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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

All of us know that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a person’s life – and a bad one can be a disaster for a young person, who’s trying to find their way.

So how do we make sure that the best people become teachers?

That’s the question that obsessed Julia Gillard when she was education minister in 2008. And the answer she came up with has had some unforeseen consequences that teachers are still living with now.

Today, Senior Reporter for The Saturday Paper, Rick Morton, on the testing regime for Australian teachers… inspired by an American consultancy firm.

It’s Tuesday, October 4.

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RUBY:

Rick, for a while now, I think there's been this sense that there is this slow moving crisis building in the teaching industry. We've got teachers saying that they're burnt out and leaving the workforce. So could you just paint a bit of a picture for me of what it is that we're actually seeing happen in the teaching industry right now?

Rick:

Yeah, I think the pandemic broke a lot of people and magnified existing issues as it has with many other sectors around the country. Right.

Archival tape -- 9 News Nationwide Plan:

“Well, burnout, underpaid and leaving the profession in droves. The teacher shortage in Australia has hit crisis levels.”

Rick:

So, you know, in teaching in particular, it's long been the case that there has been limited career progression. There's been this consistent devaluing of the work that teachers do. They're asked to do more with less. The overwork is considerable. There's so much stress, even housing affordability, as these jobs are being pushed out of the city centres because people can't afford to raise families in these really expensive capital cities. And it's a big problem. And teachers are leaving.

Archival tape -- 7NEWS NSW Teacher Shortage:

“4000 more teachers needed within five years. Instead, a survey shows 60% plan to leave. Just last year, a staggering 10,000 quit or retired.”

Rick:

And this is all contributing to what is now firmly becoming a crisis in this country and in the industry.

RUBY:

Yeah and you can’t blame someone who feels underpaid and undervalued for wanting to leave the profession. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of actually becoming a teacher and why it is that not enough people are graduating and replacing those who've left?

Rick:

Yeah. Well, I mean, even just to become a teacher, it's quite a lot of work. It's a three year degree, like a lot of professions, but also a lot of practical placements within those degrees, which require you to work essentially full time at a school without being paid. So if you're from a low income background, for example, it becomes quite difficult to work and then also do the requirements of your degree and they are becoming increasingly onerous. And that's particularly true since 2016 when there's been this added test. And that test is called the Literacy Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education, or "LANTITE". I'm just going to call it LANTITE because it sounds cooler. So the LANTITE test is 65 literacy questions. It doesn't include speaking, for example, which is part of literacy and 65 numeracy questions. And somehow this becomes the arbiter of all that is good in teaching students.

And I was talking to Carl Smith. He's a Ph.D. researcher about assessment methods. And he was saying that ironically or funnily enough, teachers in their degree are taught better principles of test management and interpreting results and analysis of student outcomes, than they are afforded themselves by sitting the LANTITE test. But even if you zoom back from all of that, it's a very narrow way of measuring teaching quality.

And just to set the scene, there's been more reviews into teacher quality and training than, you know, students in classrooms have had packed lunches. There was one in particular that released the final report this year into initial teacher education. And the submissions to this review were really heartbreaking from students who had failed this test. And one student, in particular, said, I'm a mature-aged student that started university in 2014 and spent four years of my life studying to be a primary school teacher. I was deemed a capable teacher by my peers and passed the full requirements of the course set out to me in 2014, which I paid for. Two years into the degree, I am told I have to pass an additional standardised test in exam conditions to graduate and teach. I passed the course successfully but failed my LANTITE exams. This test has robbed me of my dream career. I am left with student debt anxiety and damaged confidence. I don't even have a diploma to show for my four years of success. Now, often these tests are conducted after teaching students have typically completed that practical experience requirement of their degree. And, you know, often those same student teachers have received praise and feedback, positive feedback from the schools where they were doing that practicum. And it's not enough, apparently, because this test can invalidate all of it and just wipe out years of good work.

RUBY:

It seems kind of cruel to let people go through an entire degree to the point where they've actually gone into schools and feel like they're doing a good job and are being told they're doing a good job only to have this last hurdle trip them up. Can you tell me a bit more about who it is that's ending up failing this test?

