Well, I knew the axe-grinders at The Australian couldn’t go long without kicking around the merit-pay for teachers can.
But readers deserve better than the selective reporting of Justine Ferrari in today’s article which claims “overwhelming support” amongst teachers for merit-based pay.
For a start, a survey of 13,000 teachers is nowhere near the author’s claimed one-third of the profession, which numbered almost 250,000 in 2005 according to the Bureau of Statistics. This alone invalidates the article’s central premise of “overwhelming support” for merit pay.
It is disappointing that The Australian‘s specialist education reporter seems blithely unaware of elementary facts such as the size of the profession she’s been writing about for years, but then I suppose it’s hard to keep up with current statistics when one’s time is spent sharpening axes instead.
The author also declines to reveal anything about the origin of the study beyond a cryptic mention that it was “commissioned by the federal Education Department”. I believe this is code for the fact that the former Minister commissioned a study of options for merit pay half-way through the last term of government in the forlorn hope that she could use it to brow-beat the state Ministers. Thus the study comes from the fine political tradition of commissioning the findings you want to find, after a search of credible research yields nothing you want to hear.
And in the absence of any more substantial information about the study’s methods, I’m inclined to point out that a survey of 13,000 is an improbably massive sample, many multiples of your typical Newspoll or Nielsen survey, and on the same scale as those wonderfully reliable online newspaper surveys which gather 20,000+ responses in thirty minutes flat…but I digress.
Leaving aside the numbers, the misreporting is compounded by Ferrari’s misapplication of the label ‘merit-based pay’, which was advanced by the previous federal Minister for Education as tying teachers’ pay to the performance of their students. The article itself revealed that such an initiative has the support of only one-quarter of respondents, who themselves number only one-twentieth of the profession. Hardly ”overwhelming support”.
But not to be discouraged by sheer abject rejection of an initiative that is dear to the hearts of The Australian‘s editorial team, and in deference to her journalistic masters, Ferrari manages to re-badge “merit-pay” as something more palatable to many.
For the notion which drew most support was to pay teachers more based on their competence and qualifications, even though this not at all what earlier advocates of merit-based pay had suggested. In any event, a framework to better recognise teachers’ competence and qualifications has been in place in NSW since 2004, when the NSW Institute of Teachers set out standards for teachers’ ongoing professional development, backed by legislation in that state. This standards framework (not seniority) will in time become a means for career progression and promotion to higher duties and pay scales.
Even so, we do not need a survey to tell us what has the “overwhelming support” of most Australians. That is to better remunerate all teachers, who continue to suffer real declines in income compared to previous decades.
If The Australian were half as committed to reporting news as they are to kicking cans, pushing barrows and grinding axes, they might yet reverse their readership trend, which will probably see them slip below six-figure circulation some time in the next two years…
The headline “75% of teachers reject merit pay option” couldn’t get a run at the Oz could it? This is another one of those issues that is mis-reported acrosss the media spectrum in Australia. Perhaps because there are some subtleties involved. A study commissioned by the last Fed gov didn’t really receive much attention because it talked about the range of options for what might be called ‘merit pay.’ http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/profiles/research_on_performance_pay_for_teachers.htm
Justine Ferrari did today what she often does in educational articles – obscures the distinctions in a policy issue to argue an ideological stand point. There are many models for differentially paying teachers based on skill sets, experience or qualifications. These do not need to have teachers remunerated by the results of their students.
We do not advocate a similar system for doctors or, God forbid, lawyers, even though there are mechanisms that are available for measuring the efficacy of these professionals. We recognise that in these areas, there are circumstances beyond the control of an individual that impact on the outcome of their professional intervention. We also recognise that they are not solely responsible for the outcome achieved. Is it so hard to give the same recognition for teachers?
We already have merit pay. Its not like we pay all our teachers equally. Its just that our measure of merit is based almost solely on the numbers of years spent teaching in Australia.
New York City recently instituted a merit pay scheme, more precisely a bonus scheme, but nevertheless tied to school performance. It seems an interesting model.
Kevin,
The users of both doctors and lawyers can choose whether or not to go to them. Lawyers are also on a (very steep) billing scale. Doctors can (and many do) charge over the scheduled fee.
Now, where was that argument again?
After my experience of useless time-serving teachers in the public school system with my kids, I’m all for some sort of performance-based pay system. Apart from weeding out the incompetents it means good teachers will be properly rewarded as they should be.
I spent 23 years in the federal public service and one thing (amongst others) that p*ssed me off, was the bludgers on the same level and pay scale as me who got there simply by seniority.
And, anyway, most employees at all levels in the public and private sector have annual reviews now. I don’t see why teachers, especially because of their critical position in educating our children, should be exempt. I realise there are problems in judging a teacher’s performance (socio-economic factors in a school’s area etc) but I’m sure something could be worked out if teachers got on board.
“Users of both doctors and lawyers can choose whether or not to go to them.” Only in certain circumstances – for the poor or the unconscious, you are stuck with what is available. Private schools give some measure of “choice” (as defined by John Howard) and most states allow parents to have some ‘choice’ over their school. The issue of merit pay is different to the question about choice – the underlying question is how do we improve teaching in all of our schools? Merit pay as it is currently defined is a poor model for doing it.
Don’t get me wrong here, and this is the point I tried to make in my previuous post – I am not against differential pay for teachers, but the models that have been used in the past – such as the one in Texas http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/10878/1/266/ have little or no intrinsic merit http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1113/p09s02-coop.html?s=hns.
By all means pay teachers who work harder – go on camps or excursions with students, or offer after hours classes. But the argument that we should measure changes in student test scores over a year as an adequate evaluation of the educational experience of a child in that classroom reduces education to its most utilitarian.
There isn’t even currently a mechanism to sack teacher who are incompetent.
Unless they get caught “interfering” with a student, or making an inappropriate remark, they are almost bulletproof.
That’s just not true, Steve. I can’t find the figures, now but a substantial number of teachers were sacked for incompetence in Queensland last year. In addition, there have now been two (I think) waves of incentive payments to “burnt out” teachers to take 50 grand and run.
What refreshing news. Plenty more to go though. I look forward to the day when retention of incompetent teachers is no longer a problem.
Next step, some performance/competence pay. Perhaps seniority could begin accruing only when teachers are able to spell and are proficient at grammar.
Though I look forward to the day when Queensland kids are not being taught by teachers who are too stupid to be proficient in their own native language. Or at the very least are humble enough to be ashamed that they are not proficient.
I don’t know how widespread a problem it is, SATP, and I’d be interested in some figures. Anecdotally, I agree that there is some poor work being done on the part of some teachers. In the schools that I am familiar with there were a few, but I can’t draw any conclusions about the scale of the problem from having met some useless teachers – or indeed if the scale is such that it can reasonably be defined as a problem.
