That is not what I had in mind; the initial idea was to pull together some threads of thinking developed over a decade or so. Certainly I began with a set against what governments of all persuasions had been saying and doing about schools since the Howard years, an approach driven with utter conviction by the Rudd/Gillard governments in their “education revolution” (with the sole but compelling exception of Gonski). But as I dug out and for the first time really focused on a mass of evidence about how things had been going, I got more than I’d bargained for.

I was not shocked, exactly, but taken aback by the consistency of the picture over a wide field and across many years: Australian schooling has been on the slide for two decades, is still on the slide and is showing no signs of turning around.

That conclusion was reinforced and expanded in scope late in the piece when I realised at last that much-publicised difficulties of a behavioural and emotional kind (“classroom disruption,” “school refusal,” early leaving, bullying, lack of “engagement,” problems of “wellbeing”) are even more marked, fundamental and significant than the cognitive shortcomings on which much of the evidence dwells. They suggest that schooling isn’t working, and that it isn’t working because what children and young people experience there is badly out of kilter with what they experience elsewhere.

There was more to come as I turned to the obvious question: why? Why didn’t an agenda prosecuted with exceptional vigour by exceptionally capable political leaders deliver what it promised, let alone do what really needed doing? There is nothing inherently wrong in the big arguments used to make schools sit up straight and do as they were told — choice, equality, “effective” teaching, and the duty owed by publicly funded schools to the wider society, including its economy. All can be constructive, inspiring even. But not the versions that came to dominate official minds.

Then came the third and final occasion for a sinking feeling: how and by whom could the slide be arrested and reversed? As the straightening agenda expanded and grew in confidence, the system of governance — already limited to doing what could be done in bits and pieces within three-year election cycles — became more complex and less capable. When the Productivity Commission looked at the problem it found that key elements of the national reform agenda had been “stalled” for thirteen years, and that the things talked about at national HQ could seem “remote” from the “lived experience” of teachers and school leaders. There is now no entity, national or other, no government, state/territory or federal, and no stakeholder or combination of stakeholders with a span of responsibility and authority and a relationship between brain and body close enough to conceive and drive change of the kind and scale required.

There is another side to this ledger, however. I was not the only or first to be dismayed at how things were playing out. Prominent veterans Brian Caldwell and Alan Reid (both former deans of education) conclude that “Australian schools have hit the wall” (Caldwell) and need “a major overhaul” (Reid). A former NSW education minister, Verity Firth, argues that the time has come for structural reform rather than more of the same. Her Western Australian counterpart (and former premier and Gonski panel member) Carmen Lawrence rages against the long tail, rising segregation, pathetically narrow performance measures, the failure of new school planning, “deeply disturbing” inequities, and “huge” differences in resourcing and opportunity. Barry McGaw, former chief executive of ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and former head of education at the OECD, famously careful in his pronouncements, says bluntly that quality is declining, inequity is high, and the system is “resistant to reform”; his successor at the ACER, Geoff Masters, says “deep reforms” are “urgently required.”

All this comes amid a flurry of books about the “tyranny of merit” or “threats to egalitarian schooling,” books assaulting policy “that is taking us backwards” or calling for “reimagining” or “revolution” or “transformation” or a “ground-up rethink” of what “learning systems” are needed to equip students for “societal challenges we can’t yet imagine.”

And it’s not just policy wonks and the kinds of people who write books. Others trying to find a way through the maze include some actually giving life to the idea often given lip service by the powers-that-be: that all young people will become “confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners and active and informed members of community.” Now, for the first time, breakthroughs in the rigorous assessment of learning and growth are making it possible for schools to keep doing some of the important things they have long done and to do important new things as well, and, what’s more, to do it for everyone: to provide twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years across the board.

So the nub of the answer to the question posed in the book’s subtitle — can schooling be reformed? — is yes, but it’s a very big ask, and schools can’t do it by themselves. It requires a reorganisation or “restructuring” of the system of governance; of the sector system, government, independent and Catholic; and above all of the daily work of students and teachers.

That in turn requires a very different way of thinking about schools and reform: more incremental reform, yes, but within a big, long-term strategy for structural change; equality in schooling rather than through it; more fraternity as well as more equality and liberty; more choice, but made more equally available; sectors, yes, but not organised so that two feed off the third; realising that schools, like students and teachers, need space and support to find their own way within a negotiated framework; accepting that schools can contribute to prosperity, but not by aiming at it; and the really big one, focusing not on teaching, effective or otherwise, but on the organisation of the production of learning and growth by its core workforce, the students.

Thinking needs to be more politically capable and inspiring as well as enlarging in spirit, able to stimulate and guide the kind of top-down-bottom-up popular movement briefly seen in the “I Give a Gonski” campaign (and on a very much larger scale in the distant but formative tumults of the 1960s and early 1970s).

The case for such a big and risky rests on necessity (current and piecemeal reforms can’t do what needs to be done) and the fact that it really matters, not in a life-and-death way but in a hard-to-pin-down, universal, lasting way. •

Unbeaching the Whale is published by Inside Story in association with the Centre for Strategic Education and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

The post Unbeaching the whale: the book appeared first on Inside Story.

By lunchtime on the first day we were in Melrose, a pretty town tucked up against Mount Remarkable in the lower Flinders Ranges. Lunch was a sandwich in the municipal park, and in the park was a billboard. “Paradise Square,” it announced, perhaps with dry humour. “The following is a list of known burials that took place here in the Old Melrose Cemetery between 1846 and 1872.”

And there they were, scores of names in alpha order, each with date and age of death, and a crisp descriptor. NOTT, Thomas Freedman, a surveyor of Melrose, died aged sixty-five on 5.12.1865. NOTT, Mildred, a widow of Melrose, followed her husband on 12.11.1869, aged fifty-five. Jesse Jones, a bushman of Melrose, went aged fifty in 1861. William Jones, storekeeper, went later (1868) but younger (thirty-four).

The dead of Melrose included carpenters, shepherds, a hawker, carriers and teamsters, a corporal of police, a bailiff, a surgeon, all men. The women were daughters, mothers, wives, widows. Then there were the children, so many children, aged three months or six weeks, or five years or nine years, an “unnamed son of Richard Saunders” who died on 3.1.1863 after just four hours of life. It was a touching record of another age.

In a reverie as I read the names, the dates, the lives summed up in a few numerals and a word or a phrase, I struggled to recognise a feeling that refused to surface. And then, it did: where are the Aboriginal dead? The first of the burials in the Old Melrose Cemetery was in 1846, just ten years after the colony of South Australia was declared in Adelaide, 430 kilometres south of here. Melrose in 1846 would have been on the frontier. Where were the Aboriginal dead?

It was the same in Quorn, less than an hour up the road. Lots of info about the Ghan and the movies that had been made in the district but nothing about Aboriginal people — who they were or how they fared when the inexorable frontier arrived. Beltana, a scattering of houses and ruins further on, dwelt on its overland telegraph station, long since passed from use. Nothing about the Aboriginal people there either.

I’d begun to take photos of the many markers of the past — the monuments, the plaques, the information boards, the billboards and museums — and to puzzle over them. What was going on? Some of what was going on was obvious. “History” was a boom industry fed by tourism. Melrose announced itself as “historic,” chiefly on the ground that it had been base camp for John McDouall Stuart on his many attempts to cross the continent from south to north and back again. Quorn was “historic” because on the old line it used to be the last stop for the Ghan before it headed out into the desert for Alice Springs, a couple of days away. Beltana was “historic” by virtue of its telegraph station and by being not much more than a collection of ruins. The old road, which followed the old railway line that followed the old Overland Telegraph Line that followed Stuart’s epic plod, was itself historic. It was now “The Old Ghan Heritage Trail.”

The first of these many markers of History had been installed in the 1960s but most were of more recent date. They were about an implied “us,” our Pioneers, our Settlers, our Explorers, our feats of endurance, engineering, discovery. This was winners’ history. Where were the losers?

The losers made their first appearance near Lake Eyre, 400-odd kilometres on from Melrose. An info board there detailed the many traditional and contemporary uses of ochre, mined nearby. This was the equal and opposite of the markers in which Aboriginal people didn’t appear; there was no mention of us. Neither the markers about us nor the markers about them reported when or where or what happened when we encountered them, and they us. The ochre info board and many to follow did a jump cut: one moment we’re in Traditional Times, the next, in the present. How did they get from then to now? Just don’t mention the war.

That remained the overwhelming rule for a thousand kilometres or more, although there were exceptions: reports of the terror provoked by the huge four-legged, hard-footed animals that appeared without warning in the 1860s, references to the disruption of Indigenous land “since the Europeans first permanently arrived/invaded,” info boards about police operations “to control cattle spearing by Aborigines on newly established pastoral properties,” an info board that dispensed with evasions about “arrival/invasion” and just called the spade a spade, even an angry denunciation of the “transnationals and colonialist governments… defying the natural order of things in their quest for material wealth.”

I photographed every one of these many markers and kept on puzzling. Eventually I realised what should have been obvious: the history wars then raging in newspapers and scholarly articles and books and on the airwaves had been going on out here for decades. We’d won the country and then set out to win the story as well. The struggle over what the story would and would not tell was as much a part of the story as the events themselves.

By the time I reached Tennant Creek, a couple of weeks after lunch in Paradise Square, the telling of the story had been added to my list of things to find out about. Eventually, it worked its way to the top.

I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted to not go back. I didn’t like it when we lived there and ached to leave, despite the fact that it was a kind of kids’ paradise. We’d thread our way through the spinifex to old mine shafts and chuck beer bottles down to see how deep they were, or lie on our backs inside the fence around the aerodrome and scare ourselves stupid as the DC-3, feeling for the runway, roared over us just a few feet above.

Out the back of our place was the Works and Housing depot, surrounded by piles of junk from the war, then only seven years away, including, inexplicably, an old Rolls-Royce limo complete with a screened-off passenger compartment and a speaking tube through which we’d issue instructions in what we took to be toffy tones. There were topknot pigeons to be shot at with air rifles, and old tins and jars to be blown up with miners’ lamp carbide.

We stood at the dam behind the pub where the night before a bloke had bet he could swim across, but drowned, and we pedalled out to the bend in the Peko Road where Mr Archer had killed himself when he rolled his Fargo ute. We swam in the waterhole under red gums at Seven Mile, and every Saturday night there were the pictures at the open-air theatre, Westerns mostly, in my memory anyway.

Sometimes even a kid could see the magic in the desert, the sunsets, the fresh and vivid world after rain, the brilliant stars that would light our way home after the pictures. But mostly it wasn’t like that at all, just the blinding light that flattened and bleached, and the heat, and the incessant moaning of the wind and the ugly cawing of the crows.

I now suspect that in developing something close to loathing for Tennant, I had been taking my mother’s part. She suffered in the heat and despaired at the red-brown dust that was forever blowing through the flyscreened verandas onto furniture, floors, ledges, shelves, everywhere. She became anaemic, teary and homesick. She missed her family and the soft green Adelaide Hills where they worked their orchards and market gardens, and where she’d grown up, and she missed her eldest son, who’d been sent to Alice Springs for high school. She wanted to leave, and so did I, but couldn’t. She fretted that her husband would apply for a transfer rather than wait for another promotion, and it would be her fault.

Her husband, my father, was in his element. For fifteen years he’d been a teacher. Now he was the head teacher, a member of Tennant’s public service elite. Our house was one of five or six identical government houses lined up along with the police station, the post office and the school at the southern end of town. At the other end were two general stores, the bakery-cum-cafe, the cool-drink factory, the picture theatre, and the pubs, the Goldfields and the Tennant.

It was only half a mile or so to the other end of town, and we went down there just about every day. We’d ride our bikes along the narrow bitumen strip between expanses of gravelly red dirt — the Alice–Darwin highway that doubled as Tennant’s main street, lined by dusty shanties with stamped earthen floors and push-out galvanised-iron windows, which looked as though they had slumped in the heat.

I’d visit Mum at the general store where she worked behind the counter or go to mates’ places or ride past the stinky din of the front bar of the pub and see inside as the door swung open or just hang around. It was wholly familiar, but mysterious. We knew that this was the real Tennant to which teetotal public service blow-ins had no access, but we caught glimpses and heard echoes in the stories Tennant told about itself.

These were the stories we told back in Adelaide three years later as reports from another planet: stories about gold that went missing after a couple of fellas came up on the Tuesday plane and went back down again on Wednesday, about cattle rustling or bar-room brawls, about mysterious deaths and fortunes won and lost, and of course the one about how Tennant Creek the town was seven miles south of Tennant Creek the creek because that’s where the beer truck had broken down.

To these we added stories of our own about a hundred days in a row over the one hundred mark, about the dust storms and the weekly bath in a few inches of increasingly brown water, about a diet strong on meat but light on fruit and veg, about the Barcoo Rot and the conjunctivitis from the diet and the flies, about Dad asking the police sergeant whether bush turkeys were protected and being told that they were and how to cook them, and about the New Year’s Day when Danny Brookes’s Rolls-Royce limo — he’d tracked down the owner and bought it for sixty quid, apparently — trundled past our place, draped with men and women in various states of undress, still carousing, did a stately U-turn then headed back to the other end of town.

What I couldn’t understand then was that we had returned from the frontier, the place that all of Australia was at one time or another. Some of it still is.

We’d hardly arrived in Tennant before we found out about the kids from the mission. We saw them every Saturday night at the open-air pictures. We all sat in a deckchair sort of arrangement, rows and rows of long horizontal poles with canvas strips slung between them. It paid to get there early because the canvas strips, permanently exposed to the elements, often ripped to cheers and whistles in the middle of a film, and the strips got shorter and tauter every time they were repaired.

Anyway, we’d all be settled under our blankets against the cold desert nights and waiting for “God Save the Queen” when the kids from the mission would file in between us and the screen, crossing to the far side to the benches reserved for them. After the pictures they’d climb onto the mission truck and head off up the road into the darkness while we walked home under that vast, glittering sky, in the other direction.

Apart from Saturday nights you could never tell when you might see them. Sometimes there was a Black tracker at the back of the police station. Once I saw four or five Aborigines a bit of a distance out in the spinifex that stretched away from our back fence to a distant horizon. I got close enough to see them squatting in the sandy dirt behind a low humpy, playing cards. Then one day they were gone. Sometimes when I visited Mum at the general store there would be several old Aboriginal men sitting, cross-legged, on the veranda. Perhaps it was them I saw one day on a truck rigged up to carry cattle, the mission truck I suppose. They were in army greatcoats, standing motionless and silent as the truck went slowly past.

There was a sports day at the creek. We all drove out from the town and they came down from the mission. We spread ourselves under the gums by the waterhole. They were across the other side of a dusty clearing where the races were run, adults as well as children. We were invited to Sunday lunch at Banka Banka, the nearest station to Tennant Creek. Seated at a long table, we were served by Aboriginal women who padded silently across the cool concrete floor.

One September holidays Dad loaded up his single-spinner V8 Ford Custom with camping gear and off we went to Darwin, where we saw the wrecks in the harbour and neat rows of bullet holes in the walls of the old post office, and gawked at the Aborigines who hung around the back streets. They were really black, we observed, not just dark like ours.

On the way back we stayed a night at the Mataranka Station homestead, already operating as a guest house. We swam in the warm bubbling spring at the head of the Roper River, clear as crystal. In the morning, at breakfast, the room was dominated by a noisy group a couple of tables away. They’re making a film, Dad told us. Among them, quite still, and very beautiful, was a young Aboriginal woman.

These were encounters as in a tableau. So far as I can recall I never spoke to any of these Aborigines, nor they to me. The only exceptions to this rule, and even more puzzling because of it, were three Aboriginal kids at school, the brothers Roy, Rex and Rennie Hare. How come they lived in the town and not out on the mission? Was it because they weren’t real Aborigines? Their father, Mr Hare, was the nightsoil man who collected the tubs slopping with shit and phenol and sodden strips of newspaper from the back of the drop dunnies. Mr Hare was white, but Roy, Rex and Rennie’s mother was Aboriginal. The Hares lived in one of those tin shanties, the very last one right up the other end of town.

The Aborigines were nearly invisible yet somehow always there somewhere; sometimes referred to, even discussed, but never explained. Our Grade VI Social Studies text recorded the feats of John McDouall Stuart, whose explorations prepared the way for the Overland Telegraph Line, which I could see just by looking out the schoolroom window.

I was in awe of Stuart. How could he have walked all that way from Adelaide? More than a thousand miles! Five times! I designed a kind of palanquin supported by poles carried by a horse at each corner that he could have used to stroll along in permanent shade. The Social Studies textbook told us about Stuart’s encounter with fierce Aborigines just a bit further on from Tennant Creek the creek. When we crossed Attack Creek at the beginning of our big camping trip to Darwin, there was a small thrill of excitement. Shots were fired, and spears thrown, here!

 The space between that day in June 1860 and ours was filled by a vague sense of a vanished world. On one of our Sunday drives along bush tracks, we passed close to the bluffs of the gap in the range just north of the town. That’s Gins’ Lookout, Mum said, pointing to one of the bluffs. That’s where the “lubras” used to keep a lookout for the men coming back from the hunt. She told us that one of the old men who sat on the veranda of the general store was their king. Such a dignified old man, she said.

In the early 1960s I went to uni in Adelaide, to what was then generally regarded as the hottest history department in the country. In four years my cohort did no Australian history at all, let alone the history of relations between black and white. It was the fag end of the mental world of the Grade VI Social Studies textbook.

Elsewhere on campus, however, were signs of what was to come, including meetings and protests in support of “rights for Aborigines.” Scrappy little events like the two or three I went to turned into an uproar that subsequently rose and fell but never really went away — a freedom ride, a tent embassy, speeches and tracts and posters beyond counting, strikes, investigations, legislation and litigation, movies, books and docos, then Mabo, a semi-official accusation of genocide, and the ferocious history wars. All that provided the means by which people of my generation and demographic learned what we hadn’t been told and unlearned some of what we had.

For reasons that I can’t really explain but suspect don’t do me much credit, it was a long time before I started to connect all that national uproar with the one time and place at which my life had intersected so directly with the lives of Aboriginal people — and the people who kept them out on the mission, over to one side at the movies, out of our school and town, out of mind.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t know; I hadn’t realised how much I didn’t know. Thanks to all those Westerns, I could reel off a long list of “Indian” tribes, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, the Apache and the rest, but I did not even know that we had been living among the Warumungu and the Warlpiri. I didn’t know what the “mission” was or how the Warumungu and the Warlpiri got to be there or even where it was.

I began finding out, partly out of embarrassment but also out of curiosity. Who were they? Where on earth had a full-on policed and regulated apartheid regime come from? Where did it go? The more I read, the more there was to know and the more I wanted to know it.

That was a puzzle in itself. After a pretty slow start, why the obsession? No doubt it was the usual thing — the further you get from childhood the more fascinating it becomes — but it wasn’t just that. I was being carried along by a deep emotional undertow. The Aboriginal people and their relationship with the rest of us have become sites of proxy political warfare and synthetic emotions, but there’s real stuff there too, ranging from just feeling bad (in my case, whenever I think about those kids crossing in front of the screen at the Pioneer Picture Theatre) through to how everyone felt when Cathy Freeman won the big race. Against any expectation and all intentions, and with very mixed feelings, I decided to go back.

It was partly just a standard grey nomad kind of thing to do, and a chance to revisit what had been, after all, a burst of the vivid in an otherwise sepia-toned boyhood, but there were offsets too — the old aversions and a new one, the fact that Tennant had turned into Australia’s most notoriously dysfunctional town, something I had no wish to see. But I did want to find out where the Tennant Creek I’d lived in had come from, and gone, and thought (correctly, as it turned out) that I couldn’t unless I went there.

So, I set out for Tennant Creek to find out about relations between two racial groups in that particular field of life but didn’t get far — to Paradise Square in Melrose, at lunchtime on Day One to be exact — before there was something else to find out about: how the story of those relations had been told, and not told.

All the stories that the Tennant Creek of my boyhood had told about itself, and the stories we took back to tell our uncles and aunts and grandparents, they weren’t Tennant’s big story at all. By the time I’d made the last of three trips back to Tennant I’d learned that the struggles over whether and how to tell Tennant’s story were for a century and a half Australia’s struggles writ small, and intense. I found that among the protagonists were several of Australia’s intellectual luminaries and that not once but twice poor beaten-down smashed-up Tennant Creek had managed to make it onto the national stage, not in a starring role but in a big enough part to earn a place in the credits. Tennant, with and like Australia, had tried to tell the story. •

This is an edited extract from Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Black Inc., 2022). For a 20 per cent discount, follow this link and use the discount code INSIDE at checkout.

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First, how are the schools going? In reading, writing and numeracy, as tested for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, NAPLAN reveals some ups and some downs since 2008, but no significant improvement. In science and maths, tested internationally by PISA and TIMSS, Australia is a bit above the middle of the OECD pack, which doesn’t sound too bad until we learn that this represents one in five fifteen-year-olds failing to reach “proficiency” in science, and one in four in maths.

Overall, a quarter of kids leave school without certification of any kind, and the much-discussed “long tail” of attainment persists. Many students don’t reach the minimum standard, and often fail to do so year after year. Kids who start behind typically get further behind. For Indigenous students it’s worse (although things are at least getting better from a very low base). Other sources of “disadvantage” — “geolocational,” disability, language background, and living in out-of-home care — are also of concern.

If school “performance” is a worry, so too is how students feel at and about school. A 2018 survey found that nearly one in three fifteen-year-old students didn’t feel they belonged at school, and more than one in four reported feeling like an outsider. When data of this kind are fed into a Sense of Belonging Index, Australia scores below the 2018 OECD average, and we’ve been sliding since 2003. On the related issue of wellbeing, the commission reports a 2014 survey (the most recent available) as finding that one in five students between the ages of eleven and seventeen had experienced high levels of psychological distress, and one in seven had had an episode of mental illness during the year. The clear implication is that schools aren’t doing enough to help.

Teachers aren’t happy either. They’re shouldering the load, the commission says, and too much of the load isn’t actual teaching. Teachers considering leaving often cite the workload and/or a wish to achieve “a better work–life balance” as reasons. Also cited: “challenges with student behaviour” (26 per cent) and “not enjoying the work” (21 per cent). A mere 2 per cent thought they weren’t suited to teaching.

The second story concerns the National School Reform Agreement, or NSRA. What even is it, as First Dog might say? It is, the commission says, an agreement by nine governments that the pursuit of a “high-quality and equitable education for all students” can be delivered by “three reform directions” and three target outcomes to be “progressed” through “national and state-specific initiatives,” assessed against “seven performance indicators,” and reported to the community in the interests of “transparency” and “confidence.”

So many moving parts! So many devices! So many players! In case the description alone doesn’t make the point, the commission hammers it home: “policy discussions” convened under the NSRA can be “remote” from “the lived experience of teachers and school leaders” (i.e. it’s a talkfest); some initiatives under the agreement have been delivered but others are “stalled”; two of the three “stalled” initiatives — both focused on tracking student progress and tailoring teaching accordingly — “are already thirteen years in the making”; and most of the delivered initiatives are “enablers” rather than rubber on the road.

All in all, the NSRA’s various initiatives are likely to have had “little impact” on student achievement. The next intergovernmental agreement should “focus on a small number of reforms” (i.e. the “reforms” have been all over the shop); initiatives should be limited to those that might benefit from “coordination” and avoid “a one size fits all” approach (i.e. agreements thus far have hindered more than helped); milestones should be clear (i.e. no one knows where we’re up to); and “thorny issues” will need to be “resolved” (i.e. they’ve been ducked).

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the NSRA has not just failed to work but, for fundamental, structural reasons, can’t work, and never will.

The problem began with the Commonwealth’s move into schooling in the “state aid” election of 1963. It was compounded by Whitlam and his Karmel Report and then by the Rudd and Gillard governments when they dollied up Canberra’s imperialism as a “national approach” complete with a National School Reform Agreement.

For the whole of this sixty-year period, the funding, regulation and governance of the Australian school system has fallen between two stools, neither national nor local. It can’t move forward and turn into a genuinely national system because neither the Constitution nor the states/territories will let it.

The two levels of government, the state/territory and the federal, work less with each other than against each other. The NSRA is really neither national nor an agreement; it is a federal coercion arising from federal dollars. As Julia Gillard made clear in 2008 when she filled out some of the detail of the beefed-up Commonwealth role, “reporting on performance will be a requirement of any new school funding agreement.” What the Productivity Commission sees as failures of program design and simple fecklessness are better understood as artful foot-dragging by press-ganged sailors on a rudderless ship.

If schooling can never move on to become coherently national then where can it go? There is really only one alternative: back to the future. Schooling will have to be returned whence it came, to the states and territories. If some or all of them want to get together for whatever purpose from time to time, then that would be up to them, not to the only Australian government that doesn’t actually run schools.

Is that the commission’s conclusion, that the feds should get out of schooling? Its way of saying the unsayable? Perhaps, but probably not. For one thing, the commission is itself a part of the Canberra machine. For another, its idea of “reform” is indistinguishable from that pursued by the Commonwealth.

The Productivity Commission says it is taking an interest in schools because it wants them to be more productive. They will then help, in turn, to make the economy more productive.

How to do that? Well, the commission is staffed by economists, so their first recourse is to human capital theory. Developed at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, human capital theory addressed a puzzle: why was the US economy so much more productive than most? The first answer: because its relatively huge education system generated a copious supply of educated labour, otherwise known as “human capital.” How does education do that? What is the missing link? The answer was found in the labour market, where employers pay more for educated labour because it is more productive.

Human capital theory went global in the early 1960s after it was picked up and promulgated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (emphasis added). It arrived in Australia in 1964 via the Martin report on tertiary education — the first few pages of which, by the way, offer a compelling insight into the theory and its impact.

In the almost seventy years since then, human capital theory has been rejected outright by some and revised and refined by many others, none of which seems to have reached the commission. Education, it declares, is the source of no less than a fifth of labour productivity growth in recent years “and will become increasingly important in maintaining future growth.” Moreover, education “benefits both individuals and society” — by boosting earnings, increasing fulfilment, improving health outcomes, reducing crime, and lifting social and economic mobility.

All that talk about “benefits,” as if schooling didn’t do a fair bit of damage to a significant number of kids (and to the social fabric). It’s still correlation assumed to be causation (including the preposterous claim that “one standard deviation increase in the effectiveness of the average teacher would raise average lifetime earnings of the classroom by several hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.”) Education is still a driver of economic growth, not a mere supplier, let alone product. But the main problem is that the theory provides no guidance at all about how education itself can be made more productive, apart from the idea that if education is good then more education is even better. That was plausible in the United States in the 1950s and Australia in the early 1960s, but now?

That leaves the commission looking for help in working out what to say about more productive schools. Unsurprisingly, it turns to “effectiveness” theory, currently the orthodoxy in Australian schooling and, despite its origins in the discipline of psychology, very like economics in its assumptions and methods.

The core finding of the “effectiveness” approach is that there are big differences in the effectiveness of individual teachers and teaching strategies. It follows that the way to boost schooling’s productivity (or “performance”) is to boost the “quality” of teaching by getting “better quality” recruits into the profession, disseminating “best practice,” and driving schools to drive teachers to “perform” via standardised tests and published results.

The commission takes to this idea like a duck to water. Suddenly finding itself with the key to schooling productivity, it comes up with lots of bright ideas — twenty-seven of them by my count.

Consolidated, the list looks like this: schools should identify students who are falling behind and respond with “targeted interventions”; learning for all students should be “personalised” via “untimed syllabuses”; equity groups need an “inclusive” approach; student wellbeing must be brought into focus; “systematic” mechanisms must be used to diffuse “evidence-based practices”; Master Teachers are needed, which means boosting the HALT (Highly Accomplished or Lead Teacher) program; on-the-job-learning through “professional development” is a priority; best practice must become common practice; ongoing professional feedback needs to be systematised, perhaps via Quality Teaching Rounds, as used in Singapore and elsewhere; digital technologies can support teachers, reduce teacher admin loads and enhance learning; support staff should be better deployed; schools should focus on “innovation” and “development”; different “models” of schooling should be trialled and evaluated; we should perhaps follow the examples of the US charter schools and England’s academies (which have “transformed” that country’s school system); school hours might be more flexible and extended.

Just how this miscellany squares with the commission’s insistence on focus and parsimony in the NSRA is not explained. More, as anyone who has been around schooling for a while will attest, the commission’s list is reminiscent of countless whiteboards from conferences, workshops, professional development days and the like. Most items arise from a particular cast of mind but otherwise lack any sense of priority or sequence. Those who run schools and systems would be entitled to be offended by this offer to teach them to suck eggs, and by the simple ignorance of those who would teach them.

For example, “innovation” has been a mantra since the 1960s and official since the Karmel Report and its Innovations Program. So also for “inclusive” approaches to “equity groups” and another Karmel initiative, the Disadvantaged Schools Program and its many derivatives and like programs. Master Teachers perhaps? The commission appears unaware of the Advanced Skills Teacher initiative of the early 1990s and its ignominious end as just another salary increment. As for charter schools and academies, words fail. The commission seems unaware of Western Australia’s independent public schools program or of a national de facto charter school system, the heavily subsidised, fast-growing independent schools.

If we really did contemplate ramping this up somehow, the American charters and the British academies would serve as warnings. Both programs have been surrounded by controversy and conflict since their introduction in the 1990s and the early 2000s respectively. Evidence on the “performance” of the charters and academies is fiercely contested. But the real issue is to do with their impact on school systems and their performance. Far from “transforming” England’s schooling, the academies are better seen as the most recent episode in a long and often bitter class-based struggle between the “comprehensives” and the grammar schools, while in the United States the charter schools and their bête noire, the public systems, are sites of cultural warfare backed by the two main political parties.

How about the commission’s idea of trialling different “models” of schooling? Is it aware of (for example) the Big Picture schools (which really are transformative)? Or Victoria’s publicly funded “community schools”? Or the chequered histories of Preshil (Victoria), Marbury (South Australia), the School Without Walls (ACT), the Nimbin Community School (New South Wales), the Bowden Brompton Community School (South Australia), among many others? The difficulty isn’t in cooking up “alternative models” or even in getting an alternative model off the ground. The problem is in getting the elephant to learn from the ant. Changing heavily defended structures is a very different thing from finding interstices between them.

Beneath the commission’s simple ignorance is incomprehension. Consider the injunction that best-practice teaching should be common practice. There is, of course, plenty of scope for improvement in how teachers do their work. More than three-quarters of classroom talk is typically teacher talk, and when the teacher does ask questions almost all the answers require only “surface” learning (recall of facts and the like). About half the typical class will already know about half the content of the typical lesson. Students spend most of their time listening, or pretending to. They get little feedback on how they are going; most of what they do get comes from other students, and most of that is wrong. Teachers routinely mistake busyness for engagement, activity for learning. Students — the experts on the quality of teaching — mostly report having had only a handful of teachers who made a lasting and positive impact.

Some teachers do manage consistently to transform the recalcitrant class into a harmonious choir, and many don’t, or do so only sometimes, and the extent to which teachers do or don’t does indeed make a big difference to the quality and pace of students’ learning. But “highly effective” teachers are, almost by definition, the exception. How to get, let’s say, 200,000 of those who don’t teach consistently at that level to catch up with the 100,000 who do? And why, after decades of effort in teacher training, in-service education, thousands of studies and years of hot gospelling about “teacher quality,” is it still not happening?

Is the problem in the teacher and the teaching? Or is it in the organisational form, in the inherently low-productivity set-up of class, classroom, timetable, subject, lesson, test, success, failure? Apart from passing references to “experimenting” with different “forms” and to “untimed syllabus,” the commission neither asks nor canvasses this question. Nor does the commission wonder in which schools those 100,000 (or whatever) very effective teachers, and the 200,000 others, might be concentrated. Any teacher knows the answer to that question; many vote with their feet.

The Productivity Commission is of course correct in another of its suggestions, that “equity groups” would benefit from a more “inclusive” approach. But is it aware that Australian schools now have the highest concentrations of “disadvantaged” (and “advantaged”) students of any comparable OECD country? Plus high levels of segregation by religion and ethnicity? That has to do with the housing market, of course, but it also has to do with something the commission ignores: the organisation of schooling at the macro level rather than its conduct at the micro, and in particular its division into sectors, one government, two non-government, one secular, two “faith-based,” all three funded, governed and regulated in their own way, the game as a whole set up in a way that encourages two sectors to suck the most sought-after families (and teachers) out of some schools and into others. Has the commission read the Gonski report, and the excellent analysis that informed it? Is it aware of the dynamics of the sector system and the growth of “diversity” between schools rather than within each, and that this is what presents schools, from top to bottom, with the “inclusiveness” challenge?

Human capital theory in its unreconstructed form owes its longevity more to the enthusiastic support it attracts from a very large and influential education industry (no less than four of the sources on human capital thinking are education lobby groups) than to its explanatory power or usefulness in guiding reform. We can make much more sense of schooling if we see it as a product as well as (or more than) a supplier/driver of prosperity by providing the educational credentials that fuel the ever-increasing competition between individuals and occupational groups for “positional goods.”

That certainly explains a lot more about schooling than does human capital theory, including the explosive growth in education numbers, often far outstripping economic growth; the displacement of much learning and “skill development” from workplaces to front-end, credential-yielding formal education; the increasing organisation of schooling to generate a giant ranking of students, made explicit in Australia by the ATAR; and the secular demographic shift in the school system noted a moment ago. That in turn goes a long way towards explaining why schools and school systems have struggled with so little success to reduce inequality and the “long tail” of attainment, or to help kids who start behind to catch up.

The commission first collapses this heresy into the confines of economics in the form of “signalling theory” (“does a qualification make you smarter or just signal that you are smarter?”) and then briskly dismisses it as not standing up to empirical scrutiny. That understanding “credentialism” might require some sociology, history and political science as well as economics seems not to have occurred.

The commission is on a similarly sticky wicket when it turns to the effectiveness approach to explain schooling. Developed mainly in the United States in the 1970s as a response to the radical and disruptive ideas about schooling widespread in the previous decade, it is deeply conservative in adhering to the received “grammar” of schooling: the class, classroom, timetable, subject, lesson, test, success, failure. Like human capital theory, the effectiveness idea was quickly adopted by the OECD and disseminated around the world by its program of standardised testing. Like economics, it ends up thinking that change is something achieved by technical management, and that is perhaps what appealed to the Rudd and Gillard governments and their goal of “Top Five [in OECD league tables] by ’25.”

Substantial and consequential differences in the “effectiveness” of teachers and teaching strategies undoubtedly exist. Nor can it be doubted that the effectiveness movement has brought some empirical discipline to the waffle endemic in and about schooling. The account of the realities of the classroom given above, for example, is gleaned from a guide to “effectiveness,” the International Guide to Student Achievement. Effectiveness thinking and evidence has been helpful to teachers and schools in providing answers to the crucial question: what works? That question was indeed the title of a foundational text.

Things begin to go wrong when general findings and guidance are turned into the very precise “effect sizes” popularised by John Hattie. Holding students back? –0.32. Diversity courses: +0.09. Mainstreaming/inclusion? +0.27. Reading Recovery: +0.53. And top of all pops, “conceptual change programs”: +0.99. To speak so clearly and confidently in answering the “what works” question, to do all those intricate calculations of “effect,” the effectiveness approach needs to see schools as the box between “inputs” and “outputs” and then take a drastically simplified view of both.

On the “inputs” side it considers only the most proximate causes of differences: teachers and teaching strategies and “interventions.” That screens out all the things that shape and organise the daily work and workplaces of teachers and students, and the working careers of the latter — the organisation of Australian schools into sectors; the big structures of funding, regulation and governance; and the heavily entrenched “grammar” of schooling.

It is equally reductionist on the “outputs” side. Its fundamental, and sometimes exclusive concern is with “outcomes,” and particularly “outcomes” in science, numeracy and literacy, as revealed by standardised testing. The problem is that that is very much narrower than the span of schooling itself — just a fraction of the cognitive fraction of the formal curriculum, which in turn is the source of only one part of “what is learned in school.”

Schooling, moreover, is not only an individual business, and it isn’t just about outcomes. As can be seen in the social, religious and ethnic segregation noted above, schooling shapes the social order. And its twelve years represent something like a fifth of most working lives. So blinkered in this is the Productivity Commission that when it inspects the indicators used by the NSRA it dwells on their technical quality and says nothing about their scope. What schooling needs is not more highly polished indicators but indicators that represent what it is that schools actually do, and should do.

The effectiveness approach has another thing in common with economics: it is so dominant in its field that it has become a true believer in its own “science.” It regards that “science” as the only source of real “evidence” about schooling, and has even achieved a new national institution, the Australian Education Research Organisation, dedicated to that proposition. It cannot see itself any more than it can see much about schools and schooling because it has no philosophy or history and very little of the social sciences and their many derivatives to see with.

In thinking that schooling is all about teaching, effectiveness research sees students as consumers, and then wonders why so many of them become “disengaged” and why “student agency” is so difficult to provide. In its origins and its contemporary functioning the effectiveness movement is not reformist or even conservative. It is reactionary, shoring up a low-productivity and obsolete mode of schooling, and drawing attention away from the big structures that hold it in place. Often singing the praises of teachers and schools, it is in effect if not intention engaged in a form of victim blaming.

It does all this by starting from the wrong point altogether. Schools are less sites of the delivery of the service of teaching than sites of production where the core workforce, those it calls “students,” labour away as best they can within the frame given by history to produce not just learning but themselves and each other. If the Productivity Commission really wants to make schools more productive, then that is where it should start.

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For example: Leigh tells of the Australian middle-distance runner Peter Norman, who once stood on the Olympic podium with two Black American placegetters as they raised their fists in protest against their country’s racism. Norman, white, a devout member of the Salvation Army, and wearing the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, was in full support.

This was in 1968, when the White Australia policy still hadn’t been fully dismantled. On his return to Australia Norman copped sometimes vicious criticism, in the midst of which he was invited by a Methodist minister in suburban Melbourne to preach from his pulpit. The minister was Leigh’s grandfather. More than four decades on, in 2012, the minister’s grandson moved a parliamentary motion in posthumous apology to Peter Norman for the obloquy he had endured. The motion was carried, unanimously.

Along with a fluent pen, a family tradition of Christian socialism and gilt-edged training in economics, Leigh owes a debt to organised sport. He’s a self-confessed sports tragic who competes in triathlons, marathons and the like, and his latest book Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy pursues the nice idea that if Australian “business” were as well organised and competitive as Australian sport, the economy would be as productive as the field of dreams.

Where hyper-competitive and well-regulated sporting Australia has gone from one success to another, corporate Australia has been given an easy ride and grown fat, not very competitive, not very innovative, not very good at lifting productivity or wages, and very, very profitable. In other words, Australian capital has enjoyed a thirty-year romp on the back of a disempowered working class.

Leigh doesn’t use such dirty language, of course, and he refrains from mentioning that the romp really got going under a government led by a Labor prime minister trained in economics and a treasurer surrounded by staffers and financial journalists dazzled by the newly fashionable neoliberal version of economics. Leigh is constrained by his day job, and he is limited by his discipline, particularly when he uses its lens to examine things other than the economy. Education, for example.

Schooling was a particular interest of Leigh’s when he was a professor of economics at the ANU. His work found, among other things, that the productivity of schooling has been falling since the 1960s (more spending, worse outcomes), and that declining “teacher quality” (ie. lower entry standards) is associated with lower “teacher effectiveness” (ie. student scores in standardised tests). From there it is but a short distance to conclude that if we fix teacher quality, up will go effectiveness along with the productivity of schooling. In sport, he says, great coaching makes all the difference; so too teaching in schools. He even suggests that “attracting and retaining great teachers is perhaps the best single thing that we could do to create a more affluent and equitable society.”

How come? Well, careful studies by economists have shown that with more schooling comes increased self-control, reduced crime, more civic engagement, better health and higher incomes. So, QED, more great teachers make more happy, healthy, wealthy and wise citizens, and hence a more affluent and equitable society.

Well, it might look like that to economics, but it’s not necessarily like that at all. Coaching can change who wins, but it doesn’t make more medals. Income, health, civic-mindedness (and the lack of them) are less products of schooling than properties of the destinations, the lots in life to which schooling allocates. If we look inside the box of schooling, which economics doesn’t, we can see the workings of the machine made visible by ATAR, the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, a tyranny of merit of just the kind Leigh admires in sport and, quite rightly,wants for business, but not what will provide twelve worthwhile years of schooling for all comers. More great teachers won’t change that game. •

Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy
By Andrew Leigh | Monash University Publishing | $19.95 | 96 pages

Comment to: dean.ashenden@unimelb.edu.au

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All this was supposed to be driven by an expanded “national” machinery of agreements, meetings and institutions centred on Canberra — the only administration not stuck with the tricky business of actually running schools — in which state/territory and federal governments of all persuasions were enlisted. Those responsible for making this Heath Robinson contraption work were left confused about “who is steering the ship” and exposed to incessant micromanagement by state/territory ministers who carry the can for troubled systems. And the system as a whole — already hamstrung by the proliferation of agencies, institutions and authorities — was left with no entity (state, federal or national) with a span of authority and responsibility sufficient to drive improvement.

The “revolution” and its various components were no sooner in place than a leading international authority on systemic change predicted in unambiguous terms that it wouldn’t work. Six years on, the head of Australia’s leading education research agency asked how well we’re doing in meeting a series of “challenges,” ranging from lifting the teaching profession to reducing the long tail of student underachievement. He found that things were going nowhere or backwards in all of them. Six years later he looked again: much the same story. The revolution’s own miserable measure of “outcomes” in the “fundamentals,” the PISA test, has recorded a slow but steady decline in Australia. The rallying cry of “top 5 by ’25,” embedded in the Australian Education Act of 2013, now looks risible.

This comprehensive failure has left an elephant-sized question in the room: now what? The revolution’s one real success was in directing the attention and shaping the language of “policymakers” and “thought leaders.” They now have no other way of thinking and talking about schooling. Hence ministers declaring that yet another bad PISA result to be yet another “wake-up call,” hence more announcements about lifting teachers’ pay or entry scores, hence new tests to make sure that teachers can spell, and hence more looking at other countries to see what they are doing right that might work here — all less from conviction than from not knowing what else to do. Seen from the outside it comes close to a famous definition of insanity.

But what is the alternative? Revive and reconfigure Gonski, the revolution’s one attempt at structural reform designed to “level the playing field,” as proposed in Waiting for Gonski by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor? Put all schools, government and non-government alike, on a common basis of funding and regulation to stem the “residualisation” of the government sector and the damage being done to the learning and life chances of the most disadvantaged students?

Greenwell and Bonnor’s proposal, and the analysis underlying it have a lot going for them, on which more in a moment. But first the “but.” Could Gonski rise again? It enjoyed massive popular and professional support and still didn’t get up last time. What chance a revamped (but not necessarily less threatening) version promoted in the midst of the long post-Gonski hangover? When the non-government schools are already on such a good wicket?

And let’s imagine a school system on the other side of a substantial upheaval. We’d still have much or all of that counterproductive national machinery. We’d still have Canberra finding yet more ways to interfere in everything and federal education ministers wanting to be national education ministers. We’d still have an obsolete “grammar” of schooling centred on ranking rather than success for all. And we’d still have heads full of trivialising ideas about “outcomes,” “effectiveness,” “teacher quality” and “performance,” as well as the belief that salvation will be found in “practice” when the problems are essentially structural. If it is possible to say that the Greenwell and Bonnor proposal is too much, it is also possible to say that it is not enough.

Are we in a catch-22, where what needs doing can’t be done? Not quite. The one thing that can be done is the thinking that the revolution couldn’t do.

• Stop obsessing about a narrow range of “outcomes” and start thinking about all the things that schools do, are and should be. Schools are meant to — and often claim to — “develop the whole person” and not just the cerebral cortex. Very well: how do we know if they are? Getting a broader sense of cognitive “outcomes,” often urged, is just the start. Schooling is an experience as well as a producer of outcomes: around a fifth of most working lives is spent at school. Is it a safe, happy, rewarding experience? For whom? Schooling has outcomes for the social order as well as for individuals. Are they of the kind that a pluralist, democratic society needs?

The case has to be made for indicators that measure the quality of the experience, the diversity within each school rather than between schools, and the development (or otherwise) of “general competencies.”

• Stop devising bite-sized improvements and start trying to understand why incremental reform has such a disappointing record. Consider, for example, the current crop of solutions to teacher shortages, low morale and poor retention in the light of “reforms” stretching back to the 1960s. One by one, apparently sensible proposals led to new agencies and institutions for teacher training, registration, standards and discipline, and the setting of terms and conditions of employment — most within each of the eight states and territories and/or at the national level.

That tangle meant failure for the Rudd/Gillard proposals, and it means that the current crop will fail too. In much the same way, bite-sized improvements in teacher workload have driven one reduction after another in class sizes and one increase after another in numbers and categories of “support” staff. The result has been chronic cost escalation, an extended life for a fundamentally obsolete way of organising student and teacher work, and no improvement in teacher morale and workloads.

• Stop talking about the quality of teaching (or teachers) and start talking about the quality of work in schools. In fact, go a step further: stop focusing on teachers and teaching and begin at the beginning, with learning. For its fixation on teaching, the revolution can thank a vast body of research into “teacher effectiveness” premised on the assumption that it could replicate the success of the medical sciences by doing the same kind of science. The most fundamental mistake lies in imagining that schools are essentially deliverers of the service of teaching in much the same way that hospitals and clinics deliver health services. In reality, schools aren’t like that at all.

Schools are sites of the production of learning, not by teachers but by a four million–strong workforce otherwise known as students. The big determinant of their productivity is not the quality of supervision but the organisation of their work. An inherited “grammar” of schooling is organised around increasingly intense competition, from Year 1 all the way up to Year 12, for position in a ranked order. It guarantees failure for many. A more productive grammar would shift assessment from ranking to the growth and progress of each student and, around that, change the organisation of work and workplaces.

The implications stretch from infrastructure (dominated by the classroom) to industrial awards and teacher unionism to popular assumptions about what schooling looks like. That’s what needs thinking and talking about. It is terra incognita to effectiveness research, and to the revolution.

• As the grammar of schooling is to work and workplaces, so are the “sectors” to the industry as a whole. Don’t take them as a given for policy; do make them its objects. They are not, as is so often claimed, a means by which families can choose an “appropriate” or a “faith-based” schooling, or a way for governments to cut costs by permitting fees to be charged. They are the means by which some schools have sucked the most sought-after students and families out of other schools.

Social segregation in Australian schooling is now more pronounced than in any comparable OECD country. To social segregation is added religious division — government schools are secular, but almost all non-government schools are attached to one or other of around twenty religions and denominations. With that and other sorting devices comes the separation of language and cultural groups too. In this matter, we have a very good starting point for thinking and talking in Greenwell and Bonnor’s book. (And, we should add, a case of “outcomes” being given too much weight and social, religious and cultural division getting not nearly enough.)

• Don’t dwell on “transparency” (a Gillard favourite), or reporting and accountability (state ministers’ contribution to teacher workloads), or “school performance” (intimidatory ranking for schools as well as kids). Start talking about the structure of the system and its governance — the fragmentation of authority and responsibility within state and territories, between the sectors, and between these and Canberra and its purportedly “national” machinery.

How can these bizarre arrangements be reconstructed? Should we go back to the future? Return responsibility for schooling whence it came (and as the Constitution requires), to the states/territories? Install in each a cross-sectoral statutory authority with a remit to drive a long-term restructuring of the industry and its work and workplaces? If not that, then what?

There is no shortage of things that could be added to this list. The revolution’s questionable taken-for-granteds (“equality of opportunity,” “choice,” schooling’s economic contribution) badly need re-examining. So does the habit of looking for silver bullets in other countries rather than trying to understand how Australia’s system has developed and what it can and can’t become. So also the endless talk about what makes a good teacher or a good school to the exclusion of what makes a good system.

But the point is not in a to-do list. The point is that the revolution has failed and so has its way of thinking. The first step towards unbeaching the whale is to start thinking outside that suffocating box. •

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A decade on, all this stands like Shelley’s Ozymandias, that colossal Wreck on which is inscribed: “Top 5 by ’25.” Even by its own miserable measure, the revolution failed, utterly. Australian schools have not raced up the OECD league table, as was promised. To the contrary, they are further away from the international Top Five than ever. Others have raced, we have languished. Where did it all go so badly, so hopelessly wrong?

Although Savage disclaims any concern with that question, he provides an important part of an answer in his penetrating analysis, the fruit of in-depth interviews with eighty-odd Australian and international “policy actors,” close scrutiny of the revolution’s myriad speeches, statements, reviews and polemics, and all the latest in “policy studies” theorising.

Savage finds three substantial defects in the apparatus of revolution. First, a “playbook” of reform, a manual of measures and strategies promulgated by the OECD and made just about compulsory by its standardised testing and international league tables. The playbook and its enforcement, eerily reminiscent of the textbook and the Friday test, turned platitudes about “evidence,” “outcomes,” “evidence-based policy” and “evidence-based practice” into a stifling orthodoxy; larger ways of thinking about schooling and its purposes were pushed to the margins or extinguished altogether.

Second, and particularly damaging in Australia, was a mania for “alignment.” “Alignment thinking” drove a massive effort to line up everything from new national institutions to the daily work of every teacher in every school behind the great task of lifting “outcomes” in the “fundamentals.”

Third, and underlying both the playbook and the alignment push, was a “techno-scientific” cast of mind that discounted practical know-how and local knowledge in favour of purportedly universal, evidence-based assertions about “what works.” Linear minds, Savage argues, set out to seduce the non-linear world of schooling “with the alluring promise of order, certainty and progress.” In practice, this overweening drive for order generated disorder of several kinds: pushback by the states and territories against Canberra and its obsessions; a complicated, confusing “policy environment” in which “policy actors” were never quite sure who was “steering the ship”; and a “disconnect” between what policy said and what was done in its name.

Savage’s analysis of the inner workings of the education revolution is quietly devastating, but he resists the temptation to dance upon its grave. What the revolution has wrought, he seems to suggest, is what we’ve now got, and we’ll have to make the best of it. Policy and policymakers need to be more respectful of difference in thinking and practice, and more tolerant of at least some disorder. Above all, they must end their “romance with rationalisation.”

I can second most of these motions without expecting them to be carried, for reasons more apparent to old-fashioned political history than to policy studies. The problem with the “education revolution” was not that it carried out the most wide-reaching and comprehensive reform of Australian schooling policy in the nation’s history, but that it didn’t. With the partial exception of the Gonski funding proposals, Rudd and Gillard left the unique, dysfunctional fundamentals of the Australian school system unnamed and untouched: three “sectors,” each with its own sources and levels of funding, regulation of student selection and choice, and form of government; each sector represented in each of the eight states and territories, making a total of twenty-four “jurisdictions”; and two levels of government, the state/territory and the federal, closely engaged in every jurisdiction.

Problems arising go well beyond a confusing “policy environment” in which “policy actors” are never quite sure who is “steering the ship.” No one steers the ship, or can. With the possible exception of a handful of powerful independent schools, no agency — not the jurisdictions, not the states/territories, not the Commonwealth and not the newly installed national machinery — has the scope of control and responsibility or the stability of direction needed to change anything of real educational significance.

This incompetent machinery is heavily defended. Around the sectors have formed ethnic, religious and class-based interest groups, all in for their chop, each intent upon defending its patch and willing to frustrate any larger scheme that might threaten it. Specifically, as was seen in the sad case of Gonski, the two non-government sectors will go to war over any change to funding or regulatory arrangements that might interfere with prosperity won at the expense of the government sector.

On this divisive and counterproductive organisation of schooling — the timid effort to change school funding excepted — the revolution had no policy. These matters therefore fall outside Savage’s analysis too. “Policy studies” study what “policy actors” do and say, not what they fail to do. A larger kind of “policy studies” would be less inclined to take its cue from “policy,” less interested in critique, less focused on the machinery of policy, and more interested in working out what needs to be done about the deformed structure of Australian schooling.

A first submission: get the feds out of schooling; in each state/territory, move towards a framework of funding and regulation common to all schools; and install within each state/territory a statutory body to keep schools at a safe distance from ever-changing ministers and governments. •

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On this question the government could find itself between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, if it doesn’t provide funds, it might be back to the future, a repeat of amazing scenes in 1962 when Catholic schools in Goulburn closed and sent their students to government schools — which, of course, couldn’t cope. One non-government school principal, speaking on condition of anonymity, thinks that parents will be reluctant to change schools mid-year, but after that? The impact, he says, “could be really substantial.” Many of his colleagues are reported as agreeing.

On the other? If the government pays up without thinking through the consequences, it will compound a big and chronic problem. And, we should add, it will miss a golden opportunity.

One part of that big problem is financial. Australia’s dual system — a nationwide government school system and a nationwide non-government school system — is inefficient. Governments spend more than they should because there is so much duplication of facilities and services. A bad set-up is made worse by bad administration. Many non-government schools now get almost as much from the public purse as their government-sector equivalents (astonishingly, some actually get more).

Contrary to rhetoric, this generous public funding is used not to reduce fees and increase “choice and access” but to ice the cake and attract customers away from the government schools. Over the decades since the “Goulburn strike” forced the hand of government, Catholic schools have moved upmarket, effectively sending poor Catholic families to the government sector. Many independent schools have been turned into five-star resorts. It is at this point that the financial problem becomes a social, educational and governance problem.

Australian schools play by two very different sets of rules, to the advantage of one sector but at the expense of the other and of the school system as a whole. Schools that charge fees and parents who pay them are permitted to select and choose. Most of those that don’t pay fees can’t choose or select. The choosers usually opt for schools where their sons and daughters will find other students just like them. The chosen schools become more socially homogeneous, and so do the rejected schools. In the upshot Australian schools are among the most socially segregated in the Western world, and are segregated by religion and ethnicity as well. That undermines the work of schools as engines of social cohesion and sites of students’ social learning. The evidence suggests that segregation is also bad for academic performance.

There are unfairnesses as well, and they cut in both directions. On the one hand, most government schools and parents have limited access to choice and selection. But on the other, parents who can choose must pay to exercise that publicly endorsed right, and some of them can’t really afford it. Moreover, many parents who can afford to pay don’t because they use the real estate market or selective government schools to get for free what others pay for.

On top of all that, arrangements for governing and funding all this remain inordinately complex and incompetent, despite Gonski’s attempt at repair. Australian schooling as currently organised is incapable of tackling serious reform, including reform of any of the problems noted above, and is also stymied by chronic political conflict over the second-order question of sectoral funding shares. Tom Greenwell’s Canadian contrast is a nice reminder of just how bizarre and counterproductive our “system” has become.

The immediate problem is to ensure that the non-government system isn’t gutted and the government system isn’t inundated. The risk of that happening seems likely to grow, and to go on growing, along with unemployment, underemployment, and fear of debt. If it does, the cost of a quick fix will grow too, and that will compound the big problem.

The way out has three parts.

First, the government must help schools help parents, immediately. In doing so it should remember that government schools lean on parents to make “voluntary contributions,” often quite substantial ones; they’ll need help too. The government should establish a fund to which all systems, government and non-government alike, can apply, and it should commission an urgent analysis of the likely trajectory of the problem.

Second, it should make clear that this is an interim measure only. It should announce an in-principle intention to move to full public needs-based funding for all systems and independent schools willing to work within a common charter of rights and obligations. The core principles and objectives of that charter would include: no fees, the right to faith-based schooling, the obligation to reduce within-school segregation, and full transparency as to performance and compliance.

Third, it should set up the machinery to turn these principles into a well-designed proposal.

Is this pie in the sky? Or a left-wing plot?

On the funding side, no. The non-government systems like to claim that they save governments seven or eight billion dollars a year, something like 15 per cent of Commonwealth schools spending. The real cost of full needs-based funding would in fact be around 2 or 3 per cent. If public funding to schools that refused the charter were to cease, total public outlays would be reduced.

Governance? Existing authorities, government and non-government alike, would be left in place. The key difference would be in playing by common rules on a level field of funding and regulation. The National School Resourcing Board and the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority could be beefed up to monitor performance and ensure compliance. The Commonwealth would have to accept that the national interest is better served by a rules-based, transparent national system than by incessant federal interference and second-guessing of system authorities.

Ideology? The “level playing field” sketched above would essentially be a managed market, operated in the interests of greater equity, better performance, and more equally available access to school choice. For those who wonder what that might look like: consider the AFL (and Andrew Leigh’s discussion of its structure and success).

Feasibility? Some very difficult questions arise. What is meant by “diversity”? Would the same definition apply to every school? What about schools for Indigenous kids? Would all schools have the right to provide a “faith-based” education? By what means could selection be made more widely and more equally available?

There are no easy or perfect answers to these and many other questions. Some of the answers would have to be condensed into a suite of performance indicators going well beyond the current myopic focus on the formal curriculum, and that would be a technically challenging task. But coming up with answers worse than those in current operation would be hard.

And how would workable answers to these questions be found? Who would design a level playing field and map out a process of transition? One option would be a Gonski-style review, high-powered, well funded, with a small panel and a tight deadline (but this time headed by an eminent figure from the public sector rather than the private).

A final question: could a government long identified with non-government schools come at anything along the lines suggested? Three weeks ago the question would have been absurd. Now? Still probably not likely, but you never know.

On the one hand, the non-government systems, which have intimidated governments by campaigning on the “higher fees” slogan whenever funding decisions look like going against them, would not want to lose that leverage. Nor would they want to open their books to full public scrutiny. Low-fee independent schools would be glad to see the end of fees but wary of a charter’s contents and guarantees. High-fee independent schools would invoke big words about rights and taxpayer entitlement. Canberra bureaucrats would hate a larger role for statutory authorities and a smaller one for them.

On the other hand, government school systems would be generally supportive, though at least some (and in New South Wales particularly) would be leery about the implications for their selective high schools. And a level playing field for schools could be an electoral plus, popular with non-government school parents particularly, but also among government school parents attracted by a fairer system and more equally available choice.

Taken in sum, a clear-eyed look would reveal a lot in it for the Coalition and its base, but the miasma of ideology makes that unlikely. In which case, the federal opposition should pick up a gift on a platter. •

Thanks to Chris Bonnor for assistance in the preparation of this article. Comment to dean.ashenden@unimelb.edu.au would be welcomed.

The post Don’t waste a good crisis, even in schooling appeared first on Inside Story.

All five of them agree that Australia is among the school reform dunces of the Western world. While other countries forge ahead (the argument goes) we are stuck. Some schools and school systems – government, independent or Catholic ­– and some curriculum areas have done better than others, but since around the turn of the century none has done much more than flatline, despite strenuous efforts by state and federal governments.

It is on this stubborn ground that the battle of the reform agendas is being fought. Some of the reformers want to press on in the current direction. Some want a quite different agenda. And some want a different system.

To press on is to persist in the view that if schools are exposed to the right combination of pressures and given the right capacity to respond, they will lift their “performance,” and this will be reflected in better student results in standardised tests. Since Julia Gillard become federal minister for education in 2007, this has been the dominant Australian reform agenda, prosecuted through NAPLAN, the MySchool website, and a flurry of other measures aimed at encouraging parental choice, making schools more accountable for student attainment, and taking us to “top five by ’25.” Gillard’s Coalition successor in the education portfolio, Christopher Pyne, bought the line and packaged it up as the “four pillars” of reform.

Two of the five recent reports ­– one by prominent academic and consultant Brian Caldwell, the other by the Centre for Independent Studies, or CIS – belong to this agenda. Their concern is not with the “pressure” side of the equation, but with the amount and kind of elbow room schools need if pressure is to turn into “performance.”

Caldwell has been the leading Australian proponent of school autonomy since the publication of his seminal The Self-Managing School (written with Tasmanian principal Jim Spinks) in 1988. He was among the first to argue that autonomy should serve educational as well as professional and organisational ends, and was therefore among the first to realise that a causal chain with ill-defined “autonomy” at one end and closely specified “outcomes” at the other end is a long and tangled one.

The most recent of Caldwell’s many investigations of the connection, based on the experience of four government schools in Victoria, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory, finds that, yes, “autonomy” does improve “performance,” or it can anyway, sort of. The analysis “tends to confirm,” Caldwell concludes, “that higher levels of school autonomy are associated with higher levels of student achievement providing there is a balance of autonomy and accountability” (emphases added). In other words: in the universe of schooling, where everything is related to everything else, it all depends.

Such inconvenient caveats, qualifications and distinctions eluded the sponsor of Professor Caldwell’s study, then education minister Pyne. “Great schools have leaders and teachers who have the independence to make decisions and deliver the education that best suits the needs of their students,” he enthused in launching the report. “And the research, including the findings by Professor Caldwell, tells us this is the right approach.”

It doesn’t, and it didn’t, of course. The concept of “autonomy,” along with the Commonwealth’s $70 million Independent Public Schools Initiative and Caldwell himself, has been roped into a highly politicised and dubious campaign that is not interested in whether, how and to what end relationships between schools and systems need reform. It is interested, instead, in making public schools more like private ones.

The CIS is also a supporter of autonomy and of independent public schools, but wants to go several steps further. It wants Australia to follow the example of the United States, Britain, Sweden, Chile and, most recently, New Zealand in introducing “charter” schools. Models vary, but the general idea is that charters are public schools privately operated (by for-profits as well as not-for-profits) within the terms of a contract or “charter.”

In the CIS proposal, charters could set or choose their own curriculum and make their own industrial arrangements. They could be either “conversions,” which take over failing public schools, or “startups” going into competition with existing schools. One objective is, of course, to lift “performance,” but the CIS also argues that charters could encourage innovation and bring choice to families currently deprived of it for reasons of income and/or a preference for non-religion-based schooling.

Considered in its own terms the case is plausible, attractive even. The charter mechanism (unlike the “autonomy” approach) recognises that the whole web of relationships of which “the school” is part needs to be rejigged. Schools working with “the disadvantaged” – the clientele the CIS has in mind – do need better ways of organising teaching and learning, hence different staffing profiles and deployment, and hence different industrial arrangements. They certainly need school-based or school-shaped curriculum. And even if the evidence about the “performance” of charters is mixed, as the CIS concedes, well, there’s still the claimed benefit of extending “choice” to those who don’t already have it.

It is not until we step outside this advocacy that the real problems appear. Wanting to introduce charters into the US system in 1991 (when the first charters were established) is a very different thing from wanting to introduce them into Australia in 2015. In the United States the charters were designed to tackle the public school monopoly in the interests of variety, choice and innovation. Australia already has plenty of all of these features, and they have not served us well, not least because the ground rules are so different.

In the United States, neither mainstream public schools nor charters are permitted to charge fees or to select on academic, racial, income or other grounds. Without seeming to notice the implications, the CIS suggests a level playing field for Australian charters and mainstream public schools: they should be funded to the same level, should not be permitted to charge fees, and should be non-selective.

This raises an obvious question. If a level playing field is a good way to run the public system, why not the system as a whole? It might be assumed that a think tank committed to free and open competition, and to its educational correlative, equal opportunity, would be the first to ask the question, and to pursue the questions that then arise. It could ask, for instance, whether the lack of levelness in the playing field contributes to “educational disadvantage” and whether more levelness might reduce it. But the question is not posed.

How is it that the CIS wants to import the charter idea, but not its regulatory framework, from the United States? How come the CIS has public schools for the “disadvantaged” in its sights but does not even mention arrangements for the “advantaged” or what has produced such a yawning chasm between the two? Why doesn’t it mention the possibility that a “failing” Catholic school might become a “conversion” charter? Why no consideration of the pros and cons of converting at least some independent schools to charters? Or of the pros and cons of more cooperation between schools in disadvantaged areas as against more competition between them?

My purpose is not to question the sincerity of the CIS and its authors in wanting to do something about a serious educational and social problem. It is to point to a downward gaze that has trumped the CIS’s own first principles. Disadvantage is being addressed on the strict proviso that certain interests and arrangements remain not just untouched, but unmentioned. It is a question to which we will return.

Geoff Masters is the long-time CEO of Australia’s preeminent education research organisation, an international authority on the complex interactions of assessment, teaching and learning, and a prominent critic of the all-too-familiar lockstep curriculum. To these research and educational credentials Masters has added a concern with how reform should proceed. In this he draws on arguments advanced by Canadian guru Michael Fullan and others, and particularly on Fullan’s critique of the Gillard agenda (title: Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform).

Masters argues that, contra Caldwell and the CIS, choice, competition and school autonomy are best understood as elements of an agenda that doesn’t work. That agenda (Masters says) is based on the mistaken belief that “improvement will occur if schools are given incentives to improve,” including rewards, sanctions and the need to compete for students.

Countries pursuing these strategies, Masters says – referring to but not naming Britain and the United States – “tend to be the countries that have experienced the worst declines in student performance.” Research is now casting doubt both on the “theoretical underpinnings” of the incentives agenda and on associated assumptions about what motivates people to give of their best. Rather than persist with an agenda based on rewards, sanctions and competition, Masters wants Australia to build the “capacity” of teachers and school leaders, and to ensure “high quality practice across the system.”

Masters offers an outline of just such an agenda: a higher-status and more academically capable teaching profession; a “twenty-first-century curriculum”; more “flexible learning arrangements focused on growth”; early and extra attention for children “at risk of being locked into trajectories of low achievement”; and a narrower gap between the best- and worst-performing schools.

Another to depart from the dominant agenda is the most recent in the Grattan Institute’s impressive series of reports on schooling. Like Masters, Grattan urges “more flexible learning arrangements focused on growth.” Where Masters points the general direction, Grattan gets down and dirty, reporting in detail on the work of schools that are putting the learning-based-on-growth approach into daily practice by collecting detailed information about each student’s progress and using it to inform curriculum choices and teaching strategies.

It is at least possible that Masters and Grattan share something else: a loss of faith in or hope of large-scale reform. Until recently Grattan was a leading importer of ideas about how systems could and should be reorganised, but it has moved steadily from telescope to microscope, from reform of the system to reform of practice and to the school as “the unit of reform.” Masters, meanwhile, is straight-out despondent.

There is (he says) “little evidence” that the status and academic capability of teachers is about to change, while “many features of the school curriculum have been unchanged for decades.” It is not obvious that “we have policies in place to reform mathematics and science curriculum in ways that might reverse the trend in subject enrolments and performance.” The counterproductive age-based organisation of teaching and learning “is deeply entrenched and reinforced by legislation” and “there is little evidence that… we are doing a better job of reducing the number of students on long-term trajectories of low achievement.”

Masters doesn’t investigate why all this is so, why the “wrong drivers” have been chosen, or why his preferred agenda has not been pursued. Lyndsay Connors and Jim McMorrow do, and what they find justifies both a gloomy prognosis and a different approach to reform.

Lyndsay Connors is, among other things, former chair of the Schools Commission, while Jim McMorrow was the Commission’s money man and remains the authority on where “resources” come from, where they go, and what they do. As might be expected of an experienced journalist and a de facto forensic accountant, Connors and McMorrow come at the problem in a quite different way from Caldwell and the CIS, and from Masters and Grattan. They look at the workings of the system as a whole rather than those of individual schools. They start not with an agenda but an analysis of the problem, and look at the specifics of the Australian system rather than at reform efforts elsewhere. And, unsurprisingly, they reach different conclusions about what is to be done. In this they are in debt to a report prepared for the Gonski review by a Nous consortium and that, in turn, was informed by the work of a handful of mostly Melbourne-based researchers. What follows is a free translation of this substantial body of work.

Any school in any school system anywhere (the argument goes) will reflect the demographics of its location, but Australia’s set-up compounds unavoidable differences in the social composition of schools. Its most distinctive feature is the sector system: three types of school, all receiving funding from two levels of government but in three different mixes and in three different ways. Two of the three, the non-government sectors, charge fees and are mostly religion-based. The third is nominally free, and secular.

It is often thought that these arrangements permit non-government schools to select on financial and/or religious and/or academic grounds while the government schools do not. In fact, some non-government schools behave for most practical purposes as mainstream public schools and, more to the point, some government schools select all of their students on academic and therefore social grounds, and many select some of their students, both overtly and covertly.

These structural arrangements mean that an unusually high proportion of Australian parents have an unusually great capacity to choose from an unusually wide range of schools. They typically choose schools where their children will find others just like themselves. And the more parents who do that, the more other parents will conclude that they’d better do likewise. In the doing, they make a choice for those who can’t choose, for reasons of income and/or location, or because their child doesn’t have what the choosy schools are looking for. Thus the non-choosers, like the choosers, find themselves increasingly among their own kind.

To point this out is not to blame parents who can and do choose, either for choosing or for the choices they make. It is to criticise a system of pressures and opportunities to which parents respond as best they can and which, in the upshot, gives Australia an exceptionally high and rising “stratification” of schooling by class and culture, now approaching the stage at which it should probably be called “segregation,” or segmentation at the very least.

More than a third of government school students are from the lowest quarter of students according to socioeconomic status, or SES, almost three times the proportion in the independent sector, and these ratios are more or less reversed for the top quartile. There are much higher concentrations in particular schools at either end of the spectrum. The concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools is, Nous reports, “substantially higher than for any comparable OECD country,” while the proportion of all students in mixed or average SES schools is well below the OECD average. Research conducted since Nous and Gonski reported suggests that the concentration of low SES students in government schools continues.

Cultural divisions are, in at least some parts of the country, even more pronounced. Taking the cases of Sydney and New South Wales, researcher Christina Ho found sectoral differences in LBOTE (language background other than English) and non-LBOTE enrolments similar to SES differences, but with staggering concentrations in top-end schools. There, LBOTE families have opted for the government schools that select and exclude on academic grounds, while non-LBOTEs have headed for the independents that select and exclude mainly on financial grounds. Thus only one of the top ten NSW government selective schools (by HSC rank) has less than 80 per cent LBOTE enrolments, but Ho can list sixteen high-fee schools with less than 20 per cent LBOTE. In between these extremes Ho finds a less dramatic but still pronounced segmentation going on.

The sifting and sorting of students and families into particular schools feeds a sifting and sorting of the schools themselves, a process often referred to as “residualisation.” The term was popularised by public school advocates to describe a vicious circle. Schools with high proportions of kids from poor families find it increasingly difficult to attract and keep experienced and capable teachers, principals and other key educational resources, which makes them less attractive to those who can choose to go elsewhere, which increases the proportion of “disadvantaged” students, which makes the school less attractive, and so on, and on, around and around the circle.

There is also a flip side, not so often noted, a process of aggrandisement that produces schools of almost preposterous grandeur, with five-star resort buildings and grounds, parents paying in fees twice what is spent on the common ruck of students (and that’s before various endowments, public subsidies, accounting lurks and tax breaks), and executive salary packages three times those offered elsewhere. In the course of his review, David Gonski, who came from the world of Sydney Grammar, visited some of the schools at the other end of the spectrum, and was shocked. Australia has constructed a system not just of sectors but of gated communities and educational slums.

This process is often seen – and objected to – as the product of “marketisation.” It is true that schools parade their wares, and parents shop around. Indeed, more of both sides do the market-like thing in Australia than in any comparable country. But to think that Australian schooling is a marketplace and to argue that the problem lies therein is to make a fundamental mistake. The problem is in the way the market interacts with the funding and regulatory regime to produce massive distortions in what is offered and to whom it is available.

Thus we have both free and publicly subsidised fee-charging schools; religious and secular schools; schools lavishly funded and schools relatively impoverished; schools permitted to select on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religious affiliation and/or academic performance and schools prohibited from doing any of those things; parents who are required to pay when often they can’t afford it and parents who aren’t and can; and parents who are offered the full menu and others who must take whatever is put on their plate.

The most obvious educational consequence of all this, or obvious in the psychometrics relied on by all of the authors discussed here anyway, is “inequality” of “outcomes.”

The argument is that a student’s attainment is determined less by his or her school’s educational program than by the school’s student body. Thus a low SES student going to a high SES school, for example, will do better than his or her peers because of the company he or she keeps. The complex redistribution of students across schools, Connors and McMorrow argue, has therefore also been a redistribution of educational achievement. It has led to a gap between Australia’s highest and lowest performing students (as Gonski observed) “far greater” than in many other OECD countries. And it means that Australia was the only OECD country to see an increase in the performance gap between high and low SES schools between 2000 and 2009.

Most striking is an increase in “between-school variance,” a measure of the extent to which schools differ from each other. An Australian Council for Educational Research study of results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment found an increase in variance from 18 to 24 per cent between 2000 and 2009. Over the same period variance in Finland’s schools rose from 8 to 9 per cent. As noted above, recent research suggests that the overall trend in both social redistribution and the redistribution of attainment rolls on.

But do standardised tests, which these various comparisons rely on, focus on too narrow a subset of the learning that goes on in three areas of the formal curriculum (literacy, science, maths)? This is an important objection, but there is another, at least as important. Standardised tests say nothing at all about what is learned in school via the so-called “informal” curriculum.

Christina Ho points to the moral as it applies to “multicultural” learning. “Scholars of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ argue that the success of Australian multiculturalism has much to do with ordinary encounters between people of different cultural background that happen every day, in neighbourhoods, workplaces, parks – and schools,” she says. “Monocultural schools, regardless of the brilliance of their teaching programs, cannot socialise students for the realities of a cosmopolitan Australian society and a globalised world.” The same can be said of learning about social difference. The general point is that students who do not learn about others do not learn about themselves either. They are being miseducated.

Then there are the social consequences. Australian schools are increasingly active in constituting an elite that knows only itself, and an underclass that is being dudded and knows it. More diffuse but no less material is the erosion of “equal opportunity” through schooling as both a fact and as an important source of legitimation for the social order as a whole.

A first conclusion: to say that we’re not getting anywhere is not quite right. Nor is it quite right to say that the problem with schooling is a problem of agendas. A big part of the problem is that we have the wrong system, and that most agenda-setters are looking elsewhere. We could go further and surmise that all that effort in reforming practice and schools is working, not particularly well or widely, but well enough to stop us going backwards as a result of the workings of the system. The schools, in this perspective, are galley slaves, badly trained and fed, not very well coordinated, but stuck with rowing against a systemic tide.

A second conclusion: are “outcomes” the thing to focus on, or the only one? All sides of the battle accept that lifting outcomes is the main game. But shouldn’t segregation itself be front and centre, by reason of its role in generating unequal attainments as well as other educational and social consequences? Why shouldn’t any school or school system that wants to select some or all of its students be held just as responsible for the resulting social mix as it is for “outcomes”? Segregation should be seen not just as an explanation of the problem, but also as a big, direct, closely reported and well-documented target of policy.

A third conclusion: the tools of thinking about reform are not fit for purpose.

The reform debate is dominated by the “effectiveness” paradigm, and that is a very mixed blessing. Thanks to its origins in psychology and psychometrics it is much better at understanding teaching and learning and, at a stretch, how a school works, than at understanding how school systems work. It is much more interested in what makes an effective teacher or school than in what makes an effective system. It has encouraged the assumption that “reform” consists of the viral spread of “good practice” and the accumulation of micro-gains.

It has another problem, noted a moment ago. The effectiveness paradigm can see only the learning that goes on in the formal curriculum. It has blurred the vision of those who do see a segmentation problem, including Masters, Connors and McMorrow (and Nous and Gonski), but then relegate it to the status of an explanatory variable. The effectiveness approach makes them less than alert to learning in the so-called “informal curriculum,” the learning that comes from spending five or six hours, day after day, in a segregated school. They pass too quickly over the fact that high and rising segregation in schools is incompatible with a multicultural society, and with a democratic one.

The language and interests of “effectiveness” have pushed out of view the system itself, and much of what goes on in schools. And it has pushed history, politics, sociology, philosophy and economics to the margins of thinking about reform. The exception, as employed and elaborated by Connors and McMorrow, illustrates the rule.

A final thought: what is it about the system that does the damage? To one way of thinking, the problem is in regulation, and the solution is “deregulation.” In other minds, including those of the Nous researchers, the problem stems from (as Nous puts it) a “robust” and “highly competitive” market. In fact, this is less a problem of too much regulation than a matter of bad regulation. The market is not robust, but wildly distorted. Maldistributed liberty has eroded equality and discounted fraternity. The problem is not the market or regulation but their currently dysfunctional combination.

And so, inevitably, to Gonski, the proposal for systemic reform, the great offset on the Gillard balance sheet, and the hope of the side. If Gonski is lost then so is any chance of arresting and reversing the segregationist logic of the system. If Gonski survives, then it must be remembered that he was sent into the fight with one arm tied behind his back. He was permitted to examine only one aspect of funding (the fee/free distinction, for example, was off limits), and the regulatory regime, including selection and exclusion, not at all.

Connors and McMorrow argue that Gonski plus some regulatory tightening in a “hybrid” system is the best that can be hoped for. That is certainly the outer limit of what government can achieve at the moment. But is it the limit of thought, argument, proposal?

My own view is that if Gonski does survive then it should be regarded not as the systemic reform job done, but as a crucial step on a long road. At the end of that road, as the CIS inadvertently suggests, is a level playing field. Between here and there is a lot of hard thinking about policy and politics, compromise and principle, which could be approached in good faith from left, right or centre. The objective is not to restore the status quo of 1960, or to defend this sector against that, or to keep adding more choice to a hopelessly rigged market, but to combine funding and regulation so that no school gets too far behind or too far ahead in the conditions needed to attract a diverse clientele and to offer an educationally engaging program. Schools are, after all, for kids. They are meant to be a bridge to the wider world, not a mere reflection of the circumstances into which a child happens to have been born.

The post What is to be done about Australian schooling? appeared first on Inside Story.

What, if anything, might break this stalemate? One possibility is that the critics might change their minds, or give up. Another is that the AWM might change its mind. A third is that an outside party will intervene, which in practice means a national government, which in turn means a Labor government — not because Labor is sure to do something but because the Coalition certainly won’t.

Are the critics wrong? Can the AWM be made to change its mind? If not, will Labor do the needful? Yes and no; no; and perhaps.

Should the critics change their minds?

The critics have surely been correct to insist that the only word in the English language to evoke the frontier reality is “war.” It is true, as the AWM has often insisted, that armed conflict between black and white didn’t observe the usual European conventions of declaring war, putting combatants in uniform, respecting rules of engagement, and so on. It is true that combat was mixed up with other kinds of relationship, including some that would be regarded as fraternisation, or worse, in European-style warfare. And it is true that most frontier conflict occurred before “Australia” existed as a political entity.

But the bigger truth is that deadly fighting between a people trying to keep what they had and a people who wanted to take it from them was a prominent and crucial strand in relationships “between two races in a single field of life” for well over a century, and that this warfare was profoundly formative, particularly for Aboriginal people but also for the rest of us, for relations between black and white, and for “Australia” in any sense of the term.

Those realities are so plain and so well documented that the implications for the AWM are often taken to be plain and incontrovertible too. It was a war; it’s a war memorial; so, it should be in. “Our” fallen are remembered; “theirs” should be too.

But that raises at least two questions. Why does it matter so much? And why can’t the frontier wars and their dead be commemorated elsewhere, as AWM spokesmen have often suggested?

The case for including the frontier wars in the AWM does need to be revised and beefed up, in several respects:

• The real problem is not in the AWM’s grasp of history, as is implied by much of the criticism. It’s in the history to which the institution belongs. The fact, scale and impact of violence by Europeans on Aboriginal people was routinely covered up, euphemised and winked at throughout the nineteenth century and then denied for much of the twentieth. It was covered up and forgotten so thoroughly that startling facts about the enormous cost of the conflict could still be unearthed as recently as 2014. This is the history to which the AWM and its refusal belong. Given that the matter to be avoided, concealed or denied was, precisely, war, the AWM can be regarded as concealment’s epicentre. Don’t mention the war — particularly in the war memorial.

• The AWM’s director likes to say that it represents “the soul of the nation.” But the AWM tells only the story of the shining us; it should also tell the story of the other us — not to extinguish or demean the former, but to get closer to representing the real us. The AWM says that its mission is to “assist Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society,” but it has been getting away with a confidence trick, asserting that of course that means real wars. Much of the criticism of the AWM (including my own) has fallen in with that logic, setting out to prove that the frontier wars do indeed meet the AWM’s requirements. The boot should be on the other foot: the frontier wars are the only genuinely Australian wars, fought in a distinctively Australian way. They were more formative of “Australia” than any of the major overseas wars or battles in which Australians have fought, Gallipoli not excepted. It is the frontier wars, not the European-style conflicts that followed, that should have prompted and defined an Australian War Memorial, and we can be sure that had there been more in the conduct of those wars to be proud of, a memorial would have been built long ago. That the wars were suppressed rather than commemorated belongs to that part of our history often referred to as the great Australian silence, and so does the AWM.

• Since the job wasn’t done when it should have been, we are in the position of having to put things right. That cannot be done by commemorating the frontier wars somewhere else, as the AWM likes to recommend. Shunted off to the Museum of Australia or to a dedicated memorial, the frontier wars would be seen as the not-in-the-War-Memorial wars, and therefore not real wars at all. They would also be seen as something to do with the Aborigines rather than “us.” What was done would be diminished and deflected, yet again. We would have whitewash history in one place, black armband in the other.

• An important and difficult question remains. Since the AWM is a museum as well as a shrine, and since some of those who died were ours (I write as a fourth generation Anglo-Saxon Australian), we are entitled to bring the frontier wars into the AWM, and must. But the vastly greater numbers of Aboriginal dead? Where and how they are commemorated is a matter for their descendants to decide. We should make the offer, but the response is theirs.

