The MSM is full of reports and commentaries praising Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard for taking on the teacher unions with their proposals for “a new national system of school transparency” based on publication of information and ranking of the performances of schools and those who work in them.
This proposal, and the prospect of a Federal Labor Government beating up on TEH TEACHER UNIONS, has attracted praise from Peter Hartcher, Michelle Grattan, the Opposition Organ and Terry Sweetman.
However, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has a different view. Its Improving School Leadership study finds that the kind of public reporting and ranking of school performance proposed by the Rudd government does not, on the evidence, improve school performances and may even be counterproductive.
Finland, which does not resort to such practices, has the world’s best schooling system by most benchmarks.
This raises the interesting question of why a Federal Labor Government should choose to borrow policy ideas (such as public reporting and ranking of school performance) from the US and UK rather than attempting to emulate world’s best practice as represented by Finland.
Some more perspectives and information on the Finnish schooling system are provided here, here, and here.
In reviewing this material one finds that the Finnish schooling system includes features which would scandalise “mainstream” protagonists in debates on schooling in Australia, yet which seem to have done Finnish kids no harm at all:
High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7. Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules.
The Finnish education system is an egalitarian Nordic system, with no tuition fees for full-time students. Attendance is compulsory for nine years starting at age seven, and free meals are served to pupils at primary and secondary levels, where the pupils go to their local school. In the OECD’s international assessment of student performance, PISA, Finland has consistently been among the highest scorers worldwide; in 2003 Finnish 15-year-olds came first in reading literacy, mathematics, and science, while placing second in problem solving. In tertiary education, the World Economic Forum ranks Finland #1 in the world in enrollment and quality and #2 in math and science education.
There are private schools but they are made unattractive by legislation. The founding of a new private comprehensive school requires a political decision by the Council of State. When founded, private schools are given a state grant comparable to that given to a municipal school of the same size. However, even in private schools, the use of tuition fees is strictly prohibited, and any private school must admit all its pupils on the same basis as the corresponding municipal school. In addition, private schools are required to give their students all the social entitlements that are offered to the students of municipal schools.
In this school, everybody knows each other, and the pupils call their teachers by their first names as is customary in Finland.
A final point worth making is that there appears to be a strong synergy between egalitarianism and solidarity in Finnish society, and outcomes in their schooling system - once again showing the benign influence of social democracy and feminism.
One can only hope that an “evidence-based” “education revolution” can transcend Anglosphere culture war obsessions and union-bashing, and base itself on the evidence about the world’s best schooling system.
I wonder if your Prime Minister has taken his lead from Hamas in Palestine which has also decided to ‘take on’ the Teacher Unions.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hp_DKMAHnvuR6qPwBivPSwUG7RGQD92QQ0RG8
Why do we always borrow failed ideas from the US and the UK?
Great post Paul, and proof, if proof were needed, of Rudd’s real agenda.
Just reporting results from Finland is massively biased. If you look across school systems, what you find is very little relationship between the type of school system, the type of government interference, and the outcomes. The Singapore school system, for example, works in basically the opposite way of the Finnish one — there are lots of exams, homework etc. and people couldn’t care less about egalatarianism. The Hong Kong system is similar. They are both a great success, on any measure. Australia sits somewhere in the middle, and gets good outcomes in literacy and reasonable but declining outcomes in mathematics.
Given this, it seems to me there are really only two factors that make a lot of difference to the overall outcomes:
1) The amount of money going into the system and hence overall teacher renumeration. If neither parents nor the government are willing to pay enough, you end up with a system that doesn’t do well and declines over time (the same is true of our university system).
2) Cultural attitudes towards education (i.e., what the parents are willing to do to help their children). This can compensate for innumerate failings of the school system.
No doubt you can get tiny benefits from various wonder-fixes (performance pay, league tables, vouchers etc. ) if implemented properly (which is generally not the case, since they are almost impossible to implement), but this is just scratching around the edges in any case and hence avoiding the real problems.
Conrad makes a good point about cultural issues. We don’t really have the same attitude towards education than, I suspect, the Singaporeans or the Finnish have.
Personally, I would have favoured more school hours and much, much less homework, which I endeavoured to do at school anyway. All I wanted to do at home was relax, which was not a boon for my university career.
I have no objection to governments looking further than the usual places for policy ideas. I’m not sure the private/public situation in Finland could be replicated here without a major cultural shift, but when it comes to education, we just need to work towards what will deliver the best outcomes, no matter what.
