National Education Correspondent
Sydney
How schools compare. Source: TheAustralian
THE focus on high test scores is masking the failure of schools to improve their students’ learning, with a substantial proportion of fee-charging private schools “coasting” on their high-achieving students, who make little progress.
Analysis of national literacy and numeracy test results shows about 40 per cent of private primary schools and 35 per cent of private secondary schools are coasting, looking good with high test results but failing to record significant improvement in student scores.
Among government schools, about 30 per cent of primary and 20 per cent of secondary schools are classified as coasting in reading, writing or numeracy.
Teaching guru John Hattie, the chairman of the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership, said the public debate on education centred on student results but neglected the scale of improvement schools were realising with their students.
Professor Hattie said too many high-performing schools, particularly those in more affluent areas, were coasting, with their students not progressing as far as they should.
“The public, politicians and many schools think good schools are high-achieving schools but for me, the good schools are the high-growth schools where students are continually improving,” he said. “Too often we consider successful schools as those with high achievers but it is likely that many schools are high-achieving as a function of the students’ performance when they entered the school.”
Professor Hattie said the analysis showed the importance of considering both the progress that students made and also their achievement levels.
“An over-emphasis on achievement leads to many of our brighter students permitted to coast whereas an emphasis on both achievement and progress means all students should gain at least a year’s progress for a year’s input,” he said. “We should consider both the achievement levels and the progress or growth of each student and school.”
Leading education researcher Geoff Masters, the chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research, agreed it was time to realise the only way to measure how much learning had occured was by measuring the progress students had made.
“A highly effective school is one in which students make exceptional progress, regardless of their starting points,” Professor Masters said. “The challenge is to understand the school and teacher practices that produce exceptional rates of improvement.”
Education analyst Ben Jensen said the findings reflected the lack of significant improvement in student performance across the nation, and particularly the decline in the number of top Australian students scoring at the highest level in international tests.
Dr Jensen, chief executive of education research group Learning First, agreed on the need to focus on improvement as well as absolute scores.
“But there is also a broader problem,” he said. “We are now, thankfully, unwilling to tolerate stagnating low-performing schools in poor areas but we tolerate stagnation in wealthier schools. It is a terrible double standard that clearly hurts our kids and will have serious economic repercussions over the long term.”
While more private schools are coasting, private high schools do best in meeting these two goals of high-scoring students who are also improving above expectations. About 36 per cent are raising reading skills of their high-scoring students, 54 per cent seeing progress in writing, and 44 per cent in numeracy.
Government schools form the largest proportion of schools showing improvement among low-scoring students, particularly in the primary years. About 42 per cent of primary schools recorded great improvement in reading, 33 per cent in writing and 37 per cent in numeracy.
Former Productivity Commission economist and public school lobbyist Trevor Cobbold said a number of studies conducted in Australia over the past year or so had found that academic results of private schools were no better than public schools after accounting for the family background of students.
While the results may cause private school parents to question why they’re paying fees, the analysis does not suggest private schools are doing a bad job, but that their superiority over public schools is overstated.
Mr Cobbold said if parents thought sending their children to a private school was buying a better school, the weight of evidence was that was not the case.
“The data does not show that,” he said. “But I expect parents are also thinking they’re buying something else, such as status and hoping their child enters a better network for future employment and influence.”
The analysis should be interpreted against the background that public schools educate more struggling and disadvantaged students than the private sector, and improvement is easier to make from a lower base.
The NAPLAN (National Assessment Program — Literacy And Numeracy) tests are also not very good at differentiating achievement among top-scoring students, so the results are only indicative of school performance.
Using NAPLAN results, the analysis classifies schools into four categories based on the increase in marks from Years 3 and 7 in 2011 to years 5 and 9 in 2013. The rise in scores for each school is compared with the average progress across all schools to identify those performing above and below expectations.
Coasting schools have high-scoring students who show little improvement above expected levels; improving schools have low-scoring students who are advancing more quickly than expected; low-performing schools have low-scoring students making little progress; and successful schools have high-scoring students who are improving significantly. By chance alone, each category would contain about 25 per cent of schools, so the analysis focuses on the categories with higher proportions of schools.
Overall, about one-third of primary and high schools are coasting in reading and one-third of primary schools are improving in reading and numeracy.
Almost 40 per cent of primary schools are coasting in students’ writing results, while about one-third of high schools are classified as successful, lifting the performance of their high-scoring students.
The largest group of coasting schools is in the private sector, where almost half the independent and Catholic primary and high schools are failing to significantly lift student results in reading despite high scores by the students.
Among private primary schools, about 46 per cent are failing to record significant improvement in students’ writing and about 35 per cent are stagnating in numeracy while among government schools, about 42 per cent of primary schools are classified as coasting.
Schools with students from families with above-average levels of income and education are the largest group of coasting schools, with 56 per cent coasting in reading, 51 per cent in writing, and 41 per cent in numeracy. By contrast, the largest proportion of improving schools have students from below-average socioeconomic families, with 62 per cent recording improvement in students’ reading, 46 per cent in writing and 48 per cent in numeracy.
