Time really to stop fixating on academic achievement as an end in itself, but instead concentrate on the "need" for the academic achievement.

The school system is a failure when its primary aim is to entertain students off into adulthood, as the alternative to an industrious working life at a much younger age, in jobs which are increasingly taken-up by overseas tourists on special working visas.

Most children should be encouraged to leave school...not stay on unwillingly and disrupt the lives and endeavor of those who actually wish to be educated!
An alternative to education for the majority of adult school "internees", is the problem with education; it should never be a child minding service!

While I agree with much of what the author has to say, teachers and schools represent only a part of the solution. What happens in schools and school systems will work most effectively if they are supported by parents and families.

Many countries, including Australia, have spent vast sums trying to improve schooling outcomes by transforming school structures, curriculum and assessment and teacher training, etc. Resulting improvements have mostly been small in comparison to the level of investment.

Yet Australia is making very little investment in something that is known to make a significant difference: parents actively engaging with their children’s education from birth onwards; and there being a real understanding of the role that parents and families can play in improving learning outcomes. High expectations and the belief that every child can learn and improve are also key.

Sacker et al (2002)found that at age seven, 5 per cent of a student's achievement is determined within school while 29 per cent is determined by their parents. This finding is consistent with many other research studies.

So where are the policies, program priorities and investment that focus on engaging parents in their children's school experience in meaningful ways that go beyond just participating in what happens at school? Where are the policies and resources that build on the research which clearly shows parents can help their children succeed in school, particularly in the early years in disadvantaged communities? Where are the policies and investment that recognise the importance of parents' roles as first and continuing educators of their children?

Those issues will need to be seriously addressed if we are really going to improve outcomes for all students.

strong families bring strong outcomes. Secularist want to redefine and pervert the successful model and then bang on about needing more resources to fix their mess.

Why do people make such a meal of things. Instead of looking for lessons from other countries, what we need to do is look at what worked, when we were a top educational nation, & go back to that.

Get rid of all the trendy garbage, & go back to hard book closed exams, which really tell you what the kid has learnt & knows.

Go back to marks out of a hundred, & places in the class/school year results. Perhaps it takes a bit of lack of self esteem to get kids to work, or perhaps to get parents involved. Nothing like seeing their kid at the bottom of the class to get parents interested.

Lets face it, if they don't know their kid is failing, & they can't in todays system of protecting deadbeat teachers, with motherhood statements in school reports, they are unlikely to do anything constructive.

Lets see school inspectors assessing teachers in the classroom, & rating them on the public assessable promotions list of old. Even more important, lets see some utterly useless teachers sacked.

And lets stop mucking with curriculum. With todays mobile society kids need to be able to move schools intra & inter state, without an entire years schooling being missed or mucked up. A high percentage of the important teachers, math & science have enough trouble just managing the subject matter, let alone changing it.

Perhaps we need to double the pay for teachers of the hard stuff, math, physics etc., & halve it for tiddlywinks, media studies & performing arts etc. Even better, get rid of these child minding pretend subjects & get the kids out to work.

In my country high school of 360 students, only 12 of us did 5Th year, & half of them then went to teachers college. That's right half of the academically top kids of a whole year became teachers, & this was common. How many top kids become teachers today?

Yes Hasbeen; You've got it in a nutshell! My point exactly. The vast majority of children are not academically inclined; a point highlighted in your post.

Now though, since the new age FT agreements, and Globilisation generally have decimated Australian industry, as it marched off to Asia; how TF do we accommodate those majority of non-academic students that schools now over-educate to the point of ruination?

So my point is simple; less student numbers, less investment in wasted education!

This is what came out of that survey:
1. Finland does significantly better than Australia yet pay for teachers is about 30k a year , half the pay for the average Australian teacher. There is also a very low teacher drop out rate there and high demand for teaching positions. Teachers are highly educated there too.
2. Gillards enormous expenditure made no difference here.

Its not money that is the problem its student motivation and the ability of teachers to appropriately focus their charges in the right direction which is lacking. In Australia the dominant youth culture is about physical attractiveness and partying together with adoration of negative role models. In addition issues such as social engineering of students and teacher pay equity seems to be the major focus of the system rather than educational process

teachers and schools represent only a part of the solution.
Ian D,

They're not part of the solution, they're a large portion of the problem.

