John Fischetti

Screen panic: how much time is too much?

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Smart devices are powerful tools that can assist teaching and learning. Each device on its own is a personal assistant, a massive library, media creator, communications hub, language translator and entertainment centre on our desk or right in our hands. 

They can also cause harm. Adults worry about addiction, constant distraction and a technological dystopia full of obscure manipulative algorithms controlled by government or ‘bad guys,’ stranger danger, cyber vulgarity and toxic echo chambers. What are our teens really doing with the smart technology?  How do they cope with it? There is very little research into how our kids are using their devices from their perspectives, particularly when these tools were so heavily relied upon during lockdowns. So, last year, we asked them!

What is a smart device?

A smart device is an electronic tool (typically a watch, phone, tablet, laptop of desktop) connected (primarily) wirelessly to the internet. Smart devices allow users to interface with purpose-built applications to conduct business, communicate, create media, do banking, and more generally, text, email or talk to others in real time.

Our study

In Australia, nearly all adolescents ( 94 out of every 100 14-17 years of age) own a smartphone and many school communities have restricted their use or are exploring bans on phones at school. Teens must navigate rapidly changing cloud-based technology to negotiate their academic and social expectations and stay safe while doing this.

Educational challenges created by the pandemic created the most significant disruption to Australian schools since World War II. Schools became nimble and allowed the use of tools in ways that were not permitted before. Flexible assessment tasks gave students freedom to “figure it out.” Students connecting from home, were collaborating, creating, inventing, and studying from the patio or from the lounge. Parents and carers saw first-hand the pros and cons of the tools’ uses for school and non-school purposes.

Over the past year, we studied over 450 secondary public-school students in a mixed methods research project. The study took place in a capital city in Australia and involved students from 12 secondary schools. We have the initial survey results available now and the full results of the study will be shared as we finish the work later this year. 

How are our kids using their smart devices?

75% of students felt smart technologies improved their lives. This positive outcome was complex and diverse. One participant summed up their view on smart technology as:

“The internet is where I spend most of my time. it is what I look at through my art and music, and the way it changed humans fascinates me greatly. it has enabled strange forms of connection from people all over the world and has enabled so much collaboration for me personally.” [sic] –  16 YO Male Year 10

Here’s what we’ve found so far:

  1. 21st century learners are on their screens constantly, learning now involves devices more than ever before. Screen time is up (during and after school) of those responses that were > 4 hours daily, the average time was 6.9 hours and the maximum number given was over 14 hours per day
  2. 89% of participants used their notebook computer device extensively for learning activities at school and more than half also use it for connected learning at home via the schools’ Learning Management System
  3. The phone isn’t a phone and not really viewed as one, only a very small percentage reported using their phones to make calls. It was clear in interpreting the data however, that smartphones are used in multiple ways to support their modern lives. These devices are seen as central to adolescent life. Smartphones are also a major focus of distraction. Our young people know this. They know when they are wasting their time. 
  4. Most young people socialise within friendship groups and have productive coping mechanisms and technical know-how in order to deal issues that may occur. They know how to block suspicious communication, report those interactions the provider and many are discussing these issues with friends, family or trusted school adults at school
  5. Our participants generally believed that there was marginal impact on school performance from their social media interactions (even if there are in the minds of adults); almost 20% reported that social media caused negative distractions and another 20% admitted to constantly checking these platforms and feeling anxious when they didn’t.

Now what?

We have a tricky tightrope to walk. What is the new normal? The 1980s’ guidelines of two hours a day of screen time has not kept pace with technological changes. We could do the following three things:

  1. We have an opportunity for us to tune in to adolescent voices on this issue. We should stay in touch with our own children’s use by talking to them. They want us to know they are trying to be careful, but this smart technology is part of their life.
  2. Parents also want to know how their children are using their devices. We can help and  support them to develop productive coping skills, so they successfully navigate a complex world of ever-evolving smarter technologies. 
  3. We need to model ourselves with our children balancing device time with a healthy lifestyle (particularly bedtime and sleep patterns).

