Education, Competitiveness, Civil Society – Pick 2
We shouldn’t have to!
It appears from contact with family and colleagues at what appears to be the largest state-wide teacher stop-work action ever held in Melbourne, Australia today, we are still very much in the cycle of what I like to call “retail economics and policy planning”.
It is sad to see such limited public debate about what is REALLY happening in schools, not just in Victoria, but across the country.
At a time when we have more information, data and knowledge about both TEACHING and LEARNING, we are still destined for what appears to be a policy debate that does not get much beyond either “kicking a teacher” or demanding unlimited funds with little or no accountability.
It is an insult to offer those in the service of educating our young such limited salaries, career structures and resourcing. Likewise, this will always appear to be the case as long as the teaching service allows a quasi-profession to be externally controlled, cajoled and manipulated because it does not manage and oversee its own standards and status.
It seems, the major actors in current policy are happy to frame the debate in terms of choices that perhaps even Faust would not consider. Although such policy positions play well on TV and Radio i.e “We need to reform teaching”, “we need to get rid of poor teachers” or “our schools are crumbling”, ” our rankings are falling”, we seldom discuss the opportunities a bi-partisan, multi-party commitment to education would bring to the country as a whole.
The half-truths and selective reasoning for political-gain, [at all levels] while well-crafted, is simply that, well-crafted. Our lack of cohesion and focus, our lack of collective support for the teaching service as one of the key strategic industries of our country’s current and future prosperity, is the key to many other social and economic policy dilemmas. Just ask the residents of Hackney.
We have in fact seen enrolments in non-government schools reach approximately 34% of total enrolments and yet concurrently, we have seen the rise of policy and public debate about “falling standards” and “falling rankings”. The shift of student enrolments to non-government schools [without apparent academic improvement] and the concentration of lower-performing students in many government schools is a challenge often simply ignored, it appears, by many policy makers.
Spending & OECD Performance
A lot has been made of discussions about spending and OECD rankings in the last few weeks and months. Here is a little chart that shows spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product and the OECD Country Rankings in PISA Tests in Maths, English and Science.
Dear reader, I would simply ask you to look closely at this graph below and ask yourself a few things about Australia’s rankings, mindful of the fact that MOST of the TEACHERS that were responsbile for the PISA results in 2000 are still in schools now.
Question. What has changed?
Question: What should we do now?
This chart requires flash.
Could you pick two of these? Education, Competitiveness, Civil Society
