Australia: Simple solution to STEM teacher shortage

Both ideas put forward below have great merit but they do not exhaust the possibilities.  Another idea is to make teaching into more attractive work than it is today.  It seems fairly likely that a fair percentage of mathematically talented people are fairly nerdy types and they would be very much pushed away by the boisterous and occasionally violent classrooms that greet government school teachers today.  Almost all teachers report problems with indiscipline and it is a major reason reported for teacher turnover.

So it is a problem generally, not only for maths teachers and solving it in general would help bring back mathematical enthusiasts who have been deterred from teaching in the first place.

And both the source and the solution for indiscipline are historically as clear as day.  Leftist ideas that forbid physical punishment are the fons et origo of contemporary problems. The few disciplinary options that are now available to head teachers are plainly insufficient.  The orderly classrooms of yesteryear are now rare.  As a result, education for all is now regularly disrupted.  As usual, Leftist ideas have proved destructive.

So physical punishment needs to be an option again.  It was until recently.  I remember it myself. So it can clearly be an option again. It would require a revised legal framework but it would substantially fix education, including STEM education


Faced with the shortage of qualified teachers for science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) subjects, the federal government recently announced its intention of solving this problem - but it is a state and territory issue.

Alan Finkel, Australia's Chief Scientist, delivered an excellent speech last week extolling the importance of teaching rigorous content knowledge in STEM subjects. He identified the problem of many student arriving at university to study STEM-related degrees without the necessary foundations. Clearly, we need to improve the quality of maths and science teaching across the school system.

But it is difficult to attract science and maths graduates to the teaching profession. Approximately 20% of Years 7-10 science and maths teachers in Australia do not have any university qualification in their subjects.

One straightforward idea to encourage STEM graduates to become teachers - which CIS has been advocating for many years - is to allow differential, market-driven pay rates for teachers depending on the demand for qualified teachers in their subjects.

This isn't like the simplistic `pay all teachers more' or `introduce performance-based pay' solutions.

Rather, teacher salaries should be higher or lower depending on whether there is an oversupply or undersupply of teachers in the subject. For example, if there is an oversupply of history teachers and an undersupply of science teachers, then schools should be able to pay science teachers relatively more.

While this might seem an absolute no-brainer, it is surprisingly controversial. Education unions tend to oppose differential pay rates, which helps explain why we continue to have set teacher salaries that only vary with experience and expertise, and not with subject area. As long as this is the case, it is very hard to see an end to Australia's STEM woes.

The truth is maths, engineering, and science graduates tend to be in demand by many employers, and so they have to forgo relatively high-paying jobs to go into teaching.

Another impediment for STEM graduates becoming teachers is that they must take two years off paid work to do a Master of Teaching. Until recently, it was possible to do a one-year Graduate Diploma of Education instead.

The benefits of a Masters compared to a Diploma are arguable - and university teacher education degrees often don't equip teaching graduates with evidence-based practices. So it is hard to argue that STEM graduates should have to do a further two years of full-time study to become qualified teachers.

Introducing differential teacher pay rates for STEM teachers won't solve the problem overnight, but there seem to be few other viable options.

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Time to Junk Racial Quotas in Higher Education

“It’s time for enlightened America to hit reset on affirmative action once and for all,” writes Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter in The American Interest. By affirmative action, of course, he means the racial quotas and preferences that most selective college and university admissions departments employ.

“The reason America can never truly come together in understanding racial preferences is not benighted racism rearing its head as always,” he goes on. “It’s because the rationales simply no longer make any damned sense.” Forty years ago, they were arguably needed to reverse anti-black discrimination. Today, beneficiaries tend to come from upscale households or immigrant families never subject to discrimination here.

The weakness of the case in favor of racial quotas and preferences — which are literally racial discrimination, otherwise banned by the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — is illustrated in a Washington Post column by the thoughtful liberal Charles Lane subtitled “why restart the war?”

Lane doesn’t bother to defend this form of racial discrimination as a good thing. He just says that Donald Trump doesn’t oppose it and most of his voters don’t particularly care about it. On this issue, unlike many others, he’s ready to accept Trump’s and his followers’ priorities.

His equally thoughtful colleague Megan McArdle, assuming that ending quotas would reduce black and Hispanic numbers at selective schools, adds a curious defense of the status quo: “Elite institutions that systematically and markedly differ from the general population create a gaping social wound that never heals.” Really?

Our four most recent presidents, like eight of their predecessors, earned degrees at Harvard University or Yale University (both for George W. Bush). Our history has been far less blighted than Asia’s or Europe’s by resentment at or persecution of what Yale Law professor Amy Chua calls “market-dominant minorities.” Americans don’t much mind people of unusual ethnicity earning success by merit, whether in the National Basketball Association or in Nobel Prizes.

But pushing the case against racial quotas and preferences is the increasingly glaring contest between elite institutional practice and constitutional principle. “Governmental use of race must have a logical end point,” then-Justice Sandra O'Connor wrote Grutter v. Bollinger, allowing racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School. “We expect that 25?years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” That was in 2003. Ten years left to go.

