Kevin Rudd’s address to the National Press Club yesterday (you can read it here) was notable as much for what he didn’t say as for what he did. I’d be very surprised indeed if the expectation that he would spell out a “narrative” wasn’t created by Labor types themselves. It’s not the sort of thing that journos just make up. But with his tick a box recital of what the government had done on education, he’s signalling that he’s not going to play that particular game – pragmatism rather than oratory is his weapon of choice. But like a lot of what Rudd has announced as PM, there’s very little detail to back up his various initiatives in the latest “chapter” of the “education revolution”. That’s ok, though, apparently for a usually sceptical media, because he’s representing himself as taking on the teachers’ unions.
As Bismarck commented on this thread, it’s an old trick. As old as Bill Clinton actually – who first trialled it in Arkansas when he wanted to demonstrate that he wasn’t a “traditional” Democrat. And, as we all know, Arkansas now has a school system that’s the envy of the world (ahem)…
It’s an agenda that will have those working families nodding around the kitchen tables. And it’s got the added advantage of a big stink with the education establishment, particularly teacher unions and some state governments.
Maybe so. I wonder if those same “working families” will be nodding vigorously when it’s their local school that gets closed down. Whatever you think about the ideological agenda behind this (and I’m just repulsed by the demonisation of teachers), there’s an enormous number of ways this could turn into a political negative for the Rudd government. But, in the short term, he’s got the media coverage he wants, and got something that could be portrayed as a positive back on the front pages.
Update: Blogospheric reaction at Road to Surfdom, Public Opinion and Blogocracy.
Update: More from Sam Clifford at Public Polity, while on the other side of the blogosphere, Andrew Norton and Jason Soon are Julia Gillard’s new biggest fans.
Unless there is spare capacity in nearby schools (which might be true if the trend towards private schools continues), then I don’t see how they can do this. The kids have to go to school somewhere. Maybe its just code for, “remove the principal and all the teachers and replace them with a new bunch”. Which might be ok if for some reason there is an unhealthy culture there.
The best question Gillard didn’t answer last night on Lateline was “why would you be sacking teachers when there is a shortage of them”?
This is a sort of supply side reform – consistent with all the other human capital stuff (there’s your narrative, actually) they go on with. Get new people into teaching by… what… performance pay? Incentives to “spend time in teaching”? Incentives to work in disadvantaged schools?
Will that work? I don’t know. I rather doubt it. The dreaded teachers’ unions might actually know something about the existing conditions of work in that profession.
I really hate the Labour Right. But I fall for it every time. I’m in the bank as far as they’re concerned but no more! Move over Greens I’m movin’ in.
I thought about that too, Chris.
It would be hard to merge schools if that just entailed moving a group of students from one school to another. I would have thought that in order to “merge” two schools, there must be constructed a new school to house the members of each. Or at least a renovation/expansion of one of the merging parties to provide extra capacity.
Consolidation of resources, combined with renewed investment in the facilities and buildings of schools, seems like it could be a good idea.
That is, as long as there IS renewed investment and not just downsizing of the Public School system…
Is there really a shortage of teachers? One one hand there are people claiming there is, on the other hand new teachers can’t seem to get permanent jobs. If there was really a shortage you’d think schools would be offering permanent positions in order to keep the teachers they have.
Perhaps its just a shortage of teachers in some fields (maths/science seems to quoted commonly), and a huge excess in others? If so, differential pay could help here to encourage people to train in the fields which we need.
Andos @ 4, Canberra recently went through a lot of consolidation (moving away from the ideal of a school in every suburb) which was very unpopular. Forced moving of children from one school to another even if there are long term gains for the community is always going to bring up a lot of protests.
As a Liberal, this may shock you to hear from me, but the only way to improve education is to pay teachers more.
What won’t shock you is the way to pay for this is to have fewer teachers.
The people who run, like, the world, right now, were educated in classes of 30+ students. We need good teachers, not necessarily many teachers. Quality rather than quantity. Pay them like the professionals they should be, because a better teacher will improve educational productivity. That means you will need fewer of them.
Teacher unions are a easy target, but mostly because their educational argument begins and ends with more teachers. Oh, and, sorry, less testing.
In Australia we have an aversion to excellence driven by teacher unions. We are also in the midst of a debate about what is right and wrong to teach in class, like Maths and English were some sort of philosophical exercise. We should be measuring ourselves up against each other, in order to strive for the best we can achieve. And there is a right way to spell a word, and 1+1=2.
We need to equip our children with the tools and knowledge they need to be productive members of society, in both the economic and social sense.
“Quality rather than quantity. Pay them like the professionals they should be, because a better teacher will improve educational productivity. That means you will need fewer of them.”
Even assuming your underlying argument is good, only once those ‘better’ teachers have driven up productivity can number afford to drop. Or god help those kids in the transitional phase of low numbers of ‘bad’ teachers.
