School reforms overshadowed by dollar debate

IN 2008, Julia Gillard returned from a trip to New York City fired up by the vision of then schools chancellor Joel Klein and his radical overhaul of the city's schools. It was a meeting of minds and ideals.

Like Gillard, Klein, a former lawyer who is now an executive vice-chairman heading the education arm of News Corporation (parent company of The Australian's publisher News Limited), was born to working-class parents and educated in the public school system. Like Klein, Gillard speaks passionately about the boost in life a good education has given her.

Klein and Gillard share a desire to improve educational standards and outcomes for disadvantaged children. This desire was reflected in Gillard's mantra during her tenure as education minister that "demography is not destiny". It set out her vision to provide the same educational opportunities to all children, regardless of their start in life or the school they attend.

By last week Gillard was dismissing debate over educational standards as a "nonsense distraction" and "white noise". The comments were a misstatement, and Gillard went on to say how the government's reforms and extra funding across the past five years had improved schools. But the poor choice of words, uncharacteristic for the carefully spoken Gillard, seems a world away from the Klein-like agenda Gillard has enthusiastically pursued, and raises the question of how far the government has strayed from its school reform agenda.

In fact, the distraction and white noise is the squabble over money. Her misstep last week highlights how Gillard has lost control of the education debate and let some of the biggest education reforms in the nation's history be overshadowed by the dollars attached.

By delaying the government's detailed response to the recommendations by the Gonski review of school funding and not making the states an offer until April - more than a year after the report was released - Gillard has run negotiations into the election campaign. The complexities of introducing the new model and the short timeframe for school systems to come to grips with it have allowed Gillard's most cherished reform to be exploited by the Coalition and the states.

The rationale for changing the funding system is clearly set out by the Gonski review but the government is struggling to get that message through. Instead the Gonski recommendations have been distilled to one line: schools need an extra $6.5 billion a year.

The Gonski review, on which the new funding model is based, is the first attempt to evaluate the real cost of educating our children to a high standard. Spending in schools is based on what the states have historically spent rather than the actual costs involved.

The Gonski report is not just about extra money, it's also about funding schools to educate students at an aspirational level. It links funding to standards. It funds schools, not school sectors.

But the present debate over school funding is dominated by the size of the buckets of money the government is offering, clouding the huge structural adjustment that will take place and any explanation of how it might lift standards.

Instead, the public is left with the same unedifying school funding debate of the past 50 years: public v private schools, who wins and who loses. It is exactly the situation the Gonski review was meant to avoid.

While the funding debate has degenerated into a political brawl, there is one thing on which everyone agrees: the performance of students needs to improve. Our top students have been slipping relative to their peers overseas and our bottom students are alarmingly behind everyone else. The differences lie not in identifying the problem but in addressing it.

Klein's blueprint to improve schools involved transparency and accountability. School performance was judged and publicly reported. Student performance in literacy and numeracy was tested and publicly reported. Schools and teachers were held accountable for poor student results and failure to improve educational standards. Klein believed in giving parents such information on their schools so they could "raise hell" and demand higher standards.

It is a plan Gillard adapted for Australia. In the first stage of the transparency and accountability agenda, Gillard implemented the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy tests in 2008, the first uniform tests in the nation.

Gillard stared down teaching unions and some state governments to set up the My School website, which for the first time made literacy and numeracy results readily available school by school, enabling parents to compare more easily the performance of different schools. The intention, Gillard said at the time, was to shine a spotlight on the dark corners of the school system, to take out the guesswork for parents choosing a school and to identify those schools in need of greater assistance to educate their students.

"We should be able to identify best practice and innovation, and work systematically to ensure that they are spread more widely," she said. "We should be able to especially assist those schools that need it."

It is here where the Australian system departs markedly from Klein's in New York City. Klein graded schools every year on a scale from A to F on the improvement recorded in students' results, and schools that failed to improve were closed down.

In Australia, transparency is used to identify struggling schools and support them with additional resources - financial, or targeted teaching programs. The spotlight also identifies successful schools so effective teaching practices and programs can be shared more easily between schools.

Along with national testing and public reporting, Gillard oversaw the development and introduction of the first common national curriculum and uniform national standards for teachers. Finally, more than 100 years after Federation, all the state-controlled school systems are running on the same gauge tracks.

Now the federal government has entered the second phase of the transparency and accountability agenda: improving schools and student results. To this end, Gillard is overhauling the way schools are funded to give every school the resources it needs to educate its students.