Might a statement of the case beefed up in these and perhaps other ways, and addressing the AWM’s arguments more directly, shift opinion within the AWM?

Can the AWM be persuaded to change its mind?

The AWM is an organisation of many parts: memorial, museum, research institute, publisher, impresario and tourism provider. The one thing it does very well is the one that provided its raison d’être: the commemoration of Australia’s “fallen.” Most Australians, and certainly those of my generation, would find it difficult to visit the AWM without being moved, perhaps particularly by the “wall of remembrance” and its 100,000-plus names, most of them of young men whose lives had scarcely begun.

The AWM’s other activities, accreted in the eighty-odd years since it was commissioned, are more controversial. Its displays have given some visitors (including me) the impression that in war it takes only one to tango — a very present Us versus an almost invisible Them. We are the Winners, and In the Right. The horrors of war, and the horrors visited on civilians (women particularly), survivors and survivors’ families, are subordinated to Boy’s Own Annual displays (the second world war Lancaster bomber chief among them). Most of a reportedly large collection of materials on anti-war and peace movements, by contrast, is in storage.

The AWM’s full-throated promotion of the Anzac myth jars with the actual Anzacs’ pride in a laconic, understated patriotism; it makes a great deal more fuss about their sacrifice than they did. The AWM has come increasingly close to being a theme park, offering a really popular “visitor experience” (seventeenth most-popular tourist landmark in the world, it claims, one ahead of the Pyramids). Its chase after numbers through the gate and dollars in the till ended up with this “sacred place,” this “soul of the nation” taking donations from arms manufacturers (and perhaps fudging the fact in a report to parliament). The AWM is yet another Australian institution that has lost its way in the rank undergrowth of the long boom.

The AWM’s long-serving director, Brendan Nelson, is apt to claim credit for much of this. As one recent critic put it, Nelson has a “genius for turning every story about the memorial and the World War I celebrations into a story about himself.” He has appointed himself the nation’s commemorator-in-chief, professing emotions that are either maudlin or synthetic and certainly self-serving. He gratuitously and improperly inserted himself and the AWM into the current controversy over allegations against Ben Roberts-Smith, declaring from his perch on the high moral ground that they constitute “one of the lowest blows I have ever seen” and represent yet another attempt to “tear down our heroes.”

Nelson has played shamelessly on legitimate feelings to support his empire-building, quoting an (unnamed) veteran to the effect that “we’ve already paid in blood, and whatever the government spends on the Australian War Memorial… will never be enough.” He has implied that the psychological wellbeing of veterans is a justification for spending half a billion dollars in grossly disproportionate recognition of post-1950 conflicts. Faced with Indigenous and other critics of gargoyles in the AWM’s courtyard that depict an Aboriginal man and woman among twenty-six varieties of native fauna, the AWM included them in its gargoyle replication and replacement project. “We are not going to take twenty-six down,” the director has said, “and put twenty-four back.”

Nelson has followed his immediate predecessor in deploying a string of rationalisations for shutting the door on the frontier conflicts and the many tens of thousands of people killed in them. He has claimed “much” unspecified “consultation” with historians as providing support for the AWM’s position when almost certainly the weight of opinion within the profession, including among military historians, has for some time been to the contrary. He asserts that the founding idea for the AWM and its Act both make recognition impossible, while boasting of the memorial’s self-initiated evolution. He has said that the frontier wars just can’t be accommodated because there isn’t room, while bidding for (and getting) half a billion dollars’ worth of new space. He has insisted that frontier conflict can’t be admitted because it didn’t amount to warfare, and in any event took place before “Australia” existed, but finds no difficulty in including other war-like and peace-keeping operations. Indeed, he has recently gone one further by suggesting the inclusion of border protection personnel as well. “It’s just extraordinary what these men and women do,” he is reported as saying. “We’ve had sailors who jumped into the sea to save drowning people.”

In all of this Dr Nelson has claimed the backing, even the direction, of his council, and there is no reason to doubt him. Nine of the council’s thirteen members are affiliated with the Australian Defence Forces, three as serving officers, five retired, and one Reservist. They include one air marshal, one rear admiral, one vice admiral, one lieutenant general, one major general, and one former commander of the SAS. Of the four non-military members, two are from “the private sector,” one is a director of a “family company” and one is a journalist (and author of bestselling books on the Great War and Gallipoli). The chairman is media mogul and Anzac buff Kerry Stokes. The council’s members hold between them three ACs, five AOs and one AM, as well as other medals and awards beyond counting. The average age is sixty-one years and would be sixty-three were it not for a single youth (in his thirties), a former corporal and VC winner. He and three of the female members are by some margin the most junior members of the council.

So far as can be told from their official biographies, none of the council’s members is drawn from or has any relationship with unions or other employees’ organisations, and none is from the “community sector” (although many are office-holders in philanthropic organisations) or from peace, nuclear disarmament or similar movements. There are no young people; none is black, brown, yellow or brindle or, with one exception, from a non-Anglo-Celtic background. None is Indigenous. Again, so far as can be seen in the official biographies, none is associated with or representative of former allies, much less former foes. The council is top-heavy, military-dominated, male-dominated, Anglo-dominated and deeply integrated into the Establishment. It is representative of and sees itself as defending the interests of those who are commemorated. It is entirely unrepresentative of the nominal commemorators, the Australian community. It offers a case study in the workings and consequences of what some economists would call “provider capture.”

The real charge against Nelson, his predecessor and the various members of council who have tagged along behind them is not that they are wrong about frontier conflict or that their arguments are contentless. As I suggested earlier, they are not contentless. What is objectionable or worse is that the AWM’s arguments are made in bad faith, and that the leadership of a major national institution has hidden behind rationalisations and half-truths while showing no willingness to engage in a serious conversation about a serious question, to learn, and to hold open the possibility of coming to a different view.

A third-party intervention?

If a beefed-up, refocused case wouldn’t persuade the AWM to change itself, would it persuade a Labor government to tackle the problem? In and of itself, no. It’s not that Labor lacks the necessary sympathies. As is suggested by its recently promulgated Reconciliation Action Plan — with its full-page pics of Whitlam and Lingiari, Rudd and a member of the Stolen Generations, and Keating at Redfern — Labor’s heart is in the right place, or at the very least it likes to think so. But on the question of the AWM in general and the frontier wars in particular, Labor is starting a long way back, and is spooked by the Anzac industry.

Labor’s national platform, adopted late last year, acknowledges the Uluru call for a “truthful telling of Australia’s history” and promises a Makarrata (or truth-telling) commission as a means to that end. But neither the platform nor the reconciliation plan mentions the AWM or, indeed, the frontier wars. It is difficult to see how the truth can be told without bringing the epicentre of truth avoidance into the picture. More concerning still, shadow minister Amanda Rishworth recently joined Nelson, Stokes and the prime minister on the platform for the “Australian War Memorial Development Launch,” where she was proud to announce that a Shorten government would honour the Coalition’s pledge of half a billion dollars to that cause. We are reminded that it was a Labor government that appointed Nelson in the first place.

Nelson’s term ends in a few months, and Stokes’s appointment comes up next year. As things stand, the best that could be hoped from a Shorten government would be improvements on Nelson (unless the present government makes a pre-emptive strike in the meantime) and Stokes. But if the AWM’s culture and high command are as I’ve suggested, even the best appointees would struggle. The task is to persuade Labor that the AWM should be the focus of a comprehensive review and rethink, and to address Labor’s concerns about the political hazards of doing so.

Managed badly it could go very wrong, of course. But it could also go very well. The past decade or so has seen a steep increase in the number of news stories and comment pieces about the issue in an ever-widening range of media. That might not blow the AWM’s house down, but it signifies something. It is possible that another of our subterranean cultural shifts is under way, the kind of thing that burst into the open in 1967 when, to near-universal surprise and delight, 90 per cent of Australians voted for what they understood to be equality for Aboriginal people. The council of the AWM, and its stance are anachronisms. For some, seeing the frontier wars alongside the heroics of Gallipoli and Flanders and Milne Bay would be a source of uncomprehending offence. For most of the rest, not to mention Aboriginal Australians? We’d ask as we did after the marriage-equality plebiscite: why did it take so long? •

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Waterford’s free character reference for Nelson — including his “genius for turning every story about the memorial and the World War I celebrations into a story about himself” — is best enjoyed in full. His case against the AWM and its half-billion spend can be summarised as follows:

• The AWM’s expansion plans lack proportionality. Australian involvement and casualties in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and elsewhere, now to be memorialised by the AWM, are dwarfed by the two world wars. Of those whose names are inscribed at the memorial, Waterford points out, 99 per cent were killed before 1950. There were many single days during the first world war when more Australian soldiers died than have been killed since 1950.

• A proportional comparison is even more striking. Were we to experience today losses proportionate to those of the Great War, 400,000 would die and 800,000 would become invalids.

• Service and sacrifice must be recognised, but so must the facts. Australia made significant contributions to the outcomes of the world wars. These were provided overwhelmingly by volunteers, not professionals, and they paid a high price. The entire population was mobilised in a widely supported cause. None of these things can be said of the post-1950 conflicts.

Waterford concludes his assault on the AWM and its proposal with some thoughts about how the $500 million could be better spent, but he (with other commentators) misses the obvious option: the money should be spent on recognising the frontier wars.

To justify that suggestion, I will borrow Waterford’s methodology:

• The number of deaths from violence on Australia’s frontiers exceeded the number of Australian deaths in the first world war and was probably close to double the number of second world war casualties.

• Were we — I speak as a non-Indigenous Australian — to experience a similar casualty rate now, somewhere between two and three million would die.

• Numbers of deaths by violence on the frontiers were greatly exceeded by deaths from disease, malnutrition and addictive substances, variously preceding, accompanying and following frontier violence. An Aboriginal population estimated at three quarters of a million or more when the first fleet arrived had been reduced to less than one-tenth of that number by the 1920s.

• An entire civilisation came close to complete destruction, as did much of the ecology that sustained it, exacting a further toll of physical and psychological misery that still has a long way to run.

These figures for violent deaths no doubt raise some eyebrows, and need to be explained.

Historians have struggled with the calculation for decades. Generally speaking, the more recent the estimate, the greater the figure arrived at. By the turn of the century Henry Reynolds’s early estimate of 20,000 was regarded as very conservative. For example, in his Claiming a Continent (1996), David Day speculated that the true number might approach Australian losses in the first world war.

All this went out the window when Raymond Evans, a noted historian of the frontiers, joined with the Danish scholar Robert Ørsted-Jensen and built on pioneering research by Jonathan Richards to detail the activities and consequences of the notorious Queensland Native Police, or QNP, long hidden from view by the destruction and dispersal of the relevant records.

Richards and then Evans and Ørsted-Jensen tracked down and employed such evidence as had survived to work out numbers of QNP patrols per year and numbers of deaths per patrol. Evans and Ørsted-Jensen report a total of 3420 “official dispersals” by the QNP, resulting in more than 40,000 Aboriginal deaths. They further examined evidence about confrontations between settlers and Aborigines and concluded that 275 conflicts contributed a further 20,000-plus deaths. Adding “invader” deaths and estimates of casualties before their period of study (1859–98), Evans and Ørsted-Jensen arrived at an estimated total for Queensland in excess of 66,000 and a ratio of Aboriginal to white deaths of 44–1. These estimates, they insist, are “cautious [and] minimal.”

Violent deaths on other Australian frontiers are usually estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, with a ratio of Aboriginal to white deaths of perhaps 10–1. The much lower figures reflect the dense Aboriginal population of Queensland, the lesser impact of disease there, and the fact that most of the Queensland frontiers came after the invention of repeating rifles and the refinement of methods and tactics, including the use of mounted Aboriginal troopers recruited from previously defeated peoples.

Of course there are various sophistries available to the AWM and others to argue that these events did not constitute “war,” and it is true that there was no declaration of war, that the combatants were not in the armed forces and/or Australian, and so on and so forth. But there is now a consensus among military historians, echoing what was widely assumed to be the case in the nineteenth century: frontier conflict was indeed warfare, pursued in distinctively Australian ways.

The hard question is this: what explains the AWM’s refusal to see these wars as wars? And harder still, what explains the fact that even a distinguished journalist such as Jack Waterford didn’t think to include them either or, perhaps, did think of it and decided against? And, for that matter, what explains the fact that Evans and Ørsted-Jensen’s work and findings, which should have created a national stir when published in 2014, are still known only to the cognoscenti?

There is a certain perverse rationality to the AWM’s obscurantism, doggedly maintained for more than forty years — ever since 1979, in fact, when none other than Geoffrey Blainey was the first of many historians to suggest that the frontier wars might be included. To give them parity with other wars involving Australians would not sit well with the AWM’s even longer campaign to manufacture, promote and profit from an Anzac mystique.

But Waterford belongs to an entirely different mental world from that inhabited by Brendan Nelson and his predecessor and the many AWM council members who have tagged along behind them. So what does his silence signify?

Anyone who has puzzled over these things is in debt, conscious or otherwise, to the great anthropologist and public intellectual W.E.H. Stanner. In the second of his celebrated 1968 Boyer lectures, Stanner pointed to something previously unnoticed, the “great Australian silence,” a silence that reigned over “relations between two racial groups within a single field of life.”

“It is a structural matter,” Stanner argued, “a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”

There has since been a torrent both of storytelling, and of conflict over whether and how the stories should be told. Dozens of historians and others, led by the heroic Henry Reynolds, have worked to break that silence at its centre so that we accept two things: that we are the beneficiaries of a past that includes both honourable sacrifice in honourable causes (including particularly those for which the AWM was conceived and created) and brutal, sustained and deeply dishonourable violence against peoples almost powerless to resist. The first is central to our way of thinking about who we are; the second is peripheral at best. The case to be made against the AWM is that it is wilfully, culpably wrong about both. •

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But were they capable? Would all that extra money disappear in the black hole of schooling? The questions were asked of the first Gonski’s sponsor, Julia Gillard, who came up with the risible idea that every school would have to submit a performance plan for approval. When the Coalition, via education minister Simon Birmingham, abruptly switched from opposing Gonski to embracing it, the are-we-wasting-all-that-money question became Mr Birmingham’s to answer. His response was to recall David Gonski and ask him to “examine the evidence and make recommendations on the most effective teaching and learning strategies.”

Gonski and his colleagues set to work in August 2017 and sent their report to the minister in late March. It was released to the public at the beginning of this week.

The panel was constrained by four realities. It was asked to “focus on practical measures that work,” an approach that, it turns out, it didn’t really agree with. Second, what no doubt looks to the minister to be a perfectly reasonable effort to ensure value for money may look to others like a velvet glove around Canberra’s financial fist. A third difficulty is that the report had to come up with an approach that could and would be implemented faithfully by each of Australia’s twenty-plus very different school jurisdictions. And, finally, the review was required to focus on school and classroom practice when most of the problems, including problems in practice, have their origins elsewhere.

In sum, the panel was asked to resolve two deep and ancient schisms in Australian schooling — the conflict between “conservative” and “progressive” educational approaches, and the conflict between the federal government and the states — while pinning down the notoriously elusive relationship between school funding, educational practice and academic outcomes — and to do it all with one hand tied behind its back, in eight or nine months.

It is in the nature of the task that the Gonski 2.0 report would lack the clarity, coherence and do-ability of Gonski 1.0. The report hovers uneasily between a strategy, a list of things that would be worth doing, and a “vision statement.” It offers only elements of a strategy, but not a fully formed strategy. Some of its specific suggestions are worth pursuing, but they don’t add up to a plan. The great achievement, and the biggest risk, is in the vision. Gonski 2.0 is the first official declaration that a long-familiar model or “grammar” of schooling, premised on selection and therefore success purchased at the price of failure, is obsolete, and must be replaced.

The report begins with a compelling tale, but fails to draw its morals. Things are going badly — falling rankings in the OECD’s league tables, worse outcomes in 2015 than in 2003, a decline in maths performance across all four socioeconomic quartiles, falling attainments across all sectors, a substantial gap between the best-performing countries and Australia, and so on, and on. It boils down to the fact that since Australia adopted a strategy that promised to improve outcomes, outcomes have continued to deteriorate. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this strategy, organised around “outcomes” and the notion that accountability and competition would cause teachers and schools to lift their game, has been a complete failure, and should be ditched.

The review panel doesn’t say this and probably couldn’t. But did it have to accept the basic premise of the failed strategy, that “outcomes” are indeed the problem? Of course academic outcomes are crucial, particularly in the foundational areas of language, science and maths. But they are a problem, not the problem. The problem, or the most substantial single problem in Australian schooling anyway, is the massive redistribution of the population across schools and school systems, a continuing increase in the concentration of “advantaged” students in their schools and “disadvantaged” students in theirs, and a shrinking proportion of schools with socially mixed enrolments.

This segmentation is destructive in several ways. It encourages relationships within rather than across social and cultural groups. It narrows the social understanding and learning needed in a democratic, multicultural society. It is at least as important, educationally and socially, as academic outcomes, and is, moreover, a primary driver of our outcomes problem. Declining outcomes are a symptom of an underlying problem as well as a problem in itself. (I wrote at greater length about this problem in an earlier article for Inside Story.)

In the review’s defence, it could be said that fixing the segmentation problem was the business of Gonski 1.0, and so it was. But Gonski 2.0 could have lined up clearly behind Gonski 1.0 by pointing out that there is only so much that schools can do as long as they are rowing against the segmentation tide. It could have said that laying the foundations of social cohesion is as fundamental a task for schooling as delivering better outcomes performance, and it could have pointed out that tackling segmentation head-on is the most promising way to lift outcomes.

That would mean, among other things, drawing as much attention to declining diversity within schools as to declining outcomes, and asserting that arresting and reversing segmentation is the top priority for reform. It would mean recommending that social learning and diversity within schools be tracked and publicised just as assiduously as we now track outcomes. Unfortunately, the review did none of these things.

The panel makes a number of specific recommendations. Two of these relate to those particularly troubled phases of schooling, the early years and the senior secondary years. Others bear on schooling as a whole: better career paths and professional development for teachers; ditto for school leaders; better workforce planning; more innovative and adaptive school systems; a national “evidence institute”; and the biggie, a transition from an “industrial” model to teaching premised on the continuous progress of every student.

Three of these areas, early learning, senior secondary schooling, and workforce planning, are delegated to further reviews. The early learning review is already under way. The senior secondary review will take in the “purpose, content and structure” of the last two years of schooling and tackle the “disengagement” of so many secondary students. The suggestions seems to be that Australia might follow many other systems in making age fifteen or thereabouts the moment of choice between two distinct forms of schooling, one essentially academic, the other vocationally based.

The workforce planning proposal is less convincing in several important ways. It fails to link workforce planning to the future of schooling or to link educational with industrial relations considerations. It therefore misses the opportunity to engage teacher organisations and draw them away from oppositionism and a narrow focus on the terms and conditions of employment. And, since most industrial relations questions are settled at the state level, any review process should include the local as well as the national.

All this implies a sustained, strategic collaboration rather than a conventionally framed, fly-in-fly-out review. Pending such a major undertaking, the review’s proposals for change in the career structure, professional development and rewards of teaching and school leadership will remain, like their many antecedents, merely the kind of thing that has to be said.

By far the most important of the review’s conclusions is that the “industrial model” of schooling — the forty-five-minute lesson in a single subject delivered to twenty-five or so students of the same age by a teacher standing at the front of the classroom, followed by assessment of all against a single standard — is obsolete. Formed in a long-gone era, it leaves the slow behind and the quick bored, and fails to develop the kind of broad competencies that life and work increasingly demand.

The essence of a better model or “grammar” of schooling, the review says, is a focus on growth rather than attainment measured against a single standard for a given age, to make it possible for “every student [to] progress regardless of starting point or capabilities.” The review wants the curriculum — in other words, the work that students are asked to do — to be organised around “learning progressions” against which growth can be assessed and by which further “personalised” work can be guided.

This is a powerful idea that makes intuitive sense to anyone who has tried to cope with the typical class comprising students four, five or even more learning years apart. It owes much to “measurement science” and to the advocacy of three Melbourne-based institutions, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and the Grattan Institute. It would be surprising if the panel’s moving spirit in this was not Ken Boston, member of both Gonski panels and a former head of Britain’s national curriculum body.

The big problem in this very big idea is obvious. How do we get from here to there? The review offers several suggestions: a web-based assessment tool, the recasting of curriculum as a series of developmental progressions, and professional development for teachers and school leaders. Its version of the “evidence institute” is more sophisticated than Labor’s, and could be construed as supporting the new grammar as well as dispensing “what works” advice.

These recommendations assume that much or all of the matching of learning to learner will be done within the organisational frame of the lesson, the teacher, the class and the subject. The review, advised by a “measurement science” derived mainly from the discipline of psychology, has limited its recommendations to teaching, curriculum and assessment. In the initial stages of a transition, that would be plenty to go on with, of course, but sooner or later — sooner for some students, schools and areas of learning than others — the focus would need to shift from technique to the organisation of people, time and space. That raises the question of the capacity of school systems to inspire, plan and carry through a substantial reorganisation of work and workplace.

On these issues the report’s talk of “obstacles” is allusive at best. The current model of schooling is embedded in heavily defended industrial awards, in the physical infrastructure of schools, in the habits and skills of the workforce, and in parent and community views about what real schooling should look like.

If the report’s picture of a new grammar is limited by language and purview of psychology-derived research, its view of school systems is limited by management-speak. It wants school systems to confront these “challenges” by being “innovative” and “adaptive” through “continuous improvement.” But there is not much point urging systems to be innovative and adaptive if they are not capable of it.

I have relied before on an observation by the chairman of the long-gone Schools Commission, Ken McKinnon, that Australian schooling is good at gardening but not at engineering. A new model of schooling can be gardened into existence only to a certain point, beyond which engineering is required. The school systems weren’t good at engineering in McKinnon’s time. Have they got the hang of it now? My own view is that they are less capable now than they were in the 1970s because the structural circumstances within which they work are even more constraining now than then.

Within each state, authority is dispersed across three sectors, and then between statutory authorities, the industrial relations systems and teacher organisations, universities, government departments, and ministers’ offices. Decision-making is often heavily politicised, and conducted by a constantly changing cast of governments, ministers and senior public servants.

The problem is compounded by the Rudd and Gillard’s consolidation of a “national approach.” The key areas of strategic policy formation and accountability, as well as some aspects of resource allocation and curriculum, have all been ceded to national agencies and processes, leaving the states and non-government systems as not much more than retail outlets. Looked at from the other direction, the national “system” has no authority over the many matters still in the hands of the states and systems.

Perhaps worst of all, the “national approach” herds every system into a single reform strategy. When it fails, all fail, and there is no alternative to learn from. Of course systems should collaborate, but at their own initiative and in varying combinations, not in a lock-step march to the “national” drumbeat.

The “shared ambition, action and accountability” the review calls for will not overcome these limitations. It is very difficult to imagine that each of Australia’s twenty-plus school jurisdictions — some big, some small, some tightly hierarchical, some “devolved,” some in this sector, others in that, some already advancing elements of the review’s agenda, others not — will want or be able to do the report’s bidding. This is not the fault of the review panel or its report. To the contrary, they have made the best of a bad job. It is simply to point out that nobody, not the state governments, not the systems, not the federal government, not the national apparatus and processes, is capable of the “sustained, long-term and coordinated improvement” that the review correctly says is required.

These realities have bedevilled countless reviews over decades. Teacher education holds a dubious record of being the subject of more than a hundred reviews since the 1970s without actually changing much. Reviews are endemic in schooling, one form of the prodigious quantity of talking done in and around schools and school systems. Talk is the virus-like means by which slow, haphazard and not necessarily intended change is effected. Most reviews are stones thrown against castle walls, expressions of frustration at the gap between what could and should be done and what is done. Reviews kick the can down the road, as the old hands put it. Their net effect is a cumulative incrementalism in which problems and costs mount up more quickly than solutions can be found and implemented.

The first Gonski report was an absolutely outstanding exception to this rule. The rule will continue to apply, however, unless that report is seen as a platform upon which further structural and governance reform can be built. The second Gonski report is closer to the rule, but it has one very good chance to escape the oblivion into which its many predecessors have sunk: it has made the genuinely historic call that the familiar way of organising and conducting teaching and learning is obsolete, and that a very different grammar is needed and available. The risk is that the “transition” from one to the other is beyond the capacity of the system, and that the failure will be put down to the idea. •

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Boldness is badly needed — boldness in developing policy, in abandoning policies that haven’t worked, and in facing up to what can and can’t be done from Canberra. Above all, you will need to make a clear-eyed assessment of the educational achievements and failures of the last Labor federal government and its “education revolution.”

This means your priorities must be very different from those of the Rudd–Gillard and Abbott–Turnbull governments — and, indeed, significantly different from those you have flagged so far.

You should:

1. Reclaim Gonski, by setting a Gonski Plus scheme against the Coalition’s Gonski Lite.
2. Dampen down the monomania about “outcomes,” and begin measuring indicators that better reveal and explain what schools do (and what parents want from them).
3. Push the responsibility for “performance” back to the school systems. Be clear: you intend to be the federal minister for education, not the national minister for schools.
4. Shift the conversation about schools: no more talk about “revolutions,” much more about schools and social cohesion.

We’ll return to those four points shortly, as well as one other thing: the need to rethink your recent proposal for a national “evidence” institute.

Labor’s “education revolution”

Both your problems and your opportunities descend from 2007, when Labor came into office promising an “education revolution.”

All revolutions need stories to explain and justify themselves and to enlist wide support. As education minister and then prime minister, Julia Gillard told three stories. The first was that schools were, above all, a preparation for a turbulent but exciting future. Students and, through them, the economy must be equipped with the new, complex skills demanded by accelerating technology-driven change. A second story centred on “outcomes” in the foundational areas of language, maths and science. International comparisons showed that we weren’t improving while other nations — including our economic competitors — were; now, we needed to recover our position near the head of the pack. A third story was more familiar: we must achieve greater equality of opportunity in and through schooling. Schools are there, as Gonski would say, to “ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, power or possessions.”

The available evidence suggests that the performance of Australian schools, on the revolution’s own measures, is worse now than when the revolution was launched.

A national agenda was intrinsic to each of these stories. Successful schooling was a national priority. The revolution was a national undertaking, to be led and driven by the national government.

Revolutions need strategies as well as stories. There were four of them, each related in different ways to the stories.

By far the most prominent was “Gonski.” It drew on the outcomes story and contributed to a more national architecture for schooling, but it was first and foremost the bearer of the equality story. A second strategy tackled the other end of the schooling machinery. Where Gonski focused on the big structures, the “educational practice” strategy targeted the day-to-day life of the school and the classroom with “quality of teaching” and “school improvement” campaigns. This practice strategy focused on — indeed, was obsessed by — outcomes, and demanded “transparency” about the “outcomes performance” of each and every school.

A third, less prominent strategy was to develop national infrastructure and machinery to guide and frame practice, deliver funding, and make and legitimate the big decisions. And the fourth was the storytelling itself. Julia Gillard was a tireless and articulate campaigner in the cause of the revolution.

This combination of stories and strategies successfully became the official agenda for schooling and erected a new national schooling infrastructure. It was entirely unsuccessful in its stated aim of lifting “performance.” Indeed, the available evidence suggests that the performance of Australian schools, on the revolution’s own measures, is worse now than when the revolution was launched.

The challenge facing you as shadow minister is to understand why this is so, and to work out what is politically possible for you to say and do about it. If you can’t, there is every reason to believe that the situation in ten years’ time will be much as it is now, and as it was a decade ago.

1. Reclaim Gonski and build on it

The Gonski report was sent to the minister late in 2011 and released to the public in February 2012. It gave the minister a winning formula which, over the next eighteen months, she squandered, leaving Gonski to be purloined some years later by a Coalition government. It must be your first priority to get it back, by restoring some of its original features, by doing a reverse purloin of a couple of Coalition improvements, and particularly by building on it.

Gonski recommended that schools doing the hardest educational yards should get extra funding, irrespective of which sector they belonged to; that state and federal governments should work out the cost and decide who would contribute what and how to distribute the funding; and that this should be done with the ongoing assistance of a new “national schools resourcing body.”

Gonski solved several problems at once. It cut through a tangle of state and federal funding formulas and schemes; it reduced the grounds for endless conflict between sectors about funding shares; it breathed new life into the dispirited struggle for equality; and it lent credibility to the revolution as a whole. For all these reasons it was popular and energising, among teachers particularly, but also more widely. Its slogan — needs-based, sector-blind — was concise and memorable, and “Gonski” quickly entered the language.

The Coalition’s Gonski is a mixed bag. On the negative side: it makes government schools largely dependent on the often indigent state governments but gives non-government schools the shelter of more reliable federal funding. This inserts a fault line that seems destined to become a split. On the positive: Labor’s “no school worse off” requirement, expensive and by no means “sector-blind,” has gone. The national schools resourcing body, proposed by Gonski but ditched by Gillard, has been resurrected. More ambiguous is the review being chaired by Gonski himself, which has been charged with filling a gap in the original plan by telling schools how best to turn extra “needs-based” dollars into outcomes. So, that is Gonski Lite.

You might also start thinking about another Gonski-level review to tackle the things that Gonski didn’t, the  Karmel double standards. There is an historic opportunity here.

And Gonski Plus? It must restore the original funding commitment because it is important to honour the commitment that has been given. It should return to the principle of all governments being jointly responsible for the funding of all schools. The “no school worse off” provision should lie unmourned in its grave. The National School Resourcing Board should be kept. I’m not so sure about the current Gonski how-to-get-most-educational-bang review. It might have some useful things to say, in which case you should support them (or borrow them), but for reasons explained more fully below, the federal government needs to get out of the business of telling systems how to do teaching and learning.

In any event, you should gazump Gonski Lite with a proposal of your own: extend the needs-based principle to resource allocation within schools as well as between them. Undertake to convene high-level conversations between the willing industrial parties — and only the genuinely willing — about how to give each school more scope for aligning its resources, and particularly its teacher time, with need.

There is one more ingredient in Gonski Plus, bigger than the others and more complicated. Its starting point is this: Gonski is not the be-all and end-all in the reform of the big structures of schooling, and if it is the end, it won’t work. It is a beginning, a very good beginning, but not more. Your problem, and your political opportunity, is this: what next?

Behind the Gonski prescription is the “residualisation” diagnosis. Schools in disadvantaged areas have the hardest educational job to do, but can’t attract the best teachers and principals to do it. Their “performance” falls. The families that can leave, do. That exodus increases the proportion of disadvantaged students, which increases the school’s problem in attracting staff and other resources, and so on down the spiral. Needs-based funding, Gonski proposed, would combat residualisation by lifting the quality of practice in residualised schools and hence improving outcomes and reducing inequality.

The trouble is that there’s more to the problem than residualisation, and more to the solution than better funding and practice. Residualisation is the extreme result of an across-the-board shift in school populations triggered in the early 1970s by the double standards built into the Whitlam government’s landmark Karmel Report.

The first double standard was that some schools would charge fees and some parents would pay them, and most schools wouldn’t, but all would get public funding — an internationally unique arrangement. The second: some schools (including some government schools) would be allowed to select and exclude students on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religion and/or academic potential, while others would be forbidden from excluding anyone on any grounds at all.

These double standards have meant that an unusually large minority of Australian families has an unusually wide choice of schools, yet many have little or no choice at all. Those with a choice have typically used it to send their sons and daughters to schools where they mix with students just like themselves. Equally, the sons and daughters of those who don’t have a choice end up mixing with each other too.

In other words, when Australia went for more diversity between schools it also got less diversity within each school. On the one hand is a steadily increasing “between-school variance,” up from 18 per cent in 2000 to 24 per cent in 2009 (compared with Finland, for example, up from 8 to just 9 per cent over the same period). On the other is a high and rising proportion of schools with concentrations of the “advantaged” (at one end) or the “disadvantaged” (at the other), and a correspondingly small and falling proportion of schools with socially mixed enrolments.

One problem with segmentation in school populations is that it’s a generator of under-performance, and not just in residualised schools. It is bad for outcomes and bad for equality of outcomes. Less noticed but more worrying is that segmentation makes for a narrow social experience and therefore a sub-standard social education, and it encourages the formation of social relationships within groups rather than across them. I have often quoted economics writer Ross Gittins on this point and will quote him again. He notes that Jewish kids go to one school and Islamic kids to another, and then asks a trick question: what did the rich kid say to the poor kid? Answer: nothing, they never met. Segmentation cuts across one of the basic tasks of schooling.

It’s so basic that you must do something about it. But what? This is difficult territory, but as Julia Gillard demonstrated when she commissioned Gonski, good policy can turn difficulties to advantage. Moreover, the politics of the issue have been transformed by the two Gonskis. Just one startling example: a Catholic schools authority has recently attacked the unconscionable policy of giving public money to high-fee private schools! You have much more room for manoeuvre than Gillard did when she commissioned Gonski.

At the very least, you should start making clear that diversity within schools is essential to better overall “performance” and a better society, and you should argue for new indicators of the extent of diversity within each school and of students’ social learning. On the last of these, more below.

You should also start thinking about what comes after Gonski. The light on this particular hill is the opportunity to replace Karmel’s double standards with a common funding and regulatory regime. That would include full public funding up to Gonski standards for all systems (government and non-government alike) willing to sign up to a charter of rights and obligations, including the obligation to increase diversity in each school’s enrolment.

You should start thinking about how to prepare the ground for movement in that direction. This would include talking about relieving parents of the burden of fees, and about making choice not more “widely” available but more equitably and sustainably available. You should make it a priority to explain why diversity within schools as well as between them is of fundamental educational and social importance.

You might also start thinking about another Gonski-level review to tackle the things that Gonski didn’t: those Karmel double standards. There is a historic opportunity here.

2. Dampen down the outcomes monomania, and push for a broader set of indicators

The “practice agenda” flowed from research that found teachers vary greatly in their “effectiveness,” as do “interventions.” Thus, a highly effective teacher could move students along one-and-a-half “learning years” in a single school year while an ineffective teacher might generate just half a year’s growth. In the same way, some strategies and tactics at classroom and school level “work” and some don’t. For example, smaller classes, repeat years and ability grouping aren’t “effective” (it is claimed), but peer tutoring, phonics instruction and feedback are.

This approach captured, even captivated, policy-makers and politicians. It was so clear, simple and plausible that even Christopher Pyne could say the words. It was “evidence-based.” And the policy implications seemed both obvious and practicable.

So successful was Gonski in winning hearts and minds that it ran the risk of being seen as the answer to every prayer.

The “quality of teaching” could be improved by getting more effective teachers into schools and lifting the effectiveness of those already there (and, sotto voce, getting rid of very ineffective teachers); by linking better appraisal and professional development to more rewarding career paths; and by upgrading standards of entry and practice and lifting the standing of the teaching profession.

Getting schools to make more use of “what works” meant four things. Schools and their principals were given more “autonomy,” and hence responsibility, for “performance.” Evidence about “effective interventions” was more widely disseminated. The idea of a national curriculum was revived and renovated. And “performance” became a stronger focus via a new national standardised testing program (NAPLAN) and a new website (MySchool). Two new agencies, ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) and AITSL (the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) would do the work.

The measure, the raison d’être, the sun around which these planets of reform revolved? “Outcomes.” When research found that a teacher or an intervention was “effective,” that meant better outcomes. When the “performance” of a school or a system was being discussed, that too meant outcomes. And if outcomes were the one true measure of effectiveness and performance, the one true measure of outcomes was PISA, the OECD’s triennial assessments of “what students know and can do” in the foundational areas of language, science and maths. That test was so central that the entire strategy would be measured against a single, culminating objective: we would be in PISA’s “top five by ’25.”

There are things to like in this agenda. If teachers don’t change the way they work, it’s hard to see anything else changing, and they can’t do that by themselves. Many schools do need the right kind of “autonomy.” Academic or “cognitive” outcomes matter in themselves, and capabilities in language, science and maths matter across the rest of the curriculum. Academic/cognitive learning is a special responsibility of schools. Students, teachers and school systems all need to know how students are going, and that certainly includes outcomes — there would have been no Gonski, for example, without data on outcomes.

But it didn’t work. A decade on, nothing has changed. Every third year the education minister of the day issues another PISA-prompted “wake-up call.” The “top five” is further away than ever. In some parts of the system things are not even failing to improve. They’re getting worse.

How can this be? Perhaps the practice agenda has worked well enough in enough schools to reduce the impact of rising segmentation? Perhaps. And it is more than possible that it suffered from poor execution, on which more in a moment. But there is also very good reason to conclude that the whole agenda was a dud.

Compare and contrast with Gonski. Gonski was grounded in a penetrating analysis, historically, sociologically and politically informed, of the dynamics of the Australian school system. That analysis was not complete, but it was revelatory nonetheless. It tracked down interrelated problems of funding, governance and educational delivery, and responded with practical policy. The changes it proposed would ripple out across the system and into the future. It was politically smart. “Stakeholders,” numerous and entrenched, were lined up behind the proposals before they went to the minister. It had that catchy, compelling slogan: needs-based, sector-blind.

Gonski appealed to people, in schools and elsewhere. It tapped into a deeply and widely held belief that every kid deserves a fair go and that schools must give it to them. So successful was Gonski in winning hearts and minds that it ran the risk of being seen as the answer to every prayer. The lawns of Parliament House were spiked with thousands of hand-shaped cut-outs, each declaring: I give a Gonski!

The practice agenda was none of these things. It was fully imported, off-the-shelf, pre-bundled. Both the underlying research into “effectiveness” and the “what works” prescription were made in the United States by people who dealt in generic “factors” rather than complicated relationships particular to place and stretching over time. It was a miscellany of measures, neither internally coherent nor consistent with other policy. The MySchool website, for example, reported raw-score “outcomes” for each school. That effectively told parents which schools to avoid, thus fuelling the residualisation spiral that Gonski was trying to arrest. The emphasis on teachers and teaching encouraged teacher-centred instruction, which cut across the story about developing “twenty-first-century capabilities.”

The OECD made the same point more crisply. ‘School reform’, it said, ‘will not work unless it is supported from the bottom up’. In Australia, it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

The assumption underlying much of the practice strategy was that “transparency,” pressure and competition would cause schools and teachers to lift their game. But teachers saw the “teaching quality” push as none too subtly blaming them for the problem, and saw the policies arising as merely remedial. That in turn contradicted the stated aim of lifting the standing of the profession. Teachers also saw the exclusive focus on a certain kind of academic outcome as a trivialisation of what they and schools were on about, and a treatment of the symptom rather than the cause. The emphasis on appraisal and accountability was minatory, and “transparency” could be seen as a euphemism for naming and shaming. Stakeholders (including teacher organisations) were blitzed rather than enlisted. The lawns of Parliament House were not crowded with I want MySchool! placards.

To compound all these problems, the one part of the practice agenda that could have offset at least some of these negatives went largely unimplemented. Teaching does need better pre-service training, better career structures and professional development, more respect and a higher professional standing, but any gains were at the margins.

Visiting Australia in 2009, Canadian whole-of-system change expert Michael Fullan predicted that the practice agenda wouldn’t work. “It might be considered unfair to judge [the reforms] before they have an impact,” he said, but they were using “the wrong drivers,” and there is “no way the… wrong drivers can motivate the masses, which is required for whole system reform.” The OECD made the same point more crisply. “School reform,” it said, “will not work unless it is supported from the bottom up.” In Australia, it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

The problem for you as shadow minister is that the practice agenda is entrenched in a national apparatus of assessment and accountability and in policy-makers’ heads. When the latest round of PISA brought the usual bad news, the minister issued the usual “wake-up call,” as if to say that we’ve got the right policies and all we need is for schools to pull up their socks. For your part, your recent national schools forum spent three of its four sessions (on “Improving learning outcomes,” “Raising the status of the teaching profession,” and “School leadership”) cocooned in the mental world of a failed agenda.

A rethink should begin at the centre of it all: “outcomes.” The problem is not so much the thing itself as the way it has been used, and “outcomes” have been used very badly indeed. Outcomes data should never have been used as a public measure of each school’s “performance.” As the seminal McKinsey report on school reform notes, systems that are in the top five “refrain from target-setting and only make system-level data available publicly.” Nor should outcomes data as generated by NAPLAN ever have been given to parents as an index of their child’s progress. And nor should outcomes ever have been seen as the only part of schools’ work that is crucial. The misuse of data has been mitigated by the introduction of “like school” comparisons and measures of progress, but much of the problem remains.

You should be clear that in your mind these things need equal top billing with academic outcomes… None is easy to measure, but nor are any harder to measure than cognitive outcomes.

Neither a federal minister nor anyone else could abolish the whole thing, even if he or she wanted to. What you can do is announce that, as minister, you will press your state and territory colleagues to commission an expert national review of how information about the “performance” of students, schools and the system can be collected and used in ways that support improvement, broadly construed. Such a review might take as its starting point McKinsey’s finding that successful reformers release system-level but not school-level data, preferring to use the latter to engage schools “in a private dialogue about how they can improve.”

You should also say that, for your part, you support moves to measure and report on “twenty-first-century outcomes” (learning to learn, collaborative problem-solving, and so on) but you are also persuaded that cognitive or “academic” outcomes are not enough. They should be at the centre of reform efforts, but not by themselves.

“Non-cognitive” outcomes, the values and attitudes that kids take from schools, are every bit as important. The experience of school matters as much as outcomes of whatever kind; school is not only a preparation. Twelve years or so represents a fifth or more of most people’s working lives. Are they good years? Safe, happy, engaging, rewarding? And schools are about the ties that bind, or fail to as well as each individual’s learning and experience. Schools matter more to the social order than they do to “the economy.” They help (or fail) to sustain the cohesive social order on which economic activity depends. In a democratic, multicultural, wealthy society, that means schools that are socially, ethnically and culturally diverse.

You should be clear in your mind that these things need equal top billing with academic outcomes, which means measuring and reporting them just as strenuously as we measure and report academic outcomes. None is easy to measure, but nor are any of them harder to measure than cognitive outcomes.

Putting the spotlight on non-cognitive outcomes, on the quality of the experience of schooling, and on the diversity of school populations would pay off in several ways. Technically, it would give a much clearer picture of how schools are actually going, and a stronger basis in evidence for finding out why. And a set of indictors that more fully reflects what parents (and students) want from schools, what teachers do and try to do, and the complicated, multipurpose, difficult-to-steer reality of schools would help to turn passive resistance to reform into active support. Politically, it would sustain the sentiment that when it comes to schools, Labor is the one that cares.

You must concern yourself with “outcomes” because they are part of the national framework within which systems and schools operate. The rest of the practice strategy — the “teaching quality” and “what works” agendas — are not. They are to do with teaching and learning, matters into which the federal government has long intruded, to the cost of all concerned.

3. Push responsibility for “performance” back to the school systems

The taken-for-granted in each of Julia Gillard’s stories about the schools revolution is that the revolution would be national.

Australia’s unique way of being not-national in schooling includes close involvement in schooling by two levels of government, the division of schools into three sectors — each with its own funding, organisation and governance — and the replication of these arrangements in each of eight states and territories.

Labor’s ambition was to bring a new level of coordination and common purpose to these twenty-plus “jurisdictions” through a new (national) funding scheme, a new mechanism of cooperation between governments, a new (national) curriculum, new (national) accountability instruments and institutions, and a single (national) reform agenda driven by unanimous subscription to a single theory of school reform.

Ironically enough, this approach replicated in form if not in specific content the approach that gave us the problem in the first place. Since the 1960s it has been a Labor article of faith (to which I subscribed until relatively recently) that better schooling and more equality in and through schooling would come from Canberra, not the states — indeed, in spite of the states. That the states have floundered in schooling is a matter of record. That Canberra can make matters worse is not.

Of the four elements of the Rudd–Gillard “national approach” — rationalised funding, cooperation between governments, a performance infrastructure, and a school-reform doctrine — only the funding scheme (Gonski) was likely to work, and that was the only one not implemented. The others were implemented, more or less, and served to compound the problems.

Hence the spectacle of the only minister who employed not a single teacher and ran not a single school stumping the country telling the others how to lift their educational game

The idea of a peak body of governments to align policy on things such as schooling was not Labor’s invention, but the Rudd government did come to office determined to use it to drive a different kind of federalism. The idea actually came from one of the states (Victoria) and involved pursuing a “national reform agenda” through “national partnerships” hammered out by new COAG (Council of Australian Governments) working parties.

That did not survive. On one flank were Canberra’s bureaucracies. Their reflex was to tell the states what they would deliver in return for federal money. On the other side were state ministers who soon saw that the “more national” approach was in fact a more Canberra approach. COAG and its working parties became arenas of contestation as much as cooperation. There were structural problems as well, including the fact that government school systems were directly represented but non-government systems, controlling a third of the nation’s schools, were not.

Chronic overlap in and confusion about who was responsible for what was intensified by the practice agenda. It took the federal government deep into teaching and learning, deep, that is, into the core business of the systems. Hence the spectacle of the only minister who employed not a single teacher and ran not a single school stumping the country telling the others how to lift their educational game, and of a Coalition minister who took it for granted that he could set up a review of the “national” curriculum and have it report to him for action as required.

The construction of the federal minister for education as a de facto national schools minister has continued. You have promised that a Labor government would “work closely with principals, school leaders, [and] teachers.” In the same vein the current minister has, among other things, told school systems what kinds of teachers they should be recruiting, and advised schools on what they should do about students’ smartphones.

We can respect the concerns, but not the overreach and mission creep. Teacher employment is none of Simon Birmingham’s business, and your referents, if you take his place, should be systems, governments and national organisations, not principals, school leaders and teachers. These solecisms are the tip of an iceberg comprising a long history of federal governments using tied grants, funding agreements and targeted programs to get the states and, through them, the government and non-government systems to do Canberra’s educational bidding. Some of these programs appear to have been productive if seen in isolation but not as parts of a whole.

Perhaps the most counterproductive component of the “national approach” is that each increment in “the national” — in curriculum, in performance indicators, in accountability and performance, in the articulation of a theory of teaching and school reform — has meant a decrement in the capacities, the sphere of action, and the expectations and sense of responsibility of the twenty-plus systems. In the upshot, no one — not the federal government, not the emergent “national” apparatus, not the state governments, not the systems themselves — is capable of driving reform.

Theories of whole-of-system reform agree on two fundamental requirements: “alignment” of the many elements of schooling — values, objectives, curriculum, assessment, the organisation of teaching and learning, teacher selection and training, career structures, kinds and degrees of school “autonomy,” accountability, resourcing — to support each other and pull in the same direction. And, second, this effort must be sustained over extended periods. As the Nous report to Gonski put it, “the key to improving Australia’s education system is not in doing a lot of new things, but rather it is in applying what we know works in a comprehensive, integrated and sustainable manner.”

If you cannot go forward and cannot go back, you will have to go sideways. The imperfect but best available answer lies in a redefinition of the federal government’s role, and of a “national approach.”

To give Julia Gillard one of her several dues, she saw that the Australian school system wasn’t capable of doing anything in a comprehensive, integrated and sustained manner. The trouble is, her fix didn’t work either. The “more national” approach fell between two stools. It did not produce a national system, and it did not empower local ones.

What can you do? Here as elsewhere you are between a rock and a hard place. The government systems are protected by the Constitution and incumbency, the non-government ones by incumbency and interest groups. Any attempt to push further into their territory will guarantee a repeat of the 2007–13 experience. In any foreseeable future, there will be no national system or anything like it.

Nor can Australia follow the example of Canada, or the advice of one of the Abbott government’s reviews: get the federal government out of schooling. Both sides of federal politics are locked into Gonski-style funding commitments, and the sector system makes that almost impossible to avoid. The national agencies and apparatus are established facts and would be very difficult to dismantle. The electorate expects that federal governments — and particularly federal Labor governments — will “do something” about schools and will vote for those that do.

If you cannot go forward and cannot go back, you will have to go sideways. The imperfect but best available answer lies in a redefinition of the federal government’s role, and of a “national approach.”

The “national” should be confined to a broadly specified framework, with goals, objectives and funding on the one side, “performance” on the other. Within that framework school systems should be responsible for finding their own salvation, their own way of aligning curriculum, assessment, approaches to teaching and all the rest, subject only to full disclosure within the terms of the framework, including disclosure of exactly where the money went and why.

In other words, the “national” should cease to be “federal” in thin disguise. Neither the “national” nor the federal government should promulgate theories of the reform of teaching and learning or get involved in their conduct or reform. Specifically, the national curriculum should be joined by a statement of principles to guide school systems that want to develop or adapt other curriculums. Each system should be free to develop its own performance indicators as a supplement (or alternative to) those specified in the Measurement Framework for Schooling in Australia.

If systems want to collaborate, in whatever combination, the federal government should offer to convene and support such collaboration. It should keep and publish the national books. Unavoidably, it will continue to be the biggest single funder of schools. And, as I’ve suggested, the federal government still has fundamentally important work to do in reforming the funding and regulatory elements of the framework of schooling.

To repeat, this is an imperfect solution. The line between a framework for schooling and the conduct of teaching and learning is obviously blurry, particularly in the accountability area.

More consequentially, the school systems (and particularly the government systems) have serious structural problems of their own. What should be expert and arm’s-length decision-making is highly politicised. Authority and responsibility are dispersed across statutory authorities, government departments, ministers’ offices and the universities, most of them influenced or even dominated by interest groups. Ministers and senior bureaucrats have short half-lives.

Systems are captive to quasi-legal industrial agreements that specify everything from class sizes to the disposition of time to career structures. Most systems have made the mistake of pushing teacher organisations to the margins instead of drawing them into a big, long-term strategy of reform. And teacher organisations have made the mistake of focusing on immediate gains in terms and conditions rather than considering these with a view to the long-term future of teaching and learning and the schools workforce.

Many systems, and particularly the smaller ones, have lost intellectual capital and institutional memory. There are continuing difficulties in getting the right relationships between “autonomy,” support and accountability; between schools in the same neighbourhood; and between governments and the “government” and non-government school systems.

These are dolorous facts, but they will be there, disguised and compounded, in any “national approach.” Federal governments have a particular role in convening the development of a national framework within which school systems can operate more productively, but beyond that their only contribution to driving “comprehensive integrated and sustained reform” is to keep out of the way. You should be clear about where the responsibility for the reform of teaching and learning lies, and that a federal government cannot be held responsible for things that it does not control.

Unless and until that point is taken, school systems will continue to look for national resolution of local problems and hide behind the PISA-encouraged obfuscation that it is “Australia” that has the school performance problem.

4. Shift the conversation about schools, and put social cohesion at its centre

In a labour-intensive, hearts-and-minds industry like schooling, storytelling can be a powerful strategy, but only if the stories ring true, and can be acted on. Julia Gillard was a gifted storyteller, and it got her into trouble. Her story about schools and equality worked because the schools–equality relationship is something that people really care about and want, and, in Gonski, the story came with the means of its realisation. The stories about schooling and the economy, and about “outcomes” as the one true measure of schools, were unconvincing because they were based on fallacies. But the story that really went wrong was the one about “revolution.”

You should make out the case for schools as builders of social cohesion, as giving students the chance to learn for real that they belong to a wonderfully diverse society with some big common values including a commitment to democracy, and to multiculturalism.

It is not hard to see how it happened. There is a great deal that needs to be done in schooling, perhaps even enough to warrant the term “revolution” (as long as it’s a lower-case “r”). Both Rudd and Gillard subscribed to the Labor doctrine that Canberra has a special mission in schooling. For well-known biographical reasons, both cared about schooling and believed in it. The trouble was that the aspiration was way out of kilter with the means. For reasons discussed a moment ago, Canberra cannot make a “revolution” in schooling, however much it might be needed, and talking as though it can raises unmeetable expectations, invites disappointment and cynicism, and effectively takes responsibility for an unavoidably unsatisfactory result.

Bearing that cautionary experience in mind, what stories should you tell?

Your first story should be about what you can and can’t do. You should promise a federal government that will play its part and expect other governments and school systems to play theirs. You will deliver better funding in a better way, and you will press hard to build on Gonski and to deliver a stronger national framework within which systems and their schools can do their job.

Your second story should go to the heart of that framework, to the kinds of schools that parents, teachers and students want, and to the proper appreciation of the work that schools do. You should commit to fighting for measures of schooling that see academic progress as crucial but care equally about the experience of children and young people in school, and their personal and social development.

Third, you should make out the case for schools as builders of social cohesion, as giving students the chance to learn for real that they belong to a wonderfully diverse society with some big common values, including a commitment to democracy and to multiculturalism. This story will have to take on the tricky task of explaining that in this area Australia is not travelling as well as it has, and that schools are compounding the problem rather than reducing it, and that is why you will give so much of your attention to shaping a national framework that encourages and rewards greater social and cultural diversity in each school.

In short, you should be the human face of an alternative federal government that, in schooling, is committed, thoughtful, encouraging and realistic. There should be no mention of revolutions. And no “wake-up calls.”

A postscript: please rethink your proposal for a national evidence institute

You recently committed to spending $73 million over four years to establish and operate an independent organisation to commission research, assess programs sold into schools, and publish summaries of “evidence on best practice.”

Four things can be said in favour of this proposal, and rather more against. Politically, it provides some insurance against the Gonski 2.0 report, due soon. It supports teachers rather than monitoring them. It implicitly acknowledges the loss of intellectual input to the schools sector. And it is proposed to be independent.

And against? The proposal comes from the tradition of federal intrusion into the core business of systems discussed and criticised above. For that reason alone, it should not proceed in its present form.

Like the forum you convened late last year, the proposal belongs to the mental world of the Rudd–Gillard reform-of-practice strategy. It is, moreover, redundant. Those wanting to find out more about the “what works” approach have no difficulty in doing so, as a simple Google search on “what works in schools” will demonstrate. The proposal arrives very late on a well-populated field; it is now fifteen years since the US Department of Education launched its What Works Clearinghouse, for example.

As for research, Australia has 3000 full-time-equivalent education research academics, and contributes 4 per cent of the discipline’s total global output. Australia does more than its share. Research on effectiveness is grossly overdone. You will no doubt be aware of John Hattie’s formidable digest of 800 meta-studies (soon to be expanded to 1200), themselves digests of more than 50,000 studies of effectiveness. In short, there is no case for more; but there is a case for different. Cost-effectiveness research, for example, offers a much more useful and needed angle of view than the effectiveness approach and should be encouraged. As minister responsible for higher education you would be well placed to suggest such redirection of effort.

Then there are the limitations of information, of “evidence,” and of evidence on “what works.” It is true that until quite recently schools proceeded on the shaky basis of assumption, experience and professional folklore. Putting these to the test of research represents a crucial step forward.

But no evidence, including that generated within the effectiveness paradigm, can be the basis of practice, as both the term “evidence-based” and the proposed name of the institute imply. That idea has been imported into education from the health industry by effectiveness researchers, but schools are fundamentally different from hospitals and surgeries. The latter are sites of the delivery of a service (of medicine); schools, by contrast, are sites of production (of learning), a much more elusive matter in which judgement, character, intuition and values do and will continue to play a large part. By paying no attention to a fundamental input (cost) and ignoring all the consequences of schooling except one (cognitive outcomes), the claim to be following in the “evidence-based” footsteps of medical science has been a political rather than an epistemological success.

Evidence and its cousin, technique, are increasingly important elements of practice. They inform it, but not mainly through mere reticulation. In school and classroom improvement, as in system-level change, many things, including information and evidence, must be aligned within a strategy pursued over years. The clearing-house idea encourages a quite misplaced plug-and-play expectation.

Perhaps the most fundamental limitation of the effectiveness approach is its symbiotic relationship with a “grammar” of schooling familiar to all: thirty-odd “lessons” per week, each in a “subject,” delivered by a teacher to a group of students of the same age, and so on. Effectiveness research tells us what works in that particular setting.

Here is something for an institute to do, not by “research” or even research and development, but by something closer to development-research-development, a well-organised, sustained interaction between thinking and doing.

Will that grammar of schooling serve into the foreseeable future? Probably not. It has never worked for a significant minority of students (teenage boys particularly). It is a highly person-dependent and therefore low-productivity work process. It has great difficulty in exploiting the digital technologies. And it is not well suited to the circumstances in which children and young people do and will live, or to the kinds of learning they need.

Moreover, it seems at least possible that a very different grammar is emerging. It focuses not on the quality of teaching but on the organisation of learning. Specifically, it looks to the reorganisation of schooling around the continuous progress or growth of each student, and to a very different student working day and “learning career.”

The shift towards a grammar of that kind would (or will) bring with it a problem that the right kind of intellectual effort could help tackle: how can systems and schools make what they’ve got work better and at the same time move towards what’s needed? Now here is something for an institute to do, not by “research” or even research and development, but by something closer to development-research-development, a well-organised, sustained interaction between thinking and doing.

Not every school system will see that as a priority, or not yet anyway, in which case such an institute could be (like the OECD) subscription-based. The role of a federal minister? You could float the idea and see how many hands go up. You could encourage, convene and, perhaps, use some of that $73 million to subsidise, but all within a clear understanding: this is your call, systems, not ours. •

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Davis brings a new argument to this long-running conflict. If Australia’s public universities are to survive the looming threats of digitally delivered education, globalisation and big capital, we need a new policy framework and new kinds of public institutions. The Dawkins monoculture must give way to a “rich ecosystem of institutional types.” The Australian Idea of a University is about much more than ideas and universities; it is an argument and proposal for reshaping the entire tertiary education system.

All but two of Australia’s forty-odd universities, Davis argues, conform to the model established with the University of Sydney in 1850: they are publicly owned, self-governing, meritocratic, commuter, comprehensive and vocational. As one colony after another commissioned its very own university, each followed the example of Sydney, then of Sydney and Melbourne, then of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and so on down the line. The model was subsequently elaborated by a growing emphasis on research, and vastly expanded, but successive attempts to depart from the template have all melted away. Davis sees this striking continuity as a case of “path dependency” arising from “an initial choice [that] shapes subsequent options.” Once we start down a pathway (the theory goes) the costs of departing from it exceed the costs of following it, the familiar becomes the ideal, and sheer habit “is a lane cut deep in the landscape.”

In this account of the origins and development of the Australian university — highly recommended, by the way, for its combination of clarity, readability and succinctness — John Dawkins plays a key role. He is remarkable not just for his attachment to the standard model but also for his zeal in applying it to everything in sight. Institutions of all shapes, sizes and specialisations were swallowed by or turned into universities, defined in legislation by Dawkins as conducting both teaching and research in at least three broad fields of study.

The upshot, Davis argues, has proved to be expensive, overweening and cumbersome. Academic staff from the old CAEs (colleges of advanced education) were now required to undertake research as well as teaching, so costs shot up. A huge increase in the number and range of vocational courses at university level put the entire VET (vocational education and training) sector at a discount. And the newly merged, multi-campus, multipurpose, rapidly expanding institutions were too big, too complex and too wedded to one way of doing things.

If Dawkins is the evil genius in this story, his successors have played the part of accomplices, taking over the machinery of the “unified national system” to control both public subsidies and what the universities could charge their customers, putting the universities between a financial rock and a hard place. Moreover, neither direct funding nor prescribed fee levels have borne any clear relationship to actual costs. Davis argues that the universities have been able to survive only by virtue of their successful entry into the international education market and by developing a maze of cross-subsidies — between international and domestic teaching, between cheap-to-deliver courses and expensive ones, between teaching and research.

The universities, and particularly the high-prestige Go8 (Group of Eight) universities, have long agitated to bring this regime to an end, most recently in their doomed campaign to deregulate fees. But now there is a quite new situation, or a new argument at least: the logic of path dependency is up against the logic of creative destruction. The highly regulated Australian public universities must contend with new players who can offer what the market demands without having to do research, or offer a broad menu, or, in an increasing number of cases, run an expensive campus. We already have around 170 non-university providers of higher education, most in IT, business or design, many of them for-profit, some overseas-owned. The Australian online education market is worth an estimated $5.9 billion a year and growing quickly, “an attractive prospect for Silicon Valley players such as the ‘MOOCS-for-credit’ offered by Kadenze or the self-explanatory offering of nopayMBA.com.”

Australian universities know how to play this game. They do it all the time overseas, and with great success, but perversely they are not permitted to play it at home. For now, they remain in a strong position, as protected by legislation and regulation as they are hampered by them. But in the not-so-distant future? What Australia needs, Davis concludes, is a system of regulation and funding that “allows innovation and rewards difference.” It would have four elements.

First, a national framework must embrace “the entirety of post-school education,” including particularly the badly degraded vocational education and training sector.

Second, funding must be geared to the actual costs of teaching and research. As things now stand, “no institution can afford to specialise in a discipline such as engineering or visual arts without the cushion of large law, business, nursing and teaching courses to pay the bills.”

Third, an arm’s-length agency of the kind that operated from the 1950s to the 1980s, first as the Universities Commission and then as the Tertiary Education Commission, should be revived to “oversee policy implementation from vocational education to doctoral programs, and so provide Australia with a coherent framework for higher education.”

Fourth, we need new public institutions, diverse in size, mission, student mix, course offerings, mode and language of instruction, undergraduate and postgraduate offerings, generalist and professional programs.

It is not necessary to agree with every part of Davis’s argument —particularly on the degree of uniformity in the Australian system, on the origins and consequences of the Dawkins revolution, or on the universities as the victims of policy — to support his conclusions and applaud most of his proposals. In fact, the first three of them comprise an unusually coherent and far-sighted “vision” for tertiary education.

Davis is not the first and will not be the last to put proposals along these lines. He is well aware that their boldness means that they have a very hard row to hoe. Ironically enough, they would probably require a Dawkins to be achieved. The Tertiary Education Commission idea is not popular among his colleagues, as he points out. And, as a student of path dependency, he is also aware that the structures of the education system and the processes of policy formation are heavily defended. The two tertiary sectors are funded and controlled in very different ways, the universities by the Commonwealth, the VET sector by a tangled combination of state/territory and federal governments. Prerequisite to Davis’s plan is a Commonwealth buy-out of the states’ stake in VET, an objective that eluded even the indomitable Dawkins.

The transfer of any responsibilities from ministers and departments to statutory authorities has a similarly discouraging history. Departmental heads see statutory authorities as invaders, while the coordinating agencies, Finance, Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet, see them as a threat to, well, coordination. For their part, ministers are happy to present a smaller political target but also like the power and profile that comes from handing out money and running things.

For all these reasons, statutory authorities in education have had short and unhappy lives at the national level. Whitlam’s Schools Commission and Curriculum Development Centre barely survived a decade. ANTA (the Australian National Training Authority) had a similarly brief half-life, as did Dawkins’s NBEET (National Board of Employment, Education and Training). Perhaps others created by Gillard and, most recently, by Birmingham will do better? To date, the main exception is the Tertiary Education Commission, which Davis wants to revive. Its relatively long life saw it become a secretive creature of the sector rather than a buffer between it and government. It had little say in any significant change and reform, which remained in the gift of government.

Davis’s underlying idea is the right one, though. What he wants is a field structured and managed in a hands-off way so that “innovation” and “difference” will align players and strategies more closely with variety in demand and mode of delivery. Perhaps the emerging forces of creative destruction will change the political equation in its favour? Or other means will be found to the same end? We can hope so.

The fourth of the Davis proposals is quite different from the first three. It addresses not the framework for tertiary education but its contents. Here the problem is not in the context and prospects of the proposal, but in the proposal itself.

Davis wants new tertiary institutions, and lots of them. We must have more diversity and we must get costs down, he says, and that can’t be done within existing institutions. They’re locked into the teaching–research nexus, and “no government will (or should) contemplate changing [their] status,” so future growth should be channelled away from them and into new institutions diverse in every respect bar one. They must be teaching-only.

These are odd propositions. It is an oddly relaxed and comfortable conclusion to an argument about the gathering forces of “creative destruction.” It is odd to argue that the teaching–research nexus is a central problem and then accept that it will be the dominant mode into the indefinite future. And it is odd to imply that the universities are travelling tolerably well on teaching and research and the relationship between the two.

On the teaching side of the nexus, “quality” seems to have more or less flatlined at a relatively low level ever since the course experience questionnaire was introduced in the 1990s, no small achievement under circumstances discussed below. But the proof of this, like all other puddings, is in the eating, not in the “quality” of the process. Teacher education, for example, enjoys relatively good ratings for “course experience” but not for its usefulness. Between one- and two-thirds of newly qualified teachers have reported feeling ill-prepared for a range of routine teaching tasks, and around three-quarters have declined to say that they felt well or very well prepared “for the realities of teaching.” Principals’ ratings of these new graduates are lower still. The problem is that some of the knowledge needed by teachers is of the university kind and some is not; some “learning to be a teacher” can be done on campus and in advance of actually trying to teach, and some cannot.

The same kind of thing is true, in different ways and extents, across the extraordinarily wide range of occupations now entered via a university course, from chiropractic, Chinese medicine, dietetics and nutritional science to journalism, fashion design, film-making and animation to management accountancy, law and social work to town planning, surveying, architecture and building. The common problem, of which many university leaders are increasingly aware, is in getting the specific mix of on- and off-campus teaching and study, simulation and workplace experience required to generate specific combinations of knowledge and capability required for occupational and workplace success. It is likely that teacher education is somewhere near one end of a spectrum of success in university vocational preparation, some of the health-related occupations — advantaged by mystique, lavish funding and the threat they pose to life and limb — at the other.

If the graph is more or less flat on one side of the nexus, on the other it climbs steeply. The massive growth in research output is usually seen as a response to the demands of a knowledge-based economy, thus conveniently implying that it is functional, indeed fundamental to the entire social order. But the research boom also owes much to the universities’ anxiety about differentiating themselves from lesser breeds and, more recently, to the development of research as a global industry with its own “economy.”

This growth in research has been purchased at the cost of teaching, partly in class sizes and staff–student contact, mainly by bringing in “sessional” staff employed on short-term and often part-time contracts to fill the vacuum left by academics rushing to spend more time on research. Steadily increasing cynicism and resentment within universities is matched by increasing scepticism in the laity about the point of all this research, and about whose interests are actually being served. The pressure is building not just for measurement of research “quality” or impact, or even for cost–benefit analysis, but for a really serious effort to understand the opportunity costs of it all.

In short, there are real problems on both sides of the teaching–research nexus, and in the nexus itself. What to do?

The answer is both obvious, and complicated. The obvious part: the flow of resources from teaching to research should be reversed.

The complications? Doing a better job of “teaching” is less a matter of getting academics to “teach” better than a matter of changing the shape of learning programs. The problem is structural, as new teaching graduates recognise when they complain about weak links between theory and practice in their training, and the lack of relevance of much “theory.” Davis’s own university took the same point when it set up (with Davis’s very active support) MTeach, a new kind of teacher-education program organised around extended periods of well-supervised practice, plenty of opportunity to digest the lessons of experience, and a formal curriculum derived mainly from practice-focused research. It works, and others are moving in the same direction — but it is not an easy thing to do.

Another complication: shifting effort from research back to teaching can easily be done in ways that compound the underlying problem of getting parity of esteem and reward for teaching and research. The big problem in the Dawkins plan wasn’t so much in the imposition of uniformity (as Davis argues) but in the kind of uniformity imposed. The universities’ privileging of research over teaching extended to embrace the whole of the higher education sector. Thus, “underperforming” academics are offered a “teaching-only” appointment.

A third complication: could and should a campaign to restore teaching to parity proceed without dealing with the employment conditions of those doing the teaching that “real” academics don’t want to do?

And a fourth: would putting effort back into teaching necessarily mean reduced research output, a lower international ranking and lower international enrolments and revenues?

Then there’s the complication of cost. Melbourne’s MTeach relied mainly on extra funding rather than a shift of the “load” from research to teaching, and it cost around $5000 per year per student more than the conventional campus-based programs. Good vocational preparation is expensive, even if “industry partners” can be got to contribute, as they should. Contract teaching staff are there because they’re cheap and “flexible.” Putting them on decent contracts would cost. Perhaps most expensive of all, if “teaching only” is not to mean “can’t do research,” a teaching-only career has to compete for status, interest and prospects with research, and that also costs. “Teaching only,” whether inside universities or in new institutions of the kind Davis wants, is expensive, unless it is done badly, in which case the hated binary system would be restored, Davis’s vehement denials notwithstanding.

Despite these many difficulties, an increasing number of universities are pursuing the teaching-only option. A closely evidenced study by a former university deputy vice-chancellor found “a consistent upward trend” in numbers of teaching-only academics. Most of this growth has been “opportunistic rather than strategic,” pursued for good and bad reasons, with both good and bad results. These Australian developments belong to Davis’s “creative destruction” process, a worldwide “unbundling” of functions performed by academics and by universities.

Much of this is of a piece with Davis’s analysis. Why does it not find its way into his prescription for universities? It is partly an artefact of his angle of view. From his lofty perch, the system and its institutions fill most of the field of vision. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. But there is more to it, and to Davis, than that. He is a prominent and thoughtful contributor to debates on research and research policy, and an active reformer of university teaching. His comprehension of the plight of the VET sector suggests an unusually enlightened self-interest — where “self” refers to universities of the Melbourne kind — but self-interest nonetheless.

This combination of perspective and interests condenses in the “diversity” catchcry, and in the argument that what we need is “diversity” all around the universities but not inside them. The Australian Idea of a University was written by the vice-chancellor of one Go8 university, was launched in passionate support of the diversity principle by the chancellor of another Go8 institution, and carries a note of emphatic support for the same cause by the former chancellor of yet another member of the Go8. That the book rules out any change in “the status of existing institutions” and ignores the possibility of diversity within them will encourage the perception that “diversity” is being used here as it has been used for many years in schooling, as a flag of convenience for the beneficiaries of history, and will in that way, and very unfortunately, discredit or distract from his larger proposals. ▪

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My submission to the review accepted that “practical measures,” readily undertaken in schools, have a part to play. It also argued that such measures will succeed only to the extent that the review panel can find good answers to its wider questions.

1. Allocating resources according to need is as important within schools as between them

The arrival in schools of additional, needs-based funding will bring with it significant problems as well as great possibilities.

One risk is that schools will see this “extra” funding as an opportunity to do “extra” things. In the worst case, “enrichment” and “remedial” programs will address need while an undisturbed mainstream program — less than rich and routinely leaving some or many students behind — will go on generating the need. At best, using supplementary funding to do merely supplementary things will be an opportunity missed.

A challenge for the review will be to find ways of encouraging schools to use new money to free up old — that is, to support “doing a Gonski” within each school as well as between schools by shifting teaching time and effort from areas of relatively low need to areas of high need.

The review asks: “Are there barriers to implementing improvements?” The answer in this area is an emphatic yes. There are cultural barriers created by habitual ways of organising teachers’ work and by legitimate concerns about the implications of doing things differently. There are also structural and therefore political barriers in the rules governing class sizes and teaching loads that make it difficult or impossible for schools to reallocate effort by (for example) putting more students in some classes so that there can be fewer in other classes.

2. In trying to improve their “performance,” schools may be rowing against a systemic tide

Research commissioned by the first Gonski review found that a relatively low proportion of Australian students are in schools with socially mixed enrolments and a relatively high proportion in schools with concentrations of disadvantaged students (on the one side) and advantaged (on the other).

An Australian Council for Educational Research study looked at the same question via an index of “school variance.” It found an increase in variance in Australian schools from 18 to 24 per cent between 2000 and 2009; over the same period, school variance in Finland rose from just 8 to 9 per cent. Other research has identified a rising incidence of both ethnic and social-class segmentation.

These developments underlie problems in performance. The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students is far greater in Australia than in many OECD countries, and Australia was the only OECD country to see an increase in the performance gap between schools with high numbers of disadvantaged students and schools with high numbers of advantaged students between 2000 and 2009.

This research looked mainly at the consequences of segmentation for the academic performance of students in disadvantaged schools. But in a recent analysis, Melbourne University’s John Hattie has argued that students in schools with high concentrations of advantaged students are also underperforming because (as he puts it) the schools are “cruising.”

An effective way to improve “performance” would be to arrest and reverse the trend to segmentation. To the extent that it is not arrested and reversed, schools are being asked to row against a systemic tide.

The federal government’s recent decision to introduce needs-based, sector-blind funding is an important step towards tackling the problem of segmentation. But it alone may not be equal to the task.

Several of the key structural drivers of segmentation remain. These include: the division between fee-charging and free schools; the absence of a ceiling on school expenditure; and a regulatory regime that permits some schools (in both government and non-government sectors) to select students on various grounds but requires other schools to take all comers, and that gives some Australian families an exceptionally wide choice of schools but others little or no choice at all.

This is more than just a problem for “academic” performance.

3. Academic outcomes in fundamental areas are not the only outcomes that matter fundamentally

Much attention is being given to defining, teaching and assessing new kinds of “outcomes,” variously referred to as generic, cross-curriculum or twenty-first-century skills. They range from “collaborative problem-solving” and “learning to learn” to “applying deep understandings of key disciplinary concepts.”

Less attention is given to a category of learning regarded by many parents and others as fundamental to schooling: the development of values, attitudes, and ways of seeing oneself and others.

The role of the school in this area of learning is limited but real, and more challenging than delivery of the academic curriculum. It is not just a matter of running anti-bullying programs or establishing a student representative council; the educational task is to make the entire “hidden” curriculum explicit, and to make a sustained effort to align it with fundamental social and educational goals.

Much of this hidden curriculum exists in the relationships among the students themselves. The school is the place where children and young people spend extended periods of time together, and where they therefore do a lot of growing up, of themselves and of each other.

What students learn from and about each other depends crucially on who the other students are. Who goes to school with whom? Some schools have a great deal of control over the who (as noted in the previous section) while other schools have little say at all, and the upshot is something that no one intended.

When economics writer Ross Gittins notes that Jewish kids go to one school, Islamic kids to another, and poses the trick question, “What did the rich kid say to the poor kid?” (answer: nothing, they never met), he is drawing attention to a social problem, but also an educational impoverishment, for all concerned.

Diversity is a fundamental social principle, but it should also be a core educational value. That value can be taught, but even the best teaching in this domain is no substitute for, or counter to, what many students see and experience. The fact that research and national policy have turned their attention to rising social segmentation mainly because of its impact on academic outcomes suggests that the “what works” agenda can encourage an unfortunate myopia.

4. Outcomes of schooling matter, but so does the experience itself

Schooling is unavoidably a preparation for life after school, but it is not only that. Twelve years is, after all, one fifth or more of most working lives. To most parents it is as important that their sons and daughters really look forward to going to school each day as it is that they make good progress in the formal curriculum. Its importance to students themselves is obvious.

How many do look forward to going to school? Why or why not? How far does that differ from one school or kind of school to another? Is the “performance” of schools in this vital area improving, or the reverse? How does it relate to their “performance” in other domains?

Answers to questions such as these do exist, but within systems, and often in less than robust form. Nationally, schools can use standard instruments to collect data on student, parent and staff satisfaction, and under the terms of the National Education Agreement they are required to “report on it,” and to include a link to the MySchool home page in the section of their annual reports dealing with school satisfaction.

“Satisfaction” is a limited concept. The questions posed in the standard survey instrument are anodyne, and don’t allow students to say at least some of what they see, think and feel about their experience at their school. Data thus collected would not support national aggregation.

The case for a robust, national collection of direct feedback from students as the basis for an experience-of-school key performance indicator is that:

⦁ what students experience is more fundamental than — indeed, is the point of — what the school provides (“school quality”)

⦁ the students themselves are the experts: data on attendance, engagement, retention, suspensions and the like are all important, but all depend upon inference; none can be as direct or specific as what students themselves say

⦁ the feedback would contribute to a broader, more realistic account of “performance,” and make possible analysis of the relationship between key performance elements.

5. Schooling as currently organised cannot deliver the experiences or the outcomes that increasingly matter

It was suggested above that resources, including particularly teaching effort, should be reallocated. Here I suggest that it should also be reorganised.

In a widely discussed paper, Geoff Masters, head of the Australian Council for Educational Research, contrasts what schools are now asked to do with what they do do:

⦁ Current curricula are often dominated by factual and procedural knowledge rather than deep understandings and their application to real-world problems as demanded in many workplaces.

⦁ Subjects are often taught in isolation from each other, at a time when cross-disciplinary solutions are needed.

⦁ Passive, reproductive learning and the solution of standard problem types prevail when creativity and innovative solutions to new problems are called for.

⦁ Assessment provides information about subject achievement when employers want information about ability to work in teams, use technology, communicate, solve problems and learn on the job.

⦁ Students often learn in isolation and in competition with each other, when workplaces demand teamwork, and interpersonal and communication skills.

⦁ Curricula are designed for delivery in traditional classroom settings at a time when new technologies are transforming how courses are delivered and learning takes place.

Masters is here calling for a new category of outcomes (as noted in section 3 above) to be taught and assessed. But he is also calling for a different organisation of work in schools — and, it should be emphasised, of the work of learning (rather than of teaching).

One implication of this analysis is that more of the work of learning should be managed by the students themselves — that they need to do more “teaching” of each other, and more work in collaboration and in learning to collaborate. But the primary reorganisation required is (as Masters and many others have long advocated) of the relationship between each student and his or her curriculum.

Students can only work at full tilt to the extent that the work they are asked to do makes sense, is engaging, and is above all doable — but not too easily doable. Students should be working as often as possible in their “zone of proximal development,” and the work of learning should wherever possible be organised as a series of “developmental continua.”

That this is not easy to achieve is obvious. It is possible only in fits and starts within the typical organisation of people, time, space and task — a group of twenty or more students, often three, four or even five “learning years” apart, brought together for just forty-five minutes to work on a more or less common task in ways necessarily orchestrated by the teacher — that is, within a “grammar of schooling” formed in its essential features early in the twentieth century.

The phrase “grammar of schooling” was coined to refer to “the regular structures and rules” of schools that function “in the way grammar organises meaning in language.” In these terms, what Masters and many others are looking for is a different grammar of schooling.

The elements of a different grammar can be found in many places: in special programs and schools for students who could not or would not swim in the mainstream; in efforts to work out how the digital technologies can be deployed to increase (rather than decrease) the productivity of schooling; in efforts to devise new kinds of assessments and new ways to integrate them into the learning process; and in a few thoroughly reconfigured mainstream schools, past and present.

Programs and work of this kind are proliferating. They are important in themselves and in what can be learned from them. But an obsolete grammar still confines them to one or other of schooling’s margins — the earlier years; the low-status or non-core areas of the curriculum; and programs for “non-academic” or “difficult” students.

The task for schools and systems over the coming decades is to form these elements into a new compound, one that answers to Masters’s criteria — cross-disciplinary, collaborative, project- and workshop-based, high-tech, and organised to ensure the continuous growth of each student — and is capable of displacing an anachronistic grammar.

6. Schools cannot reorganise themselves by themselves

The prevailing grammar is deeply embedded in the culture of schooling, in habitual ways of thinking and doing things.

It is also the case, however, that this culture is supported by structural arrangements and defended by associated interest groups and institutions. These include:

⦁ an influential segment of selective schools (both government and non-government), well served by the received grammar

⦁ tertiary selection systems which codify and, in high-status areas, insist on that grammar

⦁ industrial agreements and associated ways of allocating resources that take for granted “classes,” “lesson periods,” and a workforce dominated by a single category of education worker, the “teacher,” and embed them in quasi-legal regulation

⦁ a physical infrastructure centred on “the classroom”

⦁ an “effectiveness” industry, which has tended to obscure the fact of a specific grammar by taking the current one as given.

The combination of these well-defended structures with widely shared habits and assumptions has kept the familiar grammar in its dominant position long after the circumstances to which it belonged have disappeared, to the frustration of many working in and around schools.

A new grammar of schooling will not be moved from the margins to the mainstream of schooling by diffusion or persuasion or by the efforts of schools and innovators alone. Structural reform will be required too.

What could the review do?

The review should see its recommendations on specific “practical measures that work” within the larger task of developing a more productive grammar of schooling, and of moving that grammar from the margins to the mainstream.

Specifically, the Review should:

1. recommend that schools be permitted to increasingly allocate core as well as supplementary resources (teaching effort particularly) according to need

2. propose that the government consider further reforms to funding, and to the regulation of student selection, that build on needs-based, sector-blind funding to increase diversity within each school and reduce disparities between schools

3. suggest that the government give consideration to changing the Measurement Framework for Schooling in Australia so as to give parity with academic/cognitive outcomes to:

⦁ the character and quality of students’ experience of school

⦁ diversity within each school — as distinct from the invidious demographic comparisons currently offered on the MySchool site — and disparities between schools

⦁ students’ social perceptions and values

4. propose a sustained, high-level conversation between the industrial parties to consider:

⦁ for the near-term, ways of encouraging more needs-based allocation of resources within schools (for example, by shifting from a maximum size for each class to a maximum average class size);

⦁ for the longer-term, ways and means of driving substantial change in the organisation of learning and teaching

5. recommend an investigation into whether and how the impact on school curricula of selection for highly competitive courses, and courses in the strongly sequential disciplines, is being and could be reduced by means including replacing the TER with more broadly-based assessments of capability

6. suggest that:

⦁ substantial change in the grammar of schooling demands a clear, sustained strategic direction and coordination of effort

⦁ this is unlikely to emerge from Australia’s complex school governance arrangements

⦁ the government should therefore propose the creation of a national agency to lead the development of a long-range strategy for schooling through authoritative, policy focused and consultative analysis, review and recommendation of the kind exemplified in the international sphere by the OECD. ⦁

This is an edited version of Dean Ashenden’s submission to the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools.

