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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