PISA Results Confirm the Need for Investment

By Angelo Gavrielatos, Australian Education Union Federal President.

Should we be concerned about the new Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results? Absolutely.

While we remain in the second highest group of countries, our performance in the international assessment of 15 year old students is a major wake-up call for policymakers.

Australia was the only high-performing nation to show a statistically significant decline in reading literacy between 2000, when PISA began, and 2009.

There has also been a decline in our maths score since 2003 and we have dropped out of the top ten nations in this subject area.

Of even greater concern is the evidence of growing inequality in education. The difference in average scores between students from low socioeconomic families and those from high SES families increased in reading, maths and science between 2006 and 2009.

The performance gap between students of the same age is the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling.

As the report on Australia’s PISA results says, that gap “places an unacceptable proportion of 15-year-old students at serious risk of not achieving levels sufficient for them to effectively participate in the 21st century work force and to contribute to Australia as productive citizens”.

At the heart of the equity problem is the increasing concentration of students from wealthy families in private schools and those from low SES families in public schools – a segregation that is the direct result of the market reforms of successive governments.

It is important to note that the research found that once student and school SES status are taken into account there is no significant difference between the results of students in public and private schools.

But the authors make it clear the level of resources in public schools must be increased to allow teachers to assist the children with the greatest educational needs

These findings cannot be ignored by policymakers at a state, territory or federal level.

The path to improving overall achievement and addressing under-performance is ensuring schools have the resources to ensure every child has the opportunity to get a high quality education.

The most urgent reform is to move away from the flawed federal funding system introduced by the Howard Government that is blind to the real needs of students.

Our public schools now provide education to the vast majority of low income students (78 per cent), indigenous students (86 per cent) and students with a disability (80 per cent) and yet their funding over the decade has increased at a far smaller rate than private schools. Government funding per student for Independent private schools (112 per cent) and Catholic schools (84 per cent) increased at a far higher rate than public schools (67 per cent) between 1998-99 and 2007-8, despite the greater needs of students in the public system.

New research by former Productivity Commission economist Trevor Cobbold shows that when all sources of income are taken into account, independent private schools are now spending, on average, a third more per student ($15,147) than public schools ($10,723).

 To its credit, the Gillard Government has appointed an expert panel to review this funding system. The outcome of that review must be that our public schools get more resources to lift student performance and do more to tackle educational disadvantage in Australia.

The Prime Minister is right when she says that demography must not be destiny in our great nation but we have a long way to go to achieve this goal.

 Post Script.

These results will, appropriately, spark further debate on how to improve our performance. The danger is we will only see a round of political point-scoring followed by more of the same flawed market reforms which have caused many of our current problems.

No doubt you will hear calls for a greater focus on “the basics” in our schools, more NAPLAN testing and accountability, “cash for grades” pay schemes for teachers and a greater privatisation of education through voucher funding.

The PISA results are an emphatic rebuff to those who believe the pathway to higher achievement lies in measures like these. Their introduction would see us continuing to follow the route being travelled by the United States, a nation that routinely performs far worse than Australia on every educational measure.

In an analysis of past PISA results the head of the Australian Curriculum and ReportingAuthority, Professor Barry McGaw, said that the drop in reading literacy results “ is due to schools focusing more on basic achievement and not so much on the development of sophisticated reading of complex text”. This equally applies to the 2009 PISA results.