Soul-searching and navel gazing into the quality of teaching and teacher education in Australia has been rife lately. There were already concerns about the decline in Australia’s international rankings. Then came the Grattan Report that identified a lack of engagement amongst large numbers of students in Australia’s schools. More recently we have series showing on SBS called Testing Teachers that focuses on a controversial model that proposes to put ‘quality’ teachers into our most disadvantaged schools.
All of this of course is adding to the panic, particularly among politicians, about seeking ‘solutions’ to the ‘crisis’ in teacher quality and teacher education.
Does any of this feel familiar? Such levels of public concern about the state of education in Australia are not uncommon: in fact, there have been more than 30 reports into education in the last few decades. These reports have identified a range of issues that are contributing to the ‘failure’ of Australia’s education system.
In this blog post I will look at two of the most commonly offered solutions as a means of ‘fixing’ teacher education: the ATAR solution and the Teach for Australia solution.
Raise the ATAR solution
The low ATAR requirements for teacher education programs are often cited as a reason for our declining rankings in international measures: the argument is that, as ATARs are demand-based, the low ATAR indicates that the ‘best and brightest’ university entrants are choosing other courses rather than teacher education, and hence students are not benefiting from being taught by the brightest individuals in Australia.
The solution to this is to artificially raise the ATAR, or the requirements for entry into teaching courses, or to cap the number of places available in order to increase demand.
Such arguments generally fail to acknowledge that many students enter teacher education courses via a non-ATAR pathway – but this leads to other possible solutions, like Literacy and Numeracy tests for pre-service teachers, although one must ask why, if pre-service teachers have graduated from Year 12 and completed most of a degree at university, they need to demonstrate literacy and numeracy that must surely have been needed to complete these courses in the first place.
The Teach for Australia solution
Another solution proffered, and the one I want to concentrate more on, is the adoption of programs like Teach for Australia. The TFA program is the one featured by the now running SBS series, Testing Teachers. Since the TFA program started in Australia in 2009 it has received significant amounts of money from the federal government. Teach for Australia is a teacher education program that is modelled on similar programs that already exist in the USA and the UK. The organization sees itself as a ‘remedy for social and educational inequity by employing outstanding individuals’. These outstanding individuals are required to have already completed (or be about to complete) a Bachelor’s degree, with a high credit average. There is particular emphasis on recruiting students from the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines.
The candidates undertake an application process, and if accepted into the Teach For Australia program, they undertake a 13 week training course. This is comprised of 7 weeks online training and 6 weeks face to face training. At the conclusion of the training, these ‘associates’ as they are now called, are placed in an educationally disadvantaged school for a period of two years. During these two years, associates will teach an 80% load, and they will be mentored both in the school and from an educational academic. At the successful conclusion of the 2 year program, they will receive a Masters degree.
Not surprisingly, despite the support of successive Federal Governments, there has been significant criticism of the TFA program from teachers and their unions and from education academics. The Australian Education Union (AEU) has stated that the program is an ‘expensive failure’, and there is certainly evidence that TFA does cost more than the usual teacher education program. The average across Australian institutions for a teacher program is $23 000, whereas TFA (according to 2013 figures) costs approximately $100 000. Whether it is a failure is more challenging to identify, mainly because there is a lack of research into the efficacy of TFA associates.
The Australian Council for Education Research (ACER 2013) identified that the program was successful in recruiting suitable, academically able graduates. After one year, principals considered the teachers to be as effective as other teachers, and perhaps more effective by the end of the second year. The report stops short of saying it is more effective than other approaches to teacher education, and it identifies the high cost of the program and its small scale as potential difficulties in the future.
The Centre for Independent Studies Senior Research Fellow, Jennifer Buckingham, in a comment about Teach For Australia suggests there is little objective data about the educational impact, but goes on to cite TFA’s own report that claims 90% of TFA associates have a greater impact on student achievement than other graduate teachers. Buckingham also cites overseas programs (Teach for America and Teach First) as examples of success, but provides no further details about how such success was measured or who did the measuring. Indeed, the research into TFA’s international cousins is no less problematic. Educational researchers from the US describe Teach for America as a harmful public policy, where teachers from the program provide significantly lower outcomes than certified teachers. Professor of Education at Stanford University, Linda Darling-Hammond, supports this assessment.
