How AERO’s failures fail us all: part one published yesterday

To look at AERO’s teaching model is to wonder whether the organisation is living in some other reality, a world in which there are no students who refuse to go to school, or leave school as soon as they can, or last the distance but leave with not much to show for it, or wag it, or bully and harass or are bullied and harassed, sometimes in the classroom often outside it, or have little or no sense of “belonging” at school or “attachment” to it. Why on this crowded stage is AERO putting the spotlight solely on what the teacher is doing in the classroom? Can teaching be expected to change the whole experience of being at school? Or is that somebody else’s problem?

And what about kinds of knowledge other than formal, out-there, discipline-derived knowledge, the staple that has launched a thousand curriculums — know-how, for example, knowing how to learn, how to work in groups, how to think through complicated life and ethical questions? And what about students’ knowledge of their own capabilities and options? The suspicion arises that what AERO is after is schooling for the poor, for the denizens of the “long tail of attainment,” cheap, narrowed down and dried out, a something that is better than nothing.

AERO is misconceived

As well as misconceiving, AERO is misconceived. Its job is to gather research from up there and packaging it for consumption down below. It wants teaching to be based on research evidence — on just two kinds of research evidence, in fact — as if what teachers and school leaders know from experience, debate and intuition isn’t really knowledge at all, as if it’s research evidence or nothing. That most teachers and others in schools don’t use research evidence very often is taken not as a judgement about priorities but as an “obstacle” to uptake.

AERO claims that “evidence-based practices are the cornerstone of effective teaching” without providing or citing evidence to support the claim. More, it implies that the “how” of teaching is the only thing that teachers should concern themselves with, that teaching and schooling are free of doubts and dilemmas, of messy questions of judgement, decision and purpose.

A deeply hierarchical idea

AERO’s deeply hierarchical idea of the relationship between researchers and practitioners is of a piece with its conception of the relationship between teacher and taught. It is, in fact, the kind of institution that John Hattie feared. “There’s a debate going on about building an evidence institute for teaching,” he told Larsen in 2018. “My fear is that it will become like [America’s] What Works Clearinghouse and people will be employed to take academic research and translate it into easy language for teachers.”

At the risk of an apparent sectarianism, let me suggest that Martin Luther had the necessary idea: the priest should not stand between God and the flock but beside the flock reading God’s Word for themselves and finding their own way to salvation. AERO should stand beside teachers and schools, and it should help them stand beside their students. But that is not what AERO was set up to do.

What is AERO?

Nominally the creation of the nine ministers of education and their departments, AERO is actually the handiwork of the NSW Department of Education, long the bastion of the “traditional” classroom, and Social Ventures Australia, or SVA, an organisation privately funded to “influence governments and policymakers to create large scale impact.”

SVA was much taken by Britain’s Education Endowment Foundation, and pitched to the Commonwealth the many benefits that would flow from an Australian equivalent. The pitch included some words about new things to be learned in new ways but more about a “robust evidence ecosystem” serving the cause of “continuous improvement” that would boost school performance. SVA wanted the new organisation to be independently funded and established through a tendering process. As the proposal made its way through the machinery of the “national approach” it was shorn of the progressive talk along with the independent funding and the creation by tender.

The organisation that emerged is indistinguishable from the NSW Department of Education in its underlying assumptions about “evidence-based teaching,” its “teaching model,” its definition of “evidence,” and its view of the relationship between theory and practice and of the control of schools. AERO’s board is chaired by the former chief executive of the Smith Family, a charity so committed to “explicit teaching” that it has taken ads in the mainstream media to urge its universal adoption. The chief executive is a former senior officer of the NSW department and AERO references the department’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (“the home of education evidence”). AERO’s “partner,” Ochre Education, a not-for-profit provider of “resources [that] support effective, evidence-based practices,” has one “partner” larger than all the rest put together, the NSW Department of Education.

Embedded in its own dogma

AERO is deeply embedded in its own dogma and in the national machinery that was supposed to deliver “top 5 by ’25.” Well, here we are in 2025 and no closer to the top of the OECD’s league tables than we were fifteen years ago when the boast was made. To the contrary, as the former head of Australia’s premier research organisation and of the OECD’s mighty education division concluded recently, inequality is rising, quality is falling, and the system is resistant to reform. What reason is there to expect that another fifteen years doing the same thing will produce a different result?

AERO is not going to go away, but perhaps it can be pressed to lighten up. It should be persuaded, first, to accept that teaching is a sense-making occupation and that schools are sense-making institutions. Schools should not be treated as outlets applying recipes and prescriptions dispensed by AERO or anyone else.

Second, AERO’s evidence should bear on the system in which schools do their work as well as on the schools and their teachers. That should include evidence about whether and how Australia’s schooling system should join schools and teachers as objects of reform.

