Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

International testing of school students has found Australia is failing to keep pace with much of the developed world in science and maths.

In maths and science, Australia is now below many Asian countries like Japan and Singapore, as well as England, the US and Russia.

American fourth- and eighth-grade students made solid achievement gains in math in recent years and in two states showed spectacular progress, an international survey of student achievement released on Tuesday found (though) Science performance was flat.

In eighth-grade science, for instance, Massachusetts students, on average, scored higher than or equal to students in all countries but Singapore and Taiwan.

Nearly half of eighth graders scored at the advanced level in math in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, compared with 6 percent of American students.

Finland once again came out top in the OECD's latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, with high performances in mathematics and science matching those of top-ranking Asian school systems in Hong Kong-China, Japan and Korea.

Since 1979, the minimum Primary School teacher qualification has been a M.Ed., i.e. Master of Education.

The Australian Science Teachers Association president Peter Turnbull says the teachers need to be better educated. 

Jay, experience is education, in fact it's more educational and useful than being academically programmed. As for paying for it, that's just common sense, currently we have a huge amount of young people unemployed or under employed, with a bit of thought it wouldn't be hard to make it economically viable and profitable for all aspects of society. Sack all the senior bureaucrats and use the money they waste, get rid of all the spin doctors, stop politicians trips and perks, give them pensions the same as the aged pension and make them asset and income tested. The amount of waste in government and bureaucracy is horrendous, for some reason these people believe they are privileged and worth more, but the resulting facts show the complete opposite.

Four years of work experience is the best form of education there is and would create large amounts of work and new industry, it would solve problems in every government department and service bringing fresh ideas and enthusiasm into services, kids and society. It would also produce people at 20 years of age who have real experience in just about every facet of society, making them more understanding and responsible. Of course it would have to be formerly designed, but that's easy and would take about 5 minutes to do. All essential services including law and defence would have priority and be compulsory, you would only need them to be in each section for 3 months, so over 4 years they would experience and learn up to 16 different essential aspects of society. They could work in many essential services in their own area's as well as around the country, so improving what is currently disappearing and completely inadequate services. Education and society should revolve around living and not just academics and economics, which are really just illusional ideologies and do nothing but bring discrimination and inequality into life.

But I wrote of education, Jay, not the times as such:  and my bet is that most of the names that you list were educated more in the 19th century style - with its emphasis on rote learning, conformity and an accumulation of facts, rather than in the 20th C methods, which I don't think got much of a widespread foothold until the 1960s.

produced Bentham, Darwin, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Marx, John Stuart Mill, Nietzche, Santayana, Thoreau, Tolstoy, among others.

20th C education produced  CEOs.

What a good thing that we have moved on from the 19th century.

Schools need, first of all, to teach all children how to read so that they can be informed, how to write so that their thoughts can be comprehended, and to do the simple arithmetic that enables their life.

At present they are not doing this.

All the puffery can be discussed after they have successfully accomplished this basic aim.

Jay, I understand what you are trying to say, but really we are using 19th century approaches to education and Gillard is just following the same pattern of producing economic enslaved clones. The education system is failing and should not be used for, as you say, industrialising children and leaving them incapable of living in the real world.

Formal education shouldn't start until at least 5 years of age, so as to allow children and parents the opportunity to get to know each other and for the child to develop their own personality and understanding of early life. Currently children are born then almost immediately given away to a day jail, where they are locked up, separated from life and real learning. From five children should be taught everything about living, health, the law, how societies operate and why. As they get older so more life skills should be taught so when they reach puberty they are aware of their biologies, how society functions and the reasons why. At 16 all children should be taken out of school and placed in 4 years of work experience serving the community in all departments and services, when they reach 20 years of age, they will have the knowledge and experience to then go and choose their career or undergo higher education. This would put everyone on the same footing, as it is, it is really only the rich and elitists who can afford to undertake many university courses and the government of the day are making it harder and harder putting every poor youth who doesn't have rich parents, in debt for the rest of their lives. This is not a good outcome for society or the people, just the greedy elitists.

This approach would have the following outcomes: it would alleviate work force shortages in all areas of government and services. It would reduce youth unemployment and crime as all kids would have served a period of time within law enforcement, hospital emergency services and government departments. It would also alleviate unemployment in older people, as they would be required to teach the young the skills of life they have learned. Teaching of young children should be done by those who have experienced life and are semi or permanently retired. Having teachers who have done nothing but gone to school results in a worsening education system. As standards drop, so do the next generation of teachers. It’s just like having doctors, nurses, professionals and trades people doing their studies in universities, instead of on the job. We are seeing the outcome of this stupidity and it will only get worse. The teachers of today, know nothing about anything, except their inadequate programming. Until we adopt an education system that teaches, rather than demands and expects, education will continue going downhill. Gillard gets her ideas from her bureaucrats. As with every bureaucratic endeavour, failure, wasted resources and money is the only outcome.

Shaun Carney sees Julia Gillard’s speech on Transformational Change in Today’s Schools as the most important speech so far in the life of the Rudd government. While uniform testing has merit, the proposals are far from transformational.

Change is of two types. The more common are quality improvements, incremental changes that improve quality. Minister Gillard’s proposal fits this type. More rewarding is change brought about by paradigm shifts, by radically new ways of thinking, what Christensen, an authority on change, refers to as disruptive innovation (Seeing What’s Next ; Disrupting Class). Disruptive innovation occurred when the printing press transformed book production, or the electric bulb transformed lighting.

