Australia is developing a nasty addiction to ADHD drugs the WHO refuses to recommend

By | Addiction, Books, Education, Mental Illness | 3 Comments

In December 2018, the Australian Human Right’s Commission reported to the UN that “Australian is among the countries with the highest rate of ADHD diagnosis in the world for children 5-14 years, and the number of psychostimulant drugs prescriptions has increased dramatically.”  In the two short years since then, Australia has increased the prescription of these drugs by a 24 percent.

In 2020 the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) subsidised almost 1.5 million prescriptions for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) medication.  That is double what it was just 8 years ago and is ten times the number from 1997. We don’t have accurate current Australian statistics on ADHD but if the rate of growth in prescription drugs is any kind of guide, we have a very big problem, and it is growing at more than 10% a year.

ADHD is a neurological disorder defined by symptoms.  People with ADHD are inattentive,  impulsive, and in some cases, hyperactive.  The primary driver of those symptoms is an inability to focus.  In boys this often manifests as disruptive behaviour and in girls as inattentiveness.

Our ability to ‘focus’ is dependent on dopamine, a critical part of our reward system. It keeps us focused on chasing rewards and when there is danger, focuses us on avoiding it.  Even when rewards or danger are not in play, we keep our mind on the job with dopamine.

Like all mental illness, ADHD is likely attributable to an underlying propensity, but stress and addiction can significantly increase the likelihood of symptoms developing. The figures make it clear that we are creating disease. When we experience chronic stress due to uncertain housing, food insecurity or violence, for example we develop a tolerance to dopamine by increasing the baseline levels we need to focus. The same thing happens when we become addicted to things like sugar, online games, social media, porn, alcohol or other drugs.  When our brain is in that dopamine-adapted state, our dopamine levels are too low when we are not doing something addictive.

When dopamine levels are too low, we can’t focus.  Our mind feels like it is running too fast, and we struggle to hold a thought for more than a few seconds.  This is how addiction and stress leads directly to ADHD behaviour and it is why most people who are diagnosed with the condition are addicted or stressed or both. This rewired state also downgrades our impulse control. The net effect is that we have random and rapidly changing impulses and are more likely to act on them.

ADHD and classroom education mix about as well as oil and water.  Kids with ADHD are often compelled to move constantly, are easily distracted by noises or sights in or near the classroom, will frequently interrupt teachers and other students, struggle to translate learning into understanding and have trouble paying attention.  It is challenge for educators to remember that none of this behaviour is voluntary and not punish the child or demand that they be medicated.

The drugs dispensed at an increasingly frenetic rate to ADHD sufferers are dopamine stimulants. Just like any stimulant drug, they help us keep focus.  Their mechanism of action is similar to cocaine and amphetamines. They don’t do anything about the cause of the low dopamine state but, for as long as we take them, they can usually stimulate enough dopamine to stop our mind wandering off task. They can of course be highly addictive. This is why the World Health Organisation (WHO) has refused to add them to its list of effective and safe medicines. Yes, that’s right, the current ‘cure’ for lack of focus driven by addiction (or stress or both) it to give children addictive drugs which the WHO has refused to recommend.

As distressing as those numbers are, it’s worth remembering that ADHD medication prescriptions have doubled since that data was collected, so they are likely to be a significant underestimate.  Those same medication numbers tell us that just two decades ago ADHD was a tenth of the problem it is now. In other words, encountering a child with ADHD in the average classroom was a rare event.  The way the numbers are going, within 10 years it will be rare to encounter a child without ADHD.

We are on a fast track to having a generation of kids who are impossible to educate unless they are taking potentially addictive stimulants that predispose them to a life of addiction.  If you think that’s an exaggeration, take another look at the graph.  ADHD is a problem with a rocket and the current ‘solution’ is ignite the afterburner.  We need a plan that supports parents, reassures educators, and helps kids.  We need a plan that fixes the root causes, addiction and financial insecurity.  And we need that plan yesterday.

Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels

 

We’re looking at the wrong Nordic Country when it comes to PISA

By | Education | 2 Comments

Australia has just done worse than it ever has on the international academic benchmark, PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment).  The usual suspects are telling us to copy Finland, the darling of the early PISA tests.  But with the Fins now in a nosedive like ours, perhaps it would be smarter if we looked to their Nordic neighbor, Sweden.

PISA is conducted every three years by the OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).  It compares the performance of 79 countries using standard and consistently applied testing.  It is the international equivalent of NAPLAN, the Australian national standardized test.