SATP how will performance pay bring about the outcome that you (and I am sure any rational person) wants? So the better teachers get paid more … so what? How does that improve the performance of the rest? And if we go the next step and get rid of under-performing teachers, the only outcome will be larger classes, because there certainly isn’t a pool of competent teachers available to be employed as replacements.
Teaching has become a semi-skilled occupation, as determined by societal status and remuneration. Until that is changed, general standards will leave something to be desired. No amount of fiddling with the existing pay system is going to change that basic truth.
The main obstacle for teachers is lack of power to disciplne the kids, and lack of parental support.
There are countries nearby to us where unless a certain portion of the class passes their exams, the teacher much show cause why they should not be fired. This with classes of 40, and the only teacher’s aid being a blackboard ruler.
Teachers whose classes barely scrape through tend to not get pay rises, and eventually are given the hint to seek greener pastures (for them) in some softer country, eg, UK, Australia or somewhere.
Here, I am surrounded by teachers who go to every Teacher’s Union meeting within cooee, but are yet to attend a career development seminar or course of any sort.
They get paid the same as dedicated teachers, and accrue seniority in the same way, by the passing of calendar years.
Of course here, if a teacher was to go to a student’s home to find out why the kid is not peforming, will find mum & dad watching TV with a stubby in each hand, & belligerntly demanding of the teacher “waddaya want?” – How can they (the teacher) win?
Given the obstacles they face and the hysteria of both the media, conservative politicians and shrilly ill-informed blog posters about “the education crisis” it is indeed astounding that teachers do as well as they do, if you take “doing well” as producing students who in the main are literate and numerate, as well as a respectable number deemed fit each year to attend University.
You see one of the problems teachers have is that no-one has properly defined what their jobs are. If their primary role is to be as facilitators of learning and transmitters of knowledge and culture then I see not much evidence that they are being properly resourced for that job. In many public schools for instance I see overcrowded, dirty and dilapidated classrooms, sweltering in summer and freezing in winter. I see overcrowded curricula in response to the latest Road to Damascus orgasm from some politician or bureaucrat, or the latest already discredited air-headed idea from overseas. I see poorly resourced libraries and obsolete IT infrastructure.
If the primary role of teachers is a training role, then is this what the regime of “standards” testing starting in early primary is for? Training seven year olds to sit standardised tests? If most students are not going to choose to go to University then why is so much curricula design dominated by the Universities? Why is there resistance to the idea that students can access vocational training from the second or third year of secondary school if that is what they want? Why is it that though we have had schemes such as Pathways for a long time that so many independent schools are resistant to their students accessing it, despite their great relevance to the needs of the non-academic majority?
If the primary role of teachers is as managers of behaviour and discipline then this allows irresponsible parents to abdicate their primary role and then to turn around and blame teachers when the child inevitable transgresses. Teachers, unlike police, have next to no protection if confronted, assaulted and abused on the job. Schools do not have easy access to specialised units for the behaviourally disturbed, nor do they necessarily have the investigative powers to ascertain that the kid is acting out because he/she is regularly abused at home. School counsellors are few and far between, even at the most troubled schools.
We do better with the primary role of teachers as expensive babysitters, subject to the full force of the law if the child is injured or otherwise at risk. So the concepts of “duty of care” and in loco parentis means that teachers can be blamed at will for both the irresponsible acts of these same badly behaved students and for accidents which in the real world do not invite litigation. In effect they are Aunt Sallys for a society which allows incompetent parenting and which refuses to acknowledge that the most relevant correlation explaining failure to acquire basic skills is the correlation between….wait for it….learning failure and poverty
“That’s just not true, Steve. I can’t find the figures, now but a substantial number of teachers were sacked for incompetence in Queensland last year. ”
Happens every year. Generally speaking, Maths and Science teachers are more likely to be judged incompetent than other categories. Shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has any understanding of what ‘teaching’ is really about.
Many ‘incompetent’ teachers realise they are not coping and resign long before the axe falls. Tis a most unpleasant job if you are not succeeding. Thus the figures on those sacked simply understate tho number of separations due to ‘incompetence’.
What about merit pay for academics based on pass/fail rates as determined by external exams? Just a joke.
Boo ya, Sorcerer, that was an awesome rebuttal.
I feel sorry for teachers; they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Steve (and people like him) regards them as little better than grubs, whilst acknowledging that the job is impossible, and then having the temerity to compare our education system with (presumably) Indonesia’s, for the love of god, and argue that Indonesia’s is somehow better!?
Literacy rates might disagree with you, mate.
They get paid a pittance for what they do, and meanwhile the uni cut-offs for teachers are creeping lower and lower, so the odds are pretty good in some classes that roughly half the class is smarter than the teacher.
Everybody hates them; parents and students alike. They’re accused of postmodernism and god-knows-what else for daring to teach the facts and suggesting that kids are more interested in Gattaca than Chaucer, and that the former is more relevant, too.
Sheesh, man. I reckon teachers work bloody hard, for little reward. Yes, there’s tonnes of space-fillers and dickweeds – but cripes, since when was any profession supposed to be free of drongos?? There are plenty of doctors, lawyers, policeman, politicians, publicans and executives who are total dickweeds, and no one gets up in arms about it and acts like the profession is supposed to – somehow – be an arsehole-free zone.
Teachers can have a big impact on young people’s lives, but so can parents, uncles, workmates, friends, and all the slings and arrows of demography. They can’t be held responsible for everything that steps out of a classroom, nor more than they can for what steps into it. Even the best craftsperson can’t turn shit into shinola. But if they can make shit literate, and numerically sound, that’s got to be worth something.
Mark, if you find the figures on teacher firings, let me know — I haven’t been able to locate good data on this for any state.
Mercurius, if you’re worried about the sampling frame, why not read the study? It is of course on the DEST website.
“The main obstacle for teachers is lack of power to discipline the kids, and lack of parental support.”
Groan.SATP yakking through that arsehole on top of his head again…
As he has not directly mentioned having children, nor his experiences as a parent in interacting with the education system, I suspect he doesn’t have kids (or if he does, has had little interest in their education and little interaction with the system).
Listen, fuckwit, as the parent of two fine children who have attended both government and private schools, and who excel academically, I agreed that there are good and bad teachers. Same in any profession.
But there is no way that I’m giving anybody authority to bash or otherwise abuse my kids as a means of “discipline”.
And if there is a legitimate disciplinary procedure in place, then I, as a parent, need to be informed of that procedure pre-enrolment, or otherwise consulted.
Being a product of the private school system myself way back when such behaviour was tolerated, I well recall the odd teacher with a free hand to discipline (read: bash 12 year-olds) to work out whatever personal demons were haunting them.