It may come sooner. Earlier this month, the Trump administration Education and Justice Departments withdrew six possibly illegal guidance letters issued to colleges and universities by their Obama administration predecessors, encouraging racial discrimination in admissions.

Harvard faces a lawsuit from Asian-American plaintiffs charging it with racial discrimination against Asian-Americans similar to its 1920s to 1950s discrimination against Jews. Discovery has revealed that Asian-American applicants with high test scores, grades and extracurriculars are regularly rated low on “positive personality.” Not the kind we want in our country club.

For me, the clinching argument against racial discrimination in admissions is not how it hurts Asians or, to a much lesser extent, whites, but how it hurts the intended beneficiaries. As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor showed in their 2012 book “Mismatch,” and as subsequent research has confirmed, black and Hispanic students who are less well-prepared than their schoolmates tend to struggle with instruction pitched to others more advanced, and are more likely to shun science and tech courses and drop out without degrees.

The case for racial quotas and preferences rests heavily on the notion of “disparate impact” enunciated by the Supreme Court in the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power Co. The justices, familiar then with how Southern segregationists dissembled and disguised racial discrimination, ruled that differences between whites’ and blacks’ performance on seemingly race-neutral tests is evidence of illicit discrimination.

Similarly, as McArdle notes, segregation imposed by state law and sanctioned violence was still familiar when the Supreme Court allowed racially discriminatory admissions for “diversity” in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. That was 40 years go.

The fact is that a society as diverse and dynamic as America always has been and will have disparate impact of all kinds, sometimes the result of racial, ethnic or religious discrimination, more often the result of diverse interests, traditions, goals and skills. Trying to get the racial and ethnic balance in every occupational and educational group reflective of the total population is a fool’s errand.

Racial quotas and preferences have fostered a culture of dishonesty in higher education. Time to junk them and just be fair.

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UK: Report on religion in schools 'an attack on Catholicism'

The Catholic Education Service (CES) and the Bishop with special responsibility for religious education have reacted with outrage at a new pamphlet calling for urgent reform of religion in schools in England and Wales, written by former Home Secretary Charles Clarke and Professor Linda Woodhead and launched at the House of Commons on 17 July.

Entitled 'A New Settlement Revised: Religion and Belief in Schools' the 31-page booklet of recommendations is a bid to update the laws governing religion in schools from the Education Act of 1944 and bring them into line with Britain’s current religious and cultural landscape in which a majority of people say they have no religion.

However, a CES spokesperson said they are “not happy” and described the pamphlet as “a direct attack on the Catholic Church” and “a fundamental attack on religious liberty.”

Of particular concern to the CES is the call for a national syllabus for RE, which the authors say should be determined nationally and not locally to “raise the academic standard of religious education” and stop schools regarding good teaching of RE as “an irksome appendage to the rest of school life”. They also advise the name of the subject could be changed to “Religion, Beliefs and Values”. The CES, which acts on behalf of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference to support Catholic education, said this will result in RE being taught as “an exclusively sociological subject” and will mean “the Anglican state dictating their version of Catholicism.”

“It will also strip the Bishops of their right to set the curriculum – it’s incredibly misguided”, continued the CES spokesperson.

Bishop of Leeds, Marcus Stock, who is also on the committee for education and formation with special responsibility for religious Education, told the Tablet that the recommendations are “unacceptable for two reasons".

"Firstly, that the State can impose a national RE curriculum, which would dictate what the Church is required to teach in Catholic schools. Secondly, the curriculum they suggest contains no theological content, which is at the core of Catholic RE,” he said.

He continued: “We accept there is a need to improve RE in all schools and Catholic teachers and academics have been actively contributing to this discussion, producing suggestions that would work within the plurality in our country’s schools sector, allowing for all schools to choose between RE as a theological discipline and Religious Studies as a sociological discipline.”

“Catholic schools are the most successful providers of Religious Education in the country. This is because we take it seriously as a rigorous, theological academic subject. However, rather than look at the sector that does it the best they have opted for a reductionist approach which is exclusively sociological and has no consensus amongst RE professionals.”

In terms of faith schools, the pamphlet says Catholic and other faith schools should still be able to give priority to children of faith first “where possible” with the caveat that the admissions policy and school ethos are transparent. It added that they should make greater attempts to “promote inclusivity” and that “churches and other bodies should make strong and continued progress in reducing the numbers of their schools where faith is a criterion for admission.”

The CES spokesperson said: “There’s no appetite for getting rid of faith schools as they produce great results. They can’t shut them down but this is a backhanded way of taking the Catholic out of Catholic schools.”

The pamphlet follows the authors’ original document – 'A New Settlement – Religion and Belief in Schools in 2015'. It incorporates further research and debate carried out by the Westminster Faith Debates and the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Research programme supported by Lancaster University.

The CES said: “We made it clear when they were compiling the report that we were not happy [with what its authors were suggesting]. They have launched this in full knowledge it would be unacceptable to us”.

Professor Linda Woodhead said: “Following the launch we will be  carrying out more research on the state of religion in schools, and seeking the widest possible support for the needed changes amongst government and across the faith communities and other key constituencies.”

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