In her response to the Gonski recommendations, Gillard set the goal not only of arresting the slipping academic standards of Australian students in international tests but lifting the nation to one of the top five performers in the world. Leaving aside the matter of whether it's the right goal to strive for, the government's means to lift school standards is through the new funding model.

But with little discernible improvement in students after it pumped in an extra $1.5bn into schools through National Partnerships targeting poor literacy and numeracy skills, disadvantaged schools and the quality of teaching, the government has realised the disadvantages of handing over money without effective accountability.

Thus, to receive the additional funding the federal government is offering, state, Catholic and independent schools must also sign up to the National Plan for School Improvement. The plan targets five key areas the government says will improve schools: the quality of teachers, the quality of learning, school autonomy, meeting student needs, and greater transparency and accountability.

To improve the quality of teaching, the federal government recently outlined changes in training for teachers at university, including higher entry standards to lift the academic calibre of the profession, more practical experience, an experienced teacher as a mentor for the first two years, and annual performance reviews for all teachers.

The plan also expands national testing and reporting, as well as targeted funding for "a reading blitz" in the first years of school. States and school systems will be required to give greater autonomy to principals, including over staffing and their budgets, which could prove to be a bigger challenge for the Catholic system than for state governments.

Every school will have to develop an improvement plan that outlines the steps it will take to lift student performance and report on their success, all to be published on the My School website.

Extra information to be published on My School includes surveys of parent, teacher and student satisfaction, Year 12 attainment rates, and the languages taught at each school.

The federal government wants to establish a school performance institute to collect and analyse data, but has yet to convince any state minister of the merit of this plan: all of them have expressed reluctance at building another piece of national infrastructure. Such an institute would publish an annual State of Our Schools report, measuring progress against targets set by the Council of Australian Governments and in the school improvement plan.

It is an attempt by the Gillard government to ensure the extra money invested in schools is spent in ways that will make a difference, in line with the Gonski findings.

Schools and teachers are entrenched creatures of habit and the main lesson from the National Partnerships is that, given a choice, most schools will continue to do what they have always done, regardless of whether it has worked.

The idea of evaluating the effectiveness of teaching practices is still taking hold in the profession. Some teachers remain openly hostile to the suggestion that test data be used to evaluate how well their teaching methods work. While medicine grappled with the idea of evidence-based practice decades ago, most teachers are in the kindergarten class when it comes to changing what they do based on research and results.

The individual school improvement plans are the government's attempt to link funding to results, and perhaps the most important measure in the plan. Done properly, they would cause schools to evaluate what they do and, hopefully, change what is not working. The aim is to entrench evidence-based practice and to provide government with what School Education Minister Peter Garrett describes as a "clear line of sight" of the funding through the various systems into the classroom.

"The national plan is literally a transformation of the way in which we've treated school education in a historical sense," he says. "It's not an overhaul, it's a complete rebuild of the way in which we take, teach and support kids through the school gate."

NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli, who was the first to sign on for the new model and the plan, is also clear on where the additional money will go.

"I've made it clear to the teachers union we won't be spending it on reducing class sizes or increasing wages," he says.

Piccoli says the plan ties in "very neatly" with the reforms the state government is pursuing, including in teacher quality and training and in principal autonomy, and says it will enable them to look at things such as linking teachers' and principals' wages to the complexity of the schools in which they work, and teacher salary levels to standards of achievement.

"This additional money gives us the flexibility to do those kinds of things, it provides an in-built changing of the culture in schools," he says. "Schools won't automatically get an increase, they'll have to meet standards. I certainly expect there to be great accountability for all schools in terms of how they use the money."

From the federal government's point of view, the challenge is to stop the states doing what they habitually do: take the money without striving to change their practices, thereby defeating the rationale behind the reforms.

Setting targets also has proved problematic in the past, particularly when each state has its own set of definitions and measures. The aim of the new system is to provide certainty of funding for schools and governments through budget and election cycles, tied to an agreed plan of action that builds a body of evidence to assess schools.

From the states' point of view, the national plan highlights the fundamental dysfunction in education - that one level of government, the commonwealth, has all the money and is seeking to hold accountable a system that ultimately the states are responsible for. It sets up a conflict; the federal government blames the states for not meeting targets, and the states retort: "You're the ones pulling the levers."

The Gillard government's school improvement plan is an attempt to lead schools into teaching more effectively. It's a top-down attempt to entrench changes that are happening gradually, and haphazardly, in schools. The question is whether the plan will effect the changes required.

The intent is right, as with so many of Gillard's education policies - but they often fail during the implementation stage.