Gonski education ‘reform’ delivers a lesson in money for nothing

Then prime minister Julia Gillard takes pictures with Mitcham Primary School students during a visit to sign South Australia up to the Gonski school reforms.

Few problems are solved by spending more taxpayer money, but that doesn’t stop governments trying. When the cash doesn’t achieve the desired result, they frequently commit to increasing it, blaming failure on the level of funding rather than poor policy.

Eight years after Julia Gillard shackled education to the findings of the Gonski Review, the unpalatable conclusion is that the steep increase in school funding has been a disastrous policy mistake.

Education Minister Alan Tudge belled the cat in a speech to the Menzies Research Centre on Thursday. Since 2013, federal government school funding has increased by 80 per cent in nominal terms to a record $23.4bn, and it has committed another 40 per cent to reach $32.8bn by 2029.

Yet standards are plummeting. According to the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment tests, the performance of Australian 15-year-olds has declined by 26 points in reading since 2000, the equivalent of nine months of schooling; 33 points in maths since 2003, or 14 months of schooling; and 24 points in science since 2006, 11 months of schooling.

The picture is grim. Two decades ago, we ranked fourth in the world in reading, eighth in science, and 11th in maths. By 2018, we ranked 16th in reading, 17th in science and 29th in maths. On average, Australian students trail their counterparts in Singapore by 18 months in reading and science and three years in maths.

Those who read the Gonski Review, rather than brandished it as a slogan, won’t be surprised. Its fundamental assumption, that educational outcomes are directly related to government funding, was never tested. It was programmed to fail by its terms of reference, which asked the wrong questions. It set out to develop a system in which school achievement was not determined by differences in wealth, income, power or possessions while ignoring the influence of welfare dependency and drug and alcohol addiction in the home that put the performance of teachers into perspective.

Policy debate has been strangled by the disingenuous claims Labor peddled at two federal elections that the government was cutting school spending. In reality, funding per child in government schools increased by 10 per cent in real terms between 2013 and 2018 to $18,837 and its contribution increased by 44 per cent, thanks to spending locked in by the Gillard/Rudd governments in their last months in office.

Gonski’s misplaced focus on equity at the expense of excellence has ensured standards have fallen across the socio-economic spectrum. The decline in Australia’s brightest students compared with international counterparts is a damning indictment of the gospel of inclusiveness. Denying smart students the opportunity to fulfil their potential harms the child and the nation.

Politicised curricula that view every subject through the prism of climate change, gender and race contribute to declining performance in international tests. Children are emerging with a highly distorted view of the world. We should not be surprised that the insidious infiltration of gender activism under the guise of teaching tolerance and understanding confuses children and destabilises families since that is the intent of its activist creators. Tudge steered clear of that minefield in his headland speech, his first since he took on the education portfolio in December. However, his plain-speaking rhetoric suggested that the Coalition may be up for a fight in a policy zone it usually surrenders to Labor. It is a fight the Liberals might just win, given the transparent failings of the Gillard government’s policy and the exhaustion of Labor’s campaign over funding.

Despite Gillard’s passion as education minister, the reforms she delivered were incomplete, untested, crudely shaped and bedevilled by political expediency. Despite the efforts of her successors to smooth the rough edges, the school system we have today is troubling to almost everyone. Teachers complain of the burden of red tape, constant change and increased workload caused by emphasis on individualised learning. It is they who bear the brunt of classroom ill-discipline caused by social problems spending on schools was never going to fix.

Parents fret about the standards of education under pressure to pick the least-worst school. Grandparents are anxious about politicisation of the curriculum and influence of the perverse ideology lumped together with political correctness. The bottom line is that a generation is being denied what Robert Menzies once described as our most important right; the freedom to do our best and make our best better. It is an outcome we could have predicted since the inevitable result of every scheme to redistribute wealth is the entrenchment of mediocrity.

The federal government’s ability to reverse the decline will be hampered by the power of the teachers’ unions, reactionary institutions deeply opposed to individualism and choice.

Should the Morrison government be prepared to give it a crack, however, it may face fewer obstacles than Tony Abbott faced in 2015 from COAG and the Senate. The four-pillars reform strategy developed by Christopher Pyne provides a good framework. The review under way by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority provides an opportunity to depoliticise the National Curriculum and sanction more robust learning. It could do worse than cut and paste the Singaporean version. The second pillar of improving teacher quality and raising professional esteem requires better, practice-orientated training the existing commonwealth funding can provide. The commonwealth can reduce the incentive to universities to accept students with poor academic records for teaching degrees and learn from Canada and Finland, which apply rigorous entry requirements for teaching students and, not surprisingly, perform better on international rankings.

School autonomy, the third pillar, is a bipartisan aim embraced by Gillard that should win support from reasonable state governments. Pyne’s fourth pillar of parental engagement may be the hardest to construct. The Zeitgeist strongly favours outsourcing of parental responsibility to teachers and is foolishly encouraged by some. In the utopia imagined in the Gonski Review, economic, social and personal disadvantage are overcome by increasing school budgets but, although we may wish it were otherwise, no amount of government intervention can eliminate the lottery of birth or abolish the iron law that the most important variable in attainment is the attitude of parents.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.