AARE blog

Online courses,fee hikes won’t improve quality of higher education

Changes to higher education,

We need debate around much needed change in higher education. So the prediction by Peter Hartcher in The Sydney Morning Herald recently that the Abbott Government is “about to announce the most dramatic changes to the higher education in decades” is welcome.

Australia needs a big plan for achieving massive educational reform so we can create a workforce skilled for the future.

We cannot continue to educate students for a world that no longer exists. Jobs are moving off shore, others are disappearing. Clearly, Australia can no longer compete on the cost of labour.

So we need to ask big questions:

  • What is our plan to compete on the quality of labour?
  • What kinds of graduates should we be producing for Australia to be competitive on the world stage?
  • What capabilities do we need for the modern economy?
  • Where is the true innovation in education that is needed to support Australia’s future?

New technologies have the potential to change the way we think about education, especially when it comes to 21st century skills.

We should focus on creativity and innovation; on fostering higher levels of critical thinking, problem solving, decision making; collaboration and communication; technological literacy; on being a local and global citizen; and on personal and social responsibility. We also need greater levels of literacy and numeracy.

Presumably fee deregulation is to be part of the so-called dramatic changes, and with that comes more stark competition than we presently experience in higher education.

But what will this type of ‘competition’ do for Australia, its taxpayers, the students and their families? Will it drive the kinds of educational reforms we need to produce graduates equipped with 21st skills?

As I see it private providers (especially those publicly listed) are likely to find the cheapest ways possible to offer Australian Qualification Framework (AQF) compliant courses in order to make the profits their share-holders demand. Their students are therefore likely to encounter mass lectures with smaller group tutorials involving little or no focus on 21st Century skills.  It’s not the ‘mass education’ that’s the problem, it’s the lack of innovation and reform in what, and therefore how, students will learn.

Online lectures, books, websites, open education resources (and from peer-reviewed journals for those enrolled in a formal education system licensed to access them) are already easily accessed, right now, from the Internet, including massive open online courses (MOOCs).

As I’ve said before, any university that can be replaced by a MOOC, should be.

Universities should no longer be primarily about acquiring and disseminating information, but should be focused on the “what you can do with what you know’.

For example:

  • Can you solve problems and propose creative solutions?
  • Can you work in teams across cultures?

There are well established facts about learning via MOOCs in their current form: firstly, the experience of learning in this way is so unattractive that only around 5% of those who enrol actually complete the courses, and secondly, by far the greatest proportion of those who do complete, already have a formal university qualification. Thus it is difficult to see that MOOC providers will get far by “kicking down the doors of local universities and offering high-quality courses at very low cost over the Internet.”

Apart from these dire statistics, the most common approach to learning is via videos of lectures, readings and online tutorials. In other words, using the technology to automate existing approaches to learning and teaching. Hardly the kind of educational innovation we need.

Undoubtedly some universities will double or triple student fees if deregulation of fees is introduced. Will that extra funding result in innovation and educational reform? Highly unlikely. The extra funding probably will be quietly directed towards more research so those institutions can achieve a higher ranking in the international rankings system.

Other higher education institutions will not be in a position to raise fees and hence will struggle to innovate as they compete for already scarce funds.

These universities are highly likely to resort to mass information dissemination teaching methods, attractive because they are inexpensive to run.

So what will competition do for the Australian taxpayers’ $6 billion annual outlay on higher education?

Students attending the universities who increase their fees will get pretty much the same education as students do today, but pay double or triple the cost.  The extra fees might mean their university rises a couple of places in the ranking systems.

Surely, as a nation with a strong higher education industry, we can do better than that.

 

Shirley smallShirley Alexander is Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) where she is Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Vice President (Teaching, Learning & Equity).

Shirley’s long term research agenda has been on the effective use of information and communication technologies in learning in higher education.

Australian schooling’s dirty little secret

Teacher education, Teacher quality,

In 1990 it was called “education’s dirty little secret”. Today it is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, but it often has no name, and is accepted as part of “what we do” in schools.

It is teachers teaching out of their field of qualification.

Many secondary teachers today are expected to teach subjects they are not qualified to teach. It is so prevalent that is has become almost normal, and a subject area that tends to suffer in silence is mathematics.

