The recent rankings from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report could not have come at a better time. The Liberal party had just executed its second backflip on the Gonski funding, prompting a huge backlash from the public after threatening to abandon the full-funding pledge over the whole 6 years.

Did they make the right move? They certainly made the popular one. There is no doubt, especially now, Australian education standards are falling. Given the end of the mining boom, and the need to transition into a highly educated workforce, this is a problem that both parties should be looking at. It seems, however, that more funding is the solution! At least that’s what the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party would have us believe.

I think we all need to have a look deeper into both the report, and the government statistics before we rush into a solution.

I will preface the following analysis by stating that I like Gonski. One of the biggest problems with Australian governments is that they fail to take into advice the recommendations of the very panels that they commission. This was especially true with the Henry Tax Review, where the overwhelming majority of recommendations were simply ignored. Gonski did attempt to solve some systemic problems in the Australian education system, such as the gap between private and public schools.

However, Gonski does have some flaws, namely being the idea that funding is the main solution. If we look at the results from the PISA report, there has been a major decline in science, mathematics, and reading since 2006 and 2003.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, however, has shown that government spending on education has increased from $51,957 billion in 2006-2007, to $75,855 billion in 2011-12.

That is a huge increase, of nearly 46%. But how could government spending on education increase so much, in the span of just 5 years, and give us a poorer results?

I think it is quite clear that total funding is not the answer. I would argue that how the money is spent matters more, but the reason Australia’s results have been falling is a structural issue. When we look at the PISA report, what do we see?

Shanghai, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan.

What is one thing all these countries have in common?

All of those countries have a very strong societal value on education. Parents push their sons and daughters to do well in school, but students want to do well in school. Students in these countries know that they don’t have an apprenticeship or low-skilled labour job to fall back on. The minimum wages in these countries are also significantly lower than Australia’s putting a higher pressure on student’s to achieve well if they are to have a prosperous life for themselves and their families.

The mining boom has made Australians, and Australian students, lazy. Why would a high school student stress out about his VCE or HSC when he or she has a well payed tradie job lined up? Why would a student worry about marks, and enter a 4 year university degree when there are low-skilled mining jobs available, with higher wages than what most university graduates currently make? Why would a student stress out about his ATAR when university entrance requirements are falling every year? The economy, itself, has not valued education, so is it surprising that society has followed?

But how do we solve this? As the economy continues to slow down and unemployment rises, education will, undoubtedly, regain its value. As for the government, more funding is simply not the answer. Society and parents have far more of an impact on their children’s marks than a teacher ever could. The government, however, can still make changes, but we must recognize that funding-related or not, the effect that these modifications have on students will be marginal.

We have to resist the notion that more funding is good for the education system. It is merely a lazy excuse to ignore systemic problems with both societal attitudes towards education, and the structure of the education system itself. The only way that we can truly realise a greater quality of education for Australians is to acknowledge that the government can’t solve everything for us, and sometimes, we just need to buckle down and study harder.