Red Rag

S Whiplash pointed out that my post on values education misrepresented a government-commissioned study. The Values Education Study was about how to improve values education, rather than an analysis of values education as it stands today. Participating schools were given a grant to engage in a values education project, and report on their progress. However, that doesn’t mean the study is of no use.

The report makes it clear that most of the schools — including the government schools — already had values education programs in place. Harristown State School is one particularly striking example (p113):

Having pursued values education for five years, Harristown State was able to collect a degree of quantitative data over the whole period, rather than just the project time, using the Education Queensland opinion surveys. This has revealed a very positive view of the school amongst teachers, parents and students, and especially of the quality of relationships which the school seeks to foster…

Many of the schools used the grant to analyse programs that were already running, and made explicit the values that underpin them; for example:

The attempt by Corio Bay Senior College [a state school] to identify the core values underpinning its Advocacy Programme which has been running successfully for four years, surfaced a set of ‘constituent values’ comprising ‘an ethic of care (the values underlying personal relationships…), acceptance (nonjudgmentalism), fairness, and informality’. Beyond this, it was clear that all groups in the school ‘placed some value on structural rather than personal values: goal setting, organisational skills and course and career guidance’; pointing again to the close link many schools and clusters sought to establish between values education and programmes designed to build students’ resilience, responsibility, independence, connectedness to school, engagement and feelings of self-confidence and self-esteem. (p130)

In fact, the report remarks that “[a]n effort to articulate the values that drive the school, so they are explicit rather than implicit, was arguably one of the most common focuses of schools and clusters involved in the Values Education Study.”

Mr Whiplash complained that the list I provided of ten values taught in public and private schools were just suggestions for the future. It is true that the report suggests that the list “be considered as a ‘discussion starter’ in Australian schools, when working with their school communities on values education”, but it also indicated that the list was merely a succinct statement of the values currently being taught — it states that the list “emerged from Australian school communities.” In other words, the “broadly representative” schools that participated in the study already shared these ten values, which they recommend other schools use as a basis for analysing their own values.

The report also states that the various public education authorities are committed to values education. Apart from the fact that “[v]alues statements abound in policy documents, curriculum programmes, and reports”, a recent national agreement on values education was noted:

All key stakeholders In the Australian education context have a strong commitment to values education. This is most notably reflected in the National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century, the Adelaide Declaration by all education ministers in 1999.

(That the federal government would use rhetoric about school values as a divisive election issue is quite disturbing when it has already begun to collaborate with the states in developing a national approach.)

The study may not touch precisely on the topic at hand, but it certainly gives us a pretty good indication that the values schools consider important are pretty much the same all over the country, in the public and private sectors. Its literature review also concurs with my assessment (and that of Professor Teese, referred to in my earlier post) that it is the schools’ success in teaching that accounts for any difference.

Significantly, no attempt has been made by John Howard, Tony Abott or indeed Mr Whiplash to provide empirical evidence to back up their claims. Neither has John Anderson, but the Values Education Study’s survey indicates that teachers consider conservation values to be more important than do parents or teachers. There’s nothing to suggest that is limited to public schools, though. S Whiplash has offered some anecdotal evidence that classroom behaviour is affecting public schools, but as I’ve said before, I reckon that is an issue of discipline more than values.

Dave Ricardo offers a pretty good formulation:

Private schools teach the same values, by and large, as state schools, perhaps apart from the very small number of private schools that take religion seriously. They teach the same curriculum. The only substantial difference is that private schools can more easily get rid of badly behaved students and poorly performing teachers, and of course they are usually much better resourced.

Aside: It seems that public schools are taking a keen interest in the debate. My local highschool, Greenwood High, has a sign out the front that announces upcoming events — exam periods, concerts, etc. This is how it looks at the moment: