Condemned to innovate - Page 3

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Richard Teese

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SO FAR HAVE WE BEEN QUESTIONING THE REAL QUALITY of achievement – of education – at the high end of the school system that we have looked on these schools as the bearers of innovation, as leaders in system-wide reform.

This story can be found in the Karmel Report itself. Remarkably, the Karmel committee members relayed one of the most persistent, but baseless, claims made for the funding of wealthy independent schools. They claimed to be innovators and we took them at their word. Of course, no one can doubt that there have been resources enough in that sector to support innovation. But energies have been diverted to competitive advantage and examination performance, to product branding and business strategies for growth and market position.

Is more innovation to be found in selective schools in the public system? Or are their efforts more focused on exploiting relative advantage and selective intakes and driving up examination standards to levels unattainable by comprehensive schools?

Real innovation would be about breaking the link between social position and learning outcomes so clearly evident in the map of achievement. It would be about depth of learning, about intrinsic learning satisfaction, about interactive teaching styles that fully engage learners, about transparency of learning objectives, evaluation of programs from a pedagogical perspective, about freedom of choice based on interest and enjoyment of learning.

Real innovation is not going to come from the high end of schooling. The high-end schools are committed to conservation, to entrenchment of advantage, to predictability, to the routine production of success for the groups for whom success is routinely expected.

We have to look elsewhere for innovation – for system-wide change in the fundamental qualities of teaching and learning. And our most likely candidates are going to be the schools where everything depends on relationships between individuals. These are the disadvantaged schools. It is in these schools that the fundamental question of a child's relationship to learning in a social environment is posed in its most acute form. It is in these schools where nothing can be taken for granted regarding a child's readiness for school, his or her language skills, attitude to work in a classroom, respect for others, comprehension of the "craft" of being a pupil.

We could innovate elsewhere. We could find schools that were exactly average in social and academic terms and fund them for generalisable innovations. But if we want innovations that get to the root of the teaching relationship, we should choose schools where this is the number one priority. And if we want to train beginning teachers so well that they can manage the most demanding environments, what schools would we pick? Exactly the ones we currently pick.

We would choose schools that are condemned to innovate in order to achieve the most modest outcomes. For only then could we be sure that we were going to the root. We want children to relate undistractedly to their learning, to be free to learn in the classroom, to love the experience of learning, to share their experience, to teach themselves and others. Teachers who can create environments in which these learners thrive are needed at all levels and in all locations of the school system, including at the high end.

So we would choose as our engines of innovation not high-end schools, but disadvantaged schools. We would make them laboratories of teaching and learning reform. We would relate to them as sources of systemic renovation aimed at fundamental improvements in quality of learning on behalf of the system as a whole.

Of course, for that to happen, we would have to stop isolating disadvantaged schools. We would have to abandon all the practices that we employ to keep them isolated, which cut them off from the mainstream, which expose them to constant failure, to public slander, to low expectations. We could not keep taking their teachers and their most able students. We would have to fund them for durable improvement. We would need different initial teacher training, incentives to stay on, stable staffing and leadership, specialist support to address welfare and social needs so that education funds are concentrated on educational activities.

All these could not happen without more targeting and scaling of support. There would have to be greater transparency, more monitoring and evaluation. Schools would need to develop programs of innovation, patterns of documented and evaluated activity with known positive effects, accessible to other schools. Only through programs can benefits be generalised beyond the locations in which they originated, sustained beyond the individuals who initiated them and carried into new settings in search of a wider impact.

Policy-makers across Australia – at any rate, those committed to equity based on quality – need to forge a different relationship with disadvantaged schools. These schools should not be funded to compensate for environmental adversity and be tested simply on whether, in the narrowest of terms, they have overcome that adversity and advanced only so far as their social intakes will on average allow them. This is the wrong emphasis.

They should be funded as vehicles of system renovation, aimed at delivering benefits to the school system as a whole. The justification of their funding should lie in their role as innovators for the system, not as residual sites of under-achievement that we have created. In the end, the quality of a school system can be judged by the experience of the most vulnerable children in it. A real commitment to them is a real commitment to all children everywhere in the system. It therefore must be supported by an intensity of effort, high expectations and solidarity in sharing resources.  ♦

REFERENCES

Karmel, P. 1973. Schools in Australia. Report of the Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission (Canberra: AGPS).

Teese, R. 2000. Academic Success and Social Power. Examinations and Inequality (Carlton: Melbourne University Press).

Teese, R. and Lamb, S. 2005. Academic curriculum and school setting. How school subjects lead different lives in different schools, research in progress.

Teese, R. and Polesel, J. 2003. Undemocratic Schooling. Equity and Quality in Australian Secondary Education (Carlton: Melbourne University Press).