OECD warning: Gonski reforms key

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/23/oecd-warning-gonski-reforms-key

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One of the world’s leading education policy advisers has backed the Abbott government’s argument that school teacher quality is more important than class sizes, but reinforced the need for Australia to do more to bridge the gap between disadvantaged and well-off students.

Andreas Schleicher, of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, also stressed the importance of the David Gonski-inspired reforms to school funding, saying the existing system had problems in “in terms of equity, coherence, accountability and transparency”. The new system, legislated to begin in 2014, aimed to address issues including the “significant gap in educational resources between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged schools in Australia”, he said.

Schleicher is the special adviser on education policy to the OECD secretary general, Angel Gurría, and also serves as the organisation’s deputy director for education and skills. His comments to Guardian Australia come amid a renewed debate about Australia’s lacklustre performance in international testing and how faithfully the Abbott government will implement the Gonski reforms.

They follow remarks by the education minister, Christopher Pyne, that the latest results from the OECD’s programme for international student assessment (Pisa) were “a serious wake-up call for the Australian education system”. Australia’s rankings in mathematical literacy dropped from 15th in 2009 to 19th in 2012, scientific literacy from 10th to 16th, and reading literacy from ninth to 14th – proof, according to Pyne, that “money is not the answer in education”. He argued for a central focus on teacher quality and criticised the political left for being “mesmerised” by the push to reduce class sizes. Labelling Australia a “high equity country”, the education minister told the ABC last month: “I don't believe there is an equity problem in Australia.”

Weighing into the debate, Schleicher said the Pisa results showed there was “a significant gap in educational resources between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged schools in Australia”.

“In fact, the only countries in which that gap is larger are Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, New Zealand, Turkey, Argentina, Uruguay and the United States, none of which you would want to use as benchmarks for equity. More importantly, the results show that countries which invest their resources more equitably tend to achieve better student performance on Pisa, overall,” Schleicher said.

“Think about it this way: In the Pisa mathematics assessment, the quarter of Australia’s socio-economically most advantaged students perform as well as the average Korean student. The quarter of the most disadvantaged students compare with the average student in Greece. That gap equates to more than two school years at age 15. It gives you an indication by how much Australia could raise learning outcomes across the country if it would leverage the academic potential of disadvantaged students more effectively. That’s not easy but, surely, progress is possible.”

Pisa classifies students’ socio-economic background based on their parents’ highest education and occupation level and an index of home possessions. While Australia is categorised as a “high quality-high equity” country in mathematical literacy, the amount of variance in performance between schools is higher than the OECD average – and a large proportion of this is due to socio-economic background, according to analysis by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

Asked about Pyne’s argument that money was not the answer to improving educational outcomes, Schleicher said it was true that overall spending levels did not explain much of the performance differences among nations.

“The world is also no longer divided between rich and well-educated nations and poor and badly educated ones. You can see the same picture at the global level. Each year, OECD countries invest more than 200bn euros in math education in schools, but poor math skills still severely limit many people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs and, at the aggregate level, inequality in the distribution of math skills closely relates to how wealth is shared within nations,” he said.

“But how money is invested matters a lot. We see that high-performing education systems tend to prioritise the quality of teachers over things like the size of classes, and they are able to attract the most talented teachers into the most challenging classrooms and to get the most capable school principals for the toughest schools. The bottom line is that the quality of education cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.

“Of course, everybody agrees education is important. But the test comes when education is weighed against other priorities. How do countries pay their teachers, compared to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to be a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about teachers? Top school systems pay attention to how they select and train their staff. They watch how they improve the performance of teachers who are struggling and how to structure teachers’ pay. They provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice. Not least, they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers.

“High performers have also moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of accountability and work organisation. They support their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy, to improve their own performance and that of their colleagues, and to pursue professional development that leads to stronger educational practice. The goal of the past was standardisation and compliance; top performers enable teachers to be inventive. In the past, the policy focus was on the provision of education; in top school systems it’s on outcomes, shifting from looking upwards in the bureaucracy towards looking outwards to the next teacher, the next school, about creating networks of innovation.”

After initially suggesting a rethink of the Gonski-inspired school funding model due to begin next year, Pyne announced he would reinstate $1.2bn removed from the budget before the election and match Labor’s funding allocations for each state and territory over the next four years. Consistent with its election promise, the government will not match the final two years of the six-year plan. He has also pledged to introduce legislation to remove the “command and control” elements of the Gonski law that passed parliament just before Julia Gillard was replaced by Kevin Rudd as the prime minister. The effect of these changes will be to reduce the federal control over state education spending. The states will not face the same obligations to co-contribute or increase their own education spending in return for the federal funds. Labor legislated to implement the new system from January 2014.

Underlining the need for reform, Schleicher said it was clear that there were “issues with the current arrangements for funding in terms of equity, coherence, accountability and transparency”.

“Australia’s new funding model seeks to address those issues, and it provides many of the elements that you need to do that successfully: it has a benchmark amount per student, based on the costs of schools that are already performing well, and it provides the required funding to students identified as needing additional resources, in ways that don't reward poor performance – that's important too,” he said.

“No doubt, that approach can be further improved but Australia does not need to do everything differently here in order to do some things better.”

The ACER analysis of equity said: “Socio-economic levels of students and schools in the independent and Catholic school sectors were much higher than those of students and schools in the government sector. Regardless of their own socio-economic background, students enrolled in a school with a high average socio-economic background tend to perform better than when they are enrolled in a school with a low average socio-economic background ...The gap between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged schools was highest in New South Wales and was the equivalent of more than three years of schooling.”

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