By Jordan Baker
The alarming PISA results will trigger a frenzy of finger-pointing. Punters will blame schools. Politicians will blame each other. Experts will trot out their theories. Educators will get defensive. And parents will be rightly anxious.
None of this will help turn things around.
Australia's PISA results are sliding. Credit: Jeff de Pasquale
We must not panic. Knee-jerk reactions are disastrous in education; bad policy can have flow-on effects that last generations. There is no one thing that has driven the decline of our results as a nation compared with the rest of the world, nor any single thing that can fix it.
Some, like federal Education Minister Dan Tehan, will call on schools to go back to basics. But basics were not examined by PISA, although they may well be contributing to the poor results. PISA tests only examine how students apply what they've learned during their schooling to different situations.
That's known as higher-order thinking: the capacity to solve problems and think laterally. The data revealed tells us only that Australian students are falling behind those they once considered peers when it comes to those skills, and "the rest of the world is moving away from us", as a senior education official said.
It does not tell us why.
We will hear myriad reasons, as everyone uses the results as an opportunity to push their perspective. Some will say it's due to NAPLAN and the My School website. Others will say it's about funding, or curriculum, or student engagement or a failure to teach critical thinking.
But there is one thing we know for certain that will improve our education system: investment in quality teaching.
Research repeatedly shows it is the most powerful driver of a student's performance. And more needs to be done on this front – Australia needs to both raise the calibre of students studying to become teachers, and to develop its workforce.
That would mean increased scrutiny of university education degrees, by tightening conditions around who is accepted, and what teachers-to-be are taught. It would mean far better workforce planning across the board, but for mathematics in particular.
It would mean lifting the administration and data entry burden from teachers so they can spend more time in the classroom. And it would mean scaling up the almost non-existent master teaching programs, in which the system's best educators pass their skills onto their younger colleagues, and are recognised with higher pay.
Policymakers know this. Actually making it happen will require strong leadership and political will.
But if we're pointing fingers, we should also direct a couple at ourselves.
Schools do not exist in a vacuum. We as parents and community members are partners in teaching our children. Their outcomes will be best when we support their schooling at home, and model lifelong learning, curiosity and open-mindedness in our own lives. Too often, we don't.