Opinion & Commentary
Brightest and best miss out
When the OECD described Australia as a ‘high quality, low equality’ country in its 2000 PISA report, it fuelled an existing preoccupation among educators and academics about the amount of variation in student achievement levels. Since then, there has been much talk about the ‘long tail of educational underachievement’ in Australia.
Ask just about anyone with at least a passing interest in education to name Australia’s most significant educational issue, and they will almost certainly say that we have too many kids who are failing to get an adequate school education. Much less worried about, however, is whether there are too many kids who are not getting an excellent education. While the achievement gap is closing — in the 2006 PISA report Australia moved into the ‘high quality, high equality category’ — there is a real danger that Australia is trading off one for the other.
That we should work hard to lift the low achievers is inarguable. Even one functionally illiterate and innumerate child is too many. For this reason, a large proportion of government policy and funding are aimed at minimizing the number of children who do not achieve at least a basic level of proficiency in the essential skills of literacy and numeracy. For indigenous children, it is especially crucial. It is widely thought that if we could just raise the performance of the lowest groups, we could rest easy. Not so. Our ranking in international tests is pretty good, but by no means secure. In the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the OECD every three years since 2000, we have held our position of equal third in science, but our rankings in maths and literacy were lower in 2006 than in 2000. In literacy we slipped from equal second to equal sixth. In maths, we slipped from equal fourth to equal ninth. In a different set of tests, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, we have also moved down in the rankings in both maths and science.
This is not because of the low achievers. Our proportion of students in the lowest achievement band in both tests has been stable over time, and is either close to or less than the international average. Test score at the lower end of the scale have either changed little or, in some cases, have improved significantly.
Our big problems are at the top. In the 2000 PISA tests, we had 17.6 per cent of students performing at the top literacy level, the third highest proportion in the OECD. In the 2006 tests, we had just 8.6% of students in the top group, putting us at ninth place. And it wasn’t just our relative position that deteriorated. Australia was the only previously strong performing country that saw an absolute decline in literacy scores from 2000 to 2006, which the PISA analysis says is ‘attributable to a decline at the higher end of the performance spectrum.’
The TIMSS results are even more striking. The proportion of Australian students in the highest achievement bands is much smaller than high ranking countries. In the TIMSS 2003 results, Australia had 7% of Year 8 students achieving at the highest level in maths, whereas Singapore had 44% of its students in the top performance level.
These statistics are the result of a serious shortcoming in Australia’s education game-plan. The emphasis placed on identifying and assisting children at risk of failing to achieve at least a basic education, particularly in the early years, is necessary for both personal and public good reasons. But the children who have the potential to excel rarely get a look in.
There are plenty of examples of this. A very recent one is the NSW state government’s Best Start program, which will assess the literacy and numeracy skills of all children beginning kindergarten. The aim of the program is to identify children who are behind their peers when they begin school and who may develop learning problems. The assessment is set at a level that cannot identify children who are ahead of their peers and may also benefit from special attention.
Similarly, the terms of reference for the 2007 national numeracy review mention improving numeracy outcomes for disadvantaged learners, underperforming students and indigenous students. There is no mention of extending the abilities of the mathematics whiz-kids.
In all levels of government and in the majority of schools, concerns for underperforming students eclipse the need to provide a high quality education for highly capable students. The large majority of literacy and numeracy funding at state and territory level is aimed at remedial programs such as Reading Recovery. All schools are supposed to cater for gifted and talented students, but funding, staffing and policy support they attract is miniscule by comparison.
In his new book, Charles Murray argues that we need to expend more effort on thinking about ‘the kind of education needed by the young people who will run the country’. Failure to do so will have impacts far beyond international test results, reaching into the calibre of our universities, our global competitiveness in technology and innovation, and even the quality of our future governments.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
