As I watched James Murdoch toil through his script about how he knew nothing at the time, was shocked when he at last found out and would set up a process (with a short ‘o’) to ensure accountability and transparency, my mind drifted to the line-up of supporters behind father and son. Wendi the third wife, sharp-featured and tense sitting behind Rupert; and over James’ left shoulder Joel Klein, expressionless, perhaps because he’d already heard it all at rehearsal, perhaps because he has the job of making the Murdochs’ promises of transparency seem real.
Before his move this year to News Corporation, Joel Klein was chancellor of New York’s public schools. During that time he was an honoured guest and adviser to Julia Gillard when she was Minister for Education. I recognised him at the trial from the photo heading an article he wrote about schools in the Atlantic Magazine in June 2011, entitled ‘The Failure of American Schools’, not the first article or book to carry a similar title but none the less grandiose for all that.
‘Failure’ called to mind a piece by David Zyngier of Monash University, published in The Age in July this year. ‘Most of the so-called innovative and ground-breaking educational policies and reforms adopted in Australia over the past 50 years, in the areas of policy, curriculum, pedagogy or assessment’, he wrote, ‘have been copied from failed projects in the US or England’. This overstates his case: much of the radical reforming of the 1960s and 1970s, successful and not, was home grown, and the most monumental failure of all, beginning in the 1970s, when we started to hand out cash without conditions to non-government schools, is undoubtedly of our own making. But if we narrow the timeframe Zyngier is on the right track. In the past couple of decades kicking our own goals has given way to importing super clangers, many in the name of ‘choice’, others under the mantra of accountability and ‘transparency’. James Murdoch was emphatic about transparency, but not in a good position to advocate choice. His new coach, Joel Klein, was strong on both when he ran New York’s schools and offered solutions to fawning Australians.
Klein advocated what he calls a ‘competitive marketplace’. It failed, he says. But it was failure in the manner of News Corporation: nothing to do with the bosses, everything to do with disloyal workers in the field; nothing to do with the processes, everything to do with the teachers.
Klein’s advocacy of the features of the school marketplace probably appealed to our leaders because we were already well on the way ourselves. Our curious version of choice, for example, is probably as much our own doing as anyone else’s. In fact a news item in The Age on 30 August said we are the world’s leaders in competitive choice. And we have plenty of local enthusiasts for mass testing, league tabling, teacher grading and union bashing. Versions of these stand out in our educational history. Payment by results is the usual historical example, but our exam systems and our attachment to social selection as a feature of schooling have served that mentality well. Our secondary schools in particular have long been selective in their structures, their curricula and their outcomes. National rhetoric advocates success for all but national practice requires both success and failure. So we are a ready host for further ways to embed selection.
In Klein’s scheme a ‘competitive marketplace’ is a public school system, fully funded, in which parents can choose the best from a line-up of good and bad. The fundamental step is therefore to create, or more accurately bolster, a divided school system in which parents choose and ideally the money, in the form of vouchers, follows the choice. Having opened up choice, the next step is to publish some easy indicators for the choosers in the form of outcomes of teaching quantified, like a stock market index, from mass tests of a few—more or less measurable—skills. The final step is to use these outcomes as tools to control teaching and teachers—hire Mr Chips, fire A. S. Neill. The appendix in this case is an article blaming the failure of the ‘marketplace’ on teachers and their unions.
This is demonstrably the same plan that rules currently in Australia. Ours has developed over a good while and may or may not have been pushed further by Joel Klein’s visits and advocacy. Were he of a mind to, Klein could have learnt much from us about dividing systems and propagating choice. Australia’s set-up is a world beater in the division race. Our ideal school is a posh private school, publicly subsidised. We then stand by as publicly funded Catholic systemic schools make common cause politically with these elite private schools. Finally we set about dividing state schools into selective and unselected in line with our historical commitment to theories of mind and hand, academic and applied.
Joel Klein’s division between ‘charter’ schools (fully funded but self-managing within a charter) and public schools is comparatively benign compared to our homegrown divisions, and indeed one that we have tried already under the rubric of self-management. Where he appears to have been more influential is in our recent embracing, via My School, of mass testing as the source of alleged teacher outcomes. Again, we are not beginners in the field: Australia devises and sells tests of literacy and numeracy around the world. It is only recently, however, and under a Labor government advised by measurement experts and encouraged by Joel Klein, that we have nationwide test results in a form that reinforces the ideology of choice by creating categories of good, indifferent and bad schools. These same data have also been proposed as indicators of teacher quality that could lead to a regime of rewards and punishments of teachers.
