posted by Glynne at
5:20 AM
Sunday, October 13, 2002
“100 CHILDREN TURN 10”
- A CRITIQUE
Glynne Sutcliffe
Adelaide, October 2002
We have just been blessed with a two volume report on the acquisition of literacy in Australia – entitled “100 children turn 10”, it has a number of authors, but one of the key authorial voices is that of Associate Professor Barbara Comber, of the University of South Australia.
Barbara Comber discussed the Report with Jill Kitson on Radio National’s Lingua Franca program in late September this year.
This interview is useful as a primary source of information on how Barbara Comber herself sees the key issues of the Report. I have also looked through the Report in order to get a feel for the scope of the project.
My interest in it was initially provoked by a brief notice on the Schools page in The Australian of Sept 5th 2002 that indicated that one of the Report’s findings was that ‘Pre-school bright sparks can become primary school stragglers.’
Since I know that the great majority of the hundreds of students who have attended Early Reading Play School classes have almost all gone on to do exceedingly well in school, and since I have spent a great deal of my professional life in encouraging and working for children to become early learners and ‘bright sparks’, it is not surprising that this statement struck me as extremely problematic. THE REFUSAL OF THE EARLY CHILDHOOD ESTABLISHMENT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE INTELLECTUAL NEEDS OF YOUNG CHILDREN IS ONE OF THE MOST STULTIFYING FACTORS OPERATING IN THE CURRENT AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT.
I confess also to finding this highly negative attitude expressed in Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper very strange, given Murdoch’s call, a year ago, for the improvement of educational outcomes in Australia. Absolutely the quickest way to improve educational outcomes in all areas in Australia is to get the right early learning programs in place.
In checking with the Report, however, one discovers that the statement in The Australian, was based on the observation that some bright girls have proven vulnerable to being ignored on the grounds that they were bright and were coping and did not need teaching because they were learning so well. Ignored, they fell behind. No doubt. No contest. And it’s probably true of a few boys also.
In checking this point, one finds out that the original one hundred students selected for the study actually dropped to seventy odd over the course of the five years of the study, and that in any case the original number of twenty students at each of the five selected sites was far too small for this study to be anything other a meditation on possibilities – even with back-up numbers of students checked for selected variables rather than intensive observation, the sample is too small to make any kind of statement, statistical or otherwise, about the advantages of an early start in learning or , indeed, about anything else.
It is not at all clear to me what use this Report is. Most notably it contains no information at all about how to go about improving educational outcomes in this country, about how to improve literacy skills in any way.
This is probably due to the position of passive observer taken up by the researchers – they want to tell us how things are – and incidentally, what a good job the public school system is doing, in difficult circumstances.
There is a clearly detectable PR element present.
In other words it is not a text in search of answers to real educational problems, because (it is implied) there aren’t any real problems. Everybody is doing the best they can, in a world which, even if it is not the best of all possible worlds, nevertheless is outside the reach of education professionals to improve.
Excuses are made. If some of the children haven’t learnt to read properly, it is said to be because they weren’t attending school – either being sick, or with sick parents, or unemployed parents, or low SES (Socio-Economic Status) parents, or playing truant, etc.
This ignores the huge problems encountered by children who attend every day at schools that fail to teach them adequately.
It also totally denies the existence of what I would argue is the primary fault of public education in Australia, namely the refusal to address the needs both of average, and especially of talented, students to be challenged and stretched.
In noting the strong self-congratulatory element in the Report, we should ask whether we should really accept the status quo, and give a pat on the back to everyone involved in teaching our children how to read, write and count.
We should also ask whether those responsible for setting up or sustaining a particular system are likely to be the best people to investigate how it is working.
Five years in the writing means the project was conceived as a response to the nineties attack on the failure of our schools to deliver acceptable educational outcomes – specifically, with regard to the teaching of reading. The opening sally was fired in 1993, but public arousal was greatest after the Channel Nine expose of ‘whole language’ in its Sunday morning program in October 1996. But in the Report in front of us there is no attempt to actually understand the problems that were flagged at the time. The study never really engages with the key issues. There is an anthropological dimension – it is a write-up of observations made over the five years since 1997. To re-iterate, then – the Report is best understood as an exercise in damage control, with an intention (perhaps unconcious) to minimize any need to make changes to the status quo. We are asked to recognise that all has been, and continues to be, basically OK. What can be done is being done. What can’t be done, however desirable, can’t be done.
This may be an appropriate place to alert you to the inadequacy of Jill Kitson’s final thoughts at the end of her interview with Barbara Comber. She suggested, as you see in the transcript published on this site, that the government ought to provide more money, and that the profile and status of primary school teachers should be raised. I assume she means some kind of cranking up process akin to cranking up an ancient motor-car. But whatever ideas we may have about what ought to be done, we should be aware that neither increasing the money flow, nor “raising the status of primary school teachers” will achieve anything, unless there are simultaneous moves to change the parameters within which the tasks of teaching are conceptualized.
What else can be said?
First, the Report does, as we have already noted, underwrite the judgment (albeit as something that cannot be solved by the schools), that perhaps the gravest fault of public education in Australia is that there is a considerable and growing gap in educational outcomes between children who present with age-appropriate basic skills for their Reception year, and children who don’t. Parents should note this agreement across the ideological divide.
In her interview with Jill Kitson Barbara Comber tells us about a little girl (‘Tessa'), bi-lingual in English and Greek, who is able, at six, to run a data base of her friendship group. She is described as active in her church-based community, and as having parents who delight in her, who are (with her grandmother) there for her in everyday life, and who encourage her to develop her skills and knowledge to the maximum possible. She is said to be “assembling a whole range of different literacies.”
We also hear about a little boy (‘Mark’) who studies the Korean school curriculum with his mother after the normal school day is over, and who is a whiz-kid at math games on the computer.
We are then told, presumably by way of contrast, of the children, ethnicity not indicated, who go home after school and spend their spare time connecting the dots in the little dot books.
THERE IS NOT A WHISPER OF AN INDICATION IN THIS DEAD-PAN NARRATIVE THAT EDUCATIONAL PROFESSIONALS SHOULD BE ON THE LOOK-OUT FOR WAYS TO ENSURE THAT ALL CHILDREN GET THE BENEFIT OF AN EARLY START WITH PARENT-NURTURED INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. There is no suggestion that we should find out why European and Asian families have children who do (very) well in school.
There is not a hint of recognition that mainstream Australian ways of parenting got off to a bad start (read all about it in Miriam Dixson’s chapter on modes of birthing in early Sydney’s Paramatta gaol, in her book THE REAL MATILDA), or that they continue to exhibit massive deficiencies.
[Political correctness in Australia is a pseudo-polite expression of ‘racism’, because it is predicated on the assumption of the natural superiority of the Anglo-Celtic, and the need to make a moral effort to ‘include’ our post-WW2 immigrant population in the mainstream. What Australian professionals should be doing is asking for help to see how we can improve mainstream parenting and educational practices to achieve the same intellectual (and social and emotional) richness that so-called ‘ethnic’ communities regard as normal.]
What we get instead is the assurance that being good at math games, and connecting the dots in the little dot books, are just variations, differences, of activity. Neither should be labeled as good or bad, or compared one with the other. Each is just an example of ‘a different kind of literacy’. This approach leads to the inflated language of the assertion that connecting the dots can be referred to as one of number of ‘complex and different practices’.
And it is seen as just ‘luck’ that one set of activities allows the child to ‘take advantage’ of the school curriculum, and connecting dots doesn’t. From this insanely non-judgmental and entirely non-discriminatory position it follows with a kind of implacable logic that the proper course of action for schools and teachers is to re-ground (that is, dumb down) the school curriculum, so that expertise in connecting dots can earn a child some ‘positive re-inforcement’ (like an A grade for instance?) [Gutting the curriculum is in fact an ongoing process in Australian educational practice. It desperately needs to be terminated and reversed.]