The genie will not go back in the bottle. We can’t “ban” our way to the future as smart tools get smarter; we should trust that our young people, with our informed guidance, will make good choices. The importance of vigilance in using smart tools is crucial, but most of our participants are doing fine in their juggling act in and out of cyberspace. 

From left: John Fischetti is Professor and Pro Vice Chancellor of the College of Human and Social Futures at the University of Newcastle. He teaches and studies in the areas of school transformation and educational leadership. John advocates for school designs that promote student ownership of their own learning journeys.John.Fischetti@newcaslte.edu.au. Simon Vaughan is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle. He is a secondary principal and national leader in school innovation. His PhD work is focuses on the potential of smart technology to transform pedagogy. Simon.Vaughan@uon.edu.au. Kylie Shaw is Professor and Dean of Graduate Research at the University of Newcastle. Her research focusses on the doctoral learning journey, future-focused skills and primary school pedagogies. She is a leader in empowering women to undertake and navigate the HDR journey. Kylie.Shaw@newcastle.edu.au

Image by Adobe Stock

What if compulsory schooling was a 21st Century invention?

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There are many long-running debates in Australia around the schooling our children. Often the battle lines are drawn between traditional approaches to education versus new designs for schooling.

There is often a huge divide over concepts such as quality, equity, mastery, assessment and the case for what some call future-focused skills. There is even debate on the notions standards and what learning is. Much of the research literature and media attention about assessment focuses on successful or poor education results overseas or Australia’s weaker than expected performance on international assessments.

Gurus and pundits regularly tour Australia, either challenging us to be more like Finland or more like we ‘used to be.’

We decided to take a completely different approach.

We examined what schools might look like if they were invented today and how that could help model possible futures for schooling, particularly in light of trends to personalise learning that are taking hold around the world.

We took a counterfactual approach for our research and propose that we come at the opportunity to reconsider schooling, learning and teaching as a question, “What if Compulsory Schooling Was a 21st Century Invention?”

What is “counterfactual thinking?”

Galileo is credited with perhaps the most famous example of counterfactual thinking in history with his thought experiment that challenged the dominant thinking of Aristotle about the principles of motion. When Copernicus posited, and Galileo confirmed the Sun as the centre of the solar system and that the Earth revolved around it, many learned people of the time considered this heresy because they believed the opposite. Copernicus and Galileo had taken a very counterfactual thinking approach.

A contemporary example of counterfactual thinking is a TED talk by Matthias Müllenbeck, a director of the science and technology company Merck KGaA, who asked, “What if we paid doctors to keep us healthy?

“Counterfactual thinking is the comparison of a factual situation to a simulated alternative one.”  “Counterfactual thoughts refer to mental representations that are explicitly contrary to facts or beliefs.”  

We took a future lens to the counterfactual space to ask our question about compulsory schooling.

What did our study do?

We looked at 156 empirical studies comparing traditional and alternative approaches to instruction or assessment to examine the potential for compulsory schooling to be redesigned.

Despite much debate in the literature generally arguing the benefits of traditional versus student-centred approaches, we found no major study that sought to extensively address this question through a large scale, longitudinal comparative study. We found no study that sought to evaluate formative assessment approaches (assessment by teachers during the learning process) across at least one educational system over time.

Whilst ten studies were based on an initiative that was in place for at least one year, most studies involved a short intervention with no further follow up to consider long term benefits or challenges. The systematic review process highlights opportunity for further research to focus on evaluating initiatives over a longer period of time as well as seeking to follow up the impact of initiatives post intervention.

Using foresight strategy, a discipline that helps us to explore a range of plausible alternative futures from our current perspective, we were able to identify sixteen ‘weak signals’ that, while not predicting the future, could identify significant factors or forces that could become important.

What did we learn?

Weak signals are “the early signs of possible but not confirmed changes that may later become … represent the first signs of paradigm shifts, or future trends, drivers or discontinuities”. Identification and critical analysis of weak signals benefits strategic decision-making.

We identified 16 weak signals in the literature:

What are the implications?