Steve At The Pub, you have once again demonstrated why you are such a world-class fuckwit, why you live in Queensland, and why you have such a keen personal identification with alcohol.
Andrew Leigh
Jan 16th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Mark, if you find the figures on teacher firings, let me know — I haven’t been able to locate good data on this for any state.
And you never will. ‘Firings’ are very rare. They are ‘end of the road’ stuff. Teachers or potential teachers are filtered out at any number of points along the career path. The student teacher who is going to fail ‘prac’ is given the opportunity to ‘defer’. Are you going to count that as a ‘firing’?
The first year teacher is given or takes the opportunity to resign before the Principal reports to the Board of Teacher Registration on his/her suitability. A firing?
The teacher who coped with small classes in the bush and then found that a large secondary school was a different world will face pressures from colleagues, subject heads, deputies and principals to resign or face dismissal. Most see the writing on the wall and resign. Are these firings?
Those who ‘hang on’ then face inquiries at the Regional of Central Office level. Believe you me, even most the thickest see the light eventually.
You won’t get ‘good data’ unless you delve deeply. And you need to define ‘firings’ very, very carefully.
Andrew and wpd, I think I saw something in the Courier-Mail last year, which may or may not constitute good data. wpd, I’m sure what you say about the way it works is correct.
I also liked patrickg’s comment. Just sayin…
Mark, as I recall, these figures are published in Annual Reports or Attachments to Annual Reports. Certainly they are available under FOI. While such stats are good for media ‘beat ups’ they mask reality rather than reveal it.
BTW, the pressures to resign certainly comes from parents and students, exercised at all levels of the organisation, and not just from colleagues as my previous post might have suggested..
I had a feeling Welford, or some bureaucrat (maybe from the new College of Teachers?) came out with some figures last year, wpd, to respond to an argument akin to steve at the pub’s.
It is worth pointing out that there’s a significant difference between being a lazy and inefficient in a clerical role in a large organisation where you can virtually disappear from view (or use office politics skills to make yourself look good and more competent and hard working colleagues look bad – I’m sure we’ve all worked with people like this) and being a lazy and/or inefficient teacher and having to perform under constant scrutiny – your most merciless critics of course being your students.
Shorter SATP (for just about any topic) “punch ‘em or shoot ‘em”. Which to be fair, does work sometimes but on the other hand the simpler and more-smalled the initial action, the more easily it can be reciprocated in kind.
And good one patg.
For
“more-smalled”
read
“more small-minded”
For
“My aunt on the distaff side”
read
“Will Scarlet”
throughout.
There is merit in axe-grinding,because if every teacher was an expert in cutting up some timber,and did it regularily in front of pupils and students,the strong arms would be noticed,and all of a sudden a little bit more respect for teachers amongst those kids, ready to be disruptive because they are physical, and school somewhat droll.And with the reality,not yet accepted generally,that an ice age may be with us after a increase in temperatures globally, it may in fact, be one of the more worthy skills if everything freezes over.Explosive muscle action,from exercise like woodchopping certainly achieves heart rate increase and mind clarity.I am not stating this to interfere with the teachers concerns,but,thinking clearly is an obvious concern to teach those who often cannot do it regularly!Adults too,if you read enough blogs!Certainly fires and smoke will be always a problem for populations,and I suppose the best thing you can say about The Australian is it burns readily.
If you’re going to pay teachers so little, you’re going to have some who are stuck there and are so jaded they won’t get out and do something else.
If you paid them a lot more, the competition would probably weed out the incompentents but I’m not prepared to pay the extra taxes – not only for state schools but private too – to support this, and neither are you.
Teachers do one of the most important jobs in our society. They are generally treated terribly by State & Federal Governments, criticized for everything by whichever section of the media disagrees with a particular policy, and ignored or abused by parents (& students). Unlike many people, they can’t leave work at work, but spend hours marking, lesson planning, and (for many) attending weekend training courses. They get paid (especially in Victoria) nothing. Then we complain that intelligent, educated people don’t become teachers – but who would given the conditions? We need to pay teachers more (my father has been teaching for 35 years and earns less than a second-year graduate entry federal public servant), give them sabbaticals (one of my high school teachers who was brilliant & came in on [anti Kennett] strike days & weekends was known to have a nervous breakdown each summer), straighten out the ridiculous demands of policy (primary school teachers with no second language “teaching” another language), and make them accountable – not by student results, which punishes teachers who work at difficult schools, but parents, principals, and school councils tend to know who the good teachers are. Our society should recognize and honor the work they do.
End rant – one that I’ve had building up for a while…
wpd, you wouldn’t need to do an FOI – surely annual reports are tabled in Parliament and thus publicly available?
After three years of fury with the public school system I’m moving my youngest daughter to a private sshool. The teachers are unqualified, clueless and disinterested. But more than that the educational system prefers excursions to periodic tables, movie watching to essay structure and subjective, feel-good criteria-based assessment to any kind of objective testing or marking of submitted work.
As for this dismal bunch assessing teacher performance, don’t make me laugh. The only kind of performance assessment in my state is of basic literacy and numeracy which has bugger all to do with teaching and everything to do with IQ, parental expectations and socioeconomic group.
I haven’t the faintest idea how to fix this – it may be that the system is too far gone. My hypothesis is that failed teachers accumulate in the policy areas of educational departments, where they compete feverishly to see who can come up with the most absurd and impractical approaches to teaching.
I think it inevitable that anybody with a choice will shortly abandon the public system. Meanwhile the public schools will continue to teach nothing, assess nothing, and produce voluminous, ‘happy’ reports that employers treat with the contempt they deserve.
I’m with you Jenny – surely we can put our heads together and come up with a way of objectively testing teacher performance.
It is a self-evident truism that superior performance should be rewarded – hence merit based pay is clearly a goal we should be aspiring too. The problem is how to measure performance. The debate always seems to get bogged down in the pros/cons of using student performance metrics.
You should see the bun-flight at our primary school at the end of each year as parents jockey to get their kids into the classes with the best teachers for the next year. How do the parents know which teachers are good? There is no stamp on the teachers’ foreheads gining them a score out of 100 – but somehow, we all know who the good teachers are.
Slightly different but related topic – the testing of students is getting completely stuffed up too (at least here in Victoria). My kids school reports are now getting so bland that if I wasn’t so involved with them, I’d have no idea how well they are going. My 8 year old daughter came home last year with straight Cs – back in my day, if got anything below a B+ I’d have been mortified! But apparantly C is now good – it means my daughter is achieving in line with her expected progress for her age. The trouble is – my 11 year old son came home with straight Cs too. And I can tell you – my daughter is a much higher achiever than my son (in a relative sense). The report cards are useless.