The latest round of data has just confirmed that Australia is in serious trouble. According to the test, more than 4 out of every 10 Australian 15-year olds now do not read well enough to meet the minimum national standard.  Even more shockingly 1 in 5 Australian 15 year olds cannot read well enough to actively participate in a modern society.

Our scores in Maths, Science and Reading have been consistently falling since the testing started in 2000.  Today’s Australian 15 year olds are academically equivalent to Australian 14 year olds in 2000 (and todays 12 year olds in Singapore).  In Maths, Australia has dropped from 5th in the world in 2000 to 24th today.

The usual finger pointing started within seconds of the data release this week.  Depending on the commentator, it was either the Federal Government or the State Governments or the teachers or the lack of teachers or the parents or the quality of graduates or the Universities or not using phonics to teach reading or lack of money, or, well, you get the idea.

The proposed solutions are as tired and worn out as the pointy fingers of blame.  One of the first to be wheeled out is that we need to be more like Finland.  When the first PISA test was published in 2000, it showed that Finland was close to the top of the table in most domains.  And when the second and third tests showed them getting even better, Finland became a superstar of education. Finland has been the darling of many education consultants (and professional development salespeople) ever since.  The only trouble is, that PISA tells us their results have been plummeting just as fast as ours since 2006.

Finland does do education differently to many in the OECD, but that is a recent phenomenon.  In the mid-1990s, they copied reforms implemented in Sweden over the preceding decade.  Both countries had been leaders in school education since the 1950s using a model of public education for all.  Both demanded that a student would be guaranteed the same high-quality education delivered to the same high standards wherever they lived.  Schools were strictly and centrally controlled, had state-prescribed curriculums, external school inspections and detailed regulation. Everyone had the best school in country just down the road.

But during the 1980s and early 1990s, a revolution in education practice occurred first in Sweden and then in by the mid-1990s in Finland.  Both embarked upon what could be described as knit-your-own-adventure education. Both countries disbanded their school inspection programs, central control was loosened and local administrators and teachers were empowered on matters of curriculum, teacher training and grade criteria.  Teachers were given enormous autonomy in the classroom.  They could choose whatever teaching methods they liked and were largely free from standardized testing and school inspections.

The changes introduced assessment by objectives.  The curriculum no longer included prescribed content and detailed syllabi.  It simply established goals and expected schools to interpret and implement them as they saw fit.  Sweden also introduced school choice, allowed the entry of for-profit private operators and encouraged competition for taxpayer funded ‘vouchers.’

When Finland blitzed the 2000 PISA test, the commentators attributed that performance to the newly implemented high autonomy design, forgetting perhaps that the 15 year-olds tested in 2000 (and even 2003) had, crucially, had their early education under the old system.

Sweden’s PISA results in 2000 were nowhere near as stellar as Finland (nor Australia), but they weren’t terrible, so no-one worried too much.  When the 2003 results showed a slight decline, alarms started to sound.  Internal national testing was showing that the average 15 year old in 2004 was achieving at the same level as 14 year olds in 1996. Action plans were drawn up, but an education system is a large ship to turn.

In 2009, Sweden’s experienced what they described as a PISA-Shock.  Sweden’s PISA maths result dropped below the OECD average, something Australia has just managed to emulate. In 2012 Sweden’s results plummeted even further, but by then plans to recentralize the Swedish education system were well under way due to a series of reforms implemented as a direct result of the 2009 PISA-Shock.

They decided quality education requires quality control. A new school inspection office and regime of standards enforcement was created in 2008 and a new curriculum which was much more prescriptive about what should be taught, how it should be taught and how it should be graded was introduced in 2011. And the results are beginning to show.  The 2015 results arrested the plummet and dragged Sweden just above the OECD average.  The 2018 results have confirmed it wasn’t an anomaly, with Sweden almost surpassing Finland and scoring significantly better than the flailing Australian Education system.

Sweden is still a long way from perfect.  Its privatized school choice voucher system is strapping a rocket to inequity and this is likely to put a ceiling on what can be achieved. It still hasn’t clawed its way back to where it was in even 2003 but its results are heading in the right direction.

Sweden and Finland both threw out a system of old-school equal education-for-all, centralized control, school inspections and prescribed teaching practices in favour of more experimental, loosey-goosey methods.  Both have suffered significantly as a result.  And while Sweden accelerated its demise by simultaneously introducing school choice that exacerbated inequity, there can be little doubt that flower-power education did neither of them any favours.

We can learn a lot from the Nordic experience, but not what most people think.  It tells us education needs structure, rules, tests and inspections and if you want it to do even better, it needs all of that, without school choice.