In Australia, studies have shown that 39% of years 7-10 Australian mathematics classes were taught by out-of-field teachers, with 23% taught by teachers with no tertiary mathematics qualifications at all.

There are programs around that are designed to try to address the problem of out-of-field teaching. The trouble is they are ad hoc and mostly limited to local initiatives at the school, network or regional level.

A Rural Retraining scheme was a Victorian Government initiative designed to help registered teachers gain an extra teaching qualification in a “subject in need”. Initially it was geared towards a range of subject areas, including mathematics and science. However, support for mathematics retraining was the first to be removed because so few teachers applied for places.

We can infer from this disparity between the proportion of out-of-field teachers and lack of willingness to retrain that schools appear to be accepting the status quo of out-of-field teachers, in mathematics especially compared with some other subject areas.

The other trend to note is the high degree of funding currently being allocated to attracting newly qualified science teachers to rural, regional and hard to staff schools. While this is an important and much-needed policy, there are still no funding initiatives to retrain current out-of-field teachers of mathematics or science.

In 1999, the Australian Secondary Principals Association (ASPA) raised the issue of teacher supply and demand and enduring inequities this created in schooling. They called for coordinated policy and action:

The teacher supply issue is a state and territory government responsibility which must be addressed at that level, rather than by an individual school’s creativity and curriculum compromise… Schools where these shortages exist, are deeply concerned by the lack of action of governments and the threat to quality learning of their students. The staffing allocation rules used by various authorities do not adequately address inequities and variations in schools… Differential staffing and teacher supply models are needed to address the inequities in the various schooling systems across Australia.

Fifteen years on, this issue remains an major concern.

We have entered an era of national accreditation of teachers and national curriculum, increased school accountability and movement toward greater school autonomy. There is a need to examine how such policy directions exacerbate the problem.

As I see it there are three ways we can address out-of-field teaching:

  • Reduce the need for out-of-field teaching.
  • Improve the quality of out-of-field teaching.
  • Increase the readiness of teacher graduates to teach out-of-field.

Increasing the supply of science and mathematics teachers is imperative.  We can do this by providing Government assistance to mathematics and science professionals and recent graduates to move into teaching.

School leaders should aim to get the right people to teach science and mathematics in their schools, and make sure the ones they have are properly supported and resourced.

At both the school and policy levels, there needs to be greater support for the re-training of out-of-field teachers. They need funding, time and space to adapt and understand new and emerging teaching approaches. Losing teachers due to stress from teaching out-of-field can be avoided by sympathetic and supportive school governance and leadership regimes.

Some responsibility must fall on teacher education programs to prepare adaptable and flexible teachers. Pre-service teachers should be exposed to the likelihood of teaching out-of-field. They should learn the skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to be adaptable and flexible. They should be exposed to the variety of support mechanisms that can be provided, sought out or constructed by them if they are asked to teach out-of-field.

It is also vital to focus on the development of resilience in pre-service teachers. We need to help them accommodate new and different ways of thinking, challenge their own beliefs, assumptions, values and practices when they are faced with the dilemmas and tensions of teaching, especially when they are faced with teaching out-of-field.

Unless we start to do something about teachers teaching out-of-field, the problems we are already experiencing will only compound.

It is time for us to get “education’s dirty little secret” out into the open and deal with it.

(Dr Colleen Vale from Deakin University contributed to this blog entry.)

DSC_0368 copyLinda Hobbs is a Senior Lecturer in Science Education at Deakin University. For the past seven years she has been interrogating issues relating to teaching out-of-field, such as teacher experiences, the role of teacher education in preparing out-of-field teachers, and policy contexts impacting on teachers and schools . In addition, she is currently Project leader for an Office for Learning and Teaching grant focusing on school-based approaches to preparing primary science teachers.

Pyne’s curriculum review misses the big picture

Curriculum review, ,

Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of South Australia

 

Commissioning a review of the national curriculum and then installing a known critic of that curriculum, Kevin Donnelly, as one of the lead reviewers is like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank – the results are entirely predictable.

It is a self-referential exercise limited by the narrow views of those driving it, judging by the tone of the debate so far.  It could have been so much more.