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So what’s new? Nothing, and everything. 

It’s still the case that all involved are plotting and pitching and thinking inside the only box that most of them have ever known, a uniquely Australian Rubik’s Cube of sectors and fees and rigged rules and governments tripping over each other.

But they’re also playing astonishingly different roles from before, so different that some half-remembered lines from Handel’s Messiah came to mind. I looked them up. “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted, and ev’ry mountain and hill made low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain.”

Baddies have suddenly become virtuous (the Christian schools lobby, the Coalition government), heroes have turned into villains (Labor, the government schoolteacher organisations). Only the Catholic hard men, the Hapsburgs of Australian schooling, remain depressingly familiar, forgetting nothing, learning nothing.

The Coalition: With a list of perfidies going back to the 1960s – from making obligation-free grants to independent schools to backing them in their fight against Gough Whitlam and his schools adviser Peter Karmel, from Howard’s nifty handouts to non-government schools great and small to the post-2013 double backflip on Gonski – who could blame the Australian Education Union, or Gonski panel member Carmen Lawrence, or anyone else, for smelling a rat?

It’s true, there are some downsides to Simon Birmingham’s Gonski that the AEU and Carmen Lawrence and others should point out and worry about, and it is also true that there are some serious obstacles to be overcome between here and payday. But no sign of rats, yet. To the contrary. By all accounts, Birmingham trounced the right wing in the party room, and has given us the astonishing spectacle of a Coalition treasurer (this treasurer!) on national TV telling the Catholics that there will be no special deals, not for them, not for anyone.

The independents: The independent schools lobby’s HQ has made some familiar noises (we only get half of what they get; most of our students are in low-fee schools “serving less advantaged communities,” and so on). But that is where they’ve stopped. It is reported that the independents have told Birmingham that they’ll wear Gonski 2 – including an end to the “no school worse off” rort – if and only if (and here is another breathtaker) there are no special deals for the Catholics! The cross-class alliance that took the Catholics out of the Labor fold and into the conservative orbit in the 1960s is, for the first time that I can remember, displaying a certain vulnerability.

That’s HQ. Out in the field, bouquets. “Rather than join the line of critics from those affected,” wrote the executive officer of the Christian independent schools association to minister Birmingham, “we’d like to applaud a policy approach that is good for all schools and sectors.”

All very well for the low-fee lot (“serving less advantaged communities”). What about the other end of the independent sector’s wide, wide spectrum? The headmaster of the most notoriously “elite” school in the country, the King’s School at Parramatta, for example?

“All in all, the Turnbull–Birmingham announcements about school funding reform are to be welcomed,” said Tim Hawkes. “I’m giving it an A–,” before adding for good measure that what everyone believes to be Julia Gillard’s policy of “no losers” was actually an invention of her Coalition predecessor David Kemp – a thoroughly bad invention, because it “preserved the over-funding of some non-government schools.”

The government schoolteacher unions: Without the AEU, there would have been no Gonski. In an otherwise penetrating analysis in the Weekend Australian, Paul Kelly made the churlish observation that Gonski 1 was “an edifice to boost government school funding.”

Of course it was in the interests of government schools and their teachers, for the simple reason that they and their clientele – which includes the vast majority of the poor, the newly arrived, the disabled, the isolated and the Indigenous – had been short-changed for decades. If it was self-interest, it was very enlightened self-interest, and that is why the AEU’s efforts to mobilise mass support for Gonski were so strikingly successful. Gonski had cred, and so did they.

For the moment, however, they’ve lost it. In the course of the long, hard Gonski campaign, the teachers sometimes dwelt on the money rather than the purpose. But now they’re open to the perception that money is all they care about. “This new review is only a delaying tactic,” one state AEU president said, in tones as churlish as Paul Kelly’s.

Of course Birmingham’s drawn-out implementation plan and his big discount on the billions promised by Labor matter. But how much do they matter when stood alongside what the AEU has so passionately sought for a decade or more: sector-blind, needs-based funding? Not to mention that delicious icing on the cake, Birmingham’s hit list of “over-funded” schools.

Labor is managing to look even worse. When a couple of months ago Birmingham first dropped the phrase “over-funded non-government schools,” Labor education shadow Tanya Plibersek demanded to see his hit list. Tanya Plibersek! Not just the sensible and fair-minded MP capable of taking a position well before it becomes popular (on marriage equality, for instance), but the deputy leader of the party that has been traduced and perhaps even kept out of office by “hit list” hysteria – and which, even more than the teachers, claimed, through Gonski, the high moral ground.

That was a couple of months ago. Now, greater depths have been plumbed. Plibersek and Bill Shorten were entitled to say: You bastards! First you trash Gonski, then you back it, then you trash it again and now you say you’ll deliver it. Well, let’s hope you’ve at last realised that it’s a great thing for schools and for the idea of equality as well as an electoral asset. We’ll turn the other cheek. You dudded us, but we’ll back you – and when we’re in office, we’ll go one further. We’ll pay up, in full.

That’s what they could have said. What they actually said was all about the “political bastardry,” and the money – and not about its purpose-driven distribution or its effective use, but just amounts of money. And, talk about doing deals for the Catholics! This is vote-chasing politics at its most base, and politically stupid as well, likely to lose Labor more votes than the hard men of the Church can deliver, in an electorate sick of political games.

The Catholic hard men: Difficult though it is to imagine, the Catholics were Labor-aligned in the 1950s, and the bumbling amateurs of school politics. By the end of the 1960s, they had moved into the conservative camp, where they played the hardest of political hardball, and they have done so ever since. There have always been those in the Catholic school system and, to a lesser extent, inside the Church, who disliked that stance and behind closed doors said so. But it has been men like Stephen Elder, executive director of Catholic Education Melbourne, who have run the line.

“Catholic schools aren’t there to make a buck,” Elder declared in his response to Gonski 2. “Instead, they stem from a sense of service to the community.”

“Because they are born from a sense of service,” he continued, “we have always sought to make our schools open to as many people as possible. We have sought to keep them low-fee.” But now, “all this is under threat.” Many parish primary schools will have to double or triple their fees over the next decade and “parents will be forced to take other options for their children.”

This kind of humbug has, until now, worked. As recently as 2015 it delivered a sweetheart deal with the incoming Victorian Labor government entirely at odds with the “Gonski principles” that the government professed.

But the wheel is turning. The problem for the hard men is that they have been too successful, steadily driving towards a reality that now subverts the moral basis of their claims.

Fifty years ago, most Catholic families were working-class and most of their children were in Catholic schools, and those schools were impoverished to the point of collapse. Now, only half of all Catholic children are in Catholic schools, and the half that aren’t – almost certainly the poorer half – are in government schools. As George Pell pointed out more than a decade ago, “our schools now cater for the huge Australian middle class, which they helped to create.” Only one in five poor Catholic kids (Pell noted) goes to a Catholic school. “Catholic schools are not educating most of our poor.” 

The Catholics, moving upmarket, have flicked their “mission” to the government schools, which have not only vastly greater numbers of “disadvantaged” children and children with disabilities than the Catholic, but also a much higher proportion of their enrolments. What’s more, almost all of the steadily growing numbers in the nominally Catholic system are coming from non-Catholics.

Catholic schools, far from being impoverished, are better off than the government schools they once envied, and not just because they can tack fees on top of handsome subsidies from both state and federal governments. In a small but growing number of cases, Catholic schools get more from the public purse than do comparable government schools.

It is hard to know which is less edifying, the self-centred special pleading by representatives of the Catholic schools, or Shorten playing footsies with it.

Where now? Every one of the protagonists in this tale – from the patrician headmaster to the aggrieved teacher unionist, from Bill Shorten and Simon Birmingham to the spokesman for the Christian schools, indeed from the Catholic hard men to Gonski himself – is doing his or her thinking and claiming and proposing within a mental universe set by the circumstances that they address.

They all take as natural and, it would seem, eternal an arrangement that was cobbled together well within living memory, and which anyone with experience of schools systems elsewhere (including the system just across the Tasman) finds baffling, or just plain weird. It makes us, as deputy chair of the Karmel Committee, Jean Blackburn, observed, “a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape.”

Nothing proposed first by Gonski and Labor and now by the Coalition and Gonski will in and of itself either solve our educational problems or bring to an end the chronic and massively debilitating conflict between sectors, governments and political parties. Nor will Gonski 1 or Gonski 2 in and of itself reverse the growing social and ethnic segregation of Australian schools and the accompanying problems of educational “performance” and inequality. Gonski, in whatever form, is an important step towards improvement on these fronts, but just one step of the several required.

On the educational and social side of the problem, more in a moment. On the structural problem: we are for the first time within shouting distance of a public discussion about a possibility that should have been discussed and carried out in the 1960s, as it was in countries as disparate as New Zealand and Finland.

Consider this: if all non-government schools, including the Catholic schools, were to be fully funded from the public purse in the way and to a level proposed by Labor and now by the Coalition – no fees to be paid, by anyone – the additional cost to the budget would be somewhere around $2 billion.

That is peanuts. It is around a third of the “extra” sought by Gonski 1, perhaps 4 or 5 per cent of the annual public recurrent spend on schools, and that is without counting the many offsets. No need for Stephen Elder to fret over those parents forced – forced! – “to take other options for their children.” He might even find himself free to spare a thought for that estimated half of Australian families who can’t afford to consider “other options” in the first place, or who live in places where there are no “other options.”

In the event of full public funding for Catholic schools, Mr Elder might legitimately worry that those schools would be “taken over” by government, or would lose their “special character.” That would be the moment to think about looking at arrangements in any one of dozens of countries to see what might be the best way to meet these entirely legitimate concerns in Australia’s distinctive circumstances. Some of the many possible solutions to be found elsewhere might even have the advantage of extending choice to those many who currently do without.

In other words, the educationally, socially and fiscally disastrous Whitlam/Karmel settlement of 1973 has, ironically, brought us back to a possibility that Karmel himself entertained more than forty years ago. As Karmel wrote:

The committee sees positive advantages in [a] drawing together of the public and private sectors, based… on a greater degree of independence in government schools and not on a decrease in the independence now open to schools outside government systems…

Such developments when taken together with changed patterns of funding open up the possibility of the eventual development of a school system itself diverse, where all schools supported by public money can operate without charging fees.

That was Labor’s adviser, decades ago. What should Labor do now?

It is important for schooling (and for the party) that Labor regain the high moral ground. That can’t be done by outbidding the Coalition or by cosying up to a Catholic leadership that has yet to grasp that its golden run is coming to an end. It can be done only by building on the Gonski platform, and doing so before Gonski 2 reports in December.

By all means persist with commitments to deliver funding as promised, but promise also an expansion of Gonski 1 in ways that tackle educational reform more directly, and that canvass the possibility of more thoroughgoing structural reform.

Some suggestions, offered with apologies to those who read all but the last of them a week or so ago:

• Labor should say very clearly that Gonski is vital, but neither Gonski nor any other single-focus reform can deliver, by itself, substantial educational improvement. It might underline the point by citing a list of necessary reforms prepared by the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research.

• Labor should say that Gonski 1 was right to regard improved “outcomes” of the PISA and NAPLAN kind as fundamental. But, Labor should now add, so are other things. The character and quality of life at school, differences in the social composition of schools, and “social” learning are all at least as important and no more difficult to measure and report on than “outcomes,” and that is what it should undertake to do.

• Gonski 1 wanted funding for need to go directly to the schools concerned. A problem for this commendable policy is that most schools have little or no experience in deciding how to spend money to greatest educational effect – that is, in finding the most cost-effective interventions. Nor do most researchers, captivated as they are by “effects,” but with no consideration of costs. A very good start has been made elsewhere in finding out how to get the most bang for the educational buck, and how to help schools do it. Labor should commit to a substantial program of R&D – not “research” – to adapt that approach to Australian circumstances.

• Doing a Gonski across schools is only half of the job; the other half is to do a Gonski within each school. Schools, too, should allocate their resources according to need. Gonski’s new dollars should be used to free up old ones, to mobilise the resources that already come through the school gate in frozen form. Labor should undertake to get the industrial parties to sit down and work out how to give schools more scope for aligning resources with need. It might even make the specific suggestion that the best starting point would be to move from a maximum size for every class to a maximum average class size.

• Gonski 1 recommended a new “national schools resourcing body.” That recommendation was the first of many to be discarded. It must be reinstated. No new funding scheme can work without it or its equivalent. Labor should commit to it.

• Finally, Labor should commit to establishing a review of a stature equal to Gonski to consider whether and how fees might be abolished for all schools and school systems willing to work within a charter of rights and obligations. The former should include parents’ right to choose appropriate schooling for their children, and the right of schools to maintain a “special character,” including a faith-based character. The latter should include a more widely shared responsibility for catering for all, and a common commitment to reversing the slide into ever-deeper social and ethnic segregation and to building more socially and educationally diverse school communities. •

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The government says it will introduce needs-based, sector-blind funding for all schools, and spend more money over the coming decade to do it – all straight out of Gonski version 1. What’s more, it will get David Gonski, together with Gonski 1 panel member, the redoubtable Ken Boston, to fix one of its weak spots, making sure that more and better-distributed money does the needful. Gonski 1 was merely a “review of school funding.” Gonski 2 is a Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australia.

In its attempt at that very big ask, the review will face substantial obstacles, in the structure and politics of schooling, in the habitual practices of schools, and in unmeetable expectations.

The structure of schooling

Gonski 1 was asked to make workable Australia’s unique and dysfunctional Rubik’s Cube, a school “system” comprising two levels of government, both of them heavily involved in each of three sectors, a two-by-three set-up replicated in each of eight states and territories.

The Gonski fix was ingenious but, thanks to its terms of reference, far from complete. It recommended that state/territory and federal governments agree on a funding total and their respective contributions; that every school gets a basic level of funding plus loadings according to the size of its educational task, as indicated by its location and demographics; that the loadings go direct to the schools concerned; and that a new “national schools resourcing body” should oversee the new allocation system and do the research needed to refine it.

All that was a big improvement on what everyone agrees was a wildly inequitable and haphazard set-up, but it did not dismantle the Rubik’s Cube.

The federal government would continue to be deeply involved in the schools business, against very good arguments (including several pushed by Coalition governments) for getting the Commonwealth out of schooling altogether.

It left the fee/free distinction intact, and hence left those families struggling to pay to go on struggling while other families, well able to pay, went on enjoying the free schooling provided by government schools, and often in de jure or de facto selective schools, at that. It left the fee-charging schools able to charge whatever they liked, and guaranteed that none would be worse off in any future funding regime.

Moreover, Gonski 1 was prohibited from saying a word about the bizarre arrangement that allows some schools to select and exclude according to religion and/or capacity to pay and/or academic capacity, while others are forbidden to select or exclude anyone at all – a rigging of the regulatory game that, in tandem with funding arrangements and the real estate market, has been driving high and rising levels of social segregation and educational inequality for forty years.

That was Gonski 1. There is nothing in the government’s announcements to suggest that Gonski 2 will be asked to review any of these fundamental structural problems. Nor is there any reference to reinstating Gonski’s proposed national schools resourcing body, which would have moderated the structural problem.

The practice of schooling

The government’s rhetoric in announcing Gonski 2 is as myopically fixed on “outcomes” (aka PISA results) as its predecessor’s. Schools don’t and shouldn’t just produce “outcomes” in this or any other sense. At least as important are what students learn about themselves and others in and through the “informal” or “hidden” curriculum, and the quality and character of the experience of being at school. Schools should be encouraged to pay as much attention to their “performance” in these areas as to academic outcomes. In that, Gonski 2 has been given a bad start.

It also inherits other problems from Gonski 1. The first Gonski’s argument was that the harder the educational job, the more resources the school needs to do it. Gonski did not see this as just a fair go or a helping hand, but as the price of delivering an educational service. That is why it wanted the extra money to go direct to the schools concerned – so that they, in turn, could buy the services they needed to deliver in their specific circumstances. As well, Gonski wanted to maximise the impact of new money by concentrating it in a relatively small proportion of schools.

This commendable approach came with several problems: it depended on the schools’ bureaucratic masters to pass the money on, which, in scattered attempts at “implementation,” some did and most didn’t; it depended on schools knowing how best to use the new money; and, in the nature of being “extra,” it left the expenditure of the great bulk of the school’s resources going on doing what they have always done, which does not include deploying effort according to need.

Of these several limitations, the last is the most important. Doing a Gonski across schools is only half of the job; the other is to do a Gonski within each school.

Politics

The Rubik’s Cube might have been deliberately designed to generate conflict, and to give any aggrieved party, sector or government an effective power of veto.

The Catholic systems, easily the best-organised and most relentless of the veto-possessors, have already made unhappy noises about Gonski 2. Their allies in the independent sector will probably be more circumspect in public, but not behind the scenes.

Then there are the states and territories. The education minister says that he “looks forward to working constructively with states and territories to see implementation of these reforms” and that “delivery of reforms will be a condition of funding for states.” Good luck with that. His first offer is substantially below that once proposed by Labor, and the risk is that Gonski 2 will, like its predecessor, degenerate into a stand-off over funding amounts and shares.

And, finally, the politics. Last time around the problem was between the parties. That will be joined this time by the clash of ideologies within the Coalition. Tony Abbott and others have professed a sense of special affiliation with and obligation to the non-government sectors. Can Turnbull carry the day within his own party room? Indeed, come December, when Gonski presents his second report, will Turnbull still be prime minister?

Expectations

In the eighteen months between the release of the Gonski report in February 2012 and the federal election in September 2013, the campaign in support turned into a near-crusade. Gonski became in many minds a miracle cure, the answer to all of the many problems in schools and schooling.

The prime minister and his education minister have already reignited those flames with talk of ending “150 years of inequity” and delivering “consistency in Australian school funding for the first time ever.” Turnbull and Birmingham risk joining a long list, headed by Gough Whitlam, of those claiming to have put the “state aid” problem to rest. As for “achieving educational excellence in Australia,” the depth and complexity of schooling’s problems are such that Gonski 1 was only one step of several required. Gonski 2 is guaranteed to be a failure, and to be seen as one, if it is expected to “achieve educational excellence in Australia.”

Managing the impossible

Gonski 2 cannot solve all those problems, but it can manage them.

• It should manage expectations by saying very clearly that neither it nor any other single-focus reform can do the needful. It might underline the point by citing a list of necessary reforms prepared by the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research. Gonski 2 should also suggest that governments make good use of the next few years to work out what to do at the expiry of any agreement it might recommend, including what to do about the many remaining components of the Rubik’s Cube – the fee/free distinction, federal government involvement in schooling, and the current regulatory mess particularly.

• The second Gonski review should say that academic outcomes  and their more equal distibution are fundamental, but so are other things. It should point out that the character and quality of life at school and “social” learning are at least as important and as easy to measure and report on as “outcomes,” and should be treated as such.

• Most schools have little or no experience in deciding how to spend money to greatest educational effect – that is, in finding the most cost-effective interventions. Nor do most researchers, captivated as they are by “effects,” with no consideration of costs. A very good start has been made elsewhere in finding out how to get most bang for the educational buck, and how to help schools do it. Gonski 2 should recommended a substantial program of R&D – not “research” – to adapt that approach to Australian circumstances.

• Gonski 2 should also suggest that new dollars be used to free up old ones, to mobilise the resources that already come through the school gate in frozen form. It should recommend that the government encourage the industrial parties to sit down and work out how to give schools more scope for aligning resources with need. It might even make the specific suggestion that the best starting point would be a move from fixed class size maximums to average class sizes.

• Gonski 1 recommended a new “national schools resourcing body.” No new funding scheme can work without it or its equivalent, and Gonski 2 should say so. 

A final recommendation, not for Gonski 2 but for its political masters.

Gonski 2 can only succeed on a broad base of support. That does not exist. It must be built. In their announcement of Gonski 2, the prime minister and his minister headed in the opposite direction, blaming Labor for “trading away the principles of ‘Gonski’ for political expediency,” and claiming that it is “acting to right Labor’s wrongs.”

It is true that Labor bungled the Gonski process and delivered a new arrangement almost as incompetent as the old. But two other things are also true. Gonski was Labor’s idea in the first place. As can be seen from the several reviews generated in the early days of the Coalition government, had it been left to the Coalition it would never have come up with anything like Gonski. If Labor is going to get blame for the bungle, it should also get the credit for the only fully fledged, carefully thought-out, politically smart, well-evidenced and well-argued schooling reform strategy in many decades.

And if the Coalition is going to hand out blame, it should also cop it. Senator Birmingham’s predecessor played the Gonski spoiler from the moment of its release, opposing it root and branch, and fomenting opposition and subversion by his Coalition colleagues in the states and territories. Worse, at the eleventh electoral hour in 2013, when Gonski looked like a winner, the predecessors of the present prime minister and education minister declared a “unity ticket” on Gonski, then tore it up again the moment they were safely in office.

If teacher organisations and others fail to trust Gonski 2, the government has only itself to blame. It has the chance to redeem itself, but it won’t if it prefers cheap political shots to giving Gonski 2 a platform of consensus from which to speak. •

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Yes, and no. Over the past decade or two, as a proportion of GDP or relative to other countries, not really. Compared to other education sectors (vocational education and training and, by some measures, higher education), yes. As an amount spent per-student per-year, over the long term, yes. The best available estimate is that between 1963–64 and 2003–04 spending (in 2003–04 dollars) rose from $4575 per student to $8297. Recent increases, alleged to have been spectacular, almost certainly weren’t. These overall figures conceal substantial differences in spending between states, sectors and schools.

2. So, Australian schools are well funded?

Yes, and no. Australian spending is at about the OECD average, but that’s the total spend, not the particular. Some secondary schools (for example) have around $30,000 to spend on each student each year; most others have around half that. Big spending sometimes reflects need (schools in some remote Aboriginal communities, for example), but mostly doesn’t.

To the contrary. Thanks to the workings of the real estate market and of choice (by families) and selection/exclusion (by schools), most high-revenue schools cater to high-income clienteles. That also gets them more than their fair share of that most valuable of all educational resources, students who are good at schoolwork. Other schools with much less money thereby get to do a harder educational job.

On top of this systemic inequality is simple unfairness. A primary school on one side of the NSW–Victoria border (for example) gets $9672 per student per year, while a very similar school on the other side gets $7732. The money problem is not in the amount spent, but in how it is distributed, and used.

3. Is the money used as well as it could be?

Not really. Over the long term, more money has helped to make schools more congenial and humane places than they once were, which is no small thing. But much spending has been driven by politics rather than purpose. For two or three decades from the 1960s, most extra funding went on the high-cost, low-effectiveness strategy of across-the-board reduction in class sizes. Since then, funding increases have been soaked up by rising costs (salaries mainly), as the Baumol Effect predicts. Any genuinely “new” money (over and above cost increases) has typically gone to meet special needs (of children with disabilities particularly) and to repair damage done in the mainstream (low student engagement in secondary schools, for example), rather than to change the mainstream.

Only rarely has new money been used to free up the “old” money locked up in the “grammar of schooling” (one teacher, one class, one lesson of forty-five minutes in one subject, and so on).  That “grammar,” in turn, is locked into place by industrial agreements that set limits on the size of every class (rather than maximum student–staff ratios), enforce a strict division of labour between teachers and “support staff,” and prohibit “person–technology swaps.”

In short, each school should be doing its own Gonski, matching effort to need, but can’t. And, in sum, we have a cumulative incrementalism in which problems and costs increase faster than solutions can be provided.

4. So schools have more money but haven’t lifted their game?

No, and yes. The obvious but simple-minded conclusion, favoured by some economists, federal ministers of education, and pundits, is that spending more doesn’t work. The argument is that PISA, NAPLAN and other standardised tests show that attainment has plateaued while funding hasn’t. Leaving to one side the vexed question of how well standardised tests measure some aspects of some areas of the academic curriculum, and the fact that the academic curriculum is not the whole school story by any means, it remains true (as per point 3, above) that money has been spent where it is not needed and not where it is, and on more of the same rather than repurposed.

But these are failures of the system, not of schools. So is the tidal movement of families who can choose away from those who can’t, making it more and more difficult for many schools to lift attainment. On top of which, schools are endlessly expected to do more things (sex ed, life skills, twenty-first-century skills, careers ed…) and harder things (handle kids who for a range of reasons aren’t easy to handle and/or come from an ever-expanding range of language and cultural backgrounds). Perhaps not going backwards is an achievement? Perhaps the test scores would have been worse if spending hadn’t increased?

5. Why the endless brawling over money?

It’s the structure, stupid: three sectors, each funded in different ways from three different sources; two levels of government involved, one with the responsibility, the other with the money; some schools charging fees, others free (well, nominally anyway); some schools (including some government schools) selecting or ejecting students on academic and/or financial and/or religious grounds, others required by law to take all comers. These arrangements are international worst practice, a recipe for gaming the system and for conflict.

Everyone has been given a legitimate basis for grievance. The fee-payers argue that they need more government support to keep fees down and because they are taxpayers after all. The non-fee-payers point out that their schools are open to all and do the hard educational yards, and therefore deserve first claim on the public purse. The selective public schools (government-funded private schools, really) keep their heads down. The system creates a large space, and rewards, for politics, and minimises the role of evidence and expertise. Interest groups form around different categories of school, and ideologies form around them. Brawls over the second-order question of funding displace debate over the first-order question of the character and direction of schooling as a whole.

6. Where did these problems come from?

The Whitlam government, in the first instance. It was Whitlam’s famous Karmel Report of 1973 that determined that some schools would be funded and others merely “aided”; that therefore some parents who couldn’t afford it would pay and that many who could, wouldn’t; that parents would therefore have the right but not necessarily the capacity to choose; that some schools would select but others wouldn’t; that there would be, in short, three sectors funded in different ways, governed in different ways, with very different rights and obligations.

Of course, Whitlam (and Karmel) didn’t just dream it up. They made the best politics they could from the furious “state aid” debates of the 1950s and 1960s, which stemmed from the movements in the second half of the nineteenth century to end the decades-old system of public support for private schools, which stemmed from fundamental demographic and political facts the Europeans brought with them… Whitlam’s biographer called it Australia’s “oldest, deepest, most poisonous debate” – and that was 1977.

7. Did Gonski have the fix?

Yes, and no. Gonski’s proposals included: a fair and rational way of deciding what funding each school needed, irrespective of sector, location or clientele; a national authority to run the detail, and thereby shift the balance of funding decisions away from politics and towards evidence and expertise; a way of making the states “maintain effort” rather than use federal money to substitute for their own; and a way of putting money behind an educational strategy centred on need.

Not bad. But it is a measure of the depth of the trouble we’re in that this left five substantial problems still to be tackled: some parents paying fees and others not, irrespective of capacity to pay; some schools (and families) still able to outspend others by as much as they like; some schools able to select or exclude on grounds of income, academic ability or religion; two levels of government with coordinated funding but no clear division of labour and responsibility in other areas; and no encouragement to use new money to free up old, for each school to do its own Gonski. Even this less-than-complete program required five or six billion dollars a year in new money to lubricate the wheels of change – a tacit acknowledgement of the power of sectoral lobby groups. Gonski’s limitations, it should be emphasised, came not from the panel but from its riding instructions.

8. Was Gonski trashed by Bill Shorten, as alleged by federal education minister Simon Birmingham?

Hardly. Shorten played a late and minor role in doing on-the-fly deals with states and territories. These were mere nails in the coffin. It was Peter Garrett, Shorten’s predecessor in the education portfolio, who did most of that part of the damage, and he did so at the behest of his prime minister, Julia Gillard. Gillard deserves much of the blame for not driving Gonski home when she had the chance, thus giving the usual interest groups time and opportunity to bowdlerise a singularly bold and coherent plan. On the other hand, Gillard also deserves much of the credit for getting Gonski under way, as education minister and then as prime minister.

As for Mr Birmingham’s Coalition predecessors, what can we say? They were duplicitous spoilers from the outset: first bad-mouthing the whole idea; then egging on Coalition-governed states to reject it; then promising (at the eleventh electoral hour) a “unity ticket” on Gonski; then (nano-seconds after the election) junking it; and now, having found themselves wrong-footed by Gonski’s wide and deep support (not least inside the conservatives’ own ranks), having the gall to claim that it was Labor all along that has been the villain of the piece.

9. Will the Birmingham plan do the needful?

It’s too soon to tell if there is a plan or, if there is, whether it is any good, but early signs are less than promising. On Friday last week the minister took his proposals to a meeting with his highly sceptical state counterparts. It is difficult to be optimistic about the likely outcome. On the positive side, Birmingham made constant references to “need” and “needs-based funding,” a victory for Gonski. He also made the entirely accurate observation that Gonski has been trashed. And he hinted at a willingness to redistribute money away from those who don’t need it and towards those who do. But the usual suspects have already fired warning shots, and the minister has squibbed on fixing the big differences in spending between states. He refers to Gonski as a “funding formula,” which forgets essential elements, including a comprehensive agreement between states and sectors and the machinery needed to make it work (a national schools resources body, and state-level coordination of planning for new schools). There is little or no new money to secure state and sector buy-in.

10. Is there a way out?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run? Learn from the AFL. Use funding and regulation to make sure that no “team” gets too far ahead or too far behind, that all are equipped, encouraged and required to provide an educationally engaging program to a diverse clientele. That wouldn’t involve abolishing existing authorities (government, Catholic, and so on), practices (including choice) or rights (including to religion-based schooling), but it would mean constructing an overall framework within which all could operate more fairly, efficiently and productively. The prerequisite to success in reforming practice (“teaching quality” and the like) and lifting performance is fixing the unfair, inequitable, politics-sodden, inflexible and counterproductive combination of funding and regulation within which schools work.

The key is to level up the playing field. That would mean putting all families on the same basis, either none paying fees (not necessarily as big a hit to the public purse as might be thought) or, much less desirably, all required to pay (or be eligible for subsidy) according to taxation status. It would mean putting a ceiling on funding as well as a floor under it, and making school choice more widely and fairly available, in all three sectors. That is, of course, a bold program, minister. It raises a host of technically and politically difficult questions. It would demand leadership of the kind showed by John Dawkins in higher education in the 1980s, Paul Keating on land rights in the 1990s, or John Howard on gun control not long after. Too hard? Probably. In which case Australia’s “oldest, deepest, most poisonous debate” and the schooling system that comes with it can look forward to a few decades yet. •

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By 1966 Labor governments had been dispensing state aid for a decade or more. One state (Queensland) had been doing so ever since 1899, and another (New South Wales) since 1912. Labor had gone to two federal elections (1961 and 1963) with significant offers of aid. And while it is true that the 1966 decision led directly to the famous Karmel report of 1973, with its new deal for schooling, it also led to serious deformities in the structure of the schooling system – deformities that generated significant educational and social difficulties, and frustrated their solution.

Much in this ambiguous legacy was defined by the Byzantine politics within and between the Catholic Church and the Labor Party, institutions so similar in many respects, and so deeply entwined, that politics often took on the character of a civil war, much of it fought on the battlefields of state aid.

The Catholic–Protestant sectarianism that had riven schooling for a century or more was about to disappear, but not the acrimonious division and controversy that accompanied it. That was simply transposed to a new, secular ground.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the end of the decades-old system of public support for religious schools, and the creation of a government school system. But the Catholic Church was no hapless victim of the campaigns that brought this change. It did every bit as much as the most ardent exponents of “free, compulsory and secular” education to split Australian schooling into what became three “sectors”: government, Catholic, and “independent” or “private.” It was angrily determined to go it alone, un-aided. And, by combining modest fees with the low-cost labour of nuns and brothers shipped in from Ireland and elsewhere, it did.

Some Catholics hankered after a restoration of state aid, but others did not. With aid would come conditions and controls, and the risk of secular pollution. In any event, right up until the eve of the second world war, the question – leaving aside the small bursary schemes in New South Wales and Queensland – was hypothetical. Governments weren’t going to stir up sectarianism all over again, even if they wanted to help, which most didn’t, and the bishops weren’t going to ask for aid, for the same reason.

The war had scarcely ended before aid became both possible and necessary. Numbers of students rose as rapidly as the supply of nuns and brothers fell. Classes swelled to sixty or even seventy or more, often taught by poorly educated teachers in schools that, as demonstrated by a famous and farcical incident to which we’ll return, could not even provide enough toilets.

What could be done? State governments had trouble enough finding money for their own bulging institutions. Federation had left them with the responsibility for schools, but wartime legislation had taken away the taxation powers they needed to pay for them. The Church needed the money, though, and politicians needed the votes.

The solution was an under-the-counter trade conducted within boundaries well understood by both sides. Aid to meet educational expenses, yes; for staffing or building costs, no. To families and students, yes; to schools or school authorities, no. “Indirect” and covert aid, yes; “direct” and explicit aid, no. From state governments, yes; from the federal government, no.

A patchwork of arrangements made within these distinctions gave Australia in the mid 1950s something reminiscent of pre-abolition reality combined with post-abolition appearance. Aid ranged from the relatively straightforward (scholarships, bursaries and allowances, tax deductions, free milk, stationery and bus passes) to the truly ingenious and obscure, such as grants for Catholic parent associations to match those given to their state school equivalents, and subsidies for school pianos.

At first the management of aid-that-wasn’t proceeded smoothly enough, particularly with Labor governments. Labor was almost as Catholic as the Church itself. Most Catholics were Irish and therefore working class and therefore Labor, and Labor governments – particularly in the two big states of Victoria and New South Wales – were often dominated by Catholics. On the Church side, all was in the hands of the hierarchy. Neither the laity nor the teaching orders had any say or role in the matter (nor, it followed, did women). As Michael Hogan put it in his definitive history, the bishops set out not to change public opinion but to go around it, and they succeeded. This cosy arrangement was blown to smithereens by three explosions, one after another.

The Labor Split, 1955: Victorian anti-communist Catholics, abetted by archbishop Daniel Mannix and his protégé Bob Santamaria, marched out of the Labor Party to form what would become the Democratic Labor Party, or DLP. Hogan likens the post-Split relationship to a soured romance, but that was in New South Wales. In Victoria it was a vicious divorce.

One of many consequences was the revival in the Labor Party of the old battle cry of free, compulsory and secular. In Victoria particularly, and in the national machinery of the party, anti–state aid feeling and forces mobilised. Long-serving federal powerbroker Joe Chamberlain, hitherto content to leave backroom deals to the state branches, became a ferocious opponent of state aid in any form, determined to choke off supply to the treacherous Catholics. That was, of course, directly contrary to what was needed to get the Catholic vote back from the DLP.

The politics of the Church, the Labor Party and their relationship in the decade that followed was dominated by the state aid question. They were rancorous, perverse, doctrinaire and extraordinarily complex. Labor was a tangle of cross-cutting divisions – between left and right, pro- and anti-aid, and Catholic and Protestant; between the states (again, New South Wales and Victoria especially), the state party machines and governments, and the federal office; and between an old guard led by Arthur Calwell and a new guard dominated by Gough Whitlam, twenty years younger than Calwell and a rising star.

As for the Church, differences among the bishops, particularly those from Victoria and New South Wales, were greatly complicated by rising agitation among the laity, and especially among those who had the thankless task of running schools and a school system careening towards collapse, who were fed up with the ineffectual bishops and their backroom manoeuvres. But the laity, too, was divided, between militants and gradualists, and between those loyal to Labor and those whose loyalties lay elsewhere.

Goulburn, 1962: In July 1957 the NSW education department issued a “certificate of efficiency” to Our Lady of Mercy Preparatory School in Goulburn, in south-central New South Wales, conditional upon the installation of another seat in the boys’ toilet. (Accounts differ on this and other details. It was just one seat according to Hogan, three according to political historian Jenny Hocking, and an entire toilet block according to the Bulletin’s man on the spot, Peter Kelly.)

The parish was beyond broke; its expenditure on schools had sent it into heavy debt. It temporised and fudged. The government authorities turned a blind eye for as long as they could, but then registration inspections came around again. The department told the parish that there would be no registration this time without the toilet upgrade. The local bishop, recently installed in office at the unusually early age of forty-two, got his back up. After consultation with a small group of (male) laity, he decided to go public. In the course of a speech on St Pat’s Day, and in the presence of the local (Labor) member of the state (Labor) government, he said that the school might have to be closed. The certificate was promptly issued, pending advice that toilet facilities met requirements.

The Goulburn Catholics now asked to see the minister. The minister said no, he wouldn’t see them. The bishop said that if the government wanted the school to stay open it could always pay for its requirements to be met. More fudges and deals were attempted, without success. The bishop then wrote to the minister, inviting him to attend a public meeting arranged for four days hence. Seven hundred people – not including the minister – turned up, and voted 500 to 120 to close not just Our Lady but Goulburn’s five other Catholic schools as well. Two thousand children would be instructed to seek enrolment at their local state school. The next day, the “Goulburn Strike” (or “Lockout”) was on front pages around the country.

Turning up the heat: the bishop’s lockout hits the front pages in 1962.

The strike moved state aid from the backrooms to the middle of the political agenda. Initial media hostility soon turned to consensus that “something had to be done.” The Catholic schools could not be allowed to collapse. Goulburn’s state schools were stretched to accommodate even the one-third (or a half – reports vary) of the 2000 applicants they were able to enrol, leaving the rest with nowhere to go. Imagine that scenario across the country! Governments were getting exactly the intended message. Perhaps most significant but least noticed was that the Catholic parents and students of Goulburn had made their requests for enrolment courteously, and the state schools responded in that same spirit. Some of those enrolled in state schools stayed there after the strike was over. Sectarianism was dying.

The strike put almost as much heat on the bishops as on the government. They had lost control to the laity, and their sotto voce requests for bits and pieces of aid were increasingly seen as craven as well as ineffectual. On the government side, the NSW premier, R.J. Heffron, made a great show of refusing to be bullied and then let it be known that he would be open to representations from the Church. The Church rolled out its heavy artillery, a delegation headed by the cardinal himself, and made a list of its requirements available to the media. The list comprised more scholarships, help with teacher training and salaries for lay teachers, and support for capital works including science labs in particular.

Heffron had the advantage of a (Protestant-dominated) conservative opposition, unfriendly to Catholics and to aid, plus more than two years to the next election, plenty of time to get the party onside. His optimism was misplaced. The state conference endorsed aid of the science laboratory kind, only to be slapped down by its federal counterpart, urged on by the man Whitlam’s speechwriter Graham Freudenberg called the “self-appointed keeper of the conscience on this matter,” Joe Chamberlain. The NSW government was instructed to “recast” its plans. New South Wales resisted, and met with an even more stinging rebuke. It was required to submit all decisions on state aid to the federal secretary (aka Joe Chamberlain) “for consideration and advice.” The lesson for the Church was that Labor could not be trusted to deliver.

Menzies – Protestant, no enthusiast for state aid, firm opponent of any federal involvement in schools – saw his chance. Two weeks after Chamberlain’s diktat, Menzies called an early federal election with a centrepiece policy of providing science laboratories to all schools, government and non-government alike.

The Liberal leader had scraped home by just one seat in 1961, and Calwell believed that this time he would be prime minister. Instead, he lost ten more seats, seven of them in New South Wales. Then it was the state party’s turn to be hammered. In May 1965, the NSW Labor government fell. It had been in office since 1941. The shift in the Catholic vote, and the Church’s allegiance, away from Labor and towards the conservatives, which had commenced with the 1955 Split, was accelerating. First the Church found that it couldn’t trust Labor, then it discovered that it no longer had to.

The writing was on the wall, or two lots of writing actually, one about state aid, the other about the control and leadership of the Labor Party. Calwell couldn’t or wouldn’t read either. Whitlam could read both.

Showdown at Surfers, 1966: The sharp end of the Menzies wedge fell first on Labor’s federal MPs. Come the next election, would they promise to cancel the science labs? In May 1965 caucus decided, albeit by a narrow margin, that no, it wouldn’t. It would not undo “existing arrangements.”

The wedge now pointed at the federal conference of the party, held a few months later. Calwell supported a move to dodge the question by having it referred to a national advisory committee on education.

The committee was dominated by Chamberlain, with Calwell in support. Its majority report to the federal executive six months later proposed that there would be no aid for school buildings or staff and that Labor’s federal members could support existing federal aid, including, of course, Menzies’s science labs. But on the very day of the report’s presentation, Calwell announced that he had had an epiphany. He would withdraw his opposition to direct state aid. He had been much moved by a letter from his old friend (and friend of Labor) James Carroll, auxiliary bishop of Sydney, which documented the parlous conditions for students and teachers in Catholic schools, and protested against the iniquity of denying them financial support on the ground of their religion.

Chamberlain wasn’t going to have it. Calwell was prevailed on to change his mind, again, and the Labor executive did a U-turn of its own. Not only would parliamentary members be bound to oppose state aid but, even more startling, the possibility of a High Court challenge to its constitutionality would also be investigated.

Whitlam had been a member of the advisory committee on education, and was scathing about the majority report’s internal contradictions. Now he was apoplectic. He famously determined to “crash or crash through,” labelling the federal executive “extremists,” then (on national TV) declaring them to be “twelve witless men.” Calwell was jubilant. The upstart Whitlam had signed his own death warrant.

Calwell’s move to have Whitlam expelled by a meeting of the national executive; a desperate phone call from Queensland MP Rex Patterson (beneficiary of Whitlam’s phenomenally successful campaigning in a recent by-election) to state secretary Tom Burns; an equally desperate call by Burns to the two Queensland delegates at the meeting of the executive; the last-minute switch by those delegates as the noose was being placed around Whitlam’s neck; and Whitlam’s consequent escape by the narrowest of margins (seven votes to five) – all these are the stuff of Labor legend.

As important to history as the decision to let Whitlam off with a reprimand was the accompanying decision to send the whole business back whence it had come, to federal conference. Even that took two goes, one in March, and another in July, at Surfers Paradise. There came a denouement less dramatic than the events that had led up to it. Joe Chamberlain was out of the game for once, laid up in hospital, and anyway, delegates’ minds were concentrated by a looming federal election. It was agreed that Labor would not oppose existing aid, a crucial vote coming from Calwell, who had changed his mind yet again.

One view of that decision is that it was a volte-face, a reversal of a long-held policy. Another view, not quite the opposite but close, is that Labor had merely abandoned an old policy without deciding on a new one. A third view is that 1966 was not a reversal; it was another step down a long and tortuous path. And while 1966 didn’t decide on a new policy, it very nearly arrived at one by default. To mix the metaphors, since the early 1950s Labor had been the frog in the pan, and by 1966 it was too late to jump. It would have to live with what a tangled history had provided, which included Menzies’s “direct” federal aid as well as the many and varied devices of the states.

By 1966 Whitlam was (as he himself had pointed out) Labor’s leader in waiting, and it was his conceit that he knew how to rise above this history. What had long been seen as a question of religious versus secular schooling he had reconfigured as a question of meeting need in the interests of equal opportunity for all Australians. In place of a dog’s breakfast of measures, he would put aid on a systematic basis across the nation. Against the push by a conservative–Catholic alliance for per capita grants, his aid would be according to need in government as well as non-government schools (which meant that expensive private schools would have to fend for themselves). All this would be worked out in detail and carried into practice by a grand new edifice, the Australian Schools Commission.

It is not hard to see why Whitlam believed that his plan changed everything. Amid an increasingly heated, confused and intractable debate, his proposal had cut through. It seemed lucid, sensible and practical, as well as bold. But it also changed much less than Whitlam imagined.

The “needs” approach apart, Whitlam was effectively tagging along behind Menzies and the policy of direct aid, to be provided to all schools, by the Commonwealth. With that came a number of fundamental, structural realities: non-government schools would be “aided,” not funded. They would therefore continue to charge fees. Parents would have the right to choose between free and secular state schools or fee-charging religious schools. There would still be three school sectors, each run and funded in its own way, plus the additional complication of the involvement of a second layer of government. Implicit in the decision and the non-decisions of 1966 was the extension of an unfortunate history.

Among the very first actions of the Whitlam government was the appointment of an interim committee of the Australian Schools Commission, to be chaired by economist Peter Karmel. It handed down its report less than six months later (in May 1973). The report earned a rapturous reception for its trenchant support for equal opportunity, its encouragement of new approaches to teaching and curriculum, its preference for “community participation” over authoritarian and centralised decision-making, and its special programs for disadvantaged schools, innovation, special education and the like. A generation of teachers, academics and administrators came to see the report, the Schools Commission and the Commonwealth as sources of inspiration, salvation even.

The interim committee was serious in its advocacy of a more equal, humane and enlightening schooling for all, but that was not its core business. It was charged by Whitlam with working out the detail of his plan to bring the state aid question to a close, once and for all.

No part of Karmel’s recommendations on implementation would have surprised Whitlam or, for that matter, many of the delegates to the 1966 conference in Surfers Paradise. The three school sectors would continue to operate in their familiar form; all would get support from both state and federal governments, one sector fully funded, the other two aided and therefore fee-charging; levels of funding and aid would be determined by need, which would in turn be tied to capacity to pay; distribution of those funds within the government and Catholic systems would be the responsibility of system authorities; parents would have the right to choose and, thanks to government subvention, choice would be more widely available.

The committee was clearly uneasy with the task it had been set and, by implication, with its own proposals. It was unhappy at being required to make recommendations “in terms of structures which exist and which it has little direct power to modify [and which] may not be equally relevant for all time.” It fretted about how to ensure “maintenance of effort” by both the states and the non-government schools in receipt of substantial new funding, about the “role of fees in the financing of schools,” and about the likelihood of a “changed relationship” between government and non-government schooling. But there was no time to turn these and other concerns into proposals, and anyway they were scarcely heard in the clamour of approval. The state aid problem had been resolved, at last!

That illusion didn’t last long. Less than two years on, an economic downturn restricted the massive outflow of federal funds needed to keep the many parties happy, leaving the realpolitik of the Karmel/Whitlam settlement exposed like coastal rocks after a storm.

One problem was inordinate complexity combined with confusion of roles and responsibilities: three sectors, each funded and controlled in its own way, two of them getting funds from three different sources including fees, a total of seven governments at different stages of three-year electoral cycles and of differing political persuasions. This was the genesis of a funding system described forty years later by David Gonski and his colleagues as uncoordinated, divisive and unnecessarily complex; containing overlapping responsibilities leading to duplication and inefficiency; and lacking any coherence, transparency, or connection to educational objectives.

A related problem lay in the interaction of “need,” “capacity to pay” and arguments about reducing fees in the interests of “broadening access.” The new system was an invitation to gaming and, on occasion, rorting. State education departments and Catholic school authorities both resisted Commonwealth efforts to attach conditions and purposes to its funds.

Moreover, almost everyone had a legitimate basis for complaint. One side could insist: we are open to all, and cater to most disadvantaged students and their families, so fairness requires that our schools have priority over schools that exclude. The other side could counter: it is not fair that those who choose a religion-based education should have to pay for that choice; parents who pay taxes and then make an additional contribution to the funding of schooling, year in, year out, are entitled to public support; and the lower the public support to non-government schools, the less able we are to enrol all comers.

For all these reasons, conflict over funding returned in full spate. The Schools Commission, attempting to arbitrate between lobby groups constituted or empowered by the Karmel–Whitlam settlement, was the first major victim of policies it was charged with administering. It was downgraded, and eventually (1988) scrapped. Other victims, in whole or in part, included a federal minister (Susan Ryan, author of the putative “Ryan hit list”), a federal leader of the opposition (Mark Latham, of “Latham hit list” fame), and the Gonski proposals, Julia Gillard’s pre-emptive buckle (“no school will be worse off”) notwithstanding.

More important than any of these disturbances in the corridors of power and in public forums were the consequences down on the ground. With three sectors funded and administered in different ways came very different levels of funding and very different regulation of rights and obligations. The Karmel/Whitlam settlement gave Australia both free and publicly subsidised fee-charging schools; schools lavishly funded and schools relatively impoverished; schools permitted to select on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religious affiliation and/or academic performance and schools prohibited from doing any of those things; parents who are required to pay when often they can’t afford it and parents who aren’t and can; and parents who are offered the full menu and others who must take whatever is put on their plate.

Unfairness is one part of the problem. The other is exacerbation of social and educational division. Parents in a position to choose have typically chosen schools where their children will find others just like themselves. In the doing, they make a choice for those who can’t choose, for reasons of income and/or location, and/or because their child doesn’t have what the choosy schools are looking for. Thus the non-choosers, like the choosers, increasingly find themselves among their own kind.

Australia now has an unusually high concentration of students at both ends of the spectrum, and a relatively small proportion of schools with socially mixed enrolments. One consequence of the massive sifting and sorting of the forty years since the Karmel/Whitlam settlement is a transformation of the Catholic sector. A school system established to help the poor and the excluded has off-loaded much of that task to the government schools in favour of catering to those already in the mainstream. One quarter of students in Catholic schools are not Catholic, and half of all Catholic students – and almost certainly a relatively poorer half – are enrolled in government schools.

There is clear evidence to suggest that this segmentation, amounting in some respects and areas to segregation, has a depressing effect on the academic attainment of many, perhaps even most students. Its social and cultural effects go unmeasured and unreported.

What went wrong? In his celebrated denunciation of the 1919 Versailles peace conference, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes said of its protagonists that “the future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety.” Their anxiety was territorial settlement and reparations, with, Keynes correctly predicted, dire consequences to follow.

The analogy with the Karmel/Whitlam settlement is not exact in kind or, of course, in scale, but it is illuminating. Whitlam did have a concern for “the future life of Europe” but it played very little part in shaping his thinking about the nature and terms of a state aid treaty, most of which had taken its final shape by 1966.

In 1991 Jean Blackburn, like Keynes a key player in the proceedings concerned (she was deputy chair of the interim committee and subsequently an important voice in the Schools Commission), looked back in anger. “We created a situation unique in the democratic world,” she said. “It is very important to realise this. There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level… We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, ‘What an extraordinary situation.’”

Some of the omissions listed by Blackburn, to do with curriculum and accountability, have since been addressed, if not resolved, but others have not been addressed at all.

Both sides of politics are aware of structural problems in the school system. The Coalition has focused on dysfunctional governance arising from the involvement of two levels of government. Labor’s concerns, larger in scope and spirit, concentrate on the (closely related) problem of complex and counterproductive distribution and use of funding. Neither seems aware of the importance of student selection and exclusion, of the consequences of the fee/free distinction, or of the relationship of all of the elements identified by Blackburn to each other. Neither has grasped how these dynamics are in turn related to Australian schooling’s persistent inability to “lift performance,” and to the social and cultural effects of schooling. Neither has been able to escape the power of interest groups formed in the 1960s to block structural change, and neither has been willing to confront some of those groups on the reduction of decisions about “the future life of Europe” to grabs for cash. Each seems to understand only parts of a big, complicated problem; each, like Labor in 1966, canvasses remedies which, if seen as solutions rather than steps towards a solution, will perpetuate more than they change. •

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That version of the story comes from Deloitte Access Economics via Universities Australia, which commissioned Deloitte to “analyse the contribution that universities make to Australia’s economic and social prosperity.” But we’ve all heard other versions, and some of us have been hearing various combinations of lobby group spin, political guff and complaisant economic theory ever since 1964. It was then that the federal government’s Martin committee, advised by the OECD, which was itself advised by a small group of American economists, abruptly abandoned previous educational rationales and declared that “economic growth… is dependent upon a high and advancing level of education” and that education should therefore be regarded as “an investment which yields direct and significant economic benefits through increasing the skill of the population and through accelerating technological progress.”

This explanation of growth – the “human capital” argument – is not altogether wrong, as either explanation or prescription, but it is radically incomplete. What it overlooks is the incessant struggle of occupational and social groups, families and individuals to acquire government-backed credentials and the many social and economic advantages they bring. That struggle has had significant consequences for the size, shape, culture and outcomes of the education system, most of which have been concealed rather than understood by human capital theory. In other words, the relationship between education and economic growth is as much social, political and ideological as it is economic.

If we put the social and the political and the ideological back in, the whole picture changes. We can see why education has not just grown to meet the expanding needs of the post-industrial economy, but has exploded like an airbag.

Growth in student numbers at Australian universities, 1906–80, compared with growth in national population

Note: The solid line shows the number of additional enrolments over time (with a dotted section 1940–55 to smooth wartime and postwar effects); the dotted lines show the number of additional members of the national population, total and in the age group 17–22, over the same period. CRTS refers to the postwar scheme that enabled returned soldiers to enter higher education. 

Source: D.S. Anderson and A.E. Vervoorn, Access to Privilege, ANU Press, 1983.

In the thirty years from 1952 – in less than the working lifetime of a teacher, that is – the number of students in schools more than doubled, in technical education tripled, and in higher education multiplied by no less than twelve. As well as growing much more rapidly than the population, education outpaced both the workforce as a whole and the highly skilled workforce. Between 1980 and 1990, the proportion of the workforce with post-school qualifications rose from 38 to 48 per cent, while the proportion in skilled occupations changed not at all. Then, over the twenty-five years from 1989 to 2014, the proportion of the working age population with a bachelor’s degree or higher tripled, while the proportion of professionals in the workforce rose sedately, from 15 per cent to 22 per cent.

With social, political and ideological realities back in the picture we can also understand why a vastly expanded system, which has brought many benefits to many people, has nonetheless been a disappointment. We can see why governments have been on a policy treadmill, lubricated by an overweening and inadequate theory, tackling the same old problems over and again in the belief that more and yet more education will make them go away. The result is an increasingly bloated and self-serving university sector; a demoralised and marginalised VET (vocational education and training) system; stubborn inequalities in educational opportunities and outcomes; persistently high proportions of school leavers and adults who, as the euphemism goes, “lack the skills for full participation in contemporary society”; chronic grumbling by employers about the “job readiness” of new employees; and, for many of those on the receiving end of it all, an ever-lengthening educational experience of variable quality, ever-increasing competitiveness and ever-increasing costs.

ORIGINS

In August 1984, federal and state governments agreed that nurses should be trained not in hospitals but in colleges of advanced education. At a stroke, the higher education system was committed to grow by 18,000 places over a decade. Like the nurses who had agitated for change, the governments justified the new rule by pointing to the growing complexity of nurses’ work arising from advances in medical science and technological change in the health industry. These new conditions of labour, they argued, required a more extended and demanding preparation of nurses, and it could not be provided in hospitals.

In fact, the governments had bowed to pressure rather than reason, and acted against the advice of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission. Under a new generation of militant leaders, nurses’ unions had turned to bitter industrial action and confrontation. But their discontent grew not out of any increase in the sophistication of nurses’ work but out of something like the obverse, a lack of change in its social and financial conditions. Nurses were tired of authoritarian hospital managers and matrons and of being treated as domestic help by doctors. Their salaries had fallen far behind those of comparable occupational groups. Huge wastage rates testified to the failure of the nurses’ representatives to defend legitimate workplace interests. The new leadership saw very clearly that the only way to solve the problem was to get credentialled.

The nurses didn’t invent this strategy. Indeed the first of many precedents was established in their own industry, by the doctors, in a complicated process that extended over almost a century from the 1850s, when the infant University of Melbourne established Australia’s first medical course. The campaign involved governments, occupational registration authorities, hospitals, employers and practitioners in both England and Australia. By its end, the medical practitioners had managed to bring together three elements to form a new molecule: the medieval institution of the guild, through which occupational groups staked out an exclusive claim to the exercise of a special skill; the newer mechanism of an educational credential, attesting to the consumption of an arcane body of knowledge; and the bureaucratic state, increasingly concerned to regulate, particularly on matters of public health and safety.

The doctors’ efforts overlapped with similar campaigns by architects, accountants, lawyers and engineers. Of these, the engineers’ was the most important and significant. Unlike architects, accountants and lawyers, but like many other occupational groups, most engineers were employed by big public and private corporations wedded to the existing “pupillage” and “workshop” system of training and the relatively modest salaries that went with it. In a campaign extending over decades, the engineers struggled to organise themselves around “the fundamental principle of definition by qualification”(emphasis in the original), as Brian Lloyd, a past president of the Institute of Engineers Australia, put it.

The engineers hounded their employers all the way to the High Court. In June 1961, a signal day in their history (and that of Australian credentialism), the court determined that “the functions undertaken in employment as a professional engineer were described unambiguously in terms of the qualifications needed to carry them out.” As Lloyd reports with satisfaction, the decision “placed the Profession of Engineering on a new and much higher plane of status and reward.”

As the engineers were slugging it out with their employers an even larger group was attempting to follow their example. The teachers’ genteel “associations” were being transformed into militant unions demanding higher education qualifications and the status and remuneration that came with them. The teachers, in turn, set an example for the nurses, and for dozens of others, including, most recently, early childhood teachers.

Apprenticeships had long provided “definition by qualification” for some working-class men; from the 1960s on, one mid- or lower-tier occupation after another joined the push for credentials, from childcare workers and private detectives to dental prostheticians and jockeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s these and many other claims were advanced on behalf of myriad less powerful occupational groups by the indefatigable John Dawkins and his close adviser, former union heavyweight Laurie Carmichael. Dawkins’s “skills agenda” included an Australian Qualifications Framework that defined a hierarchy of occupations and matching qualifications all the way from certificates 1, 2, 3 and 4 to diplomas and degrees, and then up to the highest of ten rungs, the research doctorate.

As ever more occupations and employees got a foot on the ladder, those who were already there took care to maintain relativities. Many sought higher and/or longer and/or more specialised courses of study and qualification. Thus, the teachers claimed successively three-, four- and now five-year minimum courses of study, on top of which they became big consumers of postgraduate study. For accountants, membership of either of the two professional bodies demands a four-year degree followed by a program combining supervised employment with further study and examinations.

Many occupations have metastasised into a series of specialisations, most requiring a “post-initial” qualification. In 1957, postgraduate coursework students comprised just 3.5 per cent of enrolments; by the mid 1990s, in the wake of the Dawkins reforms, the figure had multiplied more than three times, and is now around 26 per cent. Increasingly, a second or third undergraduate degree is another route to the same destination – an existing higher education qualification has become the fastest-growing basis for admission into undergraduate courses.

The number of years of study required to acquire full professional status has increased correspondingly. To take the case of medicine again, the first graduates of Melbourne’s medical course were practising in their early twenties. Medical specialists are now often well into their thirties before they gain the coveted “membership,” and general practice has itself become a specialisation. While an identifiable and often complex group of skills and knowledge provides the grain of sand for a specialisation, it is the interests of those who control access to and use of that skill and knowledge that make the pearl grow.

Maintaining relativities also requires constant patrolling of boundaries and protection of nomenclature. Thus, the engineers have struggled against “alternative” entry routes and terminological hijackers such as “sound engineers” or even “automotive engineers.” In a moment of hubris the nurses talked about achieving parity of esteem with the doctors, a bid the doctors extinguished just as firmly as they have kept “complementary medicine” on the margins and other “health professionals” in a subordinate position. The teachers have had to fight on two fronts: against low standards of entry to mainstream courses, and against the recent arrival of an alternative to the mainstream, the Teach for Australia program. Some of the many groups engaged in this ceaseless struggle (nurses and electricians, for example) achieved the holy grail of closely regulated occupational closure. Others, such as the teachers, got close, while still others managed only nominal regulation or, as in the case of carpenters, gradually lost what closure they had.

The scramble among occupations for “definition by qualification” triggered a similar kind of scrambling among the institutions from which these credentials could be obtained, and within their constantly expanding customer base.

As in the case of occupations, the competition and elbowing among education providers and education consumers started at the top and worked its inexorable way downwards. When the second world war ended, Australia had just six universities, one in each of the capital cities. Only two decades later, there were fourteen, and these were joined by the “colleges of advanced education,” or CAEs, which swallowed up the old teachers’ colleges and technical institutes. In another blink of an eye the CAEs became universities too, which set off a scramble among the real universities.

First, the long-established universities formed the nucleus of the “Group of Eight,” with a view to staying at the top of several pecking orders: research; the professional and time-honoured disciplines; postgraduate and double degrees (rather than mere bachelor programs); and high cut-off courses for high-scoring students. Then the universities that were real but nonetheless excluded from that group formed an alliance of “innovative” universities, while the old institutes of technology became the Australian Technology Network, and the rump, mostly based on teachers’ colleges in the suburban and regional fringes, became “equity” institutions. Now they, in their turn, are pressed from below by TAFE colleges and private VET providers that have won from government the right to offer bachelor’s degrees, once the exclusive prerogative of universities.

In this lengthening, closely defined and tightly regulated pecking order, research output has become the key determinant of position. In 1938 there were just eighty-one research students in Australia. Now there are more than 60,000 of them, heavily concentrated in institutions that had a head start and which routinely siphon resources from teaching to maintain it.

There is (contested) evidence to suggest that the biggest beneficiaries of this research are not (as the universities like to say) “the economy” or “the nation” but rather the researchers themselves and the universities that whip them on in the race for a place in international league tables.

Overlaying the development of a hierarchy of institutions are more complicated patterns of positioning among courses and credentials. Here, three considerations interact: the level of the course, the status of the occupations to which the course and its credential apply, and the status of the academic disciplines concerned (“pure,” “rigorous” and old, rather than “applied,” discursive and new). Australia has developed a kind of currency that registers the net effect of these many variables at any one time. A glance at ATARs (the Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranks) – adjusted for fudging and fibbing – reveals how Murdoch stands in relation to James Cook, how law at Melbourne stands in relation to law at Flinders, how law in general stands against engineering, how physics or economics compares with sociology or business studies, and how any of these are faring now compared with a year or a decade ago.

As the number of groups using educational credentials to defend or advance their position increased, and as the numbers of providers and courses grew to accommodate them, the credential system spread its net over an increasing proportion of the population. In research conducted in the late 1970s, my colleagues and I had a privileged view of this constantly advancing frontier. Our fieldwork included long conversations with two groups of fifteen-year-olds and their parents and teachers, one group in mainstream government high schools in working-class districts, the other in high-fee private schools. In the latter we were struck by the number of girls determined to “go to uni” and by the encouragement they were getting from their schools and families, even though only a few of their mothers were themselves graduates, and most of their schools had long concerned themselves mainly with preparing girls for the marriage market. In the former, parents and students alike were acutely aware that “you need to stay longer at school these days,” but more as a form of defence against a deteriorating youth labour market than in order to “get on.” In all minds, including the teachers’, going to university was exceptional.

Now, three decades later, going to uni has a cult-like force. Ever-increasing numbers have been drawn into a single millrace via the elimination of the technical high school system and the marginalisation of the “school-based vocational programs” that were supposed to replace them, and by the articulation of VET and higher education credentials.

Upper secondary students by pathway type, mid 1990s

Created by Richard Sweet from data in From Initial Education to Working Life: Making the Transition Work (Table 2.2, page 170), OECD, 2000.

Being “first in the family” to go to uni, once rare, is now so common that in a generation or so it will be rare again. Females outnumber males in higher education, and working-class schools compete on the number of their Year 12s who achieve the dream. The ATAR is, for most young people, a brand on the forehead. For those suited to the particular form of learning in which this race is conducted, the question is no longer one of getting into uni, but one of which course in which uni. The rest must settle for second or third best, or try again later. Much the same can be said of occupational groups.

As an increasing proportion of occupations and a growing share of the population have been drawn into the competition for credentials, a vast industry has been constituted. Around seven million of Australia’s twenty-four million people are now engaged in one form or another of education and training – approximately 6.5 million school, VET and uni students, plus half a million or so teaching and administrative staff. In sheer numbers participating, education and training has a larger headcount than the four biggest industries (health, retail, construction and manufacturing) combined. It is, by that measure, more than half the size of the entire workforce.

This industry is now so large and so labour-intensive that a substantial fraction of its efforts is devoted to feeding itself. A recent projection suggests a growth by one-third in numbers of university qualifications in the ten years from 2015, concentrated in five industries. At the top is education and training, which accounts for nearly twice as many additional university qualifications as its nearest rival (healthcare and social assistance), and more than professional, scientific and technical services, public administration and safety, and financial and insurance services combined.

CHARACTER

To note that credentialism is at work in and through formal education and training is not to suggest that they provide nothing but credentials, or that they are simply the means by which individuals and groups clamber over each other in the struggle for the best seats on the gravy train, or to avoid missing out on a seat altogether. (Nor is it to suggest that education and/or credentialism are the only arenas in which such struggles are conducted.) Formal education and training does provide, among other things, economically useful skills and knowledge. It does this, of course, to widely varying extents and widely varying degrees of efficiency, as can be seen by comparing a first degree in dentistry, for instance, or a plumbing apprenticeship with a PhD in education or an MBA.

Nor is it to suggest that credentialism is simply the sum of the actions of individuals – a teacher enrolling in a PhD, for instance, or a manager studying for an MBA in pursuit of career advancement – or the sum of the activities of occupational groups in search of “definition by qualification.” As the pioneering example of medicine illustrates, occupational ambition is a crucial element in the compound, but so too are the state’s need and willingness to regulate, and the power of educational institutions to grant or withhold credentials according to the quantity of product consumed.

Just as capitalism is much more than what happens on Wall Street, so credentialism includes institutions and interests, ideas and culture. Increasingly, credentialism’s motive force has come from governments, which have not just responded to demands for “definition by qualification” but also effectively created them. They have done this by using these definitions as the key component in their regulation of many areas of work, and even intervening in the organisation of work (as the Hawke government did when it became involved in “award restructuring” and introduced the Australian Qualifications Framework).

While credentialism does contain its own ratchet-like logic of expansion, it is not independent of circumstances. Credentialism is triggered by economic and technological change, and is in constant interaction with them as well as with general levels of economic prosperity, security and expectation, and with the policies of government. Hence, the merely incremental advances in education and credentialling between the first and second world wars, and their exponential growth in the postwar years. Hence, also, very different rates of growth in education in the Fraser years and during the Dawkins boom. Credentialism is at work in most areas of economic life, but is more influential in some industries (health, for instance) than others (such as retail), in the public sector than the private, at higher-level occupations than lower, and in mid-sized and large organisations than small.

The education industry, like any other, comprises interests – sectors and levels, employers and employees, clients and providers. They often compete and sometimes clash, but are united in the claim that education is good, and more education is better. By extension, the more people engaged in acquiring more credentials, the better.

To that end, almost all of these interest groups have followed the lead provided by the Martin committee in 1964, taking economics and its human capital theory as the authoritative endorsement and vehicle of their claims. That is why Universities Australia hired Deloitte to make its case, and why that case is as it is: “universities embody social, economic and intellectual resources which combine to generate benefits on a local, national and global scale…” University graduates achieve “higher labour force outcomes” and, as is “well established,” a large part of that “is due to formal education.” Indeed, says Deloitte, Australia’s GDP is 8.5 per cent higher “because of the impact that a university education has had on the productivity of the 28 per cent of the workforce with a university education.” And while a university education “has been empirically demonstrated to be positively associated with improved health outcomes, quality of life and a range of other social indicators,” it is nonetheless “the broader society that is by far the greatest beneficiary.”

Governments are always the target of that argument, and are often – need and circumstances depending – its exponents as well. The case put by the Rudd government’s Bradley review (2008) to justify a “demand-driven” higher education system might have come from Martin fifty years before, or from any number of ministerial speeches in between. “Developed and developing countries alike accept there are strong links between their productivity and the proportion of the population with high-level skills,” it says. Australia is falling behind. If we are to “compete effectively in the new globalised economy” we must commit to “both structural reform and significant additional investment” as a matter of urgency. “We must increase the proportion of the population which has attained a higher education qualification,” it insists, well into a period (1989–2014) in which, as we have seen, the proportion of the working-age population with a bachelor’s degree or higher tripled. Credentialism has managed to make itself part of the taken-for-granted common sense of the age.

CONSEQUENCES

Credentialism is a source of many of the problems in the education and training system, and many of its limitations, but it is by no means an altogether bad thing.

Perhaps its most far-reaching benefit has been in supporting the massive expansion in numbers of groups and individuals given access to an extended education. Many of those involved in the struggle for “definition by qualification” saw their campaigns as a struggle for equality, and they were right to do so. The successful demand by teachers, nurses, engineers and many other occupational groups for higher qualifications has provided millions of young people from modest circumstances with a substantial expansion not just of opportunity but also of experience and knowledge. Not all get the best, of course, but getting an extended education is usually better than getting a short one.

This has helped to make a less mystified and mystifying society, and a less excluding one. It has helped to draw most migrant groups into the social and economic mainstream, and contributed to the entry of women into a wider world (particularly important given their virtual exclusion from trade apprenticeships). In 1950 there were just over 30,000 students in Australian universities, of whom only one in five were women (and even that was good compared with the proportion of female academics). In the course of a single lifetime, numbers have multiplied more than thirty times while the proportion of women among all higher education enrolments has almost tripled.

Credentialism also secured the link between social practice (medicine, engineering, teaching, the law and so on) and science, reason and humanism. In particular, the involvement of Australia’s infant universities in occupational training and certification ensured that they would follow the example of the English dissenting academies (notably the University of London) and Scottish universities rather than of Oxbridge. That gave the occupations concerned access to forms of knowledge that could not be generated within the occupations themselves. Again, medicine and medical training are particularly illustrative and important; as late as 1952, no less than a quarter of all university graduates were graduates in medicine.

And, finally, “definition by qualification” has provided many members of the workforce, employees and self-employed people alike, with the means by which they could exercise a measure of control over the content, and the terms and conditions of their work, and with an acknowledgement of its value. And even if that has involved a certain amount of conspiring against the public, as Adam Smith alleged, it has also provided the public with unprecedented levels of defence against incompetence, malpractice and snake oil.

Then there is the other side of the ledger.

Credentialism might be very good at expansion, but more education, and more opportunity for advancement through education, does not necessarily bring more equality. Credentialism is a zero-sum game, a striving by occupations, by educational providers and consumers, and by social groups for “positional advantage.” Those with the greatest social and cultural power are of course best placed in this struggle for positional goods. The opportunity is there for all, but it is heavily contested. In effect, those higher up the ladder tread on the fingers of those below. The position gained by one cannot be gained by another; indeed, if one individual or group or occupation or institution moves up, another moves down. Educationists and politicians like to talk about education’s ladder of opportunity, but have less to say about its snakes.

Most Australian eyes focus on the social-distributional aspects of these struggles – the extent to which where you start out determines where you end up. Thus Bradley, following a long tradition extending back through the Karmel Report (1973) and beyond, proposed special measures for “those disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth: Indigenous people, people with low socio-economic status, and those from regional and remote areas.”

On this score the news is mixed. To the extent that the culture of a group drawn into the expanded education system is of a kind that makes its members willing and able to do what formal education institutions want them to do, they will fare relatively well. That is why women and many immigrant groups have been able to climb the educational ladder and enter the economic and social mainstream. Hence, also, the relative failure of many local-born working-class men, and some migrant groups.

Fairness of access to rungs on the social ladder via education does matter, but the length of the educational ladder, the proportion of the population to be found on its various rungs, and the learning that does or doesn’t come with each level – all these matter more. That those with at least one tertiary-educated parent are more than four times as likely to get a tertiary education as those without is bad. But that some get twenty years of the best that the system has to offer while others get ten of the worst, and that the latter are those who really need the extra help, is worse. At the top, the double-degree holders inhabit the dreams of “innovation strategies”; at the bottom, scarcely a trickle of learning arrives. As noted earlier, a recent international study of adult literacy and numeracy found that around half of Australians aged between fifteen and seventy-four struggle to use and comprehend basic writing and numbers.

What is true of educational experience and outcomes is also true of education’s other consequences. Calculating the “income and employment premium” of qualifications is a dark art, but it is clear that the relative premium attached to a university degree is much higher than to a diploma, and that in turn to a certificate. Astonishingly, in some lower-level occupations, trainees who complete their courses actually earn less than those who do not. And down there at the bottom you don’t just get a lower rung on the salary and status ladder. You fall off. It is true, as politicians like to tell unemployed or “disengaged” young people, that the way to get a job is to get a qualification, but only if you get a better one than your peers.

Credentialism both exaggerates and mystifies the competitive element in education. It compounds the tendency to give more to those who are good at formal learning than to those who aren’t. Credentialism works on the trickle-down principle, in educational opportunity, provision and outcomes, and in their consequences in the labour market and life. Its rhetoric of opportunity and individual responsibility obscures the fact that anyone can learn if they get the right help. It also obscures the fact that the “post-industrial economy” wants more skills and knowledge at the top, yet at the bottom, left to its own devices, it doesn’t even offer a job.

A second entry on the negative side of credentialism’s ledger is its impact on costs.

Increasing numbers consuming increasing amounts of education create an increasing need for someone to pay. In 1960 prime minister Robert Menzies wrote to Leslie Martin, the man he had recently appointed to chair a tertiary education review, to point out that the government was “by no means sure that this state of things – more and more students requiring proportionately more and more outlay – can proceed indefinitely.” What Menzies saw as a problem for government, subsequent governments have turned into a problem for consumers as well, first by cutting back on what the consumers get, and then by making them pay.

Between the late 1970s and the turn of the century, the annual government spend on each higher education student, in real terms, just about halved. Over much the same period, the proportion of higher education revenues coming out of (domestic) student pockets soared from nil to 11 per cent (1989) to 19 per cent (1999). HECS and its “income-contingent loans” were an inspired alternative to the reimposition of fees, but the solution is increasingly looking like a problem. Governments have steadily jacked up the proportion of course costs borne by students and reduced repayment thresholds even as the amounts of education needed to compete in the labour market have increased.

Compounding the problem is the fact that the credentialled are not getting jobs or earning as they used to. Credentialism creates a secular tendency for the numbers of credentials and credentialled to grow more rapidly than the rewards available for distribution, a reality that causes the expectations of the credentialled to fall and those of employers to rise. To take only the case of the best-positioned, the university graduates: in 1977 average graduate starting salaries equalled average (full-time male) earnings. In zigs and zags, that 100 per cent has fallen to three-quarters of average earnings. Over much the same period, the proportion of graduates finding it hard to get a full-time job rose, also in zigs and zags, from one in ten (1979) to almost one in three (2013). Calculating “over-education” is another dark art, but on any calculation it is now so marked and widespread that even that arch-apostle of educational expansion, the OECD, is getting worried.

Components of skill mismatch, selected OECD countries, 2011–12

Notes: Under- (over-) skilled workers refer to the percentage of workers whose scores are higher than that of the min (max) skills required to do the job, defined as the 10th (90th) percentile of the scores of the well-matched workers in each occupation and country. In order to abstract from differences in industrial structures across countries, the one-digit industry level mismatch indicators are aggregated using a common set of weights based on industry employment shares for the United States.
Source: OECD (2015), The Future of Productivity, OECD Publishing, Paris.

One outcome of the pincer movement of rising costs and falling returns is rising student debt. By 2012, total HECS debt had reached $30 billion, of which around $7 billon is unlikely to be repaid. Recent projections suggest that growth in debt may be closer to exponential than to linear. Such problems may be compounded by the relatively recent extension of the HECS approach to VET students.

So far as individuals are concerned, it can be argued that if the return on investment falls too far they can take their investment elsewhere. This ignores the fact that getting a credential is less an “investment” than a life imperative for most young people. It also fails to recognise that while many of those competing in and through educational credentials are “aspirationals” putting in the effort to “better themselves,” many are simply trying to defend whatever relative position they have or avoid unemployment. It’s a matter of sticks as well as carrots, fear as well as hope.

The third and most far-reaching of the drawbacks of credentialism is its role in the near destruction of a work-based learning system. Massive systems of formal education were not constructed on an empty plain. At the opening of the twentieth century most new entrants to most occupations learned on the job. Teachers began their careers as “monitors,” lawyers as articled clerks, accountants as clerks, nurses as juniors, and many engineers in articled pupillage or apprenticeships. Sometimes, work-based learning was linked to further part-time study (as in the case of occupations organised as “trades,” for example), sometimes not. The formal education system was essentially a platform under this larger system of learning, providing the literacy and numeracy necessary to work-based learning.

By the end of the twentieth century most of this system had been subordinated or demolished. The process can be traced in “intergenerational upgrading” (a term that contains an inadvertent value judgement, by the way). As recently as the early 1980s, only a quarter of young accountants had degrees, but that was two-and-a-half times the proportion of their middle-aged colleagues and eight times the proportion of the senior members of the profession. A similar pattern could also be found in pharmacy, architecture, engineering, teaching, physiotherapy, and welfare and social work. Very few, if any, non-graduates are still to be found in any of these groups.

This is not to deny that the established system of learning was in bad shape. It was not delivering the necessary skills and knowledge, and was often both oppressive and exploitative. But as credentialism gathered momentum and formal education interposed itself between the labour market and the labour process, it was conveniently assumed that the work-based system was incapable of reform and must be swept aside, despite evidence to the contrary provided by those few occupations that forced the new system to accommodate the old. As a rough rule of thumb, the more established and secure the occupational group, the more technical and arcane its expertise, and the more closely connected it is to matters of health and safety, the more that group was able to dictate terms to the new credential providers, maintain a respect for craft knowledge, and retain a viable relationship between “practice” and “theory.” Medical practitioners are at one end of that spectrum, teachers very close to the other.

In the less powerful occupations, including nursing and engineering, hostility towards the established system came to border on hatred. The nurses were explicit in their campaign against the trainee system, and did not entertain the possibility that its reform might be better than its replacement. They wanted definition by educational credential for exactly the same reasons that the engineers’ Brian Lloyd wanted it – and he was just as hostile to work-based qualification as the nurses were to hospital-based training.

One of the most influential theorists of credentialism argued that learning could be for its own sake, to get a job, or to do a job. The rise of formal, front-end education at the expense of work-based learning has seen a decisive shift away from the first and third of these in favour of the second, with substantial educational, social and economic consequences.

Learning “for its own sake” has not disappeared but it is certainly at a relative discount. Just one indicator: between 1964 and 1999 in higher education, enrolment shares in arts and humanities (on the one hand) and business studies (on the other) moved in opposite directions. Arts and humanities fell from 36.1 to 24.5 per cent of the total as business studies rose from 11.6 to 26.1 per cent. The old idea of education as an induction into a rich culture and a furnishing of the mind harks back to the days of the cultivated gentleman, but is not altogether wrong for that.

At the same time, learning in order to get a job has gained at the expense of learning to do a job. The constant pressure of credential competition is towards longer courses and higher-status (that is, more abstract and theorised) content. With that has come a cool or lukewarm engagement with study, and an extended period between childhood and fully adult responsibilities and income. More and more young people engage in longer periods of study, the purpose and use of which lie in some uncertain or imagined future. Even content that isn’t padding often feels like it because it comes before it is needed and is therefore not really understood, or is forgotten when the day of its use eventually arrives.

In the conventional economic perspective there is only a problem if the qualification-holder can’t do the job (“under-education”) or has acquired more skills than the job requires (“over-education”). This view is more interested in whether the economy is getting the supply it wants than in the process that does the supplying. Is formal education the only or best or most cost-effective way to develop skills and knowledge? Given that most formal education demands time served as well as learning assessed, and that there is only an approximate relationship between course objectives, course content, what is assessed, and what is required in the workplace, there is a strong prima facie case that extended, formal, front-end education in pursuit of a credential is typically low-productivity education.

There is an irony in these shifts. The more that education has been touted as a response to the demands of the workplace, the more separated from the workplace it has become. It is also ironic that, over the same period, the costs of this preparation have shifted from employers to governments to prospective employees, a tacit acknowledgement that the consumer is the one who really needs all that extra knowledge – not, or not only, to use in the workplace, but to stay in an increasingly intense competition to get into the workplace.

Credentialism constructs the relationship between education and the economy at the wrong point. It shifts the nexus of that relationship from the labour process to the labour market. To draw on some relict terminology, it emphasises the exchange value of education (“learning to get a job”) rather than its use value (“learning to do a job”). Education is often said to be dominated by the economy, and to an important extent it is. But it is also the creature of the economic and other imperatives of individuals, groups and institutions, often at the expense of or without commensurate benefits to the economy as a whole.

THE DIRECTION OF POLICY

There is no point in trying to stop credentialism, and certainly no need to encourage it. The task of policy is to manage it, to use what it makes possible, to do what it doesn’t, and to moderate some of what it does.

Governments should, first, regulate and shape growth in education participation. They should stop talking up numbers, and stop using spurious comparisons with the size of post-school systems in countries that have very different educational, economic and social structures, and which are in (at least some cases) just as mistaken in their policy as we have been. Some kinds of growth should be discouraged, other kinds encouraged.

Governments should, second, discourage front-end education and encourage career and training paths that get as many young people into the workplace as soon as possible and, with that, encourage learning in and by groups as well as by individuals. That approach should certainly include, but should not be confined to, most mid- and lower-tier occupations. Many tertiary education providers are attempting what amounts to a retrofit on the learning–work relationship via internships, work experience placements and other forms of “cooperative education” or “work-integrated learning,” and by developing “profiles” of “the [insert your institution’s name here] graduate.” Peak organisations have developed a “national strategy on work-integrated learning.” (The ultimate academic recognition of a problem came in 2010 with the inception of the Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability.) Some of these developments are a mixed blessing, especially in their use of unpaid labour, and add up to a recognition of a problem rather than a solution to it. A substantial restructuring of the education–work relationship requires, among other things, long-term government commitment.

