PISA report finds Australian teenagers education worse than 10 years ago

1 HOUR AGO DECEMBER 04, 2013

Labor has labelled the Abbott government a 'circus' following a backflip on the Gonski school funding model.

AUSTRALIAN teenagers' reading and maths skills have fallen so far in a decade that nearly half lack basic maths skills and a third are practically illiterate.

The dumbing down of a generation of Australian teenagers is exposed in the latest global report card on 15-year-olds' academic performance.
Migrant children trumped Australian-born kids while girls dragged down the national performance in maths, the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, released in Paris last night, reveals.

Australia's maths performance dropped the equivalent of half a year of schooling between 2003 and 2012.
And rowdy classrooms and bullying are more common in Australia than overseas, the report
says.


China tops the latest league table of 65 countries in maths, science and literacy.

The average 15-year-old student from Shanghai is nearly two years ahead in science, and a year and a half ahead in maths, than a typical Australian teen.
Four out of 10 Australian students flunked the national baseline level for mathematical literacy - compared to just over one in 10 in Shanghai and two in 10 in Singapore.
At least one in three Aussie students fell below the national baseline level for reading and science.
The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) called on governments to "act now to stop the slide''.
The ACER director of educational monitoring and research, Sue Thomson - who wrote the Australian chapter of the PISA report - said Australia now has fewer top-performing students, and more at the bottom.
She said the reading results showed Australian students were illiterate in a practical sense.
"It's not saying they're totally illiterate or innumerate,'' she said.
"But they don't necessarily have the skills they need to participate fully in adult life.''
A year after former prime minister Julia Gillard set the goal for Australia to rank among the top five nations for reading, maths and science by 2025, the latest PISA report shows Australia has fallen further down the ladder.

As the debate over school funding continues, the results also reflect how increased spending on education has failed to arrest the slide of other countries, including the United Kingdom, which despite an increase of billions of dollars in funding is producing high school graduates who trail almost every other developed country.
Australia still performs above average for developed countries within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - but its ranking has dived over the decade.
Poland has now leapfrogged Australia in maths, helping push Australia from 11th place 2003 to 19th in 2012.
Australian teens came fourth in PISA's world literacy rankings in 2003, trailing only Finland, Korea and Canada.
But they now rank an equal 13th with New Zealand.
The ranking for science fell from 6th place in 2006, to 16th place in 2012.
Australian girls' performance in maths has fallen to the OECD average - dragging down Australia's result.
But boys are a year behind girls in literacy levels at the age of 15.
PISA exposes an educational underclass in Australia - with a two and a half year gap between the performance of students from poor or indigenous families and those from well-off households.
Dr Thomson said taxpayer funds should be targeted to disadvantaged students.
"Just putting more money in won't work, but targeting money will work,'' she said.
Dr Thompson said Asian education systems, such as Singapore, gave more remedial attention to children lagging at primary school so they did not fall behind.
The PISA report shows that migrant students performed best in the Australian test.
Even in English literacy, 14 per cent of foreign-born students were top performers, compared to 10 per cent of Australian-born students.
Indigenous students or those living in remote areas were twice as likely to do worst in the PISA tests.
Students from wealthy families were five times more likely than the poorest students to excel.
But results also varied widely within schools, between classes.
"A larger-than-average within-school variance means that, for Australian students, it matters more which class they are allocated to than which school they attend,'' the report says.
"(However) the choice of school still has a significant impact on outcomes.''
Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne - who this week pledged to give the States and Territories an extra $2.8bn in funding for schools over the next four years - said Australia's results had declined despite a 44 per cent increase in education spending over the past decade.
"These results are the worst for Australia since testing began and shows that we are falling behind our regional neighbours,'' he said.
"For all the billions (Labor) spent on laptops and school halls there is still no evidence of a lift in outcomes for students.''
Australian students also reported a higher frequency of noise and disorder, and teachers having to wait for students to quieten down, than the OECD average.
More than 40 per cent of Australian students reported that "family demands'' interfered with their school work.
One in five students felt they did not belong, were not happy or were not satisfied at school.
Australian Greens spokeswoman for schools, Senator Penny Wright attacked the Abbott government for handing the States "no strings attached'' schools funding.
"It is deplorable that in the 21st century, Indigenous students are two and a half years behind non-indigenous students, and that kids in remote areas are as much as 18 months behind children in the city,'' she said.
The Australian Education Union blasted the results as a "wake-up call'' for the Abbott government to increase funding to schools in poor areas, and set higher entry standards for teachers.
Nearly 15,000 Australian students aged 15, from 775 schools, were selected at random to take the PISA test last year.
More than 51,000 students in 65 developed countries took the test.


