If the PM or Premiers are looking for a problem to fix, this is it | Samantha Maiden

If you teach kids that literacy doesn’t matter, you get results like these, writes Samantha Maiden.

Imagine a universe where nearly half of all teenage boys fall behind the national benchmark in writing, grammar and punctuation by the time they reach year 9.

It sounds like some backwater in the United States where teachers have to set up a GoFundMe to pay for pens and paper and all the parents are nodding off on fentanyl.

They must be teaching struggling kids from an underprivileged background whose parents never went to school? Right? Wrong.

Try here in Australia.

According to the latest NAPLAN result this is a crisis occurring in the nation’s schools right now.

However, for reasons that are hard to grasp, nobody seems to think it’s a crisis.

Some teachers want the test banned because it’s bringing all the bad news.

Teachers unions are encouraging parents in some states to boycott the exams in a bid to avoid “high levels of stress and anxiety”.

Or, they think that paying the states more to run schools is the answer.

But despite the big promises of Julia Gillard and Gonski, the money never seems to arrive.

After covering these issues for 25 years, my fear is that if it was that simple, if money alone would solve all of the problems, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now, where half of all young teenage boys can’t spell or can’t construct a sentence.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard during Question Time.

Don’t get me wrong, money is nice and in some schools it is urgently needed, but when you keep throwing it at a problem and nothing is changing you have to rethink the issue.

It’s time for someone to rip up the rule book and work out what gets results and get this problem fixed.

As a parent of three teenagers there’s some ideas that spring to mind and they start with the low expectations in some public schools.

Mobile phones – now banned in SA schools – are a big distraction. How they were ever let into high schools is a mystery but the impact is manifest.

Some politicians reckon kids texting and Snapchatting and emojis are the issue. But that doesn’t explain why girls are outperforming boys.

Low expectations are another.

The number of times I have gently tried to suggest fixing up some spelling mistakes to a teenager only to be told it “doesn’t matter” and the teacher won’t mark on spelling frankly grinds my gears.

Why are some teachers telling kids spelling doesn’t matter? Why aren’t they teaching kids to spell?

Spelling does matter.

It’s a matter of human dignity in my books not to graduate high school with a vocabulary that makes you sound illiterate when you text a mate.

Don’t even get me started on the army of weirdos that think that NAPLAN is awful and don’t want their kids to do it because tests are just so terribly confrontational.

To these parents I say, step aside so I can get the data on my own kids, thanks.

Pipe down at the back and homeschool your kids if you must, let your freak flag fly, but don’t get in the way of kids that need help getting it.

As an aside, do these anti-NAPLAN fruitcakes also refuse to take their car to the mechanic because a regular service might hurt the vehicle’s feelings?

Of course, it’s private school teachers that also complain NAPLAN is not an effective assessment tool of students’ literacy and numeracy.

“The test results do not tell teachers, who do their job, and care about each of the students they teach, anything more than they already know about their students and how they are doing in their learning,’’ one submission to a parliamentary inquiry warned.

Newsflash: maybe parents would also like to know?

Jordana Hunter, program director, education, at Grattan Institute

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Maybe they are sick of impenetrable report cards that make zero sense and tell parents a teenager is “at standard”, whatever that means, and nothing much else?

In the understatement of the year, Jordana Hunter, education program director at the Grattan Institute, said declining performance among boys, particularly as they get older, is a cause for concern.

“By year 9, boys’ average reading level lags behind girls by about a year’s worth of learning,” Dr Hunter said.

“There is no good reason why boys shouldn’t be performing at the same level as girls.”

And get a load of this.

After a decade of compulsory schooling, about two in five boys were struggling to interpret texts and convey their meaning in writing.

It’s a crisis crying out for leadership. If Anthony Albanese and state premiers are looking for a problem to fix, this is it.

But is anyone listening who is prepared to actually do something?

Originally published as If the PM or Premiers are looking for a problem to fix, this is it | Samantha Maiden