Australia needs to have its own PISA-Shock moment.  We are in accelerating decline and we need to act quickly to arrest it.  We have failed a generation of Australian kids.  When one in five Australian kids is not functionally literate, we are in the middle of a full-blown education disaster.  For those children and their families, this is a crippling impairment.  And for the country that depends on every child being an active contributor, it is a rapidly accelerating catastrophe demanding an urgent solution.

Why are we throwing money at people who choose not to use Public Education?

By | Education | 11 Comments

The Government has just decided to throw another 4.6 billion taxpayer dollars at a sector which already sucks up $12 billion a year of Australia’s education funding.  On equity grounds alone, the increase for ‘private’ and not public schools is outrageous.  But it highlights an even more egregious fact.  Almost 90% of Australian households are being asked to subsidise the private choices of the other 10%.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, of every 100 Australian households, 33 will have children under 15 or dependent students aged 15-24.  In 21 of those households the school age children will be attending public schools, 7 will be attending Catholic schools and 5 will be attending independent schools (such as Protestant and Islamic schools).

Together the 12 households that have chosen not to use the education system funded by all taxpayers are asking the other 88 households to pay for their choice.  They argue that in choosing not to use a public service they are saving the community money and so they should be compensated.  But that is the equivalent of an avid reader suggesting he is saving the local library by buying his own books and then expecting his collection to be paid for by the taxpayer.  Or the chap installing a pool in his backyard to be expecting it be paid for by the government because he is taking load off the public pool.

The reality is that our voracious reader or our keen swimmer may be choosing to spend money on books and pools for any number of reasons including convenience, variety and perhaps just because they don’t like sharing.  And they are perfectly free to make those choices for those reasons.  But they don’t get to ask the rest of us to subsidise those preferences.

Likewise those 12 families are choosing not to avail themselves of the public education system for a multitude of reasons.  Maybe they like religion mixed with their education.  Maybe they want a single sex education.  Or maybe its just that they think they can get a better education than the government is offering.  Whatever is driving their choice, they should be free to make that choice.  But they should not be given taxpayer funds for electing not to use a public service, any more than our book lover or water enthusiast should be given tax dollars to build and maintain their private library and private pool.

When the governments of Australia collectively decided that education was a public service that should be free, secular and accessible to all in the late 19th century, the Catholic church opted out and declared that it would fund an alternative.  It did this knowing that to do so would cut it off from taxpayer funds. But such was its religious conviction that children of Catholics should be educated by Catholics, that this was the price it was prepared to pay.

The Church stuck to this ideal for the better part of a century, but the decline in availability of low cost teaching labor provided by religious orders and the increasing cost of providing more complex education meant they were very much the paupers’ option by the mid-1960s.  Some strong-arm tactics by the Catholic church in Goulburn resulted in the first dribble of public money.  In the half century since, those drips have turned into a torrent and not just to Catholic schools.  In many cases, including in Goulburn, Catholic schools now receive as much or even more public money than their so called ‘public’ neighours.  And still they want more.  And they tell their customers how to vote to ensure they get more.

There is nothing wrong with parents choosing not to use a public service. But that doesn’t mean the taxpayer should pay for their choice any more than the government should pay for my subscription because I pay for Foxtel rather than watch the ABC.

Australians don’t want our governments throwing our money at people who opt-out of our public services.  We want every precious education tax dollar focused on improving the skills of every single child in this country. Yes, they can choose not to be educated by the State.  But if they do so, they also forgo access to the State’s money.  The sooner we shut down the notion of privatised delivery of government funded education the sooner we can begin to claw our way back to the top of the list of the world’s best education systems.

Schools taking taxpayer funds must not be used for political campaigning

By | Education | 2 Comments

On the eve of the by-election, the three Catholic schools in the Longman electorate wrote to 5,000 parents urging them to vote for the Labor Party.  Between them, these three schools received $31.6 million dollars in government funding in 2016. It is outrageous that they are using taxpayer funds to engage in blatant politicking.

The email from the schools explained that the parents should vote Labor because the Turnbull Government’s policies would “impede our ability to build new schools in the archdiocese and we will be challenged to keep pace with the real cost increases for Catholic schooling.”  It went on to explain that Labor had pledged to spend an extra $250 million on Catholic schools nationally.  It estimated that if the Government’s policy were pursued it would cost Brisbane Catholic Schools $40 million.