Sending your children to private school is NOT about better education with two serious exceptions: phonics and the opportunity to try stuff (music, drama, sport etc.) Private education is about paying to ensure your kids (and yourself) have access to a social cohort that both includes "people like us" and excludes "yobbos" (the definition of "yobbo" is relative to the definition of "people like us"). There is nothing wrong with that. We all want our kids to spend their days surrounded by others with values that reinforce our own.
However... from an education point of view things get very tricky. A narrow definition of "education" limits itself to the 3Rs plus lots of facts(history, science etc.). A wide definition will also ADD to that RAVE: religious and values education plus "extras" (sport, music, drama etc.). The problems arise when the RAVE is pushed without bothering with the 3Rs. "Education" then becomes indoctrination.
For those of you who care it is worth reading up on the Trivium and Quadrivium which was the long standing education system (1,000+ years?) where skills were taught first and then analysis later (if deemed possible, necessary or appropriate). Actual content in this system seems to have been refined with a view to inculcating the capacity to decide, analyse, and sort sh*t from shovel...
The author of this article is correct: who would pay a gardener to simply watch the plants and weeds grow? And... of course low socio-economic schools are going to who most improvement. From nothing to something is far more impressive than good to great. Add to that the belief that once a "competency" is achieved you move onto something else. Once you can hop then you can hop. Time to learn to skip and then to jump... much more likely to learn to skip in the private sector...
As a nation, we keep trying to cure the cancer deep inside by applying soft, scented band-aids to a small lesion on the skin. This was, yet again, abundantly proved in Qld. when the Minister for Education recently noted that, after anadditional $40 million has been spent (read: wasted) over the past ten years, school results have not increased but worsened. Australia has a deep-seated 'mental illness.' Few - especially our leaders - understand what that 'illness' is because it has become part of the national 'psyche'; part of what we as a nation determinedly believe to be 'right', when history has long proved our fondly-held, oh-so-feel-good beliefs to be totally wrong. As evidenced by Australia's ever-worsening education outcomes - not to mention drugs, violence, crime and corruption - feel-good beliefs that ignore or dismiss reality invariably result in very feel-bad consequences.
Primary education has abandoned the hard work and discipline of pedagogy and instead grasped at the straw of appearance and appeasement. Appearance, as in anything that makes my school look progressive, inclusive and hip..appeasement, as in, we don't have those problems here, every child is catered for as an individual and we really can contain our small handful of miscreants.
I rarely see children actually taught anymore..you don't believe me?, spend a day in a class and learn..directed teaching is all but replaced by forests of paper handouts that would be better used to construct paper planes.Children require structure and discipline so that a foundation can be established for more independent learning, particularly in the early years where habits or skill deficiencies can set the pattern for life. Sounds really old fashioned, doesn't it.
Yesterday I saw some work that a year one pupil had attempted..writing skills..practiise between two widely spaced blue lines..the teacher wondered why the child's work was all over the place..with nothing to guide the process, that's what you can expect..perhaps the trendy term 'scaffold' might be applied here in the form of some appropriate guiding lines so that a hapless novice can develop an internal memory of what goes where.
The mis-steps of method apply to all subjects pretty well, with the exception of a teacher of French who I witnessed teaching grammar..formal, directed, disciplined and effective..vive la difference!
I think the quality of teachers is to blame for a lot of this. The universities pump them out, then they find life-long employment in the education system. How about testing teachers' achievements and progress too, and if they don't measure up, then reduce the funding of the institution that produced them.
Better qualified teachers are needed, to challenge the better scoring students to do even better.
It is of course more difficult to significantly lift results of students with an existing higher score!!
Th conclusion regarding private schools not being better schools than public suggests that the author has rejected his own graphs.
Give me a break!
In my experience many teachers do not have the skills to challenge high achieving students and these students are able to coast through schooling. The biggest factor in motivating high achievers to advance their learning is having other high achievers at the school.
So, public funding of elite private schools is shown to have a lower return in terms of raising education standards i.e. there is a better use for the money. So why persist with public funding of such schools? (Presumably some notion of equity - that all families deserve part of the expenditure.)
Furthermore, an international comparison would show that some other countries essentially only have a public school system and have good educations outcomes. And a more inclusive attitude in societies (rather than, say, kids from rich suburbs schooling together, going to uni, and then dominating law, business etc).
But none of the above excuses any barriers put up by Unions (or anyone else) to improving outcomes in public schools.
We are finally getting around to what is important about schools and schooling. It is not about the number of school halls each school has or that there is a computer for every students. It is about student performance and it is about maximising that performance for each and every student to give each student the opportunity to be the best that they can be. The recognition of this is long overdue and it is time to make the changes which will put this into effect.
Illiteracy breds illiteracy and then illiteracy becomes the norm. Have we reached the point of no return. Fixing this trend will not be easy without a huge about face of the Labor Party and Teacher's Union.
Why isn't this more widely known? Surely when each school announces it's top students it should be made to state all levels of student outcomes?
When you consider the millions splashed around with Gonski and the absurd subjects being taught from grade one (!!!) is it really suprising upwards that so many students are floundering - especially when you consider that those same students are entering Uni to become teachers and then they just continue the teaching circle.