This work points to several key points that inform our current conversation about the future of schooling:

Weak signals point to areas that are underrepresented despite their importance:

  1. Lack of large scale, longitudinal comparative studies
  2. Student Centred or Assessment for learning practices might offer some potential benefits for indigenous education. Learnings about indigenous ways of knowing may also offer benefits to all students
  3. The impact of poverty beyond the school is understated

Weak signals point to emergent hypotheses for further inquiry:

  1. Significant positive differences for experimental groups focussed on student centred approaches or formative assessment practices, compared with control groups, were more likely when the intervention lasted for more than four weeks
  2. Standardised assessment may better gauge top end performance but can lead to criteria compliance (such as teaching to the test) that limits the development of advanced learners
  3. No evidence of a reduction in gender gaps through standardised assessment
  4. Standardised assessment may push for improvement but this could be a proxy measure for school improvement practices

Weak signals point to claims that are contested:

  1. There are some possible advantages of teacher-centred approaches to support lower level students (remedial work) whilst students in the middle and upper bands are more likely to be advantaged from student-centred approaches
  2. Standardised assessment might be leading to poorer pedagogy for equity groups
  3. Standardised assessment is accepted by parents and students but is more likely to promote shallow, test-focused pedagogy
  4. Monitoring of system level improvements through standardised assessment can lead to distortion of results through the use of exemptions for equity groups

As we build new buildings, embed emerging technologies and learn coding, entrepreneurship and STEM alongside of traditional literacy and numeracy, we may have failed to look at what the knowledge-based informs us.

We may also have an ultimate counterfactual question: “Can we imagine what schools might look like if we’d never seen one before?”

Can we design them so they promote engagement, learning and wellbeing? Can they be inspiring places of love and life, passion and positiveness? Can they embed indigenous perspectives and multicultural frameworks that guide their vision? Can we imagine and then design something that we ourselves didn’t take part in?

That may be our challenge. Our children’s future is on the line.

Jason McGrath is a New South Wales school principal who is currently undertaking Ph D studies at the School of Education, University of Newcastle. The research question is ‘ What if compulsory education was a 21st century invention?’. Jason is on Twitter @Mcg_jason

Professor John Fischetti is Interim Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle. John’s research focuses on reframing teacher education, school transformation and learner-focused school design. John can be reached at john.fischetti@newcastle.edu.au or on twitter @fischettij

For those who want more What if compulsory schooling was a 21st century invention? Weak signals from a systematic review of the literature

Gonski’s new plan to reinvent Australian schools for the future has this one big flaw

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My favourite episode of the American television comedy Seinfeld is the one titled “The Opposite”. Jerry Seinfeld’s mate, George, was always down on his luck until one day he decided to do the opposite of everything that came into his head.

His natural instincts had gotten him nowhere. He had no job and was still living with his parents well into adulthood. The results of George’s decision to do the opposite were that he changed his whole daily routine, found a new partner who liked his faults and landed an amazing job with the New York Yankees.

I was reminded of George in “The Opposite” episode when the Australian government launched its new Gonski report, Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools.

The review challenges the current schooling system by calling out the vestiges of the assembly line industrial age of education and the current lack of investment in “individualized” learning and future-focused skills. It calls for new types of online formative assessment (that is assessment carried out by teachers in their classrooms as part of the teaching process) and a different progression of learning schemes to focus on early literacy and numeracy skills. It wants us to reinvent years 11 and 12 of high school, to make them more creativity and innovation-based.

This is sounding like “The Opposite” to me.

The premise of this new scheme is line with the best thinkers on education in the world, from Thomas R. Guskey who encourages teachers to “make well designed assessments an integral part of the instructional process”, to Yong Zhao who wants the public to be informed of the “side effects of sweeping education policies” such school choice. It is also following the type of reforms made in the most educationally progressive nations in the world (yes, sorry folks, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands).

However, disappointingly, the assessment recommendations are a reboot of more of the same, or worse.

The review is advocating for assembly-line type assessments in the early years. That is the opposite of how educators boost literacy and numeracy skills in young children. And here again I think of Zhao and his side effects warnings, as he puts it : “This practice can help your children become a better student, but it may make her less creative”; or “This program helps improve your students’ reading scores, but it may make them hate reading forever.” 