So let us go back to the original observation that set me off on this train of thought, namely that the Report accepts what we can discover elsewhere, that educational outcomes are widening between children (e.g. with European or Asian backgrounds) who present with some intellectual sophistication in Reception, and those (e.g. those with Anglo-Celtic or low SES families) who don’t.
This last group of children have had a lot of interactions with adults that began and ended with injunctions such as to ‘go and play’, or to ‘get out of my way’, or ‘I’m busy – ask your father/mother’, they will have had a statistically greater number of hours in child care, and they will have had less compensatory ‘quality time’ with either Mum or Dad or anyone else – unless they were lucky enough to have an available grandmother.
MY FIRST RECOMMENDATION, THEN, IS THAT EDUCATIONAL PROFESSIONALS SHOULD GET INVOLVED IN SUPPORTING ANY AND ALL CAMPAIGNS FOR IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF PRE-SCHOOL PARENTING FOR THESE CHILDREN. (And here I do mean parenting. There is a foolish notion around that the situation of lost children can be improved by by-passing parents and improving child-care facilities.)
My second suggestion is based on the recognition that however successful or otherwise any such campaigns proved to be, there will always be some children who present at Reception with some equivalent to connecting the dots (or worse) as their essential preparation for life.
What should Reception teachers do? Well it might help if they realized that the window of opportunity for acquisition of language based skills closes around six years of age (give or take six months or so). In other words, they have a year to eighteen months to get those children up to speed. If they don’t achieve this outcome, those children will be condemned to twelve (or thirteen?) years of schooling in which they become the foil for children who are becoming sharper-witted all the time.
What actually happens? Well, I haven’t personally visited Reception classrooms. But I do read press articles describing the Reception year as one in which not only is ‘nothing’ accomplished, but in which ‘nothing’ is attempted. Why doesn’t this Report (on the acquisition of literacy in Australia) address this problem.
This brings us to the long shadow of John Dewey, the father of ‘progressive’, ‘child-centred’ schooling. These children, especially, need active teaching. They will never cope with the laissez-faire model class-room, where children ‘are treated like plants’, and ‘provided with resources’ that will ‘allow them to bloom’ like flowers in the field, while the teacher smiles benignly, answers questions when asked, and sees her role as supportive (or, to use the jargon, ‘facilitative’) rather than as offering intellectual challenge and substance.
THE ONLY CHILDREN WHO CAN COPE WITH THIS KIND OF CLASS-ROOM ARE THOSE WHO ARE SELF-MOTIVATED, WELL-ORGANISED, AND FAMILY-SUPPORTED – AND WHO HAVE HAD A GOOD START WITH PARENTS WHOSE INCLINATIONS HAVE LED THEM NATURALLY TO THE ENCOURAGEMENTS AND ACTIVITIES AND CONVERSATIONAL INPUTS THAT MAXIMISED THE CHILD’S RESPONSES TO THOSE EARLY DEVELOPMENTAL ‘WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY’ FOR LEARNING. (THESE CHILDREN WILL PROBABLY GET STRAIGHT A’S – BUT NEVERTHELESS WILL STILL NOT HAVE BEEN REALLY CHALLENGED OR STRETCHED TO THEIR MAXIMUM PERSONAL BEST. IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND THE ONE-EYED MAN IS KING!)
We end up with the irony that a system which purports to care most deeply about the under-achieving child has set itself up in such a way that the initially under-achieving child is automatically channeled into an intellectual under-class.
We should remember at this point that the initial purpose of a public education system was to achieve equality of opportunity not by dumbing bright kids down, but by offering intellectual excellence as an achievable goal for all.
The role of public education as a means of upward mobility used to be deemed honourable and valuable.
What we have in this Report is well-placed education faculty academics, fully paid up members of the mainstream early childhood establishment, conceding that the public schools are most useful to those family-supported children who begin school already accustomed to ways of thinking and behaving that result in high achievement. This concession is not made with a full heart. Under the banner of the need for social justice, we hear the voice of envy. The children who do well are those who are ‘privileged’ to ‘have more of those social goods that our society makes available’, and this enables them to better ‘take advantage’ of what the school has to offer. In other words, these bright, happy little children are already being classified as in some way predatory. (Does the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ begin here?)
There is no answer to this problem - of how to cope with children who present at Reception with a developmental deficit – that can be found without discussing and modifying the role of the teacher.
MY SECOND SUGGESTION, THEN, IS THAT WE SHOULD INSIST THAT TEACHERS ACTUALLY TEACH, AND DO NOT TAKE THE EASY OPTION OF THE FACILITATIVE PHILOSOPHY.
We do need to concede on this one that there used to be a mode of teaching that was punitive, and had many negative consequences. On the other hand, the pendulum has swung way too far. Teachers have now effectively abdicated the role of teacher, even though it is still assumed by the general public that they are actually teaching. I recommend as a quick fix that “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and “Good morning, Miss Dove” be placed on the reading lists of Education faculty curricula. Discussion of these books in the context provided by a child-centred, facilitative, non-directive faculty may inspire questions. These questions could then be followed up with readings comparing what is now, amongst other things, called Direct Instruction with currently favored pedagogic styles. Out of the conversation, or debate, solutions may be found.
As an added bonus from adopting this approach, we will find that ALL children benefit from it, and those ‘privileged’ children who know how to ‘take advantage’ will more likely reach their personal best in intellectual achievement, including doing even better in Year 12.
MY THIRD SUGGESTION IS THAT WE SHOULD CONSIDER CHANGING THE RECRUITMENT DEMOGRAPHIC FOR TEACHERS OF YOUNG CHILDREN
Teachers are important – we should be looking for older teachers who have broad life experience, intellectual confidence and a fund of knowledge not exhausted by the next chapter of the manual they are using as a guide to what to teach next. Some clues about the natural demographic base for this kind of teacher might get some useful clues from Gail Sheehy’s brilliant profiling of the human life trajectory in her book, Passages. Many of the specifically intellectual deficits found in early childhood institutions may arise from recruiting for them a high proportion of staff who value ‘social skills’ and ‘relationships’ over intellectual understandings, and who are likely themselves to have qualified on the basis of acceptable (minimal) credentials rather than of their own love of learning. Ronald Ryde, of the Ryde College in London, has gone on record as saying that only retired professors should be allowed to teach our youngest children. This is an excellent approach. We just need to make sure that there are enough retired professors, or their equivalents, who are around and available.
So what else can I say?
The language currently used to discuss schooling issues is not very helpful. The term ‘literacy’ itself is a case in point. Achieving literacy (i.e. the ability to understand and use letters) is not a recognized goal – indeed has been redefined so that teachers could be forgiven for not knowing what it was they were supposed to be doing. Barbara Comber has said categorically that there is no such thing as literacy. “Literacy is a dynamic (process) covering a range of practices which vary throughout life”. Elsewhere she refers to a variety of literacies! This looks like the post-modern inability to link sub-categories to the over-arching embracing category. It is the mental aberration which leads to referring to multiplicities of feminisms or masculinities. Confronted with the denial of any over-arching, central substantive meaning to the word ‘literacy’, what on earth should teachers do to fulfill the obligations of their appointments. How much more effective would their teaching be, if they were thinking in terms of making sure that children developed the capacity to hear the sounds of their language, and recognize the symbols and spelling conventions used to designate those sounds on paper, either in hand-writing or in printed text, along with the ability to recapture the sounds of the language from the written/printed text. Instead they are lost in a maze of confusion over the relative desirability of family literacy, new (i.e. computer) literacy, community literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, etc.
MY FOURTH SUGGESTION, THEN IS THAT THE TERM ‘LITERACY’ BE SINGULARISED AND RETURNED TO ITS ORIGINAL MEANING – AS DESIGNATING FAMILIARITY AND ABILITY TO USE THE ALPHABET FOR PURPOSES OF COMMUNICATING VIA READING AND WRITING.