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http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/pisa-report-finds-australian-teenagers-education-worse-than-10-years-ago/story-fngqim8m-1226774545468

I think it speaks volumes about the intelligence of the country as a whole that we needed a report to tell us this.

Without having been to school in the last 6 or so years. Things like the laptops are the problem. Going to uni where everything was done on computers in my opinion made my education suffer. It is damn hard to learn stuff without having to write it down and work it through your head.

That and it's far easier for a teenager's attention span to suffer when there's an entire computer at their disposal to distract them.

Education is getting worse? Your having a laugh

Reality TV has done his.

/thread.

Something has gone wrong with Australia. Children are getting fatter and less educated.

Are children being disciplined enough?
Are their every desire being pandered too rather then teaching them how to live a healthy and productive life?

Reading, writing and arithmetic are just basics, everyone should learn them. Any child who struggles should be helped until they can.

Sparta aborted fuck ups at birth.

While extreme maybe we should abort fuck ups before they can damage the lives of others. In all seriousness there were so many "clowns" at school distracting everyone. Our society should not tolerate them.

LOL



Not exactly true, Newborns were dunked in wine and placed at in the mountains, the strong survived the weak perished, Children born disfigured or maimed were killed outright. Children were given to wet nurses and removed from families at a very young age and taught to be soldiers and women. Whilst effective in raising an army, it is not a good way to build a society.

though I agree, more controls need to be placed on kids through effective parenting techniques to allow all children to learn without unruly children disrupting a class room. also a removal of reliance to computers would be good, let's get back to legible cursive writing.

Gonski will not fix this problem.....nor will throwing fist fulls of cash...

Nor will continually cutting funding to an already underfunded system :-S

there are no cuts.......another of your "making shit up as you go" quotes

Why Pyne is right to review the Gonski reforms
By Kevin Donnelly
Posted Tue 26 Nov 2013, 3:40pm AEDT

With its misguided emphasis on students' socioeconomic backgrounds and its discrimination against private schools, the Gonski education reform needed to be reviewed, writes Kevin Donnelly.

Christopher Pyne, the Commonwealth Education Minister, is right to argue that the Gonski funding model, enshrined in the Australian Education Bill rushed through Parliament in the weeks before the last election, is flawed, inconsistent and lacking in transparency.

Pyne is also correct to agree that any review of the school funding model will occur next year - thus giving schools, system authorities and the states and territories the certainty that current arrangements, especially in terms of the amount of funding for next year, will remain set at the agreed level. The Coalition will also match Labor's overall spending over the next four years, though the distribution may change beyond 2014.

That the Coalition government is committed to reviewing the Gonski model, or what should be described as Gonski light given that what was being implemented by the then Rudd government bore little relationship to what the original Gonski report recommended, shouldn't surprise.

The Coalition's education policy, released during the election campaign, states that any incoming Abbott government will guarantee existing arrangements for 2014 while signalling the need to amend the Australian Education Act and revisit the issue of funding to ensure greater consistency, stability and certainty.

One only needs to read the submissions by independent and Catholic school authorities to the Senate inquiry into the Education Bill to appreciate that the Gonski school funding model is inconsistent and opaque.

Such were the criticisms and fears about the funding model, and the associated cumbersome and intrusive National Education Reform Agreement, that the Coalition senators recommended "that the bills not proceed, pending detailed examination in the 44th Parliament".

In addition, such are the fears about Gonski representing a Commonwealth takeover of schools, constitutionally the preserve of the states, that two premiers on different sides of the political fence, Napthine in Victoria and Giddings in Tasmania, expressed fears about Canberra's command and control model of education policy making.

Ministers Piccoli in NSW and Dixon in Victoria, if they have been properly briefed and have any sense of political realism, must recognise that jumping on board the Gonski bandwagon during the dying days of the Rudd government was fraught with risk.

This was especially so given that Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory had not endorsed Gonski, the Rudd government undermined any consistency by signing different agreements with different jurisdictions, and most of the promised funding was never to eventuate until years five and six - two years beyond the forward estimates.

The Coalition Government is committed to reviewing teacher training and the national curriculum; Pyne is also correct to reaffirm the election promise to review Gonski. In addition to being inconsistent and opaque, the Gonski report and its recommendations are inherently flawed.

Contrary to the argument that Gonski is fair and reasonable, the funding model, embodied in the Australian Education Bill, unfairly discriminates against the 34 per cent of Australian students attending Catholic and independent schools.

