In today’s post Ken Boston argues that that the Australian Education Minister’s Curriculum Review is really an attempt to shore-up an education system that entrenches inequality.

by Ken Boston, former director-general of the NSW Department of Education and was a member of the Gonski review panel. He was also the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in Britain.  

If there had been no Gonski report, there would be no review of the national curriculum. The purpose of the review is to allow Education Minister Christopher Pyne (pictured) to divert attention away from the inequality of opportunity which is the real cause of decline in educational achievement in Australia, and which it suits his purpose to maintain.

The game plan is to convince the Australian community that our poor educational performance is due to a low-grade politically-correct national curriculum, lacking both challenge and aspiration, having been foisted upon an unsuspecting nation by a supposed clique from the ”cultural left”. Together with poor-quality teaching (in government schools only), this is the reason our national educational performance is below countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Finland. Fix the curriculum and the teachers, and we’ll be up there at the top of the international league table.

This is a preposterous misrepresentation, but Pyne is banking on it having sufficient traction to diminish the strength of the argument to address inequality of opportunity by targeting funds strategically at areas of need. This he does not want to do.

Why is Pyne so against Gonski?

It is because he understands that Gonski is more than a new approach to allocating recurrent funds to schools. It is a fundamental re-imagining of Australian education. It asks: ”What kind of country do we want Australia to be?” And he does not like the answer to that question.

The correlation between poor student performance and aggregated social disadvantage is much stronger in Australia than in any other comparable western nation; indeed, stronger than the average for all 34 OECD countries. By consigning our disadvantaged children to the bin of under-achievement, we are failing to maximise our potential stock of human capital. It is primarily this, rather than any differences in curriculum and pedagogy, which puts us behind our international competitors. So long as aggregated social disadvantage continues to have such a significant impact on educational performance, our national decline will continue.

The essential thrust of Gonski is to target strategically our investment in schooling, from both commonwealth and state sources, in order to reduce the impact of aggregated social disadvantage on educational outcomes. As has been shown in NSW with the application of the Resource Allocation Model in government schools, the strategic targeting of resources on a school-by-school basis according to need is readily achievable, and cannot reasonably be opposed on the grounds that it is too complex to implement.

Pyne is shrewd enough to understand that strategic targeting of resources according to need will do much more than reduce the impact of disadvantage on educational outcomes. He knows that it will also reduce the impact of advantage and privilege. If school performance is neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by parental income, ethnic background, religion, school size and location, or whether a student attends an independent, Catholic or public school, success at school will be determined essentially by the student’s ability, application and hard work.

In other words, Gonski will create a genuine meritocracy.

At present, it is mainly the hard-working and talented children of the privileged who have access to the very highest levels of educational achievement. If Gonski is implemented, such access will be available increasingly to the similarly hard-working and talented children of the socially disadvantaged. This is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes: differences in outcomes will inevitably exist between children, but they will no longer be the result of factors such as poverty, religion or sector of schooling.

The Gonski vision of a fair go for all young Australians means that, in due course and over time, a hard-working talented young girl will come to have the same real prospect of winning a place in the university and course of her choice regardless of family circumstances and background, or whether she attends Tara Anglican College, Rooty Hill High School, Brigidine College Randwick, Auburn Girls High School, Queenwood, Abbotsleigh, Mary MacKillop College or Cabramatta High School. And our national performance will improve accordingly, regardless of any tinkering with the curriculum.

Is Pyne up for that? A meritocracy? Devalue private schooling? Of course not. Hence his need for a diversion. What better than a provocative review of the national curriculum?

[First Published in The Age 17 January 2014]