I have never understood the fierce resistance from the teachers unions to allowing parents to know how their childs school is doing in comparison to the one down the road. If I were a parent I would want some sort of formal measure in place other than the scuttlebutt and anacdotal evidence that is produced everytime you get a group of parents together and they start (inevitaly) to talk about their childs education.
To my mind the real debate should be around how you lift poorly performing schools up, once they are identified.
“Finland, which does not resort to such practices, has the world’s best schooling system by most benchmarks.”
Aren’t the unions against creating and using benchmarks?
And which parts of the Finnish system would you like to import?
— start school at 7 years old? (Isn’t the early childhood education agenda arguing that children should learning earlier rather than later?)
— complete school at 19? (huge implications for universities)
— stream kids off at 16 into academic and trade streams?
— make teachers have masters degrees but don’t pay them very well (I can just see the unions agreeing to that one)
There can be little doubt that the Finns get great educational outcomes. But there’s no structural aspect in the Finnish education system which creates good educational outcomes in a causal sense, except possibly having well educated teachers and a well funded system, except that teachers aren’t all that well paid. But hardly anybody in Finland is all that well paid. It’s a quite prosperous egalitarian society. Which means that you can’t import the Finnish educational system without also importing holus bolus Finnish society and culture in which it sits.
“innumerate failings of the school system.”
How can we expect our kids to learn maths when the school system itself is innumerate?
“The amount of money going into the system and hence overall teacher renumeration.”
Oh I see. We fix the school system by using money to renumerate the teachers, presumably getting them to work out how much change they’d have left from a $50 note if they bought six apples at 35c each, 500g of mince at $7.50 a kilo and an alcopop for the walk home.
Cunning plan!
What if there aren’t any ‘poorly’ performing high schools?
Why is the automatic assumption always that there are.
Schools in NSW already produce detailed school reports with analysis of HSC results and other detailed information. These reports are publicly available, often on a school’s web site - if it’s a public school that is. So parents who genuinely want to do so can compare schools.
ramhead’s post is typical of the misinformed and ignorant comments that come to light their head whenever the issue of education is raised. If there was ‘fierce resistance’ from education unions to information being available we wouldn’t have the detailed school reports referred to above.
er.. delete ‘their head’!!
Spiros, we already have benchmarks in all sorts of areas in NSW, including literacy and numeracy. Teachers spend half their time assessing students against fucking benchmarks! They are practically benchmarked to death!
I cannot believe the ignorance that surrounds the education debate. And it’s all the fault of the unions of course. I think the gullibility of some people knows no bounds.
But that’s the beauty of a league table approach. There will always be someone at the bottom of the ladder, even if top and bottom are separated by only a fraction of a percent.
There will always be a scapegoat.
Exactly zoot!
“We fix the school system by using money to renumerate the teachers”
Yes, that’s my suggestion, since comparative renumeration of teachers vs. other professions is one of the few things that correlates with overall educational performance. If you have any other suggestions (preferably that have worked in other places, which incidentally means that performance pay, vouchers, league tables, having teacher unions, not having teacher unions, having a fully public system, having many private schools, are all ruled out), feel free to make them.
“But there’s no structural aspect in the Finnish education system which creates good educational outcomes in a causal sense, except possibly having well educated teachers and a well funded system, except that teachers aren’t all that well paid.”
The teachers are well paid in comparison to other Finns. This seems to be the most significant measure of satisfaction with pay levels - that as a group the teachers are respected and receive a better pay that others.
Having wanted to support the ALP and it’s education revolution before the last election I’m stunned this is the path they have chosen to take. Like a few other readers I’m married to a teacher and the level of support they generally receive is OK but should be improved. Making teachers and principals scapegoats for systemic problems is tawdry and not much more than abuse.
Conrad, I was merely being a smartarse.
Money paid for labour is remuneration (shares derivation with ‘money’, not ‘number’), and something too numerous to count is innumerable (innumerate means numerically inept, like our kids in their Maoist postmodern hellholes).
The Finnish education system sounds a bit like one giant Summerhill.
One aspect of the Singapore system: If a class doesn’t pass their exams, the teacher may be sacked.
I’ll blame those errors on my public school background :).
