“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut
flowers when we should be teaching them to
grow their own plants.” ~ John W. Gardner
On the 3rd December 2019, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released
its latest findings on global student ability. The assessment measured 15-year-olds’ performance
in science, reading, and maths from 79 participating countries. In total, more than 600,000 students
participated with 14,273 students being assessed from 740 Australian schools. The results were
not good. Australia has been slipping in the ranks ever since PISA was first performed
back in 2000. The only good news is that there was a slight uptick in Australian students’
reading ability, but I emphasise the word “slight”. It’s nothing to write home
about.
Australia performed a little bit better than the OECD average in reading and science, but
exactly average when it came to maths. Australian students are certainly years behind the top
performer China. It should be noted, however, that mainland China only included the provinces
of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang — provinces where regional restrictions
are in place. Basically, only wealthier local families can send their children to high school
skewing these results. It would be like only including private grammar schools in Australia
and saying that that represents the average Australian.
Looking at the country ranks in detail, in terms of reading, Australian students did
okay. We’re sitting around the same level as countries like New Zealand, United States,
UK, and Japan, and significantly above the OECD average.
For maths, we’re not doing so well. We’re JUST sitting above the OECD average having
similar levels to countries like Latvia, Iceland, and Russia. Australians performed the equivalent
of more than 3½ years of schooling lower than the top performer China.
In terms of science, the results don’t look too bad. We’re on par with countries like
the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and so on.
However, the findings found that within Australia, there is quite a big disparity. In terms of
socioeconomic status, wealthy Australians are outperforming poorer Australians by almost
three years. That is, a student from a low socioeconomic background is on average three
school years lower than their rich counterparts. The differences in gender are only slight
with girls outperforming boys in reading. However, the differences between states is
quite significant with an almost two-year difference between the top performing states
and the lowest performing ones. We can see here that the top performing state in all
categories is the ACT (no surprises there… thanks politicians!), with the Northern Territory
and Tasmania consistently being the worst performers.
In my opinion, the issue with Australia isn’t its global rank, but rather the educational
disparity within Australia. We’ve allowed the wealthy to have access to a better education,
and that’s not good for Australia. It doesn’t just hurt poor people, but Australia as a
whole, and public policy is to blame. The Australian Federal and State governments are
entirely responsible for diverting funds away from public education and pumping it into
an already wealthy private school sector.
Of course, the political blame game has already begun. Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan
said the PISA results should have “alarm bells ringing”. He said,
“The time has come for us to change direction. My message to the state and territory education
ministers is this: leave the teacher's union talking points at home and be ambitious.”
Opposition party, Labor’s Tanya Plibersek unsurprisingly blames the current leadership.
She said,
“This should be a huge wake-up call for Scott Morrison and the Liberals who've seen
school test scores plummet on their watch.”
To be fair, both major parties have left Australian education in the lurch. Assessment results
have been steadily tracking downwards over the last couple of decades. Maybe instead
of playing the political blame game, we should instead focus on our children’s education
and fix this mess.