Gonksi fails a second time around - The Centre for Independent Studies
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Gonksi fails a second time around

The highly anticipated Gonski 2.0 report offers little useful guidance for schools and school systems, and does not even meet important terms of reference set down for the review.

The Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools was commissioned by the federal government last year to provide advice on how additional Commonwealth funding should be used to improve school performance and student achievement.

The committee led by David Gonski was tasked to “examine evidence and make recommendations on the most effective teaching and learning strategies to be deployed”.

The report released yesterday would have been a disappointment to many in the sector – including the federal government, who were presumably expecting clear, evidence-based direction on effective use of school resources at the system and school level.

Unfortunately, the recommendations in the second Gonski report are not based on evidence about effective use of school resources. Most are inane and obvious – for example, children who learn more in a year at school will have higher achievement. Yes, really … it is surprisingly at that useless level.

And the recommendations that do represent a departure from the status quo have several significant problems. The proposals are not supported by research, they lack detail about implementation, and overall they will significantly increase the level of complexity and bureaucratisation of the school system.

One of the main recommendations is a new online assessment instrument that teachers would use to measure student learning growth over time, aligned to learning progressions derived from the Australian curriculum. These results would form the basis of reporting to parents, presumably eventually replacing standardised tests that determine student performance against an expected range of achievement standards.

The theory is that this will allow teachers to differentiate instruction for students across ability levels, and will be more motivating for students. But the report gives no examples of how this has worked in practice – the closest approximation is the e-asTTle system in New Zealand, but this is not mentioned in the report – and its feasibility and impact can therefore only be speculative.

The report is fixated on the importance of enabling a “growth mindset” among students as being the key to their success. And many of the key recommendations report hinge on this premise – students who believe that academic ability is not fixed will achieve at higher levels, and parents and schools can facilitate this mindset. The notion of mindset is mentioned 10 times in the report. (In comparison, the word “intellectual” does not appear at all).

But this premise is not supported by evidence. Two recent meta-analyses of 129 studies of growth mindset (not cited in the Gonski 2.0 report) found a “very weak” relationship between growth mindset and student achievement, and some small positive effects of mindset interventions for disadvantaged students. The authors of the study caution that “policies and resources targeting all students might not be prudent”.

One can see the superficial appeal of a theory that children who believe they can learn are more likely to. But without a deep understanding of psychology, it implies that effective teaching is a secondary factor – and it is a huge insult to children with learning disabilities to suggest that they can do better if they simply believe they can. In a massive oversight, the report does not acknowledge any of the copious evidence about effective instruction.

Likewise, the recommendation for an increased focus on general capabilities has no support in sound research about curriculum design and how children learn. General capabilities do not exist as abstract skills, divorced from knowledge. Creativity and critical thinking are different in different disciplines and are dependent on good teaching of content. Creativity in maths is different to creativity in writing. Creating a set of learning progressions for general capabilities, as recommended in the report, as an attempt to “prioritise” them in the curriculum ignores this evidence.

One of the specific terms of reference – “improving the preparedness of school leavers to succeed in employment, further training or higher education” – was not properly addressed, with the report deeming an investigation of senior secondary education to be “beyond the scope” of the review.

Instead, the Gonski committee recommended yet another review looking into senior secondary education, giving the impression that this process has become like an expensive Gonski hall of mirrors.

It is hard to see where the whole thing might end, except with a giant headache for the government and a waste of yet more taxpayers’ money.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is a senior research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.