I was having my doubts about Kevin, thinking he looked for all the world like a reincarnation of Bob Carr all style and no substance and then he confirms my worst fears by coming out with this. At5 the same time he does nothing to address the obscene and corrupt level of funding flowing to private schools at the expense of the public system This is just a chance to look tough while doing nothing to fix education. The OECD report exposes it for the crap that it is.
Cheap populist bullshit. Geez I can’t tell you how disappointing this is. Combine this with their ratting out on the unions over work choices and keeping that star chamber in the building industry going and all I can see that we did last year was get rid of John Howard.
We still have all his crappy conservative spin driven policies. Lowest common denominator talkback driven rubbish.
Just watched Obama and saw him take on the big issues, international diplomacy, abortion gun control and gay marriage confront them and deal with them.
Kev is as weak as piss. I am dreading what he will do on climate change.
First whiff of grape shot and Kev heads for the hills. Spinning all the way.
Well said, Alan. And watching him on the 7.30 Report the other night, I can imagine him getting as annoying as Howard, with his glib catch-phrases, meaningless pontifications and patronising tone. I could forgive all these things if he had decent policies, and actually had the guts to stand for something. As it is he is shaping up as a huge disappointment.
For all Obama’s great speeches about all manner of issues, that is all they are: world-class speeches. It’s not his fault - the election hasn’t been conducted yet. The proof will be if he is elected. As usual, I hope for the best.
The problem is that high levels of social provision in relation to services like education tend to induce a culture of complacency or paralysis in the face of pressing socio-economic concerns. At just under 7 per cent, Finland has a high unemployment rate by our standards and its fertility rate of 1.73 children per woman is below replacement level. Net immigration during 2007 was a puny 13,600. In coming decades Finland faces the same crisis closing in on many other European states. It will be burdened by an aging and less productive population along with a much diminished capacity to sustain the generous education system Finns enjoy today.
John, Finland’s fertility rate is up from 1.62 in 1970-75. UN projections for Finland’s fertility between now and the middle of the century are in the range 1.83 to 1.85. This is about the same as Australia, with the difference that Finland has (and will probably continue to have) a much lower incidence of teenage births and a higher percentage of children born to mature women with higher levels of formal education and more favourable labour market prospects. This is not without consequences for the respective educational prospects of Finnish and Australian children, although it must also be admitted that it points to other factors besides the respective merits of national schooling systems in shaping educational outcomes.
And exams starting year 1 with many students having after school tutors even in the young primary school years. Exams at the end of primary school which dictate which high schools you can attend.
Korea had a better performance rating than Finland in reading so we could copy their school system of a high pressure cooker environment with after school private lessons being common.
Thats an interesting point - maybe because many of us have heard
on the grapevine of bad schools. One example - Canberra gets a lot of students over the border from Quenbeyan even though its much further away (and costlier) for them to travel to. Perhaps its just due to ill-informed rumour and the odd bad news report about violence in the schools, but then more information should help reduce that problem.
As you say, many of the schools already collect and publish the sort of data the federal government wants, so it shouldn’t cost much to collate and republish.
“Just watched Obama and saw him take on the big issues, international diplomacy, abortion gun control and gay marriage confront them and deal with them.”
Did he really, though? I thought he squibbed them. Abortion - we won’t get consensus, but we can agree that unwanted pregnancies aren’t ideal. Gun control - we won’t get consensus but criminals shouldn’t have AK-47s. Gay marriage - must be some way for a gay partner to count as family (as they already do in Australia).
Oh so its ok for your average law abiding citizen to have an AK-47?!?!
Expectations are running so high for Obama, people are bound to end up being disappointed.
“Korea had a better performance rating than Finland in reading so we could copy their school system of a high pressure cooker environment with after school private lessons being common.”
Both Finnish and Korean have exceptionally easy writing systems to learn, so the comparisons against English speaking countries are completely biased (you can learn to read and write Korean in a few weeks if you really want. It takes years to learn English (Who said linguistics were useless
?). The fact that some Anglosphere countries are coming close shows that they are probably doing a better job of literacy in early years at least.
You have to wonder why the ALP persists in propping up a costly and inefficient language, much like the UK and US, rather than emulating worlds best practice in words and grammar as represented by Finnish.
BBB
John @ 21, the CIA World Fact book has their unemployment levels at 6.9%, declining every year since 2004. They’re fertiliy rate at 1.7% has stayed more or less constant since 1970. Population growth rate of 0.112% is dramatically down from just 3 years ago, but from 1992-2005 declined at the same rate as the US (within .06%). Average life expectancy has consistently risen over the last 200 years and hasn’t yet slowed down (bad thing in your books?). Age structure is remarkably evenly spread to the age of 60.