You also seem to ignore the point that quality of teaching correllates inversely with class size. It reall really does, no matter what you may believe about our current crop of world leaders, the brilliant job they’re doing, and the class sizes they apparently all thrived within.
There are so many problems with this vague grab bag of proposals that it is hard to know where to start. But two points are obvious already:
1. The narrative has been established that there are problems in public education. This much was clear from the AM interview with Gillard this morning. The interviewer just assumed that there were ‘underperforming’ public schools out there and of course Gillard did nothing to dissuade her of this assumption. Nowhere is it asked what constitutes underperforming, who has made this judgement and why? Like so much guff we hear masquerading as news, it is just assumed. End result is that the image of public schools is further undermined.
2. If transparency etc etc is so important why do these measures not apply equally to private schools, who after all receive more from the federal purse than public schools? We can only assume that Rudd and Gillard don’t have the political will to take on the private school lobby, even to the extent of applying the same ‘benchmarks’ that public schools have to meet. These schools, often bastions of privilege and wealth have had a free ride on the public teat for too long already. Now they are even further advantaged.
I don’t have any references handy, but there are studies around which show that class size (not including silly extremes) doesn’t have much effect on outcomes.
I thought the reporting side of things was going to apply to private schools as well. And some others like principals being able hire teachers directly they already have.
Well I hope that you are right Chris, but the only schools that get a mention when the words underperforming or problem appear are the public variety.
Except that Gillard is from the Left (so is Macklin vis-a-vis welfare quarantining BTW). In fact, the Rudd government has the highest proportion of Left ministers in a federal Labor government in living memory. The Labor Right seems to be a bogeyman that gets blamed for all of Labor’s problems, whether or not it’s our fault.
“World leaders”, whoever they may be, are bad exemplars of the supposed benefis of large class sizes.
Take George W. Bush. He’s a “world leader”.
Dubya attended Phillips Academy. This is one of the elite private schools in America. It has a huge endowment. In current dollars it would have cost the Bush family about $40k per annum to send him there. Peanuts for the Bushes, but an annual wage for many, many Americans. Schools like Phillips endow many scholarships to smart kids from poor families. I doubt that Dubya was ever a scholarship boy.
Dubya’s class sizes at Phillips would seldom have been more than 15.
“Except that Gillard is from the Left.”
Not any more.
NSW teachers are currently taking rolling strike action on the Government’s attempts to control teacher transfers. Instead of vacancies going first up to interested other employed teachers Iemma wants the chance to put in ‘the best and the brightest’ with principals having a big say. Teachers Fed has some 60 000 members and 48 fulltime staff. What chance has Rudd/Gillard got to foment an ‘education revolution’ in such an entrenched environment? Even the State Government is opposed to the concept of a national curricula. I’d suggest the Feds start thinking outside the square. For example put a lot more money into cash-strapped local government run libraries with extended hours, internet access, even remedial/homework classes. If the kids are curious enough and it beats after school boredom it could catch a few of those who fall through the net or who teachers now are glad to be rid of because of their disruptive behaviour.
A couple of points.
I agree with Chris and not with FDB.
Secondly, I didn’t say world leaders. I said the people who run the world. That is, people of a certain age group, say 35-49. Basically people who were born a little before I was. But I shouldn’t decrease the chances of one of the parts of my day I look forward to most happening: being misquoted by Katz. And for the record, I never would have voted for Bush (Gore in 2000, no one in 2004, which is where I am leaning at the moment, hypothetically).
The transition would have to be gradual, obviously. You pay the teachers more, report on their performance (like how much kids are learning, stuff like that), “re-assign” the poorly performing teachers, and move forward with that model. That would take time, but more importantly, it would take real conviction and guts, something political parties of all shades are lacking at the moment.
And report on every school that gets some sort of government funding. That would be every school, wouldn’t it?
Pablo, I’n not a member of the NSWTF, but there’s a lot more to your characterisation of the dispute with the NSW government, including the problem of staffing less popular schools with any teachers at all, let alone the ‘best and brightest’ whatever that might mean.
And having known a few highly incompetent principals over the years, I’d say in many cases they are the last people that you’d want choosing the best teachers.
Some of them know as much about teaching as Rudd knows about narrative, since they long ago decided to abandon the classroom in favour of administration and promotion. Therin lies another problem…
Howard, moving forward as we are, and with all the quality benchmarks in place, and a transparent framework for the moving forward process, I don’t want to be rude, but I’d say you have a highly simplistic notion of teaching and learning.
How about you talk to some teachers, hey even visit a school, and moving forward you might learn of hitherto imagined complexities involved in the teaching process, and realise that your solutions are nothing of the sort. Moving forward
allways moving forward Aug 28th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
On the money. So is adrian. Rudd bought these myths years ago and still owns them apparently. But as Rudd is fond of saying ‘the devil’s in the detail’.
