Schools forced to dance to Canberra's centralist tune

YESTERDAY'S release of the 2012 National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy national report, which includes results for this year's tests, also includes trend results for the five years from 2008 to this year.

Those expecting to see improvement across that time - which coincides with Labor's education revolution - will be disappointed. Out of the eight sets of results only two - years 3 and 5 reading - showed significant improvement. The other six sets of results flat-lined or declined.

Yet School Education Minister Peter Garrett says Labor will be able to lift Australian students to the top five in the world by 2025 by implementing its National Plan For School Improvement and a new Gonski-inspired funding model post-2013.

Responding to last week's disappointing results in the international reading, mathematics and science tests, Garrett repeated the claim.

Citing the apparent success of past projects such as Smarter Schools, Garrett also berated state governments such as Victoria for not fully supporting the commonwealth government's agenda.

Under the Australian Constitution, school education is a state matter and, given the commonwealth government has no practical experience of managing schools, employing teachers or implementing a curriculum, Garrett is wrong to force all schools, government and non-government, to dance to Canberra's tune.

One needs only to look at the past five years of the government's education revolution, rebadged by Julia Gillard as a "national crusade", to appreciate why a centralised and statist model of public policy does not work.

The billion-dollar computers in schools program, which didn't fund teacher in-service and software, has had minimal educational impact and, even worse, left schools with computers that are now obsolete.

The Building the Education Revolution, especially for those government schools that had to accept off-the-shelf designs and expensive project management costs, also has had minimal educational value while spending billions that could have been better invested supporting teachers.

As noted in an Auditor-General's report evaluating the National Partnership Agreement on Literacy and Numeracy - and despite outlaying $540 million - an analysis of NAPLAN data from 2008 to last year indicates the program "is yet to make a statistically significant improvement, in any state, on the average NAPLAN results of schools that received LNNP funding".

The National Professional Standards for Teachers is full of vague, generalised descriptors that drown teachers in red tape and do nothing to dispel the educational fads responsible for Australia's underperformance in international tests.

Garrett claims that the government's National Plan for School Improvement is innovative. Yet state governments have implemented similar plans for many years or are about to introduce the same initiatives.

In the 1990s the Kennett government introduced the Schools of the Future program, which got schools to set targets and to design improvement plans that were reviewed annually.

Since 2010 the West Australian government, under its Independent Public Schools program, has given state schools increased autonomy and flexibility on the basis that those closest to schools should be empowered to make the decisions.

The reality is thatLabor is playing catch-up, duplicating what is already being done and imposing an additional layer of bureaucracy and compliance costs.

Evidence that the commonwealth government fails to understand how schools and classrooms function best is illustrated by Garrett's claim that "there are performance problems in every state and every school sector". The facts prove otherwise.

In the latest international test results, Australia as a whole performed poorly but schools in the ACT performed as well as schools in some of the highest performing countries.

In the Year 4 reading test students in the ACT scored 558, placing it among the top five nations and well ahead of the Australian score of 527. In Year 4 mathematics the ACT, at 545, scored the same as Finland, whose education system is considered one of the world's strongest.

Many schools in Australia's non-government system achieved outstanding results.

In the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment science literacy test, Shanghai was first at 575, with Finland in second place at 554 and Hong Kong next at 549. Australia's independent schools scored 566, while Catholic schools achieved 540.

Indeed, based on the 2009 PISA science literacy results for independent and Catholic sectors many Australian schools are already performing among the top five countries. So the Prime Minister's promise to achieve the same result by 2025 is simply political hype.

Research by Melbourne-based Gary Marks concludes that "attendance at a Catholic or independent school significantly increased the odds of university participation, net of socioeconomic background and prior achievement".

One reason non-government schools are so successful is their freedom to make decisions at the local level by those most affected; what the Catholic system calls subsidiarity.

The irony is that the commonwealth government, in its quest to improve performance, is undermining the autonomy of such schools and, as a result, ensuring that standards will fall.

Kevin Donnelly is director of Education Standards Institute and author of Educating Your Child: It's Not Rocket Science.