They’re just more facts and figures but from my brief reading, a valid argument is made that Finland has successfully accommodated strong economic growth - consistently above the European average and the US - while maintaining social equity, precisely through its building up of welfare-state institutions, rather than tearing down. Not sure how this has (so recently?) induced complacency and paralysis. They significantly upped their immigration rate in the first half of 2008. Nothing is set in stone - and from most of what I’ve read, they’re hardly complacent about potential economic problems they face into the future.
(if my arguments didn’t convince you, I hope my overuse of adverbs did
)
Speaking of worlds (sic) best practice as we were BBB, if your wife is an English teacher she may be a bit disappointed with your less than perfect emulation of this ideal.
adrian, that is the tip of the iceberg. Apostrophes, commas, semi-colons, their/there/they’re. All hopelessly misused and abused by me. I’m usually on top of compound adjectives and how to properly render interjections, though!
BBB
Colleagues of mine who have been to Finland have told me that the biggest reasons they see for Finland’s success in international testing is that they have a very homogenous culture with relatively few migrants and they spend big on early integrated intervention that includes all agencies such as education, welfare and housing.
Adrian says
“If there was ‘fierce resistance’ from education unions to information being available we wouldn’t have the detailed school reports referred to above.”
I think the main reason this sort of information is available is because the Howard government tied funding to it. The same tactic that Rudd is using. I can understand teachers not wanting this information out there because they will be blamed for results that probably have more to do with the home environment than the school environment.
Teachers in the state school system know the reality of their school and many send their own children to private schools. The information they are relying on to make their choices should be available to everyone.
No marlin you are wrong. School reports in NSW have nothing to do with the Howard government and were an initiative of the NSW government, and their origins pre-date the Howard government. I don’t even know if they are used in other states.
But don’t let ignorance stop you from making a comment.
marlin, just out of interest, the paper I linked to above comments “Relative ethnic homogeneity did not stop the country from descending into a bloody civil war in 1918″ and generally frames the war as a backdrop to modern Finland.
Adrian says
“But don’t let ignorance stop you from making a comment.”
Thanks for the civil way you corrected my error. I was referring to reports that schools have to make public on benchmark results as a result of the National tests. That was a condition of the last Quadrennial funding agreement.
Teachers in the state school system know the reality of their school and many send their own children to private schools. The information they are relying on to make their choices should be available to everyone.
Any response to this point?
I dont know what to make of the point you raised Nick. I think my colleagues were referring to the fact that the test results of Finland don’t have the long tail of lower achievement that we have becaue they have very few non-Finnish speakers etc that may be expected to not do as well on the tests.
Sorry
bit vague. I guess my point was I’ve been interested in reading that Finland’s general high achievements educationally/socially/economically are considered very much a modern phenomenon, while their ethnic homogeneity is a very old thing.
Do you or they have proof, for instance, that Australia’s lower standing is due to its higher immigration or that schools in regions with more immigrants are those bringing down the averages?
My local primary school has not a single recent immigrant, it’s ethnically homogenous – yet I guarantee you they would average low test results. The closest regional city has the highest intake of Iraqi immigrants in Australia, yet most of those are middle-class (doctors etc.) and their children I’ve spoken with are very intelligent.
So immediately I liked the second half or your argument better.
Okay, I’ve go it now Nick. I don’t know if they were referring to non-native speakers themselves but more that the teachers can expect a pretty uniform class of students in terms of background, expectations and language ability etc so more class time is on task rather than having to cater for a wider variety of needs. Granted, many non-native speakers perform better than native speakers in Australia.
marlin,
this homogeneity argument is often brought up. But it’s also true of heaps of other countries (like all those around Finland) that don’t score nearly as well. It also doesn’t explain why places like the Netherlands (which isn’t homogenous) scores really well on mathematics or why Australia, which has more socioeconomic and far more linguistic variation, scores well on literacy. Canada also blitzes the field on literacy, despite having the same sort of problems as Australia.
You’re right Conrad. It’s not all because of homogeneity, that’s why I also made the point about early intervention and the integrated co-ordination of a range of government agencies to support any child at risk of falling through the gaps.
