education ?, page-20

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/maralynparker/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/trounced_by_china_and_on_the_way_down/


Maralyn Parker
Wednesday, December 08, 2010 at 03:12pm

Schooling in Australia is going backwards. The latest international comparisons show we are getting further and further away from the top performing nations in the world in reading and maths.


The Programme for International Student Performance (PISA) measure of the standards reached by 15 year olds in reading, maths and science literacy (results of tests given in 2009) also shows Australia is the only high performing country to have dropped significantly in reading literacy standards between 2006 and 2009.

I have a terrible vision of the phonics versus whole word wars reigniting.

But if ever we needed a convincing argument for the urgency to get a quality national curriculum up and running this is it.

We trust the education ministers and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority that is writing it for us, will get it right.

While Peter Garrett will now always be known as the education minister in charge when a national curriculum was endorsed by all states and territories, he gave us a worrying response to the PISA news in a press release that said There has been no statistically significant change in any major domain since PISA 2006.

Garrett must be reading a different report or he has chosen to ignore the main message. Read more about 2009 PISA results here.

Mind you we were never a world top maths performer. But no excuse for now having 12 countries significantly beating us in maths. Some reach standards that are years ahead.

Shanghai-China and Singapore participated in PISA for the first time and trounced most of the rest of the world. Shanghai-China is now the top scorer across the board, taking the crown, probably forever, from Finland. I hope Shanghai schools and teachers are ready for the descending hordes of educators seeking their secrets of success.

The worst news for Australia comes with the first breakdown of the performance of school sectors in Australia. To me it is heartbreaking.

Independent schools significantly outperform all other schools and Catholic schools significantly outperform public schools.

In PISA speak we have become a high-quality low-equity nation, which means while results are well above OECD averages (average is not much to aspire to) we are failing to lift the standards of our most needy students.

All of the nations that substantially beat us (Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, and Canada) provide high-quality and high-equity schooling. That is their schools lift the standards of all of their students regardless of socio-economic background.

As a nation we are now paying for the visionless and irresponsible way we have allowed our education system to grow the three distinct divisions of Independent, Catholic and public schools.

Australian public schools underperform to the extent that 19 per cent of public school children do not reach the bottom level in reading literacy. It is a truly compounding problem.

Changing things now will be difficult to impossible, need incredible political courage and will probably cost a lot of money.

When a nation neglects the school systems that educate the vast majority of its students this is what happens.