The glaring contradiction in the report, as I see it, its that it asks for massive changes to an assembly-line reality by advocating for more assessment assembly-lines. Ken Boston in his recent commentary speaks to this by advocating that this is a “evolution not a revolution.” What is missing from this argument for learning progressions is the assumption that learning can be standardized across children. Chunking a NAPLAN component a day or week turns teachers into test givers and paper pushers rather than gifted learning scientists negotiating each child’s journey through the curriculum so that they are engaged and inspired, not lab rats.

I also noticed that some of the recommendations on learning progressions in the report have already failed elsewhere and have been dumped for that reason. For example New Zealand’s system, where young people faced ‘a test a day’, resulted in standards that continued to fall anyway in international comparisons. So they scrapped their national assessment program altogether.

What can we do?

I recommend that all of us who work in schools and with student performance data spend time this year advocating for reinventing the opposite of our current systems; not for more government-run assessment but for less.

We want to prepare children to be successful in their futures and to do that they need knowledge, skills and dispositions to be passionate, vibrant, dynamic, curious, open-minded, engaged (and literate and numerate) participants in their own journeys. We can’t assembly-line assess that.

If we are truly interested in improving literacy we need to read more with children. And while I know that this is told to parents and teachers over and over, the reality is we don’t do enough of it. It also means getting more books in the hands (yes, old school books) of infants, toddlers and young children.  Again, we know this, but I believe we don’t to enough to make sure it happens.  There should be at least 50 books in each home (age appropriate) by the time a child is five years old. The secret to literacy is reading more not assessing more.

Most importantly, we need high quality early childhood education for all children, not just the wealthy. Some of the recent practices downgrade early childhood workers to carer/babysitter status in salary and qualifications, just at the time we know so much more about this vital time of building cognitive capacity and hopefulness in the developing brain.

And basic, but usually ignored in education reform debates, is the glaring need for better supplementary health care for working class families in Australia. One that allows affordable dental, eye and specialist care so that these crucial wellbeing issues are not factors that negatively impact a child’s development.

In Australia we have doubled down on entrance and exit requirements for initial teacher education, now we have proposed new standardized formative assessment schemes, and these all piggy back on our mostly failed summative assessment systems (where children are tested at the end of their studies.  The proposed progressions of learning assessments narrowly simplify the process of learning into linear chunks that are not how young people learn. And they will create false measures of learning. Teachers should not have their pedagogical imaginations stripped to conform to practices that are not congruent with promoting learning.

One urban legend definition of insanity is “doing the same things over and over again and expecting better results”. When assembly line schooling is transformed to individualized learning, but the assessment scheme is from the same original mindset, we have the cart in front of the horse. And that is insane. “Stop, drop and test” assessment schemes are obsolete. It is time we in the field called this out and moved forward to build learning centers instead of testing centers. Let’s pull an “opposite George” out of our hats!

Dr John Fischetti is Professor and Head of School/Dean of Education at the University of Newcastle. John’s research focuses on reframing teacher education, school reform and learner-focussed teaching. John can be reached at john.fischetti@newcastle.edu.au or on twitter @fischettij

The myth of teacher as superhero (and other bad messages) peddled by hit TV series

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It makes good cinema to put six bright and passionate teacher recruits into some of the most underserved schools and communities in Australia and follow them around. When the filming is by Screentime (think Underbelly crime drama series, Outback Coroner, Outback ER) it is no wonder the result is highly entertaining and heart-touching.

But we believe the messages about teaching and disadvantaged communities that the recent series on SBS, Testing Teachers, sold to all of its viewers are so bad we have to call them out and unpack them. 

The bad messages

The superhero myth

One of the worst messages this series perpetuates is the teacher as a Hollywood superhero. The Western teacher superhero rescues a lucky few students who live and learn in some of the most remote and poorest regions in Australia. New teachers are positioned as self-less “saviours” whose creativity and perseverance are sufficient to bring about change in apparently “hopeless” conditions.

