 
Week 3 - Outcomes and Standards
|  | Is Standardising Standards the Way to Go? |
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MR MIKE MIDDLETON
Queensland, Australia
THERE IS CURRENTLY rampant confusion about outcomes and standards in many school communities, as well as in education offices around the country. The teaching profession's image in society and its self-confidence is not improved by front page headlines such as, 'Bad schools: Govt. plan to expose education failures' (Sunday Mail, Brisbane, 26/3/00).
The article in the Sunday Mail goes on to describe how 20% of Queensland's Year 3 children 'failed to meet national reading standards'. The trouble with these kinds of statements is that they are designed not to inform, but to shock. I well remember, as a young teacher, delivering a guest lecture to a group of some hundred Dip. Ed. students in Tasmania. I began by giving them what I called 'bad news'. 'Fifty per cent of Tasmania's primary school students', I said 'have IQs below average'. There was an audible drawing in of breath. Then, after a pause, there was embarrassed laughter. I think much of the current hype about standards is of this kind.
Five Main ArgumentsI'm choosing to structure my discussion paper by first analysing the concept of outcomes. I then want to make five main arguments.
1. Outcome-based standards are chosen; they are not absolute.
2. Standards should change over time.
3. The educational worth of schools cannot be measured merely by comparing how well their students perform on some standardised scale.
4. Some of the most important learning cannot be standardised.
5. The curriculum is more than an aggregate of subjects.
The 'Outcomes' Philosophy
In the community at large, and even among teachers, there is a range of meanings ascribed to outcomes based education. Some seem to believe it is a strategy to raise standards, to 'bring teachers to heel'. Others see outcomes as glorified objectives, measured by 'tick-the-box' criteria. Yet others see it as OBE (Spady, 1993), an imported package from North America.
I reject all of these. I believe an outcomes logic is an historical imperative, which involves a totally different mindset about the way our society schools its young people. In the first hundred years of mass education in Australia, the dominant social paradigm was industrial. From 1870 to 1970, the majority of Australia's full-time workers were unskilled (Jones, 1982). The school system was designed to provide a 'layered' adult population. Students were enrolled, and were 'processed' through a curriculum designed to grade them. The process was 'fixed'. The outcomes were differentiated.
Dysfunctional Logic
With the rapid decline in unskilled careers from 65% in 1950 to 15% in 2000 (ABS), such a logic has become dysfunctional. There are no longer careers for unskilled (read uncredentialled) people. Everyone now needs to succeed in achieving a set of essential learnings if they are to participate in Australian society. Now it is the essential outcomes which need to be defined and the process therefore needs to be differentiated. The need for the change can be traced back into the 1980s and 1970s, when many Australian teachers like Bill Hannan (Hannan 1981) and others urged reform using phrases like 'goal based learning'.
The problems with implementing a true outcomes approach occur because many teachers and school leaders, and not a few systemic administrators, believe that it is possible to implement an outcomes-based approach gently, one element at a time. At the school level, there are four major curriculum elements:
1. programming;
2. teaching and learning;
3. school structures; and,
4. assessment and reporting.
All Four Elements Must Go Together
Trying to change any one of these elements to an outcomes-based pattern without the other three is doomed to failure. The element in question will be subverted by the other three because they operate under process-based assumptions. The problem is: 'the same one that has bedevilled all education reformers since Dewey: the changes proposed are too narrowly conceived to kill off the old model of schooling, so it eventually cripples them' (Dixon, 1994:361).
Similar dysfunctions occur when systems take an incremental approach to reform. In some States, outcomes-based syllabuses are released, one at a time, over several years, as they come off the drawing board. The problem for schools is obvious. How can their programming, their teaching and learning, their structures and their assessment accommodate two quite incompatible philosophies over a period of years?
Some schools have bravely bitten the bullet and are using the National Profiles in the interim, so that their educational practices have some coherence and integrity.
In short, the traditional graded approach to schooling and the outcomes-based approach are not at opposite poles of a continuum. There is a chasm in between. The wise don't rig a tightrope. They jump.
Outcomes-Based Standards are Chosen
In the industrial, bell-curved logic, the standard was the 'norm'. Ideally, about half the students in the age cohort were below the norm and half were above it. Educational programs and associated assessment practices were designed to get a 'spread of results'. An outcomes-based set of standards is quite different. They are not statistical standards like the norm. They are chosen. They should represent what astute researchers and experienced educators believe to be the knowledge, skills and qualities young people will need if they are to participate positively in society.