Some final random thoughts:
There is some fudging of statistics and figures to be wondered about. We are told that 15-20% of children in the study were ‘not doing well’. This was provided with a loose definition – these children could not read an age-appropriate text without assistance, and could not generate a simple text that would be comprehensible/acceptable without modification to the teacher. On the other hand we are told that even the lowest achieving 15% had ‘made significant progress’ (?) by ten years of age. And to confuse things a bit more, we are told that 30% of the children could be classified as low achievers.
Barbara Comber is clearly aware of the Stanovich paper on ‘the Matthew effect” because she refers to ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ – his key to understanding the widening gap between achievers and non-achievers. However, she completely ignores the moral of the tale, namely that all children should be enabled to present at Reception richly prepared.
The stress on the need for social justice is essentially hand-wringing. What I have said above about this should be re-inforced – children whose families move around, don’t know where their next meal is coming from, where no adult family member has employment income, etc. need real help. Yet there is absolutely no effort being made to work out how to teach these children effectively and in a way that will prevent their social conditions from consigning them to a lifetime in the underclass.
The idea that there should be a focus on making disadvantaged children and their families ‘feel welcome’ in the school, that this would constitute a significant variable in improving educational outcomes for these children, this is diversionary. It is not that either the children or their families should not feel welcome - it is just that this is not the main game in town. If the school is delivering the goods, parents and children will be there. The focus needs to be substance, and supportive etiquettes can follow.
We have lip service paid to the value of independent, well-organised and well-prepared individual teachers as vital (not only to the good teaching of the majority, but also) to rescuing children who are failing out. The key to understanding that it is only lip-service being paid here is the correlated set of statements about the need for ‘consistency with colleagues’ who have ‘an agreed (uniform) approach’ with these creative top teachers (about how to teach those children – maybe, e.g. using whole language methods?) and the need for community support for their innovations. If the dominant paradigm is inadequate, then placing primacy on consistency, an agreed approach, etc. can trap potentially good teachers into a corner from which there is no escape. You can admit that good and dedicated individual teachers are necessary, wonderful, and those without whom nothing ever happens, and then demand that they function as part of a team, and you totally eliminate the source of their strength, which is independent judgment. Barbara Comber deprecates ‘the one lone heroic teacher who succeeds against the odds’, presumably on the grounds that this is not a realistic expectation. My bet is, given the current set-up, that it is only a maverick, only a ‘lone, heroic teacher’, prepared to make a stand, who can provide a genuinely good education for the children he or she encounters.
Compulsory schooling takes up a huge block out of the lifetime of a human being – and it is the formative block, which creates the adult as a member of society. Parents have an obligation to make sure that the many, many hours that their children spend in school are hours well spent, and that the lives of their children are not filled up with busy make-work that is intellectually useless.
SUMMARY
THINGS TO NOTICE :
Contrary to what you might think from the ‘review’ in The Australian, the Report essentially accepts that children who start well in school are better able to take advantage of what schools have to offer.
The authors note an increasing gap between those who do well and those who badly at school.
(This gap is the one that can be detected at point of entry to the school. Its increase is partly due to the children who start badly becoming disheartened and ‘giving up’. And partly because children who start well have the intellectual and emotional resources to move ahead in leaps and bounds.)
The research project was conceived in response to public unrest in the nineties about poor educational outcomes from tax-payer funded schools.
It doesn’t address the main problems flagged in the nineties.
It is a longitudinal study, with an anthropological emphasis on observing rather than finding or proposing solutions.
It has a strong PR flavour – we are asked to applaud the schools for doing well in difficult circumstances. If some children do poorly it is not the schools fault. The schools cannot fix problems arising from endemic problems in society at large.
In taking this attitude, the schools have abandoned the older focus on making sure children from disadvantaged circumstances had a way out of poverty available to them through intellectual achievement. Schools no longer provide upward mobility for bright kids, whatever their background. Instead they ‘lock the child into the world that the child brings with them’. So all caring parents must these days must make sure that their children bring basic literacy and numeracy skills with them to Reception.
The actual entrenching of the ‘differences’ observed in entry-point children makes a nonsense of the hand-wringing concern for social justice that pervades the politically correct literature coming out of the teaching profession and teacher-educator originated research such as this.
Trying to make education ‘relevant’ to the out-of-school life of the child can only be useful if it serves to allow a child with a deficit background to escape and transcend that background. All too often a striving for ‘relevance’, and tailoring the curriculum content to what is already familiar, means leaving the child stuck in the same place, provides no vision splendid, and fosters resentment in the child, who sees no way out anywhere.
ISSUES TO DISCUSS :
Could we solve a number of educational problems in the schools if we insisted on policy changes that stripped remedial education of its funding, and put money instead into teaching to the top. Rather than creating further educational disadvantage for those on the bottom, this might re-establish social justice by giving all children access to intellectual excellence. Children who couldn’t cope with what was on offer could be assisted to ‘get through the gate’ by being offered extra help – perhaps primarily at home but also at school, so that the actual performance and achievement levels of all would be raised. If this happened we would be spared having some children defined as cases for remediation, and subjected to a different regime of (inferior) instruction. If teachers held in-service evenings for parents which laid out curriculum goals I am sure they would get the co-operation that is not forth-coming when the goals are ill-defined, and the pleas for ‘help’ are too amorphous.
Teachers need to be fully-fledged professionals, independent in their capacity to make judgments about how they teach and run their classrooms. Whatever pre-conditions are necessary to make this possible – e.g. assessing teachers on the basis of achieved outcomes, rather than on the basis of methodologies, or demanding better entry level intellectual attainments – should be identified and put in place.
The Reception year in particular needs to be upgraded, needs to tackle substantive learning.
Schools and teachers should be required to focus on what they are supposed to do, namely teach children things of intellectual substance (both skills and content), and refrain from social engineering, which they are not very good at anyway, and where the hidden agenda of many social engineering strategies is to save the teaching profession from the need to deal with intellectually challenging curriculum content. A warm glow should not be allowed to substitute for brain food. Given brain food has primacy, a warm glow can be recommended as a nice accompaniment.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
- A CRITIQUE
Glynne Sutcliffe
Adelaide, October 2002
We have just been blessed with a two volume report on the acquisition of literacy in Australia – entitled “100 children turn 10”, it has a number of authors, but one of the key authorial voices is that of Associate Professor Barbara Comber, of the University of South Australia.
Barbara Comber discussed the Report with Jill Kitson on Radio National’s Lingua Franca program in late September this year.
This interview is useful as a primary source of information on how Barbara Comber herself sees the key issues of the Report. I have also looked through the Report in order to get a feel for the scope of the project.
My interest in it was initially provoked by a brief notice on the Schools page in The Australian of Sept 5th 2002 that indicated that one of the Report’s findings was that ‘Pre-school bright sparks can become primary school stragglers.’
Since I know that the great majority of the hundreds of students who have attended Early Reading Play School classes have almost all gone on to do exceedingly well in school, and since I have spent a great deal of my professional life in encouraging and working for children to become early learners and ‘bright sparks’, it is not surprising that this statement struck me as extremely problematic. THE REFUSAL OF THE EARLY CHILDHOOD ESTABLISHMENT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE INTELLECTUAL NEEDS OF YOUNG CHILDREN IS ONE OF THE MOST STULTIFYING FACTORS OPERATING IN THE CURRENT AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT.
I confess also to finding this highly negative attitude expressed in Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper very strange, given Murdoch’s call, a year ago, for the improvement of educational outcomes in Australia. Absolutely the quickest way to improve educational outcomes in all areas in Australia is to get the right early learning programs in place.
In checking with the Report, however, one discovers that the statement in The Australian, was based on the observation that some bright girls have proven vulnerable to being ignored on the grounds that they were bright and were coping and did not need teaching because they were learning so well. Ignored, they fell behind. No doubt. No contest. And it’s probably true of a few boys also.