While Australia doesn’t have the homogeneity advantage, although your point seems to indicate that you don’t see it necessarily as an advantage,we do have a long tail of low achieving students and our best performing students aren’t doing as well as other nations best performing students. I guess it gets more complicated if we start looking at trends within the data.
These debates always assume that a “good school” is determined by the teachers, but it’s the pupils rather than the teachers that determine whether a school is “good”.
That’s why there’s a demand for league tables and other ways to compare schools. Parents want a school where the other students are “good”. They don’t want their child suffering in a school overrun with the poor behaviour of “bad” students and the resulting low expectations of the teaching staff.
If numbers are to be given to parents to help them choose a school, the best numbers would be those that measure the extent a school increases the performance of its students. A school that takes a student at the 40th percentile of the state at Year 7 and gets them into the 50th percentile at Year 12 would get a +10 score. A school that takes 99th percentile students and turns them into 96th percentile students would get a -3 score.
There’s a league table I wouldn’t mind seeing.
Adrian @ 40 - I wonder if the education department does that type of analysis - do they have the funding to do it - do they even keep enough of this information to do this sort analysis? Because students move around or decide not to complete year 12 you’d have to track individual students combined with state wide tests.
I broadly agree with your statements about many parents not wanting their children to go to a school where there are lots of students with difficulties. I think one reason that state schools in rich areas and private schools do better is that they do have a lower percentage of problem students. I still think it would be interesting to try to track teacher performance over the long term though - seeing if there are teachers which seem to have contact with more than the average of number of students which high improvement rates over the long term.
ramhead said at 5:
So you are more interested in a child’s performance relative to the other students in their school, rather than the child’s performance compared to the other students in the state or whole country?
Their Yr12 marks and entry to uni thingy (ENTER etc) are graded across the state, so what use are comparisons between students at the same school?
Ah yes, of course, so that when “you get a group of parents together and they start (inevitaly) to talk about their childs education” the parents can have measures as to how much better their kid is than the other parents. In other words: status games.
Now why would anyone want to play status games with the lives and education of their children?
Oh and another feature of the Singaporean school system we may want to model: Here we have a prob with child obesity, there it is stress. In 6 year olds. Very commendable system obviously.
Adrian@40, I am inclined to agree.
Of course, I might be a little biased since, like some others here I am married to a teacher (she is not the union rep, just a member).
Though I am not an educator, I have worked in public schools for the past 11 years.
As a non-teaching staff member, I would hope that if a school fails to meet whatever benchmarks our dear Julia sets, my blokes jobs will not be made redundant. After all, if a school fails to meet certain academic outcomes, how is that the fault of the non-teaching staff - schools officers, cleaners and administration staff (excluding principal and deputy)? And in the event of a merger, how would these jobs be re-allocated. If the size of the grounds and facilities has not changed, why would a school want to double the number of these staff?
Methinks Kevvie and Julia are preparing to open a giant can of worms.
when it comes to education, we just need to work towards what will deliver the best outcomes, no matter what.
You know, parents not having to remortgage their homes or hit on the grandparents’ retirement fund to pay upwards of $7,000 p a (that’s conservative in Melbourne) to buy private education because they’ve been panicked out of the public system, and relatively educated families staying in the public system, that would count for a lot.
I’m very, very disappointed in JG.
I reckon that Rudd made a big mistake in not conducting a purge of the senior public service like Howard’s 1996 one. There are a lot of senior public servants who just haven’t realised that the world has changed, and they are serving up exactly the same advice they would have given Howard’s ministers. It’s not disloyalty - they think they’re professionally serving the government of the day - but lack of imagination and natural conservatism.
This stuff is a classic example - I’d guess it didn’t originate in a Ministerial office (where most bad ideas come from) but in the public service.
DD — you might be right about that, but a lot of the problems in the school system are caused by the states — and my feeling is that the less the federal government does the better, since it allows state-by-state comparisons, and hence attributions of who as fault to be easily made when fault exists. In addition, even if they did get rid of them, then unless you have apriori reason to believe that they might be able to replace them with better people, it’s not clear to me whether it would make much difference. Having some interest in some of these issues, my feeling is that it’s not like Australia is exactly overflowing with intelligent people willing to work in Canberra in the government that could fix things for them (unless they’re hiding and have never written anything for public consumption). The other problem I have noticed is that of the really good people that there are (Australia has some of the top literacy people in the world sitting in the university sector, as well as some good economists into educational achievement), many have no influence at all on public policy at all. I very much doubt the Canberra guys would even know their names, and are often hostile to them whenever they suggest things.
sorry that should be “who is at fault”
I reckon Adrian at #40 is onto something with his suggestion that we look at school performance based on “distance travelled” for pupils at the school. That’s an outcome measure that tells you something about how the school as a whole works with the children as a community.
