In the early 2000s, media mogul Rupert Murdoch brought New York City Chancellor Joel Klein to Australia to spread the word about the “New York City Miracle.” This alleged miracle was as phony as George W. Bush’s “Texas Miracle,” all hat and no cattle. Unfortunately, the Education Minister (who subsequently became Australia’s Prime Minister) bought the tale and imposed national standards and testing on the entire country.
Pasi Sahlberg, teacher, researcher, scholar, is currently based in Australia. As a chronicler of Finnish education (see his book Finnish Lessons), Sahlberg has achieved international renown. In Australia, he heads the Gorski Institute and is trying to change the course of Australian education.
Pasi Sahlberg writes here about Australia’s refusal to own up to the dire consequences of the wrong path that it has taken. It is not too late to change course.
He writes that Australia has done a great job in controlling the coronavirus, but it has been unwilling to bring the same focus to education.
Like the United States, Australia continues to fund failure.
He writes:
Despite frequent school reforms, educational performance has not been improving. Indeed, it has been in decline compared to many other countries. International data makes that clear. Australian Council for Educational Research concluded it by saying that student performance in Australia has been in long-term decline. The OECD statistics reveal system-wide prevalence of inequity that is boosted by education resource gaps between Australian schools that are among the largest in the world. And UNICEF has ranked Australia’s education among the most unequal in rich countries.
Often the inspiration for the education reforms in Australia are imported from the US and Britain. Yet, the evidence base to support many of these grand policy changes here is weak or non-existent. For instance, research shows that market-based models of school choice, test-based accountability, and privatisation of public education have been wrong strategies for world-class education elsewhere. Yet, market models have been the cornerstone of Australian school policies since the early 2000s.
Australian education is failing because of reform, not in spite of it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And Sweden, too. Sweden’s school system tanked when they adopted American-style “reforms.”
Big money reform interests go “looking” for places they can lucratively invade.
“If education was like medicine, many controversial education policies, including NAPLAN, MySchool and school funding models, would have been terminated during trial phases due to harm they do to teaching and learning.”
This quote is from the Sahlberg article cited above. He is pointing to the lack of evidence and results from adopting top down privatization and competency based education policies. These ineffective policies promote disinvestment in the public schools. The same can be said of the misguided US market based belief that competition will remedy inequities in education. These policies actually enhance inequities in educational outcomes. In the US our education policy has been forged by billionaires and corporations that have no educational expertise or deep understanding of democratic structures. Failure after failure has been ignored because there is so much money behind privatizing public education and reducing the costs of delivering the service. As stated by Sahlberg, world class education systems are investing in their public schools that provide more equity, access and opportunity than misguided privatized experiments.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Parents-want-California-s-teachers-vaccinated-15853920.php?utm_campaign=CMS%20Sharing%20Tools%20(Premium
Trump Mini-Me Governor DeSatan of Flor-uh-duh just announced that teachers will NOT be prioritized for vaccination.
I think it makes more sense to prioritize the elderly first, or at least at the same time as teachers. And the prioritization rules should not be allowed to slow down the distribution of vaccines. There are lot of healthcare workers, for example, who have no intention of getting vaccinated. We need needles in arms yesterday, especially among the age groups that we know are at the most risk.
Agreed, Flerp.
So it looks as though even Ditzy DeVoid could see that Trump (allong with Cruz, Hawley, etc) bears responsibility for the attack on the Capitol Building.
Is there time left for Trump to name Beevis or Butthead (i.e., Eric or Don Jr.) Secretary of Education?
I think this would be the perfect capstone for the Trump maldaministration, an adroit summation of the utter ignorance and stupidity and incompetence of Trump and his clown car posse.
How I wish we could have Pasi Sahlberg as our Secretary of Education! He, like Diane, could conduct a masterclass for US educators on what is wrong with our system.
And the Aussie Noel Wilson warned them of perils of the standards and testing malpractice regime in 1997. They should have listened to what he has proven about all of the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods that render using the results of that malpractice regime “vain and illusory”, in other words completely invalid.
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Twelve hours and still stuck in Modi again!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The article below is from 2012. It’s about an Australian based company called AUSSIE (Australian United States Services In Education), which dominated teacher training in NYC for pre and the first decade plus of the 21st century:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/hechingerreport.org/how-an-australian-company-won-the-top-spot-in-teacher-training-in-new-york-city/
We had one of the fellows from that program in our school for half a school year. He was there to introduce and implement their ELA program, with the emphasis on their writing program. He and I struck up a solid friendship. Used to go out for beers at a local sports bar and talk about our respective nation’s educational policies (and sports…and other things, lol).
Two things I remember the most:
1) Most of my kids were far below grade level and had some serious emotional problems. It only took a week to realize that his program wasn’t going to cut it, so we ended up collaborating on a hybrid program; using what was realistic and fun from both his and my knowledge base.
The end product was a success. This made the admins on both sides of the globe happy and, most importantly, was beneficial for the kids. It was nice to collaborate with someone from another nation.
2) He confessed that he’d taken the job because he HAD to get away from life as a classroom teacher in Australia. Said that administration had completely taken over and had stripped all the creativity and autonomy out of the classroom teachers’ hands. Was appalled at the rigidity and lack of understanding.
This was right around the time that our union in NYC was about to vote on whether to ratify a new contract or not. He emphatically urged me and anyone else who would listen to reject it. He said it was very similar to the contract that his union had signed a few years before; which marked the beginning of the end for his love of teaching.
I’d like to piece together a timeline related to my experience and this article. Pretty sure it was pre-Bloomberg/Klein. If so, I find it interesting that Murdoch would send ambassadors to Australia after the opposite had occurred not long before.
I’m just hoping Japan will not follow the same path by having pro-Japanese American political consultants invite education deformers like Joel Klein, Arne Duncan, through the connection with Brookings Institution.
Japan sits at the bottom last in education spending ratio to GDP, yet they are super-obsessed with OECD PISA ranking for years. The government is not willing to throw extra ye/penny into public schools, while they are working closely with national economic lobby organization, private corporations, and education ministry officials to create a phony privatization channel to jazz up their foreign language education–which is ironically destabilizing its profession as a gig job.Their JET/ALT program is pretty much similar to the mission of Tagged Foreign Assistants (TFA). They don’t actually teach classes, they usually serve as an assistant to regular Japanese teachers who don’t really know how to teach students English well.
I know one Japanese right-wing political consultant who has a connection with a notorious TFA founder Wendy Kopp(Yes, she visited Japan 8 years ago for her pet promotion)
He invited Kopp to his consulting session and had her talk three years ago.The guy thought that Kopp is an innovative education leader–which is utterly laughable, conflating business entrepreneurship with teaching profession.
Even today, Japan NHK World buys into the myth of TFA’s quality education.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/directtalk/20201230/2058726/
I wish Pasi Sahlberg will come to Japan some day and show them what education is all about.