The influence of student background

Student and school background as influences upon educational achievements of students have almost been relegated to insignificance in the past few years in the public arena.

Empirical data has shown for many years that there are significant trends in the achievements of students from various backgrounds (low SES, non-English-speaking, Indigenous) that are misaligned with those of students from what might be called dominant cultural backgrounds. The National Goals for Schooling in Australia (MCEETYA, 1999) recognise that students from these groups are in need of attention (well, implicitly, through aiming to improve the eductaional outcomes of these students in particular, as well as others). The National Goals recognise that there are inequalities that exist in eductaion.

However, the education-politics nexus is somewhere where this seems to be conveniently ignored. For example, Richard Teese, in 2004, at the annual AARE (Australian Association for Research in Education) gave the Radford Lecture. In this lecture, Professor Teese explained how at the point where education meets with politics and the media, the issue of students' social class, has been ignored, or obviously discounted.

Brendan Nelson, former Minister for Education, published a speech in 2004 in which he quite explicitly uses the work of Ken Rowe to express his adherence to policies which focus on improving teaching quality and NOT paying attention to 'left-wing ideologues' who claim that inequality exists because of student backgrounds. This is a particularly disturbing in light of the myriad of research findings supporting otherwise. Nelson's conclusions support the importance of teacher quality as paramount to student achievement over and above student backgrounds.

I would never discount the importance of teacher quality, but I do discount the simplistic interpretation of this. Student backgrounds do matter. Teacher quality does matter.

But, how teachers deal with students' backgrounds matters more. I would only call someone a good quality teacher if they understood the implications of student backgrounds on their education, and effectively worked towards addressing these.