I for one would be happy to pay more taxes to increase pay for teachers (public & private), assuming that there was a reasonable correlation between increased pay for those teachers who do a better job. Given the number of people willing to pay quite a bit in private school fees, I think you’ll find that there are others around willing to do the same as long as they can see the money spent having an effect (and thats the tricky bit!).
Extra competition will only weed out the bad teachers if there is a reasonable mechanism for identifying and then removing them. Otherwise the increased pay will only entrench them further as other employment alternatives will become relatively speaking less attractive.
Tell me, how many academically qualified people here currently in the workforce write essays as part of their work? Only those few in research who regularly publish textbooks and peer reviewed articles.
How many sit exams and tests ?
How many write essays and sit exams and tests for pleasure?
Speaking as someone with a reasonable undergraduate degree and a few postgrad thingies…the answer would be none.
At best essays, tests, exams and the like are boring, irksome, tiresome hurdle requirements. You get through them as best you can, including asking Mum or Dad for help and consulting with your peers, these days online, along with much swapping of resources and links to good
cheat sitescribs.All the stuff you cram for that HSC or Uni exam disappears from working memory after six weeks anyway.
Non-scientist me and partner (with an MSc) both know where to look up the periodic table and what it’s for but neither of us can recite it from memory. No scientist I know can.
Experience suggests that no matter how academically qualified people are, their preferred non-working activities are not much different to those of the rest of the population, and may even include (gasp…shock…horror) movies, sport, television, travel and reading popular fiction.
In any case Jenny’s putative child will, thirty years after finishing school, probably be working in a field totally different to that which he/she initially studies for.
Hmm, this thread certainly brings out the sick puppies and those who believe in an iron rice bowl for teachers.
Why should teachers NOT have to justify their continued employment? Why should they NOT have to justify pay rises?
Why would anybody become a teacher when they have a union which won’t stand up for them, nor will it stand up for improving the professionalism of teaching, (merely stands up for failed political ideologies), when teachers cop it in every direction, both from underclass parents who are too stupid to care about their child’s education, and from middle class parents who DO care about their child’s education?
If they learn to walk that minefield, between parents of the underclass and the middle class, they then have to deal with a system in which the professional and financial rewards do not go to the best teachers, and in which competence and dedication are not the ways to the top. Actual professionalism will get them very little respect career-path wise.
No wonder teacher’s union meetings get a better roll-up than a professional development seminar. The industry is hardly likely to attract large numbers of people who intend to do what they do do well.
Response to Sorcerer:
Your response seems to suggest you see no need for student assessment, or for learning anything that can be found on the internet. Which causes me to wonder whether you see schools as anything other than a cheap babysitter.
What I want from schools is:
- a few values and life skills for the dumb and the mediocre.
- satisfactory oral and communication skills for all (the gateway to almost anything they will ever want to do)
- teaching of the basics for major fields of knowledge so that our universities don’t have to waste scarce time resources and our talented kids don’t start their tertiary studies behind the children of other countries.
- objective and numeric assessment of student’s ability to produce substantial bodies of work and to understand and use knowledge and advanced concepts so that parents and employers can make informed decisions.
I figure kids can cope with watching movies, going on excursions and coping with enforced periods of boredom without any help from our schools.
As for testing and assessing student’s work, the great majority of workers will face a constant succession of assessments of one kind or another and the sooner they can learn to prepare themselves for those challenges, the better they’ll cope with the workforce. Just as importantly, I believe the maxim that ‘what gets measured gets done’.
“surely annual reports are tabled in Parliament and thus publicly available?”
Yes! But as would appreciate, they are not widely read. And for good reason. Boring, boring.
But if ‘firings’ are not always published, then an interested researcher could get such figures through FOI. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
Dissection time….
Define “dumb and mediocre”. Is that everyone else’s kids (except I presume Jenny’s)?
I thought values and life skills were the parents’ job anyway. Damn, got that one wrong…must tell my own kids that I should have passed the job of imparting values over to the teachers.
The foundations for both good oral communication and pre-reading skills occur from birth to age four or five through interaction with a child’s caregivers…hence Kevin Rudd’s laudable emphasis on assistance for pre-school programmes for all four-year-olds.
You mean teaching kids reading and number on an ongoing basis so they can move on to learn how to learn? No one is quarrelling with that. Rote learning and parroting back “facts” in “tests” is not learning how to learn. It’s learning how to do tests.
What is a “basic for major fields of knowledge”? Doesn’t each “field of knowledge” (i.e. University course) have its own rules and parameters for research and presentation? And don’t these differ from institution to institution?
And do we discontinue English language classes at University for NESB students because they should have done English already at school and bad luck if they haven’t ?
Given that Australian academics are highly sought after overseas, which has lead to a considerable brain drain, particularly in the sciences, where is your evidence that the products of our Universities are inferior to those of other countries?
So how many entry level jobs require the production of “substantial bodies of work”?
I hate to say it but in the real world savvy employers are initially looking beyond mere marks at a prospective employee’s ability to communicate with customers and clients and to work in teams, neither of which skill necessarily require an inflated tertiary entrance score. In fact most entry level jobs do not require University qualifications. The average workplace does not require the ability to produce voluminous tomes of erudite scholarship. Furthermore, a sound performance in a previous job is the best indicator of whether or not someone will get a subsequent job or a promotion.
Workplace assessments, on this planet anyway, do not entail written examinations either. They are done on the basis either of an agreed set of performance parameters or on the acquisition of observable skills.
And guess what, private schools teach exactly the same syllabi as public schools. They are bound to by law. Moreover their teachers have been to the same unis and have the same qualifications.
The main difference overall lies in the power of the private sector to select their students. Be careful then if you choose private that your offspring are deemed “worthy”.
“And guess what, private schools teach exactly the same syllabi as public schools. They are bound to by law. Moreover their teachers have been to the same unis and have the same qualifications.”
So true but not widely understood or believed. Teachers move across the divide on a regular basis also.
sorcerer, you are only permitted to destroy a limited number of myths in each post. Take note.
“The main difference overall lies in the power of the private sector to select their students.”
And to select (and dismiss) their teachers.
Questioning the usefulness of rote learning is often brought up in these discussions. I think there are some areas where rote learning is useful – multiplication tables for example. Yes, these days you can use your mobile phone to do those calculations, but there is a practical advantage (eg grocery shopping) in being able to do these sorts of things your head.
Mathematics is one core area. This is of concern to many university institutions who have had to add remedial maths programs in recent years because the quality of high school mathematics has dropped to the point where many students do not have the skills to tackle university level maths (which is central to many university courses).
Definitely. I know the school I went to did occasionally come into some criticism from public schools in the state for “poaching” their good teachers.
