Eyes on the prize.
An exploration of two conflicting educational visions.
Listen to the podcast segment of Ideology in Education (at 13:06) based on this blog post for the Teacher’s Education Review below 👇.
In my last post for The Interruption, I began exploring the relative silence in reference to the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration in Australian educational discourse. The 2019 declaration ‘sets out the national vision for education and the commitment of Australian Governments to improving educational outcomes’ (Department of Education, 2022, para. 1) yet has largely become an educational policy relic, long forgotten in the (actual/perceived) crises that have befallen Australian education over the last few years.
The declaration boldly states:
‘Our vision is for a world class education system that encourages and supports every student to be the very best they can be, no matter where they live or what kind of learning challenges they may face’ (Berry et al., 2019, p. 2).
In this post, I aim to put forward a brief argument of how the two core aims within this statement are often in conflict with one another. In particular, I wish to argue that tensions between these two particular aims (1) to have a world class education system and (2) to support every student to be the very best they can be, arise due to significant differences in their ideological foundations.
Maybe then we can explain the reluctance to refer back to the Mparntwe agreement.
World class?
Firstly, let’s discuss what it might mean to have a world class education system.
As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has grown in power globally, it has sent countries into panics wanting to ensure they don’t fall too far down the ladder of the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) scores.
From a policy perspective, the quality of an educational system is now largely determined by OECD published PISA results, a standardised test that focuses on performance in a narrow curriculum of reading, mathematics and science skills. The OECD boast that:
‘over the past two decades, PISA has become the world’s premier yardstick for comparing quality, equity and efficiency in learning outcomes across countries, and an influential force for education reform’ (Schleicher, 2019, p. 4).
As a result, countries have been pitted in direct competition with one another, their PISA performance publicly released, scrutinised and judged.
Australian governments have continued to focus on these measurements as a gauge of the quality of our education system as a whole in reference to other countries, more recently resulting in calls for reforms to bolster Australia back to the group of “top performing” nations or for more focus on so-called “evidence-based” teaching practices. Australian education has subsequently been labelled as failing to achieve its goal of providing a world class education based on our position on international league tables developed by PISA.
It seems that current discourse surrounding what it might mean to have a world class education system then, is to outperform other countries in international league tables. It is to win, with other countries losing behind us in a game of global competitiveness.
Being your best.
Let’s now have a closer look at what it might mean for education to support every student to be the very best they can be.
This call mirrors others within the Mpartwe agreement, that claim that young Australians are at the centre of the declaration. It is vague statement. However, it is implied that in order to help our students become their best version of themselves, Australian education must:
‘prepare young people to thrive in a time of rapid social and technological change, and complex environmental, social and economic challenges’ (Berry et al., 2019, p. 2).
It is further claimed that:
‘education plays a vital role in promoting the intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians’ (ibid., p. 2).
If it seems like a lot to place on the shoulders of teachers, I think you would be right.
If we could boil it all down, we could say that the ultimate goal here is for education to provide Australia’s young people with opportunities that allow for freedom in how they might engage with the world, not simply to support them in deciding what career path they might choose.
Running against the grain.
To have a world class education system, as I have described earlier, is to buy into the performative dimensions of a neoliberal ideology. I have explored this ideology in an earlier post of The Interruption, which you can access below.
On the other hand, to support every student to be the very best they can be, implies a connection to progressive ideologies, that value freedom for young people to uniquely explore, learn from and exist in the world.
We can see tension between these two ways of thinking about education, as the former is fundamentally tied to performance, whereas the latter is fundamentally a matter of existence.
The issue is that good performance does not always correlate with a good existence. We could suggest that there are times where a good existence might even require poor performance, less efficiency and less effectiveness.
A world class education as it is currently understood in educational discourse does in no way guarantee the moral, ethical and spiritual individual that is hoped for in the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. If anything, we have seen a focus on international league tables distract politicians, policy makers and teachers from engaging with the important moral work of education, which has been replaced by effective and efficient strategies to improve learning and performance.
The elephant in the policy.
The tensions between the core visions, (1) to have a world class education system and (2) to support every student to be the very best they can be, may partly explain the disappearance of the Mparntwe agreement in educational discourse. These are difficult tensions to work through, requiring considered time and thought to determine what can (and ought to) be done. This might explain the recent focus of governments on one of the aims more closely, that of providing a competitive education system. As I have tried to briefly show, marrying these two aims might not be as easy as it seems.
But then again, maybe it doesn’t explain it.
Nevertheless, this raises the important question of how teachers might engage in the highly contextual work of supporting young Australians to become the very best they can be, within a policy context so caught up in performance agendas to become world class.
Over to you.
Till next time.
References
Department of Education. (2022, March 6). The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. https://www.education.gov.au/alice-springs-mparntwe-education-declaration.
Berry, Y., Tehan, D., Mitchell, S., Uibo, S., Grace, G., Gardner, J., Rockliff, J., Merlino, J., Ellery, S. (2019). Alice Springs (Mparntwe)Education Declaration. Council of Australian Governments.
Schleicher, A. (2019). PISA 2018: Insights and Interpretations. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
thanks Tom you explained the Tensions well! An aspect of this that may emerge is the increasing trend of students to do unscored VCE and not sit exams. It was about 10% but moved higher in recent years (would like to get the exact %). A scenario could possibly be the students could exercise their agency for their own well being & interest by not sitting exams. That would change the narrative.
It seems like us progressive types are all about Mpartnwe declaration but no one else is interested in it; it seems to lack political pull.