Illustration: Kerrie Leishman
A lifelong primary teacher talks about a school she worked in as having two eras - first was a prehistoric age that she calls "Before Tess".
Then the school teacher-librarian arrived. "She had an amazing impact on the school," says the retired teacher, Elaine Holman.
"Before Tess arrived children just didn't go to the library at lunch-time. The children began to love going to the library and being washed in Tess's care and enthusiasm.
"BT, children could only borrow one book and they had to have a proper library bag. Tess would fill their arms with books, give them an old plastic bag with the instructions to give them all a try and bring back the ones they didn't want to read.
"When the children returned they were greeted with Tess's interest, good humour and enthusiasm instead of being quizzed and judged. The library began to fill with children playing board games, doing puzzles, using the tape recorders, enjoying it all around tables or sprawled on the floor. The happy, positive and enthusiastic energy was just unheard of BT.
"A big problem arose - there was not enough room in the library. Children had already spilled out into the corridors and stair landings. So a flag system was installed," to manage the crowd, with colour-coded flags signalling a day for each grade.
And Elaine notes the deployment of that important educational aid, the lolly: "Oh, I must not forget those lemon sherbie lollies. Tess had her own idea about who should be the recipient of these rewards. Sometimes it might be for good work, or a happy smile, or being helpful, or good manners or just for being there."
But what did the school librarian do when demand for books outstripped supply? The school budget couldn't keep up. "In her enthusiasm for children and library work Tess would go to the council library and get books by the box full on topics each class was studying.
"She went to the library to select the books in her own time and enlisted the help of teachers with cars to get them back to school." Tess didn't drive.
"The standard of teaching was improved with the children having access to these books. When the children had a project they knew they had their guiding angel waiting for them in the library."
Was this an approach that could only work in a particular school? Was it a one-off? No, says Elaine, because when she and Tess moved to another school, "I watched the same miracle happen there."
Teaching is not just another occupation. For the best teachers, it's a vocation. A calling, not a craft; a passion, not a profession. Teachers like Tess are transformative.
The federal Minister for School Education and long-time frontman for Midnight Oil, Peter Garrett, had some inspirational teachers in his own school years. He recalls "a series of terrific teachers" at his primary school, Sydney's Gordon West public school, and two "inspirational" ones at his high school, Barker College. One was a history teacher and the other, he says, "surprise, surprise, was a music teacher".
This week we saw hard evidence that Australia needs many more inspirational teachers, and that we need the systems to recruit, nurture and hold them. For the first time, Australian primary school pupils' literacy skills were measured against the international benchmark study known as Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. A random sample of 280 schools embracing 6126 year 4 pupils was tested in Australia in late 2010.
This exercise is co-ordinated by a well-regarded Dutch-based outfit, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.
The results shocked many Australian experts. In reading, Australian kids ranked 27th out of 45 nations. About one in four Aussie kids did not meet the acceptable minimum standard. The comparison exposed what Garrett described as "performance problems in every state, in every school sector". He described it as "a massive wake-up call for our educational authorities".
The countries that performed better than Australia? At the top was Hong Kong, then Russia, Finland, Singapore, Northern Ireland, US, Denmark, Croatia, Taipei, Ireland, England, Canada, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Israel, Portugal, Hungary and the Slovak Republic, Austria and Lithuania.
A separate test measured maths and science performance. The performance in this test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies, or TIMS, was also pretty poor.
Australian year 4s rated 18th in maths and 25th in science. But it was not such big news because Australia had participated in this test in the past. The Australian showing was no better and no worse than it had been four years earlier. Indeed, over the 16-year life of the test, Australia's performance was stagnant.
In the same span there were "dramatic improvements in mathematics and science performances in Singapore, Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei [Taiwan], and steady improvements in the US, South Korea and several other countries", points out the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research, Professor Geoff Masters. Hong Kong, today's top performer, was ranked 17th in 2001. And Singapore, today's number four, was 15th a decade ago.
But while the results are genuinely disturbing, they can't really be regarded as shocking. The Gillard government's review of school funding, the Gonski report, stated in its opening: "Over the last decade the performance of Australian students has declined at all levels of achievement, notably at the top end."
No less a figure than Julia Gillard has pointed out in recent years that Australia's educational standing has been in a long, slow decline. And educational decline ultimately will lead to economic decline.
The Australian Industry Group has pointed out that figures from the Bureau of Statistics on adult literacy "suggests that almost 40 per cent of the adult workforce does not have adequate literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills to operate effectively in the workplace".
Today's dunces are tomorrow's dud workers. In a world where the low-income countries are rapidly becoming high-income countries, nations like Australia need increasingly to compete at the top of the value-added economic chain. You don't do that with a national workforce of ignoramuses and mediocrities.
As Gillard has remarked: "To win the economic race, we must first win the education race." She has set Australia the goal of becoming one of the top five educational performers globally by 2025. But, as Masters says, "it is difficult to see how Australia will be in the top five countries by 2025 if we continue on our current path".
In short, Australia's long drift into educational complacency and school dysfunction is a national emergency. Surely we'll need nothing short of a revolution to turn this around.
The opposition's education spokesman, Christopher Pyne, reminded us this week that this was exactly the plan: "Julia Gillard promised nothing short of an Education Revolution in 2007 and now the report card is in - Australian students were beaten by many countries in maths and science, and all other English-speaking countries in reading."
Garrett rejects this as "empty, sterile rhetoric". He points out that the government has made some serious reforms - the first true national testing, the first national curriculum, a program of school building, a program to aid the most disadvantaged schools, and the myschool website. A national plan for school improvement is under discussion with the states.
And then there's the Gonski recommendation to increase funding to schools by $5 billion, which Garrett says is equivalent to $6.5 billion. The key design change in the Gonski plan is that it would build funding for disadvantaged schools into their recurrent funding, instead of the current more ad-hoc approach.
Garrett says that this week's lousy school results "confirm what we are acting on - endemic stasis and decline over a long period". And let's remind ourselves that schools are chiefly a responsibility of state governments.
The federal government has taken up the reform task precisely because the states have been so miserably neglectful. They've put their major reform efforts into cutting class sizes, which has turned out to be, at best, an insufficient condition for improving teaching standards. At worst, it's been a red herring distracting from reforms that are truly necessary.
But while the Gonski plan is widely applauded, it is not yet funded. And we also know that extra money is not a sufficient condition, perhaps not even a necessary one, to fix student performance. If it were, Australian schools would be improving, not falling. School funding rose by an average 8 per cent per student, after inflation, in the four years to 2010.
As the Grattan Institute's Ben Jensen says: "The world's best school systems are rarely the world's biggest spenders. Korea spends much less per student than other education systems, yet achieves far better student performance."
Masters worries that while reform is now generally heading in the right direction, "we haven't really addressed the tough questions on selection of teachers, training of teachers, and the detailed work on minimum acceptable standards for teacher expertise".
Labor plans to go to next year's election with education as one of its key campaign themes. The Gillard government needs to remain keenly focused on the subject. This week, Gillard had nothing to say about the alarming schools results. She devoted her most forceful public statements to pummelling the opposition over the James Ashby and Peter Slipper matter. But Gillard should embrace the new evidence of failing school education as a reinvigoration of her real purpose. She needs to get on with the revolution that Australia so obviously needs.
Because good teaching, ultimately, is done by good teachers. I was lucky. I had an exceptional one. Tess was my mother. Australia's national achievement and economic future can't be left to luck.
Peter Hartcher is the political editor.
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