Rick:

It's a good question. And to be really clear, it's necessary to go into this detail because ordinarily you might think and I have to guard myself against this as well. You might think, well, of course, that teachers should be able to read and write and count and pass this test. And if you think only in those binary terms, that's exactly what this argument boils down to. But the test itself has never been fully explained. They've not released the technical documents that show whether it's actually a good standard, quote unquote, good standardised test. And the people that it is failing are people that we really need in their classrooms. So there is some evidence that there are three key cohorts, the people who are more likely to fail the test and fall out of their degree and never end up graduating or teaching because of it. And those were people with English as a second language, people with just an undergraduate degree as opposed to a postgraduate degree. And this is critical, First Nations participants. Now, this review found that multiple higher education providers reported that the test was the reason that some indigenous initial teacher education students were unable to graduate or left the programme, and that this was a major loss for the programme and for the teaching workforce. Now here's the kicker. The very same teachers rejected by this kind of cursory LANTITE test are likely also the ones most able to relate to the children who are not faring well in their schoolwork because of developmental challenges or socioeconomic factors in their own family backgrounds.

RUBY:

So, Rick, it seems like this sort of classic scenario where there's this what seems like a simple and good idea, you know, make sure that teachers can read all right. But the reality of it is far more complicated. Firstly, because as you were saying, it's not clear that the test is actually accurately selecting for that in the first place, doing that job that it's supposed to do. And the second is that what it is actually doing is baking in inequality.

Rick:

Yeah. And you would think that with the new government and, you know, mounting evidence that the test is broken or at the very least that the test is not doing what it said it would do. And it's really just a very costly exercise in inducing anxiety amongst teaching students, even those who end up passing. You might think that the new government might actually reform some of this or get rid of it, but that's not what they're doing. Rather than stepping away from it because it was put in process by Coalition ministers, the new Labor Government and Jason Clare as the Education Minister are leading into it. And they want to consider more funding proposals to actually prop up this test, even though it's not necessarily covered itself in glory.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, we've been talking about this test, a literacy and numeracy test, which seems to be preventing teaching students from being able to graduate students who arguably should be able to graduate and should be able to become teachers despite that. It seems like the idea is to continue on with the test. Can you tell me, though, where the idea to even put this standardised test at the end of the teaching degree came from, whose idea was it and why was it added into the curriculum for teaching students?

Rick:

Well, do I have a little history lesson for you. So this whole argument in teaching and in education about what our kids are learning and how they're being taught, it really took off around 2007-2008 when Julia Gillard became the Education Minister. She was Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister for Education.

Archival tape -- Julia Gillard education campaign ad:

“I'm committed to creating schools that prepare our kids for success in jobs and in life.”

Rick:

And at the same time, we've got these international testing results. And Australia is doing badly. Our students are doing badly compared to other similar developed nations around the world. And Julia Gillard wants to change them.

Archival tape -- Julia Gillard education campaign ad:

“Continuing to install computers in schools and establishing a national curriculum with a focus on the basics. Together…”

Rick:

And she's coming from an incredibly good place. And around the same time there's this report that comes out and she loves this report. So she gives this speech at the City of London Corporation in June 2008. So, you know, six, seven months after they get into government. And she says, if we are truly serious about having the best schools we need to have the best people become the best teachers. Hard to argue with that really. Is the motherhood statement. Hard to argue. Now she attributed this to an interesting thought and she said, as last year's study by management consultants, McKinsey says the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. Now, McKinsey, you may have heard it. I've certainly written about it a lot. McKinsey is this global consultancy group. They’re not education professionals FYI, their business consultants. And they'd written this paper in 2007 that popularised the idea that teaching literacy levels, as measured by vocabulary and other standardised tests, affect student achievement more than any other measurable teacher attribute. It certainly seemed that was a true statement. But they embedded in this broader report where they combine it with the view that, you know, the top achieving school systems like those in South Korea and Singapore, which Australia became obsessed with, I might add, took only the top 30% of graduates to turn into teachers. Now this became a twin project, if you want to put it that way, which is that, how do we decide who are the 30% best graduates to become teachers? We introduce a standardised literacy and numeracy test, as per the McKinsey report, to choose to become a quality assurance thing. Now this early support by Gillard not just for those two concepts, but the broad debate where the whole vibe shifted to become about actually it's the teachers and we need to fix the teachers, which is commendable, but probably in hindsight a little bit one dimensional I might say. So, you know, she provided the early support, but the broad thrust of the McKinsey report was particularly enthusiastically adopted by Coalition ministers when they got into government in 2013. And it really began with Christopher Pyne and then was followed up by Alan Tudge. And once in power they actually went further. They were the ones that introduced the LANTITE, this literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education optional in 2016 as a trial and it's been mandatory since 2017.