The program focuses on the first year of 6 ‘cherrypicked’ (narrator’s language) Teach for Australia recruits who are all altruistic high achievers with self-admittedly privileged educational backgrounds. The heroic abilities of these eminently likeable protagonists are demonstrated through the supporting characters of the disruptive, apathetic, traumatised, and bullied students they are able to rescue and turnaround.

The eventual success of these teachers with their students is implied through carefully selected test scores and anecdotal notes. This selective use of quantifiable evaluation methods is a trademark of the brand along with its steadfast refusal to explain the lack of rigour in the evaluation studies.

The documentary does not tell us about the high physical and emotional cost paid by these recruits to maintain this intensity of work in a climate that constantly demands measurable improvements in student performance.

And significantly, what is unsaid but implied is that current teachers and school leaders are clueless or incompetent or unaccountable, that only a few mercenaries dropped in can salvage a system in perpetual chaos and crisis.

Perpetuating stereotypes

The show perpetuates enduring stereotypes about students from poor, Aboriginal and culturally diverse backgrounds. In each episode it selectively engages with uncited research about disadvantaged schools that reinforce deficit narratives about Aboriginal and low-income communities. For example there are descriptions of poor, working-class, disengaged parents and oft-repeated statistics on low attendance of Aboriginal students, as well as alcohol abuse by Aboriginal adults.

These communities are presented to us through a single lens, with no mention of efforts by everyday teachers, schools and communities to overcome systemic neglect and inspire children with a love for learning.

Indeed, with the exception of the student at Tennant Creek, there is little positive recognition for the parents, teachers, and other community members who positively shape the lives of these students.

Normalising the growing gap

These stereotypical representations work to normalise the growing gap in educational and economic opportunity in an increasingly unequal society. In doing so, Testing Teachers renders itself indistinguishable from three decades of ‘Hollywoodised’ documentaries and films about public education which have deflected attention from the structural forces that exacerbate educational disadvantage and inequity.

The program effectively diverts an informed public debate about how to recruit, prepare, employ, and retain the best new teachers.

For our society as a whole, the message is that it is perfectly acceptable for low SES and Aboriginal children and parents to settle for poorly prepared low-cost, fly-in/fly-out teachers from privileged backgrounds. Would you accept untrained educators on short-term contracts, however gifted and talented, to teach your children?

Students just need motivation

For students and their parents in disadvantaged communities, the message is that they should be motivated to learn and achieve, regardless of their learning conditions.

Teaching qualifications and experience are not very important

To the teaching profession at large the message is that only those who were good at ‘doing school’ can teach. Clearly, graduates can teach well without prior preparation in pedagogy, curriculum, or respect and understanding of community, history and people in a school community. Worse still, it is okay to test out whether you want to teach by using the most disadvantaged children.

Selling the Teach for Australia brand as a ‘silver bullet’

Of course Teach for Australia has plenty of money to get the ‘good stories’ out about its program. So it is no surprise that this SBS program fails to present the public with a complete picture about Teach for Australia.

It is an entrepreneurial organisation that provides high-achieving but inexperienced teacher recruits to schools in disadvantaged communities on short-term two-year contracts. While Teach for Australia is relatively new in Australia, it is essentially a clone of a deeply controversial 25-year-old, US organisation Teach for America. The latter has become an elite status symbol in the USA by offering recruits a combined opportunity for paid community service, immediate employability, and resume building. A majority of recruits move on after 2 years into top graduate schools and thereafter into high paid careers in education leadership and policy including within TFA’s own lobbying organisation – Leadership for Excellence and Equity.

The Teach for America model is now in 39 countries around the world and at the forefront of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) which seeks to casualise teachers deprofessionalise the teaching profession and thus, advance the privatisation of public education.

The rise of Teacher for America, et al ignores the increasing body of literature that indicates that young people in Teach for America classrooms actually are more likely to do worse in the long run on academic performance than those in classrooms with properly prepared teachers. In addition, the short-term nature of Teach for Australia, Teach for America, etc. commodifies the teaching profession by providing cheap short-term labour rather than addressing profound social equity issues including racism and health, housing, transportation and adult educational issues that are all part of the issues faced in the schools profiled.