On sorcerer’s points, I couldn’t agree more. The only immediate application I can find for the skills involved in researching and writing an essay is that if you’re in a public or voluntary sector policy role, you often have to produce lit reviews – but if you’ve got that sort of job you’ve usually got a postgrad qual anyway. There are much better ways of fostering critical thinking skills – at both high school and u/g level – than writing essays and doing exams. At uni, oral discussion and questioning after a presentation actually, I think, gets much closer to the mark than writing essays, which as I well know from having to grade mountains of them, are usually mismashes of lectures/texts/articles with a rather poor argument to string them together.
I don’t know that anything much I “learnt” at high school is particularly relevant to me now or was ever relevant to me in the workplace aside from literacy and numeracy. Certainly the essays on Shakespeare or the memorisation of dates for history tests have never proved in the slightest bit useful, or as correctly stated, memorable for more than about a day after they’re done and dusted with.
The habits and capacities that were traditionally inculcated by the “disciplines” of exams and much assessment as conventionally understood are actually counter-productive for most skilled jobs these days.
The sneers against “rote learning” are far too audible in debates over education. Rote learning is a crucial part of every human being’s cognitive development. Its current low status among certain factions of Cultural Warriors is a tragedy for the children they teach, and is a signficant cause of ADHD.
I’d suggest that the production of an essay on Shakespeare, or any other topic, represents at least adequate mastery of skills highly applicable across a range of jobs: the ability to read and understand a complex text, the ability to produce a document communicating ideas to others, the ability to study a problem and find a solution. Literacy doesn’t end with primers and penmanship, and numeracy isn’t just a matter of addition and subtraction, division and multiplication. While standardised testing often only provides proof of test-taking ability, much of the conventional testing and examination disciplines currently employed provide necessary feedback to teachers, parents, and students themselves of students’ accomplishments and areas for improvement. Similarly, understanding curricula and testing standards provides useful information to employers in assessing first-job applicants, when all there is to go on is school results.
Sorcerer: âTell me, how many academically qualified people here currently in the workforce write essays as part of their work?â?
I can only speak for me and my staff, all of whom routinely write reports, memos, letters, and other written communications – all of which benefit from essay writing skills.
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Sorcerer: âHow many sit exams and tests? ⦠Non-scientist me and partner (with an MSc) both know where to look up the periodic table and what itâs for but neither of us can recite it from memory.â?
I donât expect teaching or exams to be about memorisation of useless facts. But neither is it reasonable to say you can look up anything you want to know on the internet. Without a reservoir of structured knowledge and understanding the internet is near useless.
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Mark: âThere are much better ways of fostering critical thinking skills – at both high school and u/g level – than writing essays and doing exams. At uni, oral discussion and questioning after a presentation actually, I think, gets much closer to the mark than writing essays, which as I well know from having to grade mountains of them, are usually mismashes of lectures/texts/articles with a rather poor argument to string them together.â?
No doubt oral discussion and questioning work well for many already motivated students. I personally needed the adrenalin rush of deadlines and exams. As an employer I want both; the capacity to learn and work effectively in teams and the capacity to complete a course of learning and/or body of work by a due date and to demonstrate that accomplishment. And most of all I want a grading system that tells me which job applicants have those abilities and to what extent.
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Sorcerer: âAll the stuff you cram for that HSC or Uni exam disappears from working memory after six weeks anyway.â?
As almost the ultimate swotvac crammer, Iâm very familiar with the experience of the after-exam memory purge. Except that Iâm amazed how often I re-remember concepts from those years an dhow much of it comes back.
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Sorcerer: âDefine âdumb and mediocreâ. Is that everyone elseâs kids (except I presume Jennyâs)?â?
A cheap shot. Iâm sure everybody on this board is aware of the wide diversity of academic talent in any cross section of the population. I apologise for not using a politically correct label.
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Sorcerer: âI thought values and life skills were the parentsâ job anyway. Damn, got that one wrongâ¦must tell my own kids that I should have passed the job of imparting values over to the teachers.â?
I still canât work out what you think schools are for. You donât seem to see a need to learn anything (itâs all on the internet, anyway) or to cover life skills and values (parents can do that). Do students really need to spend so much of their lives learning to google? Or are you just feeling argumentative, perhaps instigated by the angry tone of my post, in turn instigated by my daughterâs miserable year at school?
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Sorcerer: âAnd guess what, private schools teach exactly the same syllabi as public schools. They are bound to by law. Moreover their teachers have been to the same unis and have the same qualifications. The main difference overall lies in the power of the private sector to select their students.â?
Iâm desperately hoping youâre wrong. I sure have to try something.
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Chris: âMathematics is one core area. This is of concern to many university institutions who have had to add remedial maths programs in recent years because the quality of high school mathematics has dropped to the point where many students do not have the skills to tackle university level maths (which is central to many university courses).â?
My concern is that Maths is possibly the only tertiary subject that still expects students to have some basic knowledge. At least there is an expectation that students will know some basic trig, calc, algebra etc. Other science subjects seem to have pretty much given up on expecting anything.
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Mark: âI donât know that anything much I âlearntâ at high school is particularly relevant to me now or was ever relevant to me in the workplace aside from literacy and numeracy. Certainly the essays on Shakespeare or the memorisation of dates for history tests have never proved in the slightest bit usefulâ?.
I hate to flatter, particularly when I so strongly disagree with your views, but I think it likely that the clarity of your thoughts and your capacity to express them in your regular posts has a lot to do with those unloved Shakespeare essays.
Jenny
Everything you said is spot on. I cannot think of many people who do not use essay writing skills in their work: business plans; investment decsisions; requests for extra funding; marketing strategy; doctor’s report; legal advice, annual reports; the list is endless.
Because the HSC has been dumbed down so much, with less and less demand for essay responses in favour of single sentences, multiple choice or “write a paragraph on….” type questions, kids are entering uni. vastly underequipped. The one exception here being Mathematics (at least in NSW).
Writing a 3,000 word essay is a highly demanding test of so many different cognitive skills, not to mention advanced research skills.
The demise of three hour final exams is a tragedy. The cognitive abilities and study effort required to be able to walk into a room and respond to four unseen questions in three hours is incredibly high. Besides, such exams draw primarily on long-term memory, but in that three hours every single part of the memory is used.
What evidence exists for this statement?
I think there’s a significant misunderstanding of what an essay is here. It’s a quite artificial piece of writing, and writing one doesn’t necessarily make you more capable of writing a memo, or a report – which is why in Business Schools, writing reports is often preferred to writing essays. I dare say I’ve read a lot more of them than a lot of people on this thread. I’m unconvinced, from the evidence of ten years’ reading tertiary essays, that they necessarily teach argumentative skills or critical thinking.
Again, the first attribute is taught as a specific skill in universities. And I honestly wouldn’t get too excited about essays or exams as a measure of doing sustained and focused work towards a deadline. About 60% of students use them as a way of demonstrating the skill of writing a heap of barely adequate words within 24 hours of the due date… which is why Queensland very sensibly moved away from external exams for high school.