There’s no reason why there can’t be a collection of measures that includes literacy and numeracy benchmarks, for instance, ranked against all children that age, plus other indicators that show changes in a group of children over time. It’s not easy to develop those indicators. Personally, I’d want them to measure social dimensions and things like that.
It’s certainly a direction that other social services are taking and I’m spending alot of my time and energy at work on ways to measure social outcomes to benchmark different approaches to the delivery of social service. That involves developing outcome heirarchies that (hopefully) start with outcomes for the individual and can then be aggregated. It’s as much art as it science though
“These debates always assume that a “good school” is determined by the teachers, but it’s the pupils rather than the teachers that determine whether a school is “good”.”
That doesn’t sound right. The students do contribute a lot to the standard of a school but surely the teachers have some impact. A school with mediocre students and good teachers would be better than a school with mediocre students and mediocre teachers.
“A school that takes a student at the 40th percentile of the state at Year 7 and gets them into the 50th percentile at Year 12 would get a +10 score. A school that takes 99th percentile students and turns them into 96th percentile students would get a -3 score.”
Interesting idea.
Tracking of the teacher’s impact on students can already be done on the basis of the progression point system (at least in Victoria). The result? A decent theoretical system of measurement but also rampant under-reporting of Prep and new students’ abilities so as to benefit the present class teacher and whomsoever has the child the following year. Clearly the proper thing to measure is how a teacher has affected a child, so on-the-ground implementation will be critical. Hands up for external testing of all children at the start of each school year? No, thought not.
BBB
Isn’t this discussion symptomatic of the confusion in these measures? Are we talking about improving disadvantaged schools or measuring teachers? The two aren’t the same thing.
Oops forgot to log in and change moniker! But it seems strangely apt…
That’s right, they’re not. But the latter may assist in developing the right policies to achieve the former. As usual, there is a wrong and useless way to do these things (simply measuring school performance (e.g. raw test scores) against the performance of other schools and putting them in a nice little list for the Sunday papers) and a right way (scientifically measuring the effectiveness of a particular teacher or school, carefully accounting for factors outside the teacher/school’s control, and figuring out why some make more of a difference to literacy and numeracy outcomes that others, ). The right way is very complex and very difficult, especially for young children. But it’s also worthwhile, and could form the basis for identifying where resources will be best applied, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Unfortunately, the ALP doesn’t seem to be going down the this road.
BBB
Yah I know a teacher who, when teaching at one on Melb’s ‘worst’ public schools, regularly managed to help her students attain a ‘C’ average pretty much every year she taught.
She moved jobs to teach at a private school and taught the same subject, same materiel, same methods, same everything… with students attaining an ‘A’ average.
Same teacher, same course, different schools and different students = different results. Shock, horror.
Yup Tony D,
seen that situation many, MANY times in my 11 years in the system. Seen admin make the mistake of not separating a particularly uncontrollable bunch of pre-school kids that were causing the pre-school no end of grief. They put a lot of them together in the same year 1 class with the result that the teacher who previously had a spotless record ended up on DWP (diminshed work performance) for not being able to control them.
The average academic score and tone of classroom behaviour is something the teacher has only so much control over. A single fiercely rebellious and disruptive student can take up a huge amount of the teachers time and energy. Result: less time left to devote to teaching the rest of the class.
If performance based pay were based on individual class results, the rating and income of even “really good” teachers could easily fluctuate up and down from year to year.
I like ideas like trade centres in secondary schools etc but on this one Rudd and Gillard can go fuck themselves. I think if there is any “weeding out” of public servants to be done, it’s not at the coalface but in the upper echalons of the public service. I think the ideals and principles of neo-liberalism have become firmly entrenched in these high offices. Example: we were told by our regional finance manager that we should think of schools as a business and children as the product! What the fuck??!!
We need another night of the long knives.
That’s exactly right, Boy from Flynn. There are similar problems with the integration of ’special needs’ children into the mainstream classroom with inadequate classroom support.