Third, the priority governments give to research in universities should be transferred to learning and teaching. It’s true that teaching has a higher profile than it did two or three decades ago, but over the same period research has become a mania. Putting an end to the subsidisation of research by teaching would be one step in the right direction. Another would be a rewards system that makes good teaching and learning as lucrative as research. And another: a sustained assault on the legitimacy and consequences of research-obsessed international league tables – perhaps by developing an alternative to them.

Fourth, learning should be redistributed, with the core focus being on the gaps between the best and the worst, and the shortest and the longest educational experiences, rather than on social group distribution. The way to kill two birds with one stone is to concentrate on the former. That would require, among other things, giving the VET sector (including school-based VET programs) the policy and funding focus currently given to higher education, and extending “education” policy into Scandinavian-style or “active” labour market programs.

Fifth, policy should tackle the conflict of interest that permits the same institution to provide, assess and credential. It should confront the fact that occupational groups involved in this arrangement seek rents as well as standards. People learn in all sorts of ways and places, the more so in a digital world, in a highly mobile labour force, and in a constantly changing labour market. Much of this learning goes unrecognised and/or unused because it was acquired outside the formal education-recognition system.

In that loss, education providers play an important part. Rather than take advantage of major advances in the articulation of occupational and other standards and in the assessment of performance and capacity, they have continued to use their power over credentials to demand time served as well as attainment assessed (and often use the former to compensate for the quality of the latter). The “recognition of prior learning” has been confined largely to the VET sector, where it has sometimes been abused by private-sector bucket shops.

Some tertiary providers have an inkling that the game might be changing. Big employers are not as shy as universities about using advanced forms of performance and capacity assessment in addition to, or even instead of, educational credentials. Digitally mediated forms of assessment and “micro-credentialling” promise a direct relationship between capabilities needed and capabilities acquired, irrespective of where or how or when they were acquired. These developments will have their effect over time, but they will battle against the entrenched power of the education sector (its universities in particular) and occupational groups. It is in the interests of government, including its budgetary interest, to weaken the nexus between formal provision and credentialling.

A sixth suggestion: policy should pay as much attention to the use of educated labour as it presently does to its production. There are few settled questions in the economics of education, but one that is close to being agreed is the view that the productivity of individuals is highly dependent on the circumstances in which they work, and the extent to which those circumstances make the most of what individuals bring to the task.

A view of the past half century that takes account of the workings of credentialism suggests that governments have exacerbated its effects rather than managed them. They have fuelled expansion of the system rather than focused on its shape and disposition, encouraged more and longer front-end education rather than work–study combinations and work-based learning, given priority to research and to the top half of the system rather than to teaching and to the bottom half, taken for granted the right of education providers and occupational groups to set the terms on which knowledge and skills will be made negotiable in the labour market, and concentrated on the provision of skills and knowledge rather than their use. The sole substantial exception to most of these rules was John Dawkins’s bold but ill-starred “skills agenda,” quickly overwhelmed by his even bolder expansion of higher education, as prompted by the OECD. To the extent that bad policy comes from bad ideas, human capital theory has a lot to answer for.

THE BASIS OF POLICY

What turned Martin into an apostle of human capital theory was a graph supplied by the OECD, and a table provided by the economists on whom the OECD relied. The graph showed two diagonal lines running from bottom left to top right, along which were scattered the names of twenty or so countries. Up in the top right-hand corner were the richest and most educated (the United States and Canada). At bottom left were the poorest and worst-educated (Portugal and Turkey). The table showed much the same thing happening to individuals. The more education Americans (men, that is) had obtained, the higher their incomes. Those with no education got 50 per cent of the amount earned by those with eight years of schooling; four-year graduates got 235 per cent.

The conclusion drawn was that this was “human capital” at work. Both individuals and economies were more productive when they had more human capital to call upon, and education provided it. Both would be wise to invest, because education offered an excellent rate of return.

The idea has intuitive appeal, but it ran into immediate and vigorous opposition, on three grounds particularly. Which of education and the economy was the chicken, and which the egg? And: do individuals get paid more because their education has made them more productive, or because it has given them qualifications that get them into the more productive jobs? And, third, even if education makes individuals more productive, is that in its turn making the economy as a whole more productive?

Economists pride themselves on empirics, but empirics were hard to come by – so hard that by 1975 the leading British educational economist of the day, Mark Blaug, summarised the many strikes against human capital theory and concluded that its “persistent resort to ad hoc auxiliary assumptions to account for every perverse result” and the resulting tendency to “mindlessly grind out the same calculation with a new set of data” were signs of “a degenerate scientific research program.” It has been dogged ever since by the difficulty in finding correlations as sweet as those that seduced Martin.

Many academic economists left the big claims about education driving economic growth to one side and got on with the more useful task of investigating when, how and why skills and knowledge are or are not used to advantage. The OECD has done much to support that work, but it also had other fish to fry. It set out to annex education to the economy (it is, after all, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), and it needed the big picture to do it. In a tireless campaign to keep the argument afloat, it engaged in one “rethinking” after another, introducing modifications, nuances and qualifications, gradually shifting the emphasis from explanation to the safer ground of prescription, but never abandoning the basic idea that education drives economic growth, and more education means more growth. And that is what governments have seized upon.

It can be argued that from the introduction of HECS in the 1980s through to Bradley’s “demand-driven system” it has been market economics rather than human capital theory that has given the expansion objective its golden run. But market economics has served mainly to clear obstacles on a course long since charted by human capital theory. It can also be argued that it’s not human capital theory that is at fault but the policy-makers. In an address to a high-end audience at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia forum, two senior policy-makers and advisers quoted with approval the conclusions of a British researcher who argued that governments have driven expansion of education on the basis of a “simple reading of human capital theory” and the misplaced assumption that it is “a sufficient basis for analysis and action.” The implication: if governments and their policy-makers read more widely and carefully, they would pay more attention to the character, quality and distribution of education.

That is certainly so, but the trouble is that it’s not just governments and politicians who use human capital theory. It is also the huge and hugely influential education industry, in which even thoughtful and critical members use “a simple reading of human capital theory” almost as a reflex. Others, including Deloitte and Universities Australia, offer it as gospel, conflating individual with economy-wide benefits; asserting that graduates are more productive and that it is formal education that makes them so; arguing that advantages enjoyed by graduates “on a range of social indicators” come from being university-educated rather than from the position in the social pecking order to which a degree gives access; failing to note that benefits to one individual may be costs to another; claiming that better economies come from bigger education systems; and resorting to weasel words (“is associated with,” “it is well established,” “it is widely accepted,” and so on) to slide past awkward questions about chickens and eggs, causation and correlation, and the gap between claim and evidence. Notably absent from Deloitte’s analysis is that core economic concept, “opportunity cost,” and the consideration it might provoke as to alternative ways of spending what is spent on universities, and more cost-effective ways of doing what universities do.

The human capital idea lends itself to this sort of special pleading. What confuses both thought and policy is the fundamental conception, the underlying imagery. Human capital theory takes just one part of the education–society relationship – what formal education does or can do for the economy – and declares it to be the main game, or even the only game. It was founded on the notion that building a healthy economy is mainly a matter of loading up individuals with portable “skills,” and has great difficulty in absorbing the fact that ways of doing things in workplaces and economies (and societies) are as much, or more, the property of groups as of individuals.

But the theory’s most damaging ingredient, responsible for encouraging governments in their myopic focus on “increasing educational attainment,” is built into the very term “human capital”: the assumption that it’s all about accumulation, right down to preposterous calculations of the total value of the “stock of human capital” and of what an increase in the Year 12 retention rate will do to GDP, another case of economic modelling gone mad. It has saturated and twisted the language so that the effects of education become “benefits,” expenditure is transformed into “investment,” and analysts of “skills shortages” forget that much of what they are talking about is the supply of holders of occupationally constructed, regulation-backed credentials, aka union tickets.

In the argument presented here, the most consequential weakness of the human capital argument is its incomprehension of the nature and effects of credentialism. A good functionalist social science, all it can see are functions performed (so long as they are performed on behalf of the economy), and malfunctions such as “over-education,” which it calls “credentialism,” a confusion of an effect with the dynamic that generated it. It would be going too far to say that the human capital idea is simply a part of credentialism, but it has served both to obscure and to advance credentialism. Economics understands some important things, but in its arrogance as “the mother tongue of policy” it does not understand that there are equally important things that it does not understand. With rare exceptions, even its discussions of “credentialism” make no reference to – much less try to comprehend – key texts in the history and theory of credentialism. And with equally rare exceptions, the economics of education knows a lot more about economics than education.

The formal education and training system is neither powerhouse nor gravy train. It is, among other things, both. Neither is an incidental by-product of the other. Both impulses powerfully influence the size, disposition, culture and effects of formal education and training. By taking the economists’ radically incomplete view of the matter, policy has had the paradoxical effect of exacerbating the impact of credentialism at the expense of the education’s economic and other contributions. Hence a seventh and final piece of advice to government: do, as advised, listen more carefully to what the economists have to say, then seek other counsel. •

Any thoughts? Comment via Disqus below...

This is a substantially revised, expanded and updated version of an article with the same title published in the Bulletin of the National Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, 7:2, May 1988. It has benefited from comments and suggestions by Mark Burford, Gerald Burke, Sandra Milligan and Richard Sweet. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for the result.

In addition to the linked sources, the article also draws on:
• “Goodbye, Florence: The Nurses’ Struggle for Status Has Ended the Age of Florence Nightingale,” by Elizabeth Pittman, in Australian Society, February 1985.
• “Work-based Learning in Australia’s Initial Vocational Education and Training System,” by Richard Sweet, in the forthcoming European Training Foundation book, Work-Based Learning: An Option or Essential for VET?, ETF, Turin, 2016.

The post Powerhouse or gravy train? appeared first on Inside Story.

The story so far. Gonski’s inquiry was commissioned in 2010 and reported in 2012. It tackled three major problems in schooling: the dysfunctional arrangements for funding three sectors in three different ways by two levels of government; the consequently chronic antagonism between sectors and interest groups; and the failure of funding policies to address growing problems in schooling, including social and cultural segregation, a widening gap between the best and worst schools, a “long tail” of students leaving school without even the bare minimum of skills, and stalled performance.

Gonski’s plan was elegant in its simplicity: state and federal governments would agree on how much each would contribute to the cost of schools, and on how the total would be distributed to school systems and thence to schools. Each school would be guaranteed a minimum per student amount (the “schooling resource standard,” or SRS), plus loadings reflecting the school’s size, location and demographics. The same formula would apply across all schools and sectors on the advice of a “national schools resourcing body.” The new scheme would be national, sector-blind and, above all, needs-based.

Gonski’s proposals were widely applauded as an educational, political and policy breakthrough. But there were problems in the plan too, most of them exacerbated by the bungled, drawn-out implementation process initiated by Julia Gillard and conducted by schools minister Peter Garrett.

The national school resourcing body was dropped early in the process. That meant that there was no agency to carry the extensive research needed (as Gonski foresaw) to settle key questions such as the level of the SRS, ways of measuring each of five categories of “need” (socioeconomic status, language background, indigeneity, disability and school size/location), the proportion of total funds to go to basic resourcing as against the loadings, how many schools should receive loadings, and how extra resources could be most cost-effectively used. Nor was there an accountability mechanism.

Critics on the right (and in cabinet, apparently) claimed that school funding increases over the decades had done little or nothing to improve outcomes, which meant that Gonski’s $6.5 billion increase on an annual spend of around $40 billion was a case of throwing good money after bad.

Since most needy schools were government-run, that sector was Gonski’s main beneficiary. Some supporters of non-government schools were suspicious or hostile, and Gonski became identified in many minds with public schools and the teacher organisations that did so much to bring the review into being. As well, Gonski was often seen as a kind of consolation for schools doing the hardest educational yards rather than, as intended, the price paid for schools to deliver improved performance.

All this was in addition to the handicap given to Gonski at the outset, the requirement that “no school will be worse off,” which greatly complicated the calculation of school entitlements and pushed up costs (accounting for up to half of the $6.5 billion by some estimates).

But the resistance that really mattered came from Coalition-governed states, which stood on their constitutional dignity and refused to enter an agreement that would tell them how much to spend on schools and how to spend it. They were aided and abetted by the Abbott opposition, which attacked the scheme at every opportunity right up to the eve of the 2013 election, when it abruptly switched to a Gonski “unity ticket.” That, in turn, was abandoned as soon as the new government took office.

The upshot was that some states had signed up before the election for Gonski and its conditions through to 2017, others were told by the incoming government that they could have the money without any strings attached, and all were informed that from then on things would revert to the unfair, educationally counter-productive and administratively chaotic arrangements that confronted Gonski back in 2010.

Meanwhile, other arms of the Abbott government commissioned reviews – the Commission of Audit, the Competition Policy Review, and the Reform of the Federation process – that either directly tackled school funding or made recommendations bearing on it. None had Gonski’s breadth, and none linked resource distribution and use with national goals for schooling such as social cohesion and equality of opportunity.

Ironically enough, though, they might be just the thing that would allow Turnbull to give a Gonski. Together, they suggest that the Gonski approach should rely less on a single, prescriptive formula and more on an agreed framework for local implementation. It would thus be made more workable, and more acceptable to Coalition governments at both state and federal levels.

What might such an agreed framework for schools funding look like? It would need to include at least four components:

• A statement of purposes, making clear (as Gonski put it) that differences in educational outcomes must not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession

• A statement of principles, specifying that funding should be, among other things, nationally consistent, sector-blind and needs-based

• A provision that all school jurisdictions, government and non-government, will report allocations made to each of its schools, and the methods and data used to determine them, publicly, promptly and in detail, using a common reporting template

• A provision that all jurisdictions should participate in an ongoing, national research effort to understand how best to allocate and use resources to achieve stated purposes.

A framework along those lines would address most of the problems in the original plan, and those arising from its stormy, aborted implementation.

No response to complex political and policy problems will be perfect, of course. In this case, there seems little prospect of removing the “no school worse off” provisions, for example. And there would be much devil in the detail of a devolved approach, including how much variation between jurisdictions should be permitted, and by whom. But that is detail. And after all, there’s not much to beat.

That’s the first reason why Turnbull should consider Gonski. The second is that – Abbott and Pyne rhetoric notwithstanding – there is nothing intrinsically Labor in Gonski. Indeed, its first and still most enthusiastic supporter is NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, a National Party member in a government led by Liberal premiers. Piccoli is by no means a lone Coalition voice for Gonski, and has promised to lobby the new government in support.

The third reason might seem trivial to the point of irrelevance, but history sometimes turns on small things. Malcolm Turnbull and David Gonski are old friends. They went to school together (Sydney Grammar) and Turnbull recently launched Gonski’s book, I Gave a Gonski. They belong to very similar ideological and social worlds. What Gonski proposes is consistent with – and perhaps even essential to – the kind of forward-looking Australia Turnbull says he wants. It would be surprising if Gonski did not use his undoubted access to Turnbull to make out the case.

There are two further reasons why Turnbull might listen, both of them political.

Among the many areas in which the Abbott administration was gratuitously adversarial, and blatantly deceitful, was schools funding. It opposed Gonski, then supported it, then ditched it, the stance on each occasion dictated by party-political advantage seen in the shortest of terms. What better way for the new minister to distance himself from his predecessor, or for the new government to demonstrate that it is not the old one in drag, than to reverse the ill-judged and petty decision to dump Gonski?

Last, and perhaps the best reason of all from a Turnbull point of view: why go to the next election, less than a year away, with the electorally popular Gonski in Labor’s hands?

Labor still owns the Gonski brand, and despite its bungling of the implementation process, it deserves to. Gonski is, as shadow treasurer Chris Bowen has put it, “in our DNA.” But if Labor tries to run again on Plan A, vulnerable both states’ opposition and to sharp criticisms of design, it could find that it has handed one of its biggest political assets to its new opponent. •

The post Could Turnbull give a Gonski? appeared first on Inside Story.

Robinson makes two great contributions to this struggle. He grasps that something big is going on in and around schools, and he insists that the received way of conducting schooling is, at last, vulnerable. His account of what a “transformed” school does and can look like is incomplete but nonetheless inspiriting. There are, however, serious shortcomings in his understanding of present realities and future possibilities, and in his “theory of change.” It is possible to share his sense of urgency and possibility without subscribing to his understanding of how history works or his confidence that “time and tide are on the side of transformation.”

To begin with what Robinson is against. He is against what he calls the “industrial” approach to schooling, and he is against a “reform” agenda that derives from and reinforces that approach. “Industrial” schooling (he says) was installed to meet the social and economic needs of the nineteenth century, and is “wholly unsuited” to the twenty-first century. GERM – the rather tortured pun is intended – pushes schooling in exactly the wrong direction with “catastrophic consequences” for students and teachers, and compounds an “ever-widening skills gap between what schools are teaching and what the economy needs.” Standardised and standardising education crushes creativity and innovation, “the very qualities on which today’s economies depend.”

Moreover, and despite its reliance on a mass of research into “what works,” GERM itself doesn’t. Driven by “political and economic interests” including the OECD and its test-based league tables, national governments (remember Julia Gillard’s “top 5 by ’25”?), and giant testing corporations, the GERM prescription has delivered only modest, patchy and sometimes transient gains. The big problems of schooling – inequality, low student engagement and high attrition, teacher dissatisfaction – are as pervasive as ever.

And what is Robinson for? He is for a transformed system. That, he argues, is what really works. “The challenge is not to fix this system but to change it; not to reform it but to transform it.” That is required by both the emerging social and economic reality and by the very idea of “education.” The continuing cultural, social and development tasks of schools are central to his thinking, but so is the view that schools must prepare young people for a “profoundly” changed workplace by developing “twenty-first-century skills,” including flexibility, adaptability, initiative and self-direction, critical thinking and problem solving, and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy.

All this is consistent, in Robinson’s view, with the incontestable fact that “children have a powerful, innate ability to learn.” The school’s job is not to push them through a one-size-fits-all program but to build on this “learning power.” Within a familiar structure (arts, humanities, maths, science and so on) curriculum should be enacted in a quite new way. Entrenched distinctions between the academic and the vocational, between the formal and the informal curriculum, and between disciplined learning and the development of “creativity,” must be overcome. Doing and making should be accorded as much time and respect as study. Learning must be “personalised” to match the learner’s age, stage, interests and capacities. Schools must give all students a red-hot chance to find out what they are good at and passionate about. Students must learn with and from each other, and take full advantage of the resources of the home, the community and, of course, digital technologies.

To these ends, assessment should focus on developing learning and the learner, generating feedback and guidance rather than mere comparison and grades. It must be as concerned with each individual’s growth in understanding, insight and capacity as with the acquisition of propositional knowledge, as much a form of learning as a support to it.

Most important of all is the teacher. “Great teachers are the heart of great schools.” The teacher’s core and irreplaceable responsibility is to create the conditions in which learning can be generated while accepting that he or she is “not always in control of these conditions.” Teachers must ignore the false distinction between “traditional” and “progressive” pedagogies to draw on a range of fit-for-purpose techniques and approaches. What matters is getting the right approach for the purpose and the learner. Contra GERM and the accountability agenda, teachers must be trusted, respected and rewarded as professionals.

Those acquainted with Robinson’s earlier work will be familiar with this “critique of the way things are” and his “vision of how they should be.” But to these Robinson now adds a “theory of change.” It is a bold undertaking.

At the heart of this theory is a switch in what he refers to as a metaphor but others might think of as a “paradigm.” “If you think of education as a mechanical process that’s just not working as well as it used to,” he argues, “it’s easy to make false assumptions about how it can be fixed; that if it can just be tweaked and standardised in the right way it will work efficiently in perpetuity.” But it won’t, “because it’s not that sort of process at all.” Schooling is an organic process.

“Education is really improved only when we understand that it… is a living system and that people thrive in certain conditions and not in others.” Schools are “complex adaptive systems” that by their nature offer far more scope for innovation than is generally realised – and, what’s more, they can only be changed in and through the daily activity of those who live it. The culture of any given school comprises habits and systems that people act out every day.

“Many of these habits are voluntary rather than mandated,” he says, “teaching by age groups, for example, or making every period the same length, using bells to signal the beginning and end of periods, having all of the students facing the same direction with the teacher in the front of them, teaching math only in math class and history only in history class, and so on.”

Robinson really homes in on – indeed his argument depends on – change “within the system as it is.” In his theory, “revolutions don’t wait for legislation… they emerge from what people do at ground level.” Like most revolutions, “this one has been brewing for a long time, and in many places it is already well under way. It is not coming from the top down; it is coming, as it must do, from the ground up.”

Yes, the revolutionary will encounter system-level obstacles including “the inherent conservatism of institutions [and] schools themselves,” conflicting views about the sorts of changes that are needed, differences in “culture and ideology,” and “political self-interest,” and must therefore “press for radical changes” in system-level policies. But history is with the activist and the innovator. “[T]ime and tide,” Robinson declares, “are on the side of transformation.”

Robinson’s book often reads like a self-help manual. PowerPoint lists, twenty-five of them by my count, range from the three elements of academic work, the four purposes of schooling and the eight core competencies to ten tips on how to make your school more inviting. Superlatives (“great” schools, “wonderful” teachers, “inspiring” leaders, “extraordinary” innovations, and so on) are in ready supply. But Robinson also covers a great deal of complicated ground in an enviably accessible fashion. Anecdotes, examples and eyewitness accounts abound, some featuring the usual suspects (High Tech High, for example), many not. Few of those who work in and around schools, including older students as well as parents and teachers, will fail to find Robinson engaging, illuminating and perhaps even inspiring.

There are several points at which Robinson’s case is obviously vulnerable. When he claims that the GERM agenda doesn’t work, and that we do know what actually works, his adversaries will compare his anecdotes and generalisations with their own stockpile of closely researched evidence, including the evidence that the improvement agenda can work, and is little by little lifting its own game as well as that of the schools.

The proposition that what the economy now needs corresponds neatly with what school reformers have long wanted is convenient, to say the least. His picture of the labour market and the workplace of the future is as romantic as it is hazy. The apparent assumption that “profound” and ever-accelerating change is uniquely characteristic of our times is questionable. Indeed it could be argued that the kind of change to which Robinson alludes is occurring within a frame of stability and burgeoning wealth peculiar to the West over the past two or three generations.

There is also a quarrel to be picked with Robinson’s insistence that schools are organic and are not mechanical. It makes much more sense to see them as both, and other things as well. My own view is that schools are best seen as sites of production; they have much in common with other workplaces and work processes but also quite distinctive characteristics and purposes as producers of learners and learning. One among a number of advantages of a “production perspective” is the realisation that schooling is not just a preparation for work. It is work – around a fifth of most people’s working lives, in fact. That provides a better starting point for thinking about what needs changing in schools than focusing on “preparation” for the workplaces presumed to await them in some distant future. Another advantage, to which we return, is that a production perspective provides a better basis for understanding how technology will change teaching and learning.

But the really crucial question for Robinson’s argument against GERM and “industrial” schooling, and for “creative schools” and “transformation,” is this: is genuinely transformative change in schooling possible?

This is where Robinson’s high sense of the purposes and possibilities of schools, and his admirable support for genuine grassroots movements over GERM’s carefully crafted enlistment, get him into trouble. They carry him from an absolutely correct intuitive judgement to a “theory” so misleading as to verge – given his prominence and influence – on the irresponsible.

Robinson is correct in sensing, contra GERM, that schooling’s future will not be continuous with its past, and in proclaiming that a sea change laden with great possibilities is now under way. But his theory of change does not see what “transformation” is up against, or what is driving change at this particular moment, or what will be required if change is to be shaped in a way that he and many others (including me) would like to see.

Robinson’s theory can’t see what transformation is up against.

In their seminal essay “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?” American historians David Tyack and William Tobin draw heavily on the work of their colleague Larry Cuban to argue that schools, like languages, possess a grammar. Just as the grammar of language organises meaning, so does the grammar of schooling organise “the work of instruction.”

“Here we have in mind, for example, standardised organisational practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and allocating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into ‘subjects,’” Tyack and Tobin say, and go on to suggest that over time the internal coherence of this grammar acquires external support. “Neither the grammar of schooling nor the grammar of speech needs to be consciously understood to operate smoothly,” they note. “Indeed, much of the grammar of schooling has become so well established that it is typically taken for granted as just the way schools are. It is the departure from customary practice… that attracts attention.”

All of this is correct, in my view, but nonetheless understates the reality of what “transformation” of the Robinson kind must contend with. The taken-for-granted image of the “real” school is just one of the struts and stays that have grown up around the grammar of schooling, particularly during its massive postwar expansion. It includes: a credentialling system that transmits the demands of universities directly into the schools’ curriculum, and connects schooling to a society-wide competition for advancement (or to avoid relegation); a physical infrastructure devoted to the classroom; a workforce dominated by a single category of worker, “the teacher,” industrially organised, and tenured; industrially backed regulation of the terms and conditions of teachers’ work in ways derived from the grammar (class sizes, contact hours, and so on), and which also frame students’ work; budgets largely absorbed by the salaries of a tenured, closely defined and highly regulated workforce, with little capacity to link resources with “policy,” and a consequent cumulative incrementalism that fuels a tendency for costs and problems to pile up faster than solutions; and a range of interest groups, none of which has the capacity to drive an agenda for the whole, but many of which have the power to single-handedly frustrate such an agenda (vide Gonski).

This means that any theory of transformative change has something rather more on its plate than “the inherent conservatism of institutions [and] schools themselves.” It must cope with a grammar of schooling, and the industry in which that grammar is embedded. Yes, “the system” is complex and adaptive, a culture enacted by individuals in their daily work, and shaped by their outlook and decisions. But it is also a heavily reinforced structure, a form and instrument of power. It is just this combination of flexibility and structure that gives “the system” its capacity to resist, deflect and absorb efforts at “transformation,” as Tyack, Tobin and Cuban are at pains to emphasise.

Thus Cuban has documented the emergence of “hybrid” pedagogies which reflect both teachers’ attachment to progressivist ideas and the hard facts of their work within the frame of class, classroom, subject and lesson. Tyack and Tobin point to the ebb and flow of experimentation, innovation and “alternatives,” which are often driven by charismatic leaders within the overall dominance of a stable grammar. They see the system as a whole operating so that “changes in the basic structure and rules” of the grammar of schooling, like the grammar of language, “are so gradual that they do not jar.” It might even be said that these familiar exceptions to the rule belong to the system’s fundamental logic, functioning as its safety valve, repair shop, and legitimation device – until now.

Robinson’s theory doesn’t see what is driving change or what is distinctive in the present moment in schooling.

In Robinson’s theory, “transformation” will come from grassroots innovation required by a shifting social, economic and technological context, and fuelled by idealism and hot gospelling. Well, yes, and no. Not really grasped in this account is the ever-expanding force of technology, and not around schooling so much as right in the heart of it, in quite unprecedented combinations of hardware and software that will increasingly embody and orchestrate teaching and learning.

It’s not that Robinson is unaware of that fact. The spread of the digital technologies, he writes, is “already transforming teaching and learning in many schools.” He includes “new technologies that make it possible to personalise education in wholly new ways” among the three distinctive features of the present moment in schooling, and Sugata Mitra, the Kahn Academy and the “flipped classroom” all make guest appearances.

But being aware of these developments is not the same as really understanding their weight and impact. The nomination of technology as one of the three “different this time” factors arrives in the book’s penultimate paragraph. The formal discussion of the new technologies is allocated just over a page, where it is treated as just one among “an abundance of emergent features” of schooling. Teachers, assessment, leaders and home influences, meanwhile, get whole chapters to themselves. The discussion of technology is, in short, a retrofit, glued onto an argument which took its essential shape decades ago.

Although Robinson refers over and again to the pervasiveness of technological change, and although he senses that the ground is moving under our feet, his working view of technology within schools is not all that different from that adopted by the industry: learning comes from teaching and teaching comes from the teacher, whose work will be supported and perhaps even empowered by the new technologies but isn’t replaced or even seriously disrupted. Technology does indeed seem to be supplementary if we look at it within the history of schooling. But what if we see both schooling and technology in the larger history of production? From that standpoint it appears that schooling is just now arriving at a point previously reached by one industry after another since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the point at which technology becomes capable of not just supplementing human labour but substituting for some forms of that labour, and demanding the reorganisation of the rest.

Specifically, technology increasingly offers a distinct source and form of teaching labour. And that implies a quite different way of organising the work of teaching and learning, as can be seen in a preliminary way in “blended” schools, “virtual” educational programs such as the Kahn Academy, and indeed entirely “virtual” secondary schools. “Teaching” no longer comes from just “the teacher,” and therein lies the real threat to the received grammar.

That Robinson’s theory sees neither what transformation is up against, nor what is driving the big change, betrays a cast of mind that comes almost completely intact from the 1960s. The sixties are, if I may say so, an excellent place to start thinking about schooling, but as a place to finish, not so much. It would be unfair to suggest that Robinson, like the Bourbons, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but it is fair to say that he has remembered more of the world in which his outlook was formed than he has learned about technology and its inexorable movement from the margins to the centre of schooling.

Creative Schools is dedicated to Bretton Hall College, where as a young working-class trainee teacher he was exhilarated by the ideas of Alec Clegg and other luminaries of British progressivism. His picture of a “transformed” school, although given a contemporary gloss and rationale, belongs essentially to that era. It is to sixties progressivism that Robinson also owes his habitual dichotomies – creative versus industrial schooling; perfidious systems versus idealism at the grassroots; bottom-up change versus top-down; transformation versus mere improvement; the selfless workers in the vineyard versus the self-interested interlopers of “business” and “politics.”

The binary most central to Robinson’s case is his assumption that transformation/revolution means out with the old and in with the new. In fact, it’s more a case of the old colliding with the new – the immovable object of schooling versus the irresistible force of technology – with who knows what upshot.

We can be sure that getting change won’t be the problem, but that getting desirable change will be. We can be confident that schools will not be obliterated in the way of newspapers, for example – they perform irreducible functions including childcare and bringing children and young people together to grow up. We can also be sure that change, of whatever kind, will not obliterate the incumbent grammar and install another. Rather than talking about a “transformation,” therefore, we should talk about a transition,probably from a single dominant grammar to several competing grammars, including both the one Robinson doesn’t like and the one he does. In that transition GERM’s theory and practice of “school improvement” may have as much to offer as the ideal of “transformation.”

In this scenario, what will be up for grabs is mix and balance, and that will vary over time and place. Within schools, and secondary schools particularly, the trick will be in mastering a kind of meta-grammar, finding optimal combinations of several educational forms, with various attempts at “blending” being obvious examples. Within systems the problem will be to make that possible.

Robinson’s theory doesn’t see how change can be shaped.

If Robinson’s or other transformed grammars are to survive and flourish it will only be by combining top-down strategy with bottom-up movement.

Getting the right relationship between systemic and local action has proved elusive in most Western school systems most of the time. That is one reason why GERM, with its over-reliance on top-down engineering, has failed more often than not. The same will be true of the transformation idea if it can’t solve what is essentially the same problem. When they are pushed from the top, as the Gillard “revolution” found, the grammar and industry of schooling lock together and seize up like compressed cornflour. But as was so clearly demonstrated in the decades following the 1960s, grassroots, advocacy-driven efforts can thrive all over the place for a while, burning up huge quantities of energy, hope and idealism, and then dwindle.

If there is a way out of this conundrum in tepid political times such as these, it may be in making politics with the industry’s interest groups, the most powerful of which are not the “outsiders” that so worry Robinson but the industry’s employers and employees.

As things now stand, their power is contained by the industrial and regulatory regime they constructed and within which they conduct their relations. Is it possible that they might abandon this adversarial stasis to collaborate in pursuit of their joint and several long-term objectives?

These insiders confront together the irresistible force of technology-enabled and technology-magnified change. The clear lesson of history is that those affected by such disruptions will do a lot better for themselves (and, in this case, for their ideals and sense of professionalism) by using disruption rather than resisting it. Employers and employees could set out on a long march through the grammar’s legacy orgware, and particularly its regulation of teachers’ (and therefore students’) work and workplaces, the currently lopsided composition of the workforce, and the inflexible disposition of budgets and associated habits of thinking in terms of “effectiveness” rather than cost-effectiveness and opportunity cost. The industry might change itself in ways that permit and encourage new grammars to emerge.

This or something like it may offer a way of shaping the irresistible. There are precedents in Australia’s recent industrial history. There may not be a coherent way of shaping change. For Robinson’s efforts to set out an alternative to GERM’s Gradgrind theory of change we should be grateful, but a more successful attempt will reflect a much more developed sense of structure and power, of politics and history, and of technology and production, and be made of much tougher stuff. •

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The report is exceptionally clear and cogent, and mercifully succinct, thanks in part to its narrowed gaze. It proposes that the best current model of university-based teacher education – and it is a very good one – be installed across the system, with those providers who can’t or won’t “shape up” (as the review’s chair, Professor Greg Craven put it) being required to “ship out.”

In not considering a different strategy, strong on exit standards but encouraging of different ways of reaching them, the reviewers have missed an opportunity. Alternative approaches are not quite excluded from the report, but the two most radical and promising of them, Britain’s “school-led” programs, and Teach for America (and its Australian franchise), are not even mentioned. The review has not comprehended what technology can do, in schools or in teacher education, let alone what it will soon be able to do.

At a time when extra funding is hard or impossible to find, the advisory group has recommended an expensive model of pre-service and early-service education and development without saying how the money should be found. It has not considered whether existing resources could be reallocated to its priorities.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the proposed scheme, it is a nice irony that a government that likes to represent itself as supporting the market and its power to disrupt entrenched interests has endorsed what many of its supporters might regard as government-backed and regulated provider capture.

Over the decades in which the universities have had the field to themselves they have built an empire, and treated the inhabitants as empires do. Just about every university offers teacher education; for some it is core business. Together, they enrol most of Australia’s 80,000 teacher education students and offer most of its 460-odd courses. Some of these programs are very good, some very bad, most in between, a fact that the reviewers’ necessary circumspection barely conceals. It found “a high degree of variability in the quality of practice” with “significant pockets of objectively poor practice.” It concluded that “the standard across all initial teacher education programs must be lifted.” (Emphasis in the original.)

The evidence on which these judgements rest (reported in more detail previously in Inside Story) tells a plainer story. One survey found that three-quarters of new teachers declined to say that they felt “very well” or even “well” prepared for “the reality of teaching.” Another found that between 20 and 40 per cent felt unprepared in a number of areas of practice. Yet more surveys have found over and again that new teachers complain about the weak links between theory and practice in their pre-service courses, the lack of relevance of much of the “theory,” and poor or no liaison between school and campus. Principals agree with them. Asked much the same questions, they give new teachers even lower ratings than the new teachers give themselves. International comparisons are likewise disheartening.

Action Now points out that this baleful performance has continued despite dozens of reviews of teacher education at national and at state levels, dating back to the early 1970s. As the report’s title suggests, these reviewers, to their great credit and by contrast with most of their predecessors, have picked the main point and kept it front and centre: teacher education is there to teach people to teach. Although the advisory group has made recommendations on selection procedures, training for maths and literacy specialists in primary schools, and an inane test of trainees’ literacy and numeracy, it is the demonstrated capacity to teach in the typical circumstances of the school – the class, the classroom and the lesson – that dominates the report and its recommendations.

To this end the advisory group wants less time on campus, more in schools; stronger relationships between universities and practicum-providing schools to be formalised in quasi-contracts; the development of a cadre of go-betweens and in-school supervisors and mentors; and training in the theory and practice of a “clinical” and “evidence-based” approach in which teaching is matched to diagnostic assessment, and the effectiveness of that teaching is constantly evaluated. In all but name, this model of teaching and teacher preparation is the two-year MTeach course pioneered with great success and well-deserved acclaim by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, or MGSE.

The advisory group’s recommendations on how this model would be implemented around the country are just as clearcut. The essential idea is standards plus enforcement. The standards developed over recent years by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership “provide a strong foundation for quality assurance and improvement to initial teacher education,” the review finds, but “they are not being effectively applied.” There will be standards for just about everything: entry to programs and exit from them; accreditation of those programs; school–university partnerships; and beginning teacher induction. Adjectives – “rigorous,” “evidence-based,” “transparent,” “world-class,” and so on – are liberally applied. The institute, hitherto responsible for the development of standards, would be charged with enforcing them as well.

There are plenty of reasons to wonder whether things would happen in such an orderly, comprehensive way. Scaling-up a good program sounds like a surefire approach to reform, but it depends on the model of scaling-up being as well thought out and tested as the model itself. Leaving to one side the fact that implementation depends on a politically wounded and unpopular minister to enlist the support of the universities and employers of teachers (state and territory governments, that is), there is the problem of driving substantial change through teacher education itself. At least two kinds of reality have been underestimated.

First, the report implies that the problem with universities is attitudinal and cultural, but that passes too lightly over both the goodwill and educational idealism of many teacher education academics, and the power of the structures, incentives and sanctions within which they work. Many teacher educators were teachers before they moved into academe, but are now physically and mentally far removed from their former world. Research, not teaching, is what defines success or failure, and the most rewarded research hardly equips academics for the kind of role the review proposes for them.

Second is the money problem. Staff deployment and cultural change of the kind required by the proposed relationship between schools and universities is expensive, as the MGSE found when it set up the MTeach. The MGSE estimates that a “clinically based” program costs around $5000 per student per year over and above the cost of a standard campus-based program. Without examining ways of reallocating resources, it appears, the review has concluded that someone will have to pay.

Christopher Pyne has made clear that it won’t be him. “Australian government funding provided to universities for the training of teachers includes the delivery of practical experience,” the government’s response says. “As this is a shared cost between universities and schools, it is important for universities to work collaboratively with school systems and schools to make sure this funding is used to support effective practical experience programs.” It is hard to see either the universities or Pyne’s state counterparts agreeing that the money can be conjured up by “collaboration.”

Presumably one option would be to convert teaching/research positions to teaching-only postings in schools or school liaison. Another is suggested by a quick look at the website of Coursera, the Stanford-based MOOC provider. It has just released “Foundations of Teaching and Learning,” a series of twelve courses concluding with a “capstone project” covering “the professional roles and responsibilities of a teacher… how to become more effective, what research tells us about how students think and behave… how we can apply this understanding in your approach to teaching, and how to design instruction, activities and assessments around learning goals, and defining teacher and student success.” All that is free, and available to anyone anywhere in the world who has a computer and broadband. Certification is an optional extra – a total of US$281 for the twelve modules plus the capstone project.

MOOCs are not The Answer, but they do suggest where part of an answer could be found. Rather than have the same course developed dozens of times over, why not offer three or four online versions of it from which providers (and students) could choose, and choose whether to offer it hands-free or as part of a blended learning program? Possibilities of this kind are not entertained by the advisory group. It views technology as a supplement to the usual business rather than a substitute for some of it.

Nor does the report alert its readers to particularly promising alternatives to the MTeach model. It does make passing reference to “employment-based programs,” but doesn’t examine radical alternatives developed in Britain and the United States. In Britain, groups of schools have combined to offer apparently very successful workplace-based teacher preparation. A recent report from the UK Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills found that of twenty-one teacher education programs reviewed within a toughened-up framework, only five were “outstanding for the overall effectiveness of training and outcomes for trainees.” All five were “small employment-based partnerships with schools centrally involved.” None were university-based.

In the United States an even more radical departure, Teach for America, or TFA, takes bright young graduates from just about any field of study through an intensive up-front induction program then places them in disadvantaged schools where they take on closely supervised teaching responsibilities from day one. By combining work and further study TFA “associates” can earn a graduate teaching qualification. A Teach for Australia program was established in 2010, and has an impressive brag sheet, including strong feedback from principals, 100 per cent of associates placed in disadvantaged schools, 40 per cent of them in non-metro areas and the same proportion maths and science specialists, a 50:50 gender split, very high demand for entry (only 6 per cent of applications accepted), and an impressive average ATAR of 95. An evaluation by the Australian Council for Educational Research found that costs were high but effectiveness might be as well. “The perception schools have of Associates is very positive,” it concluded, “and, thus far [2013] every school that has participated in the program would like to continue that association.”

Within Teach for Australia is concealed the really big question: if the standards developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership are as good as the review advisory group says they are (and they do seem to be), then why have courses of fixed length? The advisory group endorses both muscular standards and the requirement that the great majority of teacher education students must complete four years or more of study in an approved higher education course.

If people come into teacher education with very different kinds and amounts of experience and knowledge (and they do), and if they learn at very different rates (as is particularly the case in learning to teach), and if you are confident that careful assessments made against well-designed standards will be able to tell when they’ve got it – then why make them start at the same point, proceed at the same rate, and keep going for the same period? Why, for that matter, insist that they do so via that nineteenth-century creature, “the course”?

The question could be asked of any higher education program – engineering, philosophy, food science, medicine, whatever – but it is a particularly awkward one for teacher education. An unusually high proportion of the knowledge required by teaching – not the whole, by any means, but a relatively large fraction – is in the form of embodied capacities, easily recognised, hard to define, deployed in a rapid, reflex, intuitive way, and to do with complicated elements of personality, bearing, ways of interacting with others, emotional capabilities and needs. For that reason, some people get it very quickly while others never do, no matter how hard they try or how much help they are given.

All this suggests that the process of becoming a teacher can be organised and conducted in ways very different from the familiar. Just how it could and should be done is a question for professional judgement, personal preference and logistics. The overall framework should be, in my view, of the kind captured in the old idea of an “apprenticeship” or the newer notion of “career and training paths.” That is, programs, standards and assessments linked to different kinds and levels of responsibility in the school, from roustabout to tutoring to teaching assistant to beginning teacher to managing teacher.

Gains in educational quality might come with other benefits. Prospective entrants to the profession might see whether schools really are for them before wasting too much of their own and other people’s time. They could earn at least a modest living right from the start. That in turn could do a lot more for the “quality” of entrants than the kind of fiddling with selection processes proposed by the advisory group. Workplace-based programs could do much for the intellectual, professional and educational life of schools. If universities can be given the right incentives to participate, workplace-based programs could also see more research of the R&D kind and less of the currently dominant scientistic scholasticism.

The universities may well feel themselves to be the Advisory Group’s (and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership’s) whipping boys, and with some justice. Yet despite a long history of doing a very ordinary job and of sustained resistance to reform, the universities as a category have emerged with their budgets, research practices, staff deployments and control of qualifications – in short, their power – largely intact, and with their rivals, actual and potential, sidelined. No doubt that outcome owes something to the direct exercise of that power (chair of the advisory group and half of its membership) and to the control of what is talked about in what terms. In this case the universities are indebted to the particular world view that gave the report its focus, clarity and cogency.

Just about every element of the review’s analysis and recommendations depends on the “effectiveness” paradigm. That is where it got the idea that “student outcomes” should be the focus of teaching and therefore of teacher education; that the outcomes that really matter are cognitive, in the basics; that “teaching” comes from the teacher in the form of lessons conducted in the familiar setting of the class and the classroom; that the measure of the “quality” of that teaching is to be found in assessed “student performance”; and that teacher education providers can not only lift the “quality” of teaching but also generate “evidence” that will accurately represent the quality of their own work.

The effectiveness paradigm has been a powerful force for the good in schooling. It developed as a response to the let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom era of the 1960s and 1970s when anything “innovative” was by definition better than something that wasn’t. Effectiveness researchers asked the hard question: which of dozens of approaches and innovations actually works? And it insisted that by “work” we should mean that it does what schools are there to do, which is to help kids learn the fundamentals and to use that learning to learn other things. Against a cacophony of educanto, the effectiveness movement demanded evidence, and focused on the main game.

All this is crucial, and should not be lost. But the effectiveness idea also has some big limitations. One is the notion that the problem and the solution both lie in the skills of the teacher, to the relative neglect of the organisation of the teaching and learning process. Another is the over-emphasis on some kinds and areas of learning, and the lack of interest in the social and emotional welfare of students and teachers. But those are issues for another day. More directly relevant here are two further shortcomings.

First, educational work, like any other, has costs as well as effects. About costs the effectiveness paradigm has nothing to say, and it is therefore a stranger to that most subversive of concepts, opportunity cost. Teacher education in Australia consumes hundreds of millions of dollars a year ($600 million a year from the main funder, the Commonwealth). The advisory group has tried to wring more out of the inherited pattern of spending (then asked for more) rather than ask whether those dollars could be spent in other and better ways.

Second, the underlying question of “what works” is actually “what has worked in the past” to the exclusion of what is emerging and becoming possible. The assumption is that the future of both schools and teacher education will be in all essential features continuous with the past. In this way, in a time of rapid technology-enabled change the effectiveness paradigm becomes, without necessarily intending to, a defence of arrangements and institutions with a poor track record in both performance and reform. Prospective thinking and experimentation should not, of course, displace the lessons hard won by the effectiveness paradigm. Or vice versa. •

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Both Yong Zhao and Ravitch address an American audience, but for reasons indigenous and imperial what they have to say is as instructive here as it is in the United States, although not necessarily in ways intended.

While most of Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? is devoted to describing and explaining China’s schooling and Western perceptions of it, the bullseye in Zhao’s target is the OECD’s hugely influential PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and its tests of reading, maths and science. It is PISA that put Shanghai’s school system at the very top of the top international league table; it is PISA that relegated the United States to the middle of the ruck; and it is PISA that supplied the Gillard government with its loftiest ambition for our schools (“top 5 by ’25”!).

In Zhao’s view, the OECD’s league tables and the tests on which they rest are dangerous nonsense that has suckered credulous Western audiences into thinking that PISA reflects the realities of China’s schools (and ours), and persuaded them that the Chinese way is the way of the educational future. He argues that pseudo-science has disguised and excused a Chinese chamber of educational horrors – a system of deadening conformity, of rote learning and routine, of competition carried to the point of cruelty, and riddled with cheating, bribery and fraud. In Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, it has had the perverse effect of promoting a destructive “reform” agenda involving narrow measures of a narrow curriculum in the misanthropic causes of accountability, “performance,” and competition between schools and school systems.

Zhao is well placed to make the case, and some of the case is very well made. Born and schooled in China, he went to the United States as a graduate student in the early 1990s, and flourished. He is a prolific writer, software designer, and commentator in America and elsewhere, including Australia.

Zhao is correct to argue that PISA and its findings are abused by their sponsor, among many others. PISA is often taken as a proxy measure of “quality” – indeed of the quality of an entire school system. Hence, for example, the Grattan Institute’s 2012 report, Catching Up, and its portentous opening sentence: “Today’s centre of high performance in school education is East Asia.”

As Zhao points out, PISA reports on just three areas of the curriculum (plus, in the most recent round, “problem-solving”), and on only some aspects of those three areas. It concentrates heavily on “cognitive” to the exclusion of “non-cognitive” learning (collaboration, listening, communication, time-management, impulse control and so on). There is clear evidence to support Zhao’s contention that, in the United States at least, standardised testing is both narrow and narrowing.

Zhao raises some very awkward questions about the OECD’s assumption that one test can assess the same thing in the same way across very different cultures in dozens of national school systems. And he is right to attack the OECD’s use of league tables that make the implicit claim that #1 is “better” than #2 even if #2 is just microns away from #1 according to an instrument that would be lucky to measure in metres.

But Zhao’s debunking needs some debunking too. He (rightly) attacks the OECD and others for conflating “test results” with “quality,” but proceeds to do some conflating of his own. He routinely refers to “China’s schools” and “Chinese students” when PISA and the OECD focus on Shanghai, a city containing around 2 per cent of China’s population, and product of a distinctive history of commerce and contact with the West.

Zhao dismisses PISA’s results as meaningless, but doesn’t mention that they are broadly consistent with the findings of other international and national testing regimes, nor notice that his explanation of Chinese students’ success tacitly accepts the legitimacy of PISA’s results. He attributes that success to endless drill and coaching, competition, and the authoritarian culture of China’s classrooms, schools and systems, but doesn’t mention a significant body of research which suggests that at least some Chinese maths teachers (for example) take an approach that, in some key respects, is more “progressive” than their Western counterparts.

Nor is there discussion of arguments that high levels of student performance are associated with an organisation of teachers’ work and professional development superior to those found in the United States (and in Australia). And the most interesting phenomenon of all, the extraordinary rates of improvement in East Asian performance in PISA and other international comparisons, likewise goes unremarked.

While Zhao points out that PISA addresses only three of seven or eight key areas of the curriculum, he doesn’t acknowledge that those three areas – reading, maths and science – provide the tools of learning in other areas. He draws on the work of eminent US scholar Henry M. Levin to suggest that the “non-cognitive” skills ignored by PISA are increasingly valued and valuable in the workplace. But Zhao – who wants to get rid of standardised testing altogether – doesn’t report Levin’s recommendation that PISA-style tests be retained, complemented by tests of non-cognitive learning.

The problem underlying all these problems is a cast of mind that presumably owes something to the trajectory of Zhao’s life. His readers are asked to choose between “authoritarianism” and creativity, cognitive and non-cognitive learning, employee- or entrepreneur-focused schooling, standards and tests or none at all. The book sometimes reads as a settling of scores with Zhao’s own schooling (and who wouldn’t want to do that with such verve and venom!), and a romanticising of the circumstances of his own emancipation. He argues that American schooling has made “a Faustian bargain” with “the devil of authoritarianism.” The “tragedy” is in the “loss of values traditionally celebrated by American education” in favour of “one of the perfect incarnations of authoritarian education.”

Of these and other problems in Zhao’s case, Diane Ravitch’s NYRB readers will learn nothing at all. Indeed, Zhao’s dichotomies are replicated and amplified.

Ravitch’s review falls into two halves, the first recording The Fall, the second announcing hope of Salvation. In the early 1980s (Ravitch contends) forces outside and hostile to public schooling inflicted an agenda of accountability, competition for “performance” within a narrow curriculum, centralised standards and, above all, high-stakes testing. Despite ever-increasing evidence of its failure, that agenda has been adopted and pursued by administrations up to and including Obama’s. “At this juncture,” Ravitch announces, “comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation’s governors and legislators need to read.” This fanfare is followed by an extended and wholly uncritical précis of the book, concluding with the declaration that Zhao’s vision of schools “where the highest value is creativity” will remain out of reach “until we break free of standardised testing.”

This Manichaean approach to history, common in American political discourse, seems to be finding its way to Australia. The national president of the Australian College of Educators, Professor Stephen Dinham, has borrowed heavily from Ravitch to argue that “a plethora of vested interests has moved into the education space for ideological, political and financial reasons.” In the process, Dinham argues, “educational research and other evidence has been distorted, discounted or disregarded in favour of deregulation, privatisation, corporatisation and quick-fix solutions to the supposed problems of teaching and the ‘crisis’ in schooling. Educators have been either silent or silenced in debates and discussions about education.”

This way of understanding what is going on in and around schools leads to a whole series of problems in both analysis and policy. It turns the clash of ideas, values and interests into tribal warfare. It reduces a formidable mind like Ravitch’s to playing the crudest form of politics – an enemy of my enemies is a friend of mine. Fixing its gaze on the adversary, it is blind to itself. “Outsiders” have vested ideological, political and financial interests. Insiders, by implication, have only disinterested expertise in the service of the purest of motives. The deformities of public schooling, even in its heyday, are forgotten. Remember Karmel’s 1973 strictures on the rigid centralisation of the government systems, the widespread “antipathy towards and apathy about direct community participation,” and the persistent failure to match resources to need? The fact that deformities of this kind gave the “outsiders” their entrée is likewise ignored.

The agenda attacked by Professors Zhao, Ravitch and Dinham certainly needs and deserves attack. But it now has deep roots in schooling in both the United States and Australia. The clock can’t be turned back. Choice, tests, standards and data-based “accountability” will be here in some form or another into the indefinite future. Nor are they wholly misguided in all forms and circumstances. The problem is not to find satisfying pejoratives for them but to constrain them, and to turn them to better purposes.

What is to be preferred, imperfect test results or perfect ignorance? Where would Gonski have got to without systematic, comprehensive evidence as to differences in the educational attainments of the most and least successful students? Where would teachers be without some basis for judgements about how their students are doing, compared not just with each other, but with students in other schools?

Might it be that the best way to combat the narrowing impact of standardised testing is to attack the misuse of test results rather than testing as such, and to measure and count learning in other subjects and (as Levin suggests) in “non-cognitive” skills? To construct indicators of other things that really matter in schooling, including how students and teachers are treated by and feel about their schools?

Ravitch sees standards as hurdles that many students will fail to jump. But they can also be way-points that help every student understand where he or she is up to and where to go next. “Choice” can be very destructive, as Australian schooling has demonstrated more conclusively than perhaps any other system in the industrialised world. But so can uniformity, and rules made by distant bureaucrats in ignorance of particular needs and circumstances.

Do Chinese maths teachers perhaps have something to offer their Western colleagues? Could it be true to say (as Grattan’s Catching Up report says) that Shanghai and other East Asian systems “focus on things that are known to matter in the classroom, including a relentless, practical focus on learning and the creation of a strong culture of teacher education, research, collaboration, mentoring and feedback and sustained professional development”? And can we learn from these systems how to drive sustained improvement, even if it is improvement in only one kind of learning? If we took Zhao’s advice, seconded by Ravitch, we would never find out.

Defence and opposition are part and parcel of any brand of politics, and particularly the politics of an embattled left. But a hard lesson of the past several decades (and I write with feeling) is that when undisciplined by proposition, by the tough question of what is to be done, defence and opposition can become ends in themselves. In their pursuit, a nominally progressive politics finds itself with less and less to defend, more and more to oppose. •

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This orthodoxy derives from the “effectiveness” paradigm and its epic quest to pin down “what works,” a quest which, by John Hattie’s celebrated estimate, has launched more than 50,000 separate studies and 800 meta-studies. This research and the agenda that sprang from it take as their focus student attainment, particularly in the foundational subjects and in the formative years. The key instrument of reform is the teacher. “Teaching quality,” which research finds as making more difference to outcomes than any other “school variable,” is to be lifted by better selection, training and rewards and through the collaborative, workplace-based development of the existing workforce. The method is whole-school improvement led by the principal, whose task it is to build a consensus in the school’s leadership group about educational priorities and directions, get buy-in from staff and parents, and then lead the step-by-step construction of a consistent, school-wide approach to teaching and learning.

There are differences in emphasis in this formulation, of course, and disagreements over such matters as the balance between “outcomes” in “the basics” and the rest of the curriculum, or about the uses and abuses of standardised testing. The paradigm has been refined over the ten or fifteen years since it first crystallised, particularly in its understanding of learning as cumulative growth that proceeds in different ways and speeds. “Personalisation” or “individualisation” of the curriculum has moved to the centre of the agenda. But differences, disagreements and refinements notwithstanding, the broad direction is set. For the first time schooling has a coherent, evidence-based theory of educational improvement that empowers the teaching profession and endorses its claim to be the very heart of the schooling enterprise. It can be shown to deliver at the level of the school, of groups of schools, and even of entire school systems.

Against this formidable orthodoxy, the Rocketship of Richard Whitmire’s title advances a series of counter-propositions. Where the orthodoxy assumes a workforce dominated by the single category of “the teacher,” trained and credentialled by mainstream university-based courses to work within the isolated microcosm of the classroom, many Rocketship teachers are products of intensive TFA (Teach for America) programs, and operate as members of multi-level, multi-skilled, closely managed teams, often teaching students grouped according to need rather than in standard batches of twenty or so. Rocketship changes the organisation of teaching and learning as well as the practice of teaching, and with that what has long been the fundamental building block of schooling, the class and the classroom.

The orthodoxy’s lodestar is effectiveness, a concept shaped and articulated within the mental universe of education. Rocketship is influenced by business methods and the discipline of economics that underlies them, and appeals to cost-effectiveness and productivity. Where the orthodoxy relies on organic, evolutionary change in each school, Rocketship’s schools are designed from the ground up. To the orthodoxy’s cultural change, Rocketship adds structural engineering.

Technology, peripheral in the orthodoxy, is central to the Rocketship model. It suggests that schooling’s future will not be continuous with its past, that schooling has now arrived at a point reached by one industry after another ever since the industrial revolution got under way late in the eighteenth century, the point at which machines begin to displace some labour and demand the reorganisation of the rest. Rocketship implies that “what works” is actually what has worked in the past, not what will work in the future.

Rocketship is a chain of quasi-independent “charter” schools. It opened its first school in California’s Silicon Valley only seven years ago, to almost instant prominence and controversy. It quickly became a lightning rod for intersecting conflicts over the charters versus the established public school systems, over competition versus regulation, over technology and the future of the teaching profession, and over the proper nature and purposes of schooling. Hence Whitmire’s book.

Rocketship departs from the orthodoxy, but not before learning from it. As the orthodoxy would urge, Rocketship has an almost missionary zeal to “close the gap” between the educational attainments of the children of the poor and the affluent. Rocketship’s first schools were not for Silicon Valley’s Porsche-driving geeks, venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs but for the Latinos who cook and clean for, deliver to, and wait on the Valley’s elect. As it expands eastwards, Rocketship is targeting other disadvantaged groups including African Americans.

Again as the orthodoxy would want, Rocketship’s educational focus is on student attainment, in the foundational areas of language arts, maths, science, and social studies, in the early years (K–5). Teaching is student-centred in a way that makes most such talk seem merely rhetorical. Rocketship teachers know where each student is up to in each key area of learning, and deploy student grouping, adaptive software and supplementary tutoring accordingly.

Much of the Rocketship recipe comes directly from the “teacher quality” agenda. It pays its teachers up to 30 per cent above standard rates. It pours the effort into school-based teacher induction and development. As well, it is heavily committed to parent and “community” involvement, including annual teacher visits to every home.

Then come the differences. Most obviously, Rocketship embraces technology in a way rare in schooling but common in business. It has little interest in technology as “enrichment,” or as “preparation for the twenty-first-century workplace,” or because “we’re living in the digital age” or because the kids like it. Its productivity-focused approach rests on a truth often missed or fudged in a growing research literature which finds that technology “doesn’t work”: technology can, among many other things, substitute for some of the labour of teaching, if you use the right software in the right way.

Rocketship was an early adopter of “blended” learning, which combines technology-delivered with conventional instruction. It was a very early adopter of “adaptive software,” designed around the growing understanding of the intimate relationship between student, task, assessment and feedback, and qualitatively different from the old lockstep textbook-on-a-screen instructional programs.

Blended learning both makes possible and requires the reorganisation of the teaching and learning process, of space and of staffing mix. The last of these is the most incendiary. Rocketship schools employ fewer teachers than the mainstream, sixteen for an elementary (primary) school of average size against the typical twenty-plus, and relatively more support and paraprofessional staff. It makes “time-technology swaps,” as the euphemism has it.

Rocketship’s use of software reflects its origins as the brainchild of John Danner, a cashed-up Silicon Valley entrepreneur. It also reflects a businessman’s habitual search for greater productivity rather than merely improved effectiveness, although it would be a mistake to see Danner as just another in the growing band of American business types (with Bill Gates as the alpha male) who want to use their money and methods to “fix” schooling.

Danner spent three years teaching in a hard-yards public school after he’d made his millions, and more years helping set up the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter network and then designing his own. At which point he did what startup entrepreneurs do. He sat down with his spreadsheets to develop “the proposition.” What configuration of effort, what kind of educational workplaces, would generate most learning from the resources available?

Not, Danner decided, the old low-tech, one-teacher-one-classroom model, as taken for granted by most educators (and by most effectiveness research). But what? Eventually Danner opted for a mix of adaptive software (the long search for which provides Whitmire with one of the most entertaining of his many anecdotes); fewer but better-paid teachers; a student working day divided between learning lab and classroom; better coordination of teaching effort; and shifting resources from buildings and land to equipment and staff and staff development. All that, Danner decided, would generate more learning from the by-no-means-generous funding available to charters than any alternative configuration.

Does it?

Whitmire reports with obvious relish the results that shot Rocketship to instant fame. Its first school opened with scores on statewide tests around the 900 mark on 200–1000 scale. That is a very high number by any standards, let alone for a brand-new school starting with a full complement of kids, 85 per cent of whom qualified for free lunches and 68 per cent of whom came from families in which English was a second language. When Rocketship opened another school in the same area it began with an enrolment of 426, scored 872, filled its quota of 640 students, and soon had a waiting list of 400.

By way of emphasis Whitmire records the performance of two district schools operating in the same area and serving much the same clientele. One scored 654, below the “basic” 700 level, with only 23 per cent of students proficient in reading and 40 per cent in maths, while the other managed only 16 per cent proficient in reading and 30 per cent in maths.

These are numbers and examples that show Rocketship to advantage, of course. There are claims that Rocketship’s scores overall have declined steadily since inception, but even if that is the case it leaves open the question of how Rocketship’s scores compare with those of other schools with a similar clientele, not to mention the question of how the productivity equation pans out.

Rocketship’s apparently remarkable performance, Whitmire argues, was accomplished on rations. Rocketship builds its schools at $180 per square foot, around half the cost of district schools. While the 654-point mainstream school referred to above “floats in a luxurious island of land, fifty-seven thousand square feet of buildings on 6.4 acres,” its Rocketship competitor “clings to an acre lot with only twenty-two thousand square feet under roof.” The former had twenty-nine teachers (and a counsellor), the latter just sixteen teachers.

By the standards set for them and just about every other American school, Rocketship schools do seem to produce more from less. Whether it is the right “more,” and whether it is achieved at a greater cost to a broad and broadening educational experience, neither Whitmire nor the evidence seem able to say.

So many charter schools have failed at least as badly as mainstream public schools that apparent success poses a problem of explanation. Some of Rocketship’s critics argue that its apparent gains are “selection effects.” Rocketship’s students come from families actively seeking high achievement in “the basics,” the critics argue, while established public schools are left with the rest and with a broader educational remit.

Other and related “effects” may apply. For example, Rocketship’s students have so far come predominantly from immigrant families and are beneficiaries of their parents’ desire to find a better life. Rocketship teachers are young, many of them highly motivated TFA graduates working in newly established schools, perfect conditions for the “observer effect” to do its work. Teachers work long hours, and spend an average of less than three years teaching, although that is consistent with the TFA idea, and some of those who leave teaching stay with Rocketship in management and leadership positions. Whether Rocketship can sustain its “sense of urgency” (as Danner’s co-founder puts it) remains to be seen. Its cost structure is likely to change for the worse if expansion creates the need to pay more to retain longer-serving teachers.

On the other hand, Rocketship has proved to be remarkably willing to learn and to change. Danner’s “rotational” blended model is being phased out in favour of a “flex” system, which combines the two kinds of space into a single large area, making it easier for teachers to put the right students in the right groups for the right support at the right time. Whitmire argues that even more fundamental to Rocketship’s success than blended learning is its deep commitment to productivity and an acceptance of its organisational imperatives. Rocketship really, really understands that any failure to wring the maximum educational value from every dollar is not money wasted, but learning lost.

Just how good Rocketship is, and just how much of that is owed to its particular way of assembling the many atoms that make up the complicated molecule of schooling, is yet to be determined. But in the meantime we must take seriously the likelihood that it is Rocketship and not the orthodoxy that has glimpsed the future of schooling.

This is not to suggest that Rocketship is a template for the “next” model of schooling. It is not. Its rethinking starts from teaching rather than from learning. It implicitly sees students as the objects and recipients of instruction rather than as producers of learning. There is clearly much further to go, particularly in the redesign of the student labour process as “adaptive” software gives way to fully interactive programs, and in exploiting students’ capacity not just to “learn to learn” but to learn to help each other learn. Rocketship is a Model T, at best. But it is definitely not a horse and buggy.

Rocketship’s first heresy concerns models of schooling; its second, the process of reform.

The charter movement, of which Rocketship is a prominent part, asserts that established school systems can’t do “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” change. The orthodoxy is a recipe in search of a cook. In the usual metaphor, the old systems lack “drivers” powerful enough to override the tangle of institutionalised interests attached to massively expanded school systems. Hobbled by “legacy orgware” developed over centuries of evolution – infrastructure dominated by the classroom box, a tenured workforce dominated by a single category of worker, locked-in budgets dependent on increments to sponsor any reform, and habits of mind shared by everyone from researchers to parents, teachers to students – the old systems are cumbersome, immobilised, disempowered.

In this view, only the hot breath of competition from schools formed outside the legacy orgware will get real reform under way. Reform will be driven into the systems, not by them. Rocketship has its own way of emphasising the point. Unlike some charters, its schools are greenfield sites, in both literal and metaphorical senses of the term. Think Aldi. Rocketship buys land, builds buildings, recruits staff, enlists parents and then, like a vehicle at the end of the production line, another Rocketship school lifts off. Each new school is a replica of the last and an incubator for the next, developing the nucleus of its leadership and staff.

If one side of the Rocketship model of change is expansion through replication, the other is competition. Like most charters, Rocketship “takes” students (as many would have it) from long-established mainstream public schools. But of course students can’t be “taken” unless parents choose to go. Here is the big driver (the charters claim) that the established systems lack: parent power, enabled by competition, legitimated by choice.

All this is straight from the neolib playbook, of course, but it would be both incorrect and foolish to explain the charter phenomenon in those terms alone. Insofar as standardised testing reveals what is going on, American schooling is in much more trouble than Australia’s, in both overall “performance” and its social distribution. At fifteen times the size of the Australian system, and with control divided between three levels of government rather than Australia’s two, it is even more unwieldy. What the charters tap into is a sense shared by many parents that they are being dudded by “the system,” a conclusion amply supported by a mass of research evidence.

The Australian situation differs in degree rather than kind. The preconditions for a charter insurgency are present in Australia: a deep and deepening failure of schools to educate the poor; increasing anxiety within systems and frustration without at ever-increasing funding and flat-lining performance indicators; the apparent inability of the big government systems – with the possible and contingent exception of the NSW system under its remarkable minister Adrian Piccoli – to mobilise; little to show for the almost frantic efforts of the Rudd and Gillard governments at the national level; the fragmentation of the old command economies, most recently in Western Australia’s “independent” government schools policies; and of course acceptance in Australia of “choice” of school as something close to a basic human right wrapped up in an irrefutable economic truth. The charters have expanded across the United States and into England and Sweden. If, as seems at least possible, they turn up in Australia, is that a bad thing?

It depends, first, on what kind of charters. Some operators specialise in “restarts,” taking over failing schools or even whole school districts. Most, however, depend on “choice.” It must be acknowledged that the “choice” offered by the US charters is not the same as “choice” in Australia, and is in several respects less toxic. There is no equivalent of Australia’s free-versus-fee, secular-versus-religious choice. Rocketship, like most charters, is a not-for-profit organisation and its schools are part of the secular public system. Choice is exercised not by those with advantages of location and/or income, but by those who typically lack both. In the not-uncommon circumstance of over-subscription, the choice is made by lottery.

Most fundamentally, the choice is not between educational flavours, often reflective of socioeducational pecking orders, but between different educational models and different levels of educational performance. This is, in Whitmire’s view, what makes Rocketship and some other charters so important. Choice, in and of itself, as in voucher schemes (or in Australia, we might add), is worse than useless. The key thing, Whitmire argues, is what’s available to choose from.

On the other side of the ledger, however, charters by their nature threaten the viability of incumbent public schools. Some schools (including some new charter schools) die. That kind of take-no-prisoners attitude, fed into schooling from the world of business, has spread through the US system up to and including campaigns for elections to school boards and other regulatory authorities. The ensuing arguments about the educational merits of the two kinds of school tangle with debates over the ethics and consequences of competition, as well as industrial and ideological conflicts between the mostly unionised districts and the mostly non-union charters. The charter wars, which form the second of Whitmire’s two big themes, are in content, alignments and temperature not unlike the chronic Australian conflict between government and non-government schools.

Nor is it at all clear that the charters are working, or ever will, at a system level anyway. More than twenty years after the first charter schools opened in Minnesota there are almost as many students in home schooling (3 per cent of the US total) as in charters (around 4 per cent). While “top charter schools” are indeed “pushing the envelope,” as Whitmire’s title has it, many are doing no better than the mainstream schools, and doing it in much the same way. Some are even worse.

Is there an alternative to the Gullivers, on the one hand, and competition red in tooth and claw on the other? Rather than pressing on with yet more cumulative incrementalism, or trying to blast away at schooling from the outside, is there a third way? There is, but it must be admitted that it is easier to imagine than to expect. A third approach would go right to the regulatory core of the legacy orgware: the relationship between employees and employers in the heavily institutionalised form of “industrial relations.”

Industrial relations as we now know it came into being in the 1950s and 1960s, when the pressure of soaring enrolments and retention rates transformed genteel “professional associations” into blue-collar unions, and transferred control of terms and conditions from employers to a semi-judicial arena of contest. There was no other option at the time, and big gains were registered in working conditions (elimination of impossibly sized classes particularly) and in terms of employment (especially for women).

These gains came at a cost, however, and not just to the public purse. Relations between employers and employees became adversarial. Oppositionism entrenched itself in the culture of the profession and in the identity of some teachers as well as in the behaviour of some governments. Cyclical, almost ritualised bargaining became the ratchet of “conditions” and costs. Consideration of the “externalities” of teachers’ work (pay, hours, workplace rights) was separated from its educational purposes and content. Negotiations depended upon, and agreements were struck in terms of, a way of organising educational work taken for granted in the 1960s (one teacher, one class, one lesson and so on), increasingly found to be problematic, and now on the verge of obsolescence. The status and material rewards of teaching are much as they were fifty years ago. Over the course of half a century industrial relations passed from solution to problem, becoming a central component and basic guarantor of the legacy orgware, counterproductive from systemic, professional, industrial and educational points of view.

What may be worth considering is whether the missing “driver” of “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” reform can be found in a shift in relations between employers and employees as substantial as what occurred in the 1950s and 1960s: from adversarial to collaborative; from an exclusive focus on the terms and conditions of employment to include the nature and organisation of educational work and the composition of the educational workforce; and from cyclical tactics to long-term strategy.

A rethink on that scale might not amount to a Pauline conversion but it is a big ask nonetheless. Alternatives of the Rocketship kind, and modes of thought often rejected or even reviled by educationists would need to be inspected, not to find fault but to see what can be learned. Both parties would need to acknowledge that, in the circumstances now emerging, their joint and several interests are best served by pursuing a strategy that makes sense on budgetary, professional, industrial and, above all, educational fronts. They would need to collaborate to map out a long march through the legacy orgware, from what has worked to what will work. Whitmire’s book provides food for thought for those willing to entertain such heresies, and a warning for those who are not. •

Thanks to three moving spirits of school reform, Graham Marshall, Chris Wardlaw and Vic Zbar. The views expressed are, of course, my own responsibility.

Comments

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Tom Greenwell writes:

Thanks for another stimulating article Dean. The call for a collaborative focus on optimising and, where necessary re-imagining, the organisation of educational work and workers is thought-provoking.

It also provokes a range of questions which you don’t appear to address, or even acknowledge.

Is it really accurate to characterise technology as ‘peripheral’ in the ‘orthodoxy’?

Aren’t blended learning environments common, if not ubiquitous?

Are challenges to ‘the old low-tech, one-teacher-one-classroom model’ happening in any places beyond US charter schools, including Australian public schools (the ones you imply are constrained by industrial arrangements)?

Are Enterprise Agreements between State and Territory Governments and their teaching workforces really negotiated without reference to ‘the nature and organisation of educational work and the composition of the educational workforce’ or education’s purpose and content?

Is it accurate to characterise relations between education employers and employee groups as exclusively adversarial, driven by entrenched ‘teacher oppositionism’? Aren’t they ever collaborative in nature?

Is it useful to assume, with David Gillespie, that education unions must either be in the ‘genteel professional association’ category or the ‘militant blue-collar trade union’ (ie. they take industrial action) category? Conversely, is it possible education unions tend to evince qualities from both these categories?

If a radical re-organisation of educational work is desirable, isn’t it crucial that the workers concerned play a decisive role in that process, both because they have unique professional and organisational knowledge and because they’re the people who will implement it? If yes, won’t such a decisive role only be enabled by something like the current industrial practices you so readily dismiss?

Dean Ashenden writes:

And thanks for another stimulating comment, Tom! To begin with your concluding question: having ‘the workers concerned play a decisive role’ in a ‘re-organisation of educational work’ is exactly what I suggested, exactly. (In fact, you seem to acknowledge the point in your opening remarks re my ‘call for a collaborative focus’?) Perhaps where we part company is in my further suggestion that if this is to happen, a form of relationship between education workers and employers constituted in the 1950s and 1960s would have to change, substantially?

On your other questions: I do think that industrial agreements as currently struck entrench a form of educational work which many of those involved, wearing their educationists’ hats, would question. Those agreements do frustrate efforts to really figure out what the new technologies bring to the party. They are particularly restrictive with regard to both ‘time-technology swaps’ and the re-allocation and re-organisation of the work of teaching. ‘Blended learning’ generally operates within the received allocation of resources and organisation of time, space, and labour. That is accepted (in my view) by even such tech-savvy proponents of the orthodox agenda as Michael Fullan.

There are schools, as you suggest, which get around the rules, perhaps particularly in Victoria, which has the least restrictive of the government-system agreements. But this is typically in result of outstanding leadership. The exceptional schools are person- and/or circumstance-dependent. In at least some cases tacit ‘permission to proceed’ is given on condition that a low profile is maintained. My suggestion is that the exceptional and contingent nature of these schools is a function of ‘legacy orgware’ which is much more extensive than the industrial relations system and agreements, but in which they play a crucial role. And, to repeat, my suggestion is that IR just might play a key role in transforming itself and the legacy orgware, rather than conserving it. For teacher organisations to lead or collaborate in such a process would represent, in my view, an act of enlightened self-interest.

Again, thanks for taking issue, and for going so directly to the nub of the matter.

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A report from this minister, in this government, that tries to accommodate a range of views? That endorses Labor’s idea of a single national curriculum? Perhaps it is just that the critics were so fixed on Pyne’s sheer gall in appointing Donnelly that they failed to notice that he also appointed a minder, that wily operator of the machinery of influence, Professor Kenneth Wiltshire? Or perhaps Pyne has at last grasped the difference between opposition and government, and decided to box smart? On this interpretation, Donnelly and Wiltshire are sappers, preparing bridgework for a long assault on that bastion of the “cultural left,” the school system. The most satisfying construction is that Pyne’s antics on Gonski plus a mounting electoral backlash against his higher education “reforms” caused the PM’s office to put Pyne on notice and his reviewers on a very short lead.

Whatever the explanation, the final report of the Review of the Australian Curriculum is certainly not as bad as many expected, and is in some respects useful.

The reviewers were asked to examine the curriculum’s “robustness, independence and balance,” with the apparent implication that it was unbalanced, soft, and a creature of special interests. Its three “cross-curriculum priorities” – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability – seemed especially vulnerable to attack from this angle. Few observers would have been surprised to see it replaced by the Coalition’s preferred trinity, Judeo-Christian values, British heritage, and our free-enterprise economic system. That, after all, seemed to be what John Howard himself had urged back in the opposition years.

On these dire expectations the reviewers declined to deliver. They did find the national curriculum to be “monolithic, inflexible and unwieldy,” and pooh-poohed its claims to be “world class,” but they also accepted that it was basically a good idea. They conceded that the curriculum is in fact “robust” in some if not all learning areas; that threats to its “independence” came less from ideology or interest groups than from the demands of states and school systems; and that while more needed to be said about our Judeo-Christian heritage and so forth, the three priorities installed under Labor should be relocated rather than abandoned. The review did propose changes in the Labor-installed ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) but not, as some expected, its abolition.

Many of the review’s other recommendations address non-incendiary matters such as the overloading of the primary years, the need to adapt the curriculum for students with disabilities, and the need for more parent-friendly development processes and documentation.

For several decades from the 1960s debate over schooling in general and curriculum in particular was split along ideological lines on just about every conceivable issue: how to teach reading (phonics versus whole-word), teacher-centred versus student-centred pedagogy, fields of study versus the great disciplines, content versus process, direct instruction versus constructivism, reading the classics versus understanding genres, rigour versus inclusiveness, knowledge versus learning to learn, excellence versus equality, reward for merit versus success for all, and, of course, choice versus the common school.

Polarisation often prevented participants from acknowledging that many of these oppositions are little more than coded rallying cries in the great struggle of us against them. Donnelly, like a number of his ideological companions, is has moved from one side of these false dichotomies to the other, and perhaps in consequence has been a particularly divisive belligerent right up to his appointment by Pyne in January of this year. Until just a few months ago he cast himself as the scourge of the “cultural left,” an entity which never was as monocular, monolithic or influential in reality as in his imagination, and which has not existed at all for the past decade at least. Ironically enough, several of those previously tarred by the “cultural left” brush (and notably the late Jean Blackburn) are relied on by the review.

Thanks particularly to the “teaching effectiveness” movement, the curriculum debate has moved on from grand abstractions to questions of method – questions about how to boost outcomes in the fundamentals of literacy, numeracy and science. The key to boosting “performance,” in this view, is the “quality of teaching,” and better teaching can be achieved through systematic whole-school improvement. The relatively low ideological temperature of the Donnelly–Wiltshire report is an artefact of this consensus. Indeed, Pyne’s “four pillars” (teacher quality, school autonomy, engagement with parents, and stronger curriculum) are an attempt to capture it.

Whether that consensus can succeed even in its own limited terms is another question. The chaotic, riven curriculum debates of decades following the 1960s (rehearsed in the report’s first chapter) can be understood as an effort to come to terms with a problem presented to rather than sought by the teaching profession: what is the purpose of twelve years of schooling, for all? Even harder: how is it to be done?

The reviewers acknowledge these problems. They suggest that the “missing step” in the development of the national curriculum was the failure to construct an “overarching framework,” and that this led to the curriculum’s problems of coherence and bulk. But having made those useful observations, the reviewers join the long list of pundits who have ducked, adding only the suggestion that further work is “urgent.” They also avoid most of the “how” questions, preferring to lean in the general direction of the teacher’s authority while also acknowledging that “all good teachers use a variety of pedagogical approaches.”

Conspicuously absent from this formulation and from the report as a whole is any reference to a central question for the future of teaching and learning (or what some refer to as “curriculum delivery”): what will and should be the role of the digital technologies? The teacher-quality paradigm on which the reviewers tacitly depend is undoubtedly the best option for most schools in the short-to-medium term, but beyond that? Often seen as a new dawn (to borrow Debussy’s aphorism at Wagner’s expense), the focus on the teacher and teaching will prove, in my view, to be more like a glorious sunset.

In the meantime, it is by no means clear that the undoubted potential of the effectiveness approach will be fulfilled. While a blurring of ideological boundaries in talk about curriculum does reduce one obstacle to its implementation, curriculum is only one site of the ideological conflict, and that in turn is only one of the faultlines of Australian schooling. Others include confusion over state and federal government responsibilities; chronic conflict between governments and various schooling agencies and interest groups; and, of course, the sector system and its division between fee and free.

This fractured arrangement of responsibility and authority is what has made the system incapable of lifting its performance in an increasingly international competition, the almost frantic efforts of the Rudd and Gillard governments notwithstanding. The present government has lower ambitions. Will it have more success?

On the mostly positive side of the ledger are suggestions made by the Commission of Audit about a different division of labour between levels of government. On the wholly negative side are the recent solecisms of the Review of Competition Policy. Where the Donnelly–Wiltshire review can be placed is to be determined. As the reviewers themselves note, the fate of their report depends not on their minister but on what he can get past the state and non-government systems. Suggesting, as the reviewers do, that the systems have too much say in ACARA may not be a good start. Every jurisdiction is wary of yet more change, and the NSW minister in particular is hostile to any sign of federal interference. All will want to know what the Abbott government proposes to do about money.

The Donnelly–Wiltshire report opens with the observation that “there is little as controversial in education as determining what it is that young people should be able to know, understand and be able to do following their time at school.” Their review attracted 1600 submissions. Gonski’s funding review received 5700. •

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Schooling makes only a cameo appearance in the review’s interim report. It is relegated to Chapter 10 (on “human services”) along with aged care, health, disability support, employment services and the like. Each of these “services” is examined according to the precepts of competition theory. Is it a natural monopoly? How complex is it, and what is the nature of transactions between consumer and provider? Are there capacity constraints? Or problems in switching from one provider to another? What are the consequences of provider failure? What degree of regulation should or might governments impose?

Schooling, the panel concedes, illustrates some of the problems that may arise when markets are extended into human services. It notes the OECD’s conclusion that school systems with low levels of competition often have high levels of “inclusion,” and, conversely, high-competition systems often have markedly unequal educational outcomes. It cites evidence from Sweden’s excursion into a more competitive system which suggests that it is the advantaged who do the choosing, with “increasing social segregation” as the result.

But, says the panel, inequality is often worse without choice, and choice (in Sweden for example) can stimulate innovation and improve performance. Even if not everyone can choose, does it follow that no one should? And anyway, choice is unavoidable. It’s only a question of who makes it, the consumer or the government.

What could be more even-handed, more reasonable, than that?

In fact the report is entering false claims for both theory and policy. To say so is not to suggest that mainstream economic theory sheds no useful light on schooling – to the contrary, economics has much more to offer than the schooling industry is generally willing to acknowledge.

It is to suggest, however, that the review has been unable and apparently unwilling to see that there are things it can’t see. What can be picked out from a high conceptual altitude is not necessarily what things look like down on the ground. Conspicuously missing from the report’s citations are two recent and substantial studies of how choice and competition actually work in the real world of Australian schooling.

