I recently attended (online, of course) the 2021 Wyndham Lecture, which was given by Professor Bob Lingard and hosted by the NSW Institute for Educational Research. It is always a good event, and this one was certainly no different – it was a thoughtful and detailed analysis of the current state of play of education in Australia, with implications beyond our national borders. The first thing that struck me is that, while Professor Lingard’s work is well known, he works at a number of levels of abstraction greater than mine. I’m more interested in what happens on a daily basis in the classroom, in the interactions between teacher and students. This is the stuff of learning design, which is part of my interest. Bob, however, works at a significantly higher level than that – he’s interested in policy and questions of funding and resourcing. However, that doesn’t mean that our two areas of interest are not unrelated; indeed, I would suggest that the are closely related, and the one influences the other. Nevertheless, it’s a different kind of research than that which I am used to, and I enjoyed that aspect of it very much while acknowledging my limited expertise in the field.
So what did Bob speak about? Essentially his argument was as follows. Austrlaian education, as expressed in the Alice Springs Education Declaration has a commitment to equality – of opportunity, and perhaps of outcomes. This was central to the Gonski Review which sought to ensure that all students had access to a high standard of education regardless of their background or circumstance. That was more than a decade ago, and instead of moving towards equality, which might be at least palatable, all the evidence indicates that we are moving further and further away form any representation of equality; in fact there is now a greater correlation between background and student achievement than there was in the past. Bob put it like this:
We articulate and hold out this aspiration to all young people, but ‘compromised conditions of possibility’ of achieving for all young people: Lauren Berlant (2011) calls this ‘cruel optimism’.
Lingard (2021)
Lingard then went on to describe the motivations and causes for this growing inequality. He argues that there are many causes, including funding, SES inequality, approaches to policy making, data not being used productively, and pressures on teachers (at which my ears pricked up). At that point, he suggested that there’s too much focus on teachers and what they do – the reality is that the actions of a teacher are only a small part of the overall achievement of students. In other words, we can’t ‘teacher educate’ our way out of this!
Instead, Lingard said:
Politicians and policy-makers [are] the problem; [there is a] need to reassert commitment to common good [and move] from cruel optimism to non-stupid optimism. Teachers and schools are not the problem. Structural and systemic inequalities and policies need to be a focus.
Lingard (2021)