Perhaps the best examples of well constructed learning environments are multiplayer on-line games such as World of Warcraft (WoW). Players rapidly learn to function competently in new professions, with radically different rules and protocols. The principal drawback of the massive learning that players achieve is that it generally has little practical value in the real world.

WoW introduces knowledge in small chunks: the working storage of the human brain can hold only about 7 pieces of information (cognitive load). Players practice using this information until they have mastered it (it solidifies into long term memory patterns that work subconsciously and do not need precious working storage). Players then move to the next level where they are given new skills to master. Feedback is frequent and immediate, at most a second for simple things, perhaps an hour for complex strategies. Players thus enjoy a state of flow, where they tasks are neither too hard nor too easy.

In such games it is the learners that teach each other. Players contribute to blogs that discuss tips. They also form on-line groups that work as teams. Some players contribute new scenarios. No longer do professionals (people paid to practice their skills) teach directly.  Their work changes, providing support functions such as game design and help desk.

Christensen says that it he has never seen a mature organisation successfully implement a disruptive innovation. It has to come from new organisations – institutional culture is just too strong.

Gillard’s proposals are for a system that generates incremental change. Systems require a feedback and control loop, to sense when it is going off track, and take corrective action. Nationalised testing provides a relatively accurate sensory mechanism.  The weaknesses with such systems are twofold. Firstly, the feedback occurs at best, annually, a rather slow loop, certainly not very useful for the individual children. Imagine driving a car on a twelve minute journey in which you are only allowed to take a quick peak once a minute. Secondly, control is achieved through threats of accountability and coercion, an environment of fear and anger.

The most robust, reliable and yet politically incorrect test of all is the IQ test. It tells us that in an average class of ten year olds, one out of six is capable of handling material one year in advance of the others, and another sixth can really only handle material one year less difficult. The learning that is missed is cumulative. What a waste.

Another elephant in the room is that underperforming schools are caused by poor teaching. A greater truth is that it is caused by the students. I used to be a board member of a good suburban public school. A child with severe learning disabilities sought admission and we, being a progressive community welcomed him with open arms. Finding that the government quotas for teacher-aids that came with such children wasn’t enough, we used PTA- raised funds. It wasn’t that the government was insensitive or uncaring – a lot of money was spent on a lot of specialists having a lot of meetings and doing a lot of talking. Even with the support, it was quite stressful for the class teachers, the fellow students and the staff. Starting a week with a student breaking furniture or urinating on a carpet affects the whole week. Other parents with similar children heard about the attitude of our school, and bought homes in our suburb.

It would be an exaggeration to say that underperforming schools are not filled with severely handicapped children. But just four rowdy boys can drain a teacher’s energy, and her job changes from teaching to class control.

Both the above issues have deep emotional and ethical impacts. Nevertheless we need to put aside our emotions to examine them objectively and openly if we are to arrive at viable options, from which we can then select an ethical solution.

As any striking teacher can attest, their biggest power is not their power to disrupt children’s education, but to disrupt parent and workforce patterns.

Perhaps the biggest elephant is that education itself has been commoditised to fit the industrial model. Packets of learning are doled out in a standardized factory. The human mind learns all the time from a plethora of sources and teachers. How important, really, is formal schooling in one’s education for living?

Deputy Prime Minister Gillard’s proposal to implement uniform testing is certainly a step forward, would perhaps even have been transformational twenty years ago. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are capable of much better. We have the knowledge and the technology. All it requires is real vision and determination. Do we have that vision and determination?

I consider myself responsible for the performance of any employees that I might have, and therefore consider that the administration should be under fire for any under performance of teachers, rather than teachers themselves.    For example, the administration that oversaw a local 6th class having 26 different teachers in one school year, (so I am told).

To speak of diversities such as students, schools, parents and teachers as if they were homogenous, is nonsense.   No "one size fits all" outcomes from this approach will do anything much.

Gillard's speech is typical of a politician, lots of words but not one bit of sense. If you're going to change the downward slide of education, you have to really change it, not just babble out empty rhetoric and bureaucratic non speak. We must remember, Gillard is a lawyer, so what else can you expect, but waffle and garbage. To get beneficial results for all in the education system, you have to approach it from a lateral direction and not just use past their use by date paper tigers.

What the f-ck does Gillard think she is playing at, with education!!?.

Did folk watch this idiot Klein on the Press Club luncheon show today?

Klein is right out of the nineteenth century- a true Dickensian Gradgrind and it was sad also to see his role reprised by Christian Kerr's Bounderby at today’s press club luncheon, notable for the gormless absence of Gillard.

The policy is virulent American neolib to its insane bootstraps.

Withdraw funding from assert-scarce public schools and feed the money into private schools.

If the resource deficient schools can't get better results under the new shame and blame regime- shut them down!

Adopt a confrontationist stance as per unions and teachers and back parents over teachers as to curricular every time.

It has nothing to do with educating kids and everything to do with implementing a particularly 19th century form of neoliberalism that (should have) reached its zenith during the Bush era, before the disastrous results of neo con policy elsewhere became apparent. It will put civilisation back to Creationist feudal times, as its creators fully intend.

And the only reason Gillard is party to it is because of the slavish need to "harmonise" Australia to America and to keep "in" with the brainless, psychotic parentage of the Hobbesian mortgage belt, who in their megalomania think they know more about education than educators and teachers.

I can't think of a politician I've come to loathe so quickly, so intensely as I have Gillard!