Gillard’s 'best practice' mantra

Gillard is wedded to the identification of “best practice” and sharing it with “underperforming” schools and teachers.

It is clear that her My School website with its so-called “rich information” enabling “comparative effectiveness” will be instrumental in the public identification of “best practice”. Yet the only performance measurements will be the NAPLAN (numeracy and literacy) results of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 classes. These results will be “rich” because they will be contextualised with reference to school socio-economic data, student attendance figures, numbers of teachers and other staff. But even with this contextualisation, this “enrichment”, the NAPLAN results remain snapshots of only a part of what constitutes school effectiveness. They are not even good snapshots of what they purport to test i.e. literacy and numeracy. For ease of marking they are mainly in the form of multiple choice questions, so students are not required to submit the processes that led them to arrive at a particular mathematical solution, nor are they required to explain or justify responses to reading stimuli. Multiple choice is easier and quicker (therefore cheaper) to mark, and lends itself easily to conversion into a NAPLAN score. There is a narrative or story writing component, but no opportunity for drafting or for discussion with a teacher on a finished piece. The task lacks ownership and authenticity.

Surely it is an “overconfidence bias” on the part of the Deputy Prime Minister that leads her to believe that such thin material as NAPLAN results will lead to the identification of “best practice”.

It is also clear that Gillard believes that “underperformance” by teachers and schools is the single most important obstacle to “every child in every school” getting a world class education. She has taken to quoting the work of New Zealander Professor John Hattie whose research identifies teacher quality as “the single greatest in-school influence on student engagement and influence”. What she doesn’t point out is his important caveat that there may be more important out-of-school influences that he chose not to look at in his study: his book isn't about “what cannot be influenced in schools - thus critical discussions about class, poverty, resources in families, health in families, and nutrition are not included - this is NOT because they are unimportant, indeed they may be more important than many of the issues discussed in this book. It is just that I have not included these topics in my orbit.”

Thus Gillard may be said to suffer from what Groopman describes as the “Pygmalion complex”, and she manifests it with trite throwaways like “demography is not destiny … children from the poorest and most difficult backgrounds can learn and achieve and if they fail to do so, we the adults have let them down”. In this case, “we, the adults” are “underperforming teachers”.

Hence her “focussing illusion” of relying on a “single change in the status quo”, namely, teacher quality. Hence her quest for “best practices” to be imposed by “turnaround teams”, by Teach for Australia appointees, by the lure of six-figure salaries for “best” teachers to go to “underperforming schools”. And, given that learning is often a complex process subject to multiple influences with some, as noted by Hattie, likely to be more important than teacher quality, is she not in danger of “confirmation bias”, preferring her own preconceptions to “conflicting evidence”?

To make matters worse, both Gillard and Rudd have clearly opted for mandated paths to “performance” improvement, with financial incentives on the one hand, and talk of replacing “underperforming” principals and senior staff on the other.

It is quite remarkable, in my experience, that teachers continue to have a thirst for professional development despite widespread cynicism - shared with many parents - about the mania of some decision-makers for following fads from overseas. Invariably these fads came dressed in the emperor’s clothes of “best practice”.

Generally teachers are indifferent to or hostile towards mandated professional development in departmental policies: they want quality professional development that helps them improve student learning outcomes, professional development that raises their proficiency as educational practitioners.

Gillard’s “best practice” mantra may seem to offer what teachers want - help to improve their practice - but her method of identifying it, her deficit view that equates poor student learning outcomes with teacher and school “performance”, and her intransigence and commandism all seem to indicate that she does not really understand a term - “best practice” - that is so prominent within her rhetoric.