On the contrary...


There are three simple reasons why Gonski is the right way to fund education in Australia, writes Jane Caro.
The quantum of funding for non-government schools, what is known as the Schooling Resource Standard, is reduced by a figure of at least 10 per cent - described as "parents' capacity to pay". Wealthy parents sending their children to privileged, well-resourced state schools face no such impost.

The statement in the Gonski report that "students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and Indigenous students have the most significant impact on education outcomes" mirrors the cultural-Left argument that socioeconomic disadvantage is the prime cause of students' underachieving.

The evidence proves otherwise as detailed in a recent publication by the University of Melbourne's Gary Marks. In his book Education, Social Background and Cognitive Ability, Marks dispels the myth that postcode is destiny by detailing other more influential factors, such as: student prior ability, school culture and classroom environment, and effective teachers and a rigorous curriculum.

After examining debates about the impact of students' background and recent research, Marks writes: "... arguments that the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities across generations is strong and enduring and that cognitive ability is irrelevant are simply not true."

Reinforcing a number of studies associated with the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth that also question the significance of socioeconomic background, Marks also concludes, "Deliberations on education policy should not be based on the premise that the bulk of inequalities in education can be attributed to socioeconomic background".

The Gonski report is based on a mistaken view of what leads to educational disadvantage and underperformance. Gonski also discriminates against Catholic and independent schools and represents a highly centralised, bureaucratic and inflexible model of education guaranteed to stifle creativity and innovation and drown schools and teachers in red tape and compliance costs.

The Coalition government is right to honour its election promise to review Gonski next year and to work in collaboration with the states, territories and non-government school authorities to fashion a more transparent, credible and equitable outcome for schools.



http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-26/donnelly-why-pyne-is-right-to-review-the-gonski-reforms/5117438

Funding cuts
More referenced budget cuts

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Another quality rebuttal from Batfink. Bravo.

your post is about legislation that labor put forward, and now you are bitching that Abbott is proceeding with legislation that Labor put forward......?????????

Haha. Was just going to say, you didn't need a report to tell you this. I could have told you from first hand experience.

that's why is sent all my 4 children to private school........i pay and expect results....

And what do you say to those who can't afford to do such things? Should they not be afforded the same opportunities? Or are you too busy building your society of Epsilons?

1) They are afforded the exact same opportunities, anyone can be sent to a private school.
2) There are a number of schools in Melbourne who provide an extremely high quality education without costing much. (Eg. Melbourne High, Macrobertsons).

Researchers obviously checked this forum.

It's not an opportunity if you can't afford to go there.

well to be honest i have struggled to afford it myself, but my good wife started a education fund for our children the day we decided to get married and we put a bit away each week into the ASG scholarship fund, so we started before they were born and we sent them to state schools until the end of primary school so they were able to be kids and not be pressured by the enormous amount of homework private schools dish out, so they only went private for years 9,10,11 & 12. that gave us like 6 years to get ahead and i worked ridiculous amount of time, overtime and did private jobs for many years, to give my children a better education that what i was afforded.......(wait for the abuse).....

and unlike others i haven't blamed anyone or looked for handouts and favors, we did it through pure hard work making sacrifices and doing with out.....

What school out of curiousity? I went to a private school in Sydney's West and it was not worth the money my parents forked out for it.

I attended a public school for a term in my education career and was taught far far more, much better value and I learnt life lessons.

It's not all, but I'm just curious which of the multitude of educational sects you chose.

Edited by notatroll: 5/12/2013 03:26:31 PM

i don't buy into this "public schools are disadvantaged" crap......all my kids went to public schools until high school when when changed to private.....

maybe more families should put their child endowment aside or stop smoking, or stop drinking, or don't get tattoo's or nike air shoes or everlast trackies.....

Commie.

the expensive one was St Paul's Grammar in cranebrook

most private schools have a number of scholarships for socioeconomic disadvantaged families....

my mates two daughters go to St Paul's and he and his wife earn average wages, they manage
some people make excuses, some get on with it and make it work.....

like some people these days say we can't afford another child....fuck i laugh when i hear that.....

Just because you've been afforded to maybe 5% of the country doesn't mean that everyone is, batfink. And because your elitist political and social ethos behaves like everyone does doesn't make you a genius, it makes you a fool.

You're operating around the assumption that people who can't afford to send their child to private school smoke and drink and are covered in tattoos and wear glorified pyjamas. Or it could be (get this) that they're FUCKING POOR and subsequently receive an inferior education (as demonstrated by imonfourfourtwo).