Despite contested claims of effectiveness, its wealthy backers, and a media strategy with seemingly limitless resources, have facilitated the rapid global expansion of the “TFA” brand. Building on the US model, TFA is financed by a powerful global network of corporate players (including Google, Rolls Royce ), venture philanthropists (Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Bezos Foundations), international financial institutions (including Visa and the World Bank) as well as public monies from national/federal and local governments.

What has also helped the brand is a disturbing trend of uncritical media coverage from corporate news media outlets which has been documented by numerous education researchers. In Australia too, Testing Teachers has received favourable coverage from leading Australian news outlets across the ideological spectrum. To begin with, reviewers for SBS, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald reviewers all failed to notice that TFA is not new in any sense of the word. A little more homework would have also revealed the striking resemblance between TT and other equally well-financed, recent documentaries showcasing the TFA approach e.g. Tough Young Teachers (BBC3 – UK, 2014) and multiple documentaries by US filmmaker Davis Guggenheim .

While the use of language and cultural symbols is contextualised to the viewing audience, the plot or storyline and take-away messages do not vary. The setting is always a disadvantaged/needy/challenging school and within these schools, we are only shown the classrooms with students who are unregulated/disruptive/tricky characters and of course, the superhero teachers.

Missing from this silver bullet solution is the historical context of a profession that is being systematically casualised under the rhetoric of austerity and efficiency. The argument should be that these bright new teachers are able to quickly gain traction in difficult situations and show results better than the ill qualified person who may have been casualised. They do not substitute for a traditionally prepared teacher.

The issue remains why our best new teachers are not seeking jobs in diverse schools throughout the country and why incentives have not been implemented to ensure every child has a highly qualified new teacher.

Media messages matter

Images about teaching and communities matter. This series was indeed entertaining. It may well inspire graduates to join TFA for a short-term teaching stint but will it inspire the kind of long-term commitment needed to provide equal educational opportunity for every Australian child? Undoubtedly, this promotional documentary will help more money to pour in to the TFA coffers (the results TFA is paying for). However the damage the bad messages do to the teaching profession and to Australia’s disadvantaged students and communities is immeasurable.

As educators and educational researchers, we believe we need to call out those bad media messages when we see them.

Nisha Thapliyal is Lecturer, Comparative and International Education at the University of Newcastle. Nisha’s research focuses on education equity, community-based activism and the democratisation of education policymaking. Nisha can be reached at nisha.thapliyal@newcastle.edu.au or on twitter @NishaT4edu

John Fischetti is Professor and Head of School/Dean of Education at the University of Newcastle. John’s research focuses on reframing teacher education, school reform and learner-focussed teaching. John can be reached at john.fischetti@newcastle.edu.au or on twitter @fischettij

Education in Australia needs to change direction NOW, before it’s too late

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We believe the next five years are vital to the future of education in Australia. As we see it, our choices are stark; we can base what we do on successful models from Australia and around the world or we can embrace practices whose deleterious results have already been demonstrated elsewhere. The choices we make can set our nation on a path towards competitiveness and innovation or irrelevancy in the global economy.

What difference will the change of Prime Minister and Education Minister make?

The recent change of Prime Minister and Education Minister might see some changes in direction. New education minister, Stephen Birmingham, has flagged an interest in vocational education and stated he is “not wedded” to university fee deregulation. It is likely he will redirect higher education reform to strong incentives for improving student persistence and graduation from university.

As we see it, vocational education reform is more than a federal/state issue, it is about skillsets needed to be successful in the innovation age economy. And University reform based on graduation requirements has promise, however is wrought with potential flaws as we can see from the experience of other countries.

Australia will need a lot more than fiddling at the edges of education policy if we are to have a successful future as a nation.

What makes us think education in Australia is at a crossroad?

A series of educational reports have been released recently that appear to raise concern about the health of our educational systems. In a climate where policymakers are pushing for educational reforms, we can see these reports being used as levers for change.

