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Gillard’s 'best practice' mantra

By Mike Williss - posted Thursday, 28 January 2010


“… our new transparency measures will use this information so that when we see great practice, great teachers, great school leadership, a school that’s really making a difference we can celebrate that achievement and we can share that best practice ... school by school, this information is vital to making sure we know where best practice is.” Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, Press conference, Brisbane, January 19 2010.

“… we are shining a light on excellence and best practice so that it can be shared.” Gillard, St Paul’s College press conference January 20, 2010.

“Our My School website … You can look at your own child’s local school and really powerfully you can compare it to schools around the country that serve similar sorts of kids and that’s going to enable us to identify best practice and share it.”

“… what the website allows, we will see some schools are doing better for those kids, and the best practice in those schools can be shared.” Gillard, radio interview, January 21, 2010.

Quite apart from the question of why the “best practice” discovery process needs to be pursued on a government-supported website instead of through collaborative and peer-reviewed professional processes, there is a worrying aspect to the invocation of the “best practice” mantra.

That worry has been powerfully articulated in the health profession context by an article in the latest New York Review of Books.

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Harvard University Chair of Medicine Dr Jerome Groopman examines the options available to the Obama administration in achieving the goals of its current health care legislation. They basically boil down to the choice between “best practice” being mandated or suggested.

He clearly favours the latter, and decries legislative mandate: “Doctors and hospitals that follow ‘best practices,’ as defined by government-approved standards, are to receive more money and favourable public assessments. Those who deviate from federal standards would suffer financial loss and would be designated as providers of poor care.”

He decries it because he has a problem with the concept of “best practice”: “Over the past decade, federal ‘choice architects’ - i.e. doctors and other experts acting for the government and making use of research on comparative effectiveness - have repeatedly identified ‘best practices,’ only to have them shown to be ineffective or even deleterious.”

He should know, because he self-critically includes examples of his own making, among others, showing how “best practice” has proven ineffective or backfired in medical application.

He says one of the reasons for the “repeated failures of expert panels to identify and validate ‘best practice’” is that they “did not distinguish between medical practices that can be standardized and not significantly altered by the condition of the individual patient, and those that must be adapted to a particular person.”

He adds that treatment is “too often inadequate” when we “impose a single ‘best practice’ on a complex malady”.

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He goes on to identify three flaws in formulating “best practices”:

  • “‘overconfidence bias’ by which we overestimate our ability to analyse information, make accurate estimates, and project outcome”;
  • “‘confirmation bias’ - the tendency to discount contradictory data, staying wed to assumptions despite conflicting evidence”;
  • “the ‘focussing illusion’ which occurs when, basing our predictions on a single change in the status quo, we mistakenly forecast dramatic effects on an overall condition”.

Is any of this relevant to the pursuit of “best practice” in an Australian educational context?

Gillard is wedded to the identification of “best practice” and sharing it with “underperforming” schools and teachers.

It is clear that her My School website with its so-called “rich information” enabling “comparative effectiveness” will be instrumental in the public identification of “best practice”. Yet the only performance measurements will be the NAPLAN (numeracy and literacy) results of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 classes. These results will be “rich” because they will be contextualised with reference to school socio-economic data, student attendance figures, numbers of teachers and other staff. But even with this contextualisation, this “enrichment”, the NAPLAN results remain snapshots of only a part of what constitutes school effectiveness. They are not even good snapshots of what they purport to test i.e. literacy and numeracy. For ease of marking they are mainly in the form of multiple choice questions, so students are not required to submit the processes that led them to arrive at a particular mathematical solution, nor are they required to explain or justify responses to reading stimuli. Multiple choice is easier and quicker (therefore cheaper) to mark, and lends itself easily to conversion into a NAPLAN score. There is a narrative or story writing component, but no opportunity for drafting or for discussion with a teacher on a finished piece. The task lacks ownership and authenticity.

Surely it is an “overconfidence bias” on the part of the Deputy Prime Minister that leads her to believe that such thin material as NAPLAN results will lead to the identification of “best practice”.

It is also clear that Gillard believes that “underperformance” by teachers and schools is the single most important obstacle to “every child in every school” getting a world class education. She has taken to quoting the work of New Zealander Professor John Hattie whose research identifies teacher quality as “the single greatest in-school influence on student engagement and influence”. What she doesn’t point out is his important caveat that there may be more important out-of-school influences that he chose not to look at in his study: his book isn't about “what cannot be influenced in schools - thus critical discussions about class, poverty, resources in families, health in families, and nutrition are not included - this is NOT because they are unimportant, indeed they may be more important than many of the issues discussed in this book. It is just that I have not included these topics in my orbit.”

Thus Gillard may be said to suffer from what Groopman describes as the “Pygmalion complex”, and she manifests it with trite throwaways like “demography is not destiny … children from the poorest and most difficult backgrounds can learn and achieve and if they fail to do so, we the adults have let them down”. In this case, “we, the adults” are “underperforming teachers”.

Hence her “focussing illusion” of relying on a “single change in the status quo”, namely, teacher quality. Hence her quest for “best practices” to be imposed by “turnaround teams”, by Teach for Australia appointees, by the lure of six-figure salaries for “best” teachers to go to “underperforming schools”. And, given that learning is often a complex process subject to multiple influences with some, as noted by Hattie, likely to be more important than teacher quality, is she not in danger of “confirmation bias”, preferring her own preconceptions to “conflicting evidence”?

To make matters worse, both Gillard and Rudd have clearly opted for mandated paths to “performance” improvement, with financial incentives on the one hand, and talk of replacing “underperforming” principals and senior staff on the other.

It is quite remarkable, in my experience, that teachers continue to have a thirst for professional development despite widespread cynicism - shared with many parents - about the mania of some decision-makers for following fads from overseas. Invariably these fads came dressed in the emperor’s clothes of “best practice”.

Generally teachers are indifferent to or hostile towards mandated professional development in departmental policies: they want quality professional development that helps them improve student learning outcomes, professional development that raises their proficiency as educational practitioners.

Gillard’s “best practice” mantra may seem to offer what teachers want - help to improve their practice - but her method of identifying it, her deficit view that equates poor student learning outcomes with teacher and school “performance”, and her intransigence and commandism all seem to indicate that she does not really understand a term - “best practice” - that is so prominent within her rhetoric.

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About the Author

Mike Williss is a teacher of Chinese in South Australia. After 32 years in the classroom , he now works for the Australian Education Union in South Australia.

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