PISA results: Public schools trailing independents and other countries
Shocking new figures have revealed public school students are not just trailing Catholic and independent school counterparts but also students in former eastern bloc countries.
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Public schools are failing their students and are being outperformed by former Eastern Bloc countries like Lithuania and Slovenia.
The PISA results reveal students in the Australian public system were being beaten by counterparts in countries such as Slovenia in reading, Lithuania in maths and Czech Republic in science — while also trailing behind pupils in Catholic and independent schools here.
Public school kids are almost a year behind Catholic school counterparts in reading and one and a half years behind children at independent schools.
For maths, public schools are three quarters of a school year behind the Catholic school pupils and one and a half school years behind independent schools.
It was a similar story with science, with Catholic pupils almost one year ahead of those at public schools and independent schools a full year and a half.
Centre for Independent Studies researcher Glen Fahey said government schools neglected their duty to some students.
“They have put some schools and some students in the too hard basket and as a result of that, it should come as no surprise that government schools are over-represented when it comes to poor performance,” he said.
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He said public schools were controlled by teacher unions who fought transparency about performance at every turn as well as public sector bureaucracy that was slow to change.
“Government schools are captured by bureaucracy and they suffer under the thumb of unions to a greater extent than the non government schools, that is a hard thing to overcome,” he said.
“We need to have a system that doesn’t let government schools off the hook for underperformance, because zoning arrangements do that.”
He said as it stood there was no free market for students to switch schools because they were confined by strict zoning rules that told them where they could be educated.
Condell Park Christian School principal Donald Leys said setting high standards which were supported by the parent community was vital to academic success.
“We have a collaborative supportive team around the teachers and that is the parents,” he said.
“I know the success of independency here is that we have parents who selected this school because of the virtues they see within the school — character-building, personal discipline and taking ownership of their actions.”
He also said qualified maths and science teachers as well as smaller class sizes meant they could identify a student who was struggling and cater lessons to lift them.