Australia's education system is turning out illiterate children thanks to abandonment of the three Rs.
Every day worried parents crowd outpatients' departments at children's hospitals across Australia. Mums and dads clutch kids with strange rashes, football injuries, broken bones, soaring temperatures. But now there's a new group - a growing number of parents are seeking help for children failing at school.
Late last year, the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne released the results of a review showing that a quarter of children who attended its outpatient services (including the emergency department) were not suffering a medical condition. Instead they had learning difficulties and associated behaviour problems.
"What is essentially an education issue has become a health one," says Dr Ken Rowe, recently appointed to head a national inquiry into the teaching of literacy. As research director at the Australian Council of Educational Research (ACER), Rowe is concerned about deficiencies in the education system that are forcing parents to seek help elsewhere - from psychologists, literacy experts and from specialists of every kind, including paediatricians. "We are providing ambulance services at the bottom of the cliff for children who are failing instead of building fences at the top to stop them falling over," says Rowe.
Huge numbers of children are falling over that cliff. Demand for services at the Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital Learning Difficulties Centre has almost doubled every year for the past five years. The states are pouring money into remedial reading - Victoria alone spent $640m on such programs between 1995 and 2002, according to ACER.
A 1996 national survey showed that 27% of Year 3 and 30% of Year 5 students failed to reach minimum reading standards. Similarly, a recent ACER report concluded that 30% of Year 9 students lacked basic literacy skills. "Our education system is in crisis," writes Kevin Donnelly, a former teacher and leading education consultant in his book Why Our Schools Are Failing. He says the mismanagement of the education system over the past 20 to 30 years means "generations of students have been, and continue to be, placed at risk".
Rowe believes the heart of the problem is that many educators are not being adequately taught to teach: "The most important factor in producing good outcomes from schooling is quality teachers." He quotes Australian research that shows almost 60% of the variation in student academic achievement - once factors such as background are removed - can be attributed to the quality of teaching.
The hot debate over literacy highlights the problem. Last year, 26 of Australia's leading literacy researchers wrote to federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson seeking a review of the methods being used to teach children to read. The experts expressed concern that while international evidence has conclusively shown that many children need proper instruction in phonics to master reading, in Australia the "whole-language" method remains the dominant model taught as part of teacher training and used in schools.
Rowe now finds himself in the hot seat, with his committee charged with finding out how teachers are being taught to give instruction in reading and whether this complies with what research indicates is best. By August the committee is required to provide its recommendations. Nelson foresees major changes. "Whatever is happening in Australian schools," he says, "is failing too many children."
Melbourne mother Yvonne Meyer, a member of Rowe's committee, has first-hand experience of the system's failings. She spent six years trying to find out why her son Jake, 11, was struggling to read and write despite receiving good reports. "They told me he was everything from gifted, to learning disabled, to lazy," she says.
Then it was discovered he could barely write his name. He had been trained to memorise and guess words instead of reading them. Meyer found her son a tutor trained in a phonics-based method known as the Spalding approach. "In the space of six weeks, being tutored twice a week, his spelling and reading improved more than it had in the last five years," she says.
Since Meyer, a screenplay writer, started speaking out about the issue, she has been contacted by many parents with similar stories. But she has also heard from many teachers who feel let down by the system. "They are the ones who have to deal with the irate parents ... They are the meat in the sandwich."
The reason so many teachers are struggling lies in their preparation, in the university system responsible for their training. And that's where the big guns are being aimed with Nelson having just announced a parliamentary inquiry into teacher training.
A similar battle is being fought in the US where, in 1998, the government passed a Reading Excellence Act requiring teacher training institutions to follow programs based on scientific evidence if they want federal money - a response to sustained criticism that they are not producing graduates who know how to teach. In Britain, research-based education practices mean phonics is compulsory in all beginning reading programs.
In Australia, we are just seeing the opening salvos. While the literacy inquiry attracts most public attention, equally important is activity taking place in a new institute, set up last year by Nelson, charged with improving the quality of teaching. Dr Gregor Ramsey, who chairs the Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership, is well known for his view that universities need to clean up their act when it comes to preparing teachers.
"Teaching is the only profession in which university academics do not see themselves as being part of the profession they should lead. They see themselves as part of the process of gathering new knowledge rather than part of the process of how best to pass it on," he wrote in an article pleading for more emphasis on pedagogy (the science of teaching) at universities.
Finally we have an institute that can provide and accredit university training of teachers and encourage these institutions to give teacher training proper priority. Ramsey believes that often the "wrong sort of people" are being hired to work in teacher education. He makes the comparison with law and medicine where many lecturers do not have PhDs or other glittering academic credentials but are brought in because of their professional expertise.
The institute is also investigating the practicum, the practical training teachers receive before they are thrown into full-time teaching. This has long been a problem, with many receiving only four weeks on-the-job training, often with minimal supervision. The universities claim they cannot provide proper supervision, unions object to teachers supervising students without extra pay, nor is there a proper system to ensure supervisors have the appropriate skills.
Meanwhile, the federal government has allocated $109m to universities over the next five years to support the costs of practicums. Ramsey and his colleagues want to ensure the money is well spent by surveying principals, teachers and other stakeholders in order to produce guidelines for a revamp of the system. They are also looking at different levels of accreditation for graduate teachers, experienced teachers, and professional leaders to head departments or schools.