Rethink the conception of “evidence”

Third, AERO should be pressed to rethink its conception of “evidence.” Schools do and must use many kinds of evidence, including some that they gather formally or informally themselves. Evidence derived from academic research may well be a useful addition to the mix, but that is all. It is — and AERO should say so — provisional and contingent, not altogether different from other kinds of evidence schools use. The contrary idea, that evidence generated by formal academic research is scientific and therefore beyond debate and disagreement is encouraging the gross misconstructions of effectiveness research described by John Hattie.

AERO should also expand the range of academic sources it draws on and the kinds of evidence it embraces, going beyond the “how” to include the “what,” “why” and “whether to” — debates over evidence and evidence-use, and evidence from educational philosophy, sociology, economics and history as well as from that dubious disciple psychology (the source of both the effectiveness paradigm and cognitive load theory) and from beyond the all-too familiar Anglosphere.

The lens must be widened

And, most important of all: while many teachers are no doubt grateful for at least some of AERO’s output, and perhaps particularly for the resources distributed by AERO’s partner, Ochre, those resources go no further than helping teachers do a job in need of a fundamental rethink. The lens must be widened to include the organisation of students’ and teachers’ daily work and the organisation of students’ learning careers as well as what teachers can do in the classroom as it now exists. AERO should identify schools working to organise the curriculum around each students’ intellectual growth and the development of their capacities as individuals and as social beings. It should put those schools in touch with one another, and work with them on a different kind of research, on finding ways through an essential but immensely difficult organisational and intellectual task. •

This is part two of the story by Dean Ashenden on AERO. We published part one yesterday. This was first published in Inside Story. We are republishing with the permission of both Dean Ashenden and of Peter Browne, editor of Inside Story.

Dean Ashenden is a senior honorary fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. He has worked in and around, over decades, as a teacher, academic, commentator and consultant: He is co-author, with Raewyn Connell, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett, of the 1982 classic Making The Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. Unbeaching the Whale: Can Australian schooling be reformed? was published last year.

The Vatican has the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. Australian schooling has AERO.

New, not very important but very symptomatic, the Australian Education Research Organisation fits snugly into the elaborate machinery of Labor’s “national approach” to schooling. As an “evidence intermediary,” its task is to make a certain kind of research finding more available to teachers and schools. But its key sponsors hope it will proclaim the doctrine in a system dependent on prescription, surveillance and compliance.

The doctrine is this: schooling is first and foremost about knowledge; teaching is first and foremost about getting prescribed knowledge into young heads; research has established the relative effectiveness (“effect size”) of teaching techniques and “interventions”; learning science has reinforced this evidence by showing how to “harmonise” teaching with the brain’s learning mechanisms; teaching must be based on evidence supplied by this research.

The faith: that in this way the long slide in the performance of Australian schools will at last be arrested and reversed.

AERO’s “gold standard”

In AERO’s view, though, there is no doctrine or faith. “Gold standard” research into effective teaching and findings on the workings of the brain have established scientific facts, clear and definitive.

Of AERO’s two intellectual pillars, effectiveness research is the much larger and stronger. Long-established and buttressed by a vast literature, it has become the lingua franca of education policy (including the policies promoted by the national approach) and has been absorbed by many teachers. But effectiveness research and its uses have also concerned and sometimes enraged many, including, surprisingly enough, John Hattie.

For many years Hattie has been by far the most influential exponent of the effectiveness idea in Australia, and perhaps around the world. But in a series of conversations with Danish philosopher Steen Nepper Larsen (published as The Purpose of Education in 2018) Hattie looks back over a formidable body of effectiveness research and his own work with schools and involvement in national policymaking to find flaws and limitations in the research itself, and gross misinterpretation and misuse of it by policymakers and schools alike.

Education research has (Hattie says) “privileged” quantitative studies over qualitative, and has been “obsessed” with the technical quality of studies at the expense of their importance and value. The focus of so much effectiveness research on basic outcomes (80–90 per cent of it by Hattie’s estimate) has been salutary, but has also obscured much of what schools do and should do.

“I want more,” Hattie says. He emphasises: “I want broader. I want schools and systems to value music, art, history, entrepreneurship, curiosity, creativity, and much more.”

Many ways of skinning the cat

In much the same way, measuring “effect size” was useful but has ended up being the reverse, Hattie argues. It helped teachers and school leaders to accept that there are many ways of skinning the educational cat and to rely less on habit, hunch and assumption. But the “effect sizes” summarised in his celebrated Visible Learning (2009) and many publications following are averages, he points out, and too often the fact, extent and causes of variation are forgotten — along with the importance of context. Effect-size tables have been taken as a kind of installer’s guide — policymakers look at them and say “tick, tick, tick to the top influences and no, no, no to the bottom,” thus missing the point entirely.