But these are not poverty-stricken schools running on the smell of an oily vestment.  They are extraordinarily well funded by the taxpayer.  For example, according to myschool, the Caboolture secondary school, St Columban’s College received 13,380 taxpayer dollars per student in 2016.  This was just a whisker under the $13,657 received by its next-door neighbor, Caboolture State High School.   St Columban’s also topped that up with an extra $5,678 per student from its fee-paying families.

In addition to that recurrent funding, both schools received taxpayer funds for capital works.  Caboolture SHS banked $516,595 from 2014-16.  But St Columban’s received more than three times as much taxpayer dosh, taking in $1,864,312.  That money is used to build assets owned by the Catholic Church, who in turn have the right to exclude the very people who paid to build them.

If the principal of Caboollture State High School had indulged in a little freelance political lobbying of his parent group, the screams of outrage would be heard from space, and rightly so.  The Principal is a government employee and has no place suggesting how parents should vote, much less actively cajoling them.  So why on earth do we tolerate it from Catholic Schools that are also funded by us?

When the governments of Australia collectively decided that education was a public service that should be free, secular and accessible to all in the late 19th century, the Catholic church opted out and declared that it would fund an alternative.  It did this knowing that to do so would cut it off from taxpayer funds. But such was its religious conviction that children of Catholics should be educated by Catholics, that this was the price it was prepared to pay.

The Church stuck to this ideal for the better part of a century, but the decline in availability of low cost teaching labor provided by religious orders and the increasing cost of providing more complex education meant they were very much the paupers’ option by the mid-1960s.  Some strong-arm tactics by the Catholic church in Goulburn resulted in the first dribble of public money.  In the half century since, those drips have turned into a torrent.  In many cases, including in Goulburn and Caboolture, Catholic schools now receive as much or even more public money than their so called ‘public’ neighours.  And still they want more.  And they tell their customers how to vote to ensure they get more.

There is nothing wrong with parents choosing not to use a public service.  But they don’t get to send the taxpayer a bill for their choice any more than I get to ask the government to send me a refund because I didn’t use the police this year.

Equally there is nothing wrong with private organisations lobbying for whatever political ideology they like.  But they don’t get to use taxpayer funds to do it.  If the Catholic Church wants to engage in political campaigning in the seat of Longman then it should hand back the $30 million plus a year it takes from the taxpayer in that seat.  If it would prefer to keep the money, then it should have to play by the same rules as a public school.  No lobbying.  No private school fees.  And the assets it builds with taxpayer funds remain the property of the taxpayer.  The days of having their wafer and eating it too need to stop. Now.

Forget bakers, why can private schools be bigots?

By | Education | No Comments

BEFORE we get in a tizz about whether bakers are allowed to refuse service to same-sex couples, we should ask why taxpayer-funded schools can refuse to employ them or educate their kids.

The Bill likely to create the mechanics of implementing Australia’s decision to support same-sex marriage is the one proposed by Liberal senator, Dean Smith. The so-called Smith Bill allows churches to refuse to marry same-sex couples. And many in the Parliament appear to accept that this is a reasonable exemption to Australia’s anti-discrimination laws.

Those laws vary a little according to where you live but generally prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, marital status, pregnancy, religious belief, sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity.

Marriage in a church is a religious service and the argument is that it is unreasonable to require the delivery of that service when it does not conform with the religious beliefs of the minister performing it.

But some law-makers want to significantly extend the reach of the exemption. Liberal senator James Paterson, for example wanted to see the exemption extended to anyone supplying goods and services to a same-sex wedding, such as florists, bakers and musicians.

Many legislators, including the Prime Minister, are not persuaded that extending that exemption to anyone involved in a same-sex wedding is reasonable. They argue it is a massive overreach which makes a mockery of laws against discrimination. And yet we have already gutted those laws when it comes to education.

Unlike Government-run schools, privately-run schools are largely exempt from the provisions of Australia’s discrimination laws. Under Federal law, a religious school can discriminate against employees, contractors and students on the basis of their “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy.”

Even harsher provisions are present in some state laws. In New South Wales, for example, all private schools (whether they claim to be religious or not) can refuse to teach or employ people on the basis of marital status, sex, disability, transgender or homosexuality.

In Australia ‘private’ schools are taxpayer funded, often to a level which equals or exceeds their public school neighbours. Those schools are in the business, and make no mistake it is a business, of delivering education services to a third of Australian children. They collectively employ around 146,000 people (almost 40 per cent of Australia’s education workforce) and yet are legally permitted to say and enforce things like: “staff, parents and students of Grace Christian School seek to honour God by … ensuring that sex occurs only within a monogamous marriage, and that we abstain from … homosexual activities.”