As I have noted, Klein thinks all this stuff has failed in the United States because of teachers, and political resistance orchestrated by teachers’ unions. Our position is different. The unions have stuck to bewailing the funding of non-government schools but have said little about the growing divisions among state schools. They do after all have members in all kinds of schools. They oppose vouchers and deplore league tables based on test data. They have gone along with the NAPLAN testing despite its educational limitations and the uses to which it is put, probably because opposition is unwinnable or at least against their other interests. Needless to say they oppose payment of teachers by performance but again they are caught in having to maintain a bargaining presence. In short, Klein’s marketplace is not the failure here he says it is in the United States.
Even so, the unions have not escaped some demonisation. They have not been blamed straight out for thwarting everything good, as Klein has done on his old patch, but they haven’t escaped either. The school curriculum has been made into a battleground, especially in history and English (usually referred to as literacy). The Coalition government drew schools into the history wars and their campaign against political correctness. School history, they claimed, had fallen to the progressives, either by being absorbed into other subjects or being biased in favour of Aboriginal and Asian studies and peace, and against pioneers, our British heritage and the ANZACs.
In that context progressive is meant to be a dirty word. Progressives, goes the story, have wishy-washy ideas, send their own kids to good schools and conduct experiments on other people’s children. Progressive is a very short way along the dog-whistle chain from Leftist. Its equivalent in US abuse is liberal, but obviously we can’t say that here. Leftists, says a more distant dog-whistle, are manipulated by hard-line communists, the kind that run teachers’ unions.
Labor doesn’t follow that chain of dog-whistles but it does follow another when it carries on about the ‘basics’. Julia Gillard was especially keen on getting schools ‘back to basics’. The idea in this case was that progressive teachers had abandoned phonics and grammar. Her new national curriculum would bring them back. Once again the cat and the mat would be joined by the action word sat. Rattling the same dog-whistle chain the Libs had used about history proved enough to charge progressives as the enemies of grammar. The road was different but the destination ended up being the same.
The burden of Davis Zyngier’s case is that when we import ideas, we ought to bring in successes rather than failures. Finland is the commonly cited success story (based on international testing programs) and it is as unlike the competitive marketplace as you can get. The United States and England, from whom we borrow quite a bit, perform much worse than we do, but press on regardless with their quaint ideas of a market for public education.
The OECD ranks us as high in quality but low in equity. Finland ranks high on both counts. The United States is low on both counts. Unfortunately we have gone so far with our own quaint ideas that a set-up such as Finland’s is out of the question. Finland has highly qualified teachers, pays them well, is content that they are all unionised and doesn’t bother with the paraphernalia of selection, mass testing, league tables and punitive teacher ‘accountability’. There are few private schools, mostly religious; like public schools, they are free, lunch included. Secondary schools are comprehensive. Streaming is not used. The differences, in short, are stark.
What we are much closer to is Crown Woods College in Greenwich, South London. A failing school, Crown Woods was recently beautifully renovated, according to a July article in The Guardian, and re-designed as a set of three mini-schools. The mini-school idea makes life among a large enrolment less forbidding. The article suggested the idea came from the United States—Victoria has pursued the same idea in both organisation and building for forty years but we’re not on the world’s worth-copying list. Be that as it may, the startling news in the article was that each mini-school houses a stream based on entry tests at age eleven, one for the gifted, one for the middle ranked and one for the rest, and each is colour coded—buildings, school uniform, the lot—purple for the bright, red and blue for the others.
The headmaster maintains that this combination of streaming and extreme separation ‘is the only way to survive in the brave new world of market-driven education’. (The Aldous Huxley reference suggests perhaps a bit of tongue in cheek.) While it sounds mad, the parents have flocked to it. The scary thing is the headmaster might be right.
Bill Hannan is a Melbourne writer who writes about art and the school curriculum. He taught English and languages and was magazine editor for the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association. Later he became chair of Victoria’s State Board of Education and assistant chief general manager of the Education Department of Victoria.