Encourage choice for the better

NEW York City's education supremo Joel Klein isn't one to mince words.

In his address to the National Press Club in Canberra this week, he said American education was so poor that if its present standards were imposed by a foreign power, it would amount to an "act of war". Klein is a culture warrior and, interestingly, one whose philosophy of rigour and accountability has been eagerly embraced by Julia Gillard and the Labor Government, much to the chagrin of many Australian educators.

So much for the end of the culture wars. The truth is that the culture wars began and will end in the classroom.

Since the ascendancy of Kevin Rudd, the culture wars have been portrayed as a fiction of the conservative establishment of the John Howard years, a manic preoccupation of "right-wing" commentators, like me. Only a few rampant Howard haters, or people who have been living on a remote island, would really believe that. The decline in standards in education is part of the banter of any parent with a child over the age of six. For almost 30 years, I have had conversations with parents about teachers who can't spell and who leave mistakes uncorrected, and particularly about the decline in curriculum, now mostly school-based. This has allowed scandalous, almost hilarious omissions.

Some examples: trivialising the study of English literature, which left one 20-year-old honours graduate of my acquaintance asking "So, who is this guy Keats?"; replacing rigorous maths with practical maths that left another graduate unable to read a map or measure anything; and the almost universal replacement of history by social science. This allows "socially aware" but mushy-brained teachers to teach the sexual revolution in the same category as the industrial, French and Russian revolutions. I have taught university undergraduates who did not know there were two world wars, and the learning of ancient history has almost disappeared.

None of this is a figment of anyone's imagination. Alarm over these trends is not a narrow ideological fixation. It is an everyday worry for mums and dads. But tell that to members of the Australian Education Union, who insist that all ills are traced to funding, and government funding of independent schools is the constant big bogey. But of course that is not the case. If anything, the reverse is true.

Overall, more than one-third of Australian children attend non-government schools and in some areas the numbers are much higher and climbing. In the ACT the number is almost 50 per cent. Instead of asking themselves why parents appear to be voting with their feet and removing children from state schools, education unions - locked in an antediluvian mindset of class war - have simply ignored these trends and still bleat about funding non-government schools. But funding is not the problem, as Klein is keen point out.

Most of the money thrown at education in New York during the past 25 years has had no effect on standards. That includes reducing class sizes - a favourite cause for the teaching unions since I began in the classroom 30 years ago. In fact, latest research tells us that past a certain point, reducing class sizes is not what counts in the classroom. What counts is what is taught, how it is taught and - one of Klein's favourite arguments - how it is assessed. In other words, testing. And of course parents have to have a say in all this. After all, it is they, not the state, who are the primary educators of their children.

The decline in education has been a 30-year phenomenon in the English-speaking world, with the US leading the way down the abyss, ironically, given the rabid anti-Americanism of so many in the Australian teaching profession and their union. The origins of this lie in the education theories born in the late 1950s and '60s, which were given impetus when deconstruction of everything, particularly language, became fashionable and education became a pawn of left-wing social theory. But the social fixers had things the wrong way around. Says Klein: "Don't tell me a kid can't learn because of poverty. If a kid doesn't learn, he is always going to be poor. So if you want to fix poverty, educate the child."

However, although we have gone a long way back down the road of illiteracy and innumeracy, not to mention lack of grasp of history (any history), there is hope for better things in Australia. In fact we are keeping our heads above water in this country because of something that Klein has just discovered works. It is called choice. Klein is a great fan of the charter school, which are simply government-funded independent schools run with a large amount of parental input. They are a way of giving parents choice and power, where before they felt imprisoned by a system that forced their children into a mould of mediocrity or worse.

The lesson that New York can teach Gillard is that a strong, viable, independent system of schools acts as a great benchmark. Parents want choice and here we already have some. Interestingly, academic reasons are not the top of the list for parents who send their children to private schools. The leading reasons are safety, the happiness of the child and ethical education; in other words, pastoral reasons. Parents of children in private schools tend to feel more directly involved, which ideally they are as partners in the education of their children, not spectators. Hence the children do better. It is the same in state schools where parents are involved. And what is more, through state subsidies of the Catholic system and other independent schools, we are getting something quite good quite cheap.

American parents want the same things Australian parents want - safety, standards and more control - hence the rise in charter schools. But the constitutional ban on funding for religious schools means that they can't have what we already have on the cheap. So rather than snipe at private education and privilege, we should be encouraging it. We should encourage a culture of choice.

The culture wars in the classroom are really just beginning and have a long way to go yet. Hopefully it won't be a hundred years war.