It's not giving a Gonski but better teachers that improve schools - The Centre for Independent Studies
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It’s not giving a Gonski but better teachers that improve schools

Taxpayer funding for schools has climbed to about $16,000 per student and exceeds $60 billion a year. At the same time, student achievement in the OECD-run Programme for International Student Assessment has plummeted faster than in just about any other country. And we expect there to be little good news in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data being released this week.

Maximising the educational return on investment must be a key imperative as we continue on the long road to being the clever country we once aspired to.

We have given a Gonski – but years of sustained, record spending in schooling, well exceeding inflation, have made little dent in addressing our educational woes.

Meeting the Gonski reforms‘ aspirations of lifting achievement and reducing inequity are admirable and we mustn’t quit on them. But we must call time on costly and failed approaches that undermine these goals.

The conventional wisdom of funding increases as a remedy for Australia’s ailing schools is also debunked by my research, with a new school-level analysis showing no clear relationship between funding and student outcomes.

The tragedy is that policymakers’ misplaced faith in simply lifting funding as an education cure-all has detracted from targeting efforts that can truly make an impact, such as in teaching quality.

A complex bevy of factors have a hand in explaining students’ outcomes – many unfortunately from beyond the school gate. But teaching quality is by far the most effective factor that’s controllable, making building capacity of our teachers the best educational investment we can make.

To properly marry resourcing with higher quality, we must bring the school workforce out of the dark ages and embrace – rather than eschew – market-based approaches.

Spending more on schooling isn’t the problem per se. It’s that policymakers have lacked the resolve to match the added investment with necessary quality inducements.

To properly marry resourcing with higher quality, we must bring the school workforce out of the dark ages and embrace – rather than eschew – market-based approaches.

Financial incentives for teachers’ performance, a more competitive workplace and more meaningful appraisal processes are needed to deliver an educational windfall.

Any honest observer knows the quality of teaching is highly variable, and yet salaries are not. This does a disservice to Australia’s hard-working teachers, who deserve a system that properly rewards and recognises their efforts.

Genuinely lifting the status of the teaching profession can be achieved only by detaching from the education unions who shield an underperforming minority at the disservice of the majority – and the long-suffering taxpayers and students along with them.

Moving up the teaching ladder largely comes from simply sticking it out longer than your peers, causing no waves and ticking compliance boxes. A genuine financial incentive linked to performance is needed to renew a workforce that’s suffered under the weight of union-dominated centralised bargaining.

The current approach to recognise high-performing teachers is time-consuming, bureaucratic and opaque – requiring candidates to amass a portfolio of achievements against vague and subjective criteria. But there are far more timely, direct and objective ways to identify and recognise our best teachers.

The teaching workforce has become uncompetitive by imposing excessive barriers to entry. The need to hold sets of credentials and accreditations has less to do with safeguarding quality standards and more to do with shielding the workforce from new entrants.

Opening up flexible entry points to teaching is needed to attract new blood – especially those seeking mid-career transitions to the classroom – and meet chronic shortages in key subject areas and hard-to-service school locations.

Policymakers would do well to reverse well-intentioned but misguided efforts to restrict supply of potential teachers – which actually has the unintended consequence of bolstering unions’ bargaining power. Instead, enhancing the supply of teaching candidates makes for a more competitive process and a higher quality workforce.

Archaic and bureaucratic performance appraisal processes have been tolerated in order to appease education unions but have amounted to a protection racket for underperformers.

Successive government reports have noted that there’s virtually no independent, objective and comprehensive assessment of performance made by school leaders. It’s an uphill battle for principals to carry out classroom observations in their own schools, thanks to union standover tactics.

This doesn’t make for a workplace where teachers can gain valuable feedback and support needed to develop their craft and to set high aspirations for themselves, their peers and their students.

It’s little wonder about two-thirds of teachers say appraisals are only done to fill paperwork and that professional development is often seen as a box-ticking exercise, not as a capacity-building opportunity.