. And no amount of “eduprattle” about “differential teaching” is going to help.

In Queensland the problems caused by the weak, poorly defined syllabi and their essentially non existent assessment systems are compounded by the wild variations in the time allocated for both maths and science in lower secondary years. Research that I did showed, without argument, that time allocations for those subjects varied between schools in a ratio of 2:1 for both subjects and for both school “types” - government and non-government. That is a ridiculous state of affairs.

To compound the problem even further schools these days just love mixed ability classes. Some schools do operate a form of “streaming”, a crude and inflexible system, which assumes that a student is equally talented in all subjects, an assumption that is frequently false. It is common for a student to have differing abilities in maths than English. Another problem inherent in “streaming” is that when a student shows that she or he is now in an unsuitable group it is hard to make the necessary adjustment.

A far better structure is “setting”. With that structure all the maths (and English perhaps) classes for a particular year are timetabled at the same times. That system is flexible - a student can be moved easily without causing problems for other subject area. It recognises that a student often has differing abilities at different subjects. “Setting” used to be common. Nowadays it is regarded as too hard to timetable - which raises the question “if school administrators could do it years ago why can’t they now?”

Unless and until all subject syllabi at all levels are such that the knowledge, skills and concepts to be handled are clearly defined, and the assessment systems structured so that they produce valid and reliable student results, then all else is in vain. Syllabi must be written in English and assessment systems must be such that the students (and parents) know the rules of the game they are playing. That is surely not too much to ask, after all nobody would expect somebody to play League without knowing how many points for a try or a penalty goal or a field goal.

With decent subject syllabi and sensible internal school organisation we would be providing the children with structures that give them a chance to excel. Without those changes - which would cost nothing - all other actions are doomed to failure.

As with all revolutions there would be losers.