The Grattan Institute’s 2013 study of schooling in the large and broadly representative region of southeast Queensland found (with the help of an economic perspective, by the way) that apparently high levels of competition between schools did little or nothing for educational performance. The 2011 Nous report for the Gonski review concluded (also with help from economics) that, from a social point of view, policies encouraging “choice and diversity” have been a disaster. Behind the realities recorded by these two studies lie many others, including a couple of centuries’ sectarian, sectoral, class and intergovernmental division and conflict. Using competition theory to understand all this is like trying to capture a car crash with a satnav screen dump.

The review’s Olympian gaze is as unhelpful to policy as it is to analysis. Its default position, given by the federal government’s terms of reference and the panel’s acceptance of them, is that the market is the natural order and therefore more competition is prima facie a good thing.

I am no shyer about markets and competition than I am about economics. As co-founder of the Good Universities Guides I was part of an attempt to increase choice and competition in higher education. It is my view that in specific circumstances, such as those obtaining in some localities in the United States, competition between two forms of public schooling (charter and district) appears to be crucial in lifting educational outcomes for those most in need of them – but not, I emphasise, all by itself.

There is no such thing as a one-punch fix for schooling – not more “independence” for public schools, not more accountability, not more testing, not improved “teacher quality,” not more funding, not better leadership programs, and definitely not more competition. It all depends on what competition (or any other nostrum) is combined with, and the circumstances in which that combination is deployed. That is why school reform is such a slow and difficult business.

Consider the constellation of things that would need to be changed in the specific circumstances of Australian schooling for competition to really deliver the educational goods. There would need to be a level playing field, including a Gonski-like needs-based funding floor and a per student expenditure ceiling; a universal no-fee or means-tested fee regime; a focus on competition for performance rather than for students, including regulation or some other way of managing exclusions, cherry-picking, body snatching and dumping; and agreed educational objectives combined with a common set of benchmarks and indicators.

As the Nous report and the small mountain of evidence on which it rests have demonstrated, in the absence of measures such as these the choice and diversity policies initiated in Australia in the 1970s have moved us steadily towards a school system with gated communities at one end of a spectrum and educational ghettos at the other. Unless the competition policy review panel is willing to at least note such realities and the immense difficulty of even getting a decent conversation about them – which would require it to move a long way outside the abstractions of competition theory – support for a more competitive schooling system is merely a free kick for an approach that works for those who don’t need it and against those who do. It would be better if the review’s final report said nothing at all on the subject. •

The post Australian schools: the view from Mars appeared first on Inside Story.

David Gonski is a famously cool customer, but surely even his sangfroid was tested as he rose to speak on Wednesday evening at Melbourne University’s Wilson Hall. This was his first substantial public statement since the release of the eponymous report on schools funding more than two years ago, years of incessant headlines, of hopes raised and dashed, and of bitter political brawling. He was entering dangerous territory.

The “Gonski” review was launched by the Rudd/Gillard governments at the point of intersection of three of the most enduring conflicts of Australian political life: between federal and state governments, between left and right, and between the free, secular government school sector and religion-based, fee-charging non-government schools. All ride on the tectonic plates of class and class relations, slow-moving but fundamental.

“Gonski” argued that these divisions have allowed the school system to drift steadily towards greater social segmentation, and have prevented it from tackling persistent problems of inequality. Overcoming these problems, the review suggested, demanded overcoming these divisions. All public funding for schooling, federal and state alike, should go into a single national bucket from which each school would be funded according to the difficulty of its educational task, irrespective of its location or sector.

The divisions declined to be overcome, however. “Gonski” was first hung out to dry by its sponsor, the Gillard government, then passionately embraced; watered down before being accepted by some states and rejected by others; rejected then embraced then tolerated for the moment by the federal Coalition in the person of Christopher Pyne; and, most recently, confronted by a counter-proposal.

The National Commission of Audit, after finding arrangements left in the wake of Gonski to be “complex, inconsistent and lack(ing) transparency,” has recently urged the new government to abandon the national bucket in favour of a devolved approach – give the money to the states, that is, for their use and distribution within a broad national framework.

What, in the light of all that, would this courteous, quietly spoken master of the backrooms of power, this chairman of everything, choose to say? He had promised to define “the essence of the findings of the review,” to consider whether and how these findings had been understood and implemented, and to close with some remarks on what he learned from being involved in the review. Plenty of scope there.

Would he play the statesman, perhaps? Accept that the end of greater fairness in schooling might be served by means other than those that he and his panel devised? Some version of the Audit Commission’s model, for example? That would alienate Labor as well as making it seem that he had reverted to corporate type, not a man of principle at all, just another player in the cynical game.

Or fight fire with fire? The temptation was certainly there, in Pyne’s brazen opportunism, and in the Commission of Audit’s arch interpretation of “Gonski” as just another funding mechanism. A payback killing might keep faith with Gonski’s many supporters and his Labor’s sponsors, but it would also enrage a federal government with a long memory. It would obliterate any hope of influencing the Abbott government’s eventual solution.

Or might he, just might he say what he really had “learned from being involved in the review”? That Australian schooling is squandering its patrimony, becoming more socially divided and less able to deliver on the promise of “equal opportunity” by the minute? An ungovernable mess, buzzing with activity but making scarcely any headway? That its world’s-worst-practice three-sector system is a divisive relic of the nineteenth century? That the blame-shifting involvement of two levels of government in every school in the country is counterproductive? That having governments on three-year electoral cycles run a business that needs big strategies pursued over decades is a recipe for muddle, frustration and waste?

No, he didn’t say those things. But nor did he say anything to the contrary. He is a subtle man, used to saying things with silence.

What he did say, out loud, was that he apologises for nothing and regrets nothing – well, one small thing perhaps. It might have been better, in the light of experience, not to have mentioned the price tag. “Major media outlets,” he observed, naming no names, “talked of further billions for education and no doubt those who had to find the amount were very bluntly reminded of what was involved.”

The shame of that was that it distracted from the real point and purpose of the report, the breadth and complexity of problems it took on: big differences in funding amounts and methods between states and sectors; the fact that those least in need had most, and vice versa; the opaque, complex and various ways of measuring and allowing for disadvantage; the lack of clear statements of “aspirations” for schooling. “Two years on… our analysis has stood up to scrutiny,” said Gonski. “Some may disagree with aspects and conclusions but I’m not aware of any major holes that have been found.”

Gonski was warmly welcomed by a big crowd and even more warmly farewelled – he made it clear that this was his “postscript” – but was only once interrupted by applause, and that was when he insisted that the purpose of a funding system was to “ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession.”

At that and many other points Gonski took tacit issue with Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society. He reported his own family’s debt to schooling. He talked about the “enormous” difference between “well-endowed schools and those in the lower socioeconomic areas.” He insisted that many of his peers in the world of big business shared his “feeling for society.” He encouraged people to work outside their home territory. “It is good for the individual [and] good for the society” because it builds “trust and cooperation” between sectors.

He attacked as well as endorsed and defended. His chief target was the Commission of Audit. Its alternative scheme might be clear and simple, but “like a lot that is simple it is not adequate.” States could not be both custodians of their own schools and responsible for funding competitors. In any event, leaving things to the states could lead to different systems and different aspirations in different parts of the nation. The Commission’s argument for winding back spending increases planned for 2017 and beyond was to be regretted. If money had to be saved, why hadn’t the Commission revisited the previous government’s decision that “no school will be worse off”?

Gonski told his audience that the review presented him with an “opportunity to make a stand.” His speech was another, and he took it.

Is that entirely a good thing? Gonski’s speech, like his report, reflects rising concern around the Western world that the surge of wealth to the already-wealthy over the long postwar boom has become a threat to social cohesion and to the legitimating claim that “opportunity” is “equal.” Social cohesion and legitimacy are core business for schooling. We should certainly be grateful that Gonski called for a national approach to schooling in the social as well as the geographic and political sense.

It is an approach that should have national appeal, especially coming as it did from the big end of town. There is nothing inherently sectional or party-political about it. A conservative government could find as many reasons to go along with it as a Labor administration, and as Gonski himself pointed out, the most enthusiastic “Gonski” supporter has been the Coalition government in New South Wales.

Its federal counterpart, however, is of a very different mind, and not merely in the service of Christopher Pyne’s ever-changing political needs. The underlying dynamic is that members of privileged groups often use privilege to pursue immediate individual interests at the expense of the long-term stability of the social order on which their privilege depends.

That is exactly what the high-fee independent schools have been encouraging their clients to do in the golden decades since Gough Whitlam launched an education spending bonanza in response to Peter Karmel’s Schools in Australia report. Burgeoning wealth has allowed them to just about guarantee the transmission of cultural capital from one generation to the next, partly through success in academic competition, partly via what would in other circumstances be called social engineering – using fees and academic selection to cherry-pick students and families, and to constitute networks, outlooks and codes. In the process, these schools and their selective companions in the government sector have performed something like the inverse of that service for excluded social groups and their schools.

In this perspective, Gonski (Shore old scholar) and fellow panellist Kathryn Greiner (chair of high-end Loreto Kirribilli) can be seen as reminding their peers that schooling has tasks and responsibilities that go beyond privileging their own offspring. And Pyne can be understood as saying: you gotta be kidding – enjoy!

Pyne has prevailed, thus far at least, because problems of social cohesion and legitimacy are not (yet) as marked in Australia as in some other societies, notably Britain and the United States, and because he and his Coalition colleagues are blinkered to Gonski-like concerns by their own experience of privilege and by an ideology that reflects it. They find it easier to see individuals as masters of their fate, and markets as the arena of their fair and bracing competition, than to see that both depend on a coherent social order accepted by its citizens as fair and legitimate.

In these circumstances it is not hard to see why David Gonski’s expression of a fundamentally different way of thinking about society and schooling would receive such a warm reception from his Wilson Hall audience. But there is a big distance between the impulse and its full articulation as policy and translation into practice.

“Gonski” was only ever one part of the jigsaw of a fully national approach to schooling. It was never even allowed to be a full review of funding. Its terms of reference took as given Australia’s unique and uniquely dysfunctional three-sector system – some pay, some don’t, and so on ad infinitum. “Gonski” recommended funding floors, but no ceiling, leaving those who can to pay whatever it takes to thwart equal opportunity. “Gonski” had much more to say about the distribution of funding than its effective use. It is now, after two years as a political football, weaker in all these respects.

One of the central obstacles to a fully national approach is the so-called “residualisation” process, alluded to above. As the Gonski review and one of its commissioned reports show in close detail,  well-positioned schools – in all three sectors – do whatever they can to attract the “best” students and their families, thereby both excluding the rest and undermining the schools that they do have access to. Levelling-up the funding field is a part of the answer, but so is doing something about the rules and conventions of the game. On these, Gonski’s terms of reference were silent.

Problems of design are compounded by problems of political engineering. The hard fact is that “Gonski” did not get up. The Gillard and Rudd governments tried to get nine governments to pull in the same direction, and Gonski’s proposals depended on their being able to do so. They couldn’t. That failure follows the failure of Whitlam’s Schools Commission, established in 1973 to prosecute a national approach but dead within a decade, victim of states and non-government systems jealous of their prerogatives.

The apparently paradoxical lesson may well be that the Commission of Audit’s devolution scheme, muscled-up to include targets for and monitoring of schools’ social composition, income and expenditure, value-add, and quality of learning experience as well as the “outcomes” nominated by the Commission, is more likely to achieve Gonski’s objectives than the mechanisms proposed by the review.

The great danger now, particularly for the Labor Party, is that it will venture once more unto the Gonski breach. Unfortunately, Gonski’s remarks did little to encourage Labor to think twice, and Bill Shorten probably wouldn’t be listening anyway. His budget-in-reply speech suggests that he can scarcely believe his political luck. He can go to the next election as the man who will deliver Gonski.

For those with long enough memories there is an awful feeling of déjà vu all over again. Gonski’s oration was in honour of Jean Blackburn, the philosopher queen of Australian schooling for two decades or more. Blackburn was a highly influential member of Whitlam’s Karmel Committee. It, too, wanted a “national” approach in the social as well as the geographic and political sense, a schooling system that honoured the social contract. It, too, was the hope of the side.

As some of Jean’s intimates know, she was worried sick, right from the start, that the alignment of political forces was such that “Karmel,” despite having the right impulse, was constructing the wrong machinery. Far from settling the “state aid” question, as Whitlam boasted, she feared that it was being put on a new, complicated, inherently unstable and heavily defended basis. As a prominent figure in Australian education with important work to do as the Schools Commission’s guiding intellectual light, she was hardly in a position to say so. Later, she was.

“There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no public education accountability, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level,” Blackburn wrote in 1991. “We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, ‘What an extraordinary situation.’”

The resulting mess is what, forty years later, Gonski was asked to deal with. Unless we are very lucky, and in particular unless Labor is prepared to do some difficult and rapid thinking, someone will be saying something very like that about Gonski in another forty years’ time. •

The post Mr Gonski and the social contract appeared first on Inside Story.

THREE new books about schooling, the first a polemic, the second a polemic disguised as a guide for parents, and the third a scholarly history – all dwell on that uniquely Australian mistake, the three-sector system of government, Catholic and independent schools. In doing so they (and this review) illustrate one of the reasons for regarding it as a mistake. We spend so much time and political energy talking about this second-order problem, from irreconcilable points of view, that we can neither concentrate on nor agree about matters of genuinely educational importance.

Marion Maddox’s Taking God to School is the starkest illustration of the point. A senior academic and a team of researchers have spent much high-quality intellectual effort in exposing what everyone already knows, sort-of: that governments have aided and abetted the rise of fee-charging religion-based schools and hence the decline of free and secular state schools, and have smoothed the path of religion into the state schools as well.

This is not to suggest that Maddox’s excellent efforts are beside the point. Unfortunately the reality constructed by the sector system makes them very well directed indeed. The most startling and troubling of Maddox’s exhaustively documented revelations concern the dark and fringy kind of religion which suffuses some small independent schools and (as a recent incident in Victoria illustrates) some federally supported programs in government schools. Governments allow and subsidise schools that teach creationism as a legitimate alternative to evolution (and obligatory for the truly faithful) and advertise as their first priority the training of “soldiers” to “do battle for the Lord in a world which rejects his laws and dominion.” Such content and objectives are conspicuously absent from the National Goals for Schooling on which all Australian governments have agreed. Less egregiously, but still unacceptably, church-based schools work the angles, including using religious exemptions to implement discriminatory employment and enrolment practices.

Almost as offensive, to Maddox’s mind, is the use of public funds to help create and expand church-based schools that charge as much to let a child through the gate for a year as some people can earn over the same period.

Maddox is particularly well placed and qualified to rage against these iniquities. She has research degrees in both politics and theology, is a practising Christian, and is a product of both state and independent schools. Her independent alma mater, she reports with eloquent fury, boasts an indoor eight-lane fifty-metre heated pool (with a learn-to-swim area, an “international water-polo field” and both one- and three-metre diving boards), a drama theatre with red-carpeted steps deep enough to either lounge on or place chairs, and a “free-standing two-storey music block, home to the music curriculum that takes over the Sydney Opera House for its biennial concert” – all subsidised by state and federal governments via capital grants, recurrent funding and tax-deductible donations from prosperous old scholars.

Maddox argues that these nominally Christian schools have become instruments of intimidation, a means by which parents are convinced that if they’re not paying till it hurts they’re not doing the best by their children. In the name of “choice” these schools contribute to the wasteful and socially undesirable duplication and triplication of provision. These are matters to which we will return.

Maddox notes that as Australia has become less religious, its schooling has become more so, a paradox fuelled, she suggests, by governments’ love affair with outsourcing. It is also a dialectic: schools are a key site of “blowback” against rising irreligion. More consequential for Maddox’s argument and conclusions is her focus on exposé, and on religion rather than on who has used it, and what for. That focus leads Maddox to pass lightly over the workings of selection in government schools (some of which are in effect fee-free private schools), and to urge a return to “free, compulsory and secular” schooling – a return, that is, to an age that never was, and in which “secular” was in part a sectarian weapon in the struggle between the Catholics and the rest. Maddox closes with the injunction, “Let us reclaim the secular.” Secularism, she insists, is not a rival to religion, as some advocates of religion like to say, but “a way of going about things that enables people with as many different voices as possible to participate in public life.” Even with that crucial caveat, Maddox’s battle cry could, for reasons discussed below, easily lead us deeper into the cul-de-sac in which the politics of schooling has been trapped for much of the past couple of centuries.

DAVID GILLESPIE is, if anything, even better placed to make his pitch than Maddox is hers. A father of six children, with no educational interests or doctrines to defend, his declared purpose is to show other parents how he and his wife managed to find great schools for their brood without going broke. To that end, Gillespie speeds with amazing dexterity across a vast body of research about what makes for successful schooling – research which, he points out, is frequently esoteric, of questionable quality and needlessly replicated as well as inconclusive or downright contradictory. Gillespie’s cool, sceptical eye (he was a corporate lawyer) allows him to see more clearly than most of us who have spent a lifetime trying to figure out how schooling does and should work, although it should also be noted that he was much aided and influenced by research commissioned by the Gonski review and conducted by a consortium led by the Nous consulting group.

Gillespie’s conclusions, in no particular order, are as follows. Teacher unions can take much of the blame for ever-decreasing class sizes which have inflated costs without improving outcomes, for protecting bad teaching, and for declining parental trust in state schools. A good school system should be able to overcome any disadvantage irrespective of home environment. There are good and bad big schools and small schools, single-sex and co-ed schools, and high-fee, low-fee and government schools. Raw scores don’t matter, value-add does. “Charter” schools, aka “independent state schools,” might fix some schools under some circumstances but they can’t fix the system and may actually make it worse. Teachers make all the difference to kids, and principals make all the difference to schools. Teacher qualifications don’t matter, teacher skill does. Teachers need less contact time, a culture of mentorship, and encouragement to continuous improvement. They should gather and give constant feedback on student performance. Learning to learn is important, and so are extracurricular activities (music especially). Languages other than English should form part of every kid’s diet, and phonics is essential to learning to read. Technology can make a real difference but often doesn’t. Homework policy doesn’t matter much, but effective communication with parents does. Streaming is bad for all concerned (but “acceleration” for kids in areas where they are exceptionally able isn’t). Don’t hothouse your preschool kids, and don’t waste money on tutoring when they’re older. Once your kids are in a primary or secondary school don’t move them unless you absolutely have to.

It is a mark of Gillespie’s independence of mind that no reader will agree – or disagree – with everything in that list. I would quibble with quite a bit of it (more on the grounds of what isn’t there than what is), but it’s the best short summary of do’s and don’ts (most derived from the “effective schools” literature) that I’ve seen. It should be compulsory reading for every teacher education student. In fact Free Schools could replace large slabs of many teacher ed reading lists, not least because Gillespie’s ultra-egalitarian prose means that prospective teachers would actually read and understand it.

Gillespie’s tour d’horizon does indeed provide a lot of useful and extraordinarily well-supported advice for parents. But there are several catches to his claim that if they take that advice and put in a bit of leg-work all will be well. For one thing, there may be a lot of schools on the map but that doesn’t mean that the kids can be got to them and/or that mum and dad can afford fees where applicable and/or that the school will or can enrol them, a set of realities established by a recent Grattan Institute study of a typical suburban milieu (a study not referred to by Gillespie, by the way). For another, even those whose location and/or means permit “choice” don’t necessarily buy and read books, or otherwise acquire the skill and tenacity to get it right – or, as I can testify from personal experience, they do, and still get it wrong. At least some of those who can “choose” don’t really care about the things Gillespie really cares about. A third problem: to the extent that Gillespie’s advice plus the federal government’s MySchool website plus hundreds of thousands of dinner party and barbie conversations do their work, the problem which “choosing” is meant to address is thereby exacerbated.

That, to his great credit, is a reality Gillespie is willing to confront. He reports that he has been a student in the Australian education system for most of his life, but until doing the research for the book “had no real understanding of how the different components of that system work or how profoundly broken it is.” Parents shouldn’t be in the choosing position in the first place, he insists. They’re victims of “a chain of unique events in our educational history” which has issued in a “self-fulfilling, rolling disaster” in which everyone is forced to look out for themselves, often at the expense of everyone else. “I want everyone who reads this,” he says, “to know who is pulling the levers and why.”

Gillespie can be accused of heroic and hyperbolic generalisation, and as discussed further below he hasn’t really grasped who is pulling the levers and why, but he has nailed the big and often fudged workings of a complicated, opaque system. What we are really doing, he says, is “streaming our entire education system… creating a multi-tiered system that not only entrenches disadvantage at the bottom but weakens the entire system.” In the upshot we have “high levels of inequity, social division... and worse outcomes for everybody.” The evidence from around the world, Gillespie argues, leads to a simple conclusion which we have so far been unable to act upon: a good system raises all boats and a bad one lowers them.

The story of “a chain of unique events in our educational history” is told in greater detail and at a much lower temperature by Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor in A History of Australian Schooling. With its plain title, plain prose, and a design unfortunately evocative of a 1960s school textbook (lots of headers in large font, low-res photos of static subjects) this looks and in many respects is a conventional history, document-based, organised horizontally by periods, vertically by theme, subdued in tone, cautious in explanation, slow to judgement. It is also unprecedentedly broad in scope, a model of compression and synthesis, and invaluable.

There is much more between these covers than was dreamed of in the philosophy of the educational historians of a generation or two ago: daily life in the classroom as well as the big politics of funding and governance; a history of childhood and adolescence (and of these two categories) as well as the experience of teachers and teaching; the rise of kindergartens and early childhood education as well as primary and secondary schooling; the intentions (announced and otherwise) of governments and policy-makers but also the actual and often very different consequences; local and particular realities as well as state and national events. The authors even attempt an account of the education of the young in pre-European Australia.

For all that breadth, and for all their scrupulous detachment, Campbell and Proctor are obliged to provide a detailed account of the construction of various mechanisms of “differential provision for different populations” from the earliest days of settlement to the present market-like arrangement. On this last they venture a carefully guarded conclusion. “It is difficult to see how a consumer-driven allocation of enrolments can operate without creating hierarchies of schools, children and youth,” they say, adding that the attempt to do so represents “a major challenge facing those policy-makers… concerned with both equity and choice.”

I WOULD like to close by trying to shed further light on the origins and nature of the “self-fulfilling, rolling disaster” and on where a solution, or a less damaging system, might eventually be found.

The Karmel/Whitlam scheme, which inaugurated the current market-like form of the “rolling disaster,” was a deal, a compact. It was obviously a settlement between church and state, and between Labor and the Catholics, but it was also a deal between classes. It allied that large section of the working class which is of Irish origin, alienated by a long experience of dreadful treatment at British hands, with groups at the other end of the social and economic spectrum. The pivotal moment came late in the struggle over the Karmel proposals when Whitlam bowed to the demand, advanced through an obstructive Senate, that all non-government schools should get the new largesse, the toffs and the impoverished parish schools alike. The historic objective, supported and perhaps engineered by the bishops, was to have both state aid and religion-based schooling seen as a right, not a privilege.

Karmel’s complex design for that settlement – funds from three different sources distributed in three different mixes to three differently run sectors – put the sectors and schools in a zero-sum competition with each other for customers and money. Naturally enough, in this new scheme of things, those best placed to compete competed best, and vice versa. An unforeseen consequence was that schools for the non-Catholic working class, the government schools, were stuck with bureaucracies, made slow and clumsy by decades of quasi-monopoly. Teacher unions, as much victims as villains, were thereby dealt a poor hand, which they proceeded to play badly.

It was Marx, I think, who observed that an endemic problem for what he called the ruling class in capitalist societies is that members of that class pursue their own interests at the expense of the long-term interests of the class as a whole. These latter include maintaining a legitimate, coherent and stable social order, a task in which, as Campbell and Proctor show, schooling has come to play a large part. Australian elites, permitted by Karmel and encouraged by so-called neoliberal ideas that arrived in Australia at about the same time, have pursued their individual interests at the expense of the collective with an élan documented in each of the volumes noted here.

Gonski, in this view, can be seen as an effort to repair the consequent damage by reminding Australia’s elites (of which he is a prominent and constructive member) that schooling has tasks and responsibilities which go beyond privileging their own offspring. To that end he proposed a new class compact to replace Whitlam’s. Its failure reveals several things. First, that there is widespread support for an approach of the Gonski kind; neither the problem nor the hope of a solution will go away. Second, that the elites among whom Gonski moves will need some more bad report cards from the OECD before they will agree to a shift in strategy. And third, that the compact itself, and particularly its regulatory content, needs more thought by all concerned – teacher organisations, the Catholic Church and the Coalition party room, among others.

Some starting points. Teacher organisations, long identified with the defence of one sector (including its indefensible aspects), could shift their focus to advocating a universal public system (or as near to universal as can be got) in which some schools will be secular, others not. That would press the Australian branch of the Catholic Church to accept that things have moved on, and that it should agree to guarantees accepted elsewhere, including (as Maddox records) in New Zealand. It would permit an end to the invidious circumstance in which some parents pay fees and others in the same or similar circumstances don’t. Either all pay on the same means-tested basis, or none do – or at least none who patronise a school willing to play by rules limiting how much can be spent and how much they can cherry-pick students at the expense of other students and schools. Too hard? Vide the AFL.

The Karmel funding maze, which does much to make the sector system opaque and intractable, could be simplified by shifting to Gonski’s “national schools resourcing body” or to a quite different division of labour between the Commonwealth and states, perhaps along lines suggested by the Grattan Institute.

A new narrative for schooling would accept both diversity and competition – but competition for achievement rather than for students or money, and on a level playing field, within common rules. It would pay more attention to education, less to machinery. It would see schooling’s economic contribution as indirect, social and supportive rather than instrumental and individual, as the means by which the social cohesion and legitimacy necessary to prosperity is achieved through universal access to a rich scientific, artistic, material and intellectual culture. It would offer a less snakes-and-ladders interpretation of “equality of opportunity” and “ability” than was provided by Karmel or Gonski, and more emphasis on “educability.” Equality, which has carried much of the load in the struggle with unrestrained liberty, would get more help from fraternity.

Nothing would put hopes such as these more quickly to rest than a suggestion that we “reclaim the secular” root and branch – that is, tell the Catholic Church that it has to get out of the schooling business – although lurks and loopholes exposed by Maddox should be closed, and, forewarned by developments in the United States, marginalising the cranks should be a priority. •

The post A “self-fulfilling, rolling disaster”? appeared first on Inside Story.

IN THE unlikely setting of Perth in the early 1990s three colleagues and I set ourselves up as software developers. None of us had any significant experience or expertise in computing or business, but we did have a hot idea. School systems in Australia and elsewhere had at long last decided to introduce an outcomes-based curriculum, designed to allow each student to move at his or her own speed from the “mastery” of one outcome to the next. Our software would make the new curriculum work.

The problem in teaching to outcomes lay in keeping track of where each student is up to in each subject, and then finding “stage-appropriate” work for each of them to do. That’s where our software would come in. We called it KIDMAP to evoke the goal of giving the teacher a detailed record of each student’s latitude and longitude in every area of learning, and in case anyone missed the point we called our startup Mercator.

With the wisdom of hindsight I wish I had paid more careful attention to an American historian by the name of Larry Cuban. Cuban was the most prominent of a small group of scholars who had documented and explained what he called “constancy and change in the classroom.” From a Cuban perspective, outcomes and computers were merely the most recent in a long series of educational and technological fixes for the troubles of the classroom. Each had changed things somewhat, without really changing the way teachers (and therefore students) actually did their work. The brutal fact is that twenty or twenty-five students constitute a crowd, so teachers have to control and teach to the crowd. Teacher-centred instruction, Cuban argued, “is a hardy adaptation to the organisational facts of life.”

But that’s hindsight. At the time, we were on a roll. Within two or three years we had sold KIDMAP to the two biggest education departments in the country, a fact suggesting that their leadership hadn’t been reading Cuban either. On the strength of that improbable triumph – nearly half the schools in the country! – KIDMAP crossed the Pacific and landed in two “pilot” American school districts, one on the west coast, one in the east. We made enough of a ripple to find ourselves in Cupertino presenting our product to a significant fraction of Apple’s upper echelons (Apple was a niche outfit in those days). Should we bring in Steve, they wondered?

No, it soon emerged, we should not. Several of those gathered around the boardroom table gently informed us that we weren’t the first or only ones to have this bright idea, and that our version had all the limitations of its competitors. The content wasn’t there, teachers didn’t know how to do it, getting “outcomes-based” assessments into the software took too much time and effort, and school systems, for all their talk about “mastery learning” and “standards-referenced curriculum,” had little comprehension of what they wished for. Sure, there were problems of a software and hardware kind, but the real stopper was the orgware. This was the geeks’ version of the Cuban thesis.

It was one of those moments when the heart sinks. Our psychological strategy, naturally enough, was to talk about “teething problems,” including teachers who didn’t know how to open Word, classrooms with no computer or a machine that couldn’t run KIDMAP and Adobe Acrobat at the same time, and the odd bug in the software. (“Not a bug, madam, that’s a feature,” as our gallows humour had it.)

But the real problem was that when we asked system authorities to send us “outcomes-based” curriculum to load into KIDMAP they sent “outcome statements” so broad as to be meaningless, or so detailed as to be incomprehensible, and at either extreme cast in Educanto at its most opaque. When we asked for resources to link to each outcome statement so that teachers would have “stage-appropriate” stuff to give each student as he or she moved from one outcome to the next, we got a few PDFs, if anything at all. Every teacher-training workshop veered off into questions of educational philosophy and classroom management before we even got to morning coffee.

It was not just us developers of software for teachers who were in trouble. Software for students wasn’t doing so well either, a fact in which Cuban took fiendish delight. “Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wins,” he wrote in 1993, following it up with “Computers Make Kids Smarter – Right?” (1998); “Techno-Promoter Dreams, Student Realities” (2002); “Laptops Transforming Classrooms: Yeah, Sure” (2006); and, most recently, his book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2009).

Cuban’s thesis is supported by the findings of a recent meta-study of forty-five investigations into the extent to which digital technologies have made any difference to the “effectiveness” of schools and classrooms. In The Impact of Digital Technology on Learning, Steven Higgins and his colleagues survey the many forms of digital instruction and the difficulties of pinning down cause and effect in the ecology of schooling. They report that these technologies may bring an increase in effectiveness in some cases, but that increase may also be explained by the energy of the innovators rather than the innovation itself, or by the fact that the more effective schools are the first and best users of technology. For these and other reasons, they conclude, technology “enthusiasts” confront a “growing critical voice from the sceptics.”

Growing scepticism from the inside contrasts sharply with growing enthusiasm on the outside. In June of this year the Economist magazine made a bold and much-reported prediction: “New technology,” it declared, “is poised to disrupt America’s schools, and then the world’s.” The Economist would pack a punch even if it stood alone, but it doesn’t. Similar propositions have been advanced in influential US publications including the New York Times, Forbes magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post.

Once bitten I should be twice shy, but nonetheless it is my view that the Economist is much more likely to be right than the sceptics, not in consequence of “new technology” alone, but when those technologies are combined with educational ideas and techniques, financial imperatives, and political pressures. Indeed, a long, slow shift from one mode of educational production to another has already begun. Technology is going to drive the first revolution in schooling since the invention of the printing press nearly 600 years ago.

THE enabling factor is the machinery itself, different in three important ways from what KIDMAP depended on. First to arrive was the internet, a means by which any individual or group can reach any other as well as roam at will in the contemporary library of Alexandria. Second is a fusion of speed, portability, cheapness and ease of use exemplified by the touchscreen tablet. And third is the cloud, making all things digital more affordable and usable, particularly for organisations like schools.

The software is not as capable as the hardware, and its development is necessarily slower and more erratic. If we leave to one side applications that support administrative operations, software for schools has developed in two streams, “instructional” and “management,” the former designed for student use in the hope that more can learn more quickly, the latter directed towards much the same objectives, but via the teacher.

Both kinds of software have been transformed. On the instructional side, the old drill-and-practice routines of “computer-assisted instruction” and language labs have been joined by tutorials and mini-lessons of the kind popularised by the free, non-profit Khan Academy; by full-scale virtual courses of study that integrate video lessons, film clips, reading and exercises with assessment and feedback; and most recently by packages that deliver and manage extended sequences of complex learning.

The last of these combine “edware” – the educationists’ “developmental continua” – with “gamification,” the quasi-science of getting kids hooked and keeping them in “the zone of proximal development” as they advance from basic to competent to mastery. At its most sophisticated, gamification combines a carefully planned escalation of tasks and activity, guided and motivated by assessment, feedback and reward, with the capacity to switch students from one learning track to another depending on how well and how quickly they learn. It is “adaptive.” It is also social, again taking from the gaming industry its techniques of organising “players” into groups and teams to collaborate and compete.

The two streams of development, instructional and management, are now merging into “next generation learning platforms” or “learning ecologies,” to be deployed by a teacher operating, as one much-used analogy has it, less like a pilot than an air-traffic controller. The idea is that powered-up teachers will have “the curriculum” at their fingertips in digital form, together with a detailed profile of each student’s progress. The curriculum sets out the work to be done, standards to be reached, ground to be covered, or tasks to be completed, all linked to a wealth of “resources” for the student (everything from books to be read to semester-length courses of study) and for the teacher (lesson plans, teaching hints, assessment tools, guidance and the like).

Student profiles will be compiled not by the teacher after school but with data gathered from the students as they work, their every step forward, their every mistake and their every detour recorded effortlessly. (Coming soon: gaze tracking and pupil-

dilation measurement to indicate attention and comprehension.) These millions of pieces of information can be turned into insight with the help of the new sub-discipline of learning analytics, and made intelligible by 3D graphic displays. The idea is not so different from KIDMAP’s. The execution is light years away.

The traffic-controller image implies a clear division of labour between the controller and the pilots, but in practice the student will be powered-up too. So farsighted were we that KIDMAP allowed students to view their own record – with the teacher’s permission, of course. Soon students will be equipped by “personalised learning environments” to “manage their own learning,” as teachers have long wanted them to do. The lines between teaching and learning, between teacher and taught, will blur. To a degree not previously possible, students will be able to teach themselves, and each other. Learning can be crowdsourced.

Techno-sceptics sometimes forget that these are still very early days in the development of both software and content. Major educational publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have only recently swung their full attention to the digital future. They have been joined by industry giants such as Apple and outsiders like News Corp to take integration to its logical conclusion, tablets bundled with instructional and management software and proprietary content. Investment in educational technology almost disappeared after the global financial crisis but is now growing so rapidly that there is talk of a bubble. The Economist reports venture capital prowling around record numbers of startups (often based in Cupertino) with dinky names like Mathalicious, Chegg (homework help), Sharemylesson and Edmodo (share sites for teachers and others), Badgeville (gamification), Quizlet, Curriki (portal for free courseware) and DimensionU (interactive maths and science games). Apex predators including the big publishers and News Corp have swallowed specialists like Schoolnet (personalised learning), Wireless Generation (ditto), ALEKS (adaptive learning), and Bookette (online performance measurement). School-sector spending on ed tech in the United States is high ($17 billion per annum, equivalent to more than a third of Australia’s schooling budget) and rising. The inevitable hype and snake oil are finding their inevitable victims. Things will go on going wrong, and the current bubble may burst, but the surge is unstoppable.

MOST of this frenetic technological development is happening in the United States, and so is the most intense effort by schools and school systems to figure out what to do with it.

At one end of the spectrum is doing the same old thing in a brand new way: “projects” on PowerPoint instead of cardboard, googling instead of reaching for an encyclopaedia, using a keyboard instead of a pen, or an electronic whiteboard to do what could be done a century ago on a blackboard. Here the new technologies are not the least bit disruptive. They replace little and change less, except costs, which increase.

At the other end of the spectrum are “virtual schools,” which deliver a digital curriculum to students wherever they happen to be, sometimes supplemented by online tutors. Since most of the work of teaching is done in one time and place, the work of learning in another, a given amount of teaching effort can be made available to very large numbers of students (most spectacularly in the example of “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, enrolling as many as 160,000 students at a time in university courses). In consequence, virtual schools spend relatively less on staff and buildings and more on technology and content; and less of the staffing budget goes to paying teachers, and more goes to online tutors and technical and administrative support. In the upshot, the per-student costs of virtual schools are typically much lower than those of conventional schooling. The catch is that virtual schools – or at least many in the largely unregulated US environment – seem to be less effective as well as less expensive, and are really suited only to upper secondary students or to home-schoolers.

At various points in between these two extremes are myriad approaches, the most prominent of which are the “flipped classroom,” “personalisation,” and “blending.” The flipped classroom gives students “virtual” material for homework so that class time can be used for higher-order review, discussion and extension. Personalisation uses digital technology to provide each student with stage-appropriate work, something only the most exceptionally capable teachers could hitherto do.

In both approaches Larry Cuban’s resilient class has once again found a way to combine constancy with change. They retain the familiar infrastructure (the classroom), the usual personnel (one adult, twenty-five or so students), the standard routines (the lesson), and the established regulatory regime (numbers of students per teacher and numbers of lessons per day). They are an important step forward in addressing the other side of the coin of teacher-centred instruction, the problem of the baffled student, and to the extent that they succeed they will lift “effectiveness.” The trouble is that new costs are added to old. Digital technologies may be a lot cheaper per unit but in the aggregate they’re not. Even after offsets from BYOD (bring your own device) and savings from cloud computing, digital technology is expensive – expensive to maintain and update as well as to buy.

At this early stage, blended schools seem to get the best of both worlds. “Blending” can refer to anything from using online tutorials or courses within a largely conventional curriculum to systematically planned combinations of virtual and conventional instruction. One version of “rotational” blending sees students spend some of their working day in conventional groups in classrooms, and the rest in learning labs where much larger groups of students work on personalised programs under the supervision of a relatively smaller number of staff, perhaps including lab monitors or tutors working to a “leading teacher.” Another variation on the theme has students go through two or three rotations per day, each comprising a period of virtual instruction followed by class time for consolidation.

Early evidence suggests that at least some blended schools may be improving “effectiveness,” particularly for disadvantaged students, while keeping costs lower. As in virtual schools, both staffing and budgets are differently arranged, with more money spent on digital technology and content, less on staffing, and greater differentiation in responsibilities and terms and conditions for staff. One much-reported case is Rocketship, a group of publicly funded charter schools. Blending in a 450-student Rocketship school saves around half a million dollars a year, the savings “repurposed” in ways including professional development, and 20 or 30 per cent higher pay for leading teachers.

Rocketship and some other blended schools are extending rotational blending into “flex.” The classroom and the lab are traded in on something more like a workshop or studio (or a Qantas Club lounge), a linked series of spaces allowing easy movement, and equipped for work by individuals and groups of students and adults formed according to task, need and capacity. A quite different mode of educational production is beginning to take visible form. We might borrow from Cuban to say: classroom versus computer, computer wins.

OF COURSE, it’s not really the computer that wins. A combine harvester will not make medieval strip-field agriculture more productive, yet an assumption of just that kind can be found in many ways of using (and researching) technology in schooling. When computers are added to classrooms and nothing changes the conclusion is that technology doesn’t work. In fact, it is schooling’s strip-field system that is not working.

Learning can usefully be thought of as a form of production through the work of young people and adults. The digital technologies are now capable of doing in schooling what technology has been doing elsewhere for centuries: they can reallocate, amplify and, above all, substitute for labour. Machines can now do some of the work that once required a teacher, and they can allocate other aspects of that work to students. They cannot substitute for the labour of learning, but they can change how that work is done, and they can help improve its organisation so that more of it is done in an optimal way at an optimal time.

That will happen only if and to the extent that labour is actually reallocated, reorganised and replaced. That is what blended and, more dramatically, virtual schools are doing. These schools are exploring ways of combining time, space, effort and tools both different from and disruptive of the class and the classroom.

It is significant that most of these explorations are being made in schools and groups of schools started from scratch. Another effort of the imagination is needed to change what already is into what can now be. That will include dismantling what Cuban calls the “organisational facts of life,” a dense lacework of struts and stays, many installed during the long boom of schooling, which holds the class and the classroom in place: ways of framing and sequencing work (“the curriculum”); the habits of mind and expectations of parents, students and teachers; physical infrastructure; budgets committed to paying a largely undifferentiated and tenured workforce; and the close regulation of the daily work of teachers and students via industrial negotiations and agreements.

There is little evidence to suggest that those responsible for steering Australian schooling have yet grasped the scale and interconnectedness of policy needed to exploit rather than merely “adopt” the digital technologies. A recent investigation into investment in learning technologies in one state found that considerable sums had been wasted because the government, lacking a “clear plan or framework,” had left departmental staff and school leaders with “little guidance on how future learning technologies initiatives can be appropriately planned and integrated.” The recently departed federal government sprayed $2.1 billion on the naive idea that the “digital revolution” could be prosecuted by putting more computers into schools. The incoming federal government has eschewed any talk of “revolution,” digital or otherwise, and has reasserted the traditional role and authority of the teacher in the classroom. Many of those actually responsible for running schools know that there’s more to it than buying computers or depending on the good old teacher, but tend to think of “technology” as just another item in a long to-do list, mainly a question of infrastructure and digital content.

Techno-enthusiasts make equal and opposite mistakes, illustrated by Beyond the Classroom, a report commissioned by Peter Garrett when he was federal education minister. The report is valuable in its sense that something very big is at hand, but troubling in its enthusiasm for any and all things digital and in its inability to be clear about the purposes or limits of the new technology, or about the priorities and sequence of its implementation.

A prerequisite to effective policy is getting clear about what the digital technologies are for. They are to some extent for themselves; like cars, they are something young people need to learn to drive. They are a boon to school administration and a school’s interaction with its community. And since the digital technologies are the ocean in which our fingerlings swim, they are of value in making schools seem less out-of-touch. But these are second- or third-order educational considerations.

The “twenty-first-century skills” case is more compelling, but easily overstated. The argument put in Beyond the Classroom is that skills or capabilities such as “creativity and imagination, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making, ICT literacy, and personal and social responsibility,” are central to the “twenty-first-century workplace,” and schools must therefore “harness the transformative potential of digital technology.”

With the partial exception of ICT literacy, however, the skills listed are cognitive and social, not technical. The digital technologies are an important new means of acquiring these skills and a new context of their use, but the skills or capabilities are not new in and of themselves, and they are certainly not new to schools. For at least fifty years teachers have tried to teach what are variously called “cross-curricular,” “generic” and “meta-cognitive” skills, most of them very like what are now referred to as twenty-first-century skills. In any event, skills or general capabilities can’t be learned in the abstract, and they are by no means the only things that schools are there to teach. “Skills” can only be acquired in and through learning “content” of intrinsic value. In the digital as in the pre-digital world, students must wrestle with, acquire and think about facts, events, formulae, theories, people, stories, poems, equations, and realities of many kinds.

Contrary to much digital advocacy, the digital technologies are tools to be used rather than instruments to be played. The main point of getting them into schools is not to prepare students for the twenty-first-century workplace but rather to exploit their potential as new and more productive means to the old educational end of getting young people, irrespective of postcode or genetic inheritance, to emerge after twelve years of schooling well on the way to being paid-up members of a rich intellectual, artistic and material culture.

And, contrary to much digital scepticism, these are seriously new means. Digital technology has no precedent in schooling except, perhaps, the invention of the printing press and the development of writing millennia before that.

The sheer novelty of technology-enabled change in schooling leaves the movement around it poorly equipped to work out what to do. Its language can win most arguments about ends, but it is practically clueless about the new means. It simply doesn’t notice the necessary things, or looks in the wrong direction altogether.

The currently dominant idea of “effectiveness,” for example, pays no attention to costs or to the relationship between cost and effectiveness, and its “what works” doctrine assumes that what has worked in the past will work into the indefinite future. In a similar way schooling’s focus on lifting “teacher quality” assumes that “the class” is here to stay, and that the only road to improvement is through the skills of just one of its twenty-six members rather than re-engineering the work of the other twenty-five.

Schooling could usefully borrow at least two ideas developed over centuries of experience of technological change in other areas of human activity. The first is the idea of workplace reform. That reform should start not with the work of teachers, as is so often assumed but with the work of the real producers, the students who comprise well over 90 per cent of schooling’s workforce. “Workplace reform” is an embracing concept, and a strategic one. Beginning from a view of how students can best be enabled to produce learning of the most valued kinds, it takes in everything from the content and organisation of the curriculum to workplace architecture to staffing structures and industrial relations to budgets. It makes possible thinking about an orderly, coordinated and sequenced process of change – big plans, small steps.

That process should be guided by a second conceptual borrowing, the idea of “productivity.” Often used as a euphemism for cuts or for working harder, productivity should be understood in educational as well as budgetary and industrial terms. It can require technology to earn its educational keep. “Productivity” insists that there is no intrinsic virtue in technology. It presses systems and schools to ask the question: which of the combinations of time, space, effort and tools available to us at this particular point in time is most likely to do the best educational job? Often, particularly in the near-term, the answer will be the relatively low-tech option of “blending,” using online tutorials, lessons and courses to provide students with more doable work and to free up teachers.

WORKPLACE reform directed at exploiting digital technology is likely to be both more and less disruptive in schooling than in other industries. More, because the classroom is so heavily entrenched and extensively defended, and because technology- enabled change is foreign to almost all involved. And less than in, say, agriculture, or higher education, because schooling is necessarily custodial, and social. Kids need to be looked after, and they need to be with other kids and with adults to grow up.

Technology-enabled workplace change will be resisted by at least some of the interests and institutions that prospered in the long boom of schooling as well as by schooling’s structures and culture. But sooner or later, well or badly, in ways that address need or reflect advantage, it will happen. It will be driven by governments looking to get off the treadmill of spending more and more in order to stay in much the same place; by the discrediting of the class-size reduction strategy and, in due course, the teacher-quality agenda; by big business; by competition between schools, systems and nations for “performance”; by the mysterious infection of every sphere of life with the digital virus; by the educational ideals of policy-makers and teachers; and by teachers’ long-thwarted professional ambitions. What is open for determination is the extent to which “policy” can use these complex vectors to do what my Perth colleagues and I, and many, many others have tried to do so that schooling is less inclined to purchase the success of some learners with the failure of others. •

I would like to thank Bill Hannan, Mal Lee and Sandra Milligan for their help in the preparation of this article. Needless to say, responsibility for it is mine alone. Thanks also to my KIDMAP colleagues, Russell Docking, Sandra Milligan and Paul Williams.

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GONSKI’s survival to this point and its reluctant endorsement by the federal opposition represent a considerable political achievement on the part of the government, and of Julia Gillard in particular, against many expectations and predictions, including mine.

There is much to be grateful for in this win, particularly if we remember the disreputable scheme that awaited defeat. Against the status quo, Gonski proposed that schools doing the most difficult educational work should get more money to help them do it better; that this rule should apply in a common way to any such school, government, Catholic systemic or independent, in every state and territory; and that by these means “residualisation,” the steady drift of “good” students to “good” schools at the expense of “disadvantaged” ones, might be reduced.

Gonski has come to symbolise a sense of social decency (honourably defended, it should be noted, by a conservative NSW government in the persons of education minister Adrian Piccoli and premier Barry O’Farrell). It advances the important principle that all schools, government and non-government alike, must serve public purposes. If implemented, Gonski will cheer up those working in and dependent on the most disadvantaged schools (most of them government schools), and perhaps the government sector in general.

All this granted, it must still be said that Gonski has become the bearer of hopes and fears out of all proportion to its practical import. That it has attracted such passions of support and opposition and has consumed so much of the political oxygen available to education over several years suggests that there is something wrong with both the conduct of Australian schooling and our capacity to imagine its future.

GONSKI had important things to say about the distribution of resources, but little about where they should come from, or about their use. In the Gonski scheme the money still comes from both state and federal governments and (for non-government schools) from parents. It blurs the boundaries of the sector system, but leaves intact different forms of governance and regulation as well as divisions between “fee and free,” secular and religious. Rules and practices that allow student “creaming” and exclusion are unchallenged. Funding floors are proposed, but not funding ceilings.

As to use, Gonski endorsed the “effective schools” approach to getting value for money, but was unable to require or enforce it. It is true that Gonski proposed a new “schools resourcing body,” but that too was a relatively modest proposal, for a national (not federal government) agency not all that different from other bodies that operate now or have done in the past. Even in matters of distribution Gonski was bold without being revolutionary. The basic distributional principle of “need” has long been supported in various ways and degrees in most school jurisdictions.

In short, the passions surrounding Gonski have more to do with its threat to change power over schooling rather than schooling itself. For just that reason we must wonder whether it will make a significant difference to those on whom Gonski rightly focuses attention, and particularly to the half a million or so students in the system at any one time who will leave school lacking even the minimal literacy and numeracy needed to get and hold down a job, mostly the sons and daughters of poor, Indigenous, remote, and non-English-speaking families.

Any answer is complicated by the fact that the Rudd and Gillard governments have introduced other changes, ranging from infrastructure and equipment upgrades through teacher education to the collection and publication of information about the income and performance of every school in the country. Encouraged by national and international comparisons of “student performance,” the mood in all sectors and systems is to home in on, measure and lift outcomes in key areas of learning. As well, recently installed Coalition governments in the four most populous states have introduced reforms of their own devising, in one case (New South Wales) in explicit support of Gonski, in others not. Catholic systems and other non-government schools have their own reform programs too. Prediction is further complicated by the ecological character of school systems. The effects of change are almost as hard to anticipate as they are to control.

But, with bets thus hedged, my guess is that if there is any improvement it will be slower and patchier than in a number of other OECD systems.

For one thing, “Gonski” now is not what Gonski proposed. The national schools resourcing body was soon ditched. So was Gonski’s recommendation that the new needs-based loadings be confined to just one in four schools; the money is now proposed to be spread much more thinly. Gonski’s common national funding formula has been replaced by assurances that each “jurisdiction” will be free to determine its own way of turning principle into practice.

If, as seems likely, Gonski’s career from this point depends on an Abbott government, further attrition can be expected. The Coalition’s heart is in subsidising “choice” rather than reducing the need for it. LINK ABBOTT FEB 2012 It has said that it will drop the conditions on funding and simply hand the money over. The Coalition’s promises extend only for the period of the forward estimates, during which time funding commitments are still relatively low. Besides, any federal government of the coming period will be strapped for cash, its state and territory funding partners even more so. Anything Labor says about the later years is indicative at best.

THE sums currently promised are not as large at either aggregate or school level as is often assumed. Informed estimates suggest that funding increases under the Gonski scheme will fall below the growth trend-line of the past decade or so, and that loadings for need will attract less than one dollar in five. Whatever the exact amounts, it is clear that by the time the funds arrive in schools they will permit improvement rather than transformation of the kind persuasively advocated by Bill Hannan in his picture of “Pariah College.” It is hard to see Gonski money stemming the steady flow of “aspirational” families into schools catering to families just like them. It will not be sufficient to compensate for big differences in schools’ social, political, cultural and educational capital.

If not transformation, then improvement? Providing money to make improvement possible is not the same as making it happen. Gonski’s hopes are pinned on the “effective schools” paradigm and its focus on lifting measurable outcomes by the steady application of “what works,” particularly improved “teacher quality.”

The “effectiveness” idea is certainly a big advance on the formless “innovation” that consumed so much reforming energy in schools, and thanks to Australia’s particularly maladroit ways of deploying and developing teachers provides plenty of scope for improving “teacher effectiveness.” But there is an important caveat to the effectiveness prescription: it must be applied, as one of Gonski’s key advisers put it, in a “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” way.

That cannot happen on a national scale. The Gillard government made several attempts to install the effectiveness paradigm as the official national doctrine of school reform, most recently through the “school development plans” tacked onto Gonski. This proposal was already the subject of hot resistance from the states and sectors when the Coalition announced its intention to drop the whole idea. The current division of functions and responsibilities between federal and state governments, and between government and non-government sectors, generates so much confusion and conflict that there can be no “comprehensive, integrated and sustained” national strategy for schooling.

It may well be that there can’t be state-level strategies either. One problem is that the sector system exists in microcosm in each of the states and territories, but more important is the politicisation of schooling that accompanied the long decline of once-mighty state education departments. State-level decisions about the large-scale, long-lead-time enterprise of schooling are acutely vulnerable to short electoral cycles and hence to powerful interest groups formed around the sectors and the teaching workforce.

In short, the approach to school reform reflected in and endorsed by Gonski is probably beyond the capacities of the Australian system of governance. And it may not be the right one anyway.

BOTH Gonski and the “effective schools” prescription are refinements of an agenda formed during the overcrowding and funding crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. That agenda placed a big bet on more: more money for better-trained and qualified teachers working in much smaller classes, it assumed, would deliver more, better and more equal education for all.

On balance, it must be concluded that the bet has been lost. More students did get more years at school; the girls did catch up with and surpass the boys; and schools and classrooms did become much less forbidding and more congenial places. But in most circumstances smaller classes turned out to be more manageable and informal but no more productive than larger ones. Comparisons of “outcomes” over time, such as they are, suggest limited or no gains. The pay, standing and standards of entry to the teaching profession are much as they were, or worse. Although class sizes have tumbled by 40 per cent or more, problems of social and regional inequality, engagement and purpose persist. Gains, however calculated, have not been commensurate with costs. The best available estimate is that each student year now costs two-and-a-half times as much as it did in the early 1960s.

It seems increasingly likely that “the problem” is less one of scale than of kind, less in the level of resources than in the way they are turned into time and effort, and less in the things Gonski and the effectiveness paradigm have attended to than in what they took as given – or what might be called a mode of educational production.

Postwar reform metastasised a cottage industry. The fundamental unit of production, “the class” – one teacher in control of a fixed maximum number of students of the same age but of widely differing learning stages, speeds and styles, working in five or six forty-five-minute bursts per day on a single topic in a single subject – reproduced itself again and again as more and more students stayed longer and longer at school in ever-smaller classes. This vastly multiplied cellular organism entrenched itself in the practices and expectations of teachers, students, researchers and parents, as well as in regulations, budgets and infrastructure.

The problem with “the class” is that it organises the work of students in a way that makes it difficult for many of them to learn, and therefore makes it difficult for teachers to teach. Differences in stage, speed and style of learning are so marked, even in the early years, that only a small minority of exceptionally able teachers (“highly effective” teachers, as the effectiveness paradigm calls them) can keep most students “on task” and making progress most of the time.

Despite the endless experimentation with student grouping, assessment and curriculum thus provoked, it was until recently difficult to imagine what a better organisation of student work might look like. For this reason, “effectiveness” researchers (like just about everyone else) took “the class” as a given. Their focus was on extracting marginal improvement from “the class,” mainly by developing marginally more effective teachers.

Two revolutions, one internal to schooling, the other external, are bringing “the class” into focus, and they may have brought us to the cusp of a quite different way of organising student work. The first of these revolutions is the fruit of teacher experimentation as well as investigation by researchers (many of them former teachers). The foundational idea, given many different names, is “educability” rather than “ability,” the view that all students can learn if ways can be found to keep them in “the zone of proximal development,” working on tasks not too easy, not too hard within a “developmental continuum” that will see them moving in their own way, at or near their own maximum speed, from first days at school to a successful conclusion twelve years later.

The second revolution is in digital technologies that promise to reduce problems in management arising from the first. New and emerging combinations of hardware, software and content make it possible to “personalise” each student’s program of work and to track progress through it. In the doing, these new technologies perform some of the tasks hitherto undertaken by teachers, or hand them over to the students themselves.

One implication is that the hopes of reformers should be placed less in “teacher quality” than in the quality of the student labour process. Another is that schooling will require a different division of labour between and among students and the adults who work with them, and therefore different career and training paths and reward structures. A third is that at least as much attention must be given to redeploying resources as to quantities and shares of them. A fourth is that much of the work of the next reform agenda will lie in dismantling the legacies of the last one – its knotted combination of infrastructure, expectations and habits of mind, regulation of the daily work of students and teachers backed by industrial and political muscle, and budgets mostly consumed by the salaries of very large numbers of a single kind of education worker, “the teacher.” A last is that Gonski and the effective schools paradigm may come to seem, as Debussy is supposed to have said of Wagner, less like a new dawn than a glorious sunset. •

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THE collapse of the command economies of Australian schooling has been less dramatic and complete than that of the Soviet Union, but in other respects they have much in common.

Both imperiums enjoyed tremendous reach and power almost to the moment of their eclipse. As late as the 1960s the government school systems enrolled three in every four Australian students; most of the rest were in impoverished Catholic parish schools or, a tiny few, on private islands in a socialist sea. The grand departments dominated much of the curriculum, teacher education and employment, and policy. As in the case of the Soviet Union, few saw the end coming – everyone thought that the Catholic schools were the ones at risk of collapse, not the govvies – and no one really intended it.

And as in the USSR, the fatal blow was struck by friends, not enemies. The Karmel committee, riding to Whitlam’s instructions, devised a settlement of the “state aid” question resting on three different ways of funding three sectors, each to be governed by its own rules and conventions. The result was a bonanza and a liberation for the Catholic schools, and subsidies for the privates, that saw both come into competition with the government schools, and successfully so.

The departments, already rattled by the industrial and other consequences of the postwar enrolment boom, were panicked by declining prestige, authority and enrolment shares. They clutched at straws including “devolution,” “autonomy,” and “choice and diversity.” In a famous “Freedom and Authority Memorandum,” one director-general provided what turned out to be a national lead, telling his principals that from now on they were masters (or, very occasionally, mistresses) of their own fate. Zoning regulations were loosened; new “specialist” schools (in music and the performing arts, sport, technology and so on) were established; and selective schools and programs were expanded.

These developments were reviled by many, and particularly by employees and patrons of the government schools, partly out of self-interest, partly out of respect for the great principle that schools are a special kind of institution with the high purpose of seeing that the sins of the parents are not visited on the education or opportunities of the children. Schooling, in this view, is irreducibly a common, public undertaking, not a marketplace.

That view enjoyed no more success than the schools it defended. Governments of all political stripes pressed on; there was no going back on Karmel. The right of parents to choose a school on religious grounds became the right of increasingly prosperous parents to choose on any grounds at all. The consequences were rationalised by governments as a Good Thing. Savvy parents playing a competitive market would force schools to lift “performance.”

Into this desolate landscape has ridden the Grattan Institute, bent on finding out whether “competition” and its instrument “autonomy” are actually doing what governments hope and many others fear.

Grattan’s choice of topic and timing for its latest report is almost exquisite. Its motivating concern with what makes a good school system, rather than the currently conventional focus on what makes a good school, is salutary. Its findings are surprising, and will chasten both the federal government and the opposition as well as state governments. But The Myth of Markets in School Education is limited in diagnosis and limiting in prescription.

GRATTAN’s concern is to see whether schools do or could compete in ways that push up educational performance. “Evidence-based” as always, it takes a close look at what actually happens in a broadly representative group of schools, those of Southeast Queensland, home to around three million people. Grattan’s detailed examination of what actually does and doesn’t go on in these schools reveals that between 40 and 60 per cent of them don’t and can’t compete on “results,” and the rest do so only at the almost irrelevant margins.

It’s not that the schools lack the “autonomy” to compete. Contrary to popular and official assumption, Grattan finds that Australian schools enjoy a higher degree of autonomy than just about any in the OECD. What crimps the market as an instrument of “performance” is distance, transfer costs, school capacity limits, and relatively modest differences in schools’ educational performance. In the upshot, parents rarely take their sons and daughters from one school to another in pursuit of better results, and schools rarely lose or gain them. “Good schools don’t grow,” Grattan finds, “and bad ones don’t shrink.”

This is not good news for the federal government, and it is positively bad news for the Coalition. The government has put serious money into training principals to run more autonomous schools, and it has run hard on NAPLAN (the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) and the MySchool website on the grounds that better-informed parents will choose better-performing schools and thus drive a better-performing system. But at least the government has Gonski as its big selling point.

The Coalition doesn’t and, worse, it has invested heavily in the autonomy and competition arguments. It has a long history of claiming that higher subsidies to non-government schools will provide more access and therefore more choice and more pressure on schools to perform.

Grattan’s finding on that score is, simply, no, they don’t, and they won’t. There isn’t much of a market now and “government can do little about it.” Grattan’s own study reinforces evidence from around the world in suggesting that any attempt to cut fees through subsidies or vouchers “will be expensive and will only slightly increase school competition.”

Grattan is to be thanked for putting the empirical blowtorch to both policy and conventional wisdom, but there is much more to be said on this difficult, even “wicked” problem.

Grattan acknowledges that by just about any available measure Australian schools are the most competitive in the OECD, but regards most of this competition as of no interest because it is not about “performance.” But surely it is more important to understand what competition does do than merely report on what it doesn’t? To find out where and when and for whom it works, and with what consequences?

MUCH of the competition between schools is focused on the moment when students move from primary school to secondary, and in some cases before children start school or when they’re moving into the last lap, at Year 10 or 11. If a family is going to shop it does so in anticipation, and that’s when schools – and secondary schools particularly – flutter their handkerchiefs.

Some schools approach this moment anxious about numbers, either getting them up or maintaining them, but most are looking for quality rather than (as Grattan implies) quantity. Schools compete for “the best” students, and the more students (families, that is) they can persuade to want them, the better placed they’ll be to select “the best.”

Educational performance plays a part of course, and there is much talk about “excellence” (code for “academic”) and, sotto voce, about Year 12 results, but neither side can really tell how good the schools are in this arena (that is, they are unable to detect “value add”), and both have other things to worry about as well.

Families, or more precisely those families with the necessary advantages in location, cultural capital and financial capacity, shop around for the best “fit” for their son or daughter, and for the best “reputation” they can reach and afford. So schools market on presentation (uniforms, buildings and grounds), a “caring” atmosphere, and clientele, which they regulate by means of entry requirements, scholarships and, of course, fees.

In this kind of competition, as opposed to the very specific form examined by Grattan, every school and every family is affected, for good or ill, even if they play no active part in the game. Once a family and a school find each other the family bestows its cultural and social capital on that school, usually because it already has more of both, and not on other schools, usually because they don’t. Every time one school forges a little bit further ahead, others fall a little bit further behind.

And this is where the consequences flow, for everyone. This form of competition is corrosive as well as pervasive. A report prepared for and accepted by the Gonski panel found that competition has served to increase both educational poverty and social segregation. It is probably not going too far to say that without any of the participants necessarily wanting it or even being aware of it, the educationally rich get richer at the expense of the educationally poor. At the extremes we now have educational slums and gated communities. Contrary to many arguments advanced in support of the government sector, this “residualisation” dynamic is hard at work within sectors as well as between them.

Seen in this light the obvious question is not whether competition is serving the stated policy ends but what is policy going to do to control it? But the obvious question might not be the right one.

IN A particularly useful account of the difference between “autonomy” and “empowerment” Grattan argues that schools can be empowered without being autonomous, and vice versa, and that it’s empowerment that matters. Empowerment is to be found in a relentless focus on student learning combined with the means of improving that learning, via teacher appraisal, mentoring and development particularly.

One half of Grattan’s distinction is probably beside the point. Since we’ve already got more autonomy and competition than just about any other system in the OECD, the question is not whether autonomy is necessary to empowerment, but how to empower autonomous (and competitive) schools.

I should first emphasise that there may well be no good answer to this question. The high degree of autonomy and competitiveness of Australian schools is one indicator of serious and perhaps insurmountable problems of steerage arising from industrial agreements that dictate resource use by systems and schools, from the sector system entrenched by Karmel, and from chronic conflict and confusion over state and federal government roles and responsibilities. We are not well placed to do anything with the degree of coherence and direction rightly urged by Grattan. But to the extent that we are, it may be found in just the place that Grattan suggests we stop looking.

Competition has not worked as governments intended but it certainly does work. It has been a powerful driver of change in the Australian school system, and unlike most such drivers it is self-fuelling and self-expanding. The greater the number of schools and families that get involved the more that have to, for reasons of ambition or of defence. We have probably passed the point of no return and, if so, it becomes important to decide whether the problem is in competition as such or in the particular way it has been conducted over the past several decades. Rather than trying to get the genie back in the bottle, perhaps it can be put to the right kind of work? An intriguing analogy suggests that it might.

The most successful sporting code in the country, the Australian Football League, has discovered that competition is an unbeatable driver of autonomous clubs and of the game as a whole, provided that all play by the same rules (particularly on player recruitment and transfer), and with more or less the same resources, so that every team and its fans can realistically believe that they’re in with a chance, if not this year, then soon. To risk an heroically mixed metaphor, by running a comp in which dog is not permitted to eat dog, the AFL has succeeded in lifting all boats, or just about all (and it accepts responsibility for those that aren’t).

The analogy is suggestive in several ways. At the most general level, it suggests that centralisation and decentralisation can – must? – go hand in hand, and so must competition and collaboration. Each side of these binaries depends on – expands? – the other.

More specifically, it suggests that governments have not had entirely the wrong idea, just 25 per cent or so of a good one. It suggests that a “good system” no longer consists of instructions enforced by hierarchies but of a few ground rules filled out by incentives and subsidies, conventions and understandings, evidence and argument. It suggests that the way to get schools to “implement” policies is to put them in circumstances in which they can and must learn from each other. It may even suggest how most or all schools might gradually come to join a common system, if by “system” we mean “framework.”

The analogy suggests that we may be further along the road to such a framework than might be supposed, and also that there is a long way to go. We have agreed goals for schooling (however conveniently abstract), a national curriculum, of sorts, an increasingly national Year 12 certification system, and some of the elements of a national scoreboard, although as yet narrow and narrowing. What’s left of Gonski is likely to establish the right national principle for funding even if it doesn’t get that principle anywhere near full practice.

On the other hand, we have wildly different capacities to participate in the comp. For schools, Gonski lite will reduce but not remove the mismatch between the size of the educational job and the size of the budget, and will leave quite untouched a regulatory regime that allows different schools to play by different rules, particularly in the crucial domain of student recruitment, exclusion and ejection. As for families, the mad legacy of Karmel lives on there too. Many families who can’t afford to pay fees do, and many of those who can don’t. We subsidise those who don’t need it and fail to give extra support to those who do.

No analogy is complete, of course. What makes a “club” or a “team” in schools? Not individual schools, unless of the behemoth variety exemplified by a few of the wealthy independents. Locality-based groups already half-exist, and have other things going for them as well, particularly if they were to include schools from two or all three of the present “sectors.” And what is the prize? There can be no one goal or grand final in schooling. “Performance” in the conventional educational sense is essential, of course, but so is the character and quality of relationships among students and between them and staff, and the mix of students and families. So the analogy won’t take us the whole way but it might take us further than looking to the past, or at what happens in Finland or Shanghai or Southeast Queensland. •

The post Competition, “autonomy” and schools appeared first on Inside Story.

THE Grattan Institute is the most interesting voice in the debate about schooling, and among the most influential. Grattan’s ideas and proposals have supported several elements of the Rudd–Gillard “education revolution,” including its “top five by 2025” target, as well as reforms now under way in several states. Their influence can be found in hundreds of media stories and in conventional wisdoms of current media commentary, as well as in the rhetoric of the Abbott government-in-waiting.

Grattan’s work would repay attention for these reasons alone, but it also has a deeper interest. With the federal government and others, Grattan argues that we have fallen off the pace in schooling, and that we must and can accelerate. Grattan’s hits and misses in pursuing this argument are a measure of the problems and possibilities of Australian schooling as well as the strengths and weaknesses of current ways of thinking about it.

Established only five years ago, Grattan is the first Australian think tank to take a close interest in schooling, and it has already generated an impressive body of work. Its diagnoses of schooling’s ills are forthright and sometimes iconoclastic, and for these and other reasons it is an object of suspicion to some, particularly in teacher organisations and in the public systems. But Grattan is also unfailingly constructive. It rarely advances a criticism without going on to suggest what might work better. Although scholarly in content, its reports are presented in plain English and jammed with illustrations and explanations, charts and diagrams, pull-quotes and bullet points. Closely reasoned, well-evidenced articles for media outlets address the broader climate of opinion.

Grattan’s schools man, Dr Ben Jensen, is an ex-OECD policy analyst, and an economist. Most educationists do not know what economics knows and therefore regard it with disdain or even hostility. Economists, in a widespread view, are bean counters whose numbers and equations mangle the almost ineffable complexities of education and its proper study, and often smuggle in a neoliberal agenda to boot. Jensen’s scepticism about several of Australian education’s staple debates, and his habit of emphasising what “the evidence” (almost always in numerical form) does or does not support, encourage the stereotype of that invasive species, the economic rationalist, as does the occasional heroic pseudo-calculation (that, for example, a 20 to 30 per cent increase in teacher effectiveness would add $240 billion a year to the GDP by 2050). Jensen’s affiliations are likewise suspect to his public sector critics. He is on the board of a high-fee independent school. His media outlet of choice is Murdoch’s Australian.

Grattan has run with four themes: “teacher quality” and its central role in lifting student performance; the misdirected and counterproductive character of debates about schooling in Australia; the use and misuse of resources; and the problem of how to get large-scale, high-speed, long-term improvement in school systems. The common thread is that in thought, word and deed we must focus first and above all on student learning, and we don’t. This is a powerful idea, and there is much to be learned from Grattan’s pursuit of it. But why don’t we focus on the main game? What is it in the old, deep habits of Australian schooling that keep getting in the way? Grattan has yet to settle on an answer. It proceeds as if enduring structures didn’t exist, or it wishes them gone, or it mounts head-on assaults but doesn’t pursue them.

GRATTAN is only one among many advocates of the idea that teacher quality is the key to student performance and therefore to reform, but its version of the case is by some margin the most convincing available. Like other advocates of teacher quality, however, Grattan stops before it arrives at important problems and possibilities.

Grattan traverses the usual teacher quality ground, from entry standards and initial teacher education through professional development to salary and career structures, but in an unusually well-targeted, well-specified and well-evidenced way. Its account is distinctive in its emphasis on school-based, collaborative, career-long teacher development organised around strenuous but supportive appraisal. Ways and means are spelled out in close detail, often by drawing ideas and evidence from the OECD school systems.

There is also, however, a curious paradox, a non sequitur even, in the teacher quality agenda. The announced focus is on improving student learning, but all the attention is on the teacher. “The teacher,” Grattan says, “is the most important resource in Australian schools.” That is not the case. Students are. Students outnumber teachers fifteen to one, and are the only people in schools who can produce (or decline to produce) learning, severally and/or jointly. The focus on “teacher quality” or “teacher effectiveness” assumes that students are recipients or objects or inmates rather than seeing them for what they are: workers, or more fully, co-workers.

As for any other group of workers in any other workplace, what and how much students produce, and how quickly and efficiently they produce it, is much affected by the quality of supervision. But their success depends also on how the work is organised, controlled, sequenced, evaluated and rewarded. There is an extensive literature, a kind of anthropology of the classroom, to suggest that the dominant form of work organisation in schools — the class, the classroom and the lesson — makes the work of students, and therefore of teachers, much less productive than it might be.

The point would be important at any moment in the recent history of schooling. Consider, for example, the implications of a quasi-experimental study done in the United States by Henry M. Levin and others nearly thirty years ago, which showed peer and cross-age tutoring to be three or four times as cost-effective in improving students’ reading and maths as conventional classroom instruction, whether conducted in small or large classes, or over standard or extended class time.

But the point of understanding students as workers and the school as their workplace has more weight now than ever before because we are in the early stages of a technology-driven revolution. The rapid growth of “virtual” and “blended” secondary schools in the United States prefigures the coming fact.

Technology will do in schooling what it has long since done in agriculture, mining, finance, transport, communications and the media: it will replace human labour. It will also shift tasks from some workers to others, and from some institutions to others. Machines and students themselves will take over a number of functions hitherto performed by teachers. “Outside” organisations, often commercial ones, will take over some of the functions of schools.

These developments, already under way, will put everything up for grabs: how students relate to tasks, subject matter, each other and adults involved in the learning process; the timeliness, accuracy and utility of feedback on learning; the tasks, division of labour and conditions of employment of adults; the organisation of space and time; budgets, cost structures and infrastructure; the allocation among institutions of what is now known as “schooling” — everything.

It is odd that an economist, working in a think tank (by definition oriented to the future), should not consider these possibilities, even if only to dismiss them, but that is the case. The long-familiar “teacher in the classroom” is the constant in Grattan’s recommendations, its taken-for-granted of schooling. Why this is so is a question to which we’ll return.

GRATTAN’s thinking on the character and consequences of Australian debates about schooling is not pursued in the focused, systematic way of its work on teacher quality, but it is never far from the surface.

Grattan’s general point is that we argue about just about anything except what really matters, and in particular we argue about money, and who gets it. One of Grattan’s first statements puts “ending the debate about how much money is spent in which sector” at the top of its list of five steps towards fixing Australian schools. It has subsequently repeated and elaborated the case for putting aside “our most toxic debate and the saddest part of education in this country — government versus non-government schools.” For decades, Grattan laments in its most recent comment on the problem, “politicians and educators have argued over funding, and whether more money should go to public or private schools. As they did, children’s learning was neglected.” Successful school systems, Grattan insists, have “let go” of such off-target and distracting debates.

On the central importance of what used to be called the “state aid” debate, Grattan is of course correct. It consumes vast amounts of political oxygen badly needed elsewhere. It focuses minds and platoons of lobby groups on amounts and shares of funding rather than how best to use it. It sustains antagonisms within schooling and more generally. It is distracting, divisive and destructive.

But the suggestion that the whole wretched preoccupation can and should simply be set aside, put behind us, “let go” suggests such a limited comprehension of why the debate keeps on keeping on, of the sources of problems Grattan wants to fix, and of what frustrates the fixing, that it is hard to know where to begin. Perhaps 120 years or so into the dismal story, in 1973, when the problem assumed its present form?

In 1973 the new Whitlam government commissioned a group led by Peter Karmel to settle the poisonous “state aid” question. Working within constraints set by Whitlam, Karmel designed three different funding mixes for three different groups of schools, and provided a funding floor but no funding ceiling. Some parents were required to go on paying fees even if they couldn’t afford to while others who could afford it continued to pay nothing.

This inherently unstable “settlement” triggered a competition between sectors, and made it easier for some families and government-subsidised non-government schools to win. That soon resulted in rapid declines in the enrolment share of public schools. The public systems responded with the doctrine of “choice and diversity” via dezoning, “specialist” schools (in technology, music, sports, performing arts and the like), and an expanded number of selective and de facto selective schools. The forces of competition were loosed within the public systems as well as between them and the rest. The upshot is what the available evidence suggests is the most competition-infused school system in the OECD.

That could be a very good thing, but it all depends on what kind of competition is going on. Just about everyone knows that the present competition is unfair because the players bring such different resources to the game, but unfairness is not the worst of it. The greater problem (and the harder to see) lies in the nature of the game itself. It isn’t a race that encourages everyone to run faster. It is more like zero-sum combat that pits schools against each other for money, for prestige and, above all, for the most desired students.

The nature and consequences of that kind of competition were matters of central concern to Gonski, and are documented at length in the report prepared for Gonski by a high-powered team led by Nous Group. The report found that for reasons of location, income and/or academic promise some families can move schools and many cannot. Those who can increasingly do, and in the doing take their educational, political and cultural capital away from one school and confer it on another. The advantaged schools and their clientele become more so, as do the disadvantaged, and both become more concentrated among their own kind, a self-expanding dynamic half-grasped by the concept of “residualisation.”

Gonski was alarmed by the consequent encouragement given to educational inequality, by the poor and worsening performance of students in the most damaged schools, and by increasing social segmentation within the school system. His proposed funding shake-up put these problems front and centre. The trouble is that even if Gonski’s recommendations were to be fully implemented, which is highly unlikely, funding is not the only source of or solution to residualisation. Rules and regulations which allow or encourage residualisation comprise the other.

Australian schools operate as best they can within a regulatory regime that applies different rules to different schools, particularly in regard to funding and to student recruitment, and imposes bad rules (or a lack of them) on all schools, with educational and social consequences outlined a moment ago. The usual prescription of “more autonomy” for schools (or, more candidly, for government schools, to make them more like independent schools) is correct but facile. Of course government schools need to be more “autonomous” if they are to do what is being asked of them (by Grattan among many others), but that belief dodges two crucial questions: In what respects should they not be autonomous? And, whatever the answer is, should it apply equally to all schools, not just those in the government sector?

No school can ever be “autonomous.” Its success is of course shaped by what it is allowed to control, but also by what it isn’t allowed to, or can’t — including what other schools are allowed to do. That is what systems are meant to decide. Trying to work out what a good system would look like, and how to get there from here, is indispensable to getting the kind of schools Grattan and Gonski and many others want to see. Gonski was not allowed to address this side of his problem. Grattan is, but in its anxiety to be shot of the whole “state aid” question, doesn’t.

GRATTAN’s arguments on resource use and on the strategic conduct of reform, by contrast, go head-on at big problems. One argument takes aim at a sacred cow of postwar schooling while the other attacks the imperial assumption that in matters educational, Asia comes here to learn, not vice versa. Both campaigns are, however, as incomplete as they are bold.

The argument about resource use begins from the observation that for decades the funds provided to schools have just kept on increasing, mostly to employ more teachers to put in front of ever-smaller classes. That, Grattan asserts, has been “a huge waste of money.” The evidence here as elsewhere shows that reducing class sizes is “expensive but does little to improve student performance.” Both sides of politics have got it wrong, Grattan says, and so have both kinds of schools, government and non-government alike. The argument behind the argument is even more far-reaching: how resources are used, Grattan is saying, should be a matter for decision rather than habit. It should be informed by evidence and, crucially, by evidence about costs and outcomes, and their relationship.

Here, Grattan has shirt-fronted an article of faith among most parents and teachers, a central plank in the entire strategy of postwar school reform, and the mindset of those responsible for it. Is Grattan right? In my view, very nearly.

The facts of the class-size reduction strategy are more complicated than Grattan allows (and, I should confess, more complex than I have suggested on occasion). In settings such as work with severely disadvantaged kids, for example, small classes are a prerequisite for getting anything done. A smaller-class strategy can be effective on a system-wide scale. Even where smaller classes have not produced the goods, perhaps they could if coupled with the right kind of teacher development and other school-level change.

These are important qualifications to the general point, but the most important distinction to be made is between the desire for smaller classes and the iron fist by which they have been imposed: no class in any school may contain more than a certain fixed maximum number of students.

If we leave to one side for the moment the assumption that in just about every circumstance “the class” will be the best way to combine time, space and effort, we are left with a cascade of unfortunate consequences: if no class can contain more than, say, thirty students, almost every class will have fewer than thirty; the average class size will therefore be well below the maximum, and most classes will have even fewer students than the average; large numbers of teachers will therefore be employed and their salaries and professional standing will therefore remain low; a fair proportion of the money available will therefore go to provision well in excess of the minimum but to no great effect; almost all the available money will be spoken for well in advance of Budget day, not to mention before it arrives at the school; those involved, from top to bottom, will have little or no occasion to look for alternatives, and will therefore stop looking for them; and two fundamentally important ideas will consequently disappear, the idea of opportunity cost (what else could we do with the same money?) and the idea of productivity (what ways of doing educational work are best at turning effort into outcomes?).

If Grattan had done nothing other than question the class-size dogma it would have earned its keep. But its incomplete understanding of the real-world workings of the class-size doctrine means that it has yet to make the most of the powerful concepts of opportunity cost and productivity that underlie its critique. Derived from mainstream economics, those ideas are as constructive as they are corrosive. Their full application would change the established educational order all the way from the daily work of teachers and students to the disposition and policy clout of state and national budgets.

Grattan has been cautious in its exploration of this vast terrain. As already noted, it has not (or not yet, anyway) used work, such as that of Levin and his colleagues, on the cost-effectiveness of different educational methods to question not only class size, but also the class itself, as a taken-for-granted way of combining time, space and effort.

Nor has it worked through the system-level implications of its arguments. In a recent article, for example, Grattan considers how new Gonski money might be spent on training for principals, teacher mentoring, specialist literacy and numeracy teachers and so on, rather than on the failed option of class-size reduction. But is it enough to spend relatively small amounts of new money more productively, leaving the old money to be spent as it always has been? Isn’t there more to be gained by using the promise of new money as a lever to get employers and teacher organisations to move towards agreements about student–teacher or student–staff ratios rather than fixed class-size maxima — to encourage schools to explore possibilities opened up by research of the Levin kind, or to do a mini-Gonski and put more time and effort into the kids who most need it, as increasing numbers of schools are trying to do?

Any thinking in these directions would take Grattan into another minefield, of course, the heavily defended realm of industrial relations. This, too, is an area of toxic debate eschewed by Grattan. But just as there is no real progress to be made on the distracting and destructive debate between the sectors without tackling the sector system and the regulatory regime that underwrites it, nor can we get anywhere on better resource use without entering the world of industrial relations and agreements. This Grattan has yet to do.

GRATTAN’s argument for a different approach to the management of reform is, like its case on class sizes and resource use, inspiriting at the outset but, in the end, a bit of a let-down.

In a controversial report timed to coincide with the release of the Gonski proposals in February last year, Grattan argued that if we want rapid, system-wide improvement then we need to learn how to do it from the best, and the best are in Asia.

In Grattan’s account, reform in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai has a “relentless practical focus on student learning,” and “high-level strategy” is closely tied to what happens every day in the classroom. These systems exemplify “sequencing,” “integration,” “internal coherence,” “reinforcement,” “whole-system implementation,” “continual reallocation of resources,” and, perhaps most daunting of all, plans sustainable over twelve years.