If you want a job in, or your child educated in, a very large chunk of the Australian education system your protections against discrimination are non-existent. Your tax dollars are funding institutions which can legally discriminate against you. And yet the debate of the day is whether a baker can refuse to supply a cake to a same-sex couple.

The nation’s attention is now firmly focused on the rights of same-sex couples, so let’s use that opportunity to remove the ridiculous protections afforded to the taxpayer funded businesses we call private schools. That is where ‘religious freedom’ can really bite, not at the local cake-shop or florist.

Also published at RendezView

We can’t afford to means test schools

By | Education | One Comment

Last week the Centre for Independent Studies, a right-wing think-tank, reheated one of Tony Abbott’s most memorable policy blunders and again called for means testing public education. The only problem is that it’s already been done and is failing miserably.

In Australia, there is no such thing as private education.  We have a system where the taxpayer funds all schools but some of them charge fees on top.  In essence, that is voluntary means testing.  Those with the means sometimes choose to pay extra to add to the taxpayer funding being spent on their child.  By any measure, voluntary means testing has been a disaster and there is nothing to suggest it would be improved by making it mandatory.

According to an analysis of MySchool published last month, a middle class public school in Australia costs taxpayers $11,044 a year per child.  At the catholic school across the street taxpayers are forking out $10,915 and at the Independent school next door they are paying $10,785.  In the slightly less well-off suburb down the road the public-school costs $12,165, the Catholic costs $12,375 and the independent comes in at $11,567.

The parents who choose to submit to voluntary means testing (at the Catholic and Independent schools) will be tipping in anywhere between $3,000 and $25,000 a year on top of the taxpayer funding.

Their extra contribution clearly does not save the taxpayer money.  It just means the community as a whole is paying more to educate those children than would be the case if they simply attended a government run school.

The extra dosh also doesn’t improve the academic outcomes.  Studies have repeatedly shown that when comparing demographically matched kids, all that extra cash buys exactly nothing (except more assets for private organisations).

But ‘means testing’ does significantly degrade the performance of our top performing kids and the education system as a whole.   According to the OECD, this rolling failure is driven in no small part by the segregation of our education system into the haves and the have-nots.

The OECD has been studying the relationship between equity of access and academic performance in its member states since the turn of the century.  It has concluded that the most successful school systems are those that increase equity and limit school choice.  If everybody participates in the same system, everyone’s focus is on making that system better. It should be no surprise then that Australia’s performance on the OECD’s measures of achievement and equity have been consistently sliding while we continue to segregate our schools.

Welfare is a direct payment that benefits only the recipient.  It should be means tested to ensure it is allocated only to those who actually need help. But education is not welfare.  Societies that educate their children do better than societies which don’t.  And societies that educate all their children do better than those that only educate the rich.  Yes, individuals benefit directly from having an education but society as a whole benefits far more from having literate, numerate, employable taxpayers.

Our current system tells us adding a co-payment doesn’t save the taxpayer money, harms performance and destroys equity.  The definition of insanity is doing more of the same thing and expecting a different outcome.  Let’s not be insane with education co-payments.

 

Also published by The Courier Mail

Students will suffer as private schools chase top of the table

By | Education | 3 Comments

AUSTRALIAN private schools are gaming results league tables to get an edge over their competition.

Valuable taxpayer funds are at stake for the school, but often it is the students who are paying the real price.

In the 1870s, Australians collectively decided we needed a free education system.

Gone would be the state-funded, church-run schools that delivered education only to the privileged few. The broken system of church run-education would be history. Well, at least, it would no longer be subsidised. At the time we knew that the only path to a prosperous future was an equitable education system. The only way for society to prosper was to ensure all of us were educated.

A new order was established. The protestant schools retreated to a rump, educating only those who could afford to pay the full freight. The Catholics opted out entirely and offered an (often) impoverished education in accordance with the dictates from Rome. The rest of Australia set about building one of the most impressive education systems the world had ever seen.

There was no competition between schools. There was no marketing. If you were Catholic, you went to the local parish school. If you were well off or religious (and not Catholic) you went to the local protestant school. And both of you paid your own way. Everybody else just went to the local public school.

That didn’t stop the rent-seeking. Many generations of church leaders repeatedly made the argument for government subsidisation often under the guise of “school choice”. The punter was entitled to government funding, they argued, even if they had opted to have education delivered by someone other than the government.

But the argument was stoically resisted. The churches were told their students opted out of a free public service (as was their right), but it did not entitle them to compensation.