Atman,

Finland does not pay teachers “about 30k a year”.

Finnish teachers generally speaking are paid a little less than Australia’s when they start teaching and more when they reach the top of the scale, considerably more in the case of upper secondary teachers (OECD Education at a Glance 2011).

Using US dollars and purchasing price parity, a teacher in a junior secondary school in Finland was paid $34,707 in the first year, $44,294 in the 15th year and $54,181 at the top of the scale (OECD Education at a Glance 2011). The same teacher in Australia was paid $34,664, then $48,233 and then $48,233. The Finnish teacher gets more at the start and the end, but less in the middle. The pattern is the same for primary and upper secondary, with upper secondary teachers in Finland getting paid more than lower secondary teachers – whereas in Australia they are paid the same.

Then, you have to relate salary to the overall living standards in each country; i.e., not what their salary would purchase in comparison with the salary of someone in another country but in comparison with the salary of someone in a different occupation in that country because it is the latter comparison that affects whether people of high ability in that country enter teaching or not. The OECD also does this by publishing teacher salaries as a percentage of per capita GDP.

You can’t possibly tell if the Labor government’s increase expenditure made a difference yet as students spend 13 years at school. Increased expenditure in the last few does not make up for underspending in the first few.

You can’t possibly tell if the Labor government’s increase expenditure made a difference
Cris C,
I'd have thought that from blatant evidence the difference of Labor's increased spending was of a negative outcome. What other reason could there be to explain the dysmal standard of our school leavers ?

individual,

The performance of our school leavers is not dismal.

PISA tests 15-year-olds, not school leavers.

PISA results still put us above average, though lower than we used to be.

Labor’s investment in primary schools in 2010-2012 could not have had much influence on PISA scores as the students completing PISA were not in primary school in those years in most states.

None of this is complicated or difficult to understand. You just have to stop falling for slogans and start to think precisely.

I’m quite prepared to say what I think we ought to do abut our falling standards, but I really am over the mindless sloganeering that now dominates this site.

My suggestions include:
1) Let teachers teach and principals lead schools – get rid of the bureaucratic and management demands that bog them down.
2) Reward the best teachers for staying in the classroom and make sure they are distributed among all schools.
3) Use the funding system to increase social inclusion, not social segregation as the Gonski and Howard SES models both do.
4) Staff secondary schools as well as they were staffed 30 years ago so that teachers have the time to do their jobs.
5) Retain proper subject disciplines and ensure teachers are qualified in what they teach.
6) Reject trendy nonsense like the open classroom (which due to its failure in the 1970s has been rebranded as “flexible learning spaces”).
7) Improve the welfare system so that we have fewer children in poverty.
8) Make sure schools are democratic and collaborative workplaces that involve their parent communities.
9) Provide for ongoing professional development for teachers.
10) Ensure all children have fully registered teachers.

By chance I read this article just after I had finished listening to a BBC radio program called Boston Calling which addressed the PISA rankings from a US point of view. An author of a book about the Korean, Finnish and Polish education successes was interviewed - her message was that their classrooms were low tech, even in Korea and that government policy requires teacher trainees to be of a very high calibre. Children are taught by direct engagement with the teacher. US exchange students who had been to those countries were interviewed - their message was that teachers were better, better regarded, that maths subjects were integrated and made sense. One also pointed out that any electronic 'educational' device in the hands of a student is also a game machine and is often used as such (thanks KRudd). Not much was said about Poland, which is a pity as apparently it has shot up the PISA rankings despite being a relatively poor country.

Compare that with Australia where doing a teaching degree is the soft option with the lowest entry standard, and where we now apparently have 40,000 unemployed 'teachers'.

Me thinks it has less to do with equipping teachers better and more to do with values. The NSW selective education sector is dominated by students of Asian descent.Their numbers in our selective schools are way, way out of kilter with their percentage of the Oz population. And they are particularly dominant in the maths and science fields

Why is it so?

