A new report from the Grattan Institute reiterates what I’ve already reported on: Australia’s education system is in a free-fall of failing standards, and it all goes back to the same things: a confusing, woke curriculum and an appalling white-anting of university teacher-training by the Long March Left.
Australian schools require an investment of one and a half billion dollars over the next decade and an overhaul of "faddish" teaching practice to reverse the nation's chronic maths failure, according to new research.
Only one of those is urgently true. Australia already spends above the OECD average on education. We’ve spent more and more money, year on year, and yet standards have continued to plummet. Spending more money is of questionable value, unless we overhaul teaching practice from the curriculum to teacher education.
Should we surprised that maths results are so abysmal, when teachers are forced to teach garbage like this?
Learning to count can use “body-tallying that involves body parts and one-to-one correspondence from the counting systems of First Nations peoples of Australia to count to 20”.
They’re teaching kids to count on fingers and toes.
It doesn’t get any better in high school, where year-eight kids are expected to solve the circumference and area of a circle using “traditional weaving designs by First Nations Australians and investigate the significance and use of circles”.
Yes, literal basket weaving in high-school maths.
Do we start to see the problem, yet?
But, like the proverbial steak knives, there’s more.
One in 12 trainee teachers dropped out of maths in high school, in a troubling trend that is crippling children’s numeracy skills.
Thousands of primary school teachers are struggling to teach mathematics – resulting in teenagers who use their fingers to count, Grattan Institute research reveals.
They’re not using their fingers, they’re using traditional indigenous body-tallying strategies!
Meanwhile, we’re actually talking about having to bring in ‘veggie maths’ (as we called it in my day) – not for kids, but for teachers.
The Grattan Institute calls for remedial retraining of primary school maths teachers, through the establishment of 50 “maths hubs’’ to provide intensive support to 30 primary schools at one time.
Each hub should employ a “maths master teacher’’ paid up to $250,000 a year – roughly double a standard teacher salary – and deploy specialist coaches to schools.
Don’t just take my word for it: ask a school principal who’s embraced what actually works in teaching maths. Spoiler alert: it’s that ‘old-fashioned’ stuff that worked for you, me and generations of students. Until the woke academics came along.
Melbourne principal Steven Capp has embraced back-to-basic techniques for teaching maths at Chelsea Heights Primary School, where students scored above or well above the national average in numeracy in last year’s National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests.
“They know their times tables off by heart, and are able to quickly and easily add up and subtract,’’ Mr Capp said. “Students who have mastered the foundations of maths can move more quickly through the curriculum.
“If you’re trying to work out the area of a rectangle, it’s going to be infinitely harder if you don’t know your times tables.’’
It all goes back to how teachers are taught.
Mr Capp said his university degree had focused on “kids discovering things, rather than teachers explaining concepts to students and giving them lots of practice’’.
He said he was wrongly trained at university to teach maths through “games and problem-solving activities, in the hope students might find some pattern’’.
Now he embraces the old-school method of rote learning and step-by-step instruction of mathematical concepts. “Explicit teaching is more efficient – and all the students tend to like maths because they feel confident that they can do it,’’ Mr Capp said. “My biggest delight is when kids say maths is their favourite subject.’’
Explicit teaching is everything the woke left hate. It’s old, it’s hierarchical and it emphasises rote-learning and rigorous assessment instead of dumbing down standards in the name of ‘diversity’.
And it works. The worst sin of all in the woke left’s books.
At Budgewoi Public School on the New South Wales Central Coast, the disadvantaged school has turned its maths results around, exceeding the state average for the first time in its history.
It has been hailed by the Grattan Institute as a model for other schools to follow […]
It’s a school where 83 per cent of kids are in the bottom quartiles for educational advantage.
“Typically, 17 per cent of our students come from an Aboriginal background. Many students face social economic disadvantage and all come with a great range of abilities and potential,” Mr Forbes said.
The principal attributed the new-found success to adopting explicit teaching.
Such counter-revolutionary right revisionism will not be tolerated, comrades.