The dam broke in 1964. A generation of politicians caved into the temptation of using school funding as a vehicle for pork barrelling. And once the pork was out of the barrel it couldn’t be shoved back in.

Every year since then, the amount of taxpayer funds channelled to the private sector has inexorably increased. As a result, the sector has almost doubled in size.

So now we have “school choice”. There is a vast array of choices and that selection is getting vaster by the day. The trouble is, with choice comes, well, choices. And to “help” us with those choices, schools need to invest in marketing.

Marketing comes in many forms. It might be that flash billboard. Or it might be that ad on the bus or in the paper. But the most insidious form is the one that doesn’t look like marketing and doesn’t cost a cent, the league table.

Ranked lists of schools are based on the percentage of the cohort who took the university eligible subjects. They are easy to manipulate — if you are entirely without conscience.

Let’s say you have a cohort of 100 students and 10 of those are heading for a top range score. If all 100 kids sit university eligible subjects, your rank percentage for those kids with the high scores will be 10 per cent. But if just the right 20 sit the subjects, you are looking much more respectable at 50 per cent.

That difference could easily bump you from the bottom of a league table to the very top.

All a school needs do is convince the kids who won’t make the school look as good, to pick different “pathways”.

As one teacher wrote in an exposé published last week: “these children’s futures are held to ransom for PR opportunities”.

Parents don’t want our educators focused on manipulating their position in a league table.

We want them focused on how they improve the lot of every single student in their care.

The sooner we shut down the notion of privatised delivery of government funded education (and the marketing that entails), the sooner we can begin to claw our way back to the top of the list of the world’s best education systems.

 

Also published in The Courier Mail

Tablets: Weapons of mass distraction in the classroom

By | Education | No Comments

They cost a fortune and cause havoc at home and yet more and more Australian schools are insisting that younger and younger children be equipped with personal computing devices at school. And even though children (and many educators) love them, there is growing evidence that, far from helping our kids, these devices are likely to be the source of serious harm.

As many of us get our kids ready for school this year, we’ll discover a new and very expensive addition to the booklist. Many Australian schools are requiring that children come equipped with their own personal gaming device, sorry, their own personal computer, for use at school.

It’s a story being repeated in the countries whose education systems are failing even faster than ours (the US and the UK in particular). Like Australia, those countries, guarantee the right to a free education.

Schools can’t technically require a parent to purchase the expensive devices. But, like Australia, the peer pressure on students and parents alike means that almost everybody has one.

Now, however, some parents are pushing back because they say the devices are a distraction in the classroom and almost impossible to police at school and at home.

The push to require younger and younger children to use computers is driven by the simplistic argument that they will be ‘left behind’ if they don’t. Since computer use will inevitably be required in whatever career they choose, the earlier they start the better, or so the story goes.

The same argument could be made for driving a car, but oddly very few schools are integrating driving lessons into their preschool programs.

The reason is obvious, people will get hurt and the potential benefits are massively outweighed by the risks. There is nothing to suggest the equation is any different for personal computing devices in the classroom. And even putting aside the patent absurdity of teaching students to use tech that will be obsolete by next Tuesday (let alone when they graduate), schools have so far been blinded by the flash of the new.

Increasingly parents are demanding to see evidence that schoolroom devices deliver educational results. And while there is evidence of benefit for repetitive learning when a computer is shared by a small group there is a surprising dearth of evidence for personal devices in class. Worse, evidence of direct harm is accumulating rapidly.

Because of the enormous cost of doing it properly, controlled trials are pretty rare in education. But scientists from the MIT Department of Economics have recently published exactly that. They randomly divided the entire first year of a US college introductory economics course into 3 groups. One group had unrestricted access to tablets in class. The second group could use them but they had to be flat on the desk. And the third group had no access at all.

The results were significant. The students who had no in-class access to devices consistently outperformed all other students by almost two per cent.

And while that doesn’t sound mind blowing, falling behind two per cent in just one semester can accumulate to quite an academic disaster if it’s multiplied by the 24 semesters of education most Australian kids get through.

Interestingly the results for each of the groups who had access were the same. It didn’t matter whether the students had open slather access or strictly controlled access, their performance was impaired.

Add that evidence of academic harm to the accumulating pile of health (especially psychological) impacts (such as increased aggression, e-bullying, ADHD and psychosis) and there are very real concerns about letting these devices into classrooms. It is one of the reasons that one of the world’s best education systems, Finland, bans personal devices in the classroom and it could be part of why many Asian school systems with relatively low computer use are pulling away from us academically.

