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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.