While I partially agree with this, it rather begs the question of what the structured knowledge should entail.
And thanks for the compliment, Jenny, but the Shakespeare essays were mostly ripped off from T. H. Bradley’s book on the tragic plays.
John, what evidence from psychology is there that writing essays and sitting exams involves these skills?
If you were writing an essay, you’d need to cite some rather than make an unsupported assertion.
Mark, what evidence is there that the habits and capacities that were traditionally inculcated by the âdisciplinesâ? of exams and much assessment as conventionally understood are actually counter-productive for most skilled jobs these days?
If you were undertaking an exam or submitting work for assessment, youâd need to cite some rather than make an unsupported assertion.
But I’m not, am I, Jenny?
Point taken though.
Let me just say, though, that the case against seeing pieces of a picture solely in terms of how they can be regurgitated in a certain form at a certain time rather than having a holistic picture is pretty obvious, I’d have thought.
Mark
Cite? Dude LP is not an academic journal. Besides this stuff is about as basic as it gets. Now, you’re the teacher. If you have not grasped these realities by now, I am at a loss as to what sort of program your uni is running. Also, my understanding is that QLD has been the most violently hit by the Brave New Critical Literacy World, with few/no final exams, and particularly no external exams. This very disturbing.
Mark: “Let me just say, though, that the case against seeing pieces of a picture solely in terms of how they can be regurgitated in a certain form at a certain time rather than having a holistic picture is pretty obvious, I’d have thought.”
Sorry, but that’s not obvious to me. I’m in the business of reviewing business operations. In the process we accumulate and absorb vast amounts of material, but that in itself has no value until I’ve presented a report that carefully selects, summarises, concludes and recommends. Generalising, I’d say that the immensity and complexity of all the nooks and crannies of your holistic picture is only useful if you’ve learned to regurgitate and use carefully selected portions for particular purposes. Just like exams and essays.
John, what I was trying to ironically refer to is that in an essay you can get away with no citations for a view that is well supported (note, not “common sense”) but if you make a very unexpected statement, you’re expected to be able to back it up. The same goes, dare I say it, for conversation on blogs. What rather amazed me was your claim that a lack of rote learning was a major cause of ADHD. I’m going to take the liberty of disbelieving you unless you can demonstrate that.
As to the cognitive skills involved in sitting for exams, no doubt you’re right. But that begs two other questions:
(1) Whether those skills are the ones that are transferable to other domains, particularly in the workplace, and thus worth fostering;
(2) Whether an unintended outcome of them is to cultivate a tendency to think that retaining and regurgitating a large amount of information, and then forgetting it, is valuable in and of itself, which I’d deny both on educational and workplace grounds.
I also note that there’s a lot of slippage going on around the question of whether certain types of assessment promote capacities useful in the workplace or whether they inculcate learning.
Further, there’s the question of whether putting people under enormous pressure is helpful in any sense. The abolition of external exams in Queensland took place in 1974, long before any “Brave New Critical Literacy World”, and it was largely done for the reasons I’m outlining. There is absolutely no desire in Queensland from anyone for a return to the horrendous stress senior students suffer under the HSC, or for a view that two years of high school should be entirely oriented towards exams rather than continuous learning.
There is a range of literature on this, which if you had a genuine interest, you might care to consult.
Regardless of the laudability of providing an holistic education, means are always going to be needed to determine how effectively you’ve done so, and these will necessarily be somewhat artificial constructs.
Yes, but you don’t do that, Jenny, by pouring it all out in two hours in a room with no access to any of the source material, or the night before you have to submit your report.
When I’ve taught in Business Schools, we try instead to have students work on comparable problems over the course of the entire semester, with regular input from the tutor every week, and in a group. It’s a much more useful thing to do than having people write an essay or sit an exam.
FDB, yes, I agree, but that shouldn’t be an argument for not trying to get a construct that actually measures learning better than others.
Though I also understand that the Critical Literacy set have just been given a good bitchslapping in QLD and their bovine poison will be booted out of QLD schools. One of the great things about Rudd is he has had to confront these brutes before when he was working for Goss. With Gillard’s support for merit pay, let us pray the AEU becomes the BLF of this decade. Deregistered.
Mark
You would do well to listen to those of us who have actually worked in the business world. You would also do well to listen to what all employer groups and major employers are saying.
Whatever, John. I’m 39. I’ve worked in universities for ten years. Before that I didn’t work in universities. I’ve done a number of consultancies for biz, and for some of them, I’ve been able to charge a grand a day. I couldn’t do that, in the wonderful world of the market, if I wasn’t adding value. I’ve also got postgrad qualifications in business, and a Bachelor of Commerce with First Class Honours. I’ve lectured in management and HRM, and entrepreneurship. I’ve been involved with start ups, and have worked with marketing firms. So you might “do well” to stop making so many assumptions.
… which is why I have difficulty taking you seriously on this subject. Your “understanding” about what’s gone in the Queensland education system is nothing of the sort but a set of uninformed prejudices and biases. Until you learn to bracket those out, and actually go and find out a few facts, you’re not in much of a position to lecture others on the value of education.
On the dreaded AEU, some interesting developments:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23069745-13881,00.html
JG you would do well to shut the fuck up until you’ve learnt to say something that shows a glimmer of intelligence or insight. You are a blot on this site and Mark’s patience with your continual inantities is truly outstanding.
JG
I wouldn’t get too worried about the opinions of major employers groups or large employers.
They have the ability to groom staff who show potential and a well organised HR department will winnow out the charf.
Conversly the unions will promote the interests of their members to the detriment of others but again this is a natural position for them to take.
This is all a remove from the idea of merit based pay for teachers but then again today the ABC is announcing the federal authorities are considering offering $50,000 as a bonus payment to teachers ( note that is “teachers of excellence” – I guess they have complied secret statistics somewhere ! ) who will relocate and teach in outback indigenous communities.
If this scheme ever gets of the ground we should be able to access the information which the authorities have used as the basis for the decision as to why these particular teachers are excellent.
Mythbusting time…
John Greenfield:
The cause of ADHD and its relative ADD is generally accepted by neuroscientists to be an aberration in the chemical and electrical functioning in the brain. Hence the use of Ritalin to attempt to remedy this aberration. The fact that drug therapy alone improves the condition in around 85% or more of cases tends to back up this premise. I won’t cite any references here…since JG is such an aspiring schooolman in the Mandarin tradition he can look them up himself on Google Scholar or take himself off to the Psych section at Sydney Uni Library if he finds the Net too icky.
No they don’t. In a nutshell, short-term memory plus working memory. Both of which are essentially “voided” after six weeks. If you make an analogy with the computer, the brain archives everything it encounters all of your life, but it does not necessarily make it available for easy access. To take it further your “Desktop” contains skills and activities which you use every day such as reading, writing, driving and recalling familiar faces, so they become seemingly unconscious activities. Your running processes look after body functions, and some learned behaviours.
