Opinion & Commentary
Top students go backwards
The results of the Program for International Student Assessment every three years are highly anticipated in education circles and are dissected for years afterwards.
Unfortunately, the 2009 report released this week has been cause for dismay. Australia was one of very few countries to have a significant decline in its average reading and mathematical literacy scores. This decline is attributed largely to a reduction in the proportion of students performing at the highest proficiency levels.
It is important to bear in mind that country comparisons need be considered with some caution. Comparing city-states such as Hong Kong and Singapore with a country that has a widely dispersed population like Australia has obvious problems. It might be more defensible to compare these cities with Sydney or the ACT. However, even putting aside the international rankings, the fact remains that Australia has failed to meet its own previous standards.
The bad news about our PISA performance should not come as a shock. Australia's relatively low representation at the top of the academic spectrum was evident in PISA 2006. Shamefully, it was not taken seriously at the time.
The PISA report does not offer any explanation for Australia's shrinking pool of bright sparks. It rejects the argument that there has been a focus on students at the low end of the academic range at the expense of students at the top, apparently on the basis that there has been no change in the proportion of low achievers. Logic suggests this does not mean that there has not been increased attention paid to these students, just that it hasn't worked. In my view, education policy over the past decade has leaned heavily towards alleviating the effect of social disadvantage and lifting the performance of low achievers. These are important aims. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that not only have low achievers not benefited, high achievers have suffered.
In all countries participating in PISA there is a positive relationship between socioeconomic status and literacy performance, to varying degrees. The strength of this relationship in Australia has reduced from PISA 2000 to PISA 2009. In 2000, Australia was described as a high-quality, low-equity country. By 2006, Australia was no longer judged to be a low-equity country and in the 2009 results released yesterday, Australia is now slightly better than the international average in terms of the impact of socioeconomic background on literacy.
Nonetheless, a socioeconomic literacy gap was still evident in PISA 2009, particularly among students with the lowest literacy performance. Only 5 per cent of children in the highest socioeconomic quartile scored in the Level 1 literacy bands, compared with 24 per cent of children in the lowest socioeconomic quartile.
But there is more to the relationship between social background and school performance than meets the eye, and our understanding of this relationship has profound implications for policy.
Over the last decade, a number of studies, including PISA, have shown that socioeconomic variables are stronger at the school-level than the individual level. That is, the mean socioeconomic status of a student's school has a larger impact on their achievement than their own socioeconomic status.
These findings have been accompanied by research looking at the ways ways in which school-level socioeconomic status might affect the academic achievement of students. Gary Marks's research in this area has led him to argue that the academic context or "climate" of the school is more important than the socioeconomic status of the students themselves.
The association between socioeconomic variables and literacy is not inevitable -- there are high-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as low-performing students from advantaged backgrounds -- and it is mediated by other factors, such as quality of instruction and school climate. Marks says: "there is no deterministic relationship between socioeconomic background and low achievement". There is good reason to believe that the entrenched literacy gap can be substantially reduced.
The problem remains in finding a way to target resources without creating a new form of disadvantage. Geoff Masters, chief of the Australian Council for Education Research, once said that any student whose needs are not being met is disadvantaged. It seems that at the moment, our high-ability students fall into this category.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