We are also in the midst of a debate about what is right and wrong to teach in class, like Maths and English were some sort of philosophical exercise.
Howard, I don’t think your opinions re: education are particularly revolutionary, but that statement above really highlights to me how little you know about the education sector.
*We* – as in, Joe Latte Public – might be having this debate about maths and English, but in terms of pedagogy, they way it’s taught in unis and the way the dept. deals with it, there is no debate. Full stop.
It saddens me immensely – people seem to have this idea that education dept honchos sit around at a piss up and write policy on the back of a napkin or something. It’s really not the case at all, of course. Furthermore, education – whilst hardly foreign policy or finance – is a very slow moving beast: things like the way we teach math and english etc. don’t just change overnight (not that that would be a bad thing, per se, at least the way I was taught maths).
Education crisis, blah blah blah. Australian education is still amongst the very best in the OECD, though it’s true that it’s slipping slowly.
And lastly, of course we would think that education needs to be more like the kind we respond to Howard – we’ve made it. We’re not the ones who need help or slip through the cracks of education. Or merely trudge onward with a stellar collection of C-’s. That who curriculum changes for first and foremost, as it should be.
*****
One thing I do find interesting is that *outrage* at firing teachers, when the system tacitly does this anyway. No one in this debate is talking about the number of teachers who leave the profession. It’s huge.
Try getting a permanent position if the principal thinks you’re a dick. No way man, not unless it’s the crappiest of crappy schools. Now, if you’re really bad, this means you will simply be shunted from school to school, contract to contract, without ever picking up that beloved permanency. Until you leave. Oh resignation, sure. But it’s effectively firing.
Also, lots of teachers are shit – I’m not opposed to firing them, it would make everybody’s jobs easier. But you need someone to replace em first.
Chris gets it when he talks about the manufactured shortage. The fact is – beyond semester to semester variability – there is no real teacher shortage.
There is, however, a shortage of teachers (in some subjects particularly) who are prepared to put up with shitty, shitty working conditions in indifferent schools with inflated principals and no job security whatsoever for a pay packet somewhere between $52 – $58k a year. Yep, there’s a big shortage of them, surprise surprise.
Pablo – please correct me if I’m wrong, but its not as simple as vacancies going first up to interested other employed teachers is it? They go to those who are interested *and* have built up enough transfer points – eg getting “good” positions is used as a reward for long service, rather than being assigned based purely on who would be best for the position.
Of course everyone thinks they’re an expert on schools because they all went to one. But ‘taint so.
Rudd is supposed to be committed to “evidence based policy”. But things like the effect on outcomes of performance pay for teachers have been researched and evaluated to death overseas, and to put it kindly the evidence is mixed. Like performance pay everywhere else, it really depends exactly how you go about it – naive models drawn from executive bonuses for profitability are guaranteed to fail.
Funding schools according to outcomes is even worse – as commonsense suggests. The last thing a struggling school needs is a funding cut, and conversely a school doing well can be safely assumed to be adequately funded.
The US evidence on class sizes (again researched to death) is that it matters, but not very much. As the cross-country evidence is that the level of teacher pay has quite a sizeable effect on outcomes, Howard C is right – slightly bigger class sizes to pay teachers better should give a net improvement. Of course you can get an even bigger bang for your buck elsewhere by pouring it into early special ed for kids who are struggling.
Howard C, I was educated with class sizes of 30+, too, and got a good education. However, I believe that the fact those classes were streamed, and I had competent-to-gifted teachers, had more to do with the quality of my education than class size. Everything I’ve read suggests that, all other things being equal, smaller class sizes give better outcomes.
“As the cross-country evidence is that the level of teacher pay has quite a sizeable effect on outcomes”
You mean between countries, or across one country?
Raising the base salary may well attract better teachers to the profession, but a correlation between higher pay and better outcomes might merely show that the best teachers are going where the money is, and without an overall rise there may still be, in total, the same teachers of the same quality – and none of the good ones working where they’re most needed.
Has anyone here considered that this announcement has nothing to do with ‘teaching’ quality’ ‘information for parents blah blah’ or the issue of ‘narrative’ and everything to do with the adoption of the ‘third way’ govenance strategy, perfected by Blair and
Alistair Campbell? It works for a while, until it doesn’t. Then people simply hate your guts for taking them for fools, especially when people realise they were for a while, fools. Ask Gordon Brown and the hapless British LAbour Party back bench, who will soon be electoral toast.
David, that was the point I was making. By making teaching a more attractive profession, you’ll get a better calibre of person undertaking teaching as a career. And this is a really important area, so I’m not for arguing the toss about who picks up the cheque. But reality is reality, and the money to hire and reward better teachers must come from somewhere.
