2011 Monto nominal
B) OTRAS CONTINGENCIAS POR PROCEDIMIENTOS LEGALES
This report has attempted to provide a clear picture of how Australia’s school system is performing by international standards. It has been shown to produce strong results – very strong by world standards – but these findings need to be tempered by the following facts:
Our performance is slipping in relative terms, across all levels
The equity of school outcomes in Australia is not what it could (or should) be
The strong performance nationally disguises a wide degree of variation between schools and between sectors.
Once SES factors are taken into account, the variability in performance between schools and sectors is much less evident. And in considering the value-add that schools can provide a strong message emerges from the data that a lot of ‘high quality’ schools could arguably be better described as ‘schools with high quality’ students. This situation has come about as a result of schools’ preferences (where they can be exercised) to select students on the basis of past academic achievement.
We have every reason to make certain that students entering our school systems have better life chances when they leave. In this era, better life chances rest on having a long attachment to schooling, strong educational outcomes, and the skills to continue learning, analysing, solving, communicating and adapting. This in turn means that, while children are at school, they need to have an expectation of achievement and to be provided with tailored instruction and support to realise their potential. We have cautioned against pursuing this goal with a sector-by-sector approach. Notwithstanding that the highest concentrations of disadvantage are in the government sector, we have argued that the driving goal should be to lift the performance of all schools. Rather than set a specific target, we think it is realistic to aim for all schools to be along or beyond what we have called the ‘frontier line’ on the chart that compares relative performance against two dimensions of equity and reading scores. While we cannot document with precision and methodological integrity where the different school sectors and jurisdictions sit on that chart, we can fairly confidently speculate how the results break out. Suffice to say that a small minority would be on our ‘frontier line’ at this point and a substantial number of schools would fall into the top right quadrant.
If a country like Canada can achieve high performance with strong equity outcomes, particularly after a period of fairly middling performance, Australia should be able to do likewise. Researchers and policy- makers know what it takes to achieve this lift and we know that there are many commendable and well- directed efforts to move us on that path.
According to the evidence, effort and resources should focus on six ‘levers’ of influence. These are: 1. Improving the quality of teachers and teaching
2. Ensuring the right external standards and oversight
3. Promoting regional-level collaboration and networked schools 4. Supporting disadvantaged students
5. Investing in under-performing schools 6. Strong leadership to drive improvement.
These levers should be applied according to need. While there is a general requirement to have good school leaders and quality teaching, clearly there should be targeted effort to support disadvantaged students and improve the outcomes from under-performing schools, especially where these are experiencing the compounding effects that arise from concentrations of disadvantage.
One way of thinking about this is to consider government’s role in compensating for the absence of sufficient capability to underpin strong school performance. The illustration below (Figure 37) represents a reasonably well-resourced, well-performing school. It has good teachers, bright students, with a parent body and wider community that are willing and able to invest in the school and engage in student improvement projects.
Figure 38: The capability and capacity of a well-performing school
The second illustration (Figure 39) represents a struggling school. It is in a community with low social capital, and has a student body showing poor performance on average. Parents do not have the capacity to support their children to the same degree as others. Good leaders and teachers may be hard to come by but are desperately needed in a school like this.
The principle underpinning our proposed approach to applying the six levers is that where the students and families lack capacity, the community, school authorities and governments can step in to
compensate. Similarly, good leaders and good teachers need to be incentivised to go where they are most needed.
What does this mean in a practical sense for targeting public funds? The first point is to reiterate that most of the levers identified are being used to very good effect around Australia. To achieve a national lift in performance and improved equity, however, they need to be employed in a more comprehensive, integrated and sustainable way across all sectors and jurisdictions.
This means that current investment in those reform efforts that align with the six levers should continue, supplemented in some cases with funding to deepen and embed such efforts. For example, funding for teacher quality improvements should be maintained and could expand to enable reduced contact hours at the primary level especially (that in turn allows for more peer review and support, focus on data- driven lesson planning and time for more engagement with parents). Support for disadvantaged students should continue with consideration given to other services (e.g. after school tutoring) that could further compensate for a resource- and time-poor family environment. The pursuit of nationally- agreed outcomes, supported by effective and transparent measures of progress should also continue but with additional investment in developing agreed measures for school performance.
There is an argument to re-direct resources away from some areas and into the six levers. The data in this report has raised some important questions about how we measure school performance (i.e. in terms of ‘value-add’ rather than student scores) that in turn implies a need to re-think the extent to which schools that are already well-resourced, and which are doing well in large part due to selective enrolment practices, should be publically subsidised. At minimum we would suggest some thought be given to incentivising such schools to take on manageable cohorts of under-performing students and providing retrospective reward-based funding once ‘value-add ‘has been demonstrated.
We also argue for investment in community- or regional-level governance arrangements that put schools back into the heart of wider community-building efforts. Increasingly people travel further to be
educated, but at the same time, there are numerous examples of ‘good’ schools sitting side-by-side with ‘bad’ schools. Many Australians would be saddened by that sight for what it says about who is getting ‘a fair go’ as much as they would be concerned about ‘blights’ on the community landscape. Regardless of one’s perspective, it is not hard to make the argument that it is in a community’s interests for all schools to thrive and be a shared resource – for parents to have real choice, for the community to have school students who are engaged in learning and readily employable, and for there to be a focal point for civic collaboration.
This does not need to involve a new layer of government. There would be some minimum expectations of a community council or board, such as setting regional targets and recommending funding for between-school collaborations. Beyond that, the community could focus on what is most important to them.
Finally, we see value in targeted investment in infrastructure, primarily for under-performing schools that are struggling to provide a safe and positive learning environment for students. Such investments might also extend to technology that supports data-driven methods.
This is a rare opportunity to get the right policy and funding mechanisms in place to both anchor and shape a comprehensive, sustainable and well-integrated reform effort. Australia is in a good position and is already doing many of the right things; we are not coming from behind. But there is considerable room for improvement and without that lift, we will find ourselves lagging behind other nations in educational outcomes and compounding the existing inequities in our society.
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