Ultimately it will be necessary to persuade universities to include in the teacher education curriculum more of the basic material needed to ensure children learn. "It's not rocket science," says Rowe. He mentions watching a group of six-year-olds being taught by a highly regarded young teacher. The teacher turned to one boy and launched into a complex list of instructions: "I want you to go over to that grey cupboard, pick up a yellow pencil and a purple book from the third shelf, close the door, go to the work place, sit down, open the book ..."
"Here was this little kid who clearly had no idea what the teacher had said," says Rowe. "So she went through it all again, speaking just as quickly ... but he was still lost. So she turned to him and said, 'Peter, you naughty boy. Why don't you listen to what I say?' "
Luckily, this was occurring under supervision, with an experienced teacher able to help the young teacher match her instructions to the child's developmental needs. She was told to first have eye contact, to connect with the boy knowing she had his attention, speak slowly, present information in small chunks, then check to make sure he was still with her. The teacher was amazed at the result. "I had no idea," she said.
The reason this teacher floundered was that her training failed to instruct her to handle differences in children's auditory processing - the ability to take in or digest what they hear. Rowe and his paediatrician wife Kathy Rowe have just completed a study of 10,000 Victorian primary school students which showed almost a quarter, 70% of whom were boys, displayed poor auditory-processing capacity. And 20% of six-year olds could not process verbal information beyond an eight-word sentence. "If teachers use long sentences, children switch off because after the first couple of words they lose the rest of the sentence," says Rowe. His research shows that when teachers receive basic training, their students show improved literacy and attentiveness.
The Victorian education department is now offering this training in a video kit. But the question remains, why aren't such essential practical skills part of the education curriculum taught by universities?
"They used to be," says Noelle Michaelson, a retired Melbourne teacher who completed her training in 1960. "We were well schooled in giving instructions to children, taught to use short sentences, how to make sure we had their attention. It was a very practical course, which included a very thorough training in phonics."
Michaelson has spent most of the past year helping students whose parents are desperate about the failure of schools to teach them to read and write. Michaelson had an interesting career, spending 27 years at a leading private school where she witnessed the impact of the shift in educational philosophy which accompanied the language fad that swept through in the 1970s. Suddenly teachers were no longer allowed to use phonics to teach children to read, or explicitly teach grammar or spelling. "We were forbidden to have spelling lists and told we shouldn't correct children's work because it would ruin their self-esteem. And we weren't supposed to write on chalkboards because the children now sat in small groups doing self-directed learning."
This brave new world of education was less interested in academic results than facilitating "learning", says Dr Kerry Hempenstall, senior lecturer in psychology at RMIT University, Melbourne. "The whole language fad was not only about literacy but asserted that all learning is spontaneous and natural when children are motivated. The emphasis was on creativity, imagination and general problem solving, ignoring the essential underpinnings: basic skills and knowledge."
The experiment proved a disaster at Michaelson's school: results declined, children were removed. But eventually the leadership changed, and a new phonics-based curriculum turned things around.
Sadly many teachers lack the training to teach such a curriculum. Queensland University of Technology education lecturer Ruth Fielding-Barnsley recently surveyed 370 primary school teachers and found more than half of teachers and final-year trained teachers did not know what a syllable was and 75% could not count the sounds in words.
"My training was pathetic. We didn't do phonics at all. Many of our courses were so theoretical, things you never use in the classroom," says a teacher who graduated two years ago from Sydney University. A graduate from NSW's Charles Sturt University found herself floundering when confronted by her first group of kindergarten children. She turned to the other teachers: "How am I supposed to help this child to read? I really didn't know where to start."
"While some universities now claim to include phonics in their education courses, it appears many are only giving it lip service and most student teachers emerge without the understanding needed to teach the subject properly," says Dr Norman Swan, presenter of the ABC's Health Report. Swan developed a deep interest in childhood literacy when his son struggled with early reading and his wife began teaching the boy phonics at home.
To be effective, phonics must be taught systematically and explicitly and that requires teachers to have a thorough grounding. Many concerned parents, he says, end up exposing their children to "so-called" experts who may do more harm than good. Lately, Swan has joined with literacy experts to build a computer program, Phonica, that provides families with a reading system for home use. Results are promising (www.readingsystems.com).
But it's not just that teachers aren't equipped to teach children to read. Many are in the grip of "new learning" which is still promoted as the appropriate educational philosophy in many universities. Three years ago, the Australian Council of Deans of Education published a report, New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education, which dismissed the traditional focus on the "three Rs". The report claimed that "learning by rote and knowing the correct answers" produces compliant learners "who passively learnt off by heart". Instead, it argued for education to be reshaped to embrace "autonomous and self-directed learning".
Taken to an extreme, this means teachers aren't supposed to correct students but simply "facilitate" learning. The results are strange indeed. Meyer tells the story of teaching a creative writing course in her son's school. She'd given the students an essay topic and one student responded by cutting a photograph out of a magazine, gluing it on a page, writing his name at the top and handing it in. Meyer's reaction was to say: "No, this is story-writing. Go away and write a story."
The teacher was appalled. "You must never correct them," she told Meyer. "If he chooses to express himself by cutting out a photo, that's fine."
"You do get these excesses," says Professor Terry Lovat, president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. A member of Rowe's committee, he's all for federal government intervention to identify what is going on in universities and flush out inappropriate practices. But he's betting on some resistance. "There are people in teacher education who are so committed to these views, they won't tolerate any other." l
