Page 660 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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Whether you believe it is about social advantage, parental education and professional status, where a school is located or how well it is funded, there is one undeniable fact in NAPLAN: too many students are failing under our education system.
If we take the raw data for year 3 spelling, there are 10.9 per cent of students in ACT schools who are at or below the national minimum standard. Using the Canberra Times interpretation, that equates to 41 schools, both government and non-government. Spelling does not get any better as the years go up; in fact, it gets worse by year 9, where it is at 16.9 per cent. Numeracy does not start out as poorly, but by year 9 we have over 20 per cent at or below national minimum standard.
For those people, particularly those in the community that mindlessly chant the “Give a Gonski” line that suggests that more money is the panacea to all our educational failings, I say: look at the funding per student tables for Canberra schools—public, Catholic and independent. I do not intend here to identify any particular school and highlight where they sit on the funding per student table compared to where they sit on the NAPLAN results. Suffice it to say that some at the top of the funding table are in some cases significantly below national minimum standards.
What does that mean? It says that money alone is not the answer. We know we have a problem with a number of students in our ACT schools. But what are we doing about it? I would welcome an open debate on this, but—Ms Burch is leaving—when we raise the issue we are accused of talking down our schools. Let us stop the myopic focus on money being the panacea for all of education’s ills and work out some effective strategies and some key traits that are common to effectively performing schools.
A recent report from the Grattan Institute gives some insight into how good schools can get better and better schools can be best. It says:
School education in Australia is slipping. We are falling down the international rankings and our students are performing at a lower level in some subjects than they were a decade ago, according to the OECD.
It goes on to suggest that high-performing systems around the world know that improving the effectiveness of teaching is the way to lift school performance. They seek to increase the quality, not the quantity, of teaching. It goes on to argue this, and I think it reflects much of what is currently happening in our ACT schools:
Government regulations restrict schools. Enterprise bargaining agreements restrict changes to work schedules, and duty of care requirements restrain schools that want to free their teachers from child minding to focus on improving teaching.
Mrs Burch does not acknowledge that some schools at the top of the funding envelope are failing their students while those schools that are getting less than half that amount are achieving enormous results.
So if it is not just adding more money, what is it? There is an enormous body of research that suggests that schools can be turned around from being poor performers and it matters not whether they are in low socio-economic areas or not.
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