policy & reform
False hope of bold targets
Increasing secondary school completion rates needs to happen before we focus on more university graduates. By Stuart Middleton
Hi ho, hi ho, it’ s off to work we go. In the Year of the Snake with great Hobbit happiness and Middle Earth joy. But frankly it hasn’ t got off to a great start.
First a family funeral has to be brought forward because one family member’ s child will this year face her SAT test at her school in the US. She must be back for school on Monday!
Then, in another part of the family, arrangements have to be changed because a grandson is“ sitting a most important test in May”. This turns out be the NAPLAN test. He is seven years old going on eight and he will be in year 3 this year. It is hard to see the perspective in all this.
Both the US and Australia have opted for a testbased regime to see that no child is left behind and that literacy and numeracy standards are being lifted. If this approach works it would have started to show clear improvements in the US by now and it hasn’ t. If tests will lift literacy and numeracy then over the history of our test-obsessed systems, standards would have been at least held and might even have been expected to have risen.
Now I read in The Australian a report that numbers applying for university have flattened. This is described as“ stagnation”. The report describes the tricks that are played, such as the reporting of increases in the percentage of low socio-economic students applying but which in reality is inflated by the low base number of such students already in the university system. While this group of students might apply they are unlikely, we are told, to be offered places. Beware of percentages!
It is time that the smoke screens were removed. The only statistics that matter are the successful completion rates of qualifications. Let’ s celebrate when there is an increase in the numbers of lowsocioeconomic students who graduate with degree qualifications or in the number progressing to postgraduate work. Numbers in themselves mean little but the telling numbers are everything.
An increase described as“ healthy” in the numbers of indigenous student applications turns out to be a mere 100 additional enrolments – three busloads. This isn’ t going to lead to equity in a hurry. The gap between population proportion and share of applications for students in regional and remote areas is 6.4 per cent. This doesn’ t reflect equitable outcomes at the school level.
Now these figures might simply be a demographic blip or perhaps the figures for previous years have been inflated – demand-driven systems do seem to drive demand up for a time but then all the tricks of the sector have been exhausted and reality starts to
It is time that the smoke screens were removed. The only statistics that matter are the successful completion rates of qualifications.
impact. The reality is now, we are told, a realisation that the government’ s target of 40 per cent of young people will have a degree by 2025 – that is just 13 years away.
Note that the target applies to“ young people” and clearly the size of this stream will be influenced largely by the performance of the school system. The increase of 3000 school leavers in this year’ s applications might be a good sign; increased numbers are meeting the standard. Or it might simply mean that the higher education sector has picked all the low-hanging fruit in the first three years of the demand-driven regime and school leavers will start to represent an increasing proportion of the university.
Back in July 2010, I wrote in a blog( www. edtalknz. com) that:“ Australian educators will be pleased that Julia Gillard has been kicked upstairs by the Labor Party. After all, it can’ t be much fun having an Education Minister who exhibited so much joy in lurching towards strange goals for tertiary education. The Australians have set a goal of having 40 % of all 25- to 34-yearolds with a bachelor degree or above by 2025. This must have sent shivers down the spines of education leaders at all levels.”
I further commented that this was:“… keeping up the tradition among the Group of Five Englishspeaking education systems of aping each other regardless of common sense, they join the United States and Great Britain in setting this arbitrary target that takes little account of current performance and the reasons for it. The British set a target of 40 %( a key recommendation of the Leitch Report) and more recently President Obama has set a target that the US would simply have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.”
At that time I predicted that none of these three targets would be met because of the performance of the respective K-12 schooling systems and other factors such as the extent to which the countries can actually afford to seriously set out to achieve them. The increases in actual numbers of graduates will require three things: a substantially increased teaching body, increased capital expenditure and, above all, improvement in the successful completion of post-secondary qualifications.
Moving beyond the focus on simplistic number targets and on tests that might or might not show what is happening to standards will be a sine qua non in the future. Perhaps the Year of the Snake could be turned into the Year of the Ladder. ■
Stuart Middleton is director external relations at Manukau Institute of Technology, New Zealand.
www. campusreview. com. au February 2013 | 21