I have been reading Alain de Botton’s new book, The News, in which he critiques the narrow boundaries of what gets reported in the mainstream press:

In the field of education, it seems ‘normal’ to run stories about class sizes, teachers’ pay, the country’s performance in international league tables and the right balance between the roles of the private and state sectors. But we would risk seeming distinctly odd, even demented, if we asked whether the curriculum actually made sense; whether it really equipped students with the emotional and psychological resources that are central to the pursuit of good lives. 

In Australia, everyone has been to school so everyone has an opinion on education, based on their own experiences. Unfortunately, some people are given the opportunity to express these opinions in the media, where they become reified and elevated in importance.

Kevin Donnelly, for example, is ‘one of Australia’s leading education commentators’ (according to his bio), and gets published in the national press. So he must know what he is talking about, right?

Yet his focus on ‘back to basics’ teaching and sterner disciplinary methods in the classroom diverts the readers’ attention away from the bigger questions:

What is education for?

What do we want for our children?

Is it more important to teach them calculus than how to be a good parent for example?

Christopher Pyne has been to school so also has an opinion, based on what he experienced at St Ignatius College 30 years ago. As Alan Reid pointed out in this blog on April 10, the fact that Pyne is now Education Minister and feels qualified to drive government policy based on his personal opinion is alarmingly interventionist, compared with policy decisions in other areas such as health.

In obsessing about teacher quality, school funding and student performance I suggest that we seem to be missing the point – forgetting that schooling is part of the bigger picture of education. We should recognise that schooling is just one aspect of how our society chooses to guide and shape its children and young people for growing up and participating in society. Family, friends, homelife, environment, industry, media, social media, sport, music, religion – all contribute to shaping young lives.

De Botton’s invitation for us to consider taking a step back to question the whole system of education might be a radical way of seeing the forest instead of just the trees. For example, is it really sensible to institutionalise our children for 12 of the best years of their lives? To make them spend 5 days a week for 40 weeks of the year in a classroom setting? To spend all that time with a cohort of children of the same age but with different backgrounds, learning needs, behavioural styles, parental values? To expect teachers to be able to deliver standardised curriculum in exactly the same way for exactly the same year level in every school in the country?

And comparing the Australian education system with that of Finland, which is fashionable given their successful PISA results, is like comparing apples with oranges. The countries are fundamentally different in the way they educate and employ teachers, fund and govern schools, and embed education in the national psyche.

I have been to Finland and spoken to teachers and principals, who say that while they may be pleased with the outcomes of their schooling system against world comparisons, they are actually more concerned that their children should be happy.

Why don’t we start with this challenging premise:

 an effective curriculum should produce happy children

as we engage in these ongoing debates about education?

 

TOMDr Tom Stehlik is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of South Australia. His research interests include adult learning, student engagement, school governance and communities of practice. He has had a long association with Steiner Education as a parent, educator, researcher, consultant and board member of a Waldorf School. In July 2014 Dr Stehlik will take up an Endeavour Executive Fellowship to study teacher education and schooling in Finland.

History tells us we need the Gonski reforms

School funding, ,

Does the Australian Government want to give all Australian children every opportunity to get the best education?

There is only one answer to that question and it was the guiding principle of the 2011 Review of Funding for Schools.

The review panel, led by David Gonski, sought to cut through the political impasse that has long dogged federal schools policy and deliver long overdue funding reforms.

There is a history to this battle.

Gonski is not the only one who has had a go at trying to change things so that every Australian child has an equal chance at a good education.

A century ago the Victorian director-general of education, Frank Tate, fought hard and long against the political might of private school interests to establish public secondary schooling to matriculation level in Victoria. Even the final 1913 settlement required that no public secondary school could be located where it might competitively disadvantage a private school.

In the early 1970s the Interim Committee of the Schools Commission (Karmel Committee) recommended a needs-based funding regime for public and private schools in response to the Whitlam government’s request to examine the financial needs of schools. The committee cautioned:

‘There is a point beyond which it is not possible to consider policies relating to the private sector without taking into account their possible effects on the public sector whose strength and representativeness should not be diluted . . . As public aid for non-government schools rises, the possibility and even the inevitability of a changed relationship between government and non-government schooling presents itself.’

