Nearly Half Of School Students Below Average!
Now, I’m going to divide you into two groups here:
- You read the headline and were appalled.
- You read the headline and immediately realised that in any large group it’s likely that half will be below average.*
And, of course, it’s not that those of you in the first group lack basic numeracy or statistical skills; it’s that you probably didn’t think before reacting.
This week I read a few articles about our failing education system. These were written in response to the latest PISA results. Actually to be fair, I suspect that many of them were written before the PISA results came out because the conclusions overlooked the fact that Australian 15yo students ranked ninth in the world in reading and science, but a shocking tenth in maths.
In reading the conclusions about our education system I couldn’t help remember the “Herald-Sun” article after NAPLAN results which talked about how the lockdowns had led to devastating results for Victorian students. The only problem was that in nearly every table Victorian students were first or second but in true Murdoch media fashion never let the facts get in the way of a good attack on whatever the latest thing you want to get people all agitated about.
Now let’s be clear here: Education is a complicated business with a large number of KPIs, very few of which are generally accepted by everyone. Schools will be judged on NAPLAN, ATAR, and a whole range of tests which most people know nothing about such as PISA, but then they’ll also be criticised because kids are leaving schools without the necessary skills to make their prospective employer happy. And what about these life-skills that people should be taught at school? Not to mention manners… I mean, those kids on the train last night… Then you’ll have some politician complaining that schools aren’t teaching kids values and every school will get posters of Simpson and his donkey and a list of Australian values, before a couple of years later, politicians complaining because schools are indoctrinating students and the classroom should be values free and politics should be left out of the classroom which is a problem if the subject is Legal Studies or Politics…
Yes, Sally got an ATAR of 99.4 and got into Law but she started using drugs and is now in rehab and Freddy got an ATAR of 99.2 and got into medicine but he dropped out because he couldn’t handle the pressure but they’re still a great success story in terms of the school because no school is judged on what their students do five years down the track, unless it’s one of those exceptional things that probably has more to do with the student themself than anything the school did.
The concerning thing, however, was the great divide between those with wealthier backgrounds outperforming those “less-privileged” families…
It’s a great euphemism, isn’t it? “Less-privileged”… It sort of implies that you are privileged but not quite as privileged as those who don’t have to worry about things like money, food and shelter…
Anyway, this was the cue for “The Australian Financial Review” to editorialise about how tossing money at education had failed and Gonski reforms hadn’t worked and teachers should be taught how to manage classes and go back to all the things the research shows work and it’s all really simple. I could point out that the Gonski proposal to fund all schools to a minimum standard was never fully implemented but, again, let’s not let facts get in the way of the argument we want to make. I could also point out that, generally speaking, most of the things that simplistic editorials argue schools should be doing is what schools are doing. I could also point out that – like all science – when people talk about doing what “the research tells us works”, there’s a lot of research and not all of it agrees with each other but tell me again that teachers are quite determined to ignore what works because they all like being criticised for poor results…
It’s always interesting that any so-called failures in education lead to calls for less funding, but, if the security forces failed to predict a terrorist attack, there’d be calls for more funding. Similarly, if hospitals had patients left on trolleys or not being treated in a timely manner, we’d expect more funding. More road accidents doesn’t lead us suggest that we spend too much on repairing roads and eliminating black spots. Only in education does an “unsatisfactory” performance lead to a call for cuts.
It also interesting that the same politicians who argue that money isn’t important when it comes to education, are outraged if it’s suggested that the private school they went to might be able to do without the third practice room for their orchestra.
So in a similar spirit, I offer this editorial to corporate Australia:
“While some companies have made large profits, some companies have been less-privileged. To those companies I say that the time has come to abandon what you’re doing and to go back to what research says is best for companies which is to do thing that makes you profits and stop all this following the latest fad and asking for tax concessions because just throwing money at the problem won’t work!”
*This is not necessarily always true. Sometimes there can be outliers so large that they distort the figures so that average is meaningless and the median is a much more reliable number. For example, if Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and I were all on a plane, my presence would bring down the average wealth to the point that everyone but me would be above average wealth for the duration of the journey. If Elon Musk were to step out of the plane mid-flight, it would bring down the average wealth on the plane but improve the state of the world generally.
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19 comments
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Michael Taylor
Return to home pageHow people might have wrong observations from the common usages of “average”, for any average anytime indicates half above and half below. How we struggled at school to get the typical “fifty percent” or above, though next time, your friends might get a few more or less than that and accordingly worry or smile over nothing much. But “failure” had to be avoided. Australian students, teachers, programs, courses, all vary but little over time and more money well applied might be very useful, though nothing is ever guaranteed.
A recent survey revealed that 90% of drivers believed that they had above average driving skills. Well, I know that I do so It’s comforting to know that I’m in the majority (unlike the referendum).
It’s the reason I chucked in psychology at uni: got sick of learning that I wasn’t average and that that was a sort of bad thing.