There are other problems with the scheme outlined by Adrian @ 40. We are talking academic achievement and you would need to measure the same kids against benchmarks in the short term, that is a year. That is a lot of work. Because the exercise is norm-referenced the results overall would have the shape of a bell curve, with a huge bulge in the middle. Necessarily it would be a zero sum game with every improvement being matched with a movement the other way. Most of the movements would be relatively minor and cluster around the middle. And make little difference in the overall scheme of things.
There are many dimensions to developing growing young people who we hope have the capacity to lead satisfying and productive lives with maximum control of their own destiny. Schools try to cater for all needs of the child, and some of the co-curricula programs are vital and necessitate school-wide collaborative effort.
Social education, for example has little value if limited to the classroom. What happens in the playground, in sporting teams, in camps and retreats, and how those programs are integrated into behaviour management programs arguably have greater importance.
Last year Nic Gruen was talking on Counterpoint about the work of economist James Heckman who found that only about half of success in the labour market was due to technical or cognitive skills, the other half being attributable to non-cognitive personality factors. Whatever you think about the specifics of that research it points to a tendency to over-emphasise academic factors. I suspect the the Rudd-Gillard scheme would consume a lot of resources to produce nothing that matters very much.
It also emphasises the competitive approach. I’d prefer strategies that enmphasise cooperation, collegiality and sharing amongst the profession.
Classrooms that produce outstanding results are not hard to identify. More effort could go into action research that identifies factors that make a substantial rather than a marginal difference, to build on these successes and network the information around to help to improve the performance of other classrooms and schools generally.
I’m getting fed up with Rudd’s penchant of autocratic policy-making where he panders to the right of centre with ill thought-out populist rubbish.
I’m not sure but it appears to me that the idea of parachuting young graduates into low-performing schools seems to be a direct crib from the US Teach for America system. That has a built-in turnover where bright young things get dropped at the deep end, can’t control their difficult classes (One, because they are beginners and two, because it appears many of them would be from elite schools where they haven’t been exposed to the kind of behaviours they’re required to deal with - plus a lot of them would be lacking in knowledge of and empathy toweard disadvantaged students.) They’re given a crash training course (5 weeks in the Teach for America model) and off they go.
Then they move on to greener pastures as soon as they can and are replaced with another well-heeled greenhorn. Kids are that much more f**ed up.
Why must Australian politicians always try to import these dubious US policies?
Helen @ 57 - Isn’t the situation you describe the current problem with some of the state school systems? They use the accumulation of transfer points so the “preferred” positions go to the experienced teachers while the graduates get placed in the hardship schools - those with behavioural problems and country sites.
And just to your comment @44 - I think there’s an assumption built in there that the public schools are generally of the same quality. I think its true that many poorer, less educated families end up paying out private school fees because their local school is not as good as the ones in the richer more well educated suburbs. You can see the disparity in quality of public schools appearing in house prices (eg advertised as being in the catchment area for school X where a public school has a good reputation).
Exactly, Chris, hence my comment - govt policy should be aimed at making the public system second to none so they don’t have to do this. Sorry, commenting on the run..
Helen - sorry I misunderstood. Just that I see criticism from parents sending their children to public schools of parents who don’t, often working on the assumption that its all a result of a fear campaign or snobbery of public education, rather than a real rational choice based on the quality of education at their local public school.
It is not rare for schools in rural areas to produce lower overall scores. My wife taught in a small farming community in far north Queensland. The CULTURE was substantially different to city areas. The kids spent less time on homework and studies and more time helping their parents with the farm chores because that is what is expected of them.
If she had started calling parents in and saying “Look, little Timmy needs to spend more time studying and doing homework so we can push these scores higher, and if farm chores get in the way then they will have to be dropped” she would have been run out of town.
Indeed Boy from Flynn. I was once given homework when at school. My father contacted the teacher to ascertain just what “homework” meant.
The following day I was sent to school with a saddlebag to sew up, and a note for the teacher explaining that I had been given some chores from home, and that these chores had better be completed by the time school was out.
A bit more got said in the pub (theme: competence of teachers).
No more homework was ever given at that primary school.
Explains quite a lot.
Hehehe, now now Helen - Steve did leave himself open for that one though.
This goes to show that a particular schools academic rating is not necessarily a reflection on the competence of the teachers there or even the behavior of the kids. In cases such as these, the kids simply expended more of their energies elsewhere - and it was doing something productive, not veging in front of the playstation.
I’m all for an education revolution but this is the wrong approach.