How can educational experiences in the USA inform policy decisions in Australia? In the age of the Internet, it's easy to read US papers, journals and information clearing houses, and just as tempting to make one-to-one mappings between the results of US policy experiments to their possible effects in Australia. But often the different cultural assumptions and institutional features in our two countries defeat such comparison, like grafting the skin of an orange onto an apple.
When Australians look across the Pacific towards the USA, we first have to see over the horizon of our own preconceptions. This can be a difficult and depersonalising process, as we squint to see through a fog of presumption about what constitutes a valid system of education.
As an Australian expatriate in the USA, this process is much easier and quicker for me than it would be from afar. Immersing myself in the daily minutiae of American life, I have become aware that educational features and ideas that seem normal and natural in Australia become objects of curiosity, or simply irrelevant here - and vice versa.
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This is because when we first examine a foreign education system, the surface features may look so unfamiliar, so at odds with what we "know" works, that we might scratch our heads and wonder how they got it so wrong. But these initial reactions may derive more from our own assumptions than they do from any clear-sighted understanding of why the system presents as it does. Our analysis breaks up and sinks when it crashes into the cultural iceberg beneath the surface.
So this article is a way of “clearing the fog” as I embark on a journey to understand what policy factors are at play in the USA, and how they might differ in magnitude or effect back home in Australia.
The ultimate aim of this series is to discover, through cross-cultural comparison, what might be the essential features of viable education policies in Australia - and what features may be negotiable, reviewable or even unnecessary.
Following are just three general features that will help to frame the discussion of more specific initiatives in future articles. The first relates to the more nuanced nature of the public debate in the US, the second concerns the plurality and diversity of systems here, and the final one relates to the relatively low-key role played by large-scale bureaucracies or government programs.
Nuance
Despite what many Australians unfairly characterise as the American propensity for bombast and a lack of subtlety, the language of public debate here seems to contain far fewer hyperbolic or superlative claims when compared with the thundering denunciations and prophecies of doom we so often hear in Australia.
When one reads below the headlines, one finds that single issues are rarely presented as simply dichotomous, and less often are opponents characterised as being wrong-headed or motivated by ill intention. By contrast, so much of Australia's recent education debates seek to offer us all-or-nothing choices (public v private, merit-pay v seniority, phonics v whole-word), and an insistence that opposing ideas (insert caricatured villain here) will lead to rack and ruin.
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The origins of this foment may lie in the vast differences in the scale and diversity of education in each country, viz my next point:
Diversity
In the USA, at least 50 flowers boom (one for each state), and many more in the different systems and approaches available nationwide. The population size and historical differences in schooling mean that there is room for everybody. From this arises a sense of reassurance that any policy initiative, no matter whether it's mainstream, innovative, radical, reactionary or just plain kooky, can find a home somewhere.
The counter-intuitive effect of all this messy diversity is that it takes a considerable amount of heat out of the debates, and lets in more light. Everybody knows they can get a hearing, and a chance to run with their ideas in some form, somewhere.
By contrast, Australia's small population and relatively small number of centralised administrations mean there is far less policy room for different approaches or ideas to run in parallel. New South Wales for example runs one of the world's largest education bureaucracies, managing more schools than does any single system in America. And the NSW HSC is perhaps the largest examination of its kind anywhere in the world.
This means that in Australia, an ascendant policy idea can affect a far larger proportion of schools and students than can a single plan in America. In relative terms, the stakes are much higher here for any given iteration of policy or curriculum, and this seems to drive a more combative, winner-takes-all approach to the debates.
Self-sufficiency
The other key characteristic that moulds our thinking about education is the differing level of involvement of government(s) in our school systems. Most of us have ideological preconceptions about the virtues or vices of big or small government. In embarking on this next comparison, I invite the reader to consider government involvement from a pragmatic rather than ideological standpoint. Let's look at what works in our two countries:
Many Australians look with varying degrees of horror at the lack of US government safety nets in education, health and social security. Part of what fuels this horror is the assumption that, if the government won't help, nobody will, and people just "fall through the cracks". This may be so in Australia, but in America, the safety nets are of a different character from that with which we are familiar, and so we tend to overlook them.
For while the instinct of many Australians is to look first to government for solutions, for most Americans, government is the last place they would think of looking. The American myth (and I use that term in its broader, explanatory sense) of self-sufficiency drives a more localised and community-oriented approach to common problems than that which exists in Australia. Safety nets are much more likely to be sought and provided at the level of the district, neighbourhood or even street-by-street. Thus the safety nets that exist here tend be micro-financed and much less visible to the statisticians' gaze than the publicly accounted mass initiatives we see in Australia.
There are very few top-down approaches in the USA because the top is often too politically or fiscally weak to impose them, and because in any case the grass roots often resist what they deem to be “government interference”, thank you very much.
This is in stark contrast to Australia's ongoing preference for commissions, inquiries and summits: because they are more likely to produce concrete action (believe it or not!) than are sporadic grassroots attempts to mobilise a sparser and more apathetic population.
Again, this situation derives in part from the differing scales of our two countries. With only 21 million people, it is feasible in Australia - just - to run a centralised bureaucracy that delivers a great deal of social services. But across 300 million US citizens, 50 state jurisdictions and hundreds of counties, well, it's little wonder that people don't seek safety nets from a federal source. Why would anyone spend years, even decades, lobbying to set up a government initiative when there are often willing locals able to lend a hand this week, or philanthropists able to get an endowment running in a matter of months?
We came forth, and once more saw the stars
What conclusions can be drawn from these initial impressions? One is that there seems little hope of cooling the public debate in Australia so long as we seek silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all solutions. Just because we can impose policy at the national level, or standardise schools from Cairns to Fremantle, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should. For if we load up a single initiative at the expense of all others, we are guaranteeing some degree of marginalisation or exclusion, and those left out will find avenues, often very public ones, to vent their frustration and to undermine the structures that shut them out.
Another more controversial conclusion is that, despite the success in the USA of district-level school programs, philanthropy and the self-sufficiency ethos, it is likely that the Australia's relatively sparse population will always require a higher level of government support than is the case in the USA.
While some in Australia are attracted to building their own school systems or home-schooling, the reality is that Australia simply doesn't have the highly developed networks of superabundant philanthropy, volunteerism and population that can support initiatives on the scale that they require to be truly independent. Without scads of government money, most Australian independent schools would be insolvent.
I don't believe these differences are a matter of ideology, but rather one of pragmatism on the part of level-headed people just trying to give their kids a good education. In America, people turn to government last because there it is the least effective way to get their needs met. By contrast in Australia government is often the agency best able to deliver the services people require, not least because there are such slim pickings when one throws oneself on the tender mercies of charity or the private sector.
If we can first recognise that a strong public education system in Australia is more a matter of necessity than ideology, then we are well on the way to removing much of the heat from the public debates, and getting down to the important work of finding educational policies that can accommodate all Australians.