The senate at the time was hostile to the principles of equity underlying the Karmel report, and so, too, was subsequent the Fraser Government. This led to escalating funding for private schools and consequential residualisation of public schools – dynamics that became ever more difficult to turn around. The evidence for these two intimately connected trends, foreseen by the Karmel Committee, includes facts of funding and indicators of residualisation.

The Karmel Committee recommended that 70% of federal schools funding go to public schools, with those schools receiving on a per student basis around 70% that received by private schools, which took account of existing state and private levels of funding. The actual initial allocation to private schools was increased as the bills passed through Parliament, and over the following four decades the per student differential in funding has increased.

For the 2013-14 financial year, federal funding for each private school student averages more than three and a half times the amount allocated for each public school student.

Changes in enrolment share and the social background of students provide stark evidence for the underlying process of the residualisation of public schools.

From 1976 to 2013, the share of all school enrolments in public schools fell from 79% to 64%, and thus the share in private schools rose from 21% to 36%. Over the same period the concentration of low SES students increased in public schools and declined in private schools.

Through the 1970s and 1980s the proportions of low SES and high SES students were much the same in the public and private sectors (though there were, and remain, differences within sectors, largely based on location and academic selectivity in the public sector, and fee levels in the private sector).

This initial similarity between public and private sectors in overall social mix progressively changed over the decades.

In 2011 there were twice as many low SES students as high SES students in public schools, and around twice as many high SES students as low SES students in private schools.

Schools attended by low SES students (now overwhelmingly public schools) face many problems.

Some are documented by the OECD in its detailed analysis of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. For example, in Australia, more than any other OECD country, teacher shortages are concentrated in schools with a large proportion of low SES students. The disadvantages of the schools compound the disadvantages of the individual low SES students.

David Gonski and his fellow reviewers sought to cut through the intractable barriers to equity in schooling by recommending a largely ‘sector-blind’ funding system that coordinated federal and state funding for both public and private schools and targeted substantial extra funding at low SES and other schools with demonstrable needs – schools where extra funding would make a great difference.

Under the Gonski reforms no school would lose funding.

The reviewers, like the OECD recognised that improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students benefits not only them and their communities, but the whole society – well into the future.

Two of the OECD’s five recommendations for tackling system level policies that hinder equity in education are especially relevant to Australia:

‘Manage school choice to avoid segregation and increased inequities’

‘Make funding strategies responsive to students’ and schools’ needs’

While managing school choice has been difficult for Australian governments since the 1970s, funding that is responsive to students’ and schools’ needs is more politically viable, if fiscally difficult. Thus both Labor and the Coalition committed to the implementation of funding based on the Gonski recommendations at the 2013 election.

The Coalition’s commitment has been shaky, both before and since the election, and it has made no commitment beyond the first four years, when the significant funds that will make a difference would start to flow. Even for those first four years, it appears to be walking away from a commitment to direct additional funds to the schools that need it. As Jim McMorrow put it in January this year:

Failure to implement the comprehensive reforms put forward by the Gonski panel and embedded in the architecture of the Australian Education Act will …  mean missing the once in a generation opportunity provided by the Gonski review to settle one of the country’s most intractable and divisive areas of public policy.

If the Australian Government truly does want to give all Australian children every opportunity to get the best education it should fully implement the Gonski reforms.

BarbPreston-BW-PhotoBarbara Preston is an independent researcher and policy consultant, currently undertaking doctoral studies at the University of Canberra on supply and demand forecasting for the teaching and nursing professions. She has been researching a wide range of education matters since the 1970s – as a teacher union research officer, public servant, and, since the early 1990s, consultant to the Australian Council of Deans of Education and many other organisations. Her research interests include teacher attraction and retention, the nature of the teaching profession, the professional practice of teaching, and schools policy and social justice.

Barbara Preston’s website

Decisions about teaching methods should be made by educators not politicians

Education policy, Teacher education, Teacher quality, Teachers' work, ,

Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of South Australia

One of the chilling features of the Federal Government’s education policy is its obvious intention to tell teachers how they should teach.

Until now governments have stopped short of dictating how teachers should teach, on the assumption that these are professional decisions that are best made by educators armed with the technical expertise, and knowledge of their students and their learning context.