It can't be about their teachers, since they (initially) attend the same schools as their non-Asian counterparts. It has a huge amount to do with how their parents value education and the support and direction they give their kids.

The performance of our school leavers is not dismal.
Chris C,
I move in different circles to you. So I'm not qualified to dispute your experience. I experince young people on whom a lot & I mean a lot of tax Dollars were spent to educate them. Yet, when they arrive in our workforce they are useless beyond the wildesd imagination. So, my experience is that the system is dismal.
I witness the behaviour of teachers & it nothing short of a crying shame. It really is no wonder that the show is in an irreparable mess. I don't know as how important other people see mentality but to me it is on the top rung of the ladder in education & society. the open display of the mentality of school leavers is barely reaching the bottom rung. Just look at schoolies events around Australia & australian schoolies in Bali. Why isn't discipline taught in our schools ? Why is sense absent from the curriculum ? Is it because the teachers are out of their depth ? It certainly looks like that to me.

With all the debate about school education in recent years, the one element that is missing is "teaching" or "pedagogy". It is assumed that teachers can teach but students can't learn. It is taken for granted that "teaching" is so complex" that it can't be codified. It is routinely accepted that teacher preparation should be based on "critique" of teaching models rather than being able to apply them. The result is a "pedagogical void" in the policy, academic and research literature of education: plenty about curriculum, about teachers but precious little on "teachING".

All is not lost. In recent years there has been a growing body of research-based material about what to do in teaching. Education should emulate earlier days in Medicine and adopt a research-based teachING strategy approach to student achievement. Many will have to give up their dearly held beliefs about what makes a "good teacher", just like medieval magicians did when faced with medical and biological research.

It is assumed that teachers can teach but students can't learn.
Nova986,
Teachers and, I'm commenting from personal observation, lack the one thing that's so desirable, committment. Yes they always tell us how committed they are but are they really ? When they desire a payrise the teachers & union gang up on the Government of the day & put forward their demands. I have yet to see them do the same thing to regain control of the classroom & discilpline the undisciplined distractors in the class. I have yet to see them gang up on those parents who claim their little crapheads are angels. I have yet to see them submit a petition to change legislation re all of the above. Let's see some of that & many of us may just do a 180 & support them. As it stands now they're not worth half the pay & conditions they're getting.

As it happens I sat in on a course a while ago & it was an eye opener for me how it works. I found that most of the teacher's effort was put into putting everything into fancy wording whilst the students were totally absorbed in trying to work out the meaning of the questions. I asked several students about the difficulties they had in absorbing what the teacher told them. Every single one gave me the same answer, "I didn't know what the questions meant but once put back into everyday english during discussions I understood it all".
Problem exposed !

Hasbeen has part of the answer, but not all of it. The most obvious event associated with the decline of literacy and numeracy over the last six years must be the increase in salary paid to teachers in Australia over that period. If that were to be reversed, with salaries reduced to the levels paid in Beijing (which topped the world scores), surely we could expect the educational outcomes to approach the ones there. In the event that the teacher unions declined to work for these salaries, I am sure that many thousand of Beijing teachers could be brought here on 457 visas to fill the gap.

Now I know that any suggestion of reducing salaries will bring howls of objection, and am puzzled as to why. After all, self-funded retirees have had their incomes reduced by 40% over the last two years with hardly any mention, let alone comment, in the media. Why the difference, and why can't we campaign for a reduction in everyone else's income?

Thank you Sue for an excellent summary and for those who are genuinely interested I would recommend the full report that you wrote with Lisa Bortoli and Sarah Buckley:
http://apo.org.au/research/pisa-2012-how-australia-measures
And thank you Chris C for introducing a little bit of enlightenment into the dross. If the majority of correspondents with their simplistic, doctrinaire comments are products of an education system of the past let's hope we are doing better today.
It would be good to have a genuine discussion on education, but On Line Opinion does not seem able to provide it. For those on Linked In the Australian College of Educators has begun a discussion group.

have a genuine discussion on education, but On Line Opinion does not seem able to provide it.
Ian K,
Alright then let's try. Why are we having a discussion about education in the first place ? Because we on OLO don't understand ? Are you saying that journalists et al are all on OLO ? Are you saying the system isn't broken ? Give us an intelligent go & we'll reply in kind. refrain from rhetoric such as "they won't understand". Education affects us more than teachers because we cop the fall-out, teachers don't. We're the ones trying to work with those school leavers who can't write or read properly.
Not everyone gets carried by tax payers funding, some of us have to perform at the same time we're trying to get some sense out of those young people.

