As if relishing his power to demoralise teachers and take the crisis in schools to new lows, Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll has joined the other state and federal education ministers throwing their weight behind the right wing of the reading wars.
In June, Carroll announced to the media that the solution to declining literacy test scores was mandatory “systematic synthetic phonics” and “explicit teaching”.
Systematic synthetic phonics is a highly programmatic method of “instructing” children to read, that prioritises abstract decoding skills, divorced from meaningful and engaging literature.
Some principals of public primary schools in Melbourne who have already adopted this model have ditched picture books, and only let children choose books from the library to read for pleasure “if we are satisfied they know all the 44 phonemes in the language”.
To the relief, and surprise, of many union members, the Australian Education Union (AEU) Victoria immediately advised members not to comply with the minister’s announcement.
It condemned the new policy as a manoeuvre that distracted from the chronic underfunding of public schools and that would result in “more workload, less autonomy, and less respect for the profession (and) will simply drive more people to leave”.
Literacy rates cannot be divorced from class. As the government’s own testing regime shows, students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are 10 times more likely to have reading skills below the previously-used NAPLAN “national minimum standard” than students from the most advantaged backgrounds.
One in six children are living in poverty in Victoria and the vast majority of these children are educated in the severely underfunded public school system.
The Victorian state government funds public schools at only 65.9 per cent instead of the current state government benchmark of 80 per cent of the School Resource Standard.
Related to this underfunding is the staffing crisis, exacerbated by below-inflation wage rises, with the Victorian government predicting a shortfall of more than 5000 teachers over the next four years. Areas with highest teacher vacancy rates correlate with the highest poverty rates.
But literacy and learning is also political. Systematic synthetic phonics and the prioritisation of “explicit instruction” is the reassertion of an ardently conservative educational philosophy that assumes the learner receives the standard set of knowledge passively, and that education programs need ever more standardisation and tests.
The elevation of these strategies is of a piece with Federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s plan to enforce mandatory core content for teacher education.
The right-wing Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies reliably repeat their “back to basics” mantra whenever students and teachers start using classrooms to discuss Palestine, climate change or anything that deviates from ruling class interests.
Systematic synthetic phonics requires the distortion of language and texts into flattened chunks to be uploaded into the student, and requires the teacher to plough through a program, not to be “distracted” (responsive) to the literacy needs and interests of their class.
It denies students a role as investigators or meaning makers. Success is measured in Year 1 standardised tests that ask students to “read” nonsense words, like “jound”, to show that they aren’t relying on their recognition of actually meaningful words.
And despite the repetition of unequivocal claims that systematic synthetic phonics “works”, there is no shortage of data from the US that show no improvement to reading scores where it has been implemented.
Unsurprisingly, reading scores declined as much as 50 per cent where culturally responsive practices and bilingual whole language models were replaced by mandated English-only phonics instruction for a Navajo Nation school.
And a meta-analysis from the UK concluded: “Our analyses of the PISA data suggest that teaching reading in England has been less successful since the introduction of more emphasis on synthetic phonics … there is little evidence to suggest that a synthetic phonics first-and-foremost orientation to national curricula is likely to be the most effective orientation.”
The AEU’s opposition to Carroll’s announcement was a bolt from the blue for far too many teachers, who have been made to feel individually responsible for the social and educational crises expressed in their classrooms.
The crusaders for the “Science of Reading” phonics have presented themselves as the answer to the neglect of children and even dishonestly argue that they are the true opponents of the edu-businesses selling reading packages that claim to be based on “whole language” learning.
Union leaders faced some backlash from members and by the following Monday a bulletin to members signalled retreat; the union had just been seeking “time to be consulted about what the Minister has announced, the timeline for changes, and the support to be provided”.
It will take campaigning and action to re-establish the power of progressive teacher politics. Teachers and School Staff for Palestine groups contain core rank-and-file leaders who can lead that fight; they know that we cannot let the right dictate to us how to teach, what to teach, or how to distribute the resources to teach with.
By Lucy Honan