In checking this point, one finds out that the original one hundred students selected for the study actually dropped to seventy odd over the course of the five years of the study, and that in any case the original number of twenty students at each of the five selected sites was far too small for this study to be anything other a meditation on possibilities – even with back-up numbers of students checked for selected variables rather than intensive observation, the sample is too small to make any kind of statement, statistical or otherwise, about the advantages of an early start in learning or , indeed, about anything else.
It is not at all clear to me what use this Report is. Most notably it contains no information at all about how to go about improving educational outcomes in this country, about how to improve literacy skills in any way.
This is probably due to the position of passive observer taken up by the researchers – they want to tell us how things are – and incidentally, what a good job the public school system is doing, in difficult circumstances.
There is a clearly detectable PR element present.
In other words it is not a text in search of answers to real educational problems, because (it is implied) there aren’t any real problems. Everybody is doing the best they can, in a world which, even if it is not the best of all possible worlds, nevertheless is outside the reach of education professionals to improve.
Excuses are made. If some of the children haven’t learnt to read properly, it is said to be because they weren’t attending school – either being sick, or with sick parents, or unemployed parents, or low SES (Socio-Economic Status) parents, or playing truant, etc.
This ignores the huge problems encountered by children who attend every day at schools that fail to teach them adequately.
It also totally denies the existence of what I would argue is the primary fault of public education in Australia, namely the refusal to address the needs both of average, and especially of talented, students to be challenged and stretched.
In noting the strong self-congratulatory element in the Report, we should ask whether we should really accept the status quo, and give a pat on the back to everyone involved in teaching our children how to read, write and count.
We should also ask whether those responsible for setting up or sustaining a particular system are likely to be the best people to investigate how it is working.
Five years in the writing means the project was conceived as a response to the nineties attack on the failure of our schools to deliver acceptable educational outcomes – specifically, with regard to the teaching of reading. The opening sally was fired in 1993, but public arousal was greatest after the Channel Nine expose of ‘whole language’ in its Sunday morning program in October 1996. But in the Report in front of us there is no attempt to actually understand the problems that were flagged at the time. The study never really engages with the key issues. There is an anthropological dimension – it is a write-up of observations made over the five years since 1997. To re-iterate, then – the Report is best understood as an exercise in damage control, with an intention (perhaps unconcious) to minimize any need to make changes to the status quo. We are asked to recognise that all has been, and continues to be, basically OK. What can be done is being done. What can’t be done, however desirable, can’t be done.
This may be an appropriate place to alert you to the inadequacy of Jill Kitson’s final thoughts at the end of her interview with Barbara Comber. She suggested, as you see in the transcript published on this site, that the government ought to provide more money, and that the profile and status of primary school teachers should be raised. I assume she means some kind of cranking up process akin to cranking up an ancient motor-car. But whatever ideas we may have about what ought to be done, we should be aware that neither increasing the money flow, nor “raising the status of primary school teachers” will achieve anything, unless there are simultaneous moves to change the parameters within which the tasks of teaching are conceptualized.
What else can be said?
First, the Report does, as we have already noted, underwrite the judgment (albeit as something that cannot be solved by the schools), that perhaps the gravest fault of public education in Australia is that there is a considerable and growing gap in educational outcomes between children who present with age-appropriate basic skills for their Reception year, and children who don’t. Parents should note this agreement across the ideological divide.
In her interview with Jill Kitson Barbara Comber tells us about a little girl (‘Tessa'), bi-lingual in English and Greek, who is able, at six, to run a data base of her friendship group. She is described as active in her church-based community, and as having parents who delight in her, who are (with her grandmother) there for her in everyday life, and who encourage her to develop her skills and knowledge to the maximum possible. She is said to be “assembling a whole range of different literacies.”
We also hear about a little boy (‘Mark’) who studies the Korean school curriculum with his mother after the normal school day is over, and who is a whiz-kid at math games on the computer.
We are then told, presumably by way of contrast, of the children, ethnicity not indicated, who go home after school and spend their spare time connecting the dots in the little dot books.
THERE IS NOT A WHISPER OF AN INDICATION IN THIS DEAD-PAN NARRATIVE THAT EDUCATIONAL PROFESSIONALS SHOULD BE ON THE LOOK-OUT FOR WAYS TO ENSURE THAT ALL CHILDREN GET THE BENEFIT OF AN EARLY START WITH PARENT-NURTURED INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT. There is no suggestion that we should find out why European and Asian families have children who do (very) well in school.
There is not a hint of recognition that mainstream Australian ways of parenting got off to a bad start (read all about it in Miriam Dixson’s chapter on modes of birthing in early Sydney’s Paramatta gaol, in her book THE REAL MATILDA), or that they continue to exhibit massive deficiencies.
[Political correctness in Australia is a pseudo-polite expression of ‘racism’, because it is predicated on the assumption of the natural superiority of the Anglo-Celtic, and the need to make a moral effort to ‘include’ our post-WW2 immigrant population in the mainstream. What Australian professionals should be doing is asking for help to see how we can improve mainstream parenting and educational practices to achieve the same intellectual (and social and emotional) richness that so-called ‘ethnic’ communities regard as normal.]
What we get instead is the assurance that being good at math games, and connecting the dots in the little dot books, are just variations, differences, of activity. Neither should be labeled as good or bad, or compared one with the other. Each is just an example of ‘a different kind of literacy’. This approach leads to the inflated language of the assertion that connecting the dots can be referred to as one of number of ‘complex and different practices’.
And it is seen as just ‘luck’ that one set of activities allows the child to ‘take advantage’ of the school curriculum, and connecting dots doesn’t. From this insanely non-judgmental and entirely non-discriminatory position it follows with a kind of implacable logic that the proper course of action for schools and teachers is to re-ground (that is, dumb down) the school curriculum, so that expertise in connecting dots can earn a child some ‘positive re-inforcement’ (like an A grade for instance?) [Gutting the curriculum is in fact an ongoing process in Australian educational practice. It desperately needs to be terminated and reversed.]
So let us go back to the original observation that set me off on this train of thought, namely that the Report accepts what we can discover elsewhere, that educational outcomes are widening between children (e.g. with European or Asian backgrounds) who present with some intellectual sophistication in Reception, and those (e.g. those with Anglo-Celtic or low SES families) who don’t.
This last group of children have had a lot of interactions with adults that began and ended with injunctions such as to ‘go and play’, or to ‘get out of my way’, or ‘I’m busy – ask your father/mother’, they will have had a statistically greater number of hours in child care, and they will have had less compensatory ‘quality time’ with either Mum or Dad or anyone else – unless they were lucky enough to have an available grandmother.
MY FIRST RECOMMENDATION, THEN, IS THAT EDUCATIONAL PROFESSIONALS SHOULD GET INVOLVED IN SUPPORTING ANY AND ALL CAMPAIGNS FOR IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF PRE-SCHOOL PARENTING FOR THESE CHILDREN. (And here I do mean parenting. There is a foolish notion around that the situation of lost children can be improved by by-passing parents and improving child-care facilities.)
My second suggestion is based on the recognition that however successful or otherwise any such campaigns proved to be, there will always be some children who present at Reception with some equivalent to connecting the dots (or worse) as their essential preparation for life.
What should Reception teachers do? Well it might help if they realized that the window of opportunity for acquisition of language based skills closes around six years of age (give or take six months or so). In other words, they have a year to eighteen months to get those children up to speed. If they don’t achieve this outcome, those children will be condemned to twelve (or thirteen?) years of schooling in which they become the foil for children who are becoming sharper-witted all the time.
What actually happens? Well, I haven’t personally visited Reception classrooms. But I do read press articles describing the Reception year as one in which not only is ‘nothing’ accomplished, but in which ‘nothing’ is attempted. Why doesn’t this Report (on the acquisition of literacy in Australia) address this problem.
