Jason Clare’s counter-insurgency must save the education revolution

There is not much to boast about when 40 per cent of students in science and reading, and 50 per cent in maths, flunked passing the bare minimum basic skills and knowledge proficiency benchmarks. However, the alarming result is that the mass shift to online learning appears to have set back the results of children from poor backgrounds, those living in remote areas, and Indigenous students.

The crazy thing about Australia’s schooling slide is that there has been no shortage of analysis of the causes and cures.

Extrapolated, this implies that Australia has now fallen further behind the goal of a fairer school system that helps disadvantaged students climb the educational ladder of opportunity in life.

More spending is not the answer

Remedial action to help these students make up lost ground during the pandemic is called for. But this should also become an opportunity to draw a line under the failed educational thinking and practices that have allowed Australian school students generally to fall behind a declining and now flatlining performance curve.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare is being urged by the usual educational suspects, led by the teacher unions, to double down on Labor’s Gonski spending monument and throw billions more in taxpayer dollars at schools in the mistaken belief that money is the answer for Australia’s educational ills – a supposed correlation between higher spending and first-class education that the PISA report by the OECD’s boffins rejects.

Financial reality has at least forced Labor to acknowledge the need to do something about its other spending monument disaster and rein in the out-of-control cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Likewise, Mr Clare needs to use the negotiations with state education ministers over the next National School Reform Agreement to declare there is no magic money pudding, and instead craft a genuine reform package focused on fixing the basic problems on the ground in schools.

Progressive pedagogical fads

That requires rejecting progressive pedagogical fads like “student-led learning”, and insisting instead on direct instruction by teachers trained in evidence-based teaching who are guided by a detailed curriculum and provided with off-the-shelf lesson plans and materials, and who are equipped with the strategies and whole-school backup needed to restore discipline to the nation’s unruly classrooms so that real learning can occur.

That, in a nutshell, is the policy fix – plus doing whatever it takes to reverse Australia’s appalling rates of truancy – for what isn’t working in the nation’s schools, as recommended by education researchers across the spectrum spanning from the left-of-centre Grattan Institute to the right-of-centre Centre for Independent Studies.

The crazy thing about Australia’s schooling slide is that there has been no shortage of analysis of the causes and cures. Witness the extraordinary quarter-century struggle in educational circles over whether phonics (or sounding out words) should be used to help kids struggling to learn to read to master this foundational literacy skill.

The problem, as the phonics saga shows, is that the solutions require policymakers to have the political will to fight the so-called teaching wars against the formerly radical but now entrenched educational establishment in universities and bureaucracies.

The question is whether Mr Clare is willing to lead the counter-insurgency that is now called for to save the “education revolution”.