The inability of both progressive and competitive schooling reforms to adequately address educational disadvantage caused by poverty suggests that they have largely reached their limits.
The history of Australian public education has largely been a string of success stories creating generations of Australians who have been able to successfully contribute to, and participate within, Australian society. Since Henry Parkes passed the NSW Public Schools Act (1866) public schools have undergone many reforms to address inequalities based on religion, income, sex, race, indigenous status, gender and geography. While many of these reforms have some way to go (in particular addressing indigenous disadvantage), institutional discrimination has largely been removed.
The liberal-enlightenment traditions of public education were based on the assumption that free and secular schooling would ensure that each child has an equal opportunity to achieve their life's potential based on their innate abilities. This would result in a rational society where merit was the basis of a person's station in life, not their family's wealth, lineage or connection to the church. To some measure this was achieved in the first three decades following the Second World War when generations of children received the education they required to gain employment and enjoyed growing standards of living. But since the globalisation of the Australian economy and the replacement of the manufacturing industry with the service sector, it has become necessary for children to achieve a much higher standard of learning than previous generations.
With the increased educational demands of contemporary employment it has become clear that a stable group of Australian children (5-10%) are not achieving the standard of learning required to participate in society. Prime Minister Gillard called this phenomenon a "
long tail of underachievement". This has become a political focus now that mass-standardised testing regularly places a number on these students. International comparisons create panic within the business community while newspaper league tables extend this worry to parents. It is easy to dismiss market-based critics of public education as conservatives attempting to undo progressive reforms or corporations seeking to create a new market. But social-justice demands that all children have the necessary skills and knowledge to participate in society.
Australian schooling reforms have largely focused on the quality of education provided to children. This makes sense as it is the easiest factor for governments to control. It is based on the assumption that the success of a child's learning depends on the quality of their schooling experiences. As public education is a product of the humanist-enlightenment tradition, progressive reforms have dominated public education. Post-war progressive reforms have included reduced class sizes, comprehensive high schooling, higher qualifications and pay for teachers, constructivist curriculum structures (largely Piaget), abolition of corporal punishment and the removal of institutional discriminations. The basic goal driving these reforms was equality.
Since the 1980s, economic change and the dominance individualist social policy, progressive schooling reforms have come under growing criticism. Championed by right-wing political parties, Australian educational reformers now blame progressive policies for the inability of public education to ensure every child has the prerequisite knowledge to gain employment. Popular commentators go so far as to claim educational standards have slipped and children today are less literate than their parents' generation. While this ignores the evidence, it does appeal to conservative beliefs about moral decline from a once 'golden age' (usually the 1950s). Competition within education is seen as the answer to inadequate student learning outcomes. Competitive reform policies include public comparisons between schools, performance pay and other corporate management techniques for teachers, demands for behaviouralist teaching methods (popularly called 'return to basics') and a greater emphasis on explicit literacy and numeracy instruction. The most recent debate from competitive reformers is around the quality of teachers. It is claimed that improvements in teacher quality will lead to the greatest student learning improvements. The basic goal driving these reforms is excellence.
While Australian public schools have not been comprehensively reformed along competitive lines,
evidence from the US and the UK demonstrates that competitive reforms do little to improve student learning, in particular, with students from low SES backgrounds. US public schools have gone through waves of competitive reforms such as teacher performance pay, school league tables, school closures, directed instruction and standardised mass testing. The basic tenet of US schooling reforms is that through innovative practices schools are able to overcome the disadvantages associated poverty and ensure every child has the skills to succeed in the modern economy. Unfortunately for American public schooling, while these reforms have failed to address educational disadvantages, reformers continue to blame progressive policies for undermining competitive reforms. Like most ideologues, competitive reformers claim their theories would have worked in a more purer form.
It is apparent that progressive school reforms have largely reached the limits of their ability to address social disadvantages while competitive reforms are only exacerbating social inequality. If government's still have the will to reduce educational disadvantages they have to look elsewhere. A long research tradition has made it clear that poverty is the largest factor in Australian educational disadvantage. A student's family income is just as powerful a predictor of their school grades as is their personal IQ. Research also indicates that factors outside of a school's control are largely responsible for educational disadvantage. The reason why both progressive and competitive schooling reforms have been unable to ensure every student leaves school with the minimal skills to successfully participate in society is that school-based reforms have reached the limits of what they can achieve. While more schooling reforms can ameliorate educational disadvantage, they come at proportionally larger amounts of public finances. If governments are to continue to reduce educational disadvantage, they need to target new resources at the causes of educational disadvantage.
To do this, governments need to address the impact of poverty on childhood development. No amount of school reform is able to reverse the damaging effects of poverty on the developing brain. The
New York Times reported a warning issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics of the effects of "toxic stress" on children. Infants and children who experience chronic stress suffer permanent changes to their brain architecture and metabolism. The results are poor school performance, higher incidents of delinquent behaviours and higher rates of disease. The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality
Pathways' magazine argued that the effect of childhood poverty on poor academic outcomes can largely be explained by the impact of chronic stress on the developing brain.
Research by Daniel Hackman and Martha Farrah at the University of Pennsylvania has found a strong link between a child's SES status and their cognitive abilities and development. They explain the link between poverty and cognitive ability as caused by the chronic stresses experienced by low-SES children. This research makes it clear that a large degree of educational disadvantage is determined by the harmful effects of poverty on the developing brain. These effects permanently place a person at a social disadvantage.
An example of a public schooling system where poverty does not cause educational disadvantage is Finland. Much has been written about the success of the Finnish schooling system. There are no private schools, school begins at the age of seven, there are no external standardised tests and teachers are highly qualified and valued. Yet Finland continues to score at the top of OECD measures of schooling success. The Director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility Pasi Sahlberg has
argued that the critical difference between the Finnish public school system and the US (this could include Australia and the UK) is that Finnish public education focuses on equity, not excellence. In other words, Finnish public education is dominate by progressive educational ideas.
Daniela Fairchild of the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute's
Education Gadfly website makes the reasonable point that critics of competitive school reforms should not look to progressive Finnish schooling policies as unlike the US, Finland is a homogenous society lacking poverty. She credits the success of Finland not so much to its progressive school policies, but the lack of social disadvantage within its society.
The inability of both progressive and competitive schooling reforms to adequately address educational disadvantage caused by poverty suggests that they have largely reached their limits. To further reduce educational disadvantage and reduce the number of school students not meeting minimum learning standards governments must address the "toxic stress" of early infant and childhood poverty. Public schools are unable to overcome the disadvantageous effects of poverty as they are established within the child before they enter school.
