ACARA vs. IPA

A few weeks ago, Colleen Harkin, “research fellow” and Education Thingo at the Institute of Public Affairs, did a quick LinkedIn post, comparing the “3500 pages” of the Australian Mathematics Curriculum to the “about 80 pages” of the Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum. Harkin included a “compare the pair” photo:

It is not clear that anybody paid much attention to Harkin’s post, but a week ago the Sky Clowns decided to amplify the thing. That seemed to be enough to spur The Age to check out the IPA’s slightly implausible claim. A couple days ago, The Age published a brief article, detailing Harkin’s claim and then slapping it down:

Astounding. Shocking. Also untrue, according to the body that writes the curriculum. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority says the foundation-to-year-10 [ugh] maths curriculum is only 273 pages long, including optional resources.

The core content – the achievement standards and content descriptions – comes in at a whopping 33 pages.

Who are you backing? Godzilla or Mothra?

Harkin’s claim is, of course, utter nonsense and The Age + ACARA were right to slap it down. But let’s take this step by step.

To begin, it is not clear that “only” is the most appropriate qualifier for a 273-page curriculum. It is also not clear where ACARA got that “273”. The Age article includes no links, perhaps because there were no links for ACARA to provide. ACARA’s downloads page links to a number of mathematics curriculum files but none of the files is seemingly the whole box and dice. None of the documents is huge, but presumably the IPA went scavenging through sample materials and the Curriculum’s twenty-five other dimensions and so on, which is how they got to thousands of pages. Whatever. Let’s get to the basic bones.

ACARA links to a document, Mathematics: Scope and sequence F–10 (W,I).  This document contains just the achievement standards and content descriptions, and so is presumably the “core content” to which The Age refers. The document is 39 pages rather than 33, but whatever. Precision arithmetic has never been ACARA’s strong suit. Whichever number, should we describe that 39/33 as “whopping”, or “only”? It depends how we measure.

It is natural to compare the Australian curriculum, as Harkin does, to the Singaporean curriculum, which everyone seems to agree is sane. The comparison is a little difficult, however, because Singaporean secondary schooling has various pathways. It is easier and it suffices to compare Australia’s F-6 curriculum to Singapore’s 1-6 curriculum.*

The “core content” of Australia’s F-6 curriculum runs to 24 (double column) pages. Adding in the elaborations (W,I), which then includes the Indigenous stuff et al, but not the various Tolstoy-length sermons, takes the F-6 curriculum to 76 pages. For the sake of comparison, the Singapore 1-6 curriculum is 49 pages. This includes two pathways for Primary 5 and Primary 6, the regular curriculum and the simpler, “Foundation” curriculum. Ignoring the Foundation path, the Singaporean primary curriculum is then 43 pages.

Now, how do we compare? First, the Singaporean curriculum contains a number of non-“syllabus” sections: an introduction (6 pages); a conceptual overview of mathematics and doing mathematics, on themes and “big ideas” (10 pages); pedagogy (5 pages); and assessment (6 pages). The actual Singapore syllabus, the itemisation of content, comprises 16 pages.

So, comparing bare bones to bare bones, Singapore 1-6 is two-thirds the pages of Australia F-6. This ratio, although significant, does not begin to convey the cleanness of Singapore’s curriculum and the bloatedness of Australia’s, even just for the content. We’ll get to that, but first, let’s compare flesh to flesh.

Singapore’s curriculum document is clean, with just a few clearly distinguished and well-presented sections. Australia’s curriculum, which is not even a document, is a nightmare. The website is an unnavigable labyrinth of God Knows What intermingled with Who Cares. It is a disaster, and everybody knows it is a disaster except for ACARA and, seemingly, a couple of Age reporters.

Harkin scored an idiotic own goal with her absurd claim about the thousands of pages of the Australian mathematics curriculum, and she scored another with claims that this length was primarily due to the Indigenous stuff and “social justice” and the like. It is all nonsense. But it is not nonsense that the Australian curriculum is a bloated, unworkable mess. Harkin comes out of this looking pretty silly, but not nearly as silly as the swallow-anything Age reporters.

Harkin was fundamentally right and The Age was fundamentally wrong, but they were both fundamentally off the main point. Yes, that the Australian curriculum as a delivered website is useless is a very big problem. Obviously. It is not nearly as big a problem, however, as the fact that substance of the Australian curriculum, the content, is appalling.

Let’s consider just one example: addition and subtraction at Year 2.** The Australian curriculum has no clearly labelled subsection, but the following are the directly relevant content descriptors (which appear on different pages):

add and subtract one- and two-digit numbers, representing problems using number sentences and solve using part-part-whole reasoning and a variety of calculation strategies (AC9M2N04)

recall and demonstrate proficiency with addition facts to 20; extend and apply facts to develop related subtraction facts  (AC9M2A02)

If you glance at it sideways, you can almost see what is being asked for, but then you look at it straight on and you realise you have no idea. What does “representing problems” mean, or “a variety of calculation strategies”? How does “[be able to] recall” differ from “demonstrate proficiency with”? How does one “extend and apply” which “facts”? At this stage, the confused and desperate primary teacher delves into the elaborations, hoping to find some clarification, and they are never heard from again.

How does Singapore do it? They have a clearly labelled subsection, Addition and Subtraction, with two descriptors:

2.1 addition and subtraction algorithms (up to 3 digits)

2.2 mental calculation involving addition and subtraction of a 3-digit number and ones/tens/hundreds

That’s it. That’s all the Singapore guys write and that’s all they need to write. In brief, the Year 2 kid should be able to add 345 + 287 on paper and be able to add 345 + 80 in their head, with corresponding abilities for subtraction.

There are three things to note here. First, the Singaporean curriculum is worded much, much more clearly than the Australian curriculum. Secondly, what the Singaporean curriculum is requiring of the kids is much, much clearer than what the Australian curriculum requires. Thirdly, and by a mile most important, the standard of the Singapore curriculum, the level it is requiring of the kids, is much more advanced than the Australian standard.***

It is great that IPA is attacking ACARA’s appalling curriculum. It is just a shame that they are so ideologically blinkered and so amateurishly manipulative, and thus so bad at it. And it is a real shame that The Age has absolutely no clue that, in attacking Mothra, they are also defending Godzilla.

 

*) Singapore has no Foundation year, but does plenty of mathematics in their “pre-school”. Singapore Primary 1 students are roughly the same age as Australian Year 1 students.

**) For more such comparisons, see this and this and this.

***) For more on the addition-subtraction thing, see this, and for the general awfulness of the Australian curriculum, see this and this.