"Education should emulate earlier days in Medicine and adopt a research-based teachING strategy approach to student achievement" That's an interesting one Nova986.

There is little research that stacks one methodology against another with "results", as measured by independent assessment, being the determinant of what methodology works best. The whole business of "learning styles" dubiously derived from Gardner's "multiple intelligences" theory has become a professional development industry that has left teachers wondering about their purpose. Are they to "teach" or to guide learning?

IMO, students ultimately gravitate toward subjects that reflect their strengths. No point studying math science beyond a certain point if linear thinking is not your strong suite. "Styles" thus take care of themselves without teachers conjuring up pluralistic approaches that attempt to make the inaccessible accessible to the unsuited.

Technology does allow teachers to send students along individualized learning pathways. However, the idea of a "subject" as a discipline should not be jettisoned, nor should independent assessment to measure mastery/achievement and therefore the effectiveness of the pathway.

Sue Thomson writes in "Making the school system work
By " (6 December 2013) suggests a focus on teacher quality. I suggest part of this should be more training for teachers and in particular training on the use of new technology. New teachers in South Australian schools will be required to have a Masters degree from 2020: http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/2013/11/sa-teachers-require-masters-degree.html

Additional in-service training for teachers, guidance and mentoring can be provided on-line. However, teachers will still require time to do this: it can't be in their "spare time", or at the expense of their students.

I am not sure I want all textbooks and teaching materials written by a central bureaucracy, but materials for schools, particularly on-line ones could be centrally funded by grants. The vocational sector has a good scheme for pooling on-line teaching materials and providing help with their use and this could be extended to schools: http://toolboxes.flexiblelearning.net.au/

Australia could have an approach which combines centralized and decentralized education by a sensitive implementation of on-line blended education. This would allow students to have access to a local class and national experts.

individual,

I won’t dispute your personal experience, but that is hardly a wide sample.

Discipline is taught in schools, but schools can’t beat the home.

Ian,

Thanks. It’s a full-time job just correcting factual errors on the web before you even get to more complicated matters. I fear this site is becoming full of those who just blurt out their beliefs rather than a place of reasoned argument.

but that is hardly a wide sample.
Chris C,
Start asking around, gauge peoples' opinion & you'll find a wider sample than you can presently envisage. Go to the places ordinary folk frequent. Seek & you shall find. Stay away from Uni Campuses, you learn nothing about everyday life there.

Under all the noise about educational performance is the premise that we know the performance that is important for our australian or global society. Until there is vastly enhanced worldwide equity I think the following is the best we will do. 10-20% of all children/youth who are naturally endowed for higher academics and that is across all fields, should be given access to 6 plus hours of such high performance work. !0% have significant disability as barriers to learning and require access to the best support for learning. 70% are a spectrum of blue collar to high technical learners, and eventually provide most of the direct services and products in a community. The greatest lack in education is in the communication in, and care of, community. My best education system would see all students over 10 year old spending 3 hours in community - learning care for youngers and disabled persons, assistance for elders, appreciation of environment, care of animals, craft manufacture and marketing in community. The 20% high achievers could have access to 6 plus hours in academic training after 15 years, however the other 70% shall retain only 3 hours per day in class environment. Teenagers would find greater development outside the ;boxes; that pass for schools, which squander the vast energies of this age group. Youth would (and some do) learn more of value for their careers and adult life, in activities giving them access to diverse social environments and training towards 'seeing' the world and their fellows as possibilities for greater service and problem solving, than any other single factor. I think most of this vast group require only a modest level of maths, science and language. We could make this country and every country extraordinary in product, service, arts, culture, and sheer joy of life, by putting away the fake promise premises of education and economy, and creating life long educational access.

Owen59,
That is the basic principle of a non-military national service. Good mentality ! I hope to see more of this.