This brings us to the long shadow of John Dewey, the father of ‘progressive’, ‘child-centred’ schooling. These children, especially, need active teaching. They will never cope with the laissez-faire model class-room, where children ‘are treated like plants’, and ‘provided with resources’ that will ‘allow them to bloom’ like flowers in the field, while the teacher smiles benignly, answers questions when asked, and sees her role as supportive (or, to use the jargon, ‘facilitative’) rather than as offering intellectual challenge and substance.
THE ONLY CHILDREN WHO CAN COPE WITH THIS KIND OF CLASS-ROOM ARE THOSE WHO ARE SELF-MOTIVATED, WELL-ORGANISED, AND FAMILY-SUPPORTED – AND WHO HAVE HAD A GOOD START WITH PARENTS WHOSE INCLINATIONS HAVE LED THEM NATURALLY TO THE ENCOURAGEMENTS AND ACTIVITIES AND CONVERSATIONAL INPUTS THAT MAXIMISED THE CHILD’S RESPONSES TO THOSE EARLY DEVELOPMENTAL ‘WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY’ FOR LEARNING. (THESE CHILDREN WILL PROBABLY GET STRAIGHT A’S – BUT NEVERTHELESS WILL STILL NOT HAVE BEEN REALLY CHALLENGED OR STRETCHED TO THEIR MAXIMUM PERSONAL BEST. IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND THE ONE-EYED MAN IS KING!)
We end up with the irony that a system which purports to care most deeply about the under-achieving child has set itself up in such a way that the initially under-achieving child is automatically channeled into an intellectual under-class.
We should remember at this point that the initial purpose of a public education system was to achieve equality of opportunity not by dumbing bright kids down, but by offering intellectual excellence as an achievable goal for all.
The role of public education as a means of upward mobility used to be deemed honourable and valuable.
What we have in this Report is well-placed education faculty academics, fully paid up members of the mainstream early childhood establishment, conceding that the public schools are most useful to those family-supported children who begin school already accustomed to ways of thinking and behaving that result in high achievement. This concession is not made with a full heart. Under the banner of the need for social justice, we hear the voice of envy. The children who do well are those who are ‘privileged’ to ‘have more of those social goods that our society makes available’, and this enables them to better ‘take advantage’ of what the school has to offer. In other words, these bright, happy little children are already being classified as in some way predatory. (Does the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ begin here?)
There is no answer to this problem - of how to cope with children who present at Reception with a developmental deficit – that can be found without discussing and modifying the role of the teacher.
MY SECOND SUGGESTION, THEN, IS THAT WE SHOULD INSIST THAT TEACHERS ACTUALLY TEACH, AND DO NOT TAKE THE EASY OPTION OF THE FACILITATIVE PHILOSOPHY.
We do need to concede on this one that there used to be a mode of teaching that was punitive, and had many negative consequences. On the other hand, the pendulum has swung way too far. Teachers have now effectively abdicated the role of teacher, even though it is still assumed by the general public that they are actually teaching. I recommend as a quick fix that “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” and “Good morning, Miss Dove” be placed on the reading lists of Education faculty curricula. Discussion of these books in the context provided by a child-centred, facilitative, non-directive faculty may inspire questions. These questions could then be followed up with readings comparing what is now, amongst other things, called Direct Instruction with currently favored pedagogic styles. Out of the conversation, or debate, solutions may be found.
As an added bonus from adopting this approach, we will find that ALL children benefit from it, and those ‘privileged’ children who know how to ‘take advantage’ will more likely reach their personal best in intellectual achievement, including doing even better in Year 12.
MY THIRD SUGGESTION IS THAT WE SHOULD CONSIDER CHANGING THE RECRUITMENT DEMOGRAPHIC FOR TEACHERS OF YOUNG CHILDREN
Teachers are important – we should be looking for older teachers who have broad life experience, intellectual confidence and a fund of knowledge not exhausted by the next chapter of the manual they are using as a guide to what to teach next. Some clues about the natural demographic base for this kind of teacher might get some useful clues from Gail Sheehy’s brilliant profiling of the human life trajectory in her book, Passages. Many of the specifically intellectual deficits found in early childhood institutions may arise from recruiting for them a high proportion of staff who value ‘social skills’ and ‘relationships’ over intellectual understandings, and who are likely themselves to have qualified on the basis of acceptable (minimal) credentials rather than of their own love of learning. Ronald Ryde, of the Ryde College in London, has gone on record as saying that only retired professors should be allowed to teach our youngest children. This is an excellent approach. We just need to make sure that there are enough retired professors, or their equivalents, who are around and available.
So what else can I say?
The language currently used to discuss schooling issues is not very helpful. The term ‘literacy’ itself is a case in point. Achieving literacy (i.e. the ability to understand and use letters) is not a recognized goal – indeed has been redefined so that teachers could be forgiven for not knowing what it was they were supposed to be doing. Barbara Comber has said categorically that there is no such thing as literacy. “Literacy is a dynamic (process) covering a range of practices which vary throughout life”. Elsewhere she refers to a variety of literacies! This looks like the post-modern inability to link sub-categories to the over-arching embracing category. It is the mental aberration which leads to referring to multiplicities of feminisms or masculinities. Confronted with the denial of any over-arching, central substantive meaning to the word ‘literacy’, what on earth should teachers do to fulfill the obligations of their appointments. How much more effective would their teaching be, if they were thinking in terms of making sure that children developed the capacity to hear the sounds of their language, and recognize the symbols and spelling conventions used to designate those sounds on paper, either in hand-writing or in printed text, along with the ability to recapture the sounds of the language from the written/printed text. Instead they are lost in a maze of confusion over the relative desirability of family literacy, new (i.e. computer) literacy, community literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, etc.
MY FOURTH SUGGESTION, THEN IS THAT THE TERM ‘LITERACY’ BE SINGULARISED AND RETURNED TO ITS ORIGINAL MEANING – AS DESIGNATING FAMILIARITY AND ABILITY TO USE THE ALPHABET FOR PURPOSES OF COMMUNICATING VIA READING AND WRITING.
Some final random thoughts:
There is some fudging of statistics and figures to be wondered about. We are told that 15-20% of children in the study were ‘not doing well’. This was provided with a loose definition – these children could not read an age-appropriate text without assistance, and could not generate a simple text that would be comprehensible/acceptable without modification to the teacher. On the other hand we are told that even the lowest achieving 15% had ‘made significant progress’ (?) by ten years of age. And to confuse things a bit more, we are told that 30% of the children could be classified as low achievers.
Barbara Comber is clearly aware of the Stanovich paper on ‘the Matthew effect” because she refers to ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ – his key to understanding the widening gap between achievers and non-achievers. However, she completely ignores the moral of the tale, namely that all children should be enabled to present at Reception richly prepared.
The stress on the need for social justice is essentially hand-wringing. What I have said above about this should be re-inforced – children whose families move around, don’t know where their next meal is coming from, where no adult family member has employment income, etc. need real help. Yet there is absolutely no effort being made to work out how to teach these children effectively and in a way that will prevent their social conditions from consigning them to a lifetime in the underclass.
The idea that there should be a focus on making disadvantaged children and their families ‘feel welcome’ in the school, that this would constitute a significant variable in improving educational outcomes for these children, this is diversionary. It is not that either the children or their families should not feel welcome - it is just that this is not the main game in town. If the school is delivering the goods, parents and children will be there. The focus needs to be substance, and supportive etiquettes can follow.
