It ain’t ‘progressive’ if kids don’t make real progress

Kids are back at school and the family dog wonders where they’ve gone. It’s a chance for the adults to do some sharp thinking about education. The point has been well made that lost classroom time can be harmful, like theft from a child’s otherwise enriched future. We should turn our minds not only to lost hours of schooling but also to how successfully those hours are spent. For some time now international test results have shown an erosion of our basic numeracy and literacy. It’s a familiar complaint among parents, teachers and students that rigour and focus get lost amid a sprawling, something-for-everyone curriculum and so-so classroom management. The aim must be to challenge and motivate students so they get off to a good start with a love of learning and a sense of the links between application, knowledge and achievement.

This is easier said than done, and the task for teachers is made more difficult by poorly structured incentives and competing demands, especially if they have to do their job while parents are quick to complain but not especially engaged in their children’s education. Perhaps after losing the battle over screentime during isolation parents will have a keener appreciation for teachers’ efforts and get more involved in the busy life of their local schools. At least it may make the next spell of pandemic-driven home schooling less stressful and more successful.

But COVID-19 can’t banish the unfinished business of education reform. Teacher training in the universities has long been in need of an overhaul and it is rare for an education minister to attempt anything like systematic change. The education faculties need to attract students with a stronger academic record. Part of the problem is the university funding model in which it makes sense for vice-chancellors to enrol large numbers of poor-quality students and redirect revenue from their fees to other activities of the institution. But, to attract better-quality students, education faculties will have to earn a reputation for offering deep learning in core subjects, less social justice virtue signalling, more effective instruction in teaching methods and seriously useful experience in practice teaching, with a very close working arrangement between faculty and school. Some education faculties already do this, but it is not cheap or easy and it requires a fresh injection of academic talent. There is nothing progressive in turning out teacher graduates who, with the best intentions, see themselves as social change agents but are weak in their core subjects and struggle to engage students and control the class.

Teaching as a profession is caught in a catch-22: it needs higher-calibre graduates to lift its prestige and sense of self-worth, but without those social goods it will keep attracting too many students who would be better off outside a classroom. It needs effective politicians to champion genuine reform against resistance. Unfortunately, what passes for debate is often mere boasting about ever-increasing funding, a trend that has coincided with deteriorating standards, rather than discussion of the evidence on how to get the best academic and social outputs for a fiscal input.

It’s not encouraging that in teaching how to read — a relatively simple field in which the evidence of what works is crystal clear — there are still state systems that refuse to modernise their practices. As Jennifer Buckingham and Rebecca Urban wrote in The Weekend Australian, from their respective policy and personal positions, systematic phonics as taught in NSW is superior to the misleadingly named “balanced” approach found in Victoria. The problem is a fixation on what works in “progressive” theory, not what works in reality. It sounds exciting to espouse child-led education that maximises the autonomy of young people who are constantly bossed around. But some cognitive skills require a methodical and structured approach. If this is ignored, children fall behind in literacy. Those from stable, educated backgrounds will get help in time and they begin with many other advantages. The disadvantage of the rest is only redoubled. This is truly regressive and testifies in miniature to a pervasive problem in our education system: an emotive preoccupation with abstract quasi-political objectives and a lack of intellectual seriousness about the education that children are entitled to as they make their way in the world.