Two new books about schooling in Australia, both by prominent commentators, mark the passage from the fringes toward the mainstream of a potent insight: schooling’s problems are structural. Jane Caro’s Rich Kid Poor Kid takes aim at the organisation of our 9500 schools into “sectors”; Geoff Masters’s The Children We Leave Behind tackles the even more important and even more complicated question of how to structure the work of learning.
Caro’s little book (published by the Australia Institute in its new Big Ideas in Small Packages series) is the beneficiary of her media profile, a clear and forceful voice, and fire in the belly. To her great credit Caro maintains her rage rather than join the general indifference to a setup in which some can choose but many can’t; in which schools for rich kids define everything else as second rate; in which those who need least get most (as well as public subsidies); and which is segregated along social, religious and ethnic lines yet supported by nominally Christian churches and backed by governments of all stripes.
With rage comes a series of dilemmas. Blame the sector system for everything? Or concede that many government schools and systems play the choice game too (selective schools, zones that can be bought into, out-of-zone enrolments)? Point to the deep-in-the-bones damage done to the government schools or trumpet their virtues? Be frank about the scale of the reform problem? Or keep the spirits up with assurances that progress is possible? Go for modest but attainable gains? Or call for a substantial restructuring and get nowhere?
Perhaps unnerved by the fact that none of Australia’s nine governments wants to disturb a sleeping dog and aren’t up to big change anyway, Caro opts for a bit of everything, including canvassing Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor’s proposal for a restructured sector system. For that transgression she has been rewarded with a stern rebuke by another prominent commentator who still thinks that fixing up the government schools will do the trick.
We can hope that Geoff Masters’s The Children We Leave Behind will be a turning point but fear that it won’t.
Masters’s conclusion, authoritative, compelling and widely shared, is that schooling can and must be “transformed.” When he says at the outset that his book is “not so much about teachers and teaching practices as the policies, structures and processes that governments and school systems create and within which teachers work” he is belling the cat. Governments and their bureaucracies have spent decades telling schools and teachers that they’re the ones that need to be reformed. Masters begs to differ. In fact, he insists, it’s the other way about: schools and teachers can’t do reform or be reformed unless and until the powers-that-be reform themselves and the framework of curriculum, assessment and reporting requirements within which schools and teachers work.
This is so far as I am aware the first time a system insider has said, clearly and adamantly, that Australian schooling is on the wrong tram and heading in the wrong direction. Masters was until his recent retirement head of the Australian Council for Education Research; in that role he was for many years confidante of and adviser to governments and systems at both state and national levels.
His argument is that things go wrong from the very first day of school: kids arrive knowing different things in different amounts, but schools treat them as if they’re all the same. For the most part students are taught the same grade-level curriculum at the same time and for the same amount of time. The reality is that some are years ahead of the starting point, some years behind. The way-behind fall further and further behind “as each grade’s curriculum becomes increasingly beyond their reach.” Most of the way-behind come from what Masters refers to as “poorer backgrounds.”
Masters laid out the bones of this case in a much-discussed paper well over a decade ago but has now expanded it in several ways: he insists that the fast-expanding learning sciences do not demand “direct” or “explicit” instruction, as is so often claimed, but support the case for a restructured learning process; he details fundamental things mainstream schools can learn from “alternative” schools (many of them catering to the left-behind, by the way); and he teases out the many ways in which centrally imposed curriculum, assessment and reporting requirements hobble schools and frustrate teachers’ deepest motivations and professional aspirations.
For all its value The Children We Leave Behind understates the problem, and is stronger in analysis than prescription. Emphasising the plight of the badly educated, Masters under-emphasises the mis-education of the majority, and the consequent need for change in the scope and content of the curriculum. Kids described as “disengaged” or “discouraged” are in reality often humiliated, hurt, angry. To talk about the bad “design” of the “machinery” of schooling is to imply that the required change is just a matter of persuading the powers-that-be to get on with the obviously desirable redesign.
The reality is much less sunny: as students advance in their school careers they are pressed into a narrowly cognitive curriculum and an increasingly intense and explicit competition of each against all. The many components of this way of organising schooling are tightly integrated, capable of absorbing change in any part without disturbing the whole, and heavily defended both internally (curriculum associations, industrial regulation, and so on) and externally (vested interests, popular images of “school,” national testing and school surveillance systems and the like).
All this is not with us by chance or merely as the legacy of a distant era; it is schooling functioning as a central site of fierce struggles to maintain or advance social position. Along with many others trying to divine why schooling works as it does, Masters has been reading Michael Young’s 1958 classic The Rise of the Meritocracy but has yet to work through the full implications of Young’s argument about schooling’s central role in allocating social places and class power.
Facing up to structural realities means facing up to structural change — a very different thing from the bit-by-bit gains contemplated in Labor’s National School Reform Agreements, not to mention the literally reactionary efforts of states going so far as to mandate centrally developed lesson plans.
The commendable but so far modest efforts of the South Australians may prove me wrong, but a long history suggests that neither governments (never more than three years away from the next election) nor their bureaucracies (under the ministerial thumb and devoted to their own top-down power) will opt for structural reform unless and until they are forced into it.
The best hope lies in a movement from below, a bigger and more sustained version of the “I Give a Gonski” campaign of 2012–13, bent on loosening the ties that bind schooling to its socioeconomic role so that it can move toward the kind of schooling Masters wants.
First movers in any such effort would have to be, as in the Gonski campaign, the teacher organisations. They in their turn would have to grasp, at last, that terms and conditions matter but would matter a great deal more if grounded in teachers’ most fundamental desire: to do really good, satisfying work with the kids. For such a movement The Children We Leave Behind would be required reading. •
Rich Kid Poor Kid: The Battle for Public Education
By Jane Caro | Australia Institute Press | $19.99 | 128 pages
The Children We Leave Behind: How School Could Be Done Differently
By Geoff Masters | Taylor & Francis | $41.99 | 220 pages