A Field Day for Critics
Clearly, we don't want half our population to be below this new standard. The transition from one kind of standard to the other has muddied the waters and given critics of school education a field day. Politicians like Dr Kemp either do not understand the transition or are deliberately using it politically to score points and to direct funding accordingly. One hears complaints like, 'a third of Australia's school children are below the standard'. If the standard referred to is the old norm-based standard, then teachers have performed miracles. They have increased the fraction above standard from 50% to 70 %. If the standards are the new standards, then there cannot be comparisons with the past. The new standards are chosen; where these new standards sit is based on judgements that emerge from the often adversarial field between politics and education.
Basics: Static or Dynamic?
The historical scientific concept of 'standards' involves a static set of benchmarks against which all future measures will be compared. The metre length and the kilogram mass are but two such standards, the originals kept in museum-like security. Should educational standards be like this? Or should they be continuously upgraded and refined to meet changing challenges and circumstances? It's really a matter of how the 'basics' need to be defined. If the 'basics' are outcomes we seek, so that students will be able to function effectively in their time, and if times are changing, then it follows that the basics must change, and with them, the 'standards'.
The danger is that the more we standardise our measures, in order to get a picture of how student learning outcomes are improving, the more we will be measuring what was needed in the past rather than what will be needed in the future. We will see students in 2001 doing less well on a test designed for 1990 than did the students in 1990. So what? Surely that ought to be the case! How many 1990 secondary students would be able to use the Internet as well as most primary students today? Like it or not, history is one-way. We cannot have 1990s students do a test designed for 2001, so comparisons of that kind are futile.
The Insanity of Seeking 'New' Static States
Are we consistently changing teaching or consistently teaching change? It's crazy at the moment. We speak of a changing world, and the need to adapt, and yet we seek 'new' static states. We spend years trialing new curricula and then bedding them down. But a K-10 curriculum is an abstract construct. No child will ever study it. The world doesn't suddenly stop for ten years while students go to school.
We must stop merely re-aiming the bow. The guidance system has to be in the arrow!
Schools Must be the Focus of Accountability
This does not destroy accountability. But it does change its nature. Now the schools are accountable to the centre for the decisions they make. The research, the adapting, the creation of new possibilities and new 'standards' will need to be done by schools, networking with each other, and modifying their programs continuously to meet the changing social and technological environments. They need to be held accountable for this activity. They must become learning organisations. And just as individuals have their own learning styles and learning rates, so will learning organisations.
The Worth of Schools
There is no doubt that literacy and numeracy are important for young people. There is also no doubt that teachers find diagnostic tools to measure student progress in literacy and numeracy valuable. This applies to the 'net' used in Queensland primary schools. It also applies to the Year 3 and Year 5 testing in NSW, which many schools find useful in their decision making. However, there is a huge difference between providing schools with diagnostic tools to assist them in improving their students' learning outcomes and threatening schools with 'public exposure' of their performances in literacy and numeracy.
The messages entering the public arena by publishing such results will be dishonest and the end result will be counterproductive in terms of Australia's social resilience.
The Dishonesty of Simplistic Measures
The dishonesty involves the use of a simplistic measure that cannot possibly reflect the educational value of organisations as diverse and complex as schools. Schools have students coming to them with very different prior learnings, very different cultural backgrounds and very different day-to-day life circumstances. Some schools have high rates of student mobility, with perhaps one-third of their students changing over each year. Some schools have high rates of teacher turnover, averaging perhaps three years per teacher.
Whether the standardised comparisons measure an absolute outcome or a 'value added' outcome, they cannot accurately reflect the value of education taking place in such widely diverse schools. Those who are promoting public disclosure should contemplate swapping staff from one of our elite private schools with staff from a low socio-economic government school. Do they really believe it would make a difference for the better in either school?
A Recipe for Educational Apartheid
The counterproductivity involves the way the market responds to simplistic messages. On the surface, the theory seems to be one of healthy competition, likely to improve the standards in every school. The reality is quite different. Inevitably, what will happen is that there will be many parents who believe, often mistakenly, that a school with better overall results will likely give their child a better result. But only some parents are in a position to make such a judgement and only some of these have the means to act on it. Thus, the migration to apparently more 'successful' schools will make them even more 'successful'. Other schools will become residual. The process is a recipe for an educational apartheid in the school system. Residual schools create residual students and ultimately residual or disenfranchised adults.
Learning That Can't be Standardised
Apart from the creation of an educational apartheid, the use of public 'exposure' of schools' literacy and numeracy results will have other negative consequences. This is because the very creativity that Australia will need in the generations to come is the very thing that cannot be standardised by any kind of educational measure. Nor can confidence or self-esteem, or the readiness to take risks, or to learn from mistakes. Nor can the ability to work with others in resolving conflict or in building teamwork. Nor can the ability to work independently.
