Andrew Bolt: Prime Minister’s schools plan is already a failure
WE know throwing money at schools won’t lift standards but that didn’t stop the PM from repeating the mistakes of the Gillard government this week, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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MALCOLM Turnbull this week repeated Labor’s disastrous mistake with our schools: first promise billions and only later figure out how to spend it. No wonder our school standards are now officially worse than Kazakhstan’s — and our debt out of control.
MALCOLM TURNBULL ANNOUNCES SCHOOLS FUNDING BOOST
In a sane country you’d actually first work out how to lift your weak school standards and only then count what that would cost.
But on Tuesday the Prime Minister did the exact opposite, just as the Gillard Labor government did five years ago with its infamous Gonski report.
First he announced he’d spend lots more — $13 billion a year more by 2027: “The Quality Schools initiative we’re unveiling today will increase the Commonwealth Government’s recurrent funding for schools by 75 per cent over the decade.”
Then Turnbull revealed he hadn’t yet figured out how this money would make students smarter.
He announced instead yet another review by one of his mates, businessman David Gonski: “David will provide the high-level advice to the government on how the extra government funding announced today should be used by Australian schools to improve their performance.”
Pardon? Isn’t this putting the cart before the horse?
Worse, Turnbull actually conceded in his speech that simply spending billions like this had failed already. We’ve had Labor and Liberal governments raise spending per student by nearly 40 per cent over a decade, yet as Turnbull admitted, “the performance of Australian students in reading, science and maths in particular has been falling”.
True. The Program for International Student Assessment last year showed our 15-year-olds had worse standards of reading and numeracy than students a decade ago. The International Mathematics and Science Study even showed our students in years four and eight had been overtaken by students in Kazakhstan, Slovenia and Hungary.
Clearly Kazakhstan and Slovenia aren’t outspending us on schools and they don’t need to, either.
As a Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research study concluded in 2013: “Research in economics and education suggests the effect of additional resources on standardised test scores is, at best, small.”
It’s not money that’s holding us back, yet here’s a Liberal government now claiming more money will save us. What a sellout. For years the Liberals have argued the opposite. They’ve actually fought Labor’s far crazier plan to spend an extra $40 billion over the next decade — a recklessly unfunded promise that the Liberals correctly said had no clear connection to raising academic standards.
So how did this debate degenerate into a macho battle of billions, with the prize going to the fool promising the biggest chunk of money that we don’t actually have? Some blame goes to Gonski, now being brought back for another go at the funding debate he fumbled five years ago.
Back then, Gonski wrote a massive report for the Gillard government recommending schools get another $5 billion a year without anywhere proving this would make students smarter. Nowhere did Gonski discuss, for instance, ending our fetish for smaller class sizes, a pro-union con which led us to hire many more teachers — inevitably including many of lower ability — simply to bulk up the numbers.
Consider: would you rather have your child in a class of 25 led by a gifted teacher, or in a class of 17 taught by someone who barely passed their own exams?
Nowhere in his report did Gonski discuss setting a higher cut-off for admission to teaching courses, or giving principals more power to hire and fire.
Nowhere did he examine curriculum reform or better methods of instruction.
He certainly didn’t suggest the government do more to encourage schools that get best results — the independent and Catholic ones that have parents investing more in their children’s education, both financially and emotionally.
No, he preached instead the Left gospel that we have to eliminate “differences in wealth, income, power and possessions” in school funding, as if diverting money from private schools would make state schools better.
The blindness would break your heart — and the nation’s piggy bank.
Gonski even listed the countries with students beating us in maths: China (Shanghai and Macao), Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Finland, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Japan and Canada and Holland.
But is China really spending more than us on schools? In fact, Gonski’s report said even Canada and Japan spent less per head of GDP on education than we do.
It’s not the money, stupid.
The challenge remains: find the best way to lift standards and only then tell us the cost.
It might be nothing, or it might be billions. But until we know what we’re buying, why hand out one extra dollar?
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