Dud teachers? Definitely no dud teachers here but have a look over there.

* A version of this article appeared in the Courier Mail, Friday 25 March 2022

The Acting Federal Minister for Education, Stuart Robert, made an extraordinary comment at a gathering of independent schools in the ACT earlier this month.

Robert intimated that the key reason for Australia’s “plummeting performance in the international education benchmark tests was the fault of the bottom 10 per cent of teachers”. But he assured independent school leaders he was not talking about their schools because, “they did not accept dud teachers.”

Let’s ignore his contestable comment about international benchmark tests being the most important metric (but if you want to hear a view on this click here) and focus on his ‘dud’ teachers comment. What an incredibly provocative thing to say! Many of those in the education sector raised an eyebrow, to say the least.

PISA rankings over the past two decades or so is "the worst invention in education in the 21st century." Professor Yong Zhao

The State education sector has some amazing teachers working for it. My sister is one of them. She has worked in some of the toughest regional schools teaching mathematics for twenty-odd years. She knows how hard it can be for the most vulnerable, disadvantaged at-risk students to even turn up to school, let alone pass. Yet, each day she works hard to help them get an education that they deserve. My sister is just one of thousands of teachers in all sectors who, day in, day out, commit themselves to the education of people they believe in. Extraordinary teachers—the majority.

Yet, in my sister’s school there are some dud teachers and, in news for the Acting Minister, there are even dud teachers in independent schools. I’m sure there are a few dud principals as well.

However, you will find dud employees in every workplace. There will be dud employees in corporations and, dare I say it, in politics too. Every workplace has high and under achievers

But one swallow doth not a summer make. A few underperformers don’t drag down their whole company or industry. One bad accountant doesn’t mean the Australian accounting sector is broken. 

Yes, dud teachers and principals do need to be addressed but you cannot blame Australia’s slipping performance on international tests on a small percentage of teachers.

Anyone who understands education knows schooling is a complex system (and to be fair to the Minister, he did acknowledge this in his speech). There are a huge number of variables that have an impact on a student’s ability to learn: the values of the community they come from, their family background, their socio-economic status, their individual learning needs, the curriculum, the quality of the principal, the culture of the school they attend, the behaviour of students, the quality of the teacher/s, the resources available to the school, the bureaucracy and government policy, etc.

To the Minister I say, yes, do something about the quality of teaching in schools but pulling on one single lever expecting a miraculous result is simply naive.

I wouldn’t say the system is broken, but it does need adjusting for today’s world. It needs a bit of tuning. But as you would tune a car, you need to attend to all the components of the system to make sure things are running at their optimum.