First, in July, the Grattan Institute released a report Targeted teaching: How to get the best from our schoolchildren which revealed the gap in student performance, particularly in year eight maths, across Australia. The report highlights teaching quality as the foremost issue we must address to meet broad student needs.

In August, NAPLAN scores were reported as flat. The report said, “in the seven years since the tests were introduced in primary and high schools, most measurements show no major improvement.”

Later in August, in NSW figures released indicated that teacher mental health leave and compensation claims were up 40%. The New South Wales Education Department said insurers received nearly 690 claims for “psychological injury” from school staff in the last financial year, compared to 490 the year before.

In addition, it appears there are limited opportunities for University graduates in the marketplace. Also the most disadvantaged are even worse off than in the past. The Australian Council for Educational Research highlighted the impact of disadvantage on completion rates for university, with “low SES, non-metropolitan and Indigenous students less likely to complete their programs than their peers.”

These converging narratives appear to be leading us to the policies of the US and UK.

Faced with similar educational indicators in the early 2000s, both nations pinned their hopes on competition and privatization schemes. These were grounded in the idea that competition among schools and between teachers actually improves student learning.

Private is good, public is bad

How was this idea allowed to take hold? American scholar Michael Apple notes,

“We live in a world where we have been told through highly funded and widely publicized media that what is public is bad and what is private is necessarily good.”

Many would contend Apple’s worldview is now alive in Australia as evidenced by recent moves to turn public services such as rail and electricity networks over to private companies.

The future with a US or UK focus

If the US experience is illustrative, following this same ‘private is good, public is bad’ formula in education will lead to an increase in testing regimens and test-focused curricula as schools increasingly compete.

Enormous corporations will run mediocre charter schools across the nation, which will be part of a widespread but failing school choice program. There will be a devaluing of the public sector for education and further socio economic-based segregation of schooling and society.

Our hope is that we also avoid the onerous inspectorate model of England.

An alternative, evidence-based, better future

There are many impressive innovations occurring in Australia and around the world that we could be using more widely. These reform-based models are offering meaningful education experiences for students, often with little fanfare.

For example:

  • The Big Picture School model is revolutionizing schooling for many young people who are “leaving school to learn.” The work-integrated-learning approach coupled with a new form of transdisciplinary pedagogy is gaining traction all around the country.
  • Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) models are emerging for students “in the middle,” who have unrealized potential and need structure, mentoring, study techniques and peer support.
  • Schools such as Broadmeadow Primary near Melbourne are using neuroscience to guide a whole-child approach to teaching and learning with fantastic results.
  • Project-based learning is increasing across the K-12 spectrum leading to exciting new frontiers for the future of schooling.
  • International Baccalaureate program emphasizes a world-calibrated curriculum, problem-solving and globally marked high-level written assessment tasks.
  • In the US, the Early College model is changing the scope and sequence of the entire curriculum for students who are placed at risk in traditional school settings. The Early College model could work here.

These innovations involve a series of integrated skills that fit the innovation approach to teaching and learning that other countries are advancing. The skills are not currently assessed by NAPLAN or the HSC. They include a high level of knowledge and skills in:

  • Applied literacy and numeracy
  • Presentation
  • Technology savvy
  • Collaboration
  • Global awareness
  • Work-integrated learning
  • Market-ready and university-ready skills combined.

We believe Australia is at a cusp of exciting change. We hope foresight can help push back the anti-public school rhetoric and anti-progressive policies that confront us. Yes some valid concerns have been raised but we have, right in front of us, some really positive examples of what works.

Hopefully we can use them to guide us to a future where Australia plays a relevant role on the world stage as knowledge leaders. Let’s not look back on a generational opportunity that we had and let slip away.

 

John-Fischetti (1) copyJohn Fischetti is Professor and Head of School/Dean of Education at the University of Newcastle. John’s research focuses on reframing teacher education, school reform and learner-focussed teaching. John can be reached at john.fischetti@newcastle.edu.au or on twitter @fischettij

 

 

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Scott Imig is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle. Scott’s research is in instructional leadership, school reform and mentoring. Scott can be reached at scott.imig@newcastle.edu.au