Greg:
I’ll tell the plumber that next time he’s here. Maybe he’s missed out on something…
Sorry to disappoint Greg but I will repeat….in no job other than academia is producing anything like an essay a requirement. Business reports are not essays. Nor are briefing papers. Nor are technical documents. I know, I write all three.
Since the average “recruitment consultant” (yes Greg, most job vacancies are outsourced these days) knows diddly-squat about the structure of the Australian education system, I would hazard a guess that 90% of job applications do not survive the ensuing Brit backpacker cull. Employers are therefore often seeing only what these transients send them.
Jenny:
They are all different genres and thus demand different skills. One of the most common tasks facing business trainers is to get young people out of the habit of writing lengthy prolix slabs and trying to pass them off as business correspondence, because the writing of lengthy prolix slabs is, as Mark says, the benchmark for essay writing.
Your choice, but don’t assume others feel as you do. I prefer a rush from a good coffee myself.
Then set your own exams – and watch your employees vote with their feet.
Yeah I remember how to drive with a four-speed column gear shift but it is not something I either use much these days nor something I expect to need to write an essay on. I can also perform mathematical operations on pounds, shillings and pence without using a calculator, but I do not expect it to be useful in seeking employment.
It doesn’t take long to learn. Even oldies like me learnt search engines quickly. It’s no different in intent to learning how the Dewey decimal system works, and it has the added bonus of allowing young students to learn elementary Boolean mathematics painlessly. Search engines are just one research tool which students learning to learn will find useful. A Google search will often save time by giving students a few shortcuts to more detailed paper resources. I would imagine that schools in remote areas which have always been poorly served with libraries would find the Internet of immense value.
Chris:
It is up to the Universities to ensure that the correct criteria is set for entry to courses such as the sciences, Accounting and Engineering in the first place. I would hazard a guess that you would need a sound pass in at least 3 Unit Mathematics in the NSW HSC to satisfactorily study all three of these disciplines. So are Universities relaxing their requirements merely to put bums on seats?
Adrian, as John Cleese once observed, every village needs an idiot. We have ours.
Wow, one thing that amazes me about this thread and education debates is that suddenly eveyrone’s an expert because they’ve got kids or been to school once.
The idea that teachers – however hopeless – and education departments that are stuffed to the gills with phds and masters are somehow completely clueless when it comes to education, that the system develops by nowt more than a twenty-sided die, a long afternoon and some beercercise, is so weird to me.
After all, teachers and departmental heads know at least as much as you guys. After all, they once went to school themselves and most of them have kids.
To think – as some obviously do – that these debates and battles haven’t been waged inside education departments is hopelessly naive. They have been waged – are still being fought, most vociferously – by people far more qualified and with stronger empirical grounds than John “History Wars Gave My Daughter ADHD” Greenfield or Jenny.
I think the problem with education – beyond everyone thinking they know the whys and wherefores of education cause they once sat in a classroom (I don’t remember that on my curriculum! lol) – is the idea that there is somehow a magic bullet; one, ball-crushingly good education system that will work for the really dumb kids, and the smart ones, and the smart but apathetic ones, and the dumb but keen ones.
This educational shangri-la doesn’t exist, and – accepting that no system is ever either perfect of finalised (indeed, Australian education changes nearly as fast as an adolescent’s shoe-size), we’ve actually got it pretty good here, and our education system does in fact do a decent to great job for most – but not all – of its charges, most of the time.
Rather than casting dewy-eyed glances back into the days of canes, or inkpots, or periodical tables etc. We should accept that the world we live in has very much changed since those days, and therefore so should the education system. Teaching is about youth is about the future, not the past.
At the same time, we need to acknowledge how much hasn’t changed. Kids still learn algebra, are forced to read Of Mice and Men or 1984, learn about the Romans (that’s for you, Johnny), and old wars, old science (last time I checked, chemistry was still all fe+pb=???, not nanotechnology…). These things are relevant, some things are not.
Learning has changed because knowledge has changed. That doesn’t make every school or teacher great, nor does it make every student fantastic. But rather than grabbing onto one tiny slice or experience of the education system you happen to disagree with and thus condemn the entire building, we should do what education departments do every day, which is try to isolate what works and what doesn’t – by evidence – and try to change for the better, acknowledging that change is a) never easy, and b) never finished.
That’s my two cents, anyway.
“The demise of three hour final exams is a tragedy.”
What evidence does John Greenfield have about the abolition of 3 hour exams in the HSC.
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/events/pdf_doc/hsc_timetable_booklet_07.pdf
Even the subjects that people shop for to pick up easy marks like Religion have 3 hour exams. English is two different 3 hour exams, Maths one 3 hour, and the extension is 2 hours (which I think is the way it was when I did 4 unit Maths), Modern History 3 hours, Biology 3 hours, Physics 3 hours, Ancient History 3 hours, Economics 3 hours, Legal Studies 3 hours. The only subjects that are below 3 hours, are the vocational subjects like Hospitality, Industrial Technology et al
Don’t expect Greenfield to know stuff all about anything that he regularly pontificates on.
The man is the worst kind of ignoramus, and a putrid sore on the otherwise quite healthy LP body!
There are a few assumptions that are implicit in some of the posts here that need exposing and debunking.
The first is that skills learnt in a school environment are transferable into contexts outside school. There are mountains of evidence (which I won’t cite here) that make it clear that learning is context-specific – that is, learning how to write an essay about Shakespearean sonnets does NOT transfer directly into the skill of learning how to write a business report. While this might seem counter-intuitive, each skill must be learned in context which is why we struggle as we go from one work place to another for a while (even though we are applying apparently similar skills). This means that our curriculum needs to be driven by something other that ‘work place skills’. I can hear the repsonse now: what about literacy skills? Well, these are the same. There is no clear set of literayc skills that everyone should have access to, which is why there is such a bun fight over things like the role of correct spelling as a fundamental skill.
The second assumption seems to be that the best way to evaluate a student’s performance is to evaluate all students in the same way, at the same time, on the same task. This assumption – when you look at it in its fundamental form – is bizarre. The idea that all people can be measured using the same yard stick is an idea that we have spent the past two hundred years trying to get away from, but we think we are doing our students a favour by doing it to them. We can accurately evaluate student achievement against clear standards without the need to sit them through three hour exams – although we might keep them for you, Jenny!
But the worst assumption that keeps coming through these posts is that schooling is purely utilitarian – we force students through it so that they can get a job. What about educating students to appreciate the beauty of art? Or how to communicate with people who fundamentally disagree with your world view? Or studying mathematics so that we can better appreciate the beauty of the universe?