We have lip service paid to the value of independent, well-organised and well-prepared individual teachers as vital (not only to the good teaching of the majority, but also) to rescuing children who are failing out. The key to understanding that it is only lip-service being paid here is the correlated set of statements about the need for ‘consistency with colleagues’ who have ‘an agreed (uniform) approach’ with these creative top teachers (about how to teach those children – maybe, e.g. using whole language methods?) and the need for community support for their innovations. If the dominant paradigm is inadequate, then placing primacy on consistency, an agreed approach, etc. can trap potentially good teachers into a corner from which there is no escape. You can admit that good and dedicated individual teachers are necessary, wonderful, and those without whom nothing ever happens, and then demand that they function as part of a team, and you totally eliminate the source of their strength, which is independent judgment. Barbara Comber deprecates ‘the one lone heroic teacher who succeeds against the odds’, presumably on the grounds that this is not a realistic expectation. My bet is, given the current set-up, that it is only a maverick, only a ‘lone, heroic teacher’, prepared to make a stand, who can provide a genuinely good education for the children he or she encounters.
Compulsory schooling takes up a huge block out of the lifetime of a human being – and it is the formative block, which creates the adult as a member of society. Parents have an obligation to make sure that the many, many hours that their children spend in school are hours well spent, and that the lives of their children are not filled up with busy make-work that is intellectually useless.
SUMMARY
THINGS TO NOTICE :
Contrary to what you might think from the ‘review’ in The Australian, the Report essentially accepts that children who start well in school are better able to take advantage of what schools have to offer.
The authors note an increasing gap between those who do well and those who badly at school.
(This gap is the one that can be detected at point of entry to the school. Its increase is partly due to the children who start badly becoming disheartened and ‘giving up’. And partly because children who start well have the intellectual and emotional resources to move ahead in leaps and bounds.)
The research project was conceived in response to public unrest in the nineties about poor educational outcomes from tax-payer funded schools.
It doesn’t address the main problems flagged in the nineties.
It is a longitudinal study, with an anthropological emphasis on observing rather than finding or proposing solutions.
It has a strong PR flavour – we are asked to applaud the schools for doing well in difficult circumstances. If some children do poorly it is not the schools fault. The schools cannot fix problems arising from endemic problems in society at large.
In taking this attitude, the schools have abandoned the older focus on making sure children from disadvantaged circumstances had a way out of poverty available to them through intellectual achievement. Schools no longer provide upward mobility for bright kids, whatever their background. Instead they ‘lock the child into the world that the child brings with them’. So all caring parents must these days must make sure that their children bring basic literacy and numeracy skills with them to Reception.
The actual entrenching of the ‘differences’ observed in entry-point children makes a nonsense of the hand-wringing concern for social justice that pervades the politically correct literature coming out of the teaching profession and teacher-educator originated research such as this.
Trying to make education ‘relevant’ to the out-of-school life of the child can only be useful if it serves to allow a child with a deficit background to escape and transcend that background. All too often a striving for ‘relevance’, and tailoring the curriculum content to what is already familiar, means leaving the child stuck in the same place, provides no vision splendid, and fosters resentment in the child, who sees no way out anywhere.
ISSUES TO DISCUSS :
Could we solve a number of educational problems in the schools if we insisted on policy changes that stripped remedial education of its funding, and put money instead into teaching to the top. Rather than creating further educational disadvantage for those on the bottom, this might re-establish social justice by giving all children access to intellectual excellence. Children who couldn’t cope with what was on offer could be assisted to ‘get through the gate’ by being offered extra help – perhaps primarily at home but also at school, so that the actual performance and achievement levels of all would be raised. If this happened we would be spared having some children defined as cases for remediation, and subjected to a different regime of (inferior) instruction. If teachers held in-service evenings for parents which laid out curriculum goals I am sure they would get the co-operation that is not forth-coming when the goals are ill-defined, and the pleas for ‘help’ are too amorphous.
Teachers need to be fully-fledged professionals, independent in their capacity to make judgments about how they teach and run their classrooms. Whatever pre-conditions are necessary to make this possible – e.g. assessing teachers on the basis of achieved outcomes, rather than on the basis of methodologies, or demanding better entry level intellectual attainments – should be identified and put in place.
The Reception year in particular needs to be upgraded, needs to tackle substantive learning.
Schools and teachers should be required to focus on what they are supposed to do, namely teach children things of intellectual substance (both skills and content), and refrain from social engineering, which they are not very good at anyway, and where the hidden agenda of many social engineering strategies is to save the teaching profession from the need to deal with intellectually challenging curriculum content. A warm glow should not be allowed to substitute for brain food. Given brain food has primacy, a warm glow can be recommended as a nice accompaniment.
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posted by Glynne at
5:15 AM
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JILL KITSON SPEAKS WITH BARBARA COMBER,
ABC RADIO NATIONAL (729 ON THE AM DIAL),
2.15 PM IN LINGUA FRANCA, ON SATURDAY 26TH SEPTEMBER 2002, REPEATED THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, AT 2.15 PM
_________________________________________________________________________________________
JK : Welcome: This week – 100 CHILDREN TURN 10. We are talking with Associate Professor Barbara Comber, of the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures at the University of South Australia, on the results of the Commonwealth funded five-year study of literacy learning.
Since 1997 a team of researchers from several universities has been tracking the literacy skills of 100 children from pre-school to Grade Four in five very different school communities – an aboriginal community on the edge of the central desert, an affluent Perth suburb, a large Victorian country town, an industrial outer suburb, and a multi-cultural inner suburb both in Adelaide….
The Report ...says that the major goal of the project was to investigate the kinds of literacies and pedagogies made available to children in different contexts, over a period of time.
Barbara Comber is one of the leaders of this project and co-author of the Report, so ….we asked ‘what are these different kinds of literacies and pedagogies – what does this mean?’
BC : “One of the things we are very aware of is that literacy not just something you have or you don’t – it is a dynamic phenomena (sic); it involves a range of practices that are constantly changing through out our life, and one of the things that we were very concerned about is that children growing up, and going to school in quite different communities, might have access to very different kinds of learning, and very different kinds of pedagogy. One of the reasons for this is that our national data and international data suggests that statistically you a likely to do better at literacy, and indeed numeracy, and overall in educational achievement if you are already privileged, if you already have more of the social goods that our society provides, and that children who are growing up in relative poverty, and some isolation - we need to think very hard about what it is that is being made available to those children as part of their schooling. So even though Australia compares very well on international studies of literacy – I think we are rated in the first five, just below New Zealand – if we’ve got 15 or 20 % of our children who are not doing well, we really need to think about what is going on.
JK : Well now, what percentage of children were reading well, when they turned ten?
BC “ 85%. Most of the children, therefore, were reading at or above the national bench-mark figures, for reading and writing, and even in those 15 % who were not, they had made significant progress. So the good news is, I guess that most children in the study had made significant progress. The bad news is the increasing gaps between children – not only on the standardized tests, but our data suggests that children, you know, may actually be acquiring different literacies, so this is kind of complex. It is a good news story in that schools in some cases are achieving against the odds. Children are doing quite well, but the concern for us must be one of what about the 15% - what is going on here?
JK : Well when you say acquiring quite different literacies do you mean becoming literate in something that has nothing to do with reading and writing?
BC : Well it’s interesting. If I just give you a few examples of some of the children that perhaps I know a little better. One little girl, for example, is using her father’s computer at home to create a data base of her friends. Now she is about six when she is doing this. Another little girl is involved in internet ICT chat with other friends. A little boy is doing, when he goes home from school, the Korean curriculum with his mother and playing very complex maths games on the computer in his free time. Still other children may be engaged in activities like filling in the little dot-to-dot books. Now these are quite obviously very different kinds of things to be doing. It is not that some of them are good and some of them are bad - they are actually quite different things that the children are spending their time on. So quite apart from what they are getting at school they are learning quite complex and different sorts of practices in their home lives, and some children are lucky enough to be able to cash in on those, because it matches quite well with the school curriculum. But other children the kinds of things they perhaps are engaged in at home have less relevance, or not necessarily taken up or made visible or of use to them in the school curriculum.
JK : Well, you, to quote the report, you say that thirty of them, thirty of the one hundred children were low achievers, and you say they were still struggling with the decoding skills that most of their peers has mastered in the first few years of schooling. Asnd I find it really interesting, this recurrence of the term ‘decoding’ . Does this mean that they actually hadn’t figured out the connection between sounds and the letters of words on the page.
