Australian academics and teacher educators have recently taken aim at the government-funded organisation in articles published on the AARE blog, arguing AERO is fundamentally harming teachers’ autonomy and being used by governments to push a ‘neoliberal’ agenda in classrooms.

Dr Greg Ashman, author and deputy principal at Ballarat Clarendon College in Victoria, says he’s in no way surprised that education academics are so vocally opposed to AERO and the work it does.

The organisation wouldn’t be needed if these commentators were doing their job properly, he contends.

“AERO has kind of eaten their lunch, in the sense that it’s doing what they should be doing, which is providing practical advice to teachers.

“That’s something that they’ve … failed to do over many years.

“That’s not unique to Australia, that’s education academics across the world, really.”

The practical, highly useable guidance AERO has offered teachers and school leaders since it was established four years ago is clearly a threat to these academics, Ashman suggests, arguing “very little” of their own research holds much practical value for the profession.

La Trobe University’s Professor of Cognitive Psychology Pamela Snow and Dr Carl Hendrick, Professor of Evidence-Informed Learning and Teaching at Academica University in Amsterdam, have also come out in defence of AERO.

Snow argues that a reluctance on the part of ITE programs to sharpen their content on evidence-based instructional practices and cognitive science is precisely part of AERO’s ‘raison d’être’.

“Instead, [teacher educators] advocate for ‘a range of approaches’, because ‘all children learn differently’ and ‘teacher autonomy should be respected’. 

“…If ITE programs had been operating in recent decades the way medical, engineering, and nursing programs (for example) do, AERO might not even have been established. Ironic, isn’t it?” Snow poses in a recent post.

Hendrick, meanwhile, says AERO provides what the teaching profession has long lacked: “a trusted, independent, and publicly accountable source of credible, cumulative educational research”, he writes.

“Its commitment to quality, its consultative processes, and its refusal to pander to ideological fashions make it a public good worth defending.”

Nevertheless, academics have called into question whether the ‘evidence-based practice’ AERO shares is really just a “new avenue for government to further intrude into the classroom”.

They argue current discussion about evidence-based teaching is grounded in a “neoliberal obsession with metrics”, such as ‘convenient’ standardised tests like NAPLAN and PISA.

Ashman says this line of inquiry is deeply flawed and confused.

“Some of the arguments, I think, are a bit bizarre.

“They seem to be opposed to what they see as top-down imposition of explicit teaching via state governments and AERO, and yet they’ve criticised this as a kind of neoliberal policy, which is contradictory because neoliberalism is about school choice and freedom and autonomy, maybe some accountability measures, quasi-privatisation.”

Typical neoliberal policies would include measures like handing schools the freedom to innovate, to employ unqualified teachers and to stray from the national curriculum, Ashman adds.

“…the idea is that you’re given this freedom, and [schools] can do different things, and some of those things might work and the system might learn from it.

“That’s neoliberalism. So, that’s completely the opposite of what we’re talking about here.

“I’m not sure they quite know what they’re on about.”

Hendrick argues that using neoliberalism as a critique of cognitive science is “both conceptually muddled and rhetorically lazy”.

“Cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, and explicit instruction are not ‘market-driven constructs’, they are the result of decades of empirical work grounded in psychology and learning science.

“To suggest that instructional clarity or structured guidance is inherently ‘neoliberal’ is to mistake method for ideology,” he states.

Many education academics have come to “see everything through a political lens”, Dr Greg Ashman, pictured above, says.

Political rhetoric has long framed discussions about evidence-based teaching. It’s a curious thing, Ashman says, but it makes sense if you consider the sphere within which academics work.  

“I think it’s just that academics find these political arguments very convincing. It’s what they spend most of their time doing.

“So, if you read most academic research … it takes a political lens to education and it looks at education through ideas from critical theory like oppression and that sort of thing.

“And this traces itself back to Paolo Freire’s 1969 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which essentially took this emerging field of critical theory – essentially a kind of latter-day Marxist analysis – and then started to apply it to education.”

Even if they haven’t engaged with Freire’s ideas specifically, education academics have come to “see everything through a political lens”, Ashman says.

