Top down or bottom up?

How do you prefer educational change to happen?

---

As Australian state governments have started to embrace the science of learning, and as bodies such as the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) have supported this process with practical research-based guidance, Australian education academics have discovered a newfound dislike of top-down policy initiatives.

In two recent posts for the Australian Association for Research in Education’s (AARE) blog (here and here) that I mentioned in my most recent Curios, academics and teacher trainers Rachael Dwyer, Brad Fuller and James Humberstone, rage against what they see collectively as a ‘top-down’ approach:

“The Australian Government promotes the importance of critical thinking. But at the same time, AERO recommends strengthening evidence-based practice through highly prescriptive approaches to teaching. It mirrors the same top-down, narrow interpretation of ‘what works’ that characterises AERO’s materials.”

They essentially argue that evidence-based practice in medicine bubbled up from practitioners, whereas in education, it is being imposed from above by the Australian state and federal governments and bodies such as AERO. They ask whether AERO’s explainers are “a new avenue for governments to further intrude into the classroom.”

Firstly, where have they been? The science of learning movement has been a true grassroots movement for at least a decade in Australia. Where were these academics when I was trying to find schools to host a researchED event back in 2017 or when we ran out of lunch in Sydney in 2022? Have they been paying attention to bloggers? Take a look at my old WordPress site, for example, which was read in some policy circles, and you’ll see I have been plugging away at this for years.

I seem to remember a few academics engaging briefly in blogging in the late 2010s before retreating, claiming their time was too precious to write articles without guaranteed payment or the potential to improve their citation score. Their priorities. Their loss.

If it’s become ‘top-down’ now then that’s simply because while these academics were not paying attention, science of learning advocates won the argument. It’s because we had stronger evidence and sounder logic to draw upon. This is not a surprise when faced with ‘Neoliberalism! Positivism! Oppression! Boo!’ on the other side. A cacophony of slogans, no matter how indignantly expressed, convinces nobody but the already converted.

No, what indignant academics mean when they claim developments are being imposed on teachers from above is that this new policy direction has not come from them. And they’re sore about that.

The second point is, so what? Does it matter whether a policy bubbles up from below or is directed from above? Surely what matters is whether it is the right policy? As usual, science of learning sceptics seem determined to miss the main point as they throw up smokescreens and diversions.

I suppose one potential advantage to a bottom-up approach might be that it does not need to become a policy, as such. Instead, different schools and teachers could potentially choose to implement ideas in different ways. Our overly large, monolithic state education departments make this distinction difficult. Even with some notional level of independence, schools will look to the centre for direction and, for its part, the centre will look to justify its existence and to snuff out any potential sources of political embarrassment. However, let’s carry this idea through and imagine what a decentralised, bottom-up education system might look like. Would education academics approve?

One model is England. Through decentralisation and policy experimentation, England has developed a system of secondary education largely built around multi-academy trusts. These groups of government schools are free from local government control and instead receive grants directly from central government. A new bill sadly plans to change this but, at present, these schools are not required to follow the national curriculum and have the ability to hire teachers without formal teaching qualifications.

In Australia, even fee-charging independent schools have to follow the unambitious and uninspired Australian Curriculum and even independent schools are at the mercy of teacher accreditation bodies such as the Victorian Institute of Teachers, with its byzantine rules and boulder-like inertia. I would welcome freedom from such restraints, not just for independent schools but for all schools. Perhaps we could replicate the academies model from England and develop our own versions of multi-academy trusts which could then develop their own bottom-up responses to the specific contexts they operate in.

Instead of freaking out about Western Australia accrediting teachers with a single year teaching course and then having to honour that accreditation in other states, ministers could leave it up to schools to decide who they employ. With the proviso that all teachers pass a rigorous police check and enhanced safety check for working with children, individual schools could decide whether to hire teachers with a two-year masters degree, a one-year diploma or no teaching qualification at all. The market would then show us the true value of teacher education courses. This would be enlightening and a welcome bottom-up response to free us from an overbearing centre.

Somehow, I suspect that education academics would not be in favour of this kind of freedom from top-down control. If so, that demonstrates that this argument is just a rhetorical device rather than a matter of deeply held conviction.

Perhaps top-down control is absolutely fine when it forces teachers to comply with the orthodoxies that rule university education faculties and when it provides those faculties with a guaranteed captive supply of fee-paying, debt-ridden students.

This post was inspired by Subscriber Stan’s comment on my recent Curios. Thank you, Stan.