“There is a high degree of coherence in their strategy, over time, across the system,” Grattan quotes a leading OECD expert as saying of the Hong Kong example, “and they implement with a high degree of precision.” And it works. Singapore and Hong Kong, for instance, took only five years to climb from seventeenth and fifteenth in OECD assessments of reading to second and fourth. Systems that languished in the middle of the ruck just ten or fifteen years ago are now challenged for top place only by Finland.

This is certainly not the Australian way of doing things. The twin pillars of our postwar reform have been class-size reduction and “innovation,” a permaculture of experimentation at system, school and classroom level, often developed in opposition to the decaying state education departments, and often reflecting anything but a “relentless, practical focus on learning,” much less “internal coherence,” “whole-system implementation” or twelve-year timeframes. To borrow once again a favourite observation of the chairman of Whitlam’s Schools Commission, “we are good at gardening, but hopeless at engineering.” Grattan is saying that we need to get good at engineering, and it is probably right.

Gardening did seem to work for many years. Over the several decades from the 1970s the look and feel of schools improved out of sight, the education of girls was transformed, curriculum and particularly senior-school curriculum improved, and, perhaps most relevantly, at the turn of the century Australia was at or near the top of the OECD’s league tables. But that run has come to an end. Assessments in reading, maths and science show us flatlining at all levels even while most OECD systems are improving. Some of our old problems (educational inequality and poverty particularly) remain more or less as they have long been. Yet costs have just kept on climbing.

The most damning datum on Australia’s postwar approach to school reform is that in real terms we now spend around two-and-a-half times as much on each student each year as was spent in the mid 1960s. Costs keep running well ahead of educational gains, however calculated. It now seems that gardening actually means piling up new tasks, problems and costs on top of old ones. Grattan’s suggestion that we need to switch to engineering could hardly be more apposite.

But how? Grattan concedes that the political and policy structures of East Asia cannot be transplanted to Australian soil, and that nothing can be achieved without “the political will for change.” The national government of the past six years could hardly be accused of lacking political will, but it has not managed to come up with anything as coherent, targeted or sustainable as the reform programs seen in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and South Korea. The trouble is that there is more to be engineered in Australia than in East Asia, and less to do it with.

In the Asian systems a rising tide lifts all boats; they have high equality as well as high achievement. Here, some boats rise at the expense of others; we have deepening inequality and segregation, and sagging performance. In the Asian systems resources can be moved around wherever reform requires (up to forty students in a class to free up time for teacher development, for example). That will not be possible in Australia unless and until there is major change in industrial relations and agreements.

These industrial and sectoral realities are too strong for our machinery of change. The problem lies in political structures as well as “political will.” Decisions about schooling are shaped by myriad interest groups, particularly those that defend the sectors and industrial agreements. These groups in their turn act on an adversarial political system focused on very short electoral timeframes. Authority is divided between government, Catholic systemic and independent schools, and is exercised in different ways in each, as well as between state and federal governments. Teacher education is in the hands of universities unresponsive to employers and schools. We simply have nothing like the capacity for steerage exercised by the Asian systems or, it appears, the political capacity to get it.

At this relatively early stage in its life Grattan has tackled only one of these several sources of our relative impotence. In a recent article it suggested a clearer division of labour between the federal government and the states, but said nothing about much more disabling industrial and sectoral dysfunctions or the vulnerability of schooling to short-term political cycles and pressures in every state as well  as at the national level. Perhaps sniffing the political breeze, and daunted by the structural-cum-political problems embedded in each one of many schooling “jurisdictions” as well as the system as a whole, Grattan seems to have retreated from the very idea of big reform.

GRATTAN’s economic perspective is a crucial contribution to thinking about the future of schooling because it reaches so far down into and across the entire edifice and because it has not yet reached the default mindset of academics, policy-makers and administrators. The economic perspective opens up possibilities running all the way from the organisation of the daily work of students and teachers to ways of driving national reform, although as noted earlier Grattan has yet to explore much of this potential.

Economics is not nearly so helpful, however, in understanding the structures and organisations that determine how resources will be used, or the interest-group politics that defend them. It does not do politics, or history. Nor does economics comprehend the actual work of learning and teaching, and for that the institute’s Ben Jensen has turned to mainstream educational research and its currently dominant idea of “effectiveness.”

The strengths of the effectiveness paradigm include its refusal, by focusing sharply on learning (“student performance”), to get lost in a fog of complexities; its clarity about which of many school-level levers of change produce the best results (teaching particularly); and its rejection of the hundred-flowers approach to school development in favour of clear priorities and orderly, cumulative improvement.

Grattan has inherited the great deficiencies of the effectiveness paradigm along with its strengths. Although the prime focus of the effectiveness movement is improved student performance, its belief in the teacher as the instrument of improvement blinds it to the importance of the student labour process and work organisation. As well, the focus on effectiveness comes at the expense of an interest in the costs of various ways of improving effectiveness, which is perhaps why Grattan has so far made only limited use of the concepts of opportunity cost and productivity.

Above all, the effectiveness paradigm’s concern with “what works” is actually a focus on what has worked in the past. The unnoticed assumption is that what has worked will go on working into the indefinite future because schooling will go on looking more or less as it now does. The effectiveness paradigm marches into the future with its eyes fixed firmly on the past, causing Grattan to neglect the already-begun technology-driven revolution in and around schooling.

Also influential in Grattan’s thinking are the perspective Jensen brought back with him from Paris and the imperatives of life in a think tank. The think tank’s need to get runs on the political board may have encouraged Grattan to avoid discussion of hard-to-change structures. The OECD looks at Australia’s performance by comparing it with other countries, but it doesn’t look at the local origins of those differences or at differences within the Australian system. The international view shows how others do things, but not whether the ways of others can be adapted and adopted here. Seeing what Hong Kong does is no substitute for an analysis of specifically Australian problems and possibilities.

There are three morals to the story. First, the effectiveness paradigm needs to be expanded into a cost-effectiveness or productivity paradigm. Second, the teacher quality agenda should be subsumed within a workplace and industrial relations reform agenda. Third, the search for effective (and cost-effective) schools needs to be done within a search for an effective system of schools.

The questions comprising this third task are the toughest going around, and have yet to attract Grattan’s attention. Is there a way out of the sector system? Is it possible to decentralise, to push real control in some areas down to schools or groups of schools, while also recentralising control in other areas? To turn competitiveness to good account by fixing an inadequate and unequal regulatory regime, and/or devising a new mix of carrots and sticks? Is it possible to get employers and teacher organisations to recast agreements in ways that encourage more productive, technology-rich workplaces while still advancing the terms and conditions of teachers’ employment? And, last, can we do more engineering and rely less on gardening? Is it possible in the Westminster system to put long-term, large-scale strategy at arm’s length from interest groups and an adversarial political system?

It seems very unlikely that the next federal government will be interested in questions of this kind. To the contrary, it may well make selective use of Grattan’s arguments on teacher quality and class size (“better teachers not more teachers”), “toxic debates,” and a better federal–state division of labour as cover for maintaining the structural status quo (the sector system particularly), subsidising “choice” rather than trying to level up the playing field, and reining in federal funding and the federal role. The case for hoping that Grattan will go on to tackle the big structural questions is therefore not that Canberra will soon be thirsting for answers, but that one day — perhaps as it becomes clear that we’re not within a bull’s roar of top five by ’25, or of more important goals — it might be. •

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ONE of the deepest and most heavily defended myths of education talk, research and policy is that small classes are good, and therefore smaller classes are better still. The argument is as simple, appealing and popular as it is facile, wrong and damaging. It has acquired current political significance from Gonski’s call for a substantial increase in spending on schools, and from the ham-fisted efforts of Coalition shadow education minister Christopher Pyne to incorporate criticism of the class size reduction campaign into his platform.

One of tens of thousands of articulations of the “small classes” case (and one of many illustrations of its unsustainability) appeared in the (excellent) online outlet The Conversation and was retailed by The Monthly magazine’s (excellent) daily news digest. “Class Sizes, Gonski and Schools Funding: The Facts,” by Monash education academic David Zyngier, is (in fact) a convenient selection from the available facts. More important: it misses the central point entirely.

Smaller classes can and often do improve student learning and welfare, as Zyngier asserts, and they can make teachers’ work more doable and satisfying. Of course they can! But the point, entirely invisible to Zyngier, is this: could other ways of spending the same amount be more effective? For students and/or teachers?

In Australia the answer is almost certainly yes, they could, partly because each class-size reduction is very expensive, partly because each increment doesn’t make much difference, and partly because there are more cost-effective strategies available or on the way. Some examples.

• A quasi-experimental study in the United States compared five ways of improving literacy and numeracy: CAI (computer-aided instruction); increasing the length of the school day; class size reduction; and peer and cross-age tutoring. Of these five strategies class-size reduction (in various “steps,” from thirty-five to thirty to twenty-five to twenty, and one big step, from thirty-five to twenty) vied with increasing the length of the school day for the worst cost-effectiveness ratios. CAI was twice as cost-effective as either, remarkable when we learn that the study was conducted in the mid-1980s. Various forms of tutoring came out on top, with peer tutoring more than three times as cost-effective as class-size reductions. It is perhaps worth noting that the two senior authors of the study, Henry M. Levin and Gene V. Glass, are among the most eminent of US education researchers.

• An example of the same approach applied at the macro level: a recent US calculation estimated that just five more students in each US classroom would fund an across-the-board salary increase for every teacher of 34 per cent. That would in all probability improve student’s working lives as well as teachers’. There is good evidence to suggest that higher salaries attract more able people into the profession, and that they become more effective classroom teachers.

• A third example: Australian teachers are the victims of something approaching world’s worst practice in teacher education, both before they go into the classroom and after.  There is good reason and evidence – ably summarised by Zyngier’s bête noire, the Grattan Institute  – to suggest that teacher effectiveness and professional satisfaction can be substantially improved by well-organised, workplace-based, collaborative appraisal and professional development. The problem is that this takes workplace-based time. Perhaps, Grattan suggests, teachers and their students would both gain if their schools traded off the number of classes per week and/or the number of students per class to make the time?

• A fourth: virtual high schools in the US have substantially lower per-student costs than conventional schools. And so, proportionately, do “hybrid” schools, which find various ways to mix virtual with mainstream instruction. But are these new schools as effective as the old? It is too soon to tell, but so far there is no evidence to suggest that they won’t be, and some reason to believe that if they were to spend at the same per-pupil rate as conventional schools they would be rather more effective.

To repeat: to argue that smaller classes are better than big ones is to state the obvious and ignore the important. In doing so, and by being almost silent on costs and completely blind and deaf to opportunity costs, cost-effectiveness and productivity, Zyngier is representative of his profession.

Education research is dominated by the so-called “effectiveness” paradigm, the findings of which are so ably summarised by John Hattie’s Visible Learning. Hattie’s tour de force digests more than 800 meta-studies, themselves digests of a total of tens of thousands of studies of “effectiveness.”

Had Hattie digested cost-effectiveness research he would have published a very slim volume indeed. Education researchers who, like Henry M. Levin (and the Grattan Institute’s Ben Jensen), are trained in economics and therefore able to see and understand the relationship between both sides of the equation, are rare. Their research is rarely noticed or used.

These facts reflect the circumstances in which most education academics have conducted their careers and their research: in schools and school systems in which just about every dollar is spoken for well before it passes the parliamentary vote, committed to salaries of tenured teachers (between 60 and 70 per cent of most school system budgets), on fixed rates of pay, working in numbers and combinations determined by fixed class size maxima, all underwritten by industrial agreements and regulations. Resource use is fixed, familiar, and uniform, and therefore invisible. It is not accidental that Levin et al had to set up an experiment; the comparison was not there to be made in the status quo.

THESE arrangements are the upshot of a history beginning in the 1950s when babies of the postwar boom flooded into schools, and stayed and stayed, soon producing intolerable working conditions for students and teachers. I know, because I was there. In 1952 I was one of sixty-three students in a Grade V class in suburban Adelaide. My first (1964) class as a teacher contained only forty students, a concession to the fact that I was first year out.

I was one of those teachers (and, later, teacher educators) who stormed against the circumstances in which we were asked to work. Like every teacher I wanted to put a limit on the number of students we had to cope with in any one class. Indeed my first-ever public speech was from the floor of a mass meeting protesting against big classes and small salaries. I was an active supporter of the campaign to get what was so obviously necessary by turning our genteel “professional association” into a proper union, a transformation symbolised its entry into the ACTU.

There is no doubt that class sizes had to come down, and they did. Exact figures are hard to come by except in the proxy form of student:teacher ratios, which fell from around twenty-four in my day to around fourteen by the 1990s. Maximum class sizes range from the low twenties to thirty or so, depending on the age of the children, the subject being taught and so on. The average class size is of course markedly lower than the maximum and most classes are smaller than the average.

Nor can there be any doubt that this was a solution that produced a number of problems. One of them is that fixed maxima make it difficult for schools to do within what Gonski wants to do between schools – put most resources to work where there is greatest need. Within schools, that means some small classes, some big, and some in between, which would in turn mean trouble with the employer or the union or both.

The larger problem, however, is that reducing class sizes is very expensive and not very effective, particularly when compared with the alternatives. Per pupil expenditure in real terms was in 2003 around two-and-a-half times the level when I was teaching, but there is no evidence to suggest commensurate gains in student learning or welfare, and some evidence to suggest that in key areas (literacy and numeracy) there have been no gains at all.

As for teachers’ status and salaries, and for standards of entry to their professions, these are as low as they were in my day, or worse, particularly now that opportunities for women are so much better than they were then. Small classes have been purchased at teachers’ expense.

Small classes may well stack up as a cost-effective tactic in some educational circumstances, as Zyngier’s summary of the evidence suggests. But as a strategy, class size reduction is exhausted. Its further pursuit will be futile, and counter-productive.

As the struggle to find the Gonski dollars demonstrates, the days are over when we can just add more dollars every time a new problem or deficiency turns up. This policy by cumulative incrementalism is viewed by most of those involved as muddling through, getting us there, bit by bit, eventually. To the contrary: new problems and new tasks and new costs are piling up faster than improvements. In the coming years the most defensible reason for asking for new money will be to lubricate the more effective allocation of money already in the system.

But even if there were money on tap there would still be an unanswerable case for putting it to work where it works best. That represents responsible stewardship of public monies, hardly a right-wing virtue. Finding better ways to use what we have is the most credible possible basis for any claim for more. It is to face the facts of the past: just keeping on keeping on isn’t working any more. It is also to face facts of the future hinted at by emerging virtual and hybrid secondary schools. It is to do the best we can by the kids, and by the people who teach them.

One of the many hazards facing Gonski is that his $6.5 billion will be used on more of the same old same old. It is a weakness in Gonski and one of several blunders by the government that they failed to use the promise of new money as a lever on employers and unions to free up the old.

That education academics, teacher organisations and the profession as a whole are so blind to these realities and imperatives is a tribute to the power of paradigms (see also the “rabbit-duck illusion” of thought and practice to dominate minds long after the circumstances of their production have disappeared. The English historian and public intellectual Tony Judt said of social democrats that they are focused on defending the gains of the past fifty years to the exclusion of working out what should be the gains of the next fifty. He could have been thinking of the debate over class sizes. •

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“AMERICA’s university-based teacher preparation programs,” declared US secretary of education Arne Duncan in a much-quoted remark, “need revolutionary change — not evolutionary tinkering.” We could use a revolution here too. In fact, we know what it could look like as well as knowing that it’s needed. But it seems almost certain that we’re not going to get it.

The need is almost scandalously obvious. When new teachers are asked to rate their pre-service course, about a fifth say that it was not much help in learning how to “develop a unit of work,” a third report that it didn’t help them “work effectively with other teachers,” around four-in-ten don’t feel helped in “knowing how to engage students in learning” or in “handling a range of classroom management situations,” and two-thirds or more say the same about “teaching literacy,” “understanding and catering to student differences” and “working with students from different cultural backgrounds.” Another, less comprehensive survey found that three-quarters of new teachers declined to say that they felt “very well” or even “well” prepared for “the reality of teaching,” and a third survey found that between 20 and 40 per cent felt unprepared in a number of areas of practice. Yet more surveys find, over and again, that new teachers complain about the weak links between theory and practice in their pre-service courses, the lack of relevance of much of the “theory,” and poor or no liaison between school and campus.

Principals agree with them. Asked much the same questions, they give new teachers even lower ratings than the new teachers give themselves. In one survey, nearly half of principals scored new teachers as “well prepared” in just eight or fewer of fifty-nine areas. International comparisons are no more encouraging. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey found that more than a third of new teachers in Australia are regarded by their principals as lacking “pedagogical preparation,” putting Australia seventeenth in a field of twenty-two. Only Mexico, Turkey, Italy, Spain and Lithuania did worse. At the other end of the scale, only one in ten Danish or Norwegian principals expressed such concerns.

How bad is that? Pretty bad. Unlike graduates in fields such as pharmacy, architecture, law, accountancy and medicine, who must complete one, two or several years working under supervision and/or in further training, with salaries to suit, teacher education graduates are passed off, employed, and paid as self-sufficient professionals. Many are not.

Everyone in and around teacher education knows that there is a problem, and many are trying to do something about it. In 2008 COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, signed off on a “National Partnership Agreement on Improving Teacher Quality,” which commissioned the development of national standards for teachers and for teacher education programs, and proposed national harmonisation of teacher registration requirements, “engagement” with teacher education providers to improve pre-service teacher education, and new “alternative pathways” into the teaching profession.

Serious money provided under the agreement provoked a hive of activity down on the ground, often guided by developments in Britain and the United States, and often complemented by state-level reviews and strategic plans. Most take aim at the weakest link in a tenuous chain, the “practical component” of teacher education. Two Victorian programs, with the University of Melbourne playing a key role in both, are generally regarded as setting the pace: the masters in teaching, or MTeach, and Teach for Australia, or TFA.

The former revolves around extended “practicums” in “school centres for excellence” supervised by “teaching fellows,” all operating under “school–university partnerships.” TFA, much more strongly based in practice, offers an “alternative pathway” into teaching via a six-week residential course followed by two years as an “associate” in a school catering to disadvantaged communities. There, they have four-fifths of a full teaching load and support from “clinical specialists” (from the university), “teaching and leadership advisers” (from TFA headquarters), “mentors” (from the schools), and perhaps most important of all, each other. Efforts along similar lines can now be found in most states and territories and in a number of universities, often drawing on the “clinical practice” of the medical profession and the idea that selected schools should serve the same function as teaching hospitals.

These are, in sum, exciting times in teacher ed. But they are depressing times too, and not just because this kind of high-energy educational innovation so often gets thinner as it spreads wider. The really disheartening thing is that the main effort is not going into doing things differently but into more of the same, and it’s the innovators themselves who are driving it that way.

THE big resources are going towards increasing the length of all pre-service programs, and doubling the length of postgrad teacher training from one year to two. In April 2011 state and federal ministers of education endorsed a recommendation from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership that the last of the old one-year programs must be gone by 2017.

This is a spectacularly bad decision. We could ask some awkward questions of the institute, about why programs supposedly designed to deliver its new professional standards for teachers need to be of fixed duration, for example. Shouldn’t students move though their programs in as little or as much time as they need to reach those standards? And if we need two years to get graduates up to scratch, how is it that an “alternative pathways” program gets people into schools — with classroom responsibilities — in six weeks? But the real problems with the two-year rule are that it costs a lot, and it won’t work.

We know that it won’t work because we’ve been there before. In the 1960s primary teachers did two-year courses. The drive to improve teacher preparation and to make teaching a profession pushed courses out to three years by the 1970s and four by the turn of the century, with consequences noted above. In fact four-year-trained primary teachers generally give their courses even lower ratings than do the degree-plus-one-year secondaries. And if it is hard to detect gains in teacher effectiveness (or gains for the end-users, the school students), gains to the profession are even more elusive. Its status, salaries, and standards of entry remain as low as ever. This near-invisible progress was purchased at very considerable cost, which doubled and then some because the longer programs are taught in universities rather than in the old colleges of advanced education or teachers colleges, and the universities set aside two-fifths of each teacher educator’s time for research.

The case for doing the same all over again rests on the same old arguments: the work is more complex, and teaching must become a true profession. As the influential 2010 Queensland review of teacher education put it, pre-service programs must be longer and at a higher (graduate) level because “the status of the profession itself must be raised” and because “meeting expectations for school education in the twenty-first century demands unprecedented levels of knowledge and skill.”

We can accept the premises about the status of the profession and the nature of teachers’ work without accepting the conclusion that yet more time in university-based courses will or can provide what is needed. To the contrary: those and other demands on teachers and teaching can only be met by doing a lot less of the same and a lot more of the new. What Arne Duncan’s revolutionary talk implies is this: university-based teacher education programs are taught by the wrong kind of people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

THE crucial thing in teaching is knowing how to survive and thrive in the classroom. Most of what teachers do is still done in the classroom, and most of what they do there still depends on reflexes and intuition. It is a craft. Learning it is like learning to bat or ski or swim, only more so. Because teaching is so person- and context-dependent you don’t so much learn to teach as become a teacher, in the way that an actor becomes an actor (the two occupations have much in common), per medium of a self-customised, erratic, idiosyncratic process. It takes time, practice and help.

Much of the help required to get people through the process as well and as quickly as possible is feedback rather than “input,” and iterative contributions to long cycles of try–review–think–try again. Some get it very quickly, some slowly, some never get it at all. The only way to find out whether they have got it is by seeing how they go in the actual doing, over extended periods.

Craft knowledge is crucial, but not the whole deal by any means. Teachers need expertise in “subject matter,” and ease with abstract modes of thought, and they need what might be thought of as technical knowledge — knowing how best to move a student through the early stages of reading, for example, or recognising learning disorders and difficulties, or being able to use standards-referenced assessment. As teaching becomes less a solo performance in the theatre of the classroom, as it becomes more technology-rich, and as the relationship between teaching and learning becomes more explicit and accounted for, teachers will need more and more technical expertise.

But that doesn’t mean that expertise is best acquired either before or away from work and the workplace. Here the analogy is learning to become a musician. Musicians need both theory and practice, but they don’t learn one before the other. They don’t even learn them in parallel. They learn them in interaction, and so should teachers.

The difference is that would-be musicians can be provided with everything they need, up to and including real-life performance, at a conservatorium. There is no equivalent for teachers. Only the school can provide beginners with what they need to become pros. More exactly, only the school in the right kind of cooperation with a university. Teachers are used to going to uni. What the new practice-strengthened and practice-based “alternative” programs suggest is that it’s better for the university to go to the teachers.

An early evaluation of the MTeach is promising. It reports around 90 per cent of graduates feeling well-prepared for teaching, more than double the score of mainstream programs. The TFA program seems to be doing even better. There have been teething problems, of course, getting logistics and coordination sorted particularly, but every school involved rates the “associates” more highly than the mainstream newbies, and every school wants more of them. The schools worry about the whole thing being too demanding; the associates say bring it on. Retention rates, for very small numbers (forty or so per cohort) at this early stage, seem to be no worse than for the mainstream, although it must be allowed that those are not very high.

Taken together with experience of overseas programs these early results suggest that the whole of graduate and much of undergraduate pre-service teacher education programs can and should be based in schools.

MANY of those involved would agree but struggle to see how that can be done or afforded. Cost certainly seems to be an issue. Like other two-year programs, the MTeach gets double the subsidy from government and students (via their HECS payments) — around $32,000 rather than $16,000 for the old one-year courses — and gets a special supplement of $5500 per student per year on top of that to pay for the teaching fellows and other work in the schools. TFA is even more expensive. Early estimates suggest a per-graduate cost of around $216,000 against $140,000 for the mainstream (a calculation which, it should be noted, may have been done in a way that minimises the gap between the two).

At first glance those figures do seem to suggest that the “alternative pathways” will have to remain alternative, and that the mainstream will be battling to replicate the MTeach. But the question is worth a much closer look.

For one thing, both the MTeach and TFA are small, high-focus pilot programs with correspondingly high unit costs. More important, there has been no attempt to find offsets. If we consider using the same money in different ways it may even be that the sums already spent on teacher education are just about enough to do the job.

Consider the following “model,” just one of many ways of mixing and matching tools and techniques drawn from the new practice-based programs and beyond, from Australia’s apprenticeship programs, and from “distance ed” and the growing “massive open online courses” movement — to provide a quite different pre-service education of teachers.

First, free up a large quantum of resources and at the same time improve the quality of “theory,” by consolidating existing graduate-entry teacher education courses — 145 of them (there are another 272 first-degree programs), offered by thirty-seven universities and eleven other providers — into a small number of online programs, say three versions of each of the main specialisations so as to provide choice (for users) and the spur of competition (for providers).

Then convert some of the 40 per cent of academic time set aside for conventional “research” to “clinical practice” and school-based R&D, not for all teacher education academics, but for many. Some in universities would see that as an unacceptable loss. It would be better seen as a transformation, not as “losing research” but as shifting effort and attention from one form of knowledge production and distribution to a better one. At least some teacher educators would be excited by the prospect of joining a new corps of clinicians, providing that it was properly rewarded and recognised.

Third, replace two-year campus-based programs with three-year internships (or nominally three-year, as detailed below), with a one-to-two theory/practice split. Spread two years of teacher salary ($110,000) over the three-year internship at, say, $30,000 for the first year, $35,000 for the second and $40,000 in the third, and have $5000 left over to use elsewhere. Schools would need to get two years’ worth of work from each three-year intern, but they already do that in TFA. Small groups of interns would be based in schools geared up for the purpose (as they are in the MTeach and TFA) so that they could learn from each other, and so that the work of clinical staff could be efficiently done. Clinical staff responsibilities would include providing tutorial support to the internet-delivered programs.

Fourth and last, new and emerging techniques of assessment and appraisal could use standards developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership to determine both point of entry to the program (what is often referred to as RPL, or recognition of prior learning) and rate of progress through its stages. These could be three in number, with the typical expectation of achieving full graduation and teacher registration at the end of three years, but perhaps a year or so less or more, depending.

Of course a reorganisation of activity, resources and responsibilities on that scale could not be done overnight, or without opposition. There would be conversion costs, including redundancies, retraining (of clinical supervisors and school staff), development of online courses, and new facilities in schools. There would be problems of coordination, cooperation, and territorial possession. Universities’ research output would be reduced.

Against this can be set many possible and probable gains. Internships offering a liveable wage from day one would be attractive to many graduates, and might well lift the quality of entrants to the profession. The long, slow mutation of the school into a place of learning for teachers as well as for students would be encouraged, as would the development of long-foreshadowed career–study pathways. Online courses with in-school support would boost instructional quality and help schools learn how to use the internet for their own purposes. Teachers would have a new career option. A reduction in universities’ education research output would be offset by the development, testing and application of new and more valuable forms of knowledge and expertise. Above all, evidence from the new practice-based programs suggests, it would work. New teachers would actually be able to teach.

There is a necessary element of hypothesising and conjecture about all this, including likely costs and effectiveness, although every element of the “model” sketched above already exists in pilot form or better. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that there would be significant transition costs, but that ongoing unit costs, while greater than for one-year programs, would be lower than for two.

No doubt others could find better ways of assembling the same jigsaw, but the real question is this: why has no one tried? Why, in fact, when teacher educators were offered the opportunity — indeed, when they were prodded towards the task — did they indignantly reject it?

IN 2010 the Productivity Commission commenced a review of “the schools workforce,” including teacher preparation. It soon discovered what everyone in the industry already knew: teacher education doesn’t work very well. It also discovered that several very promising reforms, including those described above, were both dwarfed and negated by the two-year proposal.

By the time the commission had published its interim report in November 2011, the horse had bolted. Acting on the recommendation of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, the ministers assembled had made two-year programs mandatory.

That decision looked bad enough for the commission to suggest in decorous but unmistakably firm tones that it be rescinded. The commission could find almost nothing in the decision to recommend it. It worried that prospective teachers would be deterred, and that problems of supply (particularly of hard-to-get maths and science graduates) would be exacerbated. But what it really worried about were high costs and low effectiveness. While supporting longer and better practicums, the commission could not see why making not-very-effective programs twice as long would work, and suggested that evidence offered by the institute and others in support of the move was “mixed.”

But the costs! The commission pointed out that every student doing an extra year adds $10,000 to the government bill, and is even more expensive for students, doubling their HECS liability from $6000 to $12,000 and increasing by around $50,000 income foregone. Surely, the commission pleaded, there must be a better way to improve teacher preparation? Better induction, mentoring and ongoing professional development, for example?

The Productivity Commission’s interim findings and suggestions provoked a small torrent of dissenting submissions. One faculty of education declared that a minimum of two years was “vitally important.” The Queensland College of Teachers quoted that state’s review of education in support of the two-year move, without considering that the review itself might be vulnerable to the commission’s line of reasoning. The national union of non-government school teachers declared that it “rejects outright” the commission’s views, citing societal change, demands on teachers, and an expanded professional knowledge base. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership thought the question important enough to commission a special review of the international evidence, conducted by an expert who happened to be the lead author of the Queensland review.

None of these submissions discussed previous experience with doubling the length of pre-service programs. None mentioned costs. All missed or ignored the Productivity Commission’s central point, arguing at length that two years are better than one, which proposition the commission at no stage questioned. None attempted to answer the commission’s pivotal question: since two-year programs cost twice as much, couldn’t we find a better way to get the same result at lower cost? Or extract better value for the same outlay?

Unsurprisingly the commission found nothing in these protesting submissions to cause it to change its mind. In its final report, released in April 2012, it restated its arguments and concerns, and repeated its suggestion that the decision be rescinded. The ministers subsequently fretted about problems arising from transition to the two-year regime, including teacher supply; but, advised by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership rather than the Productivity Commission, the decision stood.

IN THEIR own defence the teacher educators could say that shifting teacher education from campus to school, from theory-based to practice-based, is just too hard. There are too many institutions, interests and agencies to be lined up: nine governments, two main teacher unions, three school sectors, countless “professional bodies,” and no fewer than thirty-seven universities. Worse, the “system” has no coordinating agency or supervening authority; efforts ranging from Whitlam’s Schools Commission to Gillard’s COAG partnerships have failed to herd the nation’s education cats.

In which case, why not have a go in one of the big states? Why, for example, did the Queensland review of teacher education not even consider whether the “alternative” might not become the mainstream? Perhaps more striking, why has there been no such move in Victoria, where most of the creative rethinking and experimenting has been done?

One explanation is that it would not be in the interests of the universities to do so. Doubling the length of postgraduate courses represents a substantial increase in demand for the services of teacher education faculties and in resources available to them. It is good for business.

Teacher educators are hardly the first interest group to find a happy coincidence between their own interests and those of their clients and the wider community, of course. But teacher educators are unusual in their capacity to shape these wider views. Many “outside” organisations have inquired into, reviewed and reported on teacher education, but all of them, up to and including the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (and even the Business Council of Australia), have relied on the advice, research and argumentation of teacher educators. The exception is the Productivity Commission, and it proves the rule. It brought its own brains to the task and reached its own radically different conclusions.

There is an unsavoury aspect to this otherwise commonplace interaction between interests and ideology. Academic research is usually disinterested; the researcher is independent of the researched. In this case, however, the researchers are the beneficiaries of their own work. They come close to a conflict of interest. Even stronger language might be used to refer to the fact that those asking for more bear none of the costs, and that most of those new costs are borne by the student who wants to be a teacher, the poorest and least powerful player in the whole game.

Universities are not the only group for which the term “stakeholder” is all too apt. Teachers, too, have a very large stake in the game. The idea of a “graduate profession” is just another step in a long campaign to improve the status, salaries and standards of entry to teaching by pushing up the length and “level” of its credentials.

Professionalisation is not the wrong idea (although teaching would do well to stop hankering after some of the paraphernalia and pretensions of the “true” professions), but it has been pursued by the wrong means. Teaching’s knowledge base and practice are comparable in complexity to those of other professions, but very different in form. Teaching does need and deserve a high-end credential backed by government. But trying to get it by serving ever-longer periods before getting anywhere near the job does not suit the kind of work teachers do or the knowledge they have, and it doesn’t deliver the industrial goods either.

For one thing, teaching’s pay and conditions make it a weak competitor in the market of credential-seekers, particularly as opportunities for women have broadened. That has the counterproductive effect of pushing entry standards down and forcing providers to develop “alternative pathways” and “flexible entry.” These in turn give the lie to the claim that a longer and “higher” education is necessary.

Worse, extended university-based programs split “theory” from “practice,” expand the proportion of time, attention and esteem given to the former, and denigrate and subordinate the latter. That is why teacher education doesn’t work.

The way to make teaching’s credentials work for both the performance of and rewards to the profession is to base them in practice and in genuinely usable knowledge, and to guarantee them per medium of new and emerging forms of assessment and appraisal.

Costs are not an insuperable problem. The claim for yet more resources is based less on reality than on a way of thinking about reality. Teacher educators are not used to shifting effort around in pursuit of better results, and they do not use the underlying idea of “cost-effectiveness,” a reflection of the intractable institutions which form their main subject matter. Research into productivity and cost-effectiveness in education comes from those few education researchers with training in economics. It is rare, rarely used, and even more rarely understood.

Between 1979 and 2005 there were no fewer than thirty-nine reviews of the national system of teacher education or aspects of it, and forty-one more at the state level. One review of these reviews was aptly titled Two Decades of “Sound and Fury” but What’s Changed?. The really troubling thing is not the time taken to tackle a manifest problem, but the belief in policy-making as “evolutionary tinkering,” a cumulative incrementalism viewed by most of those involved as muddling through, getting us there, bit by bit, eventually. Recent efforts at reform in teacher education and elsewhere suggest the contrary. New problems and new tasks and new costs are piling up faster than improvements. The case for the “revolution” whose broad shape is now clear is not just that it would produce better results at lower cost but also that it is necessary.

The place to start is with ways of thinking, and the place to start on that is with the application to education of economics and its paradigm-busting idea of productivity. There is much that economics does not and cannot know about education in general and teacher education in particular, but what it does know is crucial, and revelatory. We can only hope that the unprecedented appearance of the Jolly Roger of the Productivity Commission in one of the outposts of the empire of education is a sign of things to come. •

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IT IS an astonishing fact that almost a quarter of a century after John Dawkins ceased to be federal minister for education he is still being demonised, vilified even, for the changes he wrought in Australian higher education. In the late 1980s academics were accusing him of “sheer educational vandalism” and of “an attack on intelligent culture,” sneering at the “deep thinking” and “intensive research” behind his proposals, and jeering that “governments like these pass like ships in the night but leave enormous oil slicks behind them.” The rage has, if anything, intensified, and taken a biblical turn – the Garden (the Community of Scholars), the Fall (into utilitarianism, managerialism and the market), and the Serpent (John Dawkins).

Apostles of this cosmogony include historian and commentator Don Watson (“A New Dusk,” in the Monthly), Donald Meyers (whose Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline is endorsed and publicised by Watson) and former ABC religious affairs editor Paul Collins (“Thought Under Threat at Australia’s Universities,” in Eureka Street). Less theological constructions of the times and their consequences have come from the distinguished moral philosopher Raimond Gaita (“To Civilise the City?,” in Meanjin), from Robert Manne in response to Gaita (“The University Experience: Then and Now,” in the Conversation), and from Richard Hil (Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University).

Since I knew, liked and admired Dawkins during his time as federal minister for education between 1987 and 1992 in the Hawke governments, this article is partly in defence of the man and his achievements. I also want to suggest that in many commentaries on universities and their purposes a miasma of mythology, nostalgia and straight-out snobbishness conceals what is true and important, and obscures what has gone wrong, and right, in higher education since Dawkins’s time.

In Collins’s account the Dawkins amalgamation of the universities with the CAEs (colleges of advanced education) “confused two separate purposes”: “critical and creative scholarship” on the one hand, and instrumental and vocational teaching on the other. Collins also claims (quoting academic Judith Bessant) that Dawkins was guilty of “the indiscriminate application of market models and values, a commitment to user-pays systems and the widespread application of entrepreneurial language and practices.”

For his part, Watson blames Dawkins’s “reforms” (the inverted commas are Watson’s) for turning universities into “massive revenue-chasing enterprises,” academics into administrators, students into customers, and managers into royalty. Watson also holds Dawkins responsible for “the dumbing down of university education.”

Raimond Gaita writes more in sorrow than in anger, but anger is not far from the surface when he asserts that “managerial newspeak” has smothered traditional and crucially important ways of thinking about the university and its purposes, and anger bubbles to the top when he concludes that “the upshot of the expansion of the university sector is not that many more people enjoy the university experience: it is that no one does.”

Former academic Donald Meyers is the most disaffected of all. His first sentence announces that the subject of his book is “the destructive ‘reform’ of the tertiary sector spearheaded by John Dawkins,” while his last, 180 pages later, expresses the hope, however faint, of an apocalyptic crusade of recovery waged by “a Churchillian figure, able to brush the managerialists, the educationalists and political correctness to one side and to lead into action those willing to put their careers on the line for the benefit [of] all students to come and the nation our young people will inherit.”

It is certainly the case that Dawkins was, as one commentator puts it “spectacularly reform-minded.” His astonishingly bold program – it included the integration of the two higher education sectors, the amalgamation of small institutions into large ones, and the introduction of the HECS system – makes him by some margin the most influential federal minister of education ever. But Dawkins did not do several of the things he is accused of, while several of the things that he did do had origins and consequences quite different from those claimed. Before setting out to argue this case, some disclosures: I worked in CAEs between the late 1960s and the early 1980s; I was subsequently ministerial consultant to Dawkins’s predecessor, Susan Ryan; and with Sandra Milligan I established the Good Universities Guides, sometimes anathematised along with Dawkins.

DID Dawkins introduce the “user-pays” principle to universities? No, he did not. He reintroduced it, albeit on a new and much-improved basis. Users had paid to get into every university except the University of Western Australia for more than a century after the first of them was established in 1850. That foundational fact was modified by various exemptions and scholarships, particularly after the second world war. Returned servicemen, trainee teachers and, from the 1960s, holders of Commonwealth Scholarships, were all fee-exempt and given other support as well. It was not until 1973 that the user-pays principle was abolished in favour of “free” university education.

But of course it wasn’t free at all. Taxpayers paid, and much of what they paid went to families already doing quite nicely because it was their children who got into uni, and it was those same children who, thus subsidised, went on to the most-desired and best-paid jobs. As unprecedented numbers took advantage of a free uni degree, it became clear that what was intended as an egalitarian measure was in some respects the opposite, a form of middle-class welfare or, more bluntly, regressive taxation, and was rapidly becoming unaffordable as well.

Dawkins’s task was to find ways of paying a bill that looked like expanding into the indefinite future, to dampen negative redistribution, and yet still to encourage easier access for more people. It was a tall order, and the inspired answer was found nowhere else in the Western university world. Under the HECS arrangement, devised by ANU economist Bruce Chapman, “users” (perhaps better thought of as “beneficiaries”) do indeed pay, but only if and as their graduate salaries make them able to. No one was kept out for being unable to pay. Parents were relieved of the obligation to fund yet more education for their offspring. Governments could afford to expand access. And graduates whose earnings were low were required to pay nothing at all. It was a user-pays system in no simple or ordinary sense of the term. It was a most-users-pay-something-if-and-when-they-can system.

The regime that applied to international students, on the other hand, was user-pays, plain and simple, and it replaced a “free” system. But that was not Dawkins’s doing. Two reviews conducted during the Fraser years found against the existing system, which brought students to Australia as part of our international aid program, and recommended that a full-fee system take its place. These recommendations were accepted by the incoming Labor government, and the first full-fee-payers enrolled two years before Dawkins became minister. Their numbers grew rapidly, but were still relatively small when Dawkins moved on in 1992.

Dawkins is also accused of bringing “managerialism” to universities, but his contribution to that development was indirect at best. It is true that by turning small institutions into big ones and by expanding the number of government-funded places in universities Dawkins hastened the demise of the so-called “collegial system.” But it is forgotten that Dawkins confronted two substantial problems of organisation and governance. The first was a dog’s breakfast of nearly ninety higher education institutions, all answering in one way or another to both state and federal governments, many of them tiny, single-purpose and isolated, some very large and right next door to each other yet often doing the same thing. (Adelaide probably set some kind of record in this regard, with two teacher-education programs about 200 paces apart, by my reckoning, on the same campus.)

The other problem inherited by Dawkins was a “collegial system” of governance in most universities that was quite unable to cope with the substantial expansion of the preceding two or three decades. Its shortcomings were starkly revealed by a series of “discipline reviews,” initiated by Canberra before Dawkins came into the portfolio and conducted by academics eminent in the fields concerned. The reviews revealed, for example, that one in four engineering academics had published nothing in the previous five years; that law courses in the “old” universities ignored social, political and ethical issues intrinsic to the law and its administration, encouraged rote learning, and provided few or no practical skills into the bargain; that departments confident in their own academic standards rarely compared them with standards obtaining elsewhere; and that reviews of staff performance were ad hoc or non-existent, as was any attempt to solicit the views of students or to offer them any redress for unfair treatment.

Of course there were exceptions to the rule, but that was one part of the point: the “collegial system” wasn’t systematic at all. It was person-dependent, erratic and amateurish. As Manne reminds Gaita, “it was unrealistic in the extreme to imagine that mass universities could continue to be managed by academics.” The Dawkins reforms were the occasion, not the cause, of a lurch toward “managerialism” in Australian universities; and it was academics in university administrations, not politicians, who looked to American universities for more capable forms of governance, just as those universities, facing the same problem decades before, had found much of their solution in the methods and language of business.

Perhaps the most bitter of the charges against Dawkins is that he mixed the oil of universities with the water of the CAEs, that he confused institutions that were (as Gaita puts it) answerable to the idea of the university as “home to a distinctive form of intellectual life” with institutions of the vocational and instrumental kind.

One side of the reality is that Australian universities have themselves always been “vocational,” and have grown by steadily expanding the number of occupations embraced, from medicine and law and theology to engineering and teaching, geology and architecture, pharmacy and accounting, computing and surveying and nursing. The other side of the fact is that by the time of the Dawkins amalgamations the CAEs were doing much the same thing, graduating engineers, teachers, architects and accountants who had exactly the same entree to their professions as the graduates of universities. College and university academic staff were employed on similar terms, including tenure and in some cases access to study leave. Some college academics had the union ticket, a PhD, just as some in the universities did not. The colleges offered many of the reflective humanities and social science disciplines, and were getting into research as well, not as much as the universities, but not so different in scale from the efforts of the universities only two or three decades earlier. The universities weren’t fundamentally different from colleges at all, just further down the same road.

Dawkins saw that the distinction was unsustainable, but was agnostic as to the solution. His initial concern, as the responsible minister, was that different kinds and amounts of funding were going to institutions that seemed to be doing the same things, with no clear rationale for the difference and, indeed, no clear basis for the allocation of resources within the institution. Various models were canvassed in the extensive consultations commissioned by Dawkins (and, often enough, conducted by him in person), but the overwhelming press was for cold turkey: one in, all in, in name anyway. All the players knew that in place of sheep and goats would be a whole new range of hybrids.

ONE of my own criticisms of Dawkins’s policies focuses on the implications of the one-in-all-in decision for the relationship between research and teaching. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide in the early 1960s, many academics in the arts faculty were Oxbridge trained. Pining for the dreaming spires (and who wouldn’t?), few had doctorates, and they often affected a lofty disdain for the “publish or perish” proclivities of the Americans. The sciences were already different, and things were changing in the American direction across the university. By the time Dawkins arrived on the scene universities regarded research output as the crucial difference between them and the CAEs. For their part the colleges were going as fast as they could to ape their betters. Both claimed an abiding commitment to teaching, of course, but it was honoured mainly in the breach, perhaps particularly in the universities, where public rhetoric about the mutually reinforcing relationship between teaching and research cohabited with private talk about “spoon feeding” and the idea that mass failures indicated high standards.

When Dawkins accepted the recommendation that all higher education institutions should be brought or changed into universities he also accepted the near-universal assumption that the colleges had to be more like universities than vice versa, and with that he inadvertently accelerated the dynamic that was putting teaching at a discount and research and publication at a premium. The sense that “something should be done” about teaching was in the air at the time, but found no support in the Dawkins proposals. The most effective single effort to “operationalise” and reward good teaching was the Course Experience Questionnaire, or CEQ, introduced after Dawkins’s time. The questionnaire allowed comparison of graduates’ evaluations of the character and quality of their university experience, in all disciplines, in
all universities, and gave some teeth to the “teaching quality” units then being established in the universities, and to the Good Universities Guides.

But these efforts were popguns to the heavy artillery of research and publication in the arms race for advancement by individuals and institutions. Recent analysis of CEQ data for the Bradley review of higher education suggests that there have been some declines and some gains in the quality of the student experience since the early 1990s, not bad going in the face of massive increases in student–staff ratios. This suggests what might have been possible had teaching been made as countable and career-enhancing as research. That was the opportunity open to Dawkins, and he missed it. The costs of this missed opportunity are suggested by a comparison of CEQ scores in Australian and British universities since the questionnaire was introduced in Britain in 2005, and by the findings of another more-recent survey (the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement), which allows comparison of a sample of universities in Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Neither result shows Australia to advantage.

My second regret about the Dawkins program arises from what he was not able to do. Here, too, my concerns approach some of those advanced by Watson, Meyers, Collins, Gaita and Hil, but from a different direction, and with different implications.

The push for “access” and the beefing-up of the university system coincided with a neglect and relative downgrading of vocational education and training, or VET. Had that sector been revamped, refunded, and given the attention and respect it deserves, it would have been much better placed to compete with the universities as a destination for both occupational groups and individuals wanting to upgrade their training and qualifications, and thereby taken some pressure off the universities. Dawkins was as hyperactive as ever in shaping a “skills agenda” which embraced VET, but had nothing like the freedom of movement in that area that he enjoyed in higher education. VET was dominated by the TAFE systems. They were “owned” by the states, and the states wanted to keep it that way. Progress was slow, erratic and unpredictable.

Dawkins faced no such difficulties in the higher education sector. Although all the universities except the Australian National University were created under acts of the state parliaments, they were funded almost entirely from Canberra. The rest, as they always say, is history. Higher education went up, vocational education went down. The newly expanded university sector became the gateway to an ever-expanding range of occupations and people; the vocational sector didn’t. That unfortunate juxtaposition did not initiate the cult of “going to uni,” but it did accelerate it and take it past the point of no return, and in the process it deepened problems of vocational preparation in both universities and TAFEs. With the partial exceptions of medicine and some other health disciplines, the universities have never been very good at combining theory and practice, for the simple reason that they put one way of knowing and learning above rather than beside the other. The TAFE sector, by contrast, has always assumed that theory and practice complement and reinforce each other, a “philosophy” of knowing and learning embodied in its apprenticeship programs.

The effect of all this on universities is not well-described as “dumbing down,” as Watson and others assert. For one thing, it would be hard to dumb down the experience of pass students when I was an undergraduate, a reality exposed to me when I joined the honours stream. Inside that stream was “the university experience.” Outside was mayhem – often-incomprehensible lectures, intimidating tutorials, if any, three or four essays submitted across three terms and returned weeks later bearing an unexplained and uncontestable mark, and one or two do-or-die exams at the end of it all, mostly marked, I later learned, by just one assessor who proceeded with no criteria other than those provided by intuition.

What the critics refer to as dumbing down was in fact a differentiation that included smartening up: a wider spectrum with a wider range of courses for a wider range of people entering a wider range of occupations. The common element is a constant pressure to lengthen courses to upgrade their status and hence the status and rewards of the occupation concerned – what is sometimes referred to as “credentialism.” This was advanced by the rhetoric of “broadening and enriching” the educational experience and “advancing the standards of the profession” concerned. Often it has done neither; sometimes one, occasionally both. It is surely not all bad that credential inflation has given us so many double-degree programs, for example – engineers who also study linguistics, lawyers who do neuroscience, or financiers who have done some anthropology or literary studies. But it is almost all bad when the pursuit of academic respectability results in “theory” that is neither vocationally engaging nor intellectually stimulating, and a separation of “theory” from “practice,” a dynamic I witnessed in its early stages in teacher education in the 1970s.

None of that justifies Gaita’s claim that “the upshot of the expansion of the university sector is not that many more people enjoy the university experience: it is that no one does.” In 1950 there were just over 30,000 students in Australian universities, a mere 20 per cent of whom were women (and even that was good compared with the proportion of female academics). In the course of a single lifetime, numbers have multiplied thirty times while the proportion of women enrolled has almost tripled. The “university experience,” as varied as it is, and as far as it is, was and probably ever shall be from anyone’s version of the ideal, now belongs to a sizeable minority of the population. That represents a substantial expansion of the life experience of millions of people. Among its consequences is a less mystified and mystifying society, and a less unequal and excluding one. To the extent that these achievements are noticed by some critics they are depicted as a mere change in scale, and an unfortunate one at that. One consequence of “the university experience” is intellectual arrogance.

The universities did grow too much and too quickly. Each university place is expensive, and funding has failed to keep up. Student–staff ratios have spiralled, irrespective of minister or political party in office. That has pushed universities into the money-generating international student market further and faster than is defensible. We now have something like three times the proportion of international students as in American universities, for example. Yet another knock-on effect is that a necessary and essentially viable way of managing and governing universities was introduced too quickly, generating pretensions and absurdities to match those of the old “collegial” system, which in consequence looks much better now than it did at the time. In the process, the working lives of many academics have become unliveable.

UNIVERSITIES do have crucial, if not exclusive, responsibilities that go beyond the vocational, economic and social, of course. These include, in my book, a capacity and willingness to see and to know beyond what has been learned from experience and beyond what serves our own particular material and psychological interests. This capacity is hard to detect in much of the criticism of Dawkins and of the university system. The exception that proves the rule is Robert Manne, who sees his life’s work and workplace in the stream of history, and is therefore able to find gains as well as losses, and possibilities in the future other than Stygian gloom or the Rapture.

Why have his contemporaries and colleagues failed at the same task? Watson, Gaita and Collins are public intellectuals notable for a largeness of spirit and comprehension that seems to have gone missing in this case. Whether it is their interests or mine that have got in the way I cannot judge, of course. They do seem to mistake their own “university experience” for the typical when almost by definition it was not. They were good at their studies and were therefore admitted to the inner sanctum. A less benign explanation is that they suffer from a blinding anger at a loss of caste. The academic life of thirty or forty years ago was indeed pampered, as Watson concedes. “Intellectual effort coexisted with a certain amount of well-paid Olympian lassitude,” he writes. “A year’s sabbatical in every seven; a thirty-week year; tenure with no obligation to publish; for some, little more than three or four hours of teaching a week.”

But it was not just pampered. It was exclusive and excluding. Academics were Brahmans. Once admitted to the caste you were there for life, as of right. Now, everyone is an academic and lots of them are called “professor” as well. Academe is no longer a point of arrival, more an endless scramble for positional advantage. The critics are entitled to lament these developments, but criticism should not be confused with blanket condemnation, and disinterested analysis should not collapse into demonisation. Too often some of these critics sound less like righteous prophets than Russian aristocrats in the Paris of the 1920s, driving taxis and refusing to understand why the world declines to take them at their own estimate, dreaming still of a Restoration or, at the very least, revenge. •

The post Decline and fall? appeared first on Inside Story.

ANYONE who has taught has regrets, and a student I’ll call Frank Gagliado is one of mine. Frank was one of my students at Salisbury North Primary School in the dumping grounds north of Adelaide, in 1964. He was ten years old, badly overweight, sweet-natured and clearly as thick as two short planks. He stumbled over his words and sometimes nodded off in the afternoon sun, always tired from hours of working before school in the family market garden. What could you do? Frank couldn’t spell, couldn’t write, and was as slow to understand as he was desperate to try.

I would’ve remembered Frank even if I never saw him again, but I did see him again. Twenty years after I left Salisbury North Primary School a newspaper paid me to get my former students together again and see what had become of them. I discovered that Frank was now Francesco Gagliado, with a university degree and a postgrad diploma to his name. I remember you kindly, he told me. He had gone on not letting teachers like me get him down, defying the teachers who didn’t want him taking up space in the academic stream as well as parents who wanted him to work in the family business, battling his weight fluctuations, his stuttering, and the English language, and he made it. He made it into uni, the first member of a big family to get anywhere near one.

The emotions triggered by seeing the kids again caught me by surprise. As they peered in through the door of a classroom laid on for the reunion they were instantly recognisable. The skinny legs and flat chests and smooth skins had given way to beards and curves and bulk, but the eyes, the laughs, and the quirks of manner were all there still. I found myself a bit choked up and teary, and so did some of them. We’d spent a lot of time together, twenty-five hours a week, forty weeks a year, and you get close. Frank said that he remembered me kindly because I did “unusual things, like art.” I’d asked the kids to do watercolours on the windows to brighten up the bare rooms of the wooden temporaries and to screen out the white haze over the flat brown plains where they housed the GMH factory workers, the welfare mums and the Italian market gardeners. I liked sport too, rounders especially, because everyone could join in, boys and girls, sporty kids and kids like Frank, although as umpire I had to cheat a bit for Frank. And music. Looking at those same-but-different faces I could just about hear them doing “The Lorelei” and the 23rd Psalm in three parts by the end of the year, every one of them singing their hearts out. Seeing Frank again was particularly affecting, his lovely warmth, perhaps his size, the grip of his big hand, but above all what he had done. How could I have been so wrong?

Part of the answer is obvious. Frank was one of forty. If you work out how much time that gives you per student per working week, well over half an hour, you’d think there was plenty of time to dig around to find out what makes a kid tick and what he or she might be able to do. But teachers aren’t like medicos or plumbers. Their clients don’t come one by one, they come in a crowd. Teaching is first and foremost crowd control, and the way we did it in the mid 1960s is another part of the answer.

There were four Grade V classes at Salisbury North, and all four Grade V teachers started at the beginning of the syllabus in February and marched lockstep to get to the end of it by December. The syllabus prescribed what we had to cover in each subject – reading, arithmetic, spelling, geometry, social studies, and so on. We divided the year’s work up into terms, then months, then weeks, and set it out in programs submitted for approval to the headmaster and by him to the inspector. Our freedom came at the atomic level of this complicated molecule, the forty-minute lesson, seven or eight of them every day. “Discipline” was the sine qua non. Uproar told your colleagues that you were losing it, as did the whack of the beachbat or kids sitting in the corridor or trooping up to the Boss’s office.

The Friday test was our measure. It commenced with mental arithmetic at 9 am and concluded with composition before morning recess. After recess I roped the kids into marking each other’s work in the right-or-wrong subjects, then gave them busywork while I marked the rest. By lunchtime I had the results, which the kids more or less knew anyway because they never varied much, ready to give to them and then to the Boss, who compared my results with those of the other three Grade V teachers. Friday afternoon was art then sport. Monday morning kicked off Groundhog Day, except that the ones who had done well on Friday started the new week at an advantage because they understood where we were up to, and the slow ones, like Frank Gagliado, started off that little bit further behind, convinced on a weekly basis that they couldn’t do anything because they were dumb.

I was convinced too, and I was wrong.

BY THE time I started at Salisbury North teachers were getting fed up with this way of doing things. In the absence of clear ideas about how teaching and learning should be done we plumped for the opposite of how it was being done. The “system” was centralised so we wanted devolution. Inequality was stark; opportunity should be equal. Primary teachers were being trained in teachers colleges for as little as six months so we wanted university qualifications for all and pay to match. “Teacher-centred” classrooms should become “student-centred.” What, when and how we taught was prescribed; we should be able to “innovate.” And, above all, big classes should be small.

These became the elements of a strategy of reform for schooling that was getting up a head of industrial steam in the mid 1960s and would endure for half a century. With thousands of others, though, I wasn’t going to wait. A week after I’d served out my three-year teaching bond I was on a boat for England.

As big school reforms go, things changed with remarkable speed. Twenty years on, the class of 1964 looked around the classroom of 1984 in amazement. It all looked so different, and not just because a Salisbury North alumnus had torched the old wooden temps. There were so few desks! And they were set up in clusters, facing every which way. Where was the front? One of my old students wanted to know who the handsome young fella was sitting across the way. He’s the Boss, I told her. You mean he’s the headmaster? she asked, incredulous. The principal, as headmasters had become, was about the same age as my former students, and very different from the old RSL-badged kind of Boss, bright, friendly, energetic and chock full of ideas and plans. Salisbury North had joined the federal government’s Disadvantaged Schools Program, and set out to present a different face to the “community” as the school’s clientele was now known. If Frank Gagliado’s mum were to come to the school she would find a welcome notice in Italian and a nice place to sit down and have a cup of tea with the teacher. Beachbats and yard rulers were well on the way to being seen for what they were, relics of the medieval origins of schooling.

The great tide of innovation that swept around and through schools from the 1960s was immensely fertile, and transformed the look and feel of schools and classrooms. They became less formal, more congenial, and more humane. But did they work differently from my classroom of 1964? What actually happened after the teacher closed the door of that bright, breezy-looking classroom of 1984, clapped her hands, and called the class to order? Was her teaching, or teaching now, all that different from mine?

Our understanding of the real life of the classroom has undergone a revolution not unlike that wrought by DNA analysis on the understanding of animal behaviour. Researchers have installed cameras in corners of classrooms where they’ll be forgotten, bugged the kids, and gone native, anthropologist-style, sitting up the back day in, day out until they became part of the furniture. What they have seen and heard makes a sad contrast with the hopes we’d begun to entertain in the 1960s. More than three-quarters of classroom talk is teacher talk, and when the teacher does ask questions almost all require only “surface” learning (recall of facts and the like) to answer. Teachers don’t know that about half of the typical class will already know about half the content of the typical lesson. Students spend most of their time listening, or pretending to. They get little feedback on how they are going; most of what they do get comes from other students, and most of that is wrong. Teachers routinely mistake busyness for engagement, activity for learning. Students – the experts on the quality of the teaching – mostly report encountering only a handful of teachers who made a lasting and positive impact.

These are generalisations, of course, from a massive digest of more than 800 meta-studies of schooling, themselves digests of thousands of other studies, by the guru of “effective schools” research, Melbourne-based John Hattie. Findings vary from one country to another, one stage of schooling to another, and so on, but the overall picture of how classrooms work does not. And classrooms work in a way that Frank Gagliado would find all too familiar. “Progressive” ideas about “student-centred learning” and its less formal organisation of time, space and activity did indeed spread as classes shrank, particularly in the primary years. But, as America’s pre-eminent historian of the classroom Larry Cuban argues, these changes generated a “hybrid” pedagogy that was still teacher-dominated simply because the class is still a crowd, and crowd control remains the sine qua non of the teacher’s survival. It is not how teachers would like to teach; it is how they have to, “a hardy adaptation to the organisational facts of life,” as Cuban puts it.

This central reality has remained untouched by most of the thousands of innovations that so energised schools and changed the look and feel of so many classrooms. It is not so much that most innovations have been person- and circumstance-dependent, and folded when the instigator moved on or the circumstances changed, or even that they have burned up far more time, energy and money than could be justified by the results. A substantial body of research suggests that the real limitation lies in what innovation has and has not attempted to change. Indeed, the research concludes that the closer an innovation gets to the core business of schooling, to the daily work of teachers and students, the less likely it is to attract attention and debate, and the less likely it is to be implemented.

If reform has failed to change teachers’ work it has also failed to improve the profession’s rewards and standing. I think I am right in saying that when I was at Salisbury North the Boss and I were the only graduates in a staff of thirty-odd. At that time just three in every one hundred South Australian primary teachers were graduates, and many had not even matriculated, then a Year 11 requirement only. Now nearly two-thirds of teachers in South Australian government primary schools have a degree and practically all have a three- or four-year qualification. To what effect? To look back, as I have been doing, at what was being said in the 1960s about the need for more academically able entrants to the profession, for better career paths and pay, about the need for a true profession and then tune back into the current conversation is to have a particularly flattening experience of déjà vu.

As the numbers roll in it has become increasingly clear that what classrooms and teachers have been producing has not changed much either. International comparisons suggest that the Australian school system is doing better than many others, but not better than it was. Increasingly systematic and comprehensive evidence suggests that the proportions of students leaving school knowledge-rich, knowledge-poor and in-between has not changed much since my teaching days. Gonski found that around half a million students now in the system will leave without even the bare minimum of skills needed to function in the workplace or in the wider community; that a high proportion of underperforming students are the same old faces, the children of poor, remote, Aboriginal, and some non-English-speaking families, or children with disabilities; and that these children can be found in the same old places, government schools mostly, in poor and/or remote areas, in places like Salisbury North.

That is one half of a depressing story. The other half is what it all cost. The best available calculation is that between 1963 and 2003 per-pupil expenditure, in real terms, multiplied two-and-a-half times. Most of those multiplied dollars were used to appoint more and more teachers to put in front of smaller and smaller classes. Teachers at Salisbury North Primary School now have just a bit more than half the number of kids I had. From the outset the relationship between dollars spent and learning gained was governed by the law of diminishing returns. Past a certain point, somewhere between my forty and the present twenty-and-a-bit, the educational return on each additional dollar got close to zero and stayed there. But the true cost is in opportunities rather than dollars. What else could have been done with all that money? With all those hopes and energies? And, lying behind that imponderable is another: what wasn’t changed in the lives of millions of Frank Gagliados who have passed through the schooling system since 1964?

The fact now to be faced is that the entire strategy of reform of the half century beginning about the time I started at Salisbury North Primary School, and particularly its dogged pursuit of ever-smaller classes, was misconceived, not because nothing was achieved but because costs were out of all proportion to educational ground gained.

Even if that strategy was less than a total failure, and even if it is entirely comprehensible as a product of the times and circumstances in which it was devised, it is now exhausted. Yet more of the familiar kinds of innovation would take yet more time, energy and belief, all in short supply. Even small improvements in teacher pay, conditions and career structures are expensive; big ones, for more than a quarter of a million teachers, most in the direct or indirect employ of governments strapped for cash, are prohibitive. Further reductions in class sizes, the central plank of the entire platform, cannot be justified or afforded. So, what now?

MANY hopes have been invested in Gonski, but Gonski’s reforms, even if fully implemented, will be but distant thunder for the nearly four million inhabitants of the classroom. Gonski will make much possible, but guarantee nothing. The danger is that in fifty years’ time Gonski will be seen to have been the last spasm of big spending on yet more teachers and yet smaller classes. That won’t be because that’s where Gonski wants the money to go; it will be because, down there in the states and the systems, it is where the minds of teacher organisations and teacher employers habitually go – and because the cat’s cradle of regulation of class sizes and teacher working conditions they’ve created between them over the past fifty years will make it too hard to do anything else.

An alternative, recently arrived in the political arena, is not more teachers but better ones, the “teacher quality” solution. If we set aside the condescension of the phrase, the fact that it has all been heard before, and the fact that the teacher quality agenda is being used by the federal Coalition to excuse its rejection of Gonski, there is an important underlying truth: highly effective teachers can move students along at two or three times the typical rate. But there is another truth, usually ignored by those pushing the “quality” barrow: highly effective teaching is hard to do, hard to learn, and hard to find. It is exceptional. The proposition that we can make classroom maestros the rule rather than the exception by tinkering with pay structures, teacher education, bonus schemes and the like is implausible. It is also misdirected. Surely there is something fundamentally wrong with a unit that functions well only in the hands of a maestro? And therefore something wrong with reforms that leave unchanged the “organisational facts of life” to which teachers adapt?

A third option has not yet found its way into public debate but is increasingly heard in professional forums, the idea of “personalised” learning. It’s an ungainly term for exactly the thing that I was unable to do for Frank Gagliado or his thirty-nine classmates, and the thing that teachers have found hard to do ever since: organise the day so that each student is working on a task not too hard, not too easy, just right.

Advocates of personalised learning argue that the kind of preparation, organisation and rapid-fire decision-making that have until now been the prerogative of a handful of classroom maestros can be made common by combining standards- or outcomes-based curriculum with new, powerful, affordable, mobile, ubiquitous information and communications technologies.

Schools have been fiddling with computers for decades, but they have gone the way of most innovations, pushed to the margins of the dominant classroom order. The advocates of personalisation believe that this is about to change. They can point to a good deal of instructional software that helps students learn at their own pace in a thoroughly engaging and productive way, but also argue that the big gains will come from the management of learning as well as its conduct. “Expert systems” will be able to assess where each student is up to in each area of learning, figure out the best next step, summon up ways and means of taking it, and monitor progress towards clearly defined and amply illustrated objectives.

The hope is that expert systems will open up the private world of the classroom and make possible a different allocation of the labour of learning. Students, both individually and in varying combinations, will be able to take over from teachers some management of the teaching and learning process, as will other adults including parents, support staff, and trainee and intern teachers. Teachers will spend more time in expert diagnosis, prescription, planning and supervision.

The idea of personalised learning is but one short step away from exposing an assumption of schooling constructed over centuries and codified by industrial regulation. The assumption is this: students are the clients of the school, and the recipients of the school’s attentions; their learning is the fruit of the labour of the school’s “staff,” the teachers, in much the same way that a patient’s recovery is produced by the work of doctors and nurses. That assumption pervades the minds of all involved in schooling, including researchers of “school effectiveness” and advocates of “teacher quality.” It is expressed in the built world of the classroom, in its daily life, and in the habitual ways teachers and students see and treat each other.

It is a false assumption, right to the very bottom. It is not teachers who produce learning, it is students. Indeed, students are the only people in schools who can produce – or decline to produce – learning. Students are workers. Students, not teachers, are the real workforce of schools.

If we look at students as workers and producers, something otherwise hidden swims into view: the nub of it all is the daily work, the labour process, of students. That is where it goes right, or wrong. Consider, as I have belatedly done, not what I was doing in Grade V in 1964 but what Frank Gagliado was doing. His working day was just as the anthropology of the classroom would lead us to expect: working mostly by himself rather than with others, mostly listening not talking, mostly following instructions rather than figuring out what to do next and how best to do it, mostly having to stop before he’d got the hang of the task and start the next before he knew how to, mostly not really succeeding, often really failing, in his own and his peers’ eyes, all day every day for twelve years. You wouldn’t do that to an adult worker. Why do it to a young one? No wonder Frank had fond memories of art (although even there things went hard for Frank; he took home a soap carving to show his mum and she used it for washing).

What and how much students produce is considerably affected by the quality of supervision, of course, just as for any other group of workers. But the productivity of workers, students included, is shaped also by the way their work is defined, allocated, organised, sequenced, evaluated and rewarded, by “the organisational facts of life.”

The moral of Frank’s story is that the crucial point of leverage – not the only one, and not by itself, but the most generative one – for the next fifty years will not be found in school systems and their funding, or in 9000 schools and their organisation and culture, or in 270,000 teachers and their skills and qualifications, but in the extent to which the daily work, the labour process, of nearly four million learning workers makes each of them as productive as they can possibly be.

There is perhaps one other moral of Frank’s story, less to do with the how of schooling than its what for?. Our lodestar was equal opportunity, a doctrine we inherited and which subsequently became a preoccupation with who does and doesn’t move up the ladder. But all’s not well even when it ends well, as it sometimes does, and as it did for Frank. No one should have to spend so much of their young lives, as he did and so many do, feeling confused and, often enough, diminished, even humiliated: not in Salisbury North, not anywhere. Equal opportunity is not a bad idea, merely an inadequate one, as can be said also of the methods by which it has been pursued. •

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THE Gonski proposals were greeted earlier this year with approval, even acclaim. Reaction to the prime minister’s acceptance of Gonski, by contrast, has ranged from scepticism through cynicism to outright anger and hostility, from the left as well as the right.

Both reactions are skewed. The considerable promise and sheer decency of Gonski’s proposals blinded many to their limitations and deformities, most stemming from government-dictated terms of reference. These deficiencies have been canvassed previously in these pages. In a similar if inverted way, the obvious weaknesses of the plan announced by Julia Gillard earlier in the week have obscured its strengths.

The greatest of these is that the government has at last come up with the bones of a strategy for school reform. It has been the most activist pro-schooling federal government since Whitlam, and the prime minister routinely reels off an impressive tick-list: the My School website and its unprecedented exposure of information about what every school does with its money; billions for disadvantaged schools, literacy and numeracy programs, teacher quality, and computers in schools; the national curriculum; and yet more billions on the recession-resisting BER (Building the Education Revolution) program.

But this is all tactic and no strategy, a fact inadvertently thrown into high relief by the genuinely strategic character of the National Press Club speech. All the headings are there: money, scope, timelines, method, monitoring, and inspiriting rhetoric. But why now, five years after coming into office?

Confronted by the question the prime minister claimed that it’s only now that we’re ready for a full-on strategic assault. “We laid this out piece by piece deliberately,” she said. “I’ve timed the work of David Gonski and his panel deliberately.”

Scepticism at an obvious retrofit is fanned into cynicism by the vagueness of the government’s commitments and its conveniently extended timeframes – two years before any money would flow, eight years before it would be in full flood, thirteen years before it is ready to be judged against its announced goal, the coveted OECD top five.

That vagueness and that timeframe encourage the view that what Gillard is really on about here is electioneering, happy to face the music in the unlikely event of a win in 2013, consoled by the thought that she has forced the opposition into policy commitments that it probably can’t afford either, and cheered by the prospect of hammering an Abbott government for repealing Gonski legislation, as it has promised to do.

Gillard has almost certainly done those calculations, but there is reason to believe that the passion displayed in her National Press Club speech is not confected, and to accept that she really does want to drive big reform and really does believe that she can. Unfortunately, she probably can’t.

THE difficulties lie mainly in what the PM did not say. But first, something that was declared, a modest but potentially consequential shift in orientation and rationale. Gonski’s primary focus was on reducing the gap between the best- and worst-educated Australian students, to be justified by its social benefits. The prime minister, by contrast, focused on closing the gap between our own school system and others, on economic grounds, a win for the Grattan Institute’s Learning from the Best report over Gonski’s priorities.

That might not matter if it weren’t set in numbers, but it is. Indeed the one and only target for the entire effort is to get into the OECD’s top five, as measured by PISA tests of reading, maths and science, by 2025. Given that the job is not just to stop going backwards but to accelerate faster than other systems, the target is probably unattainable, but the point here is that it is also inadequate.

The government should do two things. It should add a second target for numbers and proportion of students in the lowest performance band, estimated by Gonski at half a million current students destined to leave school unable to read and write well enough to negotiate daily life or to get and hold a job. And it should expand both targets to reflect a broader slice of what schools do by deploying as soon as possible tests and assessment procedures now in development.

But the big problems are found not in what has been said or grasped but in what hasn’t. The greatest of these is that by almost any measure productivity in schooling is in freefall. Focused on getting value for additional money, the government seems to have missed the much broader and deeper issue.

The best available calculation is by ANU economists Andrew Leigh (now a Labor federal member) and Chris Ryan. They found that between 1964 and 2003 spending on schooling increased by 258 per cent in real terms, while outcomes, as indicated by available evidence about literacy and numeracy, failed to increase at all, resulting in a productivity decline of 73 per cent. The measures are narrow and inexact, and the air of precision misleading, but the general conclusion is irresistible.

There would be perfectly good reason for working at the problem even if money wasn’t so tight, but in any foreseeable future doing better with whatever is available becomes mandatory. That will include ditching the longstanding strategy of endless reductions in class sizes.

Over the period examined by Leigh and Ryan average class sizes very nearly halved. There is now overwhelming evidence to show that past a certain point, long since reached in Australia, class size reductions are in most circumstances both ineffective and very expensive. The fact now to be faced is that the class-size strategy is exhausted. Costs have been out of all proportion to educational ground gained, and there are other and better ways of using resources.

One such option has been suggested by the Grattan Institute: fewer and larger classes to free up time for teachers to meet, plan, analyse and review, and time for the only kind of teacher development that actually works, rigorous, workplace-based appraisal and collaborative feedback and mentoring.

Another indication of the potential of resource-switching is found in a recent US calculation that an increase in average class sizes by five students would fund across-the-board increases in teacher salaries in excess of 30 per cent. That startling figure can be taken together with another Leigh and Ryan study, which found that higher teacher salaries are strongly linked to higher academic standards of entrants to the profession, and this in turn is associated with greater effectiveness in the classroom.

This is not to argue that either Grattan’s suggestion or the strategy implied by the US calculation is the best way to go. It is to suggest that any candidate for spending on and in schools needs to state its case in terms of both costs and effectiveness, and to show how these compare with alternative strategies and tactics.

A SECOND route to the same objective, more fundamental and generative, but also more difficult, is to rethink the core unit of educational production, the classroom.

We are on the cusp of a revolution in the way the daily work of schooling is done, or could be done anyway, driven by combining outcomes- or standards-based curriculum with low-cost, mobile, powerful and ubiquitous information and communications technologies.

Schools have been fiddling with computers for decades in much the same way that the government has been fiddling with talk about computers. But computers have thus far gone the way of numberless other innovations, absorbed by and pushed to the margins of the dominant order. In other words, they haven’t delivered. But they will, or they will be able to anyway.

There already exists a good deal of software that helps students learn at their own pace in a thoroughly engaging and productive way. But the big gains will come from the management of learning rather than, or as well as, its conduct. “Expert systems” combined with the “soft” curriculum technologies will be able to assess or record assessments of where each student is up to in each area of learning, help figure out the best next step, summon up ways and means of taking it, and monitor progress toward a clearly defined and amply illustrated objective.

Expert systems will open up the private world of the classroom and make possible a different allocation of the labour of learning. Students, both individually and in varying combinations, will be able to take over from teachers some management of the teaching and learning process, as will other adults including parents, support staff, and trainee and intern teachers. Teachers will be able to spend more of their time in expert diagnosis, prescription, planning and supervision. Different staffing structures and career paths would follow.

These emerging possibilities found no place in the prime minister’s account of her revolution-turned-crusade, perhaps because she and her advisers rely so heavily on the so-called “effective schools” research. The effective schools paradigm has done a valuable service in sifting through countless innovations in schooling around the OECD world in recent decades in a successful search for “what works.” But “what works” is actually “what has worked,” in the past. The assumption is that the future of schooling will be continuous with its past.

Moreover, the focus is on what schools and teachers do, which betrays an assumption that what students do is an extension and consequence of the work of the organisation and its staff. Student learning is unconsciously seen much in the way of a patient’s recovery after a stay in hospital, an outcome of the labour of doctors and nurses.

But that is not what happens in schooling at all. Students are workers and producers, indeed the only workers in schools who can produce learning, or decline to. The kinds and amounts of learning they produce are shaped by the quality of supervision, of course, but also by the way their daily work is organised, sequenced, evaluated and rewarded, as for any other group of workers. Improved productivity will be found in attending to all these variables, not just the quality of supervision (as implied by the “teacher quality” agenda), or the character of its context.

Intriguingly, poignantly even, Julie Gillard’s instincts are leading her in exactly this direction even while her announced policies point elsewhere. The very last question from the National Press Club audience went to issues of expenditure, including capital expenditure. The prime minister gave a very long answer, and it took her a long and interesting way from her starting point. She eventually arrived at the following passage.

“[I]f I had a great deal of time,” she told the questioner, “I could ensure that apart from weekends you did not go home between now and Christmas as you went around the country, school after school after school, where you could see how that capital is making a difference to the way they teach kids. Multi-purpose areas, teachers don’t want to teach anymore in 1950s-style classrooms – door closed, kids in rows, one teacher. The capital forces a lot of that teaching style, where what people want now is flexible spaces, get kids over here doing the work that matters for their personalised learning, team teach – have a coach over there sitting with the young boy who’s falling behind, running his fingers over the words, spelling out the letters… Kids don’t want to sit there with a coloured book which has got a photo of someone else doing the experiment. They want to be hands-on in a modern lab doing the experiment themselves, learning from doing it, doing all the little things we want scientists to do. Generate the hypothesis, test the hypothesis…”

The prime minister is quite right to say that different and better ways to go about teaching and learning wait on changes in capital spending and the built environment of schools, but that’s not the half of it. The big barriers to the kind of learning she is groping for lie in the regulation of every aspect of the daily work of students and staff, enshrined in industrial agreements, enforced by vigilant union patrols. The spending strategy of the last fifty years has entrenched the dominance of a single unit of production: one class of a fixed maximum size, one rectangular classroom, one bite-sized forty-minute burst of production after another, one fairly standard-issue adult doing her or his best to make it all function.

These realities have gone entirely unnoticed, so far as I am aware, in any of the government’s policies and programs up to and including the proposal to spend another $6.5 billion on top of the $40 billion-plus already spent each year on schools.

To put the point more bluntly: the Australian Education Union has secured a bonanza, or the prospect of one, in exchange for not a single concession. Unaddressed, this will lead not to the kind of labour process for students so attractive to the prime minister, or to the kinds of top-gun teachers she wants, or to the kinds of rewards unions want, but to yet more teachers on all-too-familiar terms and conditions in front of yet-smaller and unproductive classes.

ONE last absence from the prime minister’s strategy: the machinery of reform. Julia Gillard is perfectly correct to say as she did on Monday that investment in education has to be a patient investment, and to add – as she did in a subsequent address to a conference of mining executives – that school reform demands the kind of lead times with which miners are familiar.

The trouble is that there is no room for patience in the machinery of governance. Many commentators have pointed out that 2025 is four elections away. In fact it’s much worse that that. There will be more than thirty elections between now and then because all nine Australian governments have a finger in the pie. There are, moreover, three sectors and their lobby groups, no love lost, and no less than twenty-three separate schooling jurisdictions.

The chances of an appropriately broad and extended strategy of the kind sketched by the prime minister surviving that ant’s nest are zero. Some readers will recall the even grander Karmel/Whitlam plans, announced and under way in 1973, scaled back in the astringent Hayden budget of 1975, scaled back again by the incoming Coalition government, and finally put out of their misery in the mid 1980s by the first Labor government to follow Whitlam.

One of the larger gaps in the prime minister’s strategy of reform is reform of the machinery of reform itself. Gonski proposed a significant step in the right direction, his “national school resourcing body.” It wasn’t even mentioned in the prime minister’s response. •

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IS IT possible to have mixed feelings about Gonski? Copious debate, commentary and criticism since the report’s release in February have served only to show what a good idea it is: good for educational equity, good for getting schools to focus on the core business of outcomes, and good for disentangling at least some of the world-class mess that is Australia’s school funding machinery.

Anyone with half a brain and half a heart gives a Gonski. As NSW (Liberal) premier Barry O’Farrell is reported to have said, “I think it would be disappointing if the opportunity that Gonski has presented wasn’t accepted… [I]t’s a formula that benefits both public education and non-government education… that we would dismiss at our own peril.”

And if further proof were required, Christopher Pyne doesn’t like it. Last week Pyne announced not just that the Coalition would oppose Gonski (no surprise in that) but also that an Abbott government would repeal any legislation giving effect to it.

So, to be clear: if Gonski doesn’t get up, as seems likely, its failure will represent the most grievous policy defeat of Labor’s two terms in government, not just because of what it would have done but because of what it would have made possible. Gonski is a big reform, and a platform for further reform.

But there are issues, three argued previously, a fourth not.

FIRST, there is no guarantee that Gonski’s recommended $6.5 billion (up from an initial estimate of around $5 billion) will end up in the schools doing the hard yards, as intended. Federal governments have turned this way and that for fifty years to get state systems and the non-government schools to do their bidding, trying the grand institution of Whitlam’s Schools Commission, locking up money in targeted (“special purpose”) programs and, more recently, sealing deals with charters, compacts, agreements and the like. None really works. Federal cabinet is reported to be worried that the money will disappear without trace, and so it should be.

Second, Gonski can provide a floor to funding but not a ceiling. The high-fee schools will take Gonski money then spend more to keep a safe distance between the best and the rest, and in the process they will sustain the “residualisation” dynamic that inexorably makes the educationally rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Third, Gonski proposes a fairer distribution of funds across the sectors, but that would still leave us with a system divided into three sectors and hence the most marketised school system in the OECD world.

The fourth observation begins with a galling concession. Christopher Pyne is not altogether wrong. In a series of media appearances and statements aimed at preparing the ground for rejecting Gonski, Pyne accused Labor of conducting “a masterclass in wasteful spending,” and argued that the most wasteful spend of all is on reducing class sizes.

In this Pyne is drawing on Catching Up: Learning from the Best School Systems in East Asia, a report released by the Grattan Institute to coincide with Gonski. Pyne quotes Grattan to claim that “the evidence overwhelmingly shows that investing in teacher effectiveness rather than the number of teachers is the most successful method of improving student learning and creating top performing education systems.”

Pyne is very nearly correct, and the fact that he uses this argument as a figleaf to cover his preference for the present funding arrangements – starkly exposed by Gonski as chaotic, ineffective and inequitable – should not get in the way of acknowledging that teacher numbers are adequate, at the very least.

A small mountain of research from around the world as well as in Australia makes it absolutely clear that past a certain point more teachers for fewer students per class just will not make any significant educational difference, and that point has long since been reached in Australia. Countless billions of new dollars have been poured into ever-smaller classes with precious little educational payoff. One recent study estimated that the campaign to reduce class sizes is the greatest single source of a 258 per cent increase in real per-student expenditure between 1964 and 2003 and of an associated decline in productivity of Australian schooling over that period of around 70 per cent. The precision may be misleading but the conclusions are not.

Perhaps more importantly, and more encouragingly, research also demonstrates that other kinds of spending yield much more bang for the buck. In other words, the real cost of reductions in class sizes is in the opportunity cost.

If schools do get Gonski money, and if they have any control over how it is spent, hiring more teachers will always be an option, but one to be weighed for cost as well as effectiveness against a host of other strategies, some touted by Pyne, some not. These include better pay, career and study prospects for capable teachers willing to work in disadvantaged schools, peer and cross-age tutoring, “right-sized” class groups varied according to the task at hand, technology-based learning programs, rigorous in-school teacher appraisal, mentoring and development, and technology-based student performance monitoring and analysis capacities in schools.

There will be many in the legion of Gonski supporters who find such approaches hard to stomach. But they should remember that these and other prescriptions are neither new nor intrinsically right/left, Coalition/Labor. Thinking of this kind sponsored a sizeable “school restructuring” movement in the United States and Australia during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The former emerged from inside the teacher union movement, while the latter was taken up by a Labor government.

In 1991 federal education minister John Dawkins set up a National Schools Project underwritten by the “award restructuring” process. Dawkins tried to encourage schools and systems to experiment with more flexible ways of combining time, space, people and money so as to deal more effectively with different kinds of students and educational tasks.

The project was killed off by the teacher organisations, aided and abetted by complaisant system authorities. The unions took “flexibility” as a threat to a “class size” strategy that defined teacher workloads in terms of numbers of periods spent per week in front of classes of a fixed maximum size.

That this strategy served to lumber schools with just one of many ways of doing educational work – one class, one classroom, one teacher, one lesson - and left teachers stuck with low salaries and flat career paths, did not come into the unions’ calculations. I must disclose that I was an early advocate of school restructuring, and led a consulting team in the only Australian attempt to operationalise it, in Western Australia in 1988. We were trounced.

But things are different now. Money is hard to find and getting harder; there will be no more free lunches. The class size strategy is discredited by research that also pinpoints much more effective ways of turning money into learning. New technology-based approaches to the work of both students and teachers are on the way. Each school’s success or failure in lifting student performance is becoming a matter of public record, and even the reluctant and the resentful will want more control over how they do what is required of them. The danger is that teacher organisations and others rightly supportive of Gonski will deny these new and emerging realities because Pyne is using them in bad faith.

Of many conclusions that could be drawn from this construction of events, two should be emphasised.

First, Gonski as proposed, with so few conditions attached, is a threshold reform. The risk is that the federal government will stump up very large sums but get little from systems and nothing from teacher organisations in return, thereby denying Gonski the teeth that his reforms require. In the absence of conditions before the event, strenuous efforts to retrofit better tracking of spending and to encourage much smarter use of money would be both essential and urgent.

Second, it would be difficult to find an episode that more starkly displays the fact that a federal system working in tandem with close party-political involvement in decision-making about schooling is utterly dysfunctional. One important but currently neglected reason for supporting Gonski is that the funding mechanism he proposes would represent an important first step toward the necessary substantial reform of the machinery of reform. •

• The best single source of evidence about the relative effectiveness of class size reductions and many other educational strategies is John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (2009). Details of the National Schools Project and its fate are provided in Max Angus and William Louden, “Systemic Reform in a Federal System: the National Schools Project,” in Michael Fullan (ed), Fundamental Change, 2005. A survey of the restructuring movement in the United States and Australia can be found in my “Professionalism of Teaching in the Next Decade: A Report of Discussions by US and Australian Educators, October 1990,” published by the University of Wollongong with the assistance of the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training, copies available on request.

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Santich records many efforts since the mid-nineteenth century to define the National Dish, and how the candidates for that honour have changed with the times. Our real gastronomic distinctiveness, she concludes, lies not in pavlova, Vegemite, lamb chops, Anzac biscuits or any other dish or dishes but in our “enthusiasm for new foods, our readiness to adapt, improvise and reinvent.” She insists that we’ve never had a single cuisine, much less a monotonously British one as is so often assumed, and we certainly didn’t wait for the postwar immigrants to bring variety of food type, origin and flavour into our diet.

I know from my own experience that this is true, up to a point. I was the beneficiary of a cuisine my mother got from her mother and grandmother, extending well back into the nineteenth century. It was rich in offal (including liver, brains, tongue, tripe and kidneys), pungent sauces, pickles, relishes and chutneys, a cheddar so magnificently matured that it could compete on equal terms with heavily spiced pickled onions, jams and beautifully preserved fruits, and an array of sweets, cakes and biscuits that even Brunetti’s would struggle to match.

And then there was bush tucker, both native and introduced. My father and his brothers and cousins learned as boys to trap yabbies and crayfish, shoot rabbit, hare, scrub turkey and duck, and fish for river callop and Murray cod as well as whiting, bream, tommy ruff, snapper and many other fish of the ocean. Earlier generations ranged even more widely, Santich points out, because they could and because they had to. Pigeon, flying fox, bandicoot, echidna, wombat and many others fell in the cause of (often unsuccessful) culinary experiment.

Although Santich marshals some intriguing menus, advertisements, lists of imported goods and the like, these don’t suggest the degree of cosmopolitanism and feverish innovation now so widely enjoyed. I went to university at about the time this revolution was getting under way, and soon became conscious that in leaving home I was also leaving one gastronomic universe for another. My hunch is that if we have always had bold palates, they’re a lot bolder now than ever before.

It would have been interesting to have all this set in a context of the subsequent fast- and prepared-food revolution – or counter-revolution? – noted rather than integrated into Santich’s overall picture. I wonder, too, how far “enthusiasm for new foods, our readiness to adapt, improvise and reinvent” marks off Australia’s gastronomic heritage from that of other so-called settler societies, particularly the United States.

The story of Bold Palates is told as much through reproductions of photographs, paintings, letters, diaries, advertisements and the like as through the text itself. There is much enjoyment to be had in browsing though this wealth of material, even if it is displayed in a rather self-consciously retro layout. But the profusion of illustration also gets in the way of a good read, as does the organisation of the book around themes and topics – “bush tucker,” “land of picnics,” “chops rampant,” “land of cakes” and so on. Each of these contains a narrative, but they combine to form a collection more than an integrated history. Santich’s muse is food rather than history. •

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IF RECENT and widely publicised comparisons of Australian schools’ performance are the canary, then something is seriously wrong deep in the mine. It is not just that the gaps – between the performance of different kinds of Australian schools and students, or between them and their counterparts in other Western countries, or between our schools and schools not too far to the north – are all growing. The real frightener is that our schools were probably doing better a decade ago. Our best hope is that we are going nowhere. It is likely that we’re going backwards.

That is one kind of problem. The other is: how to fix it? Australian schooling has been the focus of substantial efforts at reform for the entire lifetime of anyone currently working in the system, and a great deal has been achieved. Australian schools are a lot better than they were during the overcrowding and funding crises of the 1950s and 1960s, as a glance over the shoulder of baby-boomers like me will show. The sixty-three kids in my Grade V class were kept in line with a yardstick wielded by a returned soldier missing three fingers on the left hand. He was right-handed, unfortunately. And Australian schools could be a lot worse, as a glance at any OECD international comparison will testify. In the most recent study Australian schools performed better than those of the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, for example, and much better than those of the United States and Britain. And despite disturbing inequalities in the Australian performance, inequality is even more marked in countries such as Switzerland, Germany, the United States and Britain. But it nevertheless seems likely that despite unceasing efforts at all levels, and despite substantial increases in national and personal incomes, schools have not been generating better, and better-distributed, learning. Australia is one of only four school systems in thirty-four OECD countries in which measured performance in reading and maths has declined.

These troubling developments are documented in three recent reports that between them stimulated a short-lived media feeding frenzy: Catching Up: Learning from the Best School Systems in East Asia, prepared by a Melbourne think-tank, the Grattan Institute; the report of the federal government’s review of funding for schools chaired by David Gonski; and one of Gonski’s commissioned papers, Schooling Challenges and Opportunities, written by a consortium led by the consulting firm Nous Group. Together, they have made possible a discussion about the big picture of schooling, and whether and how it could or should be changed.

All three reports rely on the most recent results of the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests in reading, numeracy and science literacy among fifteen-year-olds in OECD school systems. Gonski also uses data from NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy), which takes in several age groups and subject areas, but does not include science, and TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study). These data are limited in important ways. Only some aspects of less than half of the curriculum are measured. The tests reveal more about the acquisition of specific skills and knowledge than about more diffuse study and learning skills, creativity, social skills and so on, areas in which Australian schools like to think that they shine. But the PISA tests are fair-to-average-quality canaries. They sound the alert. For confirmation we must look for evidence elsewhere, ranging from dozens of academic studies and the substantial data sets generated within each of the state systems to the feeling you get when you walk through the school gate. That evidence tends to corroborate rather than contest findings of the PISA, TIMMS and NAPLAN kind. There can be little doubt that Australian schools are not performing as well as they should, or need to, or could.

The Grattan Institute runs a very particular line about how to fix our schools, drawing less attention to the specifics of Australia’s performance than to the startling gains made by schools in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and Korea. Gonski’s findings, informed by the Nous report, are less flamboyant, more comprehensive, and more troubling. Both Gonski and Nous note that the fall in scores runs across the spectrum from the best-performing to the worst; that the distance between the best and the worst Australian schools is high; and that the proportion of students clustered toward the bottom is high, as is the proportion of that group who have not even reached the basic minimum of knowledge to function in society. The further we drill down into these sobering facts the worse they look. A relatively high proportion of underperforming students comprises the same old faces: the children of poor, remote, Aboriginal and some non-English-speaking families, and children with disabilities. And they can be found in the same old places: government schools mostly, in poor and/or remote or rural areas.

Perhaps worst, and most suggestive of problems in the whole system, is that students with the lowest attainments are highly concentrated in “disadvantaged” schools, and that the educational penalties of being there are higher than in any other comparable OECD country except the Netherlands. The only areas of clear improvement over the past decade or so are in the proportion of young people completing Year 12 or its equivalent and in Indigenous participation and performance, but the gain in the former has been in “equivalents,” and improvement in the latter is from a very low base.

Gonski refers only obliquely to an aspect of schooling that is, particularly to parents and to students themselves, as important as “outcomes” of the kind reported by standardised tests: the character and quality of an experience which stretches over quite a few of the most formative years of just about every Australian life. Gonski does note that students who do badly at school often leave school early and disaffected, and that they often go to schools where many other students also leave school early and disaffected. It is a hint that the patterning of differences in the school experience is likely to mirror the patterning of outcomes.

No single element of a complex ecology can be pinpointed as the source of either the problem or the solution. The Grattan report, lucid, focused and, to borrow a phrase, suffused with an insufferable air of adequacy, says that all we need to do is go to Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, borrow and implement the gestalt of their methods – without attempting to simply transplant it, of course – and soon we’ll be taking a leap forward as great as theirs. Gonski’s much more thoughtful proposals are threefold: for schools to be funded according to the size of the educational task set for them; for the task to be defined as improving educational outcomes, particularly among the worst-performing schools and social groups; and for the schools’ efforts in this direction to be guided by a growing body of evidence about “what works” generated by research into “effective schools.”

The boldest program is outlined by the Nous consortium. What is needed, it argues, is not a host of new ideas and policies but a comprehensive, integrated and sustainable pursuit of what is already known to work. To this strategy the Nous group attaches a number of well-designed suggestions about tactics, and particularly a focus on the very long “tail” of low-performing students concentrated in low-performance schools.

None of these proposals, from Grattan, from Gonski or from Nous, is wrong. But all except those from Nous are, to different degrees, incomplete, urging change in some areas while leaving others untouched. And all, including Nous, fail to say how their proposals will find a way down to the classroom floor. Nor does the following. But it does attempt an essential first step: understanding where both the problem, and elements of a solution, came from.

A big problem, a big solution

Problems in the control of schooling began in the early 1950s, with the erosion of the majestic state departments of education. Creatures of the exuberant egalitarian and sectarian settlement of the 1880s (schooling would be free, compulsory and secular, unless you were a Catholic or a toff), the departments aimed to deliver equality of opportunity through uniformity. And, relatively speaking, they did. The departments controlled everything: the training and employment of teachers; syllabuses and textbooks; allocation of classroom time to subjects; end-of-primary-school examinations. Their most powerful instrument was the inspectorate. The district inspector ensured compliance, disseminated instructions and innov­ations, and connected the high command with the troops in the field.

But the greatest strength of these systems lay in faith. Teachers regarded themselves as belonging to The Service. There was romance in their task of bringing the three Rs to every child, no matter what their circumstances, often over vast distances and against great physical and psychological adversity. The task was clear, worthwhile and doable. Life in the service was not meant to be easy, and The Department could be capricious, unfeeling and oppressive, but it looked after its own. Teachers had secure employment and a good living wage, which counted for a great deal in the first half of the twentieth century; but more, they believed in what they were doing, in themselves, and in the department.

The departments began to lose all this soon after the end of the second world war, at first almost imperceptibly, then in a rush that quickly brought some of them close to disarray. The problems began down in the foundations of the great pyramid of schooling, the classroom. Baby-boomers flooded into the schools and, worse, we stayed, and stayed. The classrooms bulged, and teachers, particularly in the secondary schools, found that the familiar subject matter failed to “engage” and that “discipline” failed to produce order. It was obvious to teachers that the departments would have to provide smaller classes, more teachers, and more “professional” working conditions.

This the departments were unable to do. Thanks to the transfer of state taxation powers to the Commonwealth in 1942, state treasuries had more money going out than coming in. Problems in the Catholic parish schools, containing then about one in six students, were even more dramatic. Coinciding with rising numbers coming to and staying in the schools was a rapid fall in the number of low-cost nuns, brothers and priests available to staff the schools. Class sizes were astronomical, and the schools deeply impoverished.

Unable to pay their way out of trouble and unable to avoid change in their long-established and highly successful modus operandi, the departments cast about for reforms that would still leave them in charge. Each has its own story to tell, with different patterns of discontent, of change, and of resistance to change leading to different end results – an unusually decentralised system in Victoria, a still determinedly centralised one in New South Wales, for example. But in the general upshot, more was ditched than taken on board. The departments lost the loyalty of teachers to unions, lost control of teacher training to the universities, lost curriculum and assessment to independent boards and agencies, and lost the inspectorate altogether. The department was no longer embodied in Head Office, but diffused across the state in “regions,” thus increasing from two to three the number of layers in the system (increased again from three to four as the federal government arrived on the scene at about the same time).

By the late 1960s the departments as mighty forces of progress and order were finished, beached whales stranded between the old top-down, person-to-person directives and the new idea of specifying what is to be achieved then allocating resources and responsibilities, sanctions and rewards, accordingly. Around them gathered flocks of hungry agencies, authorities and organisations.

These developments produced in the space of only twenty years or so the Whitlam revolution of 1973, laid out by the economist Peter Karmel in his report, Schools in Australia. The big problem was money, and the federal government would be the big solution. Bounty from the beneficiary of vertical fiscal imbalance gushed into the Catholic schools and flowed to the state systems. Since the bishops wanted to lock in public funding as a right not a privilege, Whitlam agreed that the second, tiny component of the non-government sector, the high-fee independents, should get some money too. Suddenly the ancient taboo on “state aid” to church schools, dating back to the egalitarian and sectarian settlement of the 1880s, seemed obsolete. Everyone was in the money. Class sizes tumbled, teacher salaries rose, new schools were built.

Paradoxes of public policy

A sweeping solution that turned largely on funding, however, soon produced new problems in just that domain. It was obvious that more money means smaller classes and better-paid and better-trained teachers, and therefore better education. The corollary was also obvious: we must spend as much as we can afford and/or as much as the most generous of comparable societies, as measured by proportion of GDP.

What began as a manifest necessity became an unsustainable dogma. One source of the problem lay in teacher salaries. As the American economist William Baumol pointed out more than forty years ago, salaries rise not because teachers are becoming more productive but because their employers are forced to compete in the labour market with industries in which workers are becoming more productive. Driving this cost escalator even faster was the push for smaller and smaller classes, a strategy which didn’t take long to run into the law of diminishing returns. Costs rose much more quickly than educational gains. These irresistible forces soon hit an immovable object. Suddenly, the federal budget was in trouble. The halcyon days of 1973 turned into the Hayden austerity budget of 1975. The struggle between opposing pressures has continued ever since, but the power of resistance is now acquiring a new ally. The baby-boomers who demanded more education are now demanding more aged care. Policies developed by a young society are unsustainable in an old one. And now, as then, baby-boomers have the numbers.

The problem of funding lies in quality as well as quantity. Prescribing class sizes and contact hours had the effect of locking into place one of many possible groupings of students and teachers, the one that was, in spite of its emerging difficulties, still taken for granted when the “class size” strategy was constructed. This turned one of many possible ways of combining what might be thought of as the factors of production – time, effort, skill and space – into the only way, for just about all kinds of schools and schooling. And it stigmatised other approaches, usually developed by teachers in low-status schools where traditional methods just didn’t work.

Locking up class sizes and teacher contact hours also locked up budgets. Just about every dollar in just about every school-system budget, capital and recurrent, is spoken for. That leaves the states in no position to drive reform, whether it’s integrated, sustainable and comprehensive or otherwise. Indeed, locking up the budget was the joint work of those nominal adversaries, teacher unions on one side and employers of teachers on the other. The unions wanted to protect the money from fickle governments, and the departments wanted to protect it from competitors in other portfolios.

All of this – a single way of organising educational work, locked-up budgets, and the puny grip of “policy” on both – is underwritten by industrial agreements which are in turn supported by the widespread belief among teachers that this is where their personal and professional interests lie. These arrangements in fact work in the opposite direction, becoming instruments of a salary structure that plateaus early and low, career structures defined more by seniority than capacity and responsibilities, low social status, and a job that for too many soon looks like a step on the way to somewhere else.

Karmel’s solution brought with it a second cluster of funding difficulties. His scheme dictated that funding for Australian schools would come from three different sources and go in three different mixes to three different categories of school. In two of these categories large numbers of parents would pay significant amounts of money towards the cost of their children’s schooling, while in the third even larger numbers would pay very little or nothing at all. Yet all three sectors, and therefore all three groups of parents, are in receipt of funding from governments, both federal and state. This arrangement is without parallel anywhere in the OECD.

One criticism of this scheme of things is that it is unfair. Many of those now paying fees can’t really afford to, while many of those who don’t, can. School funding is a de facto taxation system, simultaneously progressive and regressive. It taxes some of those who can afford to be taxed but not others, while at the other end of the scale it picks and chooses from among those with modest incomes, taxing some, exempting others. At the upper end fees run to more than $10,000 a year for a primary school student and $15,000 or more for a secondary, so that a family with three children in high-fee schools would be up for a total of around half a million dollars in present-day values. From that family’s point of view their government-school neighbours are getting a very substantial subsidy from the public purse. The other side of this coin is that a sizeable minority of families, perhaps one in four or five, most in “disadvantaged” government schools, get nowhere near enough support for their children’s schooling, even though they can’t afford now-commonplace educational experiences such as school camps and excursions, computing, extra tuition, and classes in music, sport, dance and the like. Whichever side of the coin we look at, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that schooling should get out of the taxation business or get into it on a more considered basis.

Another ground of concern is more consequential. An unintended effect of providing public support to three sectors, two of them outside public control, is that both schools and school sectors feel that they must compete, either from ambition or in self-defence. Forty years on, Australia has what may be the most marketised of the thirty-four schooling systems surveyed by the OECD. School principals in these systems were asked how many schools they competed with. In Norway 20 per cent said that they competed with two or more schools. In Finland the figure was 44 per cent. In Australia, no less than 90 per cent of schools compete with two or more other schools, by far the highest proportion in any OECD country.

In theory, that might seem to be a good thing, but in practice it is not. Steadily accelerating and extending its reach over forty years, this dynamic is often referred to as “residualisation,” a term which betrays its origins in the defence of the victims of the process, the government schools. It draws attention to the fact, compellingly documented by the Nous group, that on a playing field which is anything but level, government schools in low socioeconomic status areas lose the students whose parents can afford to change schools. Students left behind are thus deprived of the beneficial presence of students from more affluent homes, while the schools themselves find it harder to attract or hold experienced leaders and teachers, which makes them even less attractive, which causes them to lose more students and resources, and so on down the spiral. And spiral it has been. When Karmel reported, 78 per cent of all students were in government schools, up from 76 per cent a decade before. Now the figure is 63 per cent, and still falling. In the past decade 223 government schools have disappeared as twelve new Catholic and seventy-nine new independent schools have been established. In just the past five years government school enrolments have risen by 2 per cent, Catholic by 6 per cent, independent by 14 per cent.

But as the Nous study points out, the term “residualisation” glosses over the fact that the process goes on within the government sector as well as between it and the two non-government sectors. This unpleasant reality is most visible in New South Wales, the largest of the government systems, in dozens of schools with selective entry to some subject areas and twenty-odd entirely selective high schools which function as publicly funded private schools, all sucking students, prestige, academic success and viability out of hundreds of “comprehensive” confrères who are supposed to take pride in the distant flagships of their motley fleet.

The same kind of thing happens in other ways in other states. The relaxation of the old zoning regulations in the interests of “choice and diversity” has combined with “devolution” and “school autonomy” in matters of self-presentation, marketing and de facto student selection to produce a stratification, particularly in secondary schools, not all that different from the NSW case. Government schools are, of course, unavoidably the beneficiaries or victims of the social geography of sprawling suburban conurbations, and of steadily increasing income inequality. But judged by the kind and quality of educational experience and attainments delivered to their students (and, we should add, their teachers), the government systems have swum with rather than against the social tides.

As well as disguising the inner workings of the government systems, the term “residualisation” has drawn more attention to what has been going on at the bottom than at the top, where a tiny number of independent schools have taken the money from both state and federal governments and commenced spending, serious spending, so as to put themselves in a class of their own. They and most of the parents who patronise them see this in a different light: as a matter of excellence (the school view) or of the right to choose to give children the best possible start in life (the parent view). Leaving to one side other motives, usually left unstated but often to do with social aspiration and racial preference, few parents realise the extent to which a choice they make for their own children is also a choice for everyone else’s children.

A detailed analysis by the Nous group demonstrates that the “value-add” of independent schools, taken as a group, is no greater than that of government and Catholic systemic schools except in the degree to which value is added to each student by the educational “capital” that other students bring with them from home to school. The inverse of the rule applies at the other end of the scale, with the opposite effect. What is striking, Nous concludes, is “the strong correlation between the performance of a child and the average SES [socioeconomic status] of all the other students that attend his or her school.” Also striking, both Nous and Gonski note, is the unusual combination in Australia of a high concentration of high SES students with high, and low with low, and the combination of a high proportion of schools that produce very good results with a high proportion that produce very poor results.

Almost as depressing is the fact that attempts at justifying these arrangements are often made by those who suffer most from them, and in terms that compound the problem. The reasoning employed is clear, simple and seductive. Public schools provide for all. Those who want to opt out must accept the cost of leaving the commonweal. This rationale stems, of course, from the “free, compulsory and secular” settlement of the 1880s. It was always a disingenuous formulation, but its shaky foundation has now entirely disappeared. A hundred years ago a public school was “normal” and those who went elsewhere had indeed “opted out.” But that was when few went to or stayed long at secondary school, and before Karmel made opting out an option for the many, not just the few. Now people don’t opt out, they “choose.” Public schools, now merely “government” schools, are just one option among several. Worse, they’re the least desired option. Far from being the norm, they’re a fallback.

Those who once could stand plausibly on the anti–State Aid platform of free, compulsory and secular are now merely the defenders of government schools, firmly wedged in a cleft stick. They want government schools (which they still like to call “public” schools) to be seen as “great schools,” and put signs on the school fence to say so. But in other forums they have to point out that government schools are being dudded, driven down by “residualisation.” Parents pick up on the mixed messages, of course, and do what they feel they must, under a pressure so strong that sending your children to a government school is now tantamount to neglect. Individual solutions reinforce the collective problem.

Parents can hardly be blamed for seeing how the system works and then using whatever resources they can assemble to do what they think is best for their children. Nor can parents who can’t afford to avoid the circumstances handed out to their child-ren be blamed if they feel abandoned. The net effect has been to steadily and with glacial power stretch the distance between the most and the least effective schools. The system puts prestige and the most productive educational settings where they are least needed and takes them from those in greatest need. Operating more as a centrifuge than a precipitant, it flings more and more to the bottom and more and more to the top, so that in several of the big cities sizeable areas have no government secondary school or, at the other end of the scale, no independent secondary schools.

Less than twenty years after the Karmel reforms one of their architects looked back in dismay at what had been wrought. “We created a situation unique in the dem­ocratic world,” Jean Blackburn pointed out in 1991. “It is very important to realise this. There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no public education accountability, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level... We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, ‘What an extraordinary situation.’”

There is no one villain of this piece. Teacher organisations have been advocates for one sector rather than opponents of the whole system. Catholic bishops since Whitlam’s time have insisted on public subsidies for avowedly “elite” or “exclusive” schools in pursuit of a guarantee, the private “right” to public funding. These “elite” schools and their clienteles have engaged in vigorous class formation and warfare, consolidating dominant groups in their schools, dividing them further from others, and consolidating an underclass in other schools. Governments at both levels and of both stripes have adopted policies that by omission and commission have supported and entrenched an educationally and socially counterproductive organisation of a major public institution. The blame could be chased all the way back to the 1880s and no doubt well beyond that. But the point is: how many more generations has this scheme of things got left to run?

A leaderless, politicised group

If one face of “residualisation” is seen in its educational consequences, the other shows in a structure that entrenches and defends itself. Before Karmel, the structure of schooling was simple: there were six silos (or eight if you count the territories), each more or less like the others, each a law unto itself. It is true that each of the silos contained three layers – the government, the Catholic and the private schools – but each layer was clearly defined. They had little to do with each other. The government schools, by far the biggest layer, were free. Both the Catholic parish schools and the wafer-thin crust of private schools depended entirely on fees (very low in the former, very high in the latter) and contributed services for their survival.

Karmel changed all that. From that moment the biggest spender on schools controlled no schools at all, while the six state governments that did control schools were no longer self-reliant and could no longer please themselves about how resources were spent. Roles and responsibilities in the non-government sector became blurrier still, pitting long-established prerogatives against the requirements of both state and federal governments. The silos now looked more like a Rubik’s cube – a total of eight states and territories, each with three sectors, a total of twenty-four components – except that the image suggests neatness and order in what more closely resembled a field of ants’ nests, each surrounded by swarming interest groups representing parents, churches and teacher organisations, joined in the struggle for federal spoils by the eight state and territory governments.

Whitlam’s boast was that by solving the State Aid problem he took schooling out of the political arena. The reverse is the case. The Karmel–Whitlam arrangements pushed more and more aspects of schooling into the decision-making arenas of nine governments, each on its own electoral timetable, all prey to lobbies, campaigns, and displaced sectarianism and class warfare.

These fractures and conflicts interacted with others precipitated by the collapse of the old departments and the loss of their functions to newly established curriculum and assessment agencies, universities and teacher organisations. The upshot is a complex and entirely leaderless group, a tangle of bodies and agencies of every description, religious and secular, state and federal, bureaucratic and communitarian, elected and appointed, large and miniscule, each with little capacity to make anything happen but with the collective effect of preventing anything happening quickly or effectively or at all. Behind a thicket of blinds and hides exists a little corruption and malpractice but a deal of waste, inertia, territorial skirmishing, obfuscation, and evasion of the central responsibility of improving the amount of quality learning and demonstrating that that has been achieved.

The problem was in its infancy in Karmel’s day, but already sufficiently clear in prospect to cause him to recommend that Whitlam establish the Schools Commission to provide a centre to a crumb-ling aggregation of systems. Suffice it to say that it did not and could not. The commission was dismantled not much more than a decade on. Since then governments have depended on endless consultations, agreements, charters, compacts and partnerships with the ever-expanding cast of supp-licants, authorities and agencies. All this in a country with not much more than half the population of California.

A permaculture of “innovation”

The “system” is a mess, but a very fertile one. Ken McKinnon, chairman of the Schools Commission for much of its life, liked to say that Australian schooling was good at gardening but hopeless at engineering. The image nicely captures the complicated and sometimes contradictory consequences of turning silos into ants’ nests. As engineering became slower, more difficult, and much less exact, so did gardens flourish among the ruins, a permaculture of “innovation.”

Most but not all of these innovations appeared at school-level. Schools experimented with “unstreamed” and “mixed ability” student groupings, with “descriptive,” “goal-based” and “criterion-referenced” assessment, with “community participation,” “student involvement” and “relevant” curriculum, and with dozens of other ideas, some to do with core business, many not, some loopy, some very smart, almost all person- or circumstance-dependent, with a correspondingly short half-life. The departments, too, became gardeners. They fiddled with the secondary schools, combining the old high and technical schools into comprehensives and amalgamating boys’ and girls’ schools into co-eds. They went in for “devolution” to new regional offices, for open classrooms and mini-schools and school clusters, for more say for “school communities,” for “consultants” and “evaluations” in the place of inspectors, and for grants in support of “school improvement.” They rebranded everything, from discipline (“student management”) to syllabuses (“curriculum”) to headmasters and headmistresses (“principals”).

Satellites of the school solar system were productive too. Authorities entrusted with end-of-Year-12 assessment developed an extensive range of curricula, often of a very high standard. Universities generated a torrent of research and commentary, most of it of more use to academic careers than to schools, but some of it invaluable, particularly in developing forms of assessment that revealed what students had learned rather than what they had covered; in well-argued and clearly evidenced accounts of what made schools more or less effective; and in what kinds of “innovations” were worth the time and effort. Federal governments joined in, beginning with Whitlam and the Schools Commission’s “innovations program” as well as programs for disadvantaged schools, students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, girls, rural and remote schools, and special education. Successive federal governments followed suit, differing mainly in levels rather than kinds of activity. The present federal government is unusually active, propagating shelter sheds, computers, family allowances, new national agencies, a neo-inspectorate, a powerful information collection and dissemination system, and a very promising (although not yet accepted) recasting of funding to schools.

This efflorescence of energy and activity at all levels in just about every schooling jurisdiction in the country combined with federal money to see Australian schooling emerge from the overcrowding crisis of the 1950s and 1960s in relatively good shape. The puzzle to which there is no settled answer is why this combination seems to have run out of puff. The law of diminishing returns from class size reductions is part of an answer. Another is reform fatigue and deepening cynicism about endless labour-intensive, low-payoff “restructuring,” “reforms” and “initiatives for change.” Other factors might include changes in the labour market (schools benefited when teaching was the only way out and up for bright young women and have suffered as other and more attractive opportunities became available); ineffectual responses to increasing problems of “discipline,” particularly in secondary schools; and the recent ascendancy of Harvey Norman (Australian kids are these days spending more time playing games than reading). At the centre of any cluster of causes would be the gradual acceleration and expansion of “residualisation.”

Even if the effectiveness of both funding and gardening has declined, they have left a rich deposit of under-exploited resources, not all of them at the school or local level. Whitlam’s intervention, for example, made schooling a much more national affair even though it fragmented schooling in the process. In Whitlam’s wake have come a national curriculum expressed as assessable outcomes, nationwide testing and information gathering, Year 11/12 curriculum and assessment coordinated and harmonised to deliver a single national tertiary entrance system, a federal structuring of teacher unions and professional associations and conferences, national peak organisations of both government and non-government schools, and, if we’re lucky, Gonski’s proposal for a new national funding regime.

In the same contradictory way, Whitlam’s extension of public funding to non-government schools both privatised public funds and made “non-government” schools more open to public influence, and some of the losses lamented by Jean Blackburn twenty years ago have since been clawed back.

Public regulation now prohibits exclusion from any school on grounds of social or racial characteristics. All schools, irrespective of sector, are required to comply with public regulations governing everything from the number of toilets to class sizes to the treatment of girls and the content of the curriculum. All have signed up for the national goals of schooling. And all provide masses of information to public authorities about both “inputs” and “outcomes.” And while Whitlam’s efforts to get the politics out of schooling might have backfired, the grand apparatus of the Schools Commission also established an important arm’s-length precedent.

Perhaps most important of all, while the Karmel settlement can be blamed for triggering endemic competition between families, schools and sectors, it must also be given credit for sustaining and amplifying the ideal of “equality,” the basis of any opposition to the consequences of that competition. Karmel inherited the belief that equality in schooling means equal opportunity, a generous and productive idea in the days when schooling provided a decent minimum for all and in the process found those few who would “go on.” By Karmel’s time, however, that big ideal was looking more like a rationalisation for inequality on a mass scale, and Karmel, in muted tones, said so. “The Committee values the right of every child, within practicable limits, to be prepared through schooling for full participation in society, both for his [sic] own and for society’s benefit,” Karmel’s report declared. “To this end it accepts the obligation to make special efforts to assist those whose pace of learning is slow.” Not there, but getting there.

The political ask

That is a lot to go on with. But is it enough? Whether we care more about differences in attainments between Australian schools and students or between them and schools to our north, and whether we think we’re going backwards or merely standing still, the task is much the same: to generate steep improvements in educational performance across the board, and particularly in the most difficult of educational circumstances.

To that task Gonski’s proposals for funding and performance monitoring will make a contribution, but the big currents of “residualisation” will probably prevail unless and until all families and schools are put on the same footing. That would require changes in funding going beyond those envisaged by Gonski. And that would mean finding new sources of money. And that would be politically impossible as well as ineffectual unless it were to be accompanied by the right mix of rules, sanctions and incentives, universally applied.

The recent crop of big reports and the ensuing commentary have the great virtue of making it possible to talk about such imperatives and possibilities. They are not so successful, however, in suggesting how to turn them into a program of reform. Most media outlets plumped for “teacher quality” and then lost interest. Grattan had nothing to suggest about who would do the borrowing and implementing of the wisdom of the north, or how they could scramble over and around obstacles very different from those faced by unitary school systems in densely populated, culturally homogenous, autocratically governed, developing societies. Gonski inherited the essential weakness of his master, the federal government. Since it controls not a single school, Gonski was reduced to asking the national government to ask the state governments if they would kindly do what is required, including in the one third or more of schools that they don’t control either. Nous, making the biggest demands of schooling’s machinery, arrives at the biggest problem: who or what will drive an integrated strategy, across the board, over years or even decades? The political ask is of the scale of the 1970s, perhaps even of the 1880s. •

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I MUST begin with several disclaimers. First, the government’s My University website, launched on 3 April, competes directly with the Good Universities Guides, or GUGs, which my partner Sandra Milligan and I established in 1991. Second: I retain no interest in the GUGs or the company that has published them for the past decade or so, and have had no contact with that company (Hobsons Australia) during the preparation of this article (or, indeed, at any time since Hobsons acquired the guides). Third, I must admit to having had a pink haze experience when I heard what the government was up to, and another as I read as many media reports about the new website as I could stomach, and yet another as I read the ministerial media release on which almost all of these searching pieces of independent journalism were based.

When he launched the site, according to the release, the tertiary education and skills minister Chris Evans said that “students will now have access to relevant, up-to-date information to help them make the right choices.”

Will now?

Where have the minister and his media team been for the past twenty-one years? Not in just about any newsagency in the country, where they could pick up a print edition of the GUGs. Nor on the web, where they could get it all online, free.

And by “all” I mean just about everything that appears on the My University website, and a whole lot more, including links that take anyone browsing a wealth of course information straight to another wealth of information about what jobs and careers that course might lead to. Or the prospective student can come from the other direction, starting with the kind of career they’re interested in, following the link to the course that will get them there, and which universities offer it, when, for how much and all the rest, including ratings of just about anything you can think of: what graduates say about the course, how difficult it is to get into, its salary and employment outcomes, and so on, and on. And they can compare how the course as offered at one university compares in any or all of these respects with the same course as offered at other universities; or how that course compares with any other course they might be interested in. What’s more, they’ll be able to understand it. Instead of masses of numbers (“so much data can be intimidating,” as one mild-mannered commentator on the My University website put it), they’ll get understand-at-a-glance symbols, from five stars (well above average) to one star (well below average).

And what can be said about the journalists who covered the government’s great leap forward? Some might be forgiven because they aren’t specialist reporters. But others are declared to be “education writer” or similar. Three of them actually write for newspapers which for a number of years lent their masthead to the GUGs (I refer to the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian). All they had to do was google any combination of the obvious search terms to see that the government’s claim that now, at last, students could be informed, is false and misleading. The Australian’s higher education supplement did note that the new website would be in competition with the GUGs, but it, in common with every other piece I could find, failed to ask the obvious question: why is the government spending a significant amount of public money doing something that is already being done?

My University and the GUGs use almost exactly the same data sets, and these have been used by the GUGs since their first edition two decades years ago. My University would indeed have been a significant contribution to student decision-making and public information had it been launched in 1990. As it is, it adds nothing of significance to student decision-making not already available to prospective students on exactly the same medium, and it is inferior to the GUG in several important respects. It is harder to understand; it provides no information about jobs and career opportunities associated with each university course; it is not available in hard copy; and it is, in my opinion, less user-friendly and easy to navigate.

It gets worse. This website has so far cost the taxpayer $1.5 million. And the minister promises another $750,000 a year to keep it going. It would be surprising if those figures took account of the cost of public servant time devoted to the task. These are astronomical figures. I have no knowledge of the current budget for the GUGs, but I am certain that it would be just a fraction of the amounts devoted to My University. Even were the government starting this “innovation” from scratch I’m sure they could have contracted the GUG publishers to do the job for very much less. As it is, if the minister were to delegate a staffer to offer Hobsons a fraction of the proposed annual My University budget to adjust the GUG site to government requirements, I would be very surprised if he didn’t have a deal by the end of a phone call.

Perhaps someone has told the minister that there are questions about the integrity or reliability of the GUGs? It is true that they carry advertising, much of it, naturally enough, from universities and other education providers. We began that practice in our second year of publication simply because book sales generated nowhere near enough to cover the cost of publication. It was consumer information with advertising, or no consumer information at all. We fretted about both the reality and the perception of undue influence, but no such claim was every made to us.

To the contrary. The GUGs were launched by two prime ministers, one from each side of politics (Howard and Keating), and by a series of ministers, also from both sides (Crean, Costello, Beazley and Abbott, among others). Keating sat in a corner reading the book, fascinated. Crean told us, sotto voce, that he always used it before going on a campus visit because it was so much more comprehensive and understandable than departmental briefing notes. The GUGs published information about graduate employment and salary prospects, these data provided, year in, year out, by the Graduate Careers Council, extremely jealous of its reputation and of the integrity of its data. A comparative study of evaluative guides in four countries, by noted education commentator Gavin Moodie and others – in a refereed journal – declared the GUGs to be substantially better than any of the others, in every respect. Universities including Queensland University of Technology, Monash, the University of Queensland and Melbourne were happy to accept the University of the Year Award based substantially on the GUG analyses. So far as I can see the GUGs are still using the same data, format, and analysis protocols as were used from the outset.

I am happy to say how much help we had from a number of ministers who told us that they supported the GUGs (on one occasion, with a grant) because they did so much to underpin government policy of encouraging more informed student choice and getting universities to be more responsive to hard evidence about their performance. I am also happy to acknowledge the almost endless and highly professional assistance we had from departmental officers responsible for providing and checking the raw data. It is all the more galling to see that same department required by the government to turn its back on a successful collaboration of twenty years’ standing.

There is one last point to be made. My University is not just a waste of public money. It is an abuse of control over that money. It enters into direct competition with a commercial endeavour without having any commercial constraints of its own. Disgracefully, the GUGs are not even mentioned in the list that comes up from a link to “Other Useful Sites.” It is often said that governments don’t do enough for small businesses. Perhaps more telling is what they do to them. •

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SINCE the grand Karmel/Whitlam settlement of 1973, money for schools has come from three different sources and gone in three different mixes to three different categories of school. In two of these categories large numbers of parents pay significant amounts of money; in the third even larger numbers pay very little or nothing at all. Around these peculiar arrangements every religion, every state/territory government, and the best-organised unions in the country engage in a modern version of the Hundred Years’ War, their chronic enmities flaring from time to time into open hostilities, fighting always under banners of high principle, The Common Good, Freedom of Choice, Parents’ Rights, the Fair Go and, of course, Equality of Opportunity, the antagonists all swearing ultimate allegiance to Our Children’s and Our Nation’s Future. The fear that drives these hostilities is not that there will be insufficient money to do the educational job but that someone else might get a bit more. It is an inherently childish mental world, inflamed by an inherently demeaning system.

Admittedly the endless skirmishing has served to get more money for schools, but the cost has been a focus on amounts of money rather than their use. The larger issue is not how much is available, but how it is spent and how educational work is done. Although schools are more congenial places than they would otherwise have been, they are not more productive of educational outcomes. Most of the vast increases in funding have gone into ever-smaller classes, just about the least cost-effective educational strategy imaginable. Costs have risen and risen again but effectiveness has not. Schools are, in short, very much less productive than they were.

On this field of battle the federal government occupies ill-favoured ground. It is the biggest single spender but has no direct control over any schools at all. Worse, it is the only combatant simultaneously engaged with all the others. Willy-nilly it becomes a kind of umpire and arbiter as well as a player, a parent among squabbling children, in which role it is on a hiding to nothing. If it gets things right all it gains is a bit of peace and quiet for a while. If it gets them wrong? Twenty-five years on I have still-vivid recollections of travelling from one angry public meeting to another with my then-employer, federal education minister Susan Ryan, in the early days of the Hawke Labor government. The government had decided that funding to forty-one high-fee schools should be reduced, to a very modest degree, with the amounts saved going to the much needier Catholic systemic schools. What could be fairer than that? Politically deft, too, splitting one part of the non-govvies from the other and still keeping sweet with the most important of them, the Catholics. Within weeks of the announcement of that decision Senator Ryan’s political career, to that point prosperous, even dazzling, was on the way down. Wild media talk about Ryan's Hit List fuelled widespread concern that Labor was not to be trusted, that this was the thin end of the wedge. The Catholics sided with the independents, in the cause of high principle, of course. All parents, the bishops declared, were entitled to Commonwealth dollars as of right. To deny that right to one was to threaten the right of all.

It was Gonski’s task to bring some grown-up reason and evidence to this squabble, and to suggest how the system of schooling and funding that provoked it might be brought to some kind of order to serve some identifiable educational purpose. A “review of funding and regulation across government and non-government sectors” was announced in April 2010 by education minister Julia Gillard. A few months later terms of reference had been firmed up and a review panel appointed. It would be chaired by eminent businessman, philanthropist and jack of many high-end trades, David Gonski. His committee would include Ken Boston, the heaviest of heavy-hitters from the government sector, and his Catholic system opposite number Peter Tannock. Others appointed were former Labor premier and education minister in Western Australia, Carmen Lawrence; Bill Scales, from the upper reaches of both business and the public sector (and, importantly, previously involved with COAG and the Productivity Commission); and Katherine Greiner, who brought affiliations with the private schools and non-Labor politics. All were at or near the end of distinguished careers, silverbacks, at home in the deep forest, where monsters are.

Eighteen months, seventy-one consultations, 7000 submissions, four commissioned research papers and an emerging issues paper later, Gonski has landed. The government launched his report as the first comprehensive review of funding to all schools, government and non-government, in forty years, and as a key component of its Education Revolution.

A comparison with the review of forty years ago, Peter Karmel’s Schools in Australia, is illuminating. Karmel delivered not just a completely new configuration of school funding and an increase in federal spending that pushed schools (and particularly Catholic systemic schools) to a previously unimaginable plateau of prosperity, but two new national authorities, one (the Schools Commission) with the very substantial power of new money as well as a raft of “special purpose programs,” the other (the Curriculum Development Council) assuming almost instant leadership of thinking about teaching, learning and the curriculum. With direct access to a prime minister riding high and a political milieu less plagued by interest groups than ours, Karmel was able to do all this in just six months. Gonski has also proposed a new basis for funding – a “school resources standard” to be applied across all three sectors on a common, nation-wide basis – as well as closer links between funding and educational outcomes and equity of outcomes, an increase in spending by both federal and state/territory governments, and a kind of mini–Grants Commission to administer the new arrangements. He suggests School Planning Authorities in each jurisdiction to handle local infrastructure and planning issues. This work has required two years so far, with who knows how many more to be passed in “consultations.”

Gonski’s proposals do not approach the financial or institutional scale of Karmel’s, but he does have the advantage of technologies not available forty years ago. Specifically, he could use – and rely upon the ongoing use of – massive and very accessible amounts of information about both “inputs” and “outcomes” of every one of Australia’s 9000-odd schools. He could also draw on an associated stream of research undertaken over the past couple of decades within the so-called “effective schools” paradigm, unusual in educational research in being usable. It provides by far the clearest and best-evidenced account of “what works” in schools and school systems, and what doesn’t. This approach is ably summarised by the Nous consulting group in one of the two research papers that provided the basis for much of Gonski’s thinking (the other, by Allen Consulting, dealt with the school resource standard). Gonski’s report is a valuable document in itself, a lucid exposition of a great deal of complex information and argumentation, and a credit to Gonski’s consultants and his secretariat.

Gonski’s various findings and recommendations are made to seem modest by the government’s inflated rhetoric about an “education revolution,” but they should nonetheless be recognised as significant, worthwhile, strongly argued, thoroughly evidenced, and unlikely to succeed. There are problems in Gonski’s case, and bigger ones awaiting its reception.

The first of the limitations internal to Gonski appears on the “inputs” side of the equation. He suggests that each and every school, government and non-government alike, should get total payments, from all sources, according to the educational job it does, and the circumstances in which that job is done. A measure of this common per-student amount should be derived from resourcing available to “benchmark” schools, selected for their effective use of those resources. Secondary students would attract more dollars than primary. Schools with more students from poor (“disadvantaged”) or Aboriginal or non-English-speaking families should get more (a “loading”). Students with disabilities should also bring a loading, in ways to be determined by a separate review. Schools should also get more if they are small or remote. “[S]chools with similar student populations require the same level of resources regardless of whether they are located in the government, Catholic or independent school sectors,” Gonski insists. That’s the floor. But what about the ceiling? How can funding be levelled up if there is no control over “up”? All Gonski can do is recommend a minimum governmental input to a school’s funding, not a limit to the total. Over the past three or four decades schools that embody dominant conceptions of “the best,” tiny in number but high in prominence and symbolic power, have just gone on spending their way up and up and up, in the process, all things being relative, making the bottom fall further and further below. Is Gonski just the latest round in an unwinnable game of catch-up?

Second are difficulties in Gonski’s argument about how to make resources produce better outcomes, that is, to increase cost-effectiveness. He relies on NAPLAN (the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) to measure outcomes, then focuses attention on schools with a long outcomes “tail,” arguing that they will need more resources to get a higher proportion of students up to a minimum standard. Here his recommendations betray the essential weakness of the federal position. He suggests no carrots, no sticks, and no other levers to be pulled either. Needy schools won’t get any reward for lifting their game, nor lose any funds if they don’t. Who will whip or encourage them along, then? Well, “governments” (sic) should “ensure” that all schools, irrespective of sector, “are publicly accountable for the educational outcomes achieved by students from all sources of funding.” Perhaps, given the unprecedented availability of information, that will work. But perhaps it won’t. The history of trying to use funds to influence how funds are spent is not encouraging. The Karmel/Whitlam Schools Commission and Curriculum Development Council were dismantled only a decade or so after they were established, put out of their states-inflicted misery by the first Labor government to follow Whitlam. Even the state departments themselves, with a whole array of levers to pull as well as close control of funding, have found their own schools harder and harder to control.

There are problems, too, in focusing on a narrow band of outcomes and on a small proportion of schools. In relying on NAPLAN Gonski inherits many concerns about big-scale standardised tests, including their highly selective focus. He is at pains to urge a hurry-up in work now under way to measure a wider array of outcomes. But some things – how kids are treated by teachers and by other kids, for example – are not “outcomes” in the usual sense, yet are nonetheless of first concern to parents and to students themselves, and vary widely across schools. Universities measure such things, via the CEQ (Course Experience Questionnaire). But in respect of this entire “domain,” as the researchers like to call it, Gonski is silent. As for putting his spotlight on schools that generate the unusually long Australian outcomes “tail,” what about the many schools enrolling few or none of the more challenging students but which are nevertheless, as the My School website reveals, poor performers? Why not set a bar for value-add that would apply to all schools?

GONSKI has inherited another area of concern from the effective schools research movement on which much of his report relies. As already mentioned, this body of work is unusually valuable in pinning down what works and what doesn’t. It finds, among other things, that there are significant differences in the effectiveness of similar schools, but even greater (in fact much greater) differences between very effective and ineffective teachers. From here it is but a short leap to the wrong conclusion, that what we really need (or all we really need, according to the Grattan Institute and then the Australian and, more surprisingly, two of the Financial Review’s most astute commentators) is a big push on “teacher quality,” associated with the kind of teaching which has stood the test of time, with which we are all familiar, and which will be found par excellence in Singapore and Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The fact is that “traditional” teaching approaches ceased to work very well in many Australian classrooms somewhere around the 1960s, as vastly increased numbers of teenagers stayed on at school, and these difficulties have compounded as the difference between the culture of a “traditional” classroom and the society around it has continued to grow. (And that, by the way, is where the push for ever-lower class sizes came from. It was in search not for better educational outcomes but for a restoration of order.) Gonski’s argument is considerably more embracing of reality than the Australian’s, but putting “teacher quality” at the top of his reform wish-list could encourage less responsible minds. The drive to put all our eggs in the “teacher quality” basket rests on a very simple but very basic mistake. Teachers are not the schools’ workforce. Students are. The focus on “teacher effectiveness” assumes that students are recipients or clients rather than workers. The only people in schools who can produce learning are students. As in any other workplace, what and how much they produce depends on the supervisor, of course, but also on how work is organised, controlled, sequenced, evaluated and rewarded. Better forms of work organisation for Australian students will not be found in other cultures, or in the past. In any event, can anyone suggest how we might get a majority rather than a minority of highly effective teachers? Or how we could afford such a strategy?

It is when these weaknesses in Gonski’s reasoning and proposals get into the hands of the interest groups that the political trouble begins. They become the jackhammers of demolition. The federal opposition’s education spokesperson Christopher Pyne, for example, has already seized on the “subjectivity” of outcomes measures to position his party to oppose any changes to the Howard government’s “objective” allocation according to the SES (socio-economic status) of a school’s clientele.

First among these threats to Gonski will be the state governments, three of them (and shortly four?) from the Coalition’s side of politics, and two (Western Australia and Queensland) particularly hostile to all things “Canberra.” Running schools is one of the chief raisons d’etre of the states. Gonski wants their money as well as the federal government’s to detour via a common bucket before it goes back to the states and thence to government schools. And he wants the states to be answerable – albiet in some unspecified and not too-terrifying way – for what these funds generate by way of outcomes and greater equity in the distribution of those outcomes. Will the states wear that? The relatively cooperative South Australia and Victoria might, but it’s difficult to see the others signing up.

Close behind will be the non-government schools which, as in 1983, will coalesce if they see a common threat, the most immediate of which is that a few of their number might (horrors!) lose a bit of funding. So alert is Gillard to this particular danger that, following Howard, she has done a pre-emptive buckle. When Howard tinkered with funding formulae in a way that would reduce funding to some high-fee schools he took care to guarantee that there would be no “losers.” Gillard has done the same. Peace in our time does not come cheap. As Gonski tersely remarks (at several points) the government’s cave-in would lift the minimum government input to some independents, in his model, from 10 per cent of their recurrent budget to 20 or even 25 per cent. Gillard’s credibility, and therefore her ability to sell the plan, suffers too. Every time she or her ministers talk about a new era of funding efficiency, transparency and consistency, someone will add “and convenience too, don’t forget.”

The government is not looking for a fight on yet another front. The prime minister has moved quickly to put a distance between the government and the review she commissioned in another era. Her refusal to commit to the $5.3 billion Gonski wants to oil the wheels of change, and the promise to consult all and sundry, in close detail, could be taken as signals that consultation will be found to show that it’s all too hard. It seems likely that an instrument set up by a strong minister in a strong government has been handed to a weak minister in a weak government that lacks the competence, credit or stomach to carry a worthwhile and achievable improvement in a system increasingly in need of it.

BUT even if, against the odds, the core of Gonski’s proposals gets up, we will still have three different kinds of schools serving three different social and ideological mixes. It will still be possible for schools with the deepest pockets, the most prominent social position and the most powerful clientele to do whatever it takes to maintain an advantaged position for themselves and a relatively disadvantaged one for everyone else. And, on the other side of this coin, it will still be possible for one parent to ask why his neighbour gets ten or fifteen thousand a year for his child’s schooling from the public purse while he gets peanuts. One third of Australian parents will still pay school fees, two-thirds will not. In short, “the system” will still be there.

By the time Gonski is as far behind us as Karmel is now, things may well be worse. Gonski points out that in several key respects our school system has been going backwards for some time. He records that “social stratification” in schools – educationally counter-productive as well as culturally deforming – has been steadily increasing over decades. So has the distance between the achievement of the most and least successful students, and the proportion of the prosperous in the former and the poor in the latter (gaps, by the way, that seem at least as panic-worthy as any gaps between us and a few of our Asian neighbours). Concurrent with these declines are steady losses in government schools’ numbers, morale, standing and comprehensiveness. Would even a fully implemented Gonski have the oomph to arrest and reverse these trends? But Gonski was not asked or allowed to consider the shape of Australian schooling, only how it can be serviced with more educational effect and less political trouble. We may get a lull in the Hundred Years’ War, but not its end. •

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THIS IS a story about an Englishman, an Irishman and the strange career of the Australian conscience. It begins at the top of a rocky hill in Central Australia, at sunset, on or about Friday 20 July 1894. The Englishman and the Irishman have just met, and there is romance in the air. They are in a magical place at a magical time of day. Each is an exotic to the other. Baldwin Spencer, the Englishman, is a professor. Frank Gillen, the Irishman, is a postmaster. Spencer, aged thirty-five, is the son of a wealthy, protestant industrialist from Manchester and a relatively recent immigrant, now resident in Melbourne. Gillen, thirty-eight, was conceived in Ireland but born in Australia to Catholic store-keepers in a South Australian country town. Spencer is an Oxford graduate, Gillen an autodidact. Gillen is tending to the portly while Spencer is slight; each sports a big droopy moustache. Both are charming and gregarious, love a pipe, a whisky and a yarn, and they follow politics and world affairs with a nice balance of agreement and dispute. Both are of liberal mind, anti-clerical, and pro the development of the Australian continent and an Australian nation, but Baldwin is an Empire man and for Capital, while Frank is an ardent Home Ruler with Socialistic tendencies. Both are modern men. And both are utterly fascinated by the Aborigines. They would become the most famous – and infamous – duo in the history of Australian anthropology.

By the time Frank Gillen met Baldwin Spencer he had been in Central Australia for almost exactly half of his life, but his encounter with the Aborigines began before he even got there. Early in 1874, when he was an eighteen-year-old operator at the Adelaide terminus of the brand-new Overland Telegraph Line, Gillen was the recipient of a grim message from the Barrow Creek repeater station, nearly 1200 miles north in the wilds of Central Australia. Two of the station’s staff had just been speared by “treacherous natives” while taking the evening air and listening to one of their number play the violin. Over the hours that followed the young Gillen played a part in a scene that might have come from Rider Haggard. He was the intermediary in poignant exchanges between the dying stationmaster in Barrow Creek and his wife in the Adelaide GPO. Gillen was vehement in support of the vigilante squad of linesmen from the stations up and down the Line who rode out and slaughtered dozens of men, women and children.

Just over a year later Gillen was on his way north to take up a position at another of the Line’s remote stations, and he kept a diary. Like the hero of the film Dances with Wolves, Gillen advances wide-eyed and excited through succeeding layers of the frontier to its very edge, the point of that unfathomable moment of First Contact. Our sense of the young man’s deepening wonder is heightened by the way his journey slows as it advances, commencing at speed in the train, then moving to stage coach to buggy to horseback. His measure of progress through the frontier, half-consciously used, is the appearance of the Aborigines. Early on he sees layabouts, beggars, half-castes and drunkards. Later there are shepherds and trackers, much valued by pastoralists and policemen. Seven weeks after leaving Adelaide, now more than 600 miles away, he arrives at Peake, generally regarded at that time as the point beyond which firearms should always be carried. “There are dozens of Niggers about here, very few of them possess the luxury of an article of Clothing…,” he reports. “They live principally on Snakes, Lizards and herbage and all look in excellent Condition.” At every way station Gillen makes a point of visiting the Natives “for a yabber” and to build up his word lists, one of Aboriginal names, the other of more than a hundred terms and phrases arranged in alphabetical order: Al-lelia (Grass), Apra (Gum tree), Al-linga (A long distance), Anima (Sit down).

The absence of animosity toward the Aborigines in Gillen’s diary is striking. It might even be that its boisterous, jocular comments about the Aborigines and their squalid circumstances betray a young man’s moral unease. Whatever the case there is no doubt that over the succeeding years Gillen’s comprehension of the Aborigines and their experience of the whitefellas took a place in his mind at least as prominent as his earlier outrage at their “treachery.” The Aborigines were a familiar part of life on the Line’s repeater stations, first as potential adversaries, then as mendicants. The Charlotte Waters station (south of Alice Springs), where Gillen spent most of his first decade or so in Central Australia, was designed to serve as a fort but soon became an almshouse. Gillen made the most of daily interactions with the local people to get to know them and their baffling ways. So far did his sympathies grow that in 1891, not long before meeting Baldwin Spencer, he charged the notoriously violent policeman William Willshire with the murder of two Aboriginal men. Willshire’s conduct was not so different from that which a couple of decades earlier Gillen had emphatically supported.

By then Frank Gillen was officer in charge of the Alice Springs repeater station and therefore a justice of the peace, local magistrate and Sub-Protector of Aborigines. Sitting on top of the rocky hill with his new mate Baldwin Spencer, Gillen was master of all that he surveyed, the most senior civil servant between Port Augusta, 750 miles to the south, and Darwin, 1000 miles north. Down below was his redoubt, the telegraph station, “quite a little settlement in itself [as he and Spencer wrote some years later] with its operating room where day and night the machines are ticking ceaselessly: separate quarters for the officers in charge; dining, mess and living rooms for the operators, four in number; rooms for the line men; battery room, shoeing forge, blacksmith’s shop and all other essentials of a little settlement that must be able to provide for many a sudden emergency…” Gillen was referred to by his mates as His Catholic Majesty, the Pontiff, the Amir of Alice Springs.

Baldwin Spencer, too, was living an adventurous life. A decade earlier, as a twenty-six-year-old, a recent Oxford graduate and a newly married man, he had set sail for the Antipodes, 12,000 miles away, to take up the post of professor of biology at the University of Melbourne. Hyperactive, enchanted by “so much that is new” in the strange continent (his phrase, later borrowed to become the title of his biography), he was soon regarded as an inspired appointment, likely to return in the not-too-distant future to a chair at Oxford. But a trip to Central Australia, and a new friendship, would change all that.

As a star of Victoria’s scientific firmament Spencer had been nominated by the colony’s premier as its representative on the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, funded by the eponymous William Horn, a wealthy South Australian pastoralist. Spencer was the expedition’s biologist, not its anthropologist, but “biology” then was a broad church, and on his first trip deep into the continent’s interior Spencer simply couldn’t help himself. Like the youthful Frank Gillen two decades earlier, he was scarcely off the train at its terminus at Oodnadatta, 330 miles south of Alice Springs, before he began taking photographs and making notes on the Natives. By the time the expedition’s camels had padded all the way to Alice Springs, on a route that included a circumnavigation of the western MacDonnell Ranges, he was as interested in the Aborigines as in flora and fauna.

Most members of the Horn expedition headed for home just a few days after reaching the Alice Springs telegraph station, but Spencer did not. He stayed for nearly three weeks to complete his collections and investigations. But he also spent hours on end exploring Frank Gillen’s impressive store of knowledge of the Natives. It was later said that Baldwin Spencer’s greatest discovery was Frank Gillen. The converse was also true. When in 1912 Frank Gillen died of a debilitating neurological disorder Spencer wrote to Gillen’s widow the kind of letter we might all hope to write at such a time. “As I often told him,” Spencer told Amelia Gillen, “my meeting him at Alice Springs made all the difference to my life and I like to think that it made, as he told me also, a great difference to his… No one ever had a better friend and comrade than he was and I look back on his friendship as one of the greatest privileges and blessings of my life.”

SPENCER was scarcely back in Melbourne from the three-week stay in Alice Springs before the letters began to flow. (Sadly, Gillen’s widow burned Spencer’s letters to Gillen, but from Gillen’s side we can follow the course and sense the intensity of their correspondence.) “As I sit here in the old ochre smelling den, which you know so well,” says Gillen in his first letter, “I can imagine you demonstrating the anatomy of a Cockroach to a lot of Callow Youth… do you, I wonder, ever wish that you could transport yourself to the wilds of the McDonnells [sic]. I often wish that you could, I missed you very much indeed…”

The centre of their correspondence was, of course, the Aborigines, and it was therefore semi-illicit. Spencer had not been appointed to the Horn expedition to study Aborigines – that was the job of one of his colleagues, Dr Edward Stirling – and so Spencer came perilously close to treading on an academic colleague’s turf. The problem was compounded by the fact that Spencer was editor of the expedition’s reports, and therefore in frequent contact with Stirling. Gillen, too, was constrained by the fact of Stirling, or was meant to be anyway. He had established what was in effect an exclusive-provider arrangement with Stirling several years before the Horn expedition had turned up in Alice Springs, sending him information and artefacts. What’s more, Gillen had undertaken to give Stirling new material to help fill out his findings from Horn.

As the Gillen–Spencer correspondence flourished their respective relationships with Stirling frayed. As in a bedroom farce, Spencer and Gillen tried to tiptoe their way around Stirling’s room but left behind a trail of letters, chance encounters and protestations of innocence. Gillen’s long, excited letters to Spencer suggest that he was the motive force in the friendship. Gillen badly wanted to make a name for himself, not so much through wealth (although he kept plunging, vainly, on mining shares) or power (although he flirted with going into politics) as through recognition. He really, really wanted a place in the sun. Spencer must have looked like his big chance.

For his part Spencer was well embarked on a distinguished career as a biologist, but he also knew that mapping the evolution of homo sapiens was one of the hottest intellectual fields in the English-speaking world. While still a student at Oxford he had attended the first lectures on anthropology ever given in Britain, and subsequently got a vacation job helping the eminent E.B. Tylor set up what was to become one of the world’s greatest anthropological museums, the Pitt Rivers. On the eve of Spencer’s departure for Australia soon after, Tylor wrote to suggest that he might “come into contact with interesting questions of local Anthropology… [and] do valuable work in this line as well as in your regular biological work.” Soon after he arrived in Melbourne Spencer sought out the leading “ethnologists” Alfred Howitt and Lorimer Fison. He realised that the findings of these and other ethnologists could be placed in the vast panorama unveiled by Charles Darwin. “Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms…” he later wrote. “Just as the platypus laying its eggs and feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making, so does the Aboriginal show us, at least in broad outline, what early man must have been like…”

Within six months of Spencer’s stay in Alice, Spencer had arranged for Gillen to visit Melbourne, and Gillen had sworn not to give Stirling his newest, most exciting insights. In Melbourne Gillen stayed with the Spencers and was introduced by Spencer to Howitt and Fison. Back in Alice from Melbourne, floating, Gillen wrote to Spencer, telling him that it would be “a calamity to me if your interest in the subject cooled down.” A month later, in December 1895, Spencer had committed to working with Gillen. They would write a book together.

Then Gillen got lucky all over again. He’d heard of a big cycle of ceremonies known as the “Engwura,” never seen by white men. By the mid 1890s the decimation of the Aboriginal population in the Alice Springs area by violence, disease, malnutrition and simple demoralisation was such that it seemed that the great festivals might never be held again. Could he turn it on for his friend, and their book? Gillen’s standing among the Arunta (Arrente) had been greatly boosted by his efforts to have Willshire brought to justice. What’s more, he was in a position to offer the food and water needed for an extended gathering of 200 or more people. By mid 1896 it was agreed that Gillen and Spencer (artfully elevated by Gillen to the status of his “brother”) would observe and record the hitherto secret ceremonies to be conducted later in the year.

Gillen didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. It could go for a week, he told Spencer. In the event the ceremonies started before Spencer arrived in early November and continued non-stop, with up to six ceremonies a day throughout his eight-week stay. It was still not done when he left in January. Because they couldn’t figure out what would happen when, and for fear of missing something, they constructed a rough bough shelter on one side of the ceremonial ground, a few hundred yards from the telegraph station, and camped there for the duration. They met frequently with the men who did know what would happen when. Photographs of the two white and thirteen black patriarchs present one of those images in which at one moment the Aborigines look to be completely familiar and at the next completely Other. There they are, for all the world a conference committee (an academic conference committee in fact) exuding the authority of great learning, but these are also men who, by chanting exactly the right words in exactly the right sequences, by wearing the right designs and decorations, by leading their fellow-initiates through the necessary gestures, cries and steps, joined the ancestral beings with whom we and the world began.

The Engwura made great copy. Spencer and Gillen’s account of it takes up 150 of their book’s 670 pages. But content wasn’t the main thing. Other white men, including earlier ethnologists, had described various ceremonies, some in original condition, some reconstituted, but no one had ever been present at such a sustained revelation of the Aboriginal spiritual world, vast, intricate, deadly secret. Indeed no one had ever done such intensive and such privileged “fieldwork,” as their collaboration with the Arunta would now be termed. It seems to have been an unforgettable experience for the two men, Gillen particularly. After the book was published and the day before he left Central Australia for a posting Down South, Gillen sent Spencer the last of his many missives from Alice, a telegram: “Leaving for Adelaide tomorrow, taking last look at Engwura ground today. Fixing site for Erection Stone pillar there.” (The pillar, if erected, has not survived.)

The Engwura experience sustained an extravagant burst of creative energy. Gillen’s frenzy of activity and excitement was the subject of much acerbic banter from mates of Gillen’s who had in turn become correspondents of Spencer’s. “Gillen I never hear from,” one wrote to Spencer, “[H]e is working like a Trojan, night and day, at his Ethnological notes. Rumour has it that he recently got up in his Sleep and adjourned to the washhouse from which there presently came a sound of chanting accompanied with vigorous stamping of feet: and on the astonished Night Operator going to see what was the matter, he found the Pontiff, artistically decorated… corroboreeing away like an Aroondah warrior!”

Gillen’s letters to Spencer were running to forty pages and 6000 words, most without the benefit of paragraphing or punctuation, and he sent long field reports as well. We’re unravelling their systems, he would crow. We’re daily getting deeper into their mysteries! As his ambitions soared so did his anxiety. What if Stirling or any one of a number of rival ethnologists cracked it first? No, they can’t, they won’t be able to! Just look at this table of relationships! I’m getting evidence from far afield (which meant from colleagues up and down the Line). They’ll never figure out the eight-class version of the kinship system. It’s so hard to know when you’ve really got to the bottom of things. Poor old Stirling didn’t even know who’d been subincised and who not.

Spencer began drafting the book as soon as he was back in Melbourne from the Engwura, at speed. The first three of what became nineteen chapters were in Gillen’s hands by May 1897, only four months after the Engwura. You write like a dream! Gillen told him. Spencer kept firing off questions, puzzles, suggestions, Gillen chasing them down, loving it, the excitement of the hunt, the stimulus of Spencer’s “seething mind.” The chapters kept flowing up to Alice and back. It is going to be a great book! Gillen told Spencer. We look forward to the book of the century, one of the mutual mates wrote to Spencer. Gillen’s ambitions ran yet further ahead. I want to describe all of Australia’s tribes, he told Spencer, perhaps not realising that there were more than 500 of them, or had been anyway. You work like a steam hammer, he told Spencer as more chapters turned up in the post, you are working too hard, you must take a break. He didn’t. By March 1898, a bare fifteen months after the Engwura, less than four years after the two men met, a manuscript of 200,000 words, nineteen chapters, four technical appendixes, a glossary, index, an Authors’ Preface, 133 illustrations (mostly photographs) and two detailed maps was on its way to London.

But the course of this true love had not run entirely smooth. There had been spats, not many, but vivid ones, and about big things.

GILLEN’s understanding of both the Aboriginal apprehension of the world and their experience of oppression deepened rapidly as he worked toward the book. A few months after the Engwura he wrote to Spencer in anguish for his own and others’ actions in taking Aboriginal “churinga” (tywerrenge), inscribed boards and stones of deep spiritual significance. They had been collected in great number by the Horn expedition and then by one of Gillen’s mates and by Gillen himself until he realised how much they meant to their owners. He stopped collecting and asked his friend to stop too. He didn’t, with the result that the Aboriginal man who had revealed where the churinga could be found was put to death for sacrilege. “This upsets me terribly,” Gillen told Spencer. “I would not have had it happen for 100 pounds… I bitterly regret ever having countenanced such a thing and can only say that I did so when in ignorance of what they meant to the Natives… [I watched] them reverently handling their treasures – It impressed me far more than anything else I have witnessed.”

There was no cost to such sentiments, of course, coming as they did conveniently after the event. But scarcely a letter of Gillen’s fails to remark on the utter demoralisation of the Aborigines, their misery and the vicious incomprehension of the whites as to Aboriginal actions. He reports many incidents of shooting, of unjust punishment, of death from disease. He flares in anger at pastoralists who appropriate the best portion “for the exclusive use of their stock and relegate the Nigger to the barren wastes which are often destitute alike of game and tradition.” He is scathing about the Europeans’ ignorance of Aboriginal religious life. He even went, or tried to go, a step further than asserting its existence. He groped toward an understanding of its equivalence. The churinga (he wrote) are “sacred” in the sense that the sacramental wafer is sacred to the Roman Catholic. Aboriginal belief in the magical power of the churinga was like a Lourdes pilgrim’s belief in the Virgin Mary. He reckoned that the Dream Time (his neologism) wanderings were “startlingly like the wanderings of the Children of Israel.” Missionaries, Gillen said, were intent on wiping out the Aboriginal spiritual universe simply because it was rival to their own. Gillen was a proto-pluralist.

Sometimes he was even more than that. He was an anti-colonialist. “After I read your last letter I would have given a tenner to be alongside side [sic] you just to give you… a bit of my mind in return for your gratuitous attack on my Countrymen,” he stormed at Spencer. “With that arrogant assumption of superiority so characteristic of your Nigger annihilating race, you sneer at the Irish… You thank God that you are an Englishman, I thank God that I am not. I have no ambition to belong to such a race of Hypocrites. The British Lion shows his teeth but everyone, even you who are steeped in prejudice, know that those teeth are only decayed stumps and the poor old brute cannot bite. The stumps are good enough to crush niggers armed with weapons less dangerous than pea-shooters and that’s about all…” He often told Spencer that he (Spencer) was blinded by his imperial allegiance, that he wore “jingo goggles,” that “[your] environment has been too much for you – The hide bound toryism which encircles the walls of all british universities has got you in its grasp.” He foamed at the “oppressing, restraining, stifling, squelching, at times annihilating” of the Irish by the English, of England’s “old policy of crushing Irishism out of the Irish.”

This strand in the Gillen–Spencer relationship, occasionally prominent, rarely absent, has been passed over lightly by scholars, perhaps because so little of the contention between the two men is apparent in the upshot, Native Tribes of Central Australia.

Most of the book consists of loosely linked descriptions, and most of the descriptions are of ceremonies (of marriage, initiation, increase, and so on), but there were also scores of pages describing “magic,” social organisation, and “customs” (“knocking out of teeth; nose boring; growth of breasts; blood; blood-letting; blood-giving; blood-drinking; hair; childbirth; food restrictions; cannibalism” was the list of sub-heads to one chapter). Native Tribes is really a series of display cases filled with exotica. Material life, how the Aborigines actually earned a living, what governed their movements across their lands, how they brought up their children, what day-to-day life was like, all these were scarcely noted. Although Spencer and Gillen were the first to realise that “dreaming tracks” criss-crossed a landscape crowded with events and beings, and thus twigged to the rich omnipresence of Aboriginal spiritual life, they did not attempt to see it from the inside. They stared at what could be seen, from a distance. An appendix provides fifty-three measurements of the physiognomy of thirty numbered individuals. No individual is named or thanked, and differences in behaviour, personality and outlook are not recorded. Spencer and Gillen had returned from the site of a human catastrophe bearing a book about the fascinating things that had been there before.

Only rarely does the question of relations between black and white that so exercised Gillen find expression in their book. At five or six points appear sentences about the unwholesome influence of the whites (however kindly disposed they might be), the speed and inevitability of degeneration and extinction, and the declining numbers, all culminating in the following much-quoted passage. “[T]aking all things into account, the black fellow has not perhaps any particular reason to be grateful to the white man… To come in contact with the white man means that, as a general rule, his food supply is restricted, and that he is, in many cases, warned off from the water-holes which are the centres of his best hunting grounds, and to which he has been accustomed to resort during the performance of his sacred ceremonies; while the white man kills and hunts his kangaroos and emus he is debarred in turn from hunting and killing the white man’s cattle. Occasionally the native will indulge in a cattle hunt; but the result is usually disastrous to himself, and on the whole he succumbs quietly enough to his fate, realising the impossibility of attempting to defend what he certainly regards as his own property.”

The book’s reception almost matched Gillen’s fantasies. “In immortalizing the native tribes of Central Australia,” wrote Sir James Frazer, the eminent authority of the day, “Spencer and Gillen have at the same time immortalized themselves.” Native Tribes immediately became enshrined in the pantheon of anthropological classics. It influenced and was relied upon by such foundational works of the twentieth century as Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913). It was a popular as well as academic success. Spencer in particular was in ever-increasing demand as a journalist and lecturer (on one occasion even filling the cavernous Melbourne Town Hall to capacity). Gillen was lionised in his home town and received at Government House. Spencer went Home on a victory lap and returned with his FRS. Their fame was such that funds were raised to send them on a year-long trip across the continent which resulted in two more books, Native Tribes of Northern Australia (1904) and Across Australia (1912). After Gillen’s death in 1912 Spencer wrote more books based on their work together, including one in their joint names, and became the nation’s foremost expert on Aboriginal affairs as well as the grand old man of the infant discipline of Australian anthropology.

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of their first book, Spencer and Gillen’s fame has not entirely faded. The telegraph station is a museum now. Some of the buildings in Spencer’s photographs have gone but most are still there and in good nick, too good really. The old telegraph office, with its high counter, pigeon-holes and telegraphic paraphernalia is particularly authentic-looking, but also pristine, like a lounge room when visitors are expected. Gillen’s den, that magic cave of spears and boomerangs and churinga, of clutter and whisky and pipe-smoke, is now just a room. There are photographs taken by Spencer and Gillen of the Aborigines and of Spencer and Gillen, their big droopy moustaches making them look like a stage duo or (as Gillen had fibbed) brothers. The texts describing them are oddly like Spencer and Gillen’s descriptions of the Arunta, as if seen through a pane of glass. Spencer is the subject of a magisterial biography by John Mulvaney and J.H. Calaby, and Mulvaney has collaborated with Howard Morphy and Alison Petch to publish two volumes of letters to Spencer, one volume of Gillen’s, the second of other Central Australian correspondents. These are works on which many, including myself, have depended.

But much of Spencer and Gillen’s faded fame has turned into obloquy. That process began before Spencer’s death in 1929. To the rising generation of academic anthropologists Spencer and Gillen seemed old hat and, increasingly, skeletons in the discipline’s cupboard. At the entrance to the splendid Aboriginal galleries of the Museum of Victoria, where Spencer was for many years honorary director, are two TV screens playing a loop of an imagined dialogue between Spencer and one of the impresarios of the Engwura cycle in which the wise old man chides Spencer for his unacceptable thinking. Despite the efforts of scholars, including Mulvaney and Morphy in particular, references to Spencer and Gillen in scholarly work and in more general commentary on “Aboriginal affairs” often depict them as archetypes of “scientific racism.” They would be better seen as bearers, shapers and captives of the Australian conscience.

WITH HIS constant agonising over the question of how to regard and behave toward the Aborigines, and his erratic swerves from one answer to another, Frank Gillen is almost a personification of the strange career of the Australian conscience. Like many others then and since his sense of right and wrong was formed by post-Reformation Christianity and Enlightenment humanism, but greatly intensified in his case by an Irish comprehension of colonial power.

Understanding that power, however, did not protect him from it. Gillen’s most courageous, even reckless, attempt to follow the dictates of conscience was in having William Willshire stand trial for murder. But it was Gillen, not Willshire, who lost that battle. The citizens of South Australia raised a substantial fund for Willshire’s bail and defence, successfully conducted by the colony’s leading QC, Sir John Downer. The Adelaide press pilloried Gillen, and applauded Willshire’s acquittal.

Gillen’s meeting with Spencer followed soon after this debacle, and in him Gillen encountered another form of cultural power. Spencer encouraged Gillen’s intellectual development and often boosted Gillen’s confidence and soothed his fears, but he also exercised, or simply embodied, an overwhelming national, institutional and intellectual power. It would be nice to imagine that Spencer, shaken by Gillen’s half-garbled but powerful insights, canvassed whether they should put the whole anthropological project aside and work up a volume to be titled The Destruction of the Native Tribes of Central Australia. Or perhaps even British Colonialism and the Destruction of the Native Tribes of Central Australia. But that didn’t happen, of course. My guess is that Spencer didn’t respond directly to these parts of Gillen’s letters except to mollify and sympathise. In effect Spencer – anthropology – said to Gillen: no, no, don’t look over there, look over here! Anthropology averted its gaze. It was an averted gaze. In fact, it was an averted gaze that said that it wasn’t. Trust Me!, anthropology said to Gillen, I am Science.

Whatever Spencer did or didn’t say to Gillen probably doesn’t matter. Gillen was excited by what anthropology was revealing as well as troubled by things it didn’t. His sense of right and wrong was at war not just with the world around but also with that within, with what he wanted. And Spencer brought what Gillen wanted so tantalisingly close that he simply could not resist. Gillen had no sooner vented his rage at Spencer’s “arrogant assumption of superiority” than he swerved away again, avoiding that one, last, fatal word. “Bah! I can’t keep my temper,” he wrote, “I shall grow abusive if I don’t stop. Ive [sic] had a smoke and feel better.” We might even talk about the hidden injuries of colonialism to explain Frank Gillen’s moral and psychological vulnerability, and equivocation. On the churinga, for example, he started out being opposed to collecting them then thought it must be okay because Stirling said so then changed his mind again as he learned “what they meant to the Natives” and eventually sold his collection.

There was weight of argument, too, or at least its force of attraction for Gillen: what could be seen in Central Australia and elsewhere in the spread of “civilisation” was not British colonialism or the greed of the cattlemen or the brutality of people like Willshire but the working out of a great logic, an irresistible process by which creatures quaint and crude give way to “higher forms.” What a calming doctrine this must have been for someone of Gillen’s temperament and outlook. Anthropology was a solution in the mind to a problem that could not be solved in the world.

But if Gillen makes a good Faust, Spencer does not make a very good Mephistopheles. For reasons of biography, temperament, training and domicile, Spencer’s conscience had nowhere near as much work to do as Gillen’s, but it was not entirely idle. He was a man of goodwill given specific form by the Dissenting Christianity of his upbringing and the progressivist humanism of his student days. He was influenced and educated by Gillen as well as Gillen by him. We might not like Spencer’s answers to the problems posed by conscience, but that does not mean that he was indifferent to them. Spencer’s diaries, much of his journalism, and above all his wonderful photographs, all suggest that his response to Aboriginal people was much broader and more complex than that seen in his anthropology. It might not be going too far to suggest that anthropology got the better of him as well as Gillen.

The defining quality of their work was not scientific racism but muddle, both of thought and feeling. At some points they belittled Aboriginal rituals and beliefs elsewhere documented with care and respect. Often they expressed admiration and affection for Aboriginal people and urged their readers to do the same, yet also talked about them as if they were a sub-species. The people Gillen routinely referred to as Niggers were also regarded by him as close friends. Spencer and Gillen asked their audiences to put themselves in the Blackfellas’ place but wrote almost exclusively from the whitefellas’ angle. They reminded their readers, however circumspectly, that the white man took the Aborigines’ food and water then exercised terrible violence if the Aborigines took the white man’s cattle, but they also talked about the destruction of Aboriginal societies as if it were a contagion, something as mysteriously fatal as it was inevitable. Gillen did his level best to have a cop sent down for murder yet remained (with Spencer) a vehement defender of the vigilante squads that hunted down dozens of Aborigines after the Barrow Creek killings.

Conscience was at work in everything Spencer and Gillen did, in their struggles with each other and with their own needs and desires as well as with the world around. The chronic and insistent problem was that their culture’s wants were incompatible with its beliefs (or what it wanted to believe its beliefs were, anyway). There are few villains and fewer heroes in the story of black and white in Australia; Spencer and Gillen were, like many others, neither, and both. If their conscience was never victorious, nor was it ever entirely vanquished, even in their anthropology. Their “science” did provide a powerful rationalisation for the conduct of white toward black and, more fundamentally, an angle of gaze that made it very difficult to see the things that so exercised Gillen. But anthropology was, and did, other things as well. It paid attention to the Aboriginal world when no other form of disciplined enquiry was interested. Its gaze was selective, but clear, certainly relative to its predecessors. William Horn, sponsor of the scientific expedition that brought Spencer and Gillen together in the first place, expressed a widely held view when he wrote that “the Aborigine” had no religion and no traditions, merely the mindless repetition “with scrupulous exactness” of “a number of hideous customs and ceremonies which have been handed from his father.” Spencer and Gillen, informed by their detailed scientific observations, knew that this was simply not accurate, and said so. Their anthropology allowed them to detect a spiritual world of unsuspected extent, complexity and feeling, a revelation that made possible the eventual transformation of racism into pluralism. Their anthropology’s empiricism was, in its way, a search for truth, the beginnings of an effort at comprehension that has continued ever since.

