Education
PISA results – strong rankings mask long-term decline
Australia is now in the world's top 10 academic performers, reads the headline on the ABC’s article on the OECD’s latest release of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results.
In justice to Claudia Long, the article’ s author, and to her editor, the headline goes on with the qualification “but the data paints a complex picture”.
The main qualification is that while we rank well, the standard among OECD and other PISA-reporting countries has been falling. Our scores too have fallen, but not as badly as those of other countries.
Long’s article provides detail on PISA results by state and by students’ socioeconomic background, revealing significant disparities in both categorizations. By state, it is notable that the ACT and Western Australia, the states with the healthiest public budgets, enjoy the highest ratings in math, science and reading. On socioeconomic background she notes that “while performance in reading, science and maths has dropped across the board since the early 2000s, it has declined at a faster rate for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds”.
Lisa De Bortoli of the Australian Council for Educational Research summarises the PISA results in a Conversation contribution: Australian teenagers record steady results in international tests, but about half are not meeting proficiency standards. Our standards have held up in recent years, but they have slipped over the longer term. She draws particular attention to our scores in math compared with the scores in east Asian countries – Japan, Singapore, China and Korea. (The same countries are also well ahead of us in reading and science, but not by such wide margins.)
These are short summaries of the PISA results. There is a huge amount of data and analysis available on the OECD PISA website. A quick glance at their downloadable Excel file on key results reveals a few other things about our scores:
- in Australia girls outperform boys in reading, underperform in math, and are about on a par in science;
- first- and second-generation immigrant children in Australia significantly outperform native-born children in math (reading and science are not reported);
- our overall PISA scores are roughly in line with those in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands. Sweden and the UK, are higher than those in France and Germany, and are much higher than those in the USA.
A shortcoming in our school science curriculum – half of it is missing
Following the 2010 release of the Australian schools curriculum, Australia’s PISA science scores started to fall. By 2018, Australia’s average science scores had fallen by 24 points, equivalent to nearly a full year of schooling.
That decline in standards is emphasized in a report by Ben Jensen of Learning First: Fixing the hole in Australian education: the Australian curriculum benchmarked against the best.
When Jensen and his colleagues looked at the science curriculums in other English-speaking countries – Singapore, Canada, the USA and England – they found that our equivalent to F-10 (foundation to Year 10) curriculum was missing about half the content of curriculums in other countries. Our curriculum has the appropriate high-level statements, but when it comes to specific detail much is missing. It is deficient in breadth, depth, and sequencing.
They list 16 topics covered in depth in at least three of the other systems they studied, but found none of them are covered in the mandatory content of our curriculum. Quoting directly from their report , these items are:
Cells and organelles, Contact and non-contact forces, Electrical circuits, Energy and food webs in ecosystems, Energy conservation and transformation, Gravity, Heat energy, Magnets and magnetism, Mass, volume and density, Materials, Material properties, Plant reproduction, Reproductive system (animals), Spheres of the Earth, Stars and the universe, States of matter.
It’s clear that school students deficient in these topics are gong to find it hard to do the subjects on a pathway to university places in STEM courses, and perhaps in finding a pathway to university at all
Economically there is an opportunity cost of unrealized capacity in a country that needs to compete on the basis of its human capital. And as Jensen points out in an interview with Hamish MacDonald on the ABC – Is Australia’s curriculum falling behind and can we fix it? – there is an equity issue, because even if many miss out, there will be a privileged cohort who do get a rounded science education. Our society is increasingly being divided between those with a sound education and those who miss out, and that has serious consequences.
Does adding more content mean a heavier workload for already over-stressed teachers? Not necessarily, because our education systems are also lacking in teaching support materials, which the researchers found in other countries, that make it easier for teachers.
Jensen establishes a strong case for an improved science curriculum as a necessary condition for bringing our school students up to an adequate standard in science, and he points out that curriculum improvement is a low-cost reform. While that is a necessary condition, it is hardly a sufficient condition: there are issues of teacher pay, burnout, and the administrative load imposed on education authorities. These all demand a collective contribution through public budgets.
The report would have been more informative if it had explained how some schools were doing much better: are they outside the government school system; are they selective government schools; is their performance the result of particularly dedicated individuals? It could have complemented its findings with a survey of primary school teachers, to find how many had studied science themselves.
Why our school education system has become class-divided
Mike Seccombe has an article in the Saturday Paper with the headline Exclusive: less than half Albanese’s cabinet went to state schools. It also includes an attractive artist’s impression of the $29 million student centre under construction at The Scots College in Sydney, modelled on the style of a Scottish baronial castle. Construction is delayed because the builders find it difficult to get the right sandstone and slate from Scotland: apparently the colonial sandstone, found in abundance in the Sydney region, just isn’t up to the mark for Scots boys.
His article is mainly about the set of policy decisions by successive governments that have allowed a huge resource gap to open up between government and elite private schools. In relation to the standards defined by the Gonski Review, while some private schools are vastly overfunded, public schools are underfunded by more than $6 billion a year.
Seccombe describes some difficulties teachers face in government schools – dipping into their own pockets to pay for resource materials, coping with high temperatures in classrooms without air conditioning, and working in schools with crumbling infrastructure.
There is clearly an equity issue –Australia has developed one of the most segregated private-public school systems in the OECD. There is also an economy-wide cost of this misallocation of resources:
While rich schools are building heated pools for their athletes and concert halls for their music students, Australia’s overall educational performance continues to slide.
Governments, particularly Coalition governments, justify this misallocation on the basis of “choice”. But that is blatantly misleading. Because government schools are underfunded, parents are denied the choice of sending their children to an adequately-resourced government school. As Nobel-Prize winning economist Tom Schelling pointed out in his tipping model, once a system such as a state school system starts to deteriorate, with the most concerned parents deserting it for an alternative system, a destructive and unstoppable positive feedback cycle is established, leading to a strongly segregated two-tier system as a permanent aspect of the landscape.
The Productivity Commission on early childhood education and care
The Productivity Commission has published a draft report A path to universal early childhood education and care. The media has focussed on a document accompanying the report, stating that “every child should have access to up to 3 days a week of high-quality early childhood education and care [ECEC]”. In support of this goal the Commission argues that the government should increase the child care subsidy to 100 percent of the hourly rate cap for families earning less than $80 000 a year.
Perhaps the most significant statement in the Commission’s summary is its emphasis on children’s development:
Without diminishing the importance of female labour force participation, this inquiry centres children in ECEC policy – understanding what aspects of ECEC make a difference to children, how services can be inclusive for all children, and how governments can ensure that their investments in ECEC support better outcomes for children.
Early childhood education and care clearly serves two ends. There is a loose coalition of advocates for greater female labour force participation (although it is already reasonably high by international standards). Many see it as a matter of achieving financial independence for women; some economists see it as a means of mobilising under-utilized economic resources; and some on the right, see it as a means to sustain a high labour supply in order to suppress wages.
Instead of emphasizing these short-term outcomes of early childhood education and care, the Commission has decided to focus on the longer-term opportunity of investing in our human capital.