So what do I think we should learn at school? This from William James (the American philosopher): “The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Patrickg and Kevin Brady – well said.
If you paid them a lot more, the competition would probably weed out the incompentents but I’m not prepared to pay the extra taxes – not only for state schools but private too – to support this, and neither are you.
Andrew you do NOT speak for me.
Neither do you speak for all the newspaper letter-writers I read in the lead up to the Federal election, all saying pretty much the same thing: It’s time we stopped focusing on silly populist tax cuts and started building up the infrastructure we all need to live well – health, education, transport – and we’re willing to pay the taxes!
Amen.
Kevin, my only (slight) disagreement with you. Even the great artists and thinkers had clients and patrons, and were none too ashamed to pursue them. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle did not do volunteer teaching. Shakespeare wrote for paying theatre audiences. Handel, Bach and Mozart lived on what would these days be considered the public purse.
These days in modern Australia all of them would probably be either teaching or, failing that, working in hospitality or in a call centre alongside our own younger writers and visual artists.
You can count the number of writers in Australia able to live off their writing alone on the fingers of one hand. Have a look at how old they are too, and at how many have moved overseas (e.g. Peter Carey). Extend the list to actors. Nicole, Hugh and Cate may not have to tend bar or work in coffee shops, but most Australian actors do.
Starving in a garret in the name of ars artis gratia is picturesque but not practical. Just look at the ham-fisted way Centrelink treats working artists.
By all means embrace knowledge for its own sake, but a couple of bits of paper from TAFE or a post-grad business or IT qualification is what will ultimately pay the rent and feed the kids.
I have a couple of questions for Patrick g.
“After all, teachers and departmental heads know at least as much as you guys. After all, they once went to school themselves and most of them have kids.
To think – as some obviously do – that these debates and battles haven’t been waged inside education departments is hopelessly naive. ”
I have always assumed they would be up to date with the latest published thoughts and ideas. In a department like the Dept of Education is there a prevailing orthodoxy about how such ideas must be implemented though?
Beaurocratic inertia is one feature of large departments but for all the debating I’d be curious to know how often new approachs are introduced.
Do any readers have any examples where such changes have occurred?
How influential is the AEU within the various departments around Australia? Is it a constant presence at department meetings or is the union only consulted if there is a preception that conflict might develop?
If debates about merit based pay have occurred in a Dept somewhere in Austrlai what was the outcome?
Hiya Murph,
I’m not a teacher, I have studied the sociology of education in Australia; so my answers in this regard my not be completely on the mark, I would love any teachers out there to reply.
My understanding is that there are a few prevailing orthodoxies, so to speak. My experience suggests that, yes, bureaucracy does mean that things change slowly in education departments, however I stand by my call that they change all the time.
The changes may be small – little changes to curricula or test questions, to large changes – the difference in what was called Citizenship Education when I finished high school ten years ago, and what it now resembles is a great example.
In terms of the how, some things don’t change a lot: classrooms, tests, essays, homework (which is interesting in that I believe no research has ever demonstrated that homework in and of itself has any positive impact on learning, believe it or not).
Regarding the AEU, my understanding is quite limited, but I don’t think influential is really the right word, at least in so far pedagogy goes.
Homework is part of a wider conspiracy between teachers and parents. Teachers give students heaps of homework so when the little blighters get home, they’re too weighed down with boring stuff like maths, algebra, composition and comprehension exercises to bother their parents strighyt on arriving home from work. That’s my theory, anyway.
Or they feel that the syllabus has changed to the point where although they still require the same subjects in name, the actual content is different. And what do you do if 3 Unit Mathematics is no longer sufficient and there is no more an advanced unit available?
And even with the internet available, having to look everything up all the time will affect your productivity. I’ll take the example of an engineering course where you study both applied maths subjects and engineering subjects which use the concepts from the maths subjects. When they get the course schedule right they even teach the maths ones before the engineering ones, but that was never guaranteed
Now the mathematics in the engineering subjects was never technically more difficult than the maths in the maths courses. But most people had much more difficulty with the the engineering subjects. This was because in the maths courses it was always pretty clear what algorithm/technique you should use to solve the problem. In the engineering ones you had to work it yourself what mathematical concept you should use. Now if you didn’t hold most of those in your head, you could certainly look them up, but it made the process a whole lot longer and in exams you’d simply run out of time (if it was open book).
I work in the engineering/computer science field where we probably do the comparably little writing to many other professions. However with much of the communication these days, even within teams, is done electronically rather than in person, being able to write even fairly short reports is pretty important. Unfortunately I’ve seen many cases where although people are very technically competent, really bad spelling results in them coming across as either being much less competent than they are (and this is an industry where often its ok to turn up to the office in track suit pants and ugg boots). And what is easier than just looking up how to spell a word these days? But they don’t end up correcting their mistakes because for some they haven’t remembered enough about the language to recognise when they’ve made a mistake, or that there are too many corrections that it would slow them down too much.
murph the surf – Some comments from one who was once close to the action.
It is not widely understood by teachers let alone the wider community that Departments of Education do NOT develop curricula/syllabi. Such documents are developed and distributed by INDEPENDENT Boards. While Department Of Education have representation on such Boards, so do the Catholics, other Private schools, Independent Teachers Unions, Public sector Teacher Unions, Private School Parents, Public School Parents, Business representatives, Academics and indeed any other group which has a legitimate interest in such matters.
Representation has to be wide because the documents developed will, in general terms, be used in all schools and by all teachers. That’s the first point. Curricula (including modes of transmission) is outside of the Departments, generally speaking.
You ask “How influential is the AEU within the various departments around Australia?”
Answer: Not at all. The AEU might speak on national issues but it has little or no influence at the State level. Generally speaking, State Departments meet with State Teacher Unions. The AEU is not a player.
On the question of Merit Pay as envisaged by Bishop – based on student test scores – most if not all bureaucrats with school experience would be opposed.
It would only be supported by those who have no understanding of how schools work.
Chris
You wrote:
‘I know the school I went to did occasionally come into some criticism from public schools in the state for âpoachingâ? their good teachers.’
How did your school even know about the existence of these state school teachers’, let alone know which ‘good’ ones to poach?
Teaching is a very isolating profession. Even within one’s own school, it’s hard to guage how other teachers’ are fairing, let alone another school being aware of who the state’s ‘good’ teachers’ are.
I do know that one reliable indicator of a ‘good’ teacher is when a school will hold the teaching position open for one year for the resigning teacher, in case the teacher changes their mind and decides to return.
And I know of a prestigious Brisbane private school, who last semester offered a position to a seemingly ‘outstanding’ state school teacher.
This teacher was one of a few resigning teachers’ that semester from the state school he taught at. He was the only one who was not offered the opportunity to return if he changed his mind.