THAT SPENCER and Gillen’s anthropology was so influential and popular suggests that they shared with many others the need to find a new basis for moral comfort. They helped to give expression to a shift of a kind that a Kuhn or a Gramsci would quickly recognise, an abrupt movement from the dominance or hegemony of one paradigm of thought and feeling to another, provoked by a change in historical circumstances – in this case from a predominantly frontier to a post-frontier culture, a shift from a contempt and hatred unafraid to name itself to the averted gaze and crocodile tears of the great Australian silence.

Twenty or thirty years later Australia’s circumstances were again changing, this time through the emergence of a worldwide anti-colonialism, and the Australian conscience entered another phase in its strange career. Spencer and Gillen’s old anthropology became an important stalking horse for the new. The peerless W.E.H. Stanner, whose phrase “the Australian conscience” I have borrowed, was and saw himself as a conscience struggling (as he put it) to “escape” from Spencer and Gillen’s style of thinking. Even Stanner, along with many subsequent critics of our forebears, took for granted the conscience that brought him to criticise Spencer and Gillen, forgetting that his own conscience was as much a part of Australia’s history as the conduct it abhorred, and that the Australian conscience was as generative of Spencer and Gillen’s work as of his criticisms. Their work owed much to conscience, and Stanner owed much to it. It was Spencer and Gillen who gave him an attention to the Aboriginal experience when most preferred to ignore it, and the rigorously “scientific” form of enquiry essential to his “escape.” Stanner’s anthropology, which did so much to establish post-racist pluralism in Australia, was as much the offspring of Spencer and Gillen’s racist anthropology as its conqueror.

The beneficiaries of Stanner’s “escape” have also found it difficult to recognise the way conscience has worked, in the past, and in ourselves. One difficulty is empirical – the workings of conscience are often subterranean, and its results are often perverse – and that may be why historians and others have often failed to notice it. But the main problem is that we, like Spencer and Gillen (and Stanner), seek comfort.

The obvious advantage of concentrating on Spencer and Gillen’s vices is in highlighting our virtues. But to see only how we differ from them is to hide from the things we have in common with them. When on their transcontinental trek in 1901 Spencer and Gillen reached Alice Springs, they repaired once more to the rocky hill behind the telegraph station. “We found it difficult to realise [Gillen’s journal records] that it is 5 years since we last sat here together… puzzling over many things that were then strange to us but which have since been made clear and now lie enshrined in our book.” They believed that they had comprehended the Aboriginal universe and had seen its future. It is plain to us that that was a delusion of their age. But our age has delusions too. Perhaps one of them is represented by the playlet that greets visitors to the Museum of Victoria’s Melbourne Museum. In telling us that Spencer was a racist baddie it tells us that we are post-racist goodies, and implies that the conflict between conscience and interests culminated in the eventual victory of the former, with us. •

As noted above, the term “the Australian conscience” is Stanner’s. “Strange career” is from C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Whether Spencer and Gillen’s hill-top sunsets began during Spencer’s first Alice Springs visit or the second (for the Engwura) I have been unable to establish.

The post The strange career of the Australian conscience appeared first on Inside Story.

Much of this will be familiar. Windschuttle laid out the essentials of the case almost a decade ago. It will nonetheless be surprising to historians, and to lay readers such as myself, not for its novelty but for its recalcitrance. Windschuttle’s reiteration and expansion of his case flies in the face of an extensive scholarly and official literature as well as a now-substantial body of public opinion. But this time he has artillery. In the place of a few articles in a friendly middle-brow journal comes a hefty text of 600+ pages supported by more than 1500 footnotes and forty-odd pages of bibliography and index, handsomely designed and produced to boot. “While the case against genocide for the Stolen Generations has already produced several effective critics…” he writes, “a full defence of the charge has yet to be mounted… That could only be accomplished properly by a complete re-examination of the foundation on which the case was originally made: its claim to be historically true.” The book ranges over the history of dozens of Aboriginal missions, reserves and homes, the policies and agencies of the national government and governments in every state and the Northern Territory, several major court cases, the work of scholars including Peter Read, Anna Haebich and Raimond Gaita and the testimony of high-profile members of the “stolen generations” including Lowitja O’Donoghue, Sally Morgan and Charles Perkins.

Windschuttle’s arguments are lucidly made and powerfully sustained. This is polemic of a high order. He insists that both the term “stolen generations” and the associated accusation of genocide are unwarranted. He argues that few Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and that most removals were on the ground not of race but of welfare, and hence for reasons and with consequences broadly comparable with removals of white children over the same period. Exceptions to this generalisation can be justified, Windschuttle believes, by reference to the specific circumstances of Aboriginal people. In particular, the focus of policy on “half-caste” children was required because they found no welcome in either Aboriginal or white society, and girls of mixed blood faced particular vulnerabilities. The total number of removals, Windschuttle asserts, was but a fraction of the often-claimed 50,000. By his calculation the real total was about 8250.

These realities, Windschuttle contends, have been obscured by a mythology of recent manufacture, imbibed by Aboriginal as well as white, to the detriment of the good and decent people involved in child removal and of our international standing and self-respect. “[The] real Australia,” Windschuttle says, “would never have stooped so low as to try to eliminate the Aboriginal race by stealing its children.” He declares flatly that “there were no Stolen Generations,” and insists that “Australia is not and never has been a country whose people would condone such practices.” (Emphasis added.)

These conclusions, in my view, represent half-truths, contrived and disingenuous, reached not by intention but by conviction. There seems little doubt that Windschuttle is absolutely convinced of the weight and truthfulness of his claims and absolutely confident that the dense fabric of evidence and argumentation he has marshalled leads inexorably to those conclusions. He sees himself as, above all, defending Australia’s honour. It is more likely that his book will give those who doubt our honour, and particularly those abroad, more reason to question whether we will ever be able to deal forthrightly with our history and its legacies. The emotional basis of his assault on the accusation of genocide through the removal of children is clear and simple: What? Us? Preposterous! He claims an Australian exceptionalism. None of this is to suggest, however, that he is completely wrong about everything.

WINDSCHUTTLE’s temperament is a barrister’s, not a historian’s. History needs a puzzling, curious, synthesising intelligence drawn to making the best available sense of whatever bits and pieces the past has left lying about. This Windschuttle does attempt, but his overriding obsession is forensic, to search and destroy, to oppose and expose, to advance one cause and case against all comers. His impulse is less to try to figure out what was actually going on when black children were removed by white men than to demolish a hydra-headed mythology. He sets out with a tightly framed accusation that excludes many other similar and related charges, and selects from a long and complex story only events strictly relevant to the charge, then further selects only the evidence that can be held to disprove the charge and arranges it to best advantage. The preordained triumph of this legalism is then used to assert a general truth about our history and our national character.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Windschuttle’s use and endorsement of legal method is most clearly on display in his extended discussion of a significant episode in relations between white and black which, fifty years after it occurred, precipitated a court case that itself became an important moment in Australia’s history. Windschuttle’s treatment of the original event and of the legal action about it can serve as a test of his methods and perspective.

On 30 October 1996 Lorna Cubillo filed proceedings against the Commonwealth alleging that its policies had caused her to be removed from her family, for which she claimed compensation. Lorna Cubillo, nee Lorna Nelson Napanangka, was one of sixteen children taken from the Phillip Creek mission near Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory in 1947 to the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin, 700 miles away. The agents of this removal were Amelia Shankleton, a member of staff at Retta Dixon, and Les Penhall, a cadet patrol officer with the Northern Territory administration. Some of the children concerned returned to Tennant Creek within a decade or so, but Lorna returned only as a visitor. Co-claimant with Lorna Cubillo was Peter Gunner, who had been taken from his mother in 1956 and placed in a home in Alice Springs.

As Windschuttle points out, the material stakes of “Cubillo” were high. Waiting in the wings were a further fifteen claims by mothers, more than 700 claims by children, and 1367 by children of children. The intangible stakes were even higher, particularly when, soon after the claim was lodged, the Bringing Them Home report on “the stolen generations” was published. Its sensational allegation of cultural genocide provoked a furious onslaught by commentators (including Windschuttle) who counter-charged the report’s chief author, Sir Ronald Wilson, with “traducing” the nation. Stories were being fought over almost as bitterly as the land had once been. So great was the public interest in the Cubillo case that the judge took the unusual step of allowing his reading of the findings to be broadcast. By then more than four years had passed since the suit had been filed. The court had sat for 106 days in seven towns and cities including Tennant Creek. The findings were appealed, and another year elapsed before the result of the appeal was handed down.

Windschuttle relies completely – and selectively – on the court and its methods and conclusions. The court determined, first, that Lorna Cubillo had to show that she had been removed without the permission of her mother or guardian, but could not. Second, it relied on an earlier High Court ruling to decide that the policies under which Lorna was removed did take account of her race but were nonetheless motivated by concerns for welfare rather than the aim of racial obliteration. And third, the court found that even had these facts not applied, Lorna’s claim against the Commonwealth could not succeed because the Commonwealth was not responsible for the actions and policies of the Northern Territory administration.

The court’s conclusions became Windschuttle’s. Most readers would be entitled to think that it looks like a pretty open-and-shut case, and Windschuttle does nothing to disturb that view. But had he proceeded as a historian rather than an advocate it would not have seemed so simple.

For one thing Windschuttle would have let us in on a number of inconvenient passages in Justice O’Loughlin’s remarks. The judge emphasised that the case was about two people and two only, and about events in the Northern Territory and nowhere else, between 1947 and 1963 or thereabouts, not before or since. He made, and could make, no finding about the wisdom or fairness of legislation or policies of that time and place, nor comment on the consequences of those laws and policies, or on mere practices. In fact, he said, he could consider only motives, and motives only as evidenced in writing or by witnesses; but many who might have been witnesses were now dead and many documents had disappeared, so he was not in a position to make a finding that any of the Phillip Creek families had or had not given their informed consent for the removal of the children. Justice O’Loughlin strongly implied that Cubillo’s lawyers had picked the wrong target. Even if the Commonwealth was, for strictly legal reasons, in the clear, others might not be. The judge found that there was a prima facie case for “the existence of a cause of action” against three of the individual participants (including two officers of the Northern Territory administration), and against the Aborigines Inland Mission “for false imprisonment based on her [Lorna’s] removal from Phillip Creek.” The judge quoted with approval a justice of the High Court speaking of “the awful truth” of child removal. “Neither the evidence in this trial, nor the reasons for judgement [the judge said] deny the existence of ‘the Stolen Generation.’ Numerous writings tell tragically of a distressing past.”

The only one of these many points reported by Windschuttle is that concerning the disappearance of evidence and its implications. It should be noted also that on at least one occasion, in his account of the origins of the Phillip Creek mission, he gets the facts wrong even though they are presented accurately in O’Loughlin’s judgement.

A historian’s approach would also have made Windschuttle more sceptical about witness testimony. He accepts at face value evidence given by former patrol officers, for example, both in court and elsewhere, even though it is in defence of their own reputations. This, given Windschuttle’s often-stated scepticism about oral evidence, is surprising. Perhaps he is entitled to take the judge’s word for the reliability of sworn testimony, although Windschuttle fails to report a number of points at which O’Loughlin declined to accept the evidence of one of those officers. Moreover, he accepts without demur what that same former officer said in unsworn testimony in an interview given not long before the Cubillo case. Nor did he do as he has so often urged others to do and go to the archives to see whether what the patrol officers wrote in the 1940s is consistent with what they said in the 1990s. In at least some cases, on my reading of them, it is not.

A historian would also have departed from Justice O’Loughlin in another matter, his belief – or, more accurately, the belief to which the law required him to subscribe – that officials will say what they mean in official documents dealing with touchy matters. One reason why Justice O’Loughlin concluded that there was no “policy” to destroy Aboriginal society was that no witnesses and no documents available to the court said that that was what they set out to do. Windschuttle is happy to share this view about where “policy” is to be found, even though elsewhere in his book he mounts a very cogent argument that “policy” is what people do, not what they say. Had he conformed to his own definition of the term he might have found that “policy” was destroying Aboriginality even if it didn’t say so.

Most importantly, a historian would have been much more curious than Windschuttle about how it was that eight-year-old Lorna Nelson came to be in such a fix.

JUSTICE O’LOUGHLIN’s judgement contains some but not all of the relevant facts. It records that Lorna’s mother Maudie died when Lorna was very young, and that from then until her removal from the Phillip Creek mission at the age of eight years she was in the care of her dead mother’s sister, Mysie (or Maisie). It was Mysie who would have had to be shown to have refused permission for Lorna’s removal to Darwin. The court notes that Maudie and Mysie were daughters of a woman known as “Alice,” but looks no further. Nor does Windschuttle.

Maudie and Mysie’s mother “Alice” was Alice Nampin, a Garrwa woman, from the Borroloola district in the Gulf country, hundreds of miles northeast of Tennant Creek. Alice had been “given” to a station-owner from the Tennant Creek area in the 1890s during the latter’s visit to Borroloola on a cattle drive. When things were at their worst in the Gulf country, in the 1880s, Garrwa girls were being kidnapped in an organised trade and sold to frontiersmen and mining prospectors for ten pounds apiece.

It is likely that the man to whom Alice was “given” was Tom Nugent, previously a member of a gang that roamed the Territory in the early days of the frontier making a rough living, not necessarily by legal means. Looking to settle down, Nugent took the lease on a station he called Banka Banka, just a few miles up the road from the Tennant Creek telegraph station, and so brought cattle deeper into the country of the local people, the Warumungu. There he fathered a number of children by Aboriginal women and it is very likely that at least some of them were from his liaison with Alice Nampin, and that two were the girls known as Mysie and Maudie.

Not long into the new century Nugent gave up Banka Banka and went to live and work at the telegraph station adjacent to the Tennant Creek waterhole. The telegraph station was by then well-established as a ration depot where some old people camped, more or less permanently, and others came and went depending on the season and the availability of work on cattle stations such as Banka Banka. And that is probably how Nugent’s (probable) daughters Maudie and Mysie came to camp near and work at the station, and to have continuing associations with both the telegraph station and with Banka Banka, and hence with the papulanyi, the white men.

Mysie had three children (or perhaps four, the record is contested) by a white man named Dixon, then another two children by a Warumungu man named Mick Japangarti. All five (or six) of Mysie’s children were of mixed racial descent, known as “half-castes,” and were therefore vulnerable to the attentions of a policeman who set up shop near the telegraph station in response to the gold rush that began in 1932. Mysie’s children by Dixon were taken by the police, the girls to Darwin, a boy to a station south of Tennant Creek. The two younger children escaped, hiding in the spinifex from the policeman on his horse. This was the period when Aboriginal women learned (as is recorded by Justice O’Loughlin) to darken their mixed-descent children with charcoal whenever the word spread that there was a government man about.

Maudie had a child, Lorna, by a soldier by the name of Horace Nelson. Very early in Lorna’s life, perhaps even before she was born, the soldier disappeared from the scene, which is how Lorna’s aunt Mysie became, in white terms, her foster mother. On evidence given to the court and other oral evidence it seems likely that Mysie moved back and forth between the telegraph station and Banka Banka and therefore placed Lorna in the care of the missionaries at Phillip Creek and added the mission to her itinerant route. That is probably why the court had such difficulty in establishing her whereabouts at the time of Lorna’s removal.

Although some of the specifics of this sequence of events are not known with certainty the character of the history to which they belong is, and from it a number of conclusions can be drawn.

First, the removal of the sixteen children from Phillip Creek in 1947 belongs to a long sequence of abductions and removals of various kinds for various reasons. In the history of Australia as a whole the first abduction, of Arabanoo by Governor Phillip, occurred within months of the white arrival on the continent. In the history of Mysie and Lorna’s family, abductions or removals occurred across three generations: first Mysie’s mother Alice Nampin, the Garrwa woman; then Mysie’s children by the white man Dixon; then the foster child Lorna.

Second, such abductions and removals were only one part of the destruction of the relationship between Aboriginal generations. Others, in the experience of Mysie and her forebears and children, included being forced to move, sometimes constantly, to find work or sustenance in the face of the relentless erosion of access to land and water that followed the arrival of the telegraph line in 1872 and of the cattle a decade or so later. For the same reasons, younger people (who went to work on the cattle stations) became separated from the older (who often camped as indigents around the telegraph station and subsequently at the Phillip Creek mission). In this way family and authority structures were weakened and often broken.

These ceaseless disruptions and dislocations had much greater impact than abductions and removals. They contributed to the development of alcoholism, new forms of domestic violence, the selling of sex, and venereal and other diseases, all of which greatly compounded the problem of sustaining functional relationships between the generations, even in relatively fortunate groups such as the Warumungu. As is now well known, the repercussions of events that, in the case of the Tennant Creek region, commenced 150 years ago, continue still. Justice O’Loughlin’s judgement records that at the time of the court case Lorna Cubillo had been caring for two grandchildren for more than a decade because they had been abandoned by their mother and their father, her son, a drug addict.

In the chaos of the frontier and its residues the question of whether Aboriginal families did or did not give formal permission for their children to be taken away, or even asked that they be taken away, may seem rather more important to the courts than to the people concerned. Windschuttle is quite right to point to the variety of circumstances in which “permission” was given and/or desperate need arose, and to point to the various motives of participants, but wrong not to attempt to see those circumstances in full or from the point of view of those who experienced them. Some families were incapable of caring for children or had effectively disappeared altogether. Others had lost the will or confidence to “grow them up.” Still others thought that they no longer knew how to grow them up, that their way was in the dustbin of history, while some wanted their children to be educated in the Western way as well as their own. All were aware of the extent of white power and their own powerlessness in relation to it.

Justice O’Loughlin was acutely conscious that this legal matter concerning two people, and two people only, in 1947 and 1963 was just one small part of an encompassing human tragedy. Windschuttle is not. He is with the removers, not the removed, committed to one, oblivious to the other. To look, even for a moment, from the point of view of the removed would have disrupted Windschuttle’s entire argument.

Consider, for example, how Lorna Cubillo’s experience might look to her. The papulanyi deprived her family of the means and perhaps the will for an independent life. Unable to provide for her they acceded to the offer of the whitefellas at the mission to look after her. Then those same people took Lorna away to a place so far off that it might as well have been on another planet. Decades later the papulanyi provided Lorna with an opportunity to tell what had happened, which she did. But they refused to believe her. Then they changed their mind; deciding that she was right after all, they offered an apology – Lorna Cubillo, tears streaming, was in the gallery on that signal occasion. But the apology was for only one of the injuries she has suffered; and there was no compensation for any of them.

Windschuttle wants none of this limp-wristed relativism. He is a true believer. He stands on the doctrine of assimilation, in its most muscular form. That is why he identifies so completely with the cause of those involved in the removal and care of children. He spends the concluding sentences of the book making just this point. “Aboriginal children are Australian citizens,” he writes. “They deserve nothing less than the same opportunities provided for all other children in this country. Most of the people discussed in this book who worked in Aboriginal child welfare in the twentieth century thought the same… For the most part, they did the right thing, both according to their own moral values and the best interests of the children and families they served.”

Windschuttle spares us confusing arguments against assimilation and about alternatives to it. For example, that it doesn’t work. This possibility Windschuttle refuses to entertain, instead claiming that many half-caste people did not identify as members of a distinct racial community. But very often the whites who have to do the assimilating don’t want to. We have been in favour of assimilation in the generality since the 1967 referendum; in the concrete, as the Pauline Hanson episode shows, our feelings have been more mixed. It is also the case that many Aboriginal people don’t want to, or can’t, assimilate, at least not on the terms offered. As W.E.H. Stanner famously observed, assimilation asks Aboriginal people to un-be who they now are – but what if they do not know how? And Stanner was hardly one of those misty-eyed romantics that Windschuttle likes to blame for the damnable policy of self-determination.

It would be possible to argue for an assimilationist policy as a way of smoothing the path toward the inevitable upshot of what Noel Pearson has called the struggle between the 3 per cent mouse and that 97 per cent elephant. But Windschuttle prefers doctrine. Toward the end of his book he offers an astonishing hymn of praise to the civilisation that brought so much misery to an entire people, and an equally astonishing denigration of those who suffered it: “The idea that human beings can be something more than units in a collective,” he writes, “where their place was fixed and their future determined, has only arisen in societies that recognise that every individual life matters. That notion made no sense at all in traditional Aboriginal culture… in a profound sense, the missionaries accomplished what they set out to do, that is, to bring Christianity and civilisation to the world of tribal nomads…” This compares favourably with the government officials of their era, says Windschuttle, “who preferred to leave full-blood Aborigines under customary law, thereby preserving intact many of the practices the missionaries fought against, especially the propensity to violence, the ‘property status’ of women, and sex with children.”

Windschuttle makes these claims on the basis of the work of often well-intentioned, humane people who did what they could for Aboriginal children. But he forgets to point out that his cavalry typically arrived on the scene well after the damage had been done and, in the Phillip Creek case, eighty years after the whole wretched business got under way. He is often eloquent in describing the appalling circumstances in which many Aboriginal children were placed. “Parents who neglected their children, who let them go hungry, who abused them with violence, who prostituted them, who let them go wild with no supervision, or who drank themselves into an alcoholic stupor…” he writes, “all faced forcible removals.” But his eloquence fails him when it comes to considering where these circumstances came from. He presents the agents of church and government as if they were paratroopers airlifted into a dystopia of foreign manufacture.

Windschuttle is quite correct, in my view, to argue that those involved in child removal and care were often, but not always, driven strongly, but not exclusively, by ideals drawn from post-Reformation Christianity and Enlightenment humanism that many of us happen to share. But those people were representative not of us, but of one part of us, of a post-frontier conscience which in most cases, and certainly in the case of Lorna Cubillo and her forebears, turned a blind eye for decades before it roused itself to action. Until that long-delayed day, what would be seen in the Northern Territory was not the conscience of post-frontier society that Windschuttle surveys but the wants and desires of the frontier: for land and water; for cheap labour; for sex; and, often enough, for blood.

The interaction between frontier and post-frontier society, between the wants and desires of the former and the conscience of the latter, is the source of much of the complexity, contradictoriness and moral ambiguity in the history of relations between black and white. It is made more complex still by Aboriginal responses ranging from violent resistance to acceptance and cooperation. One of the things that allow Windschuttle to mount such a clear and consistent case is that he attends to only one of the three or four elements that constituted a long chain of chemical reactions. To argue as he does that our national character is seen in just one part of this morally ambiguous chaos of events is to be exculpatory, to say the least of it.

WINDSCHUTTLE is less likely to be on defensible ground in his account of events than in his criticisms of other accounts; and he is much less likely to care about what those accounts have got right than what they have got wrong. He is so belligerent, so reckless, so often guilty of the offences of which he accuses others, that those attacked could be forgiven if they simply refuse to engage with him yet again or join him in his game of gotcha, a temptation to which an enraged Robert Manne understandably succumbs in the February edition of the Monthly. Windschuttle’s position is relatively friendless at the moment, but there are no grounds for complacency. However galling it may be, it is important to respond, and to do in his case what he declines to do for others, to ask: what has he got right?

Windschuttle has raised, or more accurately, re-raised, four questions that have not yet been well stated and/or answered. He is not the first or by any means the only one to draw attention to any of these issues although his take on them is distinctive.

First, he is of course correct to say that there are events and actions in the story of black and white for which we can be grateful, and to attribute these to post-Reformation Christianity and/or Enlightenment humanism. An irony in this claim, however, is that it follows his bête noire Henry Reynolds in his 1998 This Whispering in Our Hearts – except that Reynolds reminds us that the “light” in our history was accompanied by the “dark.” Windschuttle is also correct to criticise the quite misplaced (and ahistorical) sense of moral superiority which leads many Australians to condemn our past out of hand. But again, this is hardly new or derived only from Windschuttle’s particular outlook; the anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw has been making the point for at least a decade, and many have followed her lead. And Windschuttle fails to criticise the misplaced sense of national superiority that leads many Australians into the opposite error.

Second, Windschuttle is of course entitled to question the number of children removed, although he perpetuates one of the weaknesses of previous calculations. His argument is that removals were of several kinds and for widely varying durations, but his tabulation of them is in aggregate only. The absolute and relative numbers of removals and of kinds of removals is important to his construction of events, but more so to his attack on the credibility of those who have claimed totals of 50,000 or so. Whether Windschuttle’s recalculation is correct or partly so will not be known until earlier calculators have responded in detail to the detail he has now provided. Robert Manne’s review in the Monthly gets proceedings off to a vivid start.

Third, Windschuttle is correct to join the many who have expressed concern about the term and concept “stolen generations,” although it is more accurate to say that the term is a misnomer rather than to argue, as Windschuttle does, that “there were no Stolen Generations.” And it is more helpful to point out that the concept has done damage of a kind very different from that alleged by Windschuttle. It has distracted attention from the extent and complexity of abduction and of other forms of disruption of relations between Aboriginal generations, not to mention the many other consequences for Aboriginal people of the white presence. The disproportionate attention given the “stolen generations” created the sitting duck that Windschuttle triumphantly bags (thus helping to perpetuate the problem, by the way). The claim about the “stolen generations” has come to be used as a proxy for all the wrongs visited upon black by white, most prominently in the prime minister’s apology. There is much more to be apologised for – and compensated for – than the “stolen generations.”

Fourth and last is the most difficult and dangerous question of them all: “genocide.” Windschuttle wants to declare the charge dead. He asks why there has never been any naming of names or attempt to initiate proceedings, a kind of dare implying that if the case hasn’t been mounted then we’re innocent. There is more to be gained by looking at the charge itself. Is “genocide” another of these concepts developed to name events in other histories, mainly European, and then applied to ours? Is it one of those terms that don’t really fit, such as “invasion,” “conquest,” or “war”? Or “settler,” “explorer,” and “dispossession”?

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, put intention at the centre of his neologism, something much easier to find in respect of governments and other organised groups than in the uncoordinated but pervasive and many-sided assault by white society on black in Australia, and where the motive forces were wants and desires rather than intentions. In the Australian case organised entities such as governments and churches were by no means innocent bystanders as the frontier’s wrecking ball went to work, but nor were they its principal agents. Sometimes these representatives of a post-frontier conscience stood between the protagonists, which is why they reward Windschuttle’s partial examination. But most of their sins were of omission rather than commission, of an averted gaze and a buttoned lip, of hypocrisy rather than of a deliberate campaign of destruction unashamed to say what it was up to. It is ironic, to say the least, that the agents of post-frontier society who eventually set out to do something about frontier carnage have ended up being charged with the worst of crimes while the agents and institutions of the frontier have been home free.

What is vulnerable to a genocide-like charge, yet to be given its proper name, is not the agency of church and government surveyed by Windschuttle so much as the entire historical process and the social order that enacted it, and that hardly entitles us to the kind of self-congratulatory comfort Windschuttle wants to administer. •

The post Windschuttle, again appeared first on Inside Story.

PUBLIC HISTORY tells much less than history knows, particularly when what history knows is unpalatable. The story of “the unacknowledged relations between two races in a single field of life” that W.E.H. Stanner famously demanded in 1968 has now been told in vivid detail. But surprisingly little of that story has found its way into the plaques, statues, roadside information displays, local museums and the like scattered by the thousands across the continent, so little that scholarly surveys of this particular corner of public history often draw on the same exceptions to rule: Reconciliation Place in Canberra, Coniston, Kalkadoon, Myall Creek, Fremantle, the Yagan statue. Opposite this paucity is a profusion of marks and celebrations of our manifold achievements. Hyde Park, for instance, at the heart of our oldest city, has almost as many monuments, memorial gardens and fountains and the like as it has trees, most to do with our loss, sacrifice and valour in war, the struggles of our explorers and pioneers, or the sagacity of our civic leaders. On the 97.8 per cent of human affairs conducted in this place before our arrival, on the 2000 generations who made their lives where Hyde Park now stands, on what happened in our obtaining of it, and on what became of the “dispossessed,” not a word or stone is spent. Aboriginal activists are entitled to the bitter sarcasm: Best We Forget.

Of course this gap between the known and the said owes much to psycho-social factors, as the activists’ sarcasm implies, but it has to do also with the properties of public history. Public history of the kind discussed here takes up space, and often it’s first in best dressed. Hyde Park is an attic of the clutter from the past, a lesson in historiography rather than history. As with cemeteries and headstones, such things can’t be moved or built over, so what is a latecomer to do?

Public history is unusual also in how it comes into being. The exhilarating recovery of the story of “relations between two races in a single field of life” was undertaken by individuals roused by an Aboriginal rebellion and driven by academic competition and contention. Most public history, by contrast, demands agreement by groups. That is easy to frustrate, and therefore hard to get. The blitzkrieg of the historians has been followed by the trench warfare of public history.

The different properties of public history and scholarly history, and the uneasy relations between them, are not normally the stuff of headlines, but they can be. The most important, and significant, case in point is the long-running, sporadic scuffle over what should and should not be seen in the Australian War Memorial.

THE AWM is the behemoth of Australian public history, on a quite different plane from Hyde Park or any number of parks, memorials, local museums and the like. From its initial focus on the sacrifices of Australian forces during the first world war the AWM has expanded to take in the experience of other combatants and of civilians in “wars and war-like operations in which Australians have been on active service,” including peace-keeping. The AWM is big (a staff of 200 plus 260 volunteers), rich (annual budget approaching $50 million), and immensely popular (more than 800,000 visitors a year). It is backed by one of our most powerful cultural interest groups, with a council of thirteen that includes three generals (one of them national president of the RSL), two admirals and two air marshals. It is at once a research institute, a publisher, a museum, a memorial and a place of commemoration. It makes corporeal our loss, sacrifice and valour in war and is therefore central to the central component of our national identity. It is a sacred place. To propose, therefore, as many historians have done, that it should include in its embrace the wars of the frontier is to run risks up to and including the charge of sacrilege.

That proposal was first made in 1979 when a distinguished historian engaged by the AWM as a consultant suggested that it should include “irregular warfare” such as the Eureka Stockade, the Vietnam War (not then included in the AWM) and the frontier wars. Despite the historian’s conservative credentials (it was none other than Geoffrey Blainey) and his appeal to comparability, nothing happened. The idea was raised again from time to time, typically by academic historians, and most notably a decade ago – two decades after Blainey’s initiative – by Professor Ken Inglis in the course of his remarks at the 1998 launch of his Sacred Places, an exhaustive and highly respectful study of our war memorials. Such an authority could hardly go unanswered. The AWM’s director (retired Major General) Steve Gower commissioned a report from his Military History Section, which came up with the congenial conclusion that “only police forces or British military units were involved in the ‘wars,’ whereas the Memorial’s charter calls upon it to commemorate Australia’s military forces.” This view the Council promptly endorsed.

Behind the scenes, however, disagreement simmered, with the AWM’s director on one side, its principal historian, Dr Peter Stanley, on the other. Eventually the disagreement turned into a public spat, unimportant in its detail but revealing in its tone.

In this Inglis and his Sacred Places were once again the detonators. In 2008 Inglis published the third edition of the by-now celebrated volume and reiterated his view that the events of the frontier should be represented in the Memorial. For whatever reason, Gower decided that he would not let this pass. Using his regular director’s column in the AWM’s magazine Wartime Gower declared that the new material in Inglis’s book was more opinion than research and that the book as a whole was “disappointing.” Gower reminded his readers of the report he’d commissioned a decade before from the Military History section “then headed by Peter Stanley,” repeated the report’s recommendation and the council’s endorsement, and there, Gower concluded testily, “the matter rests.”

But it didn’t. In Wartime’s next edition Stanley (who had previously left the AWM’s employ) corrected Gower. “I had nothing to do with the report,” he wrote, “and though having researched the frontier wars was not consulted.” Gower snapped back at Stanley, arguing the toss about the report’s conclusions and Stanley’s role before concluding tartly that “if he (Stanley) has any evidence-based material to contribute, it would be welcome.” Stanley offered a piece to Wartime. It was rejected. So he put it in the Canberra Times.

Stanley's piece joined a small media flurry that included a segment on the ABC’s national 7.30 Report. The 7.30 Report’s story presented a tableau of the larger struggle. On one side was AWM council member and RSL president (retired Major General) Bill Crews, backed, in Gower’s absence (he declined to appear) by archival contributions from former Prime Minister John Howard. On the other side appeared no less than five distinguished historians: soldier-turned-scholar John Coates, prominent Aboriginal academic Gordon Briscoe, and Geoffrey Blainey, Ken Inglis and Peter Stanley.

The historians argued that the fact of a “brutal, bloody and sustained confrontation that took place on every significant piece of land across the continent” had now been established beyond doubt by military historians and scholars at the Australian Defence Force Academy among many others; that the AWM already covers warfare of kinds similar to the frontier wars; and that inclusion of the frontier wars would be consistent with the AWM’s charter. In short, the historians said, the precedents and permissions are there. It fits. And in short, the spokesman for public history said, no, they aren’t and it doesn’t. Crews, speaking for the AWM and, presumably, the RSL, confronted the historians thus: “It would be our view that it is not appropriate to commemorate [the frontier wars] nationally and certainly not in the Australian War Memorial, despite the fact you may call it a war.”

Crews seems to have smelled a rat in the historians’ articulate reasonableness. He wasn’t going to get into a debate about it with people who’d spent their lives winning debates, but he was going to say that you can call it a war all you like but my gut tells me that the frontier wars were different from all the other wars, and so is commemoration of them. And he might not be altogether wrong.

THAT AUSTRALIA’S HISTORY is peculiar and peculiarly elusive is something I am qualified by recent and unsettling experience to pronounce upon. Five or six years ago I became interested in things I saw as a boy in the early 1950s in the Northern Territory mining town of Tennant Creek, a small part of the “unacknowledged story of relations between two races in a single field of life.” What began as an interest soon became a preoccupation and I read anything I could lay my hands on, first about the Aboriginal people of the region (the Warumungu, as I discovered), then about what had happened to them since that signal day in 1860 when they clashed with John McDouall Stuart near “Attack” Creek, and then about where all that fitted in the history of the frontier. There were many difficulties of comprehension but the one of relevance here is that I couldn’t make a terminology inherited from European history work. At first, shocked by what I thought I knew but didn’t, I was attracted to terms such as “invasion,” “conquest,” “genocide,” and “war.” Gradually it became apparent that these terms didn’t really get it right but nor did the weasel-words so often used instead, words like “settlement,” “pioneer,” “explorer,” “encounter,” and “dispossession.”

The capacities and incapacities of the term “war” have been the focus of the AWM struggle ever since Blainey’s 1979 suggestion that the frontier, along with the Eureka Stockade and the Vietnam war, saw “irregular warfare.” This restricted focus was entrenched by the AWM’s black-letter response to Inglis’s initial and subsequent proposal, and was accepted by the historians represented on the 7.30 Report. “You have military officers who’d served in other parts of the British Empire saying this was a war, that war had broken out on the frontier,” argued one of the historians. “You had the British Amy being sent to the Hawkesbury. You had a garrison of British soldiers being kept there.” When Crews wanted to call these events “skirmishes” another of the historians angrily retorted: “We are absolutely talking war here.” His colleagues agreed. And why wouldn’t they? The case is strong; it provides a common platform for historians of widely varying perspectives; and it makes the minimum possible demand on the AWM and is, therefore, the most likely to succeed.

But, thirty years on, it still hasn’t succeeded. Moreover, there is another case – also supported by extensive historical evidence and argument – that while the events of the Australian frontier were like those elsewhere, they also weren’t. In important respects the Australian events are unusual, unique even. Often the two “sides” of the “war” were unclear, even to each other. At least some Aboriginal groups found themselves in a “war” without realising it. What was going on was so unlike their kind of fighting that they sometimes fled toward on-coming forces. Some Europeans took the part of the Aborigines; and some Aborigines, notably trackers and Native Policemen, crossed “enemy” lines. There was no “surrender” at the end of any of these war-like episodes, no “peace” and of course no “treaty” or other explicit agreement to end the fighting. The term “victory” was rarely, if ever used, perhaps because it felt so little like one. None of this means that the events in question can’t be called “warfare”; it is to say that if it was warfare, it was of a peculiar and difficult-to-grasp kind.

A less direct but more important difficulty (also well-traversed by historians) is that war-like actions belonged to a much larger and more complicated conflict. That conflict included the exercise of non-warlike violence, at untold numbers of times and places, including whipping and bashing, chaining and jailing, the taking of children, malnutrition and starvation, the rape and abduction of women, as well as poisoning, hunting parties and “dispersals” conducted under the radar. Then there was conduct precipitated by fear or threat of violence. “[I]t is not harshness that controls the outer barbarian,” wrote one of the more humane of the frontier’s policeman, “so much as thoughts of what the white man really can perform, should he decide to be severe, that makes the ignorant native much more amenable to discipline and common sense.” (Emphasis in the original.) Larger still was death and suffering that came not from direct violence or its threat but from the compounding effects of disease, dislocation, and sheer misery, all consequences of the European “presence,” some unintended, others (such as the grog, or “dispossession”) requiring European action or complicity. Tangled up in all these was a bundle of behaviours often characterised as “accommodation.” As Stanner observed, the Aboriginal people, far from being frozen in some unchanging culture, as has so often been alleged, have been changing themselves ever since Governor Phillip ran up the flag as fast as they can possibly go to accommodate themselves to the circumstances imposed upon them by our presence and actions. In sum, one peculiarity of the “wars” on the Australian frontier is their relatively subordinated role in determining the nature and consequences of a much larger conflict. War-like actions were part and precondition of the larger conflict, a percussion whose shockwaves spread in a slow, inexorable motion that continues still.

The limitations of our inherited language as a way of grasping this peculiar history appear in the course of single remark by one of the 7.30 Report’s participants, the soldier-turned-scholar, (retired Lieutenant-General) John Coates. Coates argued that one aspect of the frontier’s peculiar train of events is illuminated by the term “civil war.” “Really, you’ve got two groups of Australians who, in a sense, were involved in a low-scale civil war,” Coates said. And of course it is true that the “wars” were between two parties, the descendants of whom wish to be and are now regarded as Australians. But they weren’t, of course, when the events took place, a difficulty which Coates immediately tries to address: “I mean, we’d arrived in their country, and tried to brush them aside, and they didn’t want to be brushed.” In other words, no, it wasn’t a civil war, it was an invasion.

The problem revealed is that what happened was like many of the things named in language developed in other times and other places – an invasion, a war, a conquest, a settlement, a dispossession, an accommodation – but also unlike, and therefore something different from all of these. Bafflingly, it somehow contains all of them

“War” is an increasingly elastic term, but however used it tends to distract attention from the fact that “war-like” events were a relatively small, albeit crucial part of a long-running, widespread, violent conflict between peoples. In other words, what gets through the AWM’s narrow gate of precedent perhaps shouldn’t; and what gets left behind is much the larger part of the whole.

That larger whole includes (and here again we are in the historians’ debt) the sheer scale of events as well as their distinctiveness. The conflict that comprised the frontier and its aftermath dwarfs others in which we have been involved, certainly by comparison with any one of them, perhaps even taken in sum. It is true that conflict on other shores has caused 102,000 Australian deaths, probably three or four times the numbers killed in frontier “warfare.” But conflict within Australia resulted destruction of a kind widely experienced elsewhere (including in countries where we have fought), conflicts in which death, maiming and pain were often greater among civilians than among combatants, and which it has long pleased us to say that “we” have been “spared.” In our case a population of around 750,000 was reduced to something like one tenth of that number. Although much of this destruction of life was not intended or even recognised for what it was, it did flow from an unrelenting 180-year determination to have the entire continent. The consequences for those who survived were both appalling and enduring; even if all goes as well as we dare hope, they still have many generations to run.

From these peculiarities of our history, problems of commemoration arise, the first of which is the problem of “sides.” The Memorial’s founding spirit Charles Bean, to his credit, wanted the memorial to avoid nationalist triumphalism and the glorification of war. But for almost all concerned, including those who visit in their hundreds of thousands, the emotional core of the AWM is not in the big abstractions of loss, sacrifice, valour, or in reminders of the grim realities of war, but in our loss, sacrifice and valour. It is, in other words, about “us” and, therefore, not “them.” As the AWM itself puts it, “The Memorial forms the core of the nation’s tribute to the sacrifice and achievement of 102,000 Australian men and women who died serving their country...” That does not include the sacrifice and achievement of the millions who died fighting with us, still less of those who fought against us. Nor is there any ambiguity, at least not in the two great defining conflicts represented in the AWM, about who is “us” and who is “them,” or where lay “defeat” and “victory,” “right” and “wrong,” and, therefore, where entitlement to pride is to be found.

A defining characteristic of the frontier, however, is ambiguity in all of these respects. Leaving aside complexities arising from the fact that the conflict began before there was any such thing as an “Australian” or an “Aborigine,” the problem now is that in the course of the conflict “they” increasingly became both “Aboriginal” and “Australian” through reacting to and absorbing much of “us,” both biologically and culturally, and, to a vastly lesser extent, we became “Australian” in and through our relationship with “them.” But for most of that long, conflictual relationship we did not want “them” to be “us,” not until the 1950s in fact, and even then only on terms of total cultural capitulation. Moreover, per medium of the Howard two-step, “we” are now anxious to separate ourselves from those who, for other purposes, we like to regard as our exemplars and progenitors.

How to get the head around all that? And what to do with it? No wonder Bill Crews smelled a rat. His truculence, on this reading of things, stems from a sense that it’s not as cut and dried as the historians make out coupled with an inability to say why not. It is easy to underestimate sheer confusion as a source of unease and therefore unwillingness to try to find a way through intellectual and emotional thickets. These difficulties are compounded, of course, by the unpleasant fact that “our” conduct was so unbecoming. It was often, in fact, cowardly. Which is why an argument based on precedent, in both history and commemoration, cuts so little emotional ice.

That does not mean that Crews and those many for whom he speaks are right in wanting to keep the frontier “wars” or “skirmishes” out of the AWM. Nor does it mean that the historians are wrong to want them in. Both sides have appropriately strong feelings on the matter. The historians are better placed to turn their feelings into words, but by agreeing to argue on the narrow ground of precedent they come close to bowdlerising the rich and complex account of Australia’s story constructed over the past forty years, and, in doing that, have left problems of commemoration un-addressed. Crews and other defenders of the AWM’s status quo, on the other hand, seem to feel that they don’t need to bother with words at all. A disingenuous legalism is all that covers an abuse of power. If there is a way out of this stalemate it may include shifting the debate to different ground.

PART OF THE CASE for taking the “frontier wars” into the Memorial is that it has unrivalled and un-rivallable symbolic and emotional power. It was first in and is by far best dressed, and will remain so in any foreseeable future. To propose to include the events of the frontier in that place and all that it represents is of course to propose something for “us” and our feelings about “our” history. But to see it as only that, or even mainly that, is remarkably self-centred. The story is far more the story of Aboriginal Australians than it is of the rest of us. Most Australian lives are explicable without reference to the fact of Aboriginal Australians. The lives and circumstances of Aboriginal Australians, however, are incomprehensible without reference to the rest of us and our forebears.

To say that that experience has no place in our most sacred place of commemoration of loss, sacrifice and valour, that it belongs in some other and lesser place, while still wanting to count the Aboriginal people as “us,” as Australians, is, to use the palest possible language, putting things at a heavy discount. It would be better described as an hypocrisy arising from a refusal to acknowledge the reality of relations between two races in a single field of life, a denial of our history. But, far worse, it is a denial and an exclusion of an entire people, and of the experience that did so much to make them, and which we did so much to make. It is, in fact, to continue a history that we all like to say is behind us, including its quantum of cowardice. Is the case for the historians to put not that the “frontier wars” do fit but that they, and much else besides, should? That it is the AWM that needs to change to accommodate Australian realities, not the other way about? It is not the fault of Aboriginal Australians that these big realities come so late in knocking on the Memorial’s door. The most compelling appeal is not to the ways in which our history is like others but, precisely, the ways in which it is distinctive, and distinctively hard to understand and absorb. The appeal should be grounded not in precedent and existing conventions, but in uniqueness, moral courage and grace.

And the case for the custodians of the Memorial to accept is that it must take another step in its evolution, perhaps the largest and certainly the most difficult of the several embraced since the days when it was simply a memorial to the first world war, to recognise that the greatest of the violent conflicts between peoples in which we have been involved occurred here and not, as we have been accustomed to believe, overseas, in forms which, for reasons of complexity, self-interest and self-absorption, we have found difficult to see and to accept.

Of course there is much that the AWM cannot do. There can and should be many other places in our public history for the recognition and commemoration of that experience. But there is some work to be done that cannot be done elsewhere. One way of putting the case for including the events and consequences of the frontier in the AWM is that, whatever the difficulties, by virtue of the Memorial’s unique place in our national life, it is not possible to do otherwise.

THE STRUGGLE over the scope and meaning of the Australian War Memorial is significant as well as important, a gauge of our progress in acknowledging “the relations between two races in a single field of life.” Thus far that story has been fully comprehended only in the gut of Aboriginal people and in the elaborated discourse of historians and other scholars. The scholars’ blitzkrieg, driven by the rebellion of the Aboriginal people, by shock at the contents of the recovered story and by the Darwinian conditions of academic work, stormed to the astonishing victory of Mabo in only three decades. The great weakness of the scholarly apprehension of the story, however, is its inaccessibility and its excessively cerebral character, and its consequent inability to do much of the necessary emotional work. The historians, rightly, want public history to “catch up,” but public history necessarily moves only by agreement and, therefore, slowly. But that is also its great strength. Public history demands, and provides a way of doing, the hard work of hearts as well as heads.

How will this struggle between the two forms of knowing the past, and two groups of history’s guardians, play out? Whatever happens or doesn’t happen at the AWM will be both important and significant. One possibility is that, inch by inch, public history is getting there, doing the grunt work of changing our sense of ourselves. The other is that it’s not and won’t, that such incremental progress as has been made owes much to a generation of historians still fired by the experience of discovering the actual contents of the story, that we are, in other words, living off emotional capital accumulated in an era now drawing to a close. •

POSTSCRIPT: A week or so ago the Australian War Memorial unveiled a new statue to honour “the myriad and vital roles” played by animals in Australia’s armed forces. An AWM curator is quoted as saying that the “complex nature and history of the new memorial gives it greater meaning.”

The post Battle over a war appeared first on Inside Story.

WHAT THE Rudd government proposes for schools – better IT infrastructure, beefed-up national curriculum, improved transition to training or work, a focus on the basic skills of the disadvantaged, better reporting on schools’ performance – are all achievable and worthwhile, but they are not even new, let alone “revolutionary.” The government is doing itself, the schools and a useful word no favours by suggesting that they are. There have been revolutions in schooling before, certainly including the institution of free and universal basic schooling, and perhaps also the tumultuous events of the 1960s and 1970s that culminated in the Whitlam government’s spectacular entry to the schooling arena. Other revolutions may come. There is work to be done that, if carried through, could be called “revolutionary.” But as things now stand the Commonwealth lacks the machinery, the resources, and the mandate for revolutionary change in schooling. It has no clear, inspiriting argument about why a “revolution” is needed, nor a picture of what it would achieve.

I would like to illustrate these points through observations from my time as a fly on the wall of schooling over more decades than I like to admit, then sketch some suggestions about the content of a “revolution” and about the government’s program.

EXPLORATION of continuity and change in schooling is best begun at the level of its microbiology, the class, the teacher, their task. For example: a schoolroom beside the transcontinental railway, not far from the Nullarbor, in 1935. Tooligie Siding was my father’s first school, and he its first teacher. The deal was that if a community provided the schoolroom the Department would provide the teacher. The little rectangular stone and galvanised iron building erected by the fettlers and pastoral workers of Tooligie assumed that the kids would sit in rows facing the teacher who would be standing at the front, and so did my father. He grouped his pupils by age and marched each age-group through more or less the same syllabus at more or less the same pace. A very few get bored because it was too slow (10/10). Some found they could keep up okay (7/10). Others fell behind (5/10). This was the rule even when, as in the case of my father’s first school, there were seven age-groups and only ten kids in a single room.

My father was typical of his cohort in wrestling with the pedagogy they inherited. In not very systematic or even conscious ways they tried to make the schoolroom less formal and “teacher-centred,” to encourage more interaction among the kids (“group work”), to make curriculum more engaging by relying less on texts and readers and more on an a la carte menu of books and other resources, to make assessment less discouraging and more useful, and to loosen up the almost North Korean lock-step parade of the age-groups through a prescribed syllabus.

Small outbreaks of such thinking and practice dotted the 1940s and 1950s, reached epidemic proportions in the 1960s, and achieved national legitimacy through the Commonwealth’s dramatic intervention in the early 1970s. The Whitlam government sponsored innovation in curriculum and pedagogy, subverted the states’ control of schooling by setting up its own machinery (the Schools Commission and the Curriculum Development Council), homed in on the needs of special groups including girls and “the disadvantaged,” and instituted a completely new funding regime for both government and non-government schools. Much of this energy faded along with the Whitlam government and budgetary boom times, but the relationship between schooling and innovation did not. Nearly two decades on, in the early 1990s, it produced late and unexpected progeny when state, territory and federal ministers of education agreed that there should be a national curriculum, and that it should be set out not in the familiar form of syllabuses and content but as a series of statements of what students would actually learn, that is, as “outcomes.” This might have been an important moment in our educational history but turned out to be merely revealing of what a “revolution” in teaching and learning might look like, and of obstacles to it.

THE CASE for building teaching and learning on a platform of “outcomes” is seductive. I was at first among the seduced, then the seducers; at conferences and seminars around the country I joined those arguing as follows. The new national curriculum provided the first-ever agreed account of what it is that students are to learn in which areas of learning and in what order. Its “outcome statements” would encourage teachers and students to turn their minds from what they were “doing” (Shakespeare, fractions, river systems, whatever) to what they were learning through the doing. Both parties would know where they were heading and why, and at what rate. Emphasising the destination as well as the journey would change assessment. Instead of telling kids how they were going relative to others (“norm-referenced”) it would evaluate how close they were to mastering a skill, a body of content or an understanding (“standards-referenced”), thus informing judgements about where to go next. It would be “formative” more than “summative.” It would shine its light on “personal bests,” and make possible continuous progress through validated success, for all.

One issue was that outcomes-based education, or OBE, would generate much more and more complex information about each student than even the fattest marks book could contain. Another was that it required a kind of neurology, a web of linkages between “outcomes” or staging points, on the one hand, and “learning tasks” and “learning resources,” on the other. Software would solve these problems. I joined a small group of converts to develop an “outcomes-based assessment, reporting and curriculum management tool.” We called it, evocatively enough, KIDMAP. (We christened our little company Mercator, which no doubt helped seal the deal with our biggest customer, a former geographer.)

The software made OBE attractive to principals and departmental officers as well as to teachers. Data from the level of the student and the classroom could be aggregated and analysed for just about any population (boys/girls, city/country, advantaged/disadvantaged and so forth) or unit of management (faculty, school, region, system), and so provide an empirical basis for judgements about where things were working and where not, and for allocating resources (and blame). OBE promised to restore the “accountability” that had vanished along with Inspectors decades earlier.

Teachers were at first strongly attracted to OBE. It was in many respects their own doing, a cumulation and culmination of that ceaseless tinkering, modifying and innovating in curriculum, pedagogy, student grouping and assessment. But as they drew closer it seemed less a variation on familiar themes than a different theme altogether. Under OBE’s regime students would work in groups organised more by stage than age. They would do more work off their own bat, and would participate in “peer” and “cross-age” tutoring as both tutors and tutored. They (not the teacher) might be the ones to go to the computer to get an “assessment task,” to record its findings, and to look up the prescription and materials for the next bit of learning. In a mutating class the teacher would be less a conductor, more a master of a five-ring circus, the workplace less like that little rectangle at Tooligie Siding and more like a studio or workshop. In short, OBE threatened the class, and the classroom.

The extraordinary resilience and durability of the class and the classroom justifies a significant scholarly literature. If, as the politicians like to say, the family is the building block of society, then so is the class of schooling: the teacher and his or her kids, in the classroom, door shut. The origins of this fundamental unit certainly long predate the Tooligie schoolroom or even the industrial revolution (its factories have often been blamed), and are perhaps to be found in the pulpit and pews of church and then of chapel. In any event, the class and the classroom are now deeply entrenched not just in the physical plant of schooling but in the hearts and minds of teachers in a way that goes well beyond their pride in the tricky craft of “classroom management.” The classroom door closes, the teacher picks up the baton, the performance begins. The teacher becomes, for the next forty minutes, him- or her- self.

I recall the stomach-sinking moment when I saw what OBE looked like to teachers up close and personal. It came at the end of a day’s PD (“professional development”) in the use of our software which was, in fact, a glimpse of how a quite different way of combining students and curriculum might play out. A few of the twenty or so participants, teachers, were drifting by, dropping evaluation forms in a box on a desk from which I kept a discreet distance. Although these forms were folded I knew what they contained: this is too hard, they’d be saying. Most, but not all, would be too polite to say: what the hell is all this crap?

WHAT MIGHT have made OBE doable, and therefore attractive to teachers? The answer is necessarily conjectural, a guess at what might have been successful based on observation of what certainly wasn’t. It is also revealing, as noted above, of why something “revolutionary” was needed, and why it wasn’t going to happen.

The first requirement would have been several years’ work, sponsored by a consortium of education departments, to develop a really smooth, appealing piece of software and then load it up with outcomes statements plus advice on how to interpret them and examples of student work at different levels, these linked to lots of the “stuff” that teachers crave – ways and means of assessment, “learning resources” for group and individual work and so forth – a giant cookbook, really, with recipes for every occasion and taste. In the meantime, there would be pilot work in a few handsomely resourced schools to work out how to manage the shift from one teaching-learning gestalt to another, including how many and what kind of NCOs would be needed to help the change an army’s direction of march. Then, if all went well, a roll-out – including a really serious upgrade of IT and physical infrastructure – over many years, perhaps spreading from a few schools to many to all, perhaps starting with a Year 1 cohort and following it up through the twelve years of schooling.

Whatever it is that might be imagined as doing the trick, what teachers actually got definitely wasn’t it. What they actually got was a rushed and inconclusive pilot program in a few schools run by principals of the early-adopter type (genuine enthusiasm metered by an eye on the main professional chance). A day or two of PD from some FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) who wouldn’t know yard duty from a non-contact period. Access to a shared computer if lucky, in the classroom if really lucky. Backyard software. “Outcomes” written in gobbledegook that had its origins in the status anxieties of ex-teachers who’d found bolthole in the universities and which pretty well avoided the question of content, of what all kids should know. A cookbook with scarcely any recipes. Parents who could make neither head nor tail of the new report cards the kids brought home. It was a shambles.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this debacle is what it reveals about the sad decline in the reach, power and credibility of the Departments.

The Department had given my father his first employment as a sixteen-year-old “monitor.” It had trained him in its teachers college (just a few blocks from The Department itself), then sent him to one of the many outposts of its far-flung empire where he had taught from its syllabuses, its readers and its texts. He placed its cakes of insoluble SAG (South Australian government) soap by the drinking trough and hung its impermeable toilet paper in the drop dunny. He awaited in a fever of anxiety the visits of its Inspectors. In his nineties he composed a brief memoir; its most vivid and frequent reports were of nuggets of praise from the inspections of fifty, sixty, seventy years before. The Department had my father by the short and curlies.

The Department had no such grip on the teachers who filed past at the end of a hard day’s PD. Indeed, one or two of the less discreet evaluation forms spoke for the rest in suggesting that only a bunch of head office wankers could dream up anything as unrelated to the real world of schools as OBE. Most felt about the Department as you do about Telstra after half an hour on the phone trying to reach an actual person.

It would be easy to join the teachers in their frustration and cynicism. But consider for a moment the predicament of the putative wankers. They worked with annual budgets in which just about every dollar was already spoken for, and in a three-year political cycle that made an eighteen-month plan notional, let alone one extending over a decade or more. They were obliged to use a tender system that ensured that a “national” curriculum would be delivered by a different bit of software for every system and – the following is with feeling – also ensured that the tiny company providing the software would be screwed so mercilessly that the only possible result was clunky, late and unreliable. (I soon learned the mordant helpdesk wisecrack: no ma’am, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.) Head office had no money for a serious IT upgrade or for sustained PD, and no arms and legs in the field because the inspectorate was long gone and the bevy of “consultants” that succeeded them had been axed in subsequent budget cuts. There was no in-house brains trust; budget cuts had sliced through curriculum directorates too, sending waves of refugees into the universities. The training of the incoming workforce had gone to the academy, which took pride in not dancing to the Department’s tune, while “professional associations” and “school-determined priorities” soaked up much of the exiguous PD budget. The men and women of the Departments had to nip and tuck, duck and weave to avoid anything that might have “industrial implications.” They had to jolly along suspicious, resentful teachers who arrived for their day of PD at 9.00, left at 3.20, and took three longish breaks in between.

The Departments, those withered old Gullivers tangled by a thousand constraints, are the principal instruments of state and territory governments in schooling and therefore of the Commonwealth through its “cooperative federalism.” Canberra axed its Whitlamite agencies in the 1980s and so, like the Pope agitating for a Crusade, has money and a capacity for moral intimidation but no troops. Moreover, as I discovered during a stint on the staff of the federal minister for education in the early days of the Hawke government, “cooperative federalism” is an oxymoron, at least so far as state education departments are concerned. The Departments might not be able to do much, but they can certainly stop a lot.

These once-great instruments of state have lost their anthem as well as their muscle. If the Department had my father by the short and curlies, it also plucked at his heart strings. He set out for the West Coast with a sense of romance, of mission even. His own life expressed its truth: he was the grandson of a drayman, son of a cook and a gardener to the wealthy, the first in his family to even get near a secondary school let alone a university. What underwrote the almost totalitarian machinery of prewar Departments (I visited the Soviet Union in 1975, by the way, and it felt like an entire country run by an education department, complete with Inspectors on each floor of the hotels) was a widespread consensus about what and how to teach and about the purposes of schooling. The Tooligie schoolroom was erected by the working people of Tooligie at a cost of 16 pounds, a significant sum in the midst of the Great Depression, but they found it. And they got what they hoped for. A shared vision of schooling was still there when my father’s children started school, after the war. The covers of our Radiant Readers showed two children (a boy and a girl), neatly got up for school, schoolbags on their backs, gazing along a road that wound over hill and down dale to the distant horizon where could be glimpsed the spires of a city, backlit by golden rays. Opportunity could be found on that long and winding road, ignorance banished by that radiant light of knowledge.

THIS GRAND VISION and its creatures, the Departments, combined to achieve great things. Four great things, in my book. They provided universal or near-universal literacy and numeracy. They gave entry to almost any compartment of life for many, particularly girls and the children of migrants. In due course they made extended schooling a common, if not quite universal experience. And they improved much in the experience of schooling, particularly for that sizeable minority of students who found in Years 11 and 12 a combination of choice and constraint, assessment and resources, incentives and sanctions, which got them to do their best work.

But these great gains came at a cost and with failures not commonly talked about by anyone except those notorious spoilt-sports and wet blankets, left-wing academics.

First, schools did deliver for girls and migrants but have not made much of a dent in that great mal-distributor, social class (or, until very recently anyway, on the exclusion of Aboriginal kids).

Second, the hope of opportunity for a few has turned into the fear of failure for many. Schooling in my father’s day looked a bit like a brick, six years high, with a little narrow ladder perched on top. At the end of six years a very few quick ones climbed onto the narrow ladder while the rest left having got what they came for, reading, writing and numbers. Few left empty handed. But as schooling went on longer and longer for more and more it looked less like a brick and more like a Dubai hotel. Climbing from broad base to a narrow spire by now eighteen or twenty years high feels less like a brief audition and more like an endurance race. Failure is now endemic and, for too many, unrelieved. Most kids know by about Year 3 whether they are cutting it or not. Their teachers usually know earlier than that. The universal opportunity to succeed is also the universal opportunity to fail. The dirty secret is that where there are ladders, there are snakes also. Purposes have become confused and have drifted ever further from realities. The most recent of several statements of national goals for schooling wants “successful learners, confident and creative individuals and informed citizens” from an institution charged with sorting out those who are from those who aren’t.

Third, while the diet of the final years of schooling is for the top third or so richer than anything experienced before or after, the nutritional content for the rest is ordinary. Many leave with little to show for it except hurt feelings. That cost is not captured by the term “inequality”; it is something more akin to poverty, or malnutrition.

There is, last, something more diffuse and more likely to be pointed out by right-wing culture guardians than left-wing academics (although there is nothing intrinsically left or right about this or most other things in schooling), a loss of the idea that knowledge is better than ignorance, that the work of schools is education. The real point of the endurance race, so far as the runners are concerned, however, is what lies at the end (or what happens if you don’t get there). The noble vision of education for all has thinned into the instrumental come-on of “equal” “opportunity.”

Teachers might not describe their working experience in terms of this kind but many would recognise the description. They are the ones who have to cope with failure, unrealisable expectations, and their consequences. Particularly when combined with hormones, those consequences can be very, very unpleasant. Am I the only one who found Summer Heights High just too excruciating to watch? Many teachers dislike the racetrack side of their work, hence their constant efforts at reform and improvement and hence also the initial appeal of OBE. The men and women of the Departments are often of the same mind. If you wanted to blame them for anything in the short unhappy life of OBE it would be for an idealism that blinded them to the fact that they were trying to make revolution from straw. They (and I) simply did not anticipate the mismatch between what we were asking schools to do and the resources, emotional, organisational, intellectual, political and financial, available to the task.

THE YOUNG MAN who arrived in Tooligie in 1935 would be hard pressed to comprehend the decline of the Department and its gospel, but from the vantage point of a school costing sixteen pounds the most ungraspable idea would be that a public expenditure of well over $30 billion a year is not enough. How could so much be spent on schooling? And how could it seem so inadequate?

More than forty years ago an American economist, William Baumol, noticed that even as some social institutions became ever more productive (that is, produced more and more for less and less) others, including schooling, headed in the other direction. The former, driven by competition, consistently found new ways to organise the production process, particularly by substituting technology for labour, for which achievement labour was rewarded by ever-increasing remuneration. The latter, steadily increasing demands and pressures notwithstanding, have been unable to change the “production” process or substitute technology for labour but have been forced nonetheless to offer higher salaries to compete for labour with the productive sectors.

This “cost disease,” as Baumol called it, has been exacerbated in the case of schooling because the chickens described above have come home to roost in the budget papers. As schools keep more students for longer so do expectations and pressures, particularly from the inmates, grow. Teachers’ work becomes less clearly defined, less doable, more stressful. One response would be to change the whole set-up. Another, much easier to imagine and pursue, is to reduce its scale. Teacher organisations have long concerned themselves with the physical plant of schooling, particularly during the years of extraordinarily rapid expansion of secondary schooling, but their most durable and successful campaign has been to reduce class sizes. That is a very expensive business. Shaving even a single student from maximum class size can cost a state budget many millions of dollars. To cut by 50, 60, 70 per cent, as has been done over the last generation or two, costs an absolute mozza. My Grade V class contained 63 kids. The student–teacher ratio for government school primary schools in 2006 was 16:1. Per capita spending in the decade to 2006 alone increased by 44 per cent in non-government schools and by 31 per cent in government. Governments spend more and more money on less and less productive schools.

What’s more, those schools keep falling further behind. The “advantaged” of the world want, naturally enough, to stay that way. As the embrace of secondary education widened and lengthened they realised that standing still meant running faster. They tried to rig the race, not by tripping up the other runners but by giving their own team a leg up, with considerable success. The high-fee independent schools now spend about two dollars per student for every one spent on a student in a public or non-government (mainly Catholic) systemic school. As parents with kids in private schools well understand there is no such thing as a free choice. Less apparent is that no choice is an island, entire of itself. Putting one student at an advantage is putting others at a disadvantage. Spending is now more or less the inverse of what “equal opportunity” would require, and the Departments, like the late Soviet Union, are in an un-winnable arms race.

THINKING ABOUT a “revolution” in schooling helps highlight some features of schooling so familiar as to pass more or less unnoticed (and, as suggested below, disguised by things we do notice). These features of schooling can be named in various ways. The four arrived at here are: chronic problems in both the amount and distribution of funding; a downward productivity spiral, exacerbated by an arms race; an educational diet of uneven quality, soured by a sense of failure for many, and amounting for a substantial minority to malnutrition; and the loss of a compelling sense of what schools are for. The common element is the work process of students and teachers, seen from the angles of cost, of experience, of consequences and of purposes. In other words, these problems are interrelated as well as deep-seated. And therein lies the case for thinking that changing them might require a “revolution” in schooling – and for thinking that they therefore may not get changed at all.

There have been major upheavals in schooling before and so there may well be more to come. Perhaps our present set-up will crumble as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Soviet Union (or Lehman Brothers)? In the economic climate now emerging perhaps anything will be possible. If we set that aside, however, no one who remembers the noise and dust, the flaring trumpets and the whiff of cordite of the 1960s and early 1970s would feel that we are in a revolutionary, or even vaguely pre-revolutionary times.

The new government in Canberra can’t be blamed for that, and in the circumstances what it proposes is, as suggested at the outset, at least as worthwhile and doable as anything attempted by a Commonwealth government since Malcolm Fraser’s day. Much of it is not new. Nor need it be. What the government can be blamed for, however, is loose talk about sponsoring a “revolution” which serves only to create un-meetable expectations, to thicken the miasma of cynicism about governments that surrounds public schools, and to hollow out a word that is still useful, even if only as a heuristic device.

There is, perhaps, one context in which the Commonwealth might use the word “revolution” to some point: it could sponsor some thinking outside the square of current policy and debate about schooling, about whether there really are big and chronic problems in schooling and, if so, whether and under what circumstances governments can do anything about them.

For instance:

• Would it be a good idea to concede that – as any state-school parent will tell you – public schooling might be compulsory and secular but it certainly isn’t “free,” so we might as well make the whole set-up fairer and more equitable by putting all schools on the same footing? That could be done either by funding non-government systems as we do government, or vice versa. As funding gets harder to come by, which it surely will, the latter might have some appeal. Could that be done through the tax system (perhaps incorporating a HECS-like scheme) so as to increase contributions by those who can afford it and increase support to those who can’t?

• If there can be no “free market” in schooling (or anywhere else), and if the bureaucracies have outlived their historic usefulness, perhaps we should look elsewhere for inspiration? Why not, for example, a national school system comprised of units about the size of the regions currently used by government and non-government systems (in New South Wales, for example, ten departmental and eleven Catholic), each modelled on the Australian Football League with its wildly successful combination of socialism and capitalism, competition and cooperation, entrepreneurs and big brothers, its relentless use of data, its flash spending and – wait for it – its spending caps? In other words, set the objectives and rules, provide the wherewithal, and watch compliance like a hawk, but otherwise leave the players to play the game with vigour.

• What can be done about the quality of educational diet? Would it be possible and productive to implement the (latest) national curriculum via new agencies at Years 6/7 and Year 10 along the lines of the very successful Year 12 set-ups? They might offer curricula from which schools or groups of schools could choose as well as provide benchmarks for students, schools and regions to see how they’re doing. More important still: they could replace pathetically inadequate programs for the “disadvantaged” with something capable of making a detectable difference to educational malnutrition.

• Are we stuck with ever-rising costs and more or less plateaued outcomes? It is hard to see in the coming budgetary circumstances how the public purse will keep on ramping up funding to schools as well as adding pre-schooling to the tab. On the “output” side, the only way to increase productivity in schooling, or at least slow its slide, is to mobilise the real (and, mercifully, unpaid) workforce, the students. If, as it insists, the government wants “evidence-based” policy then the evidence about the productivity of peer and cross-age tutoring ought to get it interested. More generally, are the class and classroom the most productive way to organise the work of teachers and students? Specifically, the monoculture of aged-based classes? Was OBE, as suggested here, a potent idea condemned by an impotent machinery? What alternatives are there? Is the building block of schooling so cemented in place by the built environment, the trench warfare between governments and unions, and the hard-wiring of teachers’ minds, as to be immovable?

Perhaps the most useful work to be done in the short term is to change what gets talked about and why. Endless barneys about shares of funding to govvie versus non-govvie schools, or by state versus federal governments, or between parental and public purses is necessary but also trivial compared with the biggest funding issue, namely, that we don’t put our money anywhere near where our mouth is. Another example: equating the grand idea of public education with state schools (as teacher unions like to do) muddles thinking about whether and how public ideals and rights can be pursued by means other than public bureaucracies and budgets. A third: talk about “equality of opportunity” focuses attention on who moves from rung to rung on the ladder, quite forgetting that the shape of the ladder might be important too. One more: guff about opportunity, citizenship and the economy makes it hard to remember that schools are, above all else, meant to do something that no other institution can do, and that is provide each kid with a generous introduction to a rich, common culture.

Talk in and around schooling can be tiring and tiresome, and often leads nowhere. But nothing, big or small, ever happens in schooling without it. In “loose-coupled” (that is, shambolic) systems, talk is the only way to get something like coordinated movement. Making it worth listening to is part of the Commonwealth’s national role. And who knows, a bit of forward scouting might blaze a trail where the ragged caravan of schooling might one day need to tread. •

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BAZ LUHRMANN and I learned at about the same time, in our separate ways, that Australia’s biggest story is not easy to get right. Luhrmann’s efforts to understand it began, he says, four or five years ago when he and his wife and their two children were living in Paris and “[I] wondered where their home was and what its stories were.” Mine began when I decided to return after an absence of fifty years to the remote mining town of Tennant Creek, where I’d spent three boyhood years, to find out how the apartheid system I lived in there had come into being and what had become of it.

In Tennant Creek and then in libraries and archives I was increasingly confused by a Babel of accounts of relations between “us” and the Aborigines, most half-right, and therefore wrong: it was an invasion and a conquest in which we were the doers (and bad), they the done-to (and innocent); it was first and foremost a story of discovery, settlement and development; it was all simply a tragic encounter that no one wanted or intended, with very sad but inevitable and unforeseeable consequences; the big nasty was the stealing of children – or frontier violence or dispossession or the grog or some other single element of a complicated compound; it wasn’t nearly as bad or as big a deal as self-aggrandising left-wing historians make out; yes, bad things happened, but it is all behind us now. And so on, and on.

Several of these half-right stories get a run in Luhrmann’s Australia, but nevertheless, in the present circumstances, I admire what he tried to do and, in a much more qualified way, what he has done. The circumstances to which I refer are the trouble we have run into in our efforts to tell and absorb the story of us and them.

IN 1968 THE great anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner famously called for an end to the “great Australian silence” and for the telling of the story “of the unacknowledged relations between two racial groups within a single field of life.” It soon became apparent that a massive labour of story recovery and telling had already commenced. The work of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and other scholars as well as the land claim process and the legal system supported and was supported by an unprecedented mobilisation of the Aboriginal people, a combination that saw the great Australian silence transformed into the great Australian din. Sensational developments including Mabo (1992), Keating’s Redfern speech (1992) and the “stolen generations” report (1997) were grounded in the newly recovered story. These were accompanied by novels and films, Bridge Walks and Sorry books, re-written school syllabuses and media coverage and controversy. Historical wealth newly won from the past trickled its way down from the academy and the courts into popular consciousness and culture, including, eventually, Luhrmann’s saga, Australia.

As it happens, Australia measures our story-telling progress because it can be benchmarked against a film made sixty years ago. The Overlanders was one of Luhrmann’s inspirations, so much so that the two films might almost have been designed as a Before and After advertisement. Both are set in the remote north, among the cattle, at the moment of apparently imminent Japanese invasion. They have similar story lines (a romance, and a cattle drive). Both celebrate a remote, mythic landscape. The Overlanders was by far the biggest Australian film of its day, perhaps ever, and Luhrmann seems to have had a similar ambition for Australia. Both films are preoccupied with Australianness which, given the setting, crucially includes us-and-the-Aborigines.

The Overlanders is the work of British director Harry Watt. He was sent to Australia early in 1944 by Ealing Studios at the request of the Australian government to make a film that would lift hearts in a country at war and show its allies a gallant little battler on the other side of the world. Watt was soon smitten by the piercing light and other-worldly splendour of the north. When he heard that early in the war thousands of cattle had been droved across the continent to keep them out of Japanese hands he had his time, place, and story, exotic yet emblematic of the kind of Australia and Australians he’d been hired to portray.

Except for one small blemish: the Aborigines. They could hardly be left out of such a film, but how to put them in without subverting the message? The problem was particularly acute for Watt. He saw with the eyes of an outsider, a lefty, and a man who made his name in social realist documentaries.

Watt’s solution to the problem comes in several parts: a smidgin of realism (a couple of glimpses of fringe-dwellers); a dash of saccharine (amiable myalls return the drovers’ wave); two Aboriginal stockmen who are as deferential to Dan as he is respectful toward them; and, most striking, an expression of empathy, and regret.

During a romantic moonlit moment the heroine, Mary Parsons, and her swain Sinbad hear in the distance one of the Aboriginal stockmen, chanting.

“What’s he singing about?,” Sinbad asks.

“About the time these people owned the land probably,” Mary replies. “When they were happy.”

That, in the depths of “the great Australian silence” of the 1940s and 1950s, was the best that Watt could manage.

That Luhrmann had available to him a far greater cultural space is obvious from the very first moment of his film, when a screen text instructs the audience in the matter of the Stolen Generations. What follows includes the tragic death of an Aboriginal mother in her frantic efforts to hide her “half-caste” son from the cops; a hero who was married to a now-deceased Aboriginal woman, who speaks an Aboriginal language and who stands in angry opposition to racist attitudes, behaviour and policies; a violently racist baddie who denies paternity of the half-caste child; and sharp conflict among the whites over the policy of taking children and missionising them. At a crucial point the (white) hero is put right in respect of his duty and his heart by his (Aboriginal) brother-in-law. One of Australia’s three leads is Aboriginal, and so are three of the second-string players. The film is peppered with snippets of insight into Aboriginal culture in both its pre- and post-European forms. In short, the distance between Australia and The Overlanders shows that we’ve come a long way. But Australia also suggests, I think, that we’ve got about as far as we’re going to get, for the foreseeable future at least.

MY FAITH IN the trickle-down theory of historical wealth was lost on road to Tennant Creek. By lunchtime on the first day of my trip back to Tennant Creek I was struck by the sheer volume of History lining the highway. There were museums, plaques, memorials, photographic displays in service stations, “historic” towns and ruins, and dozens upon dozens of nicely desk-topped information boards. What was this all about? Puzzlement turned to hyperventilation as I got the hang of what all this History didn’t and didn’t record. It might as well have taken its lead from Basil Fawlty: just don’t mention the War. It’s not that it had much less to say about the Aborigines (mostly explanations of traditional life or the significance of particular sites and places) than about the new arrivals (particularly the intrepid explorers, redoubtable pioneers, and valiant defenders), but that it had so little to say about the relationship between the two. In the real world the highway from Adelaide to Darwin is dense with the history of our relations with the Aborigines, but most highway history ignores it, or merely alludes to it in a sidelong, euphemistic way. Some of this mis-telling, particularly by the monuments, dates back to the great Australian silence (which, as The Overlanders illustrates, was actually the great Australian sotto voce) but most was devised well after the historians set to work in the 1960s. So far as highway history is concerned, they might as well have saved their ink.

At first I was inclined to write this off as outback redneckery, but a good proportion of it was commissioned or sponsored by the federal and South Australian governments and, what’s more, it seems to have been accepted or at least tolerated by its audience of southern and eastern-state tourists. Of the many hundreds of bits of story-telling along the 3000 kilometres from Adelaide to Darwin only one had been molested, and then at one remove. On the back of the toilet door at Attack Creek, just north of Tennant Creek, was some neatly written graffiti posing an apposite question in respect of the two monuments there: well, why did the Aborigines attack?

Highway history suggests that the trickling down of the story of them and us stopped well before it reached the sub-soil. To switch metaphors: the great Australian din has given way to a mix of muttering, avoidance of touchy topics, and sporadic outbursts of the kind found in families that aren’t quite dysfunctional but certainly aren’t happy either. Passionate scholarship has turned into academic industry. Some of us (particularly when at writer’s festivals) want to make a meal of the story while others want to shout it down. Some, like the schoolboy who recently told a researcher that yeh, we killed like, I dunno, a billion Aborigines, are resentful. Most are good-willed but reckon they know the story now, more or less, well enough, and there’s no point going over and over it, is there? Outside Aboriginal communities, the national mood in respect of the story of “relations between two racial groups within a single field of life” is centred somewhere between reluctant acknowledgement and truculence.

LUHRMANN MUST HAVE been aware of this mood, but he nonetheless went ahead and decided to do a movie for a mass audience that would put the story of them-and-us in the middle of Australia’s story. It would be interesting to know why. Perhaps, like me as I discovered what I mistakenly thought I already knew, and like many others who have been drawn into the story by some happenstance of life, he was galvanized by the shock of the known? Anyway, for whatever reason, Luhrmann decided to have a go.

Exactly what he got right and wrong is difficult to pin down. Construing the spare, quasi-documentary storyline of The Overlanders is straightforward. Working out what to make of Luhrman’s florid, stylised and over-cooked movie is not. Most of his Aborigines are cartoon-like characters (David Gulpillil, camping it up as King George, just about winks at the audience), but then so are most of his whitefellas. Often there is so much going on – plot and sub-plot, references to classic movies, historical argument and comment – that it is hard to tell what is going on.

Luhrmann does avoid, I think, the worst excesses of the we-did-it-they-were-done-to perspective, particularly in his account of sexual relations between Aboriginal women and white men. He is right to insist that frontier whitefellas had very different ways of being with Aboriginal people, not all of them deplorable. And he is right also to mark it down as an achievement that racism is no longer a national doctrine. But there are plenty of clangers too. In suggesting that the Missus is the only person available to take in the “half-caste” boy Nullah after his mother dies is misleading as to the conduct of both white and black. More consequentially, Australia more or less conflates the Stolen Generations episode with the Aboriginal experience of us. In fact it wasn’t even the worst of our impact on the relationship between Aboriginal generations. Australia is a cowboy-and-indian movie more than usually sympathetic to the indians, but still mainly concerned with the cowboys. The film could be taken to imply that what we feared at the hands of the Japanese is a bigger deal than what the Aborigines actually experienced at our hands, because it shows us the former but not the latter. Relationships in northern Australia in the 1940s are a given; we do not see their grim genesis or their dismaying evolution over the sixty years since the events depicted in the film.

And that is where things go most seriously wrong, in the happy ending – two of them in fact. The denoument comes with a swirl of action in and immediately after the first Japanese raid on Darwin. The baddie dies at the hands of King George, the child-stealing copper and the racist barman both reveal hearts of gold, while the hero, the heroine and the almost unbearably cute Nullah are miraculously reunited, all set now to get on with happy ever-aftering back on Faraway Downs. There follows a moment of sweet sadness as the missus realises that Nullah must live out his destiny with His Own People, and then we get the second happy ending. A screen text tells us that in 1973 the Australian government abandoned the policy of assimilation, and that in 2008 the prime minister said Sorry to the Stolen Generations.

We wish!

No doubt some of our difficulties with the story stem from the fact that it just doesn’t square with our sense of ourselves as goodies, as a rare Kodak moment in history. And, as both Luhrmann and I found, in our separate endeavours, it is a very difficult story to understand and even more difficult to tell. It is complex and elusive in the form and in the morality of relationships between white and black, blotchy in its pattern, lurching and erratic in its trajectory. Its truth lies in some amalgamation of those half-right accounts that I found so confusing when I first tried to understand Tennant Creek’s story. It is so hard to know what to think and feel about it all that the temptation is to just put it in the too-hard basket.

But the big turn-off is its endlessness. The story of them and us doesn’t have any ending, let alone a happy one. It is ugly, humiliating, and interminable. Here we are, 220 years later, and still it goes on. No matter how hard we try, no matter how great our goodwill, we just can’t get it right, bring it to any conclusion that works. Over and again we dare to hope that we’re getting there and we cheer and get a lump in the throat or a tear in the eye, in 1967 when 90 per cent voted to end racism, in 1992 when the High Court declared that Aboriginal people did indeed have a claim on the land and when the prime minister of the day said yes, we are the ones who brought the disasters, in 2000 when Cathy won her race, in 2008 when another prime minister said: Sorry. Then next day, it’s still there. Our newest way of getting the story half-right is to shrug and say, well, dwelling on it won’t do them any good, will it? Some even argue that going on about the story is damaging, that it encourages us to stew in a juice of guilt, them to brood on their victimhood. Either way, who wants to hear a story of endlessly dashed hopes and interminable failure? About themselves? Not many. “I could have made a small film about this issue,” Luhrmann is reported as saying, “and it would have been seen by people who were already aware of it. But instead I have put a contentious historic issue at the heart of this big entertainment because I wanted to get to as many people as possible.” His film recalls important truths at a time when many would rather not be reminded, but at the price of allowing us to think that it is all safely over now, that we won out in the end. Just as Harry Watt’s solution to his “Aboriginal problem” in The Overlanders was the best that could be done in his day, Australia is probably the best that can be done in ours. •

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