The latest OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results should be a wake-up call to everyone associated with education policy in this country. Australia's results are gruesome reading.
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We have dropped so far, compared to other countries, that "powerhouse" competitors like Latvia and Portugal have moved past us in maths, while Slovenia is lapping us in science.
But the news is even worse, because our results have also declined in absolute terms in every discipline tested (science, reading and maths) since starting these tests.
Only half our maths students achieve at a "proficient" standard. One in five can't read at a level where they "need to demonstrate more than the minimal skills expected".
An absolute decline is an absolute scandal. Australian parents and taxpayers have every right to be furious.
We have spent almost half a trillion dollars on schools in the past decade - a massive increase in funding by any measure. Most of the additional funding has been directed by ideologues and vested interests who have spewed utter dribble about nonsense like "21st century learning" and having a "growth mindset" being the key for our education.
We have wasted decades, and so much money. And our kids are paying the price for our folly.
We were told the problem was class sizes being too big and that we needed to train more teachers. So taxpayers stumped up the cash to have more teachers in front of smaller classes, but the result was a decline in teacher quality. Now one in 10 prospective new teachers are unable to pass an incredibly basic literacy and numeracy test.
Is it surprising this led to no improvement in educational outcomes?
We were told schools were drastically underfunded. So again we paid up. We increased spending to well above the OECD average; but since Gonski entered the lexicon in 2010, results have declined in every discipline.
That the research has repeatedly shown little or no connection between the amount of money spent and school results was of little concern to those with a hashtag but no clue.
Perhaps this explains why, in a recent survey conducted by Yougov for the CIS, 88 per cent of parents said their school was at least adequately resourced but only three out of five would send their kid to the same school if they had the choice over again.
We built new buildings, handed out computers, had a digital education revolution, two Gonski reports, and more initiatives to boost participation and performance in STEM than we can count. Well ... more than our students can count, the results suggest.
We took every politically correct, progressive fad we could think of and threw them into the curriculum, regardless of whether they had any evidence supporting them.
Now, woke teenagers are skipping school because "politicians are ignoring climate science". How would the truants know what science says, when 42 per cent of them fell short of the subject's national "proficient" standard?
It's not like this is the first warning. Things have been headed in the wrong direction for some time. Not only have the PISA results almost routinely shown declines in Australia's performance and ranking, but NAPLAN also continues to show poor results.
But it's hard to see this latest catastrophe causing a change in mindset among the vested interests. We need only look at the response to flatlining NAPLAN results to see what is going to happen. Instead of improving schooling, advocates want NAPLAN abolished.
It says everything about modern education that when our test results are bad, people want to abolish the test.
Education policy is bizarrely resistant to evidence-based practice. Practitioners have openly boasted about their ignorance of the science in their discipline; preferring to rely on their personal experience over the evidence.
An absolute decline is an absolute scandal. Australian parents and taxpayers have every right to be furious.
For example, whole language approaches to reading instruction have been discredited, yet instead of being rejected by teachers, they are repackaged as 'balanced literacy' and retained.
Programs like Reading Recovery (RR), whose 2015 evaluation found "in the longer-term, there was no evidence of any positive effects of RR on students' reading performance in year 3" still have supporters in the profession.
Meanwhile those - like my former colleague Dr Jennifer Buckingham - who promote the actual science of learning to read, are subject to baseless smears.
The PISA results for countries like Singapore, Korea and Japan show what we already know: the answer is to demand better. Better discipline in schools. Better training for teachers. Setting better minimum standards for competence.
Unfortunately, education policy is dominated by progressive orthodoxy who think rigorous standards are too stressful on students and unfair.
We have shifted away from the things that work, to the things people wish would work because it suits their ideological predisposition. We have gone from preferring evidence to putting 'personal experience' above all else.
It is not just the teachers' unions - though that is a huge part of the problem. Academics and policy makers are just as ideologically blinkered. It's infuriating to see them flick-pass responsibility for these appalling results onto underfunding, or too much school choice.
Progressives have had both hands on the helm for decades. They are to blame for the ship hitting the rocks.
It is baffling that education policy is so resistant to change, given how badly it is performing. After all, it would be one thing for results to not improve if policy settings were unchanged; but it takes a special kind of failure to get everything you ask for - including a mountain of more money - do worse, and then blame those who took your advice.
Even if the results themselves didn't cause us concern, this attitude alone should make us scared for the future of our kids.
There are few signs that the people who have steered us into this mess have any plan to get us out.
- Simon Cowan is research director at the Centre for Independent Studies.