BC : Yeah, there were some children who still weren’t able to crack the code in the sense that they couldn’t reliably, independently, read a text or put together a fairly simple text in a way that you could read it, or I could read it. Now, I need to say that many of those children had had significant periods of absence from schooling either due to their own ill-health or parental ill-health – sometimes due to family movements, due to unemployment, and I think that one of the things that we’d want to really insist on in the reading of this report is that it highlights the problems of broader social inequities and injustice in Australia right now. These children are growing up and attending school in the five communities are very different, and even within the five communities, the childrens’ lives out of school are often very ,very different – the sorts of things they are grappling with on the home front are often quite complex. So the last thing we want to do as authors of this Report is to in any way suggest that public schooling in Australia is not doing a good job.
What our study shows is that public schools in Australia are bending over backwards, and very often succeeding against the odds. But some of the things that the schools are dealing with, that the children are dealing with, that the parent communities are dealing with, are beyond what the school can change.
JK : But that sounds to me really like too broad for what your Report is actually telling us, which is partly this whole thing about decoding, that the children who are behind haven’t made that connection between sounds and the letters of words on the page. But there is another step beyond that, which was a new thought for me in many ways, is that they have to make the next connection which is between language and text, or print ,so it’s not enough just to sort of figure out, as one does if one watches Sesame Street, a lot of children come out of that being able to sound out the letters of the alphabet, but they actually have to realize that inside the pages of books, or in newspapers, they have to have a connection with the world of print. And that seems to be the key factor that is missing from the lives of the ones who are not doing well.
BC : Yes, that’s an interesting way to read it. I just want to go back first off, and come back to you know, how can I be talking about this when, you know, we are also talking about decoding, and one of the issues is this, that if the children aren’t at school, it doesn’t matter how good the pedagogy is, how direct the instruction is, how complex it is or how well meaning the teachers are, the children have got to be in school to receive the benefit of that instruction. Now coming to your wider point about yhou kknow What really counts is whether the children are making connections with text. I think that is a really really important point. Now some of the children, in almost every aspect of their lives they are involved in some kind of meaning-making with text. It is something that they just take for granted. It is part of how their parents organize their lives. If I think of one little girl, for example, the little girl I mentioned earlier, who had the data base of her friends at home on her father’s work computer, she was also richly bi-literate in the Greek language and culture, she was an active member of her wider community, the family were making sure that she learnt to read and write in Greek, she was an active partictipant in the church culture of which she was a part. So she, if we look at her literacies, she was also assembling a whole range of community literacies and family literacies, she was also assembling what we might call new literacies through her use of the computer and so on. If we then contrast that with children who may be sleeping in different houses from one night or one week to the next, whose parents don’t necessarily know where their next job is, or where their next meal is coming from, the children might be moving from, amongst the extended family then those children perhaps, they haven’t the time necessarily, it is not necessarily the priority of those children or their families, to be, to have the luxury of sitting down for example, to make a data base of the friendship groups. All I’m trying to suggest here is, I guess it’s a bit like, you know, the rich get richer…, the children who have a lot going for them in their home and wider cultural experiences are able to make use of what is on offer at the school very, very well. The children who may be irregular attenders at school, are often having to grapple with very very difficult lives in their own, in their outside of school lives. And I guess the thing is, I don’t want to pretend here that we are not interested in what actually goes in terms of the literacy instruction in school. And some of the best teaching we saw, occurred where very experienced teachers were able to connect the worlds of school, and texts of school, with childrens’ outside-of-school lives, and make it relevant, so that children actually had a desire to read, that there were pay-offs for children when they did read, and, you know, those teachers, and the children in their classrooms made really significant progress. But, you know, they had to be there for that to happen, and that’s got to do with wider issues ofhow welcome do parents and children feel in the school community. Does it feel like their place.
JK : And here, would you say, having a dedicated teacher counts for more than what particular teaching method is being used?
BC : That’s a really, really good question. I mean there’s no, from my point of view, a very well-prepared highly-organised teacher with a commitment to the children who he or she is teaching is an absolutely a fundamental ingredient. Now what those teachers need is a school community, educational leadership and colleagues who have an agreed approach to working with the children. They have really high expectations for the children, and they make those expectations known to the children, and the community, so there is an expectation that we are going to do well. And they work together as a team, so individual teachers, there’s no question, and we saw some individual teachers who had, who really in some cases made quite an incredible difference in re-connecting some children who, you know, even by Grade One and Grade Two were turned off. And those teachers need a wider school community that supports their innovation, that supports their creativity, in order to ensure that they are not just, you know, the one lone heroic teacher who succeeds against the odds. There’s got to be more than one teacher, because the children’s lives in school are, obviously, quite long, and quite complex, and yeah, we need some consistency across what’s being offered.
JK : Well it does seem to me, considering now what is the Department of Education Training and Science is going to do with this Report, that where they should be focusing is in Departments of Education, such as where you are teaching, but I mean in making primary school teaching an absolute priority, and raising its status.
BC : Well I think that’s fundamental, Jill. And while I applaud what the Federal Government and the State Governments and the Departments of Education have done to really lift the profile of Early Childhood education, I think that’s incredibly important, and we can see the effects, I think what we’ve got to do now is realize it’s not over after Grade Three. These children are in school for a very long time and there’s a lot to be learnt once you have cracked the code. What happens after the early years of schooling is that we expect children to use the technologies of reading and writing to do an enormous amount of their learning. We expect them to that both in school and out of school, using both electronic and media text, and printed text. So lifting the profile and the status of our primary teachers is absolutely important. Providing systematic professional development for teachers of literacy, and indeed teachers of numeracy, in the primary school, is really important. We can’t assume that once we’ve have got the children off to a good start then, you know, we’re done, and it’s all going to proceed without any problems.
JK : Barbara Comber, of the University of South Australia, co-author of 100 CHILREN TURN 10. The full report is available on the Department of Education, Science and Training web site, at www.dest.gov.au
And that’s all for this week’s Lingua Franca
JILL KITSON SPEAKS WITH BARBARA COMBER,
ABC RADIO NATIONAL (729 ON THE AM DIAL),
2.15 PM IN LINGUA FRANCA, ON SATURDAY 26TH SEPTEMBER 2002, REPEATED THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, AT 2.15 PM
_________________________________________________________________________________________
JK : Welcome: This week – 100 CHILDREN TURN 10. We are talking with Associate Professor Barbara Comber, of the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures at the University of South Australia, on the results of the Commonwealth funded five-year study of literacy learning.
Since 1997 a team of researchers from several universities has been tracking the literacy skills of 100 children from pre-school to Grade Four in five very different school communities – an aboriginal community on the edge of the central desert, an affluent Perth suburb, a large Victorian country town, an industrial outer suburb, and a multi-cultural inner suburb both in Adelaide….
The Report ...says that the major goal of the project was to investigate the kinds of literacies and pedagogies made available to children in different contexts, over a period of time.
Barbara Comber is one of the leaders of this project and co-author of the Report, so ….we asked ‘what are these different kinds of literacies and pedagogies – what does this mean?’
BC : “One of the things we are very aware of is that literacy not just something you have or you don’t – it is a dynamic phenomena (sic); it involves a range of practices that are constantly changing through out our life, and one of the things that we were very concerned about is that children growing up, and going to school in quite different communities, might have access to very different kinds of learning, and very different kinds of pedagogy. One of the reasons for this is that our national data and international data suggests that statistically you a likely to do better at literacy, and indeed numeracy, and overall in educational achievement if you are already privileged, if you already have more of the social goods that our society provides, and that children who are growing up in relative poverty, and some isolation - we need to think very hard about what it is that is being made available to those children as part of their schooling. So even though Australia compares very well on international studies of literacy – I think we are rated in the first five, just below New Zealand – if we’ve got 15 or 20 % of our children who are not doing well, we really need to think about what is going on.