As Dr Nicholas Kardaras (author of Glow Kids) put it, ‘If screens are indeed digital drugs, then schools have become drug dealers.’ Schools shouldn’t be encouraging in-school (and at-home) use of devices designed purposefully to encourage procrastination. And they certainly shouldn’t be doing it on the say-so of the local iPad dealer.

We do not need our schools to become part of the problem. We do not need our schools to be dealers in digital distraction. And most of all we do not need to throw up more barriers to equitable access to education.

But we do need our schools to demand proof of significant benefit before they become the unpaid salesforce of multinational computer companies. And most of all, we need them to hit the pause button while they figure it out.

First published by The Courier Mail

To have world-beating students we need world-beating teachers

By | Education | One Comment

Australia’s exam results are in and they are not pretty. Our education system continues to slide backwards while the rest of the world races forward. Worse than that, the gap between the rich and the poor stubbornly persists and grows. And that is the real tragedy because it tells us that we are actively destroying the one thing that could save our economy when the coal runs out – intelligence.

In Australia it is an undeniable fact of education statistics that socioeconomic status predicts academic performance. On average, the children of low-income parents do not perform as well academically as the children of high-income parents.

Earlier this year the Grattan Institute analysed the 2015 NAPLAN results and put some hard numbers around that assertion. They found that high scoring Year 3 students from the lowest income quintile are almost 2 years behind their peers (with identical starting scores) from families in the highest income quintile by Year 9.  They all started out as potentially great Australian thinkers, but just six years later, that potential had been severely inhibited in the kids without money.

Too many academic writers are willing to put that down to better breeding (whatever that may be), but the reality is that it’s a symptom of an ineffectual (and dysfunctional) education system.

Another way of saying this is that in Australia, your home life has more impact on your learning than what goes on at school. In many cases, school has become an interruption to learning rather than a cause of it.

Genetically, IQ is not influenced by a person’s socioeconomic status but it’s a testament to the failure of our education system that here, academic performance is. Here, the size of the numbers in your parents’ bank account determines your academic success not the size of the numbers on your IQ test.

We could save everybody a lot of anguish if we simply handed out final results based on an income test rather than an academic test. The result is not likely to be materially different to those we get now. And that would be true no matter which school system you chose.

The job of a good education system is to, well, deliver good education – to everybody. A good education system should be blind to any disadvantage. It should ensure that students perform to their full potential regardless of their home environment, where they live or their parents’ jobs. In the countries that are putting us to shame, that is exactly what their education system achieves.

In the latest round of OECD tests (PISA), 9 of the 14 countries that beat us in science (for example) had systems in which economic disadvantage is barely a factor. A poor student in Macao or Hong Kong was three times as likely to perform well as that same student in Australia.

Australian taxpayers fund education because countries that educate their children do better than those that don’t. And yet we are happy to pay for a system that is so broken that it consigns most of our children to the learning rubbish heap. That is a tragedy for them but it is a disaster for Australia. We can’t afford to waste potential like that. It is the educational equivalent of shutting three out of every four of our businesses and farms. If for no other reason than naked self-interest, Australia needs desperately to fix its highly inequitable education system.

We won’t do that with charity. We already spend more on education than most of the countries who are flogging us.  We won’t do it by making it harder to become a teacher. And we certainly won’t do it by giving every school a new library or a better cricket pitch.

We will do it by copying the one thing that all the high performing countries do. We will ensure every teacher in every school is better today than they were yesterday. We will do that using proven systems of mentoring and peer review. We will no longer throw teaching graduates into classrooms and give them 4 days a year of lip-service ‘professional development.’ We will monitor their every move and help them ensure the next move is a better one.

The systems that outperform us by a country mile are systems designed to make sure the teachers keep learning too. For people with a passion for teaching, this would be heaven on a stick. A true professional would eat this up. Someone who just wanted a secure job with good holidays and shorter-than-average hours would be less inclined to apply. It’s a system designed to attract only professional educators and make them even better at their job as they go.

Do that and we will truly have the foundation for a school system, and kids, that can beat the world.

 

Also published in The Courier Mail and the Huffington Post

How to fix our plummeting Maths and Science results

By | Education | 2 Comments

The results of the latest international benchmark tests are now in.  Once again the picture is not a pretty one for Australia.  Once again there will be much hand-wringing.  And once again nothing will change.

Every four years since 1995, Australia has participated in an international benchmarking test in science and maths (TIMSS).  Last year, 6,057 Australian Year 4 students and 10,338 year 8 students took part in the latest round.   Australia’s performance on all tests was mediocre (at best) and showed no significant improvement since 1995.  Meanwhile many other countries have significantly improved.