RUBY:

And you alluded to this earlier, that McKinsey is a pretty controversial company, aren't they, Rick? So in retrospect, it seems perhaps like it wasn't entirely wise to make this shift in educational policy in Australia based on a report that they provided.

Rick:

Yes. I would say that it's a little bit unwise. McKinsey. I mean, they take smart graduates themselves. But they're also a troubling company in many respects. And certainly, they promoted the securitisation of loans leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis. They advised the makers, this one I cannot still get over, the makers of OxyContin, a highly addictive painkiller, they told them how to turbocharge sales in the lead up to the opioid addiction epidemic in the United States. Now, McKinsey is also saying if you take a top third plus strategy in terms of taking the best teachers in a subsequent 2010 report, they literally said it's not a silver bullet. And there's lots of debate about all of this stuff, but why not give it a go? But somehow that becomes the basis for what is kind of myth-making in education policy in Australia. And the thing is, this stuff is insanely complicated and it's incredibly nuanced and it ought to be incredibly nuanced because we're dealing with children who have developing minds and the influence of the peer group, of their parent, of their home life. My mum was a teacher's aid. Like, the home life is so important and yes, the quality of the teaching, not just the teacher, but how they teach all of this stuff matters. But to reduce it to any single input is bad science and bad faith. And that's what McKinsey were essentially doing. But of course it became this platform that Australian politicians latched onto. But it's led to this kind of preoccupation, I think, in Australian education policy since 2007, 2008 that we're still trying to untangle. And of course student outcomes haven't really improved that much. There's been some improvement in mathematics in year nine, but there's been a decrease in improvement in mathematics in year four on the international testing. So read into that what you will, but I certainly don't think we can say that this whole venture has been a success.

RUBY:

Yeah, the effect of the approach seems to have been to place a lot of pressure on teachers and to really prioritise the idea of testing. I suppose there is question over whether increased testing actually works in the first place, as you've been saying. But then there's also this other kind of higher level question about, you know, what is the purpose of education? Should it be just about outcomes or should it be about support and about growth?

Rick:

I mean, look, if you want to get into the philosophical debate, I think it should be about teaching students to be critical thinkers. And it's also about connecting with kids. I have, for example, I'm fascinated by science and I love physics and biology and reading about all these things, hated it at school because I had a teacher who couldn't communicate the joy and the wonder of it. All right. Now, that teacher probably did very well. In fact, I know they did very well in their own studies because they could read and write and they could explain these incredibly complicated concepts like osmosis and, you know, adenosine triphosphate in class. But does that make me excited about it? And also I was talking to Carl Smith, this researcher, and he was saying, you know, if you've got a teacher, a student teacher with dyslexia who somehow fails the LANTITE, what happens when you've got teachers who don't have dyslexia or don't have any understanding of what it means to be neuro-divergent or to have difficulty processing certain things under high pressure environments? What happens when you see those kids in the classroom and they've got similar issues? Isn't it better to have a teaching workforce that is not one or the other, but has the diversity of people and minds that can connect to kids wherever they are, whoever they are, and in a way that actually makes them excited about knowledge and about learning and about thinking about the world. That's what teaching does. And a standardised test, whether it's LANTITE or any other standardised test, by the way, is a rudimentary thing that cannot measure any of that. It will never be able to measure any of that, and certainly not an automatic computer counted 65 question tests like LANTITE, it defies, you know, understanding that we would think that that could be anything other than an arbitrary gatekeeper.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

Rick:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Optus has hired the global accountancy and consultancy firm Deloitte to conduct a review into the massive breach of the company's data.

The review will focus on fixing security and internal processes, and Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said it was a step towards quote: "rebuilding trust with our customers".

And...

Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will now have to compete in a run-off election with populist left-wing leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Lula won more votes than Bolsanaro in the weekend's election but neither man could win the clear majority that is required.
The election is Lula's return to the political stage, after the former president was barred from running because of corruption charges brought by people with close ties to Bolsonaro. The charges have since been quashed.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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