Labor should go back to school to kickstart reform agenda
On the left, The Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor Ross Gittins reckons Treasurer Jim Chalmers should introduce a carbon tax. Traditional economists would like to see a more modern personal tax system, increased GST and labour market reform.
The media consensus is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is more concerned with political longevity and Chalmers, like Paul Keating before him, will have to learn to live under another “old jelly back” – former Labor finance minister Peter Walsh’s name for then prime minister Bob Hawke.
It was not really fair given Hawke presided over a mountain of reform, from the floating of the dollar to the deregulation of the labour market and opening up of banking to foreign competitors. In contrast, Chalmers’ to-do list of 10 reforms from his Canberra productivity roundtable last month looks little more than commonsense housekeeping.
While Chalmers’ hand-picked Productivity Commission chief Danielle Wood did speak about potential productivity gains from use of artificial intelligence by teachers in lesson planning, not much noise was made about the crucial productivity challenge long-falling education results present for the nation’s future.
Centre for Independent Studies education researcher Trisha Jha got it right in The Australian Financial Review on July 18: “With apologies to Paul Krugman, education outcomes aren’t everything – but in the long run they are almost everything.”
Despite a mammoth ratcheting-up of federal and state spending on school education under two rounds of Gonski reforms, Australia’s results in international educational comparison testing and in our own NAPLAN tests are either falling or flatlining.
Jha continued: “Award-winning education economist Eric Hanushek argued in 2023 that the downward trend in Australia’s performance in international testing and high proportions of students unable to meet basic skills would have an impact equivalent to a 6 per cent decline in lifetime earnings, compared with Australians two decades ago.”
Daily Telegraph education commentator Kevin Donnelly, discussing the roundtable, last Tuesday wrote: “Changing the tax system, addressing intergenerational inequality, reforming the national construction code and reducing red tape and bureaucratic regulation achieves little in comparison with ensuring citizens are literate, numerate, highly educated and intelligent.”
Donnelly quoted Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann from The Knowledge Capital of Nations: “Knowledge is the foundation of economic prosperity. Nations that ignore the fact suffer, while those that recognise it prosper.”
Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan thrive, the book says, because they recognise “the cognitive skills of the population are essential to long-term prosperity”.
Hanushek has for more than three decades argued in the US context that increased spending on schools and reducing class sizes has done zero to improve education outcomes. He argues the US must focus on teacher and curriculum quality and a national commitment to education.
Here we have fallen for the same trap of thinking higher spending and smaller class sizes will lift standards. We have let people with low tertiary entrance scores enter teaching degrees.
Our schools are also burdened with a national curriculum that includes three cross-curriculum priorities first flagged in the Melbourne Declaration in 2008 when Julia Gillard was Labor education minister under Kevin Rudd, and finally adopted in 2012 under Gillard as PM.
These are “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture”, “Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia”, and “Sustainability”.
To be fair, Gillard also introduced NAPLAN, the first serious attempt to measure education outcomes. Nor was Gillard the only PM to have strong opinions on the curriculum.
Short-lived Coalition PM Malcolm Turnbull argued all Australian school students should learn computer coding – something that soon will be done by AI.
Too few politicians have publicly advocated for a strong focus on reading, writing and arithmetic, even though such a focus defines the curriculums of countries performing best in international testing.
Things are worse in Democrat states in the US where students are being deliberately held back in an effort to make sure children from disadvantaged backgrounds do not fall behind.
The Free Press on August 31 published The War on Knowledge, by Dan Lerman, who describes expensive private schools where teachers do not care about spelling because it could get in the way of creativity.
As usual, it’s worst on the west coast.
“The Seattle Public School System embraced a ‘Math Ethnic Studies Framework’ starting in 2019,” Lerman writes.
Teachers were asked to reflect on how to “change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking’’.
Tracy Castro-Gill, creator of this maths framework, wrote that “decolonial teacher education must actively confront coloniality and create alternative frameworks”. Lerner says Castro-Gill “casts education itself as a colonial project to be dismantled – a fundamental departure from what the word (education) means”.
California in 2021 unveiled a draft new maths approach, “calling for districts to abandon tracking practices and delaying Algebra 1 until 9th grade in the name of equity”.
Several Democrat districts have explored new grading methods, called “grading for equity”, that eliminate penalties for missing work and cheating, and remove assessment of homework, attendance and class behaviour.
Any further downgrading of school rigour in Australia would be particularly worrying given the debasement of much of our higher education sector.
Many university students today experience little face-to-face education and do most of their lessons online. Add perverse incentives for universities to earn income by attracting foreign full-fee paying students who are seldom failed and tertiary education looks like a recipe for destroying productivity and prosperity.
This column, in a July 27 preview to the productivity roundtable, pointed out the economic home truths: productivity that used to rise at an average annual 2 per cent in the Hawke, Keating and Howard years has been rising at 1 per cent since Rudd’s 2007 election win and only 0.7 per cent this year.
Living standards here rose only 1.5 per cent over the past decade compared with 22 per cent in comparable trading partners.
We are surviving only because of the mining exports many on the left want to stop.
If Chalmers really wants to lift productivity he should read a short 2019 paper by Hanushek, “The Economic Value of Improved Schools”. He calculates that had the US in 2015 lifted education results to the level of Germany by the end of this century it would have added $US48 trillion ($72.9 trillion) to cumulative US GDP – about three times average annual GDP in 2015.
To get there, Labor would have to ignore the bleating of education unions that believe the system is about them rather than their students.
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