The scores are divided into 5 bands.  Just 5% of our year 4 students managed to perform at the highest level (let’s call that an A) in maths.  But 50% of Singapore students (for example) perform at that level.  By year 8, 7% of Australian kids get an A, but 54% of Singapore do.

The story is no more palatable in science.  Just 8% of our year 4s would get an A in science while 37% would in Singapore.  Just 7% of our year 8s get an A, compared to 42% of Singapore’s year 8s.

Overall, Australia has dropped 5 places in Year 8 results since 2011 and 10 places in year 4 maths results (our year 4 science was already terrible in 2011).

Of course, these results have been politicised within seconds of release.  The Labor Party says they show we need to spend more on schools and the Government says we need to fix up teaching.  Both statements are right as far as they go.  Unfortunately, based on previous performance, putting out a press release is as far as either party will go.

We can fix Australian education.  But to do it, two important vested interests, the rent-seeking private education providers and the teaching unions, need to leave the field of battle.  And it would be good if they took their political patrons with them.

Australian taxpayers give $12 billion a year to private education providers.  That amount is growing very rapidly and is a big contributor to the rapid rises in costs of Australian education.  It does not go towards better classrooms or teachers for the children who need it most, rather large chunks of it are spent on marketing to secure the next round of bums-on-seats based funding from the taxpayer.

The other incessant driver of cost increases is smaller class sizes driven by teaching unions.  Once again billions are spent and not a cent of it goes towards improving teaching or facilities. Meanwhile, the countries flogging us in TIMSS have been leaving class sizes at levels last seen in Australia in the 1960s and using the money that saves to focus on what goes on in those classes.

In those countries there’s a constant and pervasive culture of teacher-performance mentoring – not monitoring, mentoring. Teachers are treated like the professionals they are. They’re not abandoned in their classrooms to sink or swim, they’re constantly watched, receive constant feedback from acknowledged experts in teaching and must repeatedly demonstrate their capabilities. The career path keeps the people with the expertise at the coalface helping to bring others along. Good teachers are not promoted out of the classroom, they’re given progressively greater influence over the effectiveness of other teachers. Good teachers are used to breed more good teachers.

Systems like this have been in place in Finland since the mid-1990s, and are being progressively implemented in China, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore. They’re now starting to bear fruit as all of these countries race ahead of Australia.

Australia’s version of all this is very ordinary by comparison. In 2013, the OECD conducted a detailed survey of all OECD teachers. The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) revealed that while Australia certainly has teaching and mentoring programs, most new Australian teachers reported that they received little or no constructive feedback from the programs, it was rarely based on classroom observation and, as a result, it was disconnected from student learning. Most teacher professional development consisted of attendance at one-off courses and wasn’t part of any longer term collaborative research program.

Any incentive to improve is severely lacking. Ninety per cent of Australian teachers said they’d receive no recognition (and they’re not talking about pay) if they improved the quality of their teaching or were more innovative in the classroom. Nearly half of all teachers felt that appraisal of their work was merely a box-ticking administrative exercise and had little, if any, impact on what they actually do every day.

This mentoring and professionalism stuff is all well and good, but all this time away from class, researching and watching others, would cost a packet. The students don’t disappear. There still has to be someone in the classroom, but with their teacher off ‘gallivanting’, more teachers need to be employed to cover the classes. The interesting thing is that each of the high-performing school systems actually costs less than the Australian education system and considerably less than the OECD average. And it’s not because the teachers are poorly paid. When all the economic adjustments and fiddles are made to ensure we’re comparing apples with apples, teachers in some of these systems earn more than Australian teachers and have careers that allow them to earn even more if they’re effective.

The high-performing countries aren’t extracting the cost of teacher mentoring from teachers’ salaries, they’re getting the money by keeping class sizes high. The average Shanghai teacher is working with a class of 40 children, whereas the average Australian teacher has only a little over half that many rascals (23) to deal with.

The combined effect of privatising our schools and caving in to union demands on class sizes is to make the entire system much more expensive while not meaningfully improving anything about the delivery of education.  Both things can be fixed.  But both things require more political will than either side has shown until now.

If we want to keep reading headlines about how far behind Australia’s education system is falling behind, then the path is clear.  Keep doing what we’ve done up until now.  But if we’d rather not pick of the paper in 2020 and read we are now dead last on TIMSS 2019, then now would be a good time to do something about it.