Indeed, Professor Linda Graham, Director of QUT’s Centre for Inclusive Education, seemingly draws a parallel with those defending AERO and Steve Bannon, a far right figure in the US and former advisor to Donald Trump, claiming “legitimate critique is in danger of being drowned out”.

In Ashman’s view, this is a “very convincing” thing to say. Yet for teachers, the line is quite laughable, he says.

“[It silences] people for fear of coming across as if they’re aligned with figures such as Steve Bannon on the American right.

“Of course, out in schools and classrooms and the real world and the practical realities of teaching 25, 30 kids every day, that falls completely flat.

“Teachers read that and go, ‘oh, what’s that? Where’s that come from? That’s completely bizarre.’”

Critics of AERO have drawn issue with the fact that it does not recognise the nuance of educational research. This is problematic and something of an insult to teachers, some academics suggest.

But Ashman says the ‘nuance argument’ is used to defend an ideological position on explicit teaching.

“For a load of ideological reasons, they’re opposed to explicit teaching. That’s what it boils down to. They don’t like explicit teaching. It doesn’t feel right to them. It doesn’t feel democratic enough.

“They don’t like the idea of a teacher as an authority in the room, that they want a more level approach, where the kids are on the same level as the teacher. They don’t think explicit teaching expresses that adequately,” Ashman shares.

It pays to remember that academics are unable to defeat the argument that explicit teaching is the most effective instructional approach because the evidence here is “overwhelming”, he adds.

“So what they do is they say, ‘oh, but there’s this nuance. And when you present the evidence-of explicit teaching, you’re missing out on some of the nuance. And we’re these more superior kinds of beings who appreciate this nuance’.”

This stance is simultaneously insulting and deeply amusing for many teachers, Ashman suggests.

“That’s why when [one particular] article dropped yesterday in AARE, I had people messaging me on WhatsApp and emailing me, essentially just making fun of it.

“Because to practicing teachers, it’s just funny that someone would [make those comments].

“But clearly in academia, that’s a convincing argument to make.”

There’s a deeply patronising vein that runs through the academics’ commentary on AERO, the school leader adds.

“The impression is that we’re so silly that we’ll read something on AERO and we’ll be brainwashed because we don’t have critical faculties. And we need these education academics to filter everything for us … it is quite patronising.

“And of course, teachers do follow silly ideas, but so do education academics, there’s no cure for that.”

Consultancy firm KPMG is undertaking the AERO review, and stakeholders are invited to share their opinions via an online survey.

“I’ll be saying it’s really useful,” Ashman says of his submission.

Teachers at his own school use AERO’s resources to hone their practice, Ashman reports. Recently, for example, staff were assigned a ‘reading’, which was a video produced by AERO on explicit instruction.

“As a school, I think we’re pretty far down the road of explicit teaching, but we still thought it was a really useful video to show our teachers, because it exemplifies some of the key features of explicit teaching – practical, useful.

“And on (one of) our professional learning days, one of our senior members of staff is giving presentations and they’ll be using some of the AERO resources.

“They are just really useful resources to use and to point to, and in my submission for the survey, that’s what I’ve said.”

AERO CEO Dr Jenny Donovan has recently acknowledged the ‘surge’ in public debate about the role of evidence in education and addressed a key ‘misunderstanding’.

“One of the misunderstandings about ‘evidence-based practice’ is that it is contrary to teacher autonomy and professionalism. That couldn’t be further from the truth,” she shared in a LinkedIn post.

“At AERO, our work is built on partnerships with practising educators in the context of real schools and early childhood education and care settings.

“Many of our resources and guides have been developed by working with teachers in their own schools – testing, refining, testing again – to support the implementation of effective teaching practice….”

Donovan goes on to assert that “every profession is built on a body of knowledge, and education is no different”.

“For teachers, that knowledge combines the classroom experiences of educators with empirical evidence from multiple disciplines, including education, psychology, developmental psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.

“This body of knowledge, built up over time and continuing to grow, provides a strong foundation for teachers to make informed decisions and enhance their effectiveness in the classroom, which is a defining feature of teacher professionalism…”

For Snow, there is a deep irony in the pushback being cast at AERO.

Namely, that those casting the criticism “have already leveraged the benefits of educational success in their own lives, but are willing to jeopardise this for future generations, by not backing the strongest horse in the race,” she concludes.