Over the past 20 years governments have poured billions into the education system, overhauled the national curriculum again and again, reformed the school funding model (or not — but never mind that for now), beefed up teacher training standards, and expounded on the history, maths and reading wars.
But for all the frenetic activity on education policy, our kids keep getting dumber.
How dumb? Well 20 years ago Australia’s 15 year-olds were ranked among the highest in the world in reading, maths and science — since then their performance has slipped so much it’s as if they have missed a year’s schooling. By some measures around 20 per cent of high school kids are functionally illiterate. It won’t surprise you to learn such trends hit disadvantaged students worst of all. In fact, these kids fall further and further behind their more advantaged peers as they move through high school. Hard to imagine a more damning indictment of our education system.
Education expert Ben Jensen has a good idea of what’s gone wrong in our schools; and when I first encountered his diagnosis it had the force of a religious epiphany. Jensen, whose consultancy Learning First advises governments around the world on education reform, reckons the basic problem is we have no idea what’s actually being taught in classrooms. To make matters worse, Jensen says, educators have gone all in for well-intentioned but misguided philosophies such as “individualised learning,” and “meeting kids where they’re at.”
In this podcast we grapple with these big themes writ small in classrooms. (I even sneak in a question about crazy US ideas such as “maths is racist.”) Can we turn things around in our schools? I believe we can; if Federal Education Minister Jason Clare takes heed of Jensen’s refreshingly blunt advice.
Links:
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Curriculum-and-inequality-July-2023.pdf
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/To-lift-standards-we-must-reclaim-the-curriculum-October-2022.pdf (with Nicole Murnane)
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Four-reforms-could-close-the-education-inequality-gap-September-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-lesson-on-how-to-reverse-two-decades-of-failed-education-reforms-August-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)
https://grattan.edu.au/report/catching-up-learning-from-the-best-school-systems-in-east-asia/
And today's lesson is ...