Fixing the Teacher Crisis
Teaching in Australia is stuck in a vicious cycle of disrespect: teachers are not respected, so nobody wants to be a teacher. Subsequent shortages lead to overwork for existing teachers and a lowering of academic requirements for new teachers, further eroding the quality of teaching and respect for the profession as a whole. The result is even fewer talented graduates aspiring to teaching, and so the cycle continues.
There is not a single profession more important to the fabric of our society than teaching. Teachers, far more than doctors, lawyers and engineers have an impact on the life direction of every single member of society. A good teacher can have an enduring and profound influence on literally thousands of people and the same is true of a bad teacher.
Having the highest quality teachers ought to be a key goal of any government, and given the dire state of teaching in Australia, it ought to be especially high on the agenda for Liberals in opposition. The future of our children literally depends on it.
As Liberals, we are also in a unique position to make a difference because many of the problems are rooted in Labor ideology: the public school system is operated as an essentially socialist enterprise and suffers from the same drawbacks that are common to all socialist enterprises; namely a lack of personal incentive, autonomy and reward for effort, a tolerance of mediocrity and a heavy burden of bureaucracy.
Dismantling the socialist barriers to teaching excellence
There are three key ways in which the socialist characteristics of the public school system are holding back good teaching:
First, is a tolerance of mediocrity. If a coffee shop makes bad coffee, it won’t get any customers. If a surgeon makes a mistake they will be sued. If an uber driver drops below 4 stars, they get banned from driving. On the other hand, if a teacher or principal is underperforming, the union influence is so strong that it is almost impossible to get rid of them. A shocking story I heard first hand was a principal that managed their dud teachers by spreading them around - making sure no student got them two years in a row. This is outrageous.
What’s needed is greater accountability, and this starts at the top. Principals must be made accountable for the performance of their schools. If they perform well, they should be generously rewarded and if they underperform, they should be replaced. This accountability should then extend to teachers. Underperforming teachers don’t just harm their students, they also undermine the efforts of their higher-performing colleagues. It is very hard for school leaders to create a culture of respect and excellence if they have staff that perform poorly but haven’t committed anything egregious enough to be sacked.
For Labor and the unions, the right for a worker to keep their job always trumps the right of an employer to deliver a good service. This might not matter much on the docks or in the mines, but in schools, there must be a higher standard and principals must be free to hire and fire staff as they see fit. Of course, firing someone is always a last resort and all the proper support should be given to help the teacher lift their game, but the option must be there.
The second socialist characteristic is a total lack of performance-based incentives for principals and teachers. ‘Equal pay for equal work’ is the latest variation on a socialist theme that rewards those who do the bare minimum and serve their time. There is a reason that corporations offer strong financial incentives for CEOs: it is necessary to attract the best talent and give them skin in the game so they are maximally invested in the success of the organisation. A school is not a corporation, but the psychology of incentives is just as true for principals as it is for CEOs.
It's not enough to offer performance-based incentives for principals either. Principals should have the discretion to offer performance-based incentives (e.g. bonuses) to their staff. This would go a long way towards improving the morale and retention of those staff who consistently go above and beyond but currently get no reward for their efforts.
The third socialist barrier holding back our public schools is the weight of bureaucracy. Teachers have become so heavily encumbered by box ticking and data collection mandated by bean counters in education departments, that they have very little time for lesson planning and collaboration with other teachers (a key characteristic of world-leading Estonia’s education system).
The alternative to bureaucracy is autonomy: visionary leaders should be free to develop and pursue an organisational strategy that makes sense for their context. They should have full discretion over what administrative or data collection burden they put on their staff. The department ought not to meddle or dictate to the school leadership, but rather should act like a non-profit board in providing good governance and accountability, and make attracting and selecting high-class principals their main focus.
Promoting respect
It is clear that teachers are not currently afforded the respect they deserve as professionals by the broader public. There is no way that a patient would challenge their doctor, or a legal client their lawyer in the way that parents frequently challenge teachers. A lack of respect from parents inevitably leads to a lack of discipline and respect in the classroom, and Australia consequently has some of the most disruptive classrooms in the OECD.
Of course, to some extent respect must be earned, and respect in the profession can be improved through recruiting better teachers, but the culture of unwarranted disrespect must also be addressed.
We’ve seen this problem before: public campaigns promoting respect have been used to great effect in addressing disrespect towards police, women, even umpires. What we need is a similar campaign aimed towards respect for teachers.
There is no doubt that respect for, and desirability of a profession is closely linked to pay. On average, Australia’s teachers are paid well compared with other OECD countries. The problem is that there aren’t many pathways for high achievers to earn really good money in teaching. This need not be the case, as special competitive-entry pathways leading to higher-paid teaching jobs could be established, as well as expedited pathways to school leadership for high achievers. This would serve the dual purpose of incentivising more high achievers to choose teaching, and getting rid of the seat-warming principals that have presided over the declining standards of recent decades.
Another key factor in the attractiveness of teaching as a profession is the perception of exclusivity. The lower the entrance score, the less desirable teaching degrees are to high-performing school leavers. This is the exact reason that universities offer near identical degrees with different names and ATAR requirements. High ATAR students want to ‘spend’ their ATAR score, and choosing a degree with low entry requirements is seen as ‘wasting’ a good ATAR. What we need are high-ATAR university pathways that appeal to these students. This approach has worked for high-performing Finland and Korea, where teachers are recruited from the top 5% and top 10% of graduates, and these countries perform at the very top of the international assessment programs on student achievement.
Instead of raising the bar for teachers, in a misguided, band-aid attempt at addressing the teacher shortage, the Victorian government has further reduced the entrance requirements for teaching, which can only serve to bring in more teachers who are choosing it as a career of last-resort. Surely we owe our children better than that.
Proliferating Success
Although the state of public schooling in Australia leaves much to be desired, there are also shining examples of schools that are achieving excellent outcomes for their students, even in traditionally disadvantaged areas. Marsden Rd Public School in a disadvantaged suburb of Western Sydney is one such example, where the principal adopted the teaching practices advocated by Katharine Birbalsingh, and achieved a massive turnaround in academic outcomes, but also created a safe and respectful environment at the school.
The challenge is how to take these successes and multiply them, for which I offer three suggestions. Firstly, creating opportunities for the sharing of success stories and building formal and informal networks and communities of practice. This means giving teachers and principals back more time in their day to collaborate with each other instead of dealing with paperwork. Secondly, principals that achieve success should be given more control over a greater number of schools (potentially by incorporating underperforming schools as campuses of high performing schools). Thirdly, and perhaps most controversially, high performing schools should be given greater resources to expand and accommodate more students. While needs based funding of schools is entirely appropriate, funding should also be performance based so that more students can benefit from attending the best schools. While the temptation may be to do the opposite – fund lower performing schools to try and elevate them – surely it is better to increase funding for those schools that have proven they can achieve success with the resources they already have, rather than throw money at dysfunctional schools in the hope that money alone will solve their problems.
As a party that believes in enabling individuals to reach their full potential, we must recognise the importance of good schooling for every Australian child in achieving this aim. The status quo is simply not good enough, and we owe it to our children to pursue the reforms necessary to build a world class school system.