The point? To inform and prompt thinking, interpretation, explanation: what is this evidence telling us? What do these numbers mean? What’s going on here, and why? What, for example, should we do with evidence showing that smaller classes have not produced better performance? Just say: no more smaller classes? Or ask why smaller classes aren’t being used more effectively?

A sustained failure of policy

How can we actually do what effectiveness research has made possible? Research can go only so far; it reflects schooling as it is, not how it has to be; the rest is up to government and policy. Properly interrogated, Hattie concludes, the evidence first assembled in Visible Learning (2009) reveals a sustained failure of policy.

Hattie’s criticisms cover much but not all of the ground on which effectiveness research stands. He and others were convinced that education research could do for schooling what medical research had done for medicine. Research of the “gold standard” medical kind would reveal what worked in the classroom (or as Hattie later put it, what worked best). They were also convinced that the teacher was the crucial variable in the schooling equation, which made teachers and teaching “quality” the central objects of policy.

Not medical practitioners, not patients

But teachers are not like medical practitioners and students are not like patients. Teachers try to enlist students in their cause; students might or might not join in. They might do their best to make sense of what the teachers seems to want, or pretend that they’re trying to, or subvert or resist the teacher’s efforts in myriad ways. Much of what students learn is not what is taught but what students think has been taught; often it has not been taught at all, for students learn all kinds of other things in the classroom and everywhere else at school. They learn about themselves, the world, how the world treats them, and how they can and should treat others. Students are, in other words, co-producers of learning, of themselves, and of each other. They learn, and they grow.

What students learn and how they grow, taken in its full extent and complexity, depends partly on what teachers do but mostly on the circumstances in which they and teachers meet. Producing learning and growth is in many ways just like producing anything else. Any form of production combines people, time, space, task, expertise, objectives, rewards and sanctions in a specific way. The central question is not how to make teaching more effective (as effectiveness research assumes) but how to make schools more productive. Which combination of the many factors of production is most productive of what kinds of learning and growth for which students? The failure to ask what the evidence is telling us about what is going on and what could go on is the seed of the policy failure Hattie points to.

A less reliable vessel

“Learning science” is an even less reliable vessel. There is in fact no such thing as “learning science.” The learning sciences (plural) include experimental psychology, social and affective neuroscience, cognitive anthropology, developmental psychology, robotics and AI, and neurology, systems theory and many others. AERO relies on a particular subset of a particular branch of the learning sciences, cognitive load theory, or CLT, which is held in low esteem by many for its failure to take into account “the neurodynamic, attitudinal, social, emotional and cultural factors that often play a major, if often invisible and unsung role in every classroom.”

Learning scientists who do pay attention these “often invisible and unsung” factors reach conclusions very different from AERO’s. Two prominent psychologists for example, concludedafter career-long research that learners thrive when they feel competent and successful, challenged, purposeful, connected to community and culturally safe, working collaboratively on things relevant to their lives. A neuroscientist studying the relationship between young people’s behaviour, circumstances and neural development found that “support, safe spaces, and rich opportunities [to] think deeply about complex issues, to build personally relevant connections, and to find purpose and inspiration in their lives” is crucial to the brain’s development. Indeed, “the networks in the brain that are associated with these beneficial outcomes are deactivated during the kinds of fast-paced and often impersonal activities that are the staple of many classrooms” (emphasis added).

What about other kinds of classroom teaching?

One of the consequences of AERO’s use of CLT and effectiveness research is the assumption that teaching “knowledge” is the only game at school and there is only one way to play it. Of course knowledge is core business in schooling: knowledge of reading, writing, maths and science are “basic”; didactic teaching is for most kids and some purposes the shortest route between a fog and an aha! moment; the precepts of “explicit” teaching may well help to improve didactic teaching; and “effectiveness” research and its “effect sizes” can indeed make teachers and school leaders more aware of options and less reliant on hunch, habit and anecdote.

But what about other kinds of classroom teaching? And other ways of learning? Is AERO’s “teaching model” a one-punch knockout? The sovereign solution to the many things that students, teachers and schools contend with?

Tomorrow: How AERO can (and should) take a long hard look at itself.

This story by Dean Ashenden on AERO was first published in Inside Story. We are republishing with the permission of both Dean Ashenden and of Peter Browne, editor of Inside Story.

Dean Ashenden is a senior honorary fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. He has worked in and around, over decades, as a teacher, academic, commentator and consultant: He is co-author, with Raewyn Connell, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett, of the 1982 classic Making The Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. Unbeaching the Whale: Can Australian schooling be reformed? was published last year.