PatrickG, the maths and english comment was a bit of a throwaway line. I agree with you about many current teachers being awful, though.
Another huge issue teachers must face, and one that hasn’t been mentioned, is students who bring “baggage” from home to school. Either they aren’t being fed properly, or there is domestic problems, and so on. Teachers are relied upon do to more stuff in school I wouldn’t categorise as “teaching”. And criticising parents for being poor at parenting is not really a vote winner. Maybe all the problems associated with our education system will eventually reside in the too hard basket, which is a shame.
Update: Blogospheric reaction at Road to Surfdom, Public Opinion and Blogocracy.
Gillard is on to a winner here. The only way to improve education is to smash the AEU and to get the state out of micromanaging schools. Provide money, yes. But then get out of the way. But smashing the AEU must be our first priority.
John Greenfield’s endorsement is one I suspect Rudd could do without.
amused – re your point – you may like to check out this post if you haven’t seen it already:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/26/were-theyre-all-neo-liberals-now/
I’m sure a number of folks will be boning up on the history of education outcomes in Britain since 1997. Watch this space.
Yes, amused’s point is a good one.
And I doubt if Gillard is chasing the misfit vote with this one, but you never know.
Howard C – 40 years ago teachers were getting a lot more than they do now in real terms, but mostly I was very lucky – there were duds in the system then as well.
Thing is there’s always been ‘duds’ in the system, but it’s usually the fault of the principals who either move them on to other schools, or do nothing because it involves too much paperwork or is too unpleasant.
These are of course the very same principals that these proposals seek to give even more power to.
What an absurd stereotype you’ve constructed there. Principals, especially in state schools, generally work their guts out trying to ensure that teachers are educating their students well. As you say, there is too much paperwork attending to counselling of underperforming teachers, and just forget about sacking one who doesn’t respond to counselling. The upshot for adrian? There’s too much bureaucratic overhead to get rid of the hopelessly bad teachers, and when time-pressed and stressed principals avoid the heartache and hassle, it’s the principals fault. Talk about blaming the victim…
BBB
BBB you dill, I’m just stating the facts mate. While there are many principals who are up to the job there are a sizeable proportion who aren’t. And there are teachers who are moved from school to school because the people who should be doing something about them prefer to pass the problem on to another school or do nothing. While the proportion of ‘duds’ is extremely low the fact that they are not dealt with creates a problem for the teachers that have to work with them, and of course the teachers that they teach.
In fact in one country region in NSW, the ’solution’ for non-performing teachers seems to be medical retirement – that way everyone’s happy and the principal can avoid making tough decisions.
If anything these principals are the victims of their own ambition and a system that promotes incompetence. Ask any teacher.
Make that ’students that they teach’…
Then why say it is the principal’s fault? Why blame the employee for the dysfunctional system within which they work? We simply are not providing employees with the tools to get better results from subordinate employees. And who is in the way most of the time? You guessed it, the AEU and the relatively lazy employees whose interests the union, and unnecessarily complex workplace rules, serve.
“Ask any teacher.” I don’t need to ask a teacher, this stuff is volunteered to me all the time. I married one. And she’s the union rep!
BBB
Well that’s one thing we have in common at least!
Wow. I don’t know where to go from here. To have something as profound as that in common with you… well, let’s just say there’ll be some serious identity de-construction over dinner tonight.
Cheers
BBB
A couple of glasses of a good red is probably all the de-construction I’ll need.
Oh yes. That’s why he gave $35 million of our money to Toyota. It’s industry policy see. It’s in line with the corporatist stratagems of such nations as South Korea where the government plants the seeds of local industry so the Koreans would not depend on foreign firms for employment and would be able to export local manufacture thus earning lots of….
.
Um.
.
See? Kevvie’s combined the worst of both worlds! Very pragmatic – golf clap. Well done Kevvie.
Points taken on the NSW teaching situation. I specifically did not want to be seen as taking sides on issues but to give some idea of what Rudd/Gillard would be taking on if they opt to confront the profession. I believe it would be immensely draining and not necessarily a win for either side. Better in my view for a bit of lateral thinking on what other learning environments kids can find their way into.
Wow BBB, you of all people married to a union rep! That must make for some really interesting conversations! Opposites truly do attract!
Update: More from Sam Clifford at Public Polity, while on the other side of the blogosphere, Andrew Norton and Jason Soon are Julia Gillard’s new biggest fans.
“I really hate the Labour Right. But I fall for it every time. I’m in the bank as far as they’re concerned but no more! Move over Greens I’m movin’ in.”
“Except that Gillard is from the Left”
Julia Gillard is from the ‘Left’ faction that is ‘left’ by name only. Most Labor MPs these days are right-wingers, including Ms. Gillard.