The sustainability of the program is also enough to cause concern amongst the teaching profession. According to TFA’s own data, 70% of associates remain in the profession after the two-year program. Further analysis of the data is not available, so it is unclear for how much longer these associates remained teaching. It should be noted that the program is still in its infancy. However, Senate Estimates suggest that less than half of the original cohort of 45, who began in 2010, are still teaching.
We are asking the wrong questions about TFA
Ultimately, these are the wrong questions to be asking about Teach for Australia or even teacher education programs. Few people involved in this space would argue that teachers have a central role to play in the future development and success of Australia. For this reason, we need to adopt the best practices in teacher education, so that the teacher profession is highly motivated, skilled and capable.
The question should not be whether TFA associates are better than traditional teacher graduates – considering the more high-achieving pool that TFA draws from, and the significantly higher levels of support that are provided to TFA associates over the course of their two year placement, a better question is why is there not compelling evidence that associates are significantly better than their colleagues? Considering the extra levels of support and the increased expenditure, surely TFA associates should be outperforming their fellow teachers in all areas.
There is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Instead, the evidence suggests that, TFA associates are, at best, on par with their colleagues. In this context, then, it is interesting to question why this is the case. It is my argument that, as models of teacher education go, TFA has some valuable practices, but it is not sufficient in and of itself to provide Australia with the quality teachers that it requires. Thirteen weeks of training might be enough to provide associates with a modicum of understanding about teaching and learning, but there is much that is covered in traditional educational programs that would necessarily be excluded. This material is not mere ‘fluff’ to be casually discarded but is central to the practice of developing the knowledge and skills necessary for a teaching career.
Some ‘solutions’ that are not ‘quick fixes’
That is not to say that the TFA program is completely without worth; rather, there are elements to it that are worthy of consideration in more traditional teacher education programs. Instead of searching for ‘quick-fix’ solutions to the quality teacher crisis, (should we even accept that this is the issue, but that is a different blog post) we should invest the extra money into existing teacher education programs and to improve the professional development opportunities for teachers. Most importantly, extra investment should be spent on the time after a teacher enters the profession, as he or she begins to work towards proficient accreditation.
It is estimated that up to 50% of teachers leave teaching within the first five years of full time work. This is often attributed to either the crushing workload faced by teachers or the inability of teachers to find suitable permanent positions. Any solution to the issues facing teaching in Australia needs to address these serious hurdles and TFA does not do this.
Instead, we should be looking for a solution that provides all teachers with support throughout their career, but especially in the first 5 years. While many systems (including TFA, it must be said) provide mentoring and release time for teachers until they attain proficiency, it is true that many teachers leave the profession between their third and fifth year of full time teaching.
Teachers’ workloads have increased rapidly over the last decade. Two such examples are the collection and analysis of data and extra-curricular activities. In addition to the normal yearly and half-yearly examinations, some teachers are now expected to administer, prepare and review NAPLAN, practice NAPLAN, PAT-R, PAT-M, MAI and other tests as deemed necessary by the school. While the data might be valuable to the classroom teacher, it takes valuable time away from the actual teaching and learning. And it is not uncommon for teachers to be expected to ‘volunteer’ for a range of extra-curricular activities like coding clubs and sporting teams and social justice groups, some of which take place during pupil vacation periods or on weekends.
When faced with a workload that is often well in excess of 50 hours per week and the constant attacks on the quality of their work as professionals by some sections of the media and the government, it is hardly surprising that so many teachers leave the profession. Any solution needs to address these matters.
Rather, governments and employers need to work to reduce teacher workloads (80% of the current teaching load would be a good start). Such actions would improve the work-life balance of teachers, and this would help raise the status of the profession, which would in turn increase the desirability of teacher education courses. This is not a quick solution but it would be a sustainable one.