No longer. It is clear that this government wants to follow teachers into the classroom and direct their practice. How so?

Let’s start with one of what Minister Pyne calls his ‘four policy pillars’ – quality teachers. On the surface this would appear to be a reasonable policy goal. Who could disagree that all our students deserve quality teachers?  But scratch beneath the surface and you will find some worrying policy intentions.

The first is the rationale behind the call for ‘quality teachers’. One of the features of the education debate over the past few years has been commentators and politicians confidently pronouncing on educational matters about which they have little knowledge or understanding. This is usually preceded by a recitation of the bleeding obvious, the most well-known being the platitude that ‘research demonstrates that the quality of the teacher is the most important in-school factor which promotes student learning’. If you say that seriously enough, it can sound quite profound.

Of course, once you have established this earth shattering revelation it is but a small step to making a number of other claims. The most prominent of these is to take the quality of the teacher as an independent variable, and then dismiss as irrelevant such matters as class size, teaching resources and factors of educational disadvantage.

Once this is done it is possible to claim that all the money spent on these peripheral matters has resulted in reduced learning outcomes, and hey-presto, you have an educational justification for reducing expenditure.  It is not surprising that Minister Pyne finds this an attractive thesis.

The problem is that it is nonsense. It is the interrelationship of the variables in the context of the learning which is important. They cannot sensibly be separated out in this way.

But having isolated teacher quality, the government is able to focus on those strategies which it claims will enhance it. This demands a view of what good teaching looks like – something Minister Pyne has not been shy to articulate.

In an interview with the Minister on November 28 last year, Alan Jones asked:

… Now you’ve got kids and you know that the way they’re being taught in the classroom is not the way you were taught and it’s not better than the way you were taught,

to which Minister Pyne replied: Well we’ve said all along Alan that we want to return to more orthodox teaching methods….

Then, after being sworn in as Minister he reflected that:

My instincts tell me that a back-to-basics approach to education is what the country is looking for, what parents feel comfortable about.

In these examples we have a lawyer, turned politician, suggesting that education policy should take us back to an earlier era on the basis of his intuition, the comfort level of parents, and how he was taught many years ago.

Since then, the Minister has fleshed out his vision. It involves going back to teacher-centred methods of teaching with an emphasis on ‘direct’ or ‘explicit’ instruction – both models based on the theory that learning is telling children things, getting them to remember things, and then having them reproduce what they have been told. This fits with his narrow view of curriculum as being largely about facts.

Now if this was just a personal view I guess there would be no harm done. But unfortunately there are signs that Minister Pyne wants to ensure that such approaches to teaching become the norm in Australian education.

A favourite target has been teacher education, and it is clear that the current review into teacher education is one of the vehicles selected to carry his version of how teachers should teach.

My view is that directive approaches to teaching have a place in any classroom, but they should not be dominant. If the curriculum aims to develop young people to be critical, creative, empathetic and inquiring, then there is an important, indeed central, place for process models of teaching which foster the capacity of students to learn how to learn.

With any single cohort of students, teachers will use a number of teaching models ranging from teacher-centred to student centred  as they are needed. Teachers must have the capacity to adjust programs to suit the needs and interests of their students, to assess student learning outcomes, and work with their peers to investigate issues, problems and dilemmas in their teaching.

And yet the Minister’s excursions into teaching practice never mention this. He and his acolytes focus solely on direct and explicit teaching methods, and ignore the fact that it is the professional responsibility of the teacher to select the balance of teaching approaches needed for the students in her/his care.

If we want to prepare students for the challenges of this century, education policy should focus on providing the conditions within which quality teaching can flourish, not seek to tell teachers how to teach.

An approach which values teachers and enables them to professionally develop throughout their careers is far more likely to result in quality teaching than one which demeans their professionalism.

Educators don’t need their Minister to be making decisions for them about how they should teach, any more than surgeons need the Health Minister to be telling them how they should operate.

 

alanreid-1 copyProfessor Alan Reid AM is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of South Australia. His research interests include education policy, curriculum change, social justice and education, and the history and politics of public education. He has published widely in these areas and gives many talks and papers to professional groups, nationally and internationally. Alan presented the Radford Lecture at the AARE annual conference in December 2012.