THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION

I’m not so sure about Adrian Piccoli’s take on cultural differences within our schools as an explanation for those students who are excelling and those who aren’t.

Mr Piccoli reckons that NAPLAN results and international PISA rankings indicate that Oz students from non-English speaking backgrounds are outperforming WASP-like scholars. He ‘value-adds’ to this observation by suggesting that Asian- and S.E. Asian-background citizens place huge importance on academic achievement while the thong and T-shirt brigades worship more around sports’ arenas than anywhere near a 21st century classroom. The latter’s profile, Piccoli continues, has been underwritten by two decades of unfettered economic growth which, in turn, has led to a corresponding ‘cultural complacency’.

The higher than average representation of non-English speaking background (NESB) students in the upper bands of NAPLAN literacy and numeracy attainments is nothing new. In the three decades of Basic Skills and NAPLAN tests, NESB students have consistently done well. In one of the schools where I taught, the NESB student sub-group actually lifted the school’s averages in both literacy and numeracy in the Year 3/ Year 5 tests and this was repeated year after year.

However, the NESB card can be overplayed and I believe that Adrian Piccoli may be doing just that. His call for a cultural change to combat the complacency is, at best, a confusing addition to the endless debate about our stagnant or falling achievement levels in schools.

For starters, if you follow Adrian’s argument to its endpoint, you’d expect that NAPLAN scores would be steadily improving over the last decades. After all, there has been an increase in NESB students across many schools during this period. However, the national report card on students’ literacy and numeracy does not show any significant positive change to the quantum. Why? The answer is simple enough. While NESB students do inhabit the higher levels of NAPLAN banding, they are also featured in the basement floors of achievement.

The second problem hovers around ‘culture’ but not the culture that Mr Piccoli alludes to. Standardised testing has spawned a huge out-of-school industry in Australia and it’s now tracking at billions of dollars annually. NAPLAN-style primers, tutorial groups, private homework institutions and online student help ‘shops’ have become, by any reckoning, the shadow education system. The main focus of these institutions, transnational publishing houses and associated providers is to instruct ‘clients’ (i.e. students) in test-related methodologies and skills for the sole purpose of improving performances in NAPLAN, selective schools’ entry examinations and the HSC. For whatever reason, a significant proportion of the punters involved in these programs are NESB students. The infiltration of parallel universe schooling is only matched by its exponential growth in a relatively short period of time and that growth is continuing unabated. Is this an example of the culture that Adrian Piccoli wants us to take on board in our quest for world domination in the PISA rankings?

Current migration information regarding new arrivals into the lucky country also tends to muffle Adrian’s national call to arms. Over the last ten years, annual migrant intakes have been of the order of 150K- 200K punters and roughly 70% of each intake is comprised of skilled and professional newbies. As one would expect, NESB future citizens mirror this high proportion of ‘the educated’. In fact, the average educational attainment of migrants entering Oz is higher than the average for all citizens….period! It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to theorise that migrants’ sprogs may also demonstrate these abilities or, at least, an increased potential to realise them. ‘Culture’ isn’t the variable here but unnatural selection is.

I feel sorry for parents of school age children (of any background) these days. One week they’re lambasted for not letting the kiddies climb trees, throw a ball around a court or drink water from fuckin’ garden hoses. The next week it’s vital that the progeny adopt a Professor Peabody identity, loiter around non-functioning IWBs and have slide rules protruding from their arses. It seems that a toss of the coin is as good as anything when deciding what the current theme is for tomorrow’s leaders.

Later this month Adrian Piccoli will take the reins of an important new organisation known as the UNSW Gonski Institute for Education. I believe that he will do a good job but I’d suggest that he loses the ‘complacency’ claptrap pronto. There are far bigger challenges in Oz education than anything that feeble profiling can articulate.