If you think about it, there can only be one true average person in the world at the one time (and who that person is changes every second or so). I’m just glad it’s not me.
ahhh averages……………..the most unsophisticated and meaningless statistic. Show me what the standard deviation is, then we can talk.
Yes, the education experiment has failed. BUT, Its not the one you think it is.
Yes governments have thrown money at private education to build the sports pavilions while the rich schools still charge enough to make very well off people cringe with anxiety. So if we are streaming more people into private schools and the standards are falling……..it follows that private education is the problem. Sure, throwing more money at education can be seen as a failure in this context.
Kind of also coincides with education being streamlined to complement employment prospects. Yet at the cutting edge, where policies are made, a hidden agenda has lorded over us for 100yrs or more. Education was never about creating a class of intelligent beings, but food for the pig factory. Oh my how my generation has been conned.
Oh dear PP ….. the Mathematician in me must be pedantic and note that ”average” DOES NOT mean ”half above and half below”. Correctly THAT statistic is called the ”median”. Half the sample size above & half below the middle score.
But given your personal quest for excellence in all things vaguely academic, I offer you the ”Accelerated Learning” system which USQ mathematics applied in the 90s with a ”pass mark” of 98% in their nine (?) module course. No forward progress until the students passed the unit at the appropriate standard.
However, do NOT wait for this wonderful system to be rolled out in your local school anytime soon because it is a 20th century system based on the psychology of learning, and so beyond the capability of the NSWE DoE Head Office desk jockeys to contemplate, or even understand, let alone apply in teacher training.
But take heart, the shortage of classroom teachers in NSW will be overcome by getting Principals & Deputies to spend more time teaching so that they can become more overworked in their ”free time” between final bell and morning bell.
Funny that ….. I made the same suggestion about 35 years ago and was quietly told ”Why do you think we escaped the classroom?”
The obvious answer was, ”To get away from kids”.
Cocky, you and I know that, so I referred to what “people” thought and said, pejoratively or in a poor literary way, as did the newspaper headlines suggest. And, I’d hate to back in that classroom…(too old and cranky) so, let us enjoy our above average (undoubtedlyso) life. “Median” is useful, beyond its typical use or non-use. We recall that one can drown very nastily in a river with an “average” depth of below one metre…
NEC, while I agree with your point about medians and averages, the point I was making is that in a population like all school students it becomes next to impossible to get a significant number above average because in doing so, you’ll have raised the average. And, of course, getting more than half above the median is – by definition – impossible.
This is why I included the footnote about Elon Musk and company.
@ PP & Rossleigh: You give up too easily when there are all sorts of statistical games we can play with a set of numbers (data).
We jumped the 50% barrier by standardising scores then redistributing them according to a standard mean and fixed standard deviation (take note andyfiftysix). Then basically no kids ”standardised score” fell below 50 because the ”average score” was fixed at 65 with an SD of 12,so 3 SDs down from 65 (to a theoretical 29) was essentially impossible in practice.
The incorrigible Kathy Lette wrote in the SMH this week that she had a similar experience at a London cocktail party, being the only person attending who did not own a castle.
Yeah, exceptional article, and all the comments are far from piddling, and perhaps a tad more than fair to middling.
However, the big question remains; why isn’t the guvmint throwing money at this blog?
You’re all focusing on the wrong thing here., We need to get back to that delightful image of Elongated Muskrat stepping out of a plane at cruising altitude.
The same thing happened to the term “satisfactory” that was once seen on report cards. What could be wrong with work and results that are satisfactory? Sadly, for many it is not good enough. Yet, if a student produces satisfactory work consistently they really deserve to be recognised as excellent. The preferred word now is “sound” as in not broken or rotten?
As for Elon, I suspect that were I to ever be on a plane with him, I could convince him to step outside on the grounds that he knows he’s special and he’ll float gently to the ground and just imagine the publicity…
Also, has anyone else noticed that his name is an anagram of Lone Skum?
Mind you, I do realise that him opening the door would probably be the end of me but there are some moments when thinking of yourself is not the right thing…
Ross, Lone Skum, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I think of all the laughs I have had today that is the best.
NEC Spotted that too 🙂
However, you make a good point when we hear calls for better maths, basic stats, communication etc. skills amongst kids, but me thinks middle aged and older post school are the ones who need open access to soft skill learning resources*; media & politics too on science, research process and statistics, appalling illiteracy amongst our information and political ‘gatekeepers’.
*Always like to ask house price boasters and boosters how they calculate price based on real values; blank looks in return…..
NEC, i left all that score modifications behind me a long long time ago. My only claim to fame was getting a score of 20 for an IQ test. I think they dropped it after that…lol. Still be good to know if the bulk of students are moving forward or falling behind. Average can be so misleading.
if you use the ave atar score over 90% are, thanks to the lying rodent, below ave.
99% of people (100% of the wise ones) believe that there is no such thing as average. Moreover, 99% of people don’t believe in numbers. Even Socrates said they are utterly unreliable and inaccurate!
80% of people don’t understand basic percentages but the other half are okay with them!!
50% of the people in my street are not the other 50%.