policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
So teachers are increasingly being
required to teach to the test, for example.
Not that they want to do it, but there are
very significant pressures on them to ensure
that young people are performing well – for
example, in NAPLAN tests. What that has
tended to do is limit the range of creativity
and innovation that teachers feel they can
access in the classroom. This would just be
adding to that.
So I think we need to step back a little
and do a much stronger assessment of
the impact of policies we’ve already put in
place, before we put in another policy that’s
focused on performance, but this time the
performance of teachers and of rewarding
and incentivising that.
The whole question of an increasing
focus on student performance has had
some very negative impacts. No one’s
suggesting that we don’t want students
to do well, or that we don’t want to know
how they’re doing, but when we create
high-stakes tests that are then made
publicly available, we create a situation
of competition, of shame and of reward.
And that’s not a great environment
for learning.
Professor Peter Dolton’s study, which is
a global index of 35,000 people across
35 countries, found that both teacher
status and pay had a direct link to student
achievement in the PISA test. Do you think
the correlation is that simple?
No. It’s never that simple, and we know
that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean
causality, but there are some important
lessons there. What we need to do with
any educational research is look at it
in terms of what kind of research is it,
what it is telling us, and what are the
limits of what it’s telling us? What’s nice
about Dolton’s global teacher status
index is that it’s a very big study, so it
gives us some interesting information.
You’ve rightly connected it to status. And
that’s really what this is telling us, that in
societies where teaching is a high-status
profession, where teachers are highly
regarded, where communities respect
and value their teachers, it’s not surprising
that teachers are more inclined to feel
valued and to contribute in ways that
reflect that.
We don’t have that situation in Australia.
It’s really sad to see that most of the
reporting on teachers since the reporting
of NAPLAN and PISA results has been very
negative about teachers. And it’s not just
that, but we need to be aware that when
we do associate and blame teachers for
students’ results, for example, which often
happens, that’s partly where the issue of
performance pay arises. It’s about, ”What do
we need to attribute to teachers in terms of
their responsibility for the test results?”
What the Dolton study really reminds us
is, when teachers in a society are highly
regarded, highly respected and well paid,
then they’re the conditions in which we get
high levels of performance from students.
That’s not to say that our teachers in
Australia are not highly competent, very
good professionals, highly committed
to increasing young people’s learning
outcomes. But the conditions around them
– what we say about them and the lack
of trust often associated with the kinds of
policies that are implemented – say quite
the opposite.
The LANTITE was introduced to ensure
teachers possess adequate literacy and
numeracy skills to enter classrooms.
Shouldn’t we consider lifting the ATAR entry
scores for teachers across the country too?
It’s interesting because most of the people
coming into initial teacher education
programs across the country don’t come
in via ATAR entry. It’s only one way in
which people come in. And there’s great
variation between universities in the
relevance of ATAR.
This is really a question of: Do we trust
universities, and in particular those in
initial teacher education, to firstly select
suitable people and then to develop them
to be good quality teachers?
LANTITE is a way of checking that that’s
been done. The suggestion of lifting the
ATAR entry is another way of, in a sense,
constraining the professional judgement
of initial teacher educators to select the
incoming students.
Now, it’s again too big a stick for a
small problem, in the sense that no
one questions the fact that we want
the best quality people coming in to do
initial teacher education and to become
our teachers.
So I don’t want to suggest in any way
that those in initial teacher education
aren’t concerned about the quality of the
graduates that they produce and of the
people that come into the programs.
The issue is really about a few things. One
is that the whole idea of an initial teacher
education program is to take someone and
develop them into a teacher. And we have
great confidence that if we get people who
are committed to teaching and who really
desire to teach, then we can turn them into
a teacher. And the thing is, by lifting the
ATAR or by playing with the entry, if you like,
trying to stop certain people at the gate,
Do we trust universities ...
to firstly select suitable people
and then to develop them to
be good quality teachers?
what we tend to do is stop people who
might be very good teachers.
Not everyone thrives at school – for
a whole lot of reasons. So I’m simply
saying the ATAR doesn’t necessarily tell us
whether someone’s going to be a good
teacher or not.
It might tell us something about their
natural ability, but it might also tell us about
what group they come from.
Some groups in our communities
simply don’t do as well at school as others,
and that’s my whole research area. How
come schools don’t serve some groups of
children as well as they do others?
The most common example is young
Aboriginal children and Torres Strait
Islander children. Their results at school
are increasing, but they don’t generally
do as well at school as non-Indigenous
kids. That’s not because of any natural
difference, but because of the conditions
of schooling in society that make it much
harder for those kids to do well at school.
It’s a much bigger range of issues, but
we really want to encourage Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander children and young
people to come into teaching, we really
need them in teaching. And many of them
are doing increasingly well and getting very
high ATARs.
But we also don’t want to artificially stop
some people from entering teaching who
may become very good teachers. So again
it comes back to an issue of trust, and
just like within our society, we tend not to
trust teachers terribly much. That’s how
we’ve gone. We also tend not to trust initial
teacher educators very much either. Most
students will pass the LANTITE without any
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