Trust Dave Eggers to say it best. From his recent New York Times opinion piece
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries:
"When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources."
Eggers was writing with regard to the recently released and generally damning results of the internationally standardised reading, science and numeracy tests for 15 year olds, the
Programme for International Student Assessment. While Australia certainly fared better than the United States, our placement of 9th in reading, 10th in science (behind Estonia) and 15th for maths remains a significant tumble for a country who up until the mid 90s was very close to a world leader in the education of its children.
But perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the test results is to look at the countries that topped out the list: Singapore, Finland and South Korea. Two Asiatic educational styles, one Scandinavian. Two styles founded in rote learning and intensive, difficult schooling, one founded in
creative teaching and freeform class plans. Two styles, then, that could not be further apart. And yet they both achieved so highly.
So, what is it that links all three countries? Quite simply, it's the quality of their teachers.
Right now, Australia is facing up to a new debate about teaching quality. We have implemented the standardised NAPLAN testing - due next week - so as to assess what our children are learning from their teachers, we've instituted the MySchool website so that parents can track what children are learning from their teachers, and Gillard plans to introduce a scheme of teacher bonuses to
reward the highest achieving teachers in the country with up to $8000 a year in extra pay. To put it another way, all round, teachers are harried, observed and judged.
But it strikes me that perhaps all of this misses the point a little. Those countries now topping the charts - Singapore, South Korea, Finland - simply have a fundamentally different attitude to the value and worth of teachers. In Finland you're not allowed to be a teacher without a Masters degree. Moreover, competition for positions in the five year teaching program are so hotly contested that only 10% of applicants are accepted. Although, once you're in, the Finnish state pays for your education. As a result, the profession is filled with exceptional and dedicated minds who make the most of the freedom afforded by the loosest of core curriculums. Meanwhile, in South Korea, they regularly pay teachers somewhere in the vicinity of $100 000 per year, with the obvious result that teaching becomes a profession which people view alongside medicine, corporate work and the law.
These gestures are costly, yes. But, as Eggers points out, all it takes is a certain amount of political will, a willingness to reshape the national narrative. After all, it's easy enough to funnel billions upon billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or to bail out dying financial institutions. Or, in our case, to blindly try and put the budget back into surplus. But when it comes to the idea of funnelling billions more into our educational system, suddenly there's no impulse, no political worth.
It is odd that, societally, we have stripped so much value from something that is in many ways the primary purpose of our existence as a society, namely, the production of a well-functioning future generation. Those locations where the money exists these days - law, finance, real estate - have the future well-being of our society as only the most peripheral of their aims. Finance, in particular, could justly be accused of
stealing many of our brightest minds for an endeavour that is, in most respects, socially worthless. But at the same time education has been denigrated, downgraded, relegated to fallback status for people at university who don't really know what to do with their Arts degree. For every person filled with a passion for the education of our youth, there's another doing it because, well, it was there. In the end, we just don't pay or value teachers enough to attract in the calibre of people that we would like to be our teachers.
None of which is to denigrate the mass of teachers currently filling our schools, by and large doing an exceptional job of teaching our children. It's a difficult, unregarded and unfairly maligned profession to find oneself in these days and teachers do a tremendous job under the circumstances. But if we are serious about improving our educational outcomes across the board, it will require some significant policy recalibration and, in all likelihood, a lot more financial investment than $8000 bonuses for the top tier of teachers to fight over each year. I do take some heart from projects such as
Teach for Australia, which aims to recruit high achievers from other walks of life and model them into teachers who strive against educational disadvantage, or Masters models like that offered by the University of Melbourne, which puts a premium on previous education and life experience. But these are small gestures and a long way away from becoming the norm. Gillard often talks of her passion for education, of her enduring belief in its social importance, but if she really wanted to make her name as a grand reformist of Australian society, then perhaps reshaping the way we see teachers would be a good place to start.