This is not to argue that literacy and numeracy are not critical elements in creativity and in the other qualities. But all the elements of learning have to happen at the same time. If teachers are distracted by artificial measures of accountability that focus too narrowly, then there is a real danger of sterility in the classroom. Teachers and students become pressured to perform towards a school profile so narrowly conceived that it becomes mechanistic. Teachers model disempowerment rather than creativity, duty rather than joy, the routine rather than the unusual.
It is worth pondering on an analogy from biological evolution. In times of rapid change, a species is most likely to survive when it exhibits a wide variation among its members, and when these members remain in fertile interaction with each other.
Curriculum Pattern: Aggregated or Integrated?
There appears to be a struggle between two concepts of curriculum, one based on traditional subject categories and the other based on generic learnings. Both 'traditions' have a strong recent history. Attempts to simplify the burgeoning subject curriculum by clumping subjects together began in the late 1970s when the C.D.C.'s National Core Curriculum Project recommended nine core curriculum areas. More recently, as we entered the 1990s, there was national agreement on eight Key Learning Areas (KLAs). In parallel with these trends has been another set of initiatives, beginning with the 'key competencies' outlined in the 1985 QERC Report (Comm. Of Aust, 1985) and then taken up, in turn, in the Finn Review (AEC, 1991), the Mayer Committee Report (AEC, 1992) and most recently in the 'New Basics' development in Queensland. This second set treats what students need to know and should be able to do as the generic, underpinning 'givens' in the curriculum pattern.
'Two Bob Each Way'
In trying to accommodate both philosophies, the writers of Queensland's KLA syllabuses and of the National 'Adelaide Declaration' have had 'two bob each way'. They include both traditions but leave the relationship between the two unexplored. The new Queensland KLA syllabuses have a preamble describing the lifelong learnings that it is hoped the KLA programs will achieve.
The Adelaide Declaration (MCEETYA, 1999) is even more dualistic. Section 1 describes the talents and capacities students should have developed by the time they leave school. Then, Section 2 says that 'in terms of curriculum, students should have high standards in ...' and proceeds to list the eight Key Learning Areas. What is curriculum if it isn't a development of the talents and capacities of students?
I assert that the generic and KLA frameworks ought not to be seen as conflicting curriculum philosophies. They need each other, not as uneasy bedfellows but as necessary co-dimensions in a resilient curriculum responsive to changing times.
The traditional KLA knowledge and skill is the 'stuff' of curriculum building. It represents the raw materials for curriculum design. What is shaped from these raw materials, depends on the generic outcomes required in any particular time or context. The way the raw materials are used, the way they are combined and co-ordinated cannot be predicted in advance. On the big scale, this will depend on historical and social developments, and on the technology available at the time. At the classroom site, the patterning will depend upon the interests of students and on events within the local context. It's about generic architecture and KLA building materials.
If the KLA syllabuses are means, rather than ends, it doesn't matter that their reviewing and updating happens over a reasonably long time frame. Not all KLA outcomes will be appropriate all the time. The dynamism and the responsiveness of the curriculum depends on the way the generic outcomes are defined and redefined, and on the way these outcomes create the need for new combinations of KLA learnings, different forms of integration, and updated standards of achievement.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Mike Middleton spent has early career in education working as a teacher, deputy principal and principal in Tasmania and South Australia. During this time he also wrote several books, undertook research overseas, worked in educational television and was involved in a number of national curriculum projects, including the Australian Science Education Project, the National Core Curriculum Project, the Participation and Equity Project and a review of secondary education policy for the Commonwealth Schools Commission. More recently, he has lectured in education at Griffith University and has chaired Queensland's Ministerial Consultative Council on Curriculum. He now works as a freelance consultant with schools and systems across Australia.
Mike Middleton can be contacted by email at:
mikemidd@powerup.com.au
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REFERENCES
Australian Bureau of Labour Statistics (1998). Job Skill Level Changes 1950-2000.
Australian Education Council Review Committee (1991). Young People's Participation in Post Compulsory Education and Training (The Finn Review), July.
Australian Education Council Review Committee (1992). Employment Related Key Competencies; Vocational Education, Employment and Training (The Mayer Report).
Commonwealth of Australia (1985). Quality of Education in Australia: Report of the Review Committee, Canberra: A.G.P.S.
Dixon, D. (1994). 'Future Schools and How to Get there from Here', in Phi Delta Kappan, January.
Hannan, B. (1981). 'Goals should always be attainable' in TTUV News No. 1.
Jones, B (1982). Sleepers Wake: technology and the future of work, Sydney: Oxford University Press.
MCEETYA (1999). The Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty First Century.
Spady, W. (1993). Outcome-Based Education, ACSA Workshop Report Number 5.
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