JK : Well now, what percentage of children were reading well, when they turned ten?
BC “ 85%. Most of the children, therefore, were reading at or above the national bench-mark figures, for reading and writing, and even in those 15 % who were not, they had made significant progress. So the good news is, I guess that most children in the study had made significant progress. The bad news is the increasing gaps between children – not only on the standardized tests, but our data suggests that children, you know, may actually be acquiring different literacies, so this is kind of complex. It is a good news story in that schools in some cases are achieving against the odds. Children are doing quite well, but the concern for us must be one of what about the 15% - what is going on here?
JK : Well when you say acquiring quite different literacies do you mean becoming literate in something that has nothing to do with reading and writing?
BC : Well it’s interesting. If I just give you a few examples of some of the children that perhaps I know a little better. One little girl, for example, is using her father’s computer at home to create a data base of her friends. Now she is about six when she is doing this. Another little girl is involved in internet ICT chat with other friends. A little boy is doing, when he goes home from school, the Korean curriculum with his mother and playing very complex maths games on the computer in his free time. Still other children may be engaged in activities like filling in the little dot-to-dot books. Now these are quite obviously very different kinds of things to be doing. It is not that some of them are good and some of them are bad - they are actually quite different things that the children are spending their time on. So quite apart from what they are getting at school they are learning quite complex and different sorts of practices in their home lives, and some children are lucky enough to be able to cash in on those, because it matches quite well with the school curriculum. But other children the kinds of things they perhaps are engaged in at home have less relevance, or not necessarily taken up or made visible or of use to them in the school curriculum.
JK : Well, you, to quote the report, you say that thirty of them, thirty of the one hundred children were low achievers, and you say they were still struggling with the decoding skills that most of their peers has mastered in the first few years of schooling. Asnd I find it really interesting, this recurrence of the term ‘decoding’ . Does this mean that they actually hadn’t figured out the connection between sounds and the letters of words on the page.
BC : Yeah, there were some children who still weren’t able to crack the code in the sense that they couldn’t reliably, independently, read a text or put together a fairly simple text in a way that you could read it, or I could read it. Now, I need to say that many of those children had had significant periods of absence from schooling either due to their own ill-health or parental ill-health – sometimes due to family movements, due to unemployment, and I think that one of the things that we’d want to really insist on in the reading of this report is that it highlights the problems of broader social inequities and injustice in Australia right now. These children are growing up and attending school in the five communities are very different, and even within the five communities, the childrens’ lives out of school are often very ,very different – the sorts of things they are grappling with on the home front are often quite complex. So the last thing we want to do as authors of this Report is to in any way suggest that public schooling in Australia is not doing a good job.
What our study shows is that public schools in Australia are bending over backwards, and very often succeeding against the odds. But some of the things that the schools are dealing with, that the children are dealing with, that the parent communities are dealing with, are beyond what the school can change.
JK : But that sounds to me really like too broad for what your Report is actually telling us, which is partly this whole thing about decoding, that the children who are behind haven’t made that connection between sounds and the letters of words on the page. But there is another step beyond that, which was a new thought for me in many ways, is that they have to make the next connection which is between language and text, or print ,so it’s not enough just to sort of figure out, as one does if one watches Sesame Street, a lot of children come out of that being able to sound out the letters of the alphabet, but they actually have to realize that inside the pages of books, or in newspapers, they have to have a connection with the world of print. And that seems to be the key factor that is missing from the lives of the ones who are not doing well.
BC : Yes, that’s an interesting way to read it. I just want to go back first off, and come back to you know, how can I be talking about this when, you know, we are also talking about decoding, and one of the issues is this, that if the children aren’t at school, it doesn’t matter how good the pedagogy is, how direct the instruction is, how complex it is or how well meaning the teachers are, the children have got to be in school to receive the benefit of that instruction. Now coming to your wider point about yhou kknow What really counts is whether the children are making connections with text. I think that is a really really important point. Now some of the children, in almost every aspect of their lives they are involved in some kind of meaning-making with text. It is something that they just take for granted. It is part of how their parents organize their lives. If I think of one little girl, for example, the little girl I mentioned earlier, who had the data base of her friends at home on her father’s work computer, she was also richly bi-literate in the Greek language and culture, she was an active member of her wider community, the family were making sure that she learnt to read and write in Greek, she was an active partictipant in the church culture of which she was a part. So she, if we look at her literacies, she was also assembling a whole range of community literacies and family literacies, she was also assembling what we might call new literacies through her use of the computer and so on. If we then contrast that with children who may be sleeping in different houses from one night or one week to the next, whose parents don’t necessarily know where their next job is, or where their next meal is coming from, the children might be moving from, amongst the extended family then those children perhaps, they haven’t the time necessarily, it is not necessarily the priority of those children or their families, to be, to have the luxury of sitting down for example, to make a data base of the friendship groups. All I’m trying to suggest here is, I guess it’s a bit like, you know, the rich get richer…, the children who have a lot going for them in their home and wider cultural experiences are able to make use of what is on offer at the school very, very well. The children who may be irregular attenders at school, are often having to grapple with very very difficult lives in their own, in their outside of school lives. And I guess the thing is, I don’t want to pretend here that we are not interested in what actually goes in terms of the literacy instruction in school. And some of the best teaching we saw, occurred where very experienced teachers were able to connect the worlds of school, and texts of school, with childrens’ outside-of-school lives, and make it relevant, so that children actually had a desire to read, that there were pay-offs for children when they did read, and, you know, those teachers, and the children in their classrooms made really significant progress. But, you know, they had to be there for that to happen, and that’s got to do with wider issues ofhow welcome do parents and children feel in the school community. Does it feel like their place.
JK : And here, would you say, having a dedicated teacher counts for more than what particular teaching method is being used?
BC : That’s a really, really good question. I mean there’s no, from my point of view, a very well-prepared highly-organised teacher with a commitment to the children who he or she is teaching is an absolutely a fundamental ingredient. Now what those teachers need is a school community, educational leadership and colleagues who have an agreed approach to working with the children. They have really high expectations for the children, and they make those expectations known to the children, and the community, so there is an expectation that we are going to do well. And they work together as a team, so individual teachers, there’s no question, and we saw some individual teachers who had, who really in some cases made quite an incredible difference in re-connecting some children who, you know, even by Grade One and Grade Two were turned off. And those teachers need a wider school community that supports their innovation, that supports their creativity, in order to ensure that they are not just, you know, the one lone heroic teacher who succeeds against the odds. There’s got to be more than one teacher, because the children’s lives in school are, obviously, quite long, and quite complex, and yeah, we need some consistency across what’s being offered.
JK : Well it does seem to me, considering now what is the Department of Education Training and Science is going to do with this Report, that where they should be focusing is in Departments of Education, such as where you are teaching, but I mean in making primary school teaching an absolute priority, and raising its status.
BC : Well I think that’s fundamental, Jill. And while I applaud what the Federal Government and the State Governments and the Departments of Education have done to really lift the profile of Early Childhood education, I think that’s incredibly important, and we can see the effects, I think what we’ve got to do now is realize it’s not over after Grade Three. These children are in school for a very long time and there’s a lot to be learnt once you have cracked the code. What happens after the early years of schooling is that we expect children to use the technologies of reading and writing to do an enormous amount of their learning. We expect them to that both in school and out of school, using both electronic and media text, and printed text. So lifting the profile and the status of our primary teachers is absolutely important. Providing systematic professional development for teachers of literacy, and indeed teachers of numeracy, in the primary school, is really important. We can’t assume that once we’ve have got the children off to a good start then, you know, we’re done, and it’s all going to proceed without any problems.
JK : Barbara Comber, of the University of South Australia, co-author of 100 CHILREN TURN 10. The full report is available on the Department of Education, Science and Training